The Funeral of a Good Girl
By – TempestRaces
Chapter Fifty Five – Of Blood and Diamond Dust
Tempest paced around the backyard agitatedly. She was busy hating herself for the very real desire to accept Vince's apology and make up with him. Knowing that she shouldn't, and that his apology hadn't been very good, nor had his reasons for doing what he'd done in the first place. But she wanted to. And she hated the desire. It felt weak. Weak, and like it was just encouraging him to do stuff like this to her again. Because she would lay down and accept it. And it wasn't the kind of example she wanted to set.
She walked from the fence along one side of the yard across to the side of the small shed on the other. As she walked she got madder and madder. What was so wrong with her that she deserved this? How was it fair to show her the man she was going to fall in love with and then make him an asshole who was in love with another woman? An asshole in love with another woman who lived three thousand miles away from her. Trying to show him what he could have if he stopped being such a moron wasn't even an option.
She got angrier and angrier. Well fuck him and fuck fate! Before she could think better of it, as her pacing brought her past the makeshift picnic table in the centre of the yard, she picked up one of the bottles which the revellers had left behind to mark their passage off it's surface and flung it at the side of the shed as hard as she could. It hit the side and shattered with a crash. Shattered just like me. Unable to resist the impulse she picked up another and hurled it at the dingy white shed with a cry. A few more went careening through the air in sparkling motion before impacting the wall of her target.
Small pieces of glass flew in all directions, while the larger pieces simply fell to the ground in a crystalline pile of glitter in the dust. Looking at the carnage brought her out of her own world. While she knew that no one would mourn the passing of a handful of Corona bottles, now she'd left a mess of broken glass in Jesse's backyard. With a sigh which fought hard to become a sob, she started across the grass toward the worst of the wreckage. She hit her knees in the dirt and started to gather the larger pieces of glass. She figured the least she could do was clear up the worst of it before going inside and pretending she had no idea what had happened to the backyard.
She picked up the first piece of jagged glass and set it on the palm of her other hand. She could only figure she hadn't been watching very carefully what she was doing, when the edge pierced her skin and red blood welled up to stain the clear edge of the glass. Fascinated by both the blood and the pain, she simply watched a moment. The urge to clench her fist around the glass rather than pull it out of her flesh was one she couldn't resist. Her fingers closed over the sharp edges and the glass bit harder into her hand. She felt as if she was screaming out loud and wasn't aware only soft whimpering was audible from her lips.
"What're you doin' T? Shit!" There was blood everywhere. Blood running down the back of her hand, blood welling up between her fingers. He'd watched her pick up the glass. When she'd stared into her hand with too much interest instead of picking up more, he'd started to get worried and had moved around from behind her, which allowed him to see her whole hand. When he'd watched blood start to drip off her skin onto the grass, he'd been jarred into action. He hit the dust on his knees in front of her. He took a hold of her clenched fist.
She didn't acknowledge him in any way. He started to pry her fingers open, one by one. She didn't resist his actions, allowing him to open her hand without a fuss. But she didn't talk to him or look at him either. She just continued to stare down into her hand. A medium sized piece of glass had originally cut her palm. Since she'd clenched a fist around it, it had also cut three of her fingers, and dug in where before it had only sliced. None of it looked bad enough for stitches, but it was also bleeding fairly heavily. He plucked the glass out of her palm, which made her whimper again, before he pulled his tank top off and balled it up into her hand, closing her fingers around it. "Squeeze it." He watched, waiting for her to listen to his instructions. She did, clearly running pretty much on autopilot. Before she could figure out what he planned, he swung her up into his arms.
"Put me down," she muttered. "I hurt my hand not my legs. I can walk."
"No. Keep squeezing." He started toward the back door. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say what I said. I was just gonna yell a bit about what you did. And then that guy stood up for you, talked like he had some right to you and I just lost it."
"He didn't say anything but lay off."
"It wasn't what he said. It was how he said it." Vince sighed. He knew it hadn't been a rational reaction. Nothing he did in reaction to anything she did was rational. She made all thoughts of rational fly out the window. He couldn't help it. She drove him crazy. And the thoughts of other guys with their hands on her made it worse. And when other guys talked to her, he started to think of them with their hands on her. "It was stupid. Haven't we already covered my stupidity about a thousand times?"
Hating him was hard work. It was exhausting. It was tiring. She didn't want to keep doing it. "Hating you is so hard. I don't want to do it anymore. But how am I supposed to forgive what you said? How? Without looking like some weak, spineless bitch who likes putting up with your shit?" She was just so tired all of a sudden. After everything. The adrenaline rush of racing Dom, of facing the consequences. The adrenaline rush of getting away from the cops, from getting pulled over. The after effects of the alcohol she'd ingested. She cradled her injured hand to her chest and laid her head onto Vince's shoulder. So tired, and being angry with him was the worst of it. It made her feel crazy; constantly on edge. She couldn't keep it up.
