Kozik bent down to take a look at her side, carefully removing her hand that had stayed clamped on to the burgeoning bruise like she was holding on for dear life. He ran his fingers over them, looking any bumps, or points of pain. She hissed once he got to third bone down and dug her fingers into his other arm.
"They're not broken, but I'm not letting you back in there." He said insistently.
"I wasn't going to." Sara told him. "I need to grab my clothes and talk to Ed about my money."
She had wanted to get a little more dough out of this endeavour, but the bitch had hit already weakened ribs. Now everyone knew her left side was weak, including the other competitors. Sara hadn't been allowed in a regulation boxing ring since three months ago when the first break happened, the refs wouldn't let her fight until at least six months had passed. It was drying up her income pretty quickly.
"Can you ride?" Kozik asked. If she couldn't, they were in some real trouble. They were too far out to call Charming to pick up her bike, and Kozik didn't trust anyone but other charters to take care it.
"It'll hurt, but yeah. Where are we headed?"
"To get you patched up properly." Herman said, "I'll grab your shit if you wanna go get your money." Sara nodded and pulled him closer again, getting up on her toes to kiss him. He tried to be gentle, but she was persistent, moving against him in spite of her bruises and split lip.
"Christ doll, you're killing me." He was doing his best not to hurt her, trying to be soft and patient. Which wasn't his usual style. If she hadn't been so roughed up he would've hauled her legs around his waist and propped her back up against the wall before going to town. But she was hurting, even if she was doing her damnedest not to show it.
He kissed her again, softly, even though he knew she was getting impatient.
She wasn't some sweetbutt. Sara was part of the big, loud, crazy, biker family he belonged to, he wasn't about to go rushing in and wreck everything like he always did. His hands gripped her hips with enough pressure to satisfy both of them.
Sara broke away with a contented sigh. "I'll go talk to Ed."
If she didn't stop soon she'd forget all about it and spend all night out here kissing Kozik. She found Ed up against the bar, his hands all over the green shorts girl's ass.
"You back for more sweetheart? Glutton for punishment?" He asked, with a smile.
"Need my money, I'm leaving." She told him shortly, outstretching her hand.
Ed's goofy drunk grin turned into a squint eyed glare. "Thought you were going two rounds."
"Changed my mind. Give me the cash."
There was nothing nice about the look Ed gave her as he pulled a dirty, folded manila envelope from his pocket and slapped it into her palm.
"Fine, bitch, get out."
She counted out the bills and stuffed them back into the envelope before walking over to where Kozik was picking up her clothing. He had taken care to tuck her socks into her boots and her heart jumped a little. His hand came to rest on the small of her back as they left out the front door and went over to their bikes.
Herman took the four silver rings out of his pocket and she started to unwrap her hands.
"Got all of it?" He asked. Sara nodded. Her skin had gone to goosebumps and Kozik was in a hurry to get her dressed again. She discarded the used tape and took the rings from Kozik and slipped them onto her fingers.
Kozik tossed her jacket on the seat of his bike and motioned for her to lift her arms. Sara managed to get them up to around her shoulders before the pain got to be too much. He pulled it over her head and pulled her braided hair out of her collar. Grimacing, she did the arms by herself.
"Sit down." Herman told her, grabbing her boots and socks. There was no way in hell she would be able to reach down and pull hard enough to get them on her feet.
"I can put my own shoes on." Sara insisted, frustrated.
"No, you can't. Sit down." He told her again, kneeling down when she relented and plopped herself on her bike's seat. Two socks and two boots later, Sara was beginning to feel fully coddled. He held her jacket up by the shoulders and let her slip it on slowly.
"You put my helmet on, I spit on you." She warned.
"Okay." Kozik laughed and put his hands up in surrender, before pulling a hoodie over his kutte and t-shirt. Little Miss Independent was struggling and huffing through fastening her helmet under her chin, but one look at her eyes told him to leave it be if he still wanted his fingers.
He gave her back both of her knives, the cigarettes, the lighter, keys and the wallet. It struck him then that she didn't carry a phone with her.
"You live round here doll?" Kozik asked, swinging his leg over his bike.
"Woodruff, half an hour to our west." She told him, getting on her own bike and starting the engine.
"I'll follow you darlin'."
Sara nodded and took off, gritting her teeth against the pain racing up her side, and the cold starting to bite at her fingers. She was happier than she had ever been to see the shitty little house she rented when they pulled into the gravel driveway.
Kozik offered his hand to help her off her bike and she took it.
He waited for her to unlock the front door, hands stuffed in his front pockets. It was a low-slung, single story, almost cabin-ish house, with red clapboard siding and an aged white storm door over the plain oak inner door she was currently fumbling with. It was set on the outskirts of town, hidden from the road by a long drive and surrounding trees.
Once they were inside, Herman got the sense she didn't spend much time here. It felt like a house not quite lived in. The middle living room had two small couches and an old television that sat collecting dust. The few things that marked her existence were the collection of small shoes by the door and the dishes in the kitchen sink.
She hit the light switch and all four rooms of her luxurious existence sprang into view. One bedroom, one bathroom, a living room and kitchen-dinette combination.
"Beer?" Sara asked him, opening her fridge with her good arm.
"Yeah, sure. Where's your medical stuff?" He asked, looking around at the barren furniture.