He kissed her forehead softly. He didn't have an answer for her questions. "Come on Trouble. We need to wash that. God knows what you got in it." He carried her through the house and down the stairs, glad the kitchen had been largely empty. He set her down on the vanity beside the sink in the basement and turned on the light. "Ok, let's get a look at just how bad this is."
"It's nothing," she mumbled.
"If I know one thing about wounds—and I've had a lot of them—it's that nothing doesn't bleed like that. Lemme see." He didn't wait for her to extend her limb, but took hold of her wrist and pulled her hand toward him. "Ok, come on, open your fingers."
She started to do what he asked. Then a thread of his shirt caught the edge of one of the cuts on her fingers. "Ow."
"You can't just keep holding my shirt until that heals. Come on." He fought against getting frustrated, knowing because of him, she'd had a terrible night. He started to pry her fingers open again when it became obvious she wasn't going to open them on her own. Every noise she made in pain felt like it stabbed him in the gut. The feeling got worse, not better, when he saw the damage done under the florescent light of the bathroom. When he took the cotton of his shirt away, the blood started to well up over again. "Ah shit." He daubed at the cut on her palm to wipe up some of the crimson stain spreading. "Baby, what were you thinkin'?"
"I don't know. It hurt and it was something else to think about. The more it hurt, the more it was the only thing that had to."
There had been much in his past that had hurt him. And then one day, he had simply decided that nothing else ever would. He decided that he had already taken all any one man could take, and that was that. And, for the most part, he had been right. When you refused to let anything in too far, it was easy not to let anything hurt you. She? She had the power to wound him to the centre. Nothing else got to him the way she could. Nothing got to him the way knowing she was hurting did. The things she said to him and the things she did, they could prick him. No one ever go to him anymore, unless it was to make him angry. No one until her. She had the power to hurt him, much as he tried not to let her. Knowing she was hurting, either emotionally or physically, it was ten times worse. Knowing she was hurting both ways at once because of him was practically nauseating. So was the fear that blossomed when he thought about what it all meant. What it meant that she had such power over him. Then she sniffled in dejection and his focus shifted again onto taking care of her. Making her feel better was the only thing that mattered. He nuzzled in the hair on the side of her head, his lips brushing her temple. She turned her face into his touch and he was so pleased it worried him too, the pleasure over that simply capitulation. "We need to get this clean. Let's get it done so you can get some sleep. Ok?"
She nodded to the affirmative. He slid her forward off the vanity so that he could manoeuvre her damaged hand under the stream of warm water he'd started running. He kept one arm wrapped around her and used the other hand to guide hers where it had to go. She kept her face buried against his chest, her good arm looped around his neck. He moved her arm so that the worst of the damage was under the water. Blood turned the water cloudy pink and she made a pained sound in her throat. "Jesus T." The damage to her fingers was merely scratches. The slice in her palm had one part in the middle that was fairly deep. Still not deep enough for stitches, but worse than he'd thought. "I need you to stand there on your own while I wash this, ok?"
"No. We don't need to wash it anymore. Just get a band aid and it'll be fine."
"I hate to be the one to break this to you baby, but there isn't a band aid big enough to make this fine. It's gotta be washed and then it's gotta be bandaged. After it's cleaned out with some sorta disinfectant."
"That's gonna hurt," she complained.
"Yeah, it likely is. But blood infections hurt worse." He moved away from her and was glad when she stayed upright on her own, leaning on the edge of the countertop. He squirted liquid soap onto her palm and started to softly rub it around. He tried to be as gentle as he could. He knew soap was going to sting no matter how gentle he managed to be. And he knew he wasn't great at doing gentle. He also knew he had to be fairly sure he didn't leave any glass in the cut. She kept her head averted and her eyes screwed shut. He knew, by her refusal to watch him clean her wound, and the tension on her face that she was in real pain. He guessed she didn't want to see just how bad the damage was. He could also tell she was fighting tears, and he was glad she was winning. He figured if she saw the damage done, the tide might turn in that regard.
Then he went looking for peroxide and found out they only had iodine left. "Son of a," he growled under his breath. Like the soap hadn't been bad enough. He contemplated just wrapping the now cleaned cut and seeing how she did over night. But he dismissed the thought as foolish. Leaving anything in her hand to fester overnight just to avoid a little pain now was stupid. So was not preparing her for the worst. He bit back another curse. "Ok, I'm just gonna put the disinfectant on it and then we'll wrap it. But it's gonna hurt. Ok?"
"At this point, it can hardly hurt worse than it already does."
That's what you think. "Ok, just another second and it'll all be over." He drizzled iodine out of the bottle onto her palm. She started to bite her lip to stop from crying out. He set the bottle down and freed her lip from her teeth. She had a tenancy to bite down without regard for how much damage she was doing. The last thing he wanted was for her to do herself more injury. She finally looked up at him and the tears were welling at the bottom of her eyes. He tried not to feel guilty, but he didn't win. He got out the roll of bandages to feel useful, and started to wrap her palm, after putting a gauze pad over the worst of it. He wrapped her hand more times than he figured were strictly necessary. He was hoping it would be tight enough and thick enough to stop the bleeding. He had seen a lot of wounds in his day. So he was hoping he'd seen enough that his opinion it didn't need medical attention was the right one.
If it bled all night, or looked worse come morning, he knew he was going to have to drag her to a doctor. "What kind of painkiller can't you take when you've been drinking?"
"Tylenol. It's a blood thinner and so is alcohol."
"Ok." He dug out the Advil and made her take two. The last thing she needed was thinner blood. Enough of it was flowing just the way it was, thank you. "Let's get you to bed."
"I can take myself to the couch, Vince. I don't need your help."
"Too bad." He locked an arm under her butt and picked her up against his chest easily. She caved with a sigh and wrapped her arm around his neck, resting her head on his shoulder with her damaged hand cradled between them. He didn't stop beside the couch, but walked right into his room and set her on the bed. "You can sleep here. I'll take the couch."
"I don't need your bed. I'm fine with the couch. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have come down here in the first place."
"I don't care what you're fine with. You're hurt and tired and you can have the damn bed."
"Fine." She caved with a sigh. He was just going to keep fighting with her, and she didn't know how much of him fighting with her her head could take.
"Where's your stuff?"
"Jesse's room."
He retrieved her bags. "I'll need to check that in the morning to make sure it's not looking infected. Ok?"
"Yeah, whatever," she answered tiredly. Vince left the room and she changed into a pair of her shorts and a tank top. She shut off the light and got into the bed with a sigh. The whole room smelled like Vince. And it was so dark. And she wasn't feeling well. And she wanted to cry, but she was too numb to cry. And her hand hurt. And she didn't want to be alone. After fighting with herself for half an hour, attempting to win the argument she was having with her own mind, she conceded defeat and climbed out of the bed. She crossed the room in the dark and pulled the door open. The party upstairs was just starting to wind down, and there was still light spilling into the den from the kitchen. It hardly mattered because Vince wasn't asleep, or even trying to sleep. He was watching the small TV while lying on the couch. "V?"
He looked up with a start. "You ok?" He got up without waiting for her to answer and started toward her.
The look of concern on his face did her in. "No," she sniffled. "It's dark and my stomach hurts, and I actually wanna cry but I can't and the whole place smells like you and my hand hurts and I have a headache and I just wanna sleep!"
She was so endearing, looking all rumpled and sad, that he had to really work to keep the smile off his face. He brushed some hair out of her eyes. "You wanna sit up and watch some TV with me until you feel like you might be able to go to sleep?" She nodded yes, lower lip stuck out in a childish pout that shouldn't have been so enticing on a woman who was definitely not a child. "Ok then," he took hold of her uninjured left hand and led her to the sofa. He sat in the corner and let her curl up against his side. By the end of the half hour long program he was watching, she was out like a light.
She made a terrible patient. Just like him, he mused with a chuckle. He stood and swung her up off the couch into his arms before heading toward his room for the second time. This time, he was fairly sure she'd sleep right through being put to bed. He was wrong. She became partially conscious long enough to grab a hold of his shirt and tell him in no uncertain terms he wasn't leaving her alone in the dark. He kicked his jeans off while she held onto his shirt and crawled into bed with her.
The way she melted into him and fit so perfectly to his side, her ear to his heartbeat, never failed to amaze him just a little. He would have thought himself beyond such things having the power to impress him in any way. And he'd always figured people who slept in the same bed night after night simply discovered which side they preferred for their own and slept there. If that was the case for most people, it wasn't the case for them. Even if they started off in separate places, they always ended up in the middle wrapped around each other in the end. Perhaps more surprising was the fact he liked it that way. The fact her hair smelled like comfortable and that her skin felt as much like home as his own did. The tips of her fingers resting on the ridge of his collarbone seemed to communicate the message that all was right with the world. That as long as it was her and it was him and they were being they in the same place, everything was ok.
So why aren't you asking her to stay past Saturday again? he asked himself. Because I shouldn't have to ask her, he answered his own question. She should just want to if she wants to. He tried to let that stand, tried to go to sleep. What if she wants to, and isn't strong enough to admit it without some sign it's what you want too? He yawned into the fragrant cascade of her wild curls.
Then I guess we were doomed before we even started.