"Bathroom, there's a standing cabinet." She answered, handing him a cold bottle of Budweiser before reaching up with grunt for the bottles of hard liquor on top of her fridge. She pulled the top off a bottle of whiskey with her teeth and took a few draws.
Kozik came back into the room with almost everything she had put in that cabinet bundled up in his arms.
"What?" He asked when she busted out laughing.
"You don't need half of that."
Herman dumped all of it on the kitchen table. "Well, I just, I mean, figured better safe than sorry."
"It's okay. Help me get this shirt off." Sara told him, taking one last pull off the bottle. Kozik cracked his beer and took a swing before setting down next to the heap of medical tape, gauze, disinfectant and painkillers. He eased the hem up and over her head. The bruising had turned a deep, heavy purple, and reached from the end of her ribcage almost up to her armpit. She turned expectantly, and waited for him to get the message. It was an impressive piece of hardware to take off on her own, and with one side busted she really couldn't manage it.
"Oh!" Herman fumbled, undoing the hooks of her bra.
Sara slid it off her shoulders, and tried not to focus on the fact that she was half-naked with a man she met at a gas station six hours ago. She got up her nerve and turned around.
"Okay, what do I do?" Kozik asked, trying not to focus on the woman half-naked in front of him that he'd met at a gas station six hours ago.
"Get the big tape, the four inch wide stuff." She told him, feeling the heat rise in her cheeks and resisting the urge to cross her arms and cover herself. She didn't have a damn thing to be ashamed of, and so what if they just met, Kozik was good people, he was helping her out.
Sara was beautiful, Kozik could never deny that, even with the bruises and the scars and the dried blood on her face. She shone through it all, in the shitty fluorescent lighting of her kitchen.
"Get the scissors and cut little- little jellyfish tentacles about two thirds of the way up." Sara instructed.
"What?" Kozik laughed. She huffed out a sigh.
"Like little fingers. Here, just give it to me."
"No, I got it doll. Little jellyfish tentacles?" He asked with a grin, picking up the scissors.
"Oh shut up."
"Now what?"
"Do another one, and then peel off the backing. Stick the top part where I tell you and lay out the tentacles-" He laughed quietly and she glared at him before continuing. "so they wrap around."
Kozik did as he was told, knelt and followed her guiding hands on where to stick the first piece of tape, and then placing the second piece in the opposite direction so that the fringe overlapped.
She cleared her throat. "You've got to warm it up with your hands."
"Won't that hurt?" Herman asked, brow furrowing.
"It won't stick otherwise." Sara told him, knowing what came next and bracing herself against it.
Kozik's big hand rested lightly on the bandages, he was unsure on what the hell he was supposed to be doing, and the fact that she was topless was becoming more and more of a distraction.
"Just- God, there's no good way to say this." Sara laughed. "Just rub it."
His eyebrows shot up into his hairline and started running his hands over her taped up ribs. Sara had turned her face away, biting her lip and trying to keep him from seeing her increasingly watery eyes.
"You alright darlin'?"
"I'll be fine. Just keep going." Sara said through bared teeth.
Kozik kept working the adhesive, brushing up against the side of her breast once, then twice, his curiosity overtaking him. She simply looked down at him with a smirk and an eyebrow raised. His hands felt good on her skin, when they weren't pressing against her bruises, and the way he was looking at her made her feel things she hadn't acknowledged in a long while.
His smile grew into a slow easy grin that made her heart jump as his fingers brushed up against her again.
She bent her head, ignoring the pain, and kissed him, hands threading through his hair, tilting his face towards the light. One of his hands came to rest on the ridge of her hip, while the other continued its motion over her ribs.
Sara smiled against his lips, and he managed to get to his feet, arms wrapping around her shoulders and pulling her in tight, before leaning down to press his lips against hers again. It was needy and hard, and her fingers dug into his arms as she reciprocated, moving against him. She let his tongue dart between her lips, her hands sliding up under the hem of his shirt.
"Warm enough?" Kozik asked, resting his forehead on hers. She bit her lip and nodded, cheeks flushed red. "Let's get some ice on that eye, yeah?"
Sara pulled her shirt back on and sat on the edge of the table as he went to retrieve a bag of frozen peas from the freezer. Normally, she'd be doing all of this shit herself after a fight, or if Lumpy had come out to see her, he'd have stuck around and helped her out.
Herman didn't quite know what to do with the woman sitting in front of him, bag of frozen vegetables pressed up against her face. He felt something for her, something that was pulling him into standing between her knees and kissing her until he could put a name on it.
Sara let the bag hit the table with a thud, wrapping her arms around his neck as he pulled her hips forward. It had been too fucking long, and Kozik was hitting all her soft spots. He was goofy, and kind, and didn't mind the bumps and bruises that came with it all.
She wanted this. Wanted it more than she thought when she had run into him.
"Take me to bed." Sara told him softly, brushing her nose up against his with a grin.
"Yeah?" Kozik asked with a laugh, trying to keep his voice even while his heart rate was threatening to give him an aneurysm.
"Yeah." She answered, tilting her chin up at him in what she hoped looked like a confident manner. She wasn't like her Aunt Gemma, or Bobby's wife Precious. She could never just walk in and demand what she wanted, whether it was through words or body language or something, she didn't have the balls to do it. Sara had felt like an ugly duckling since before high school, and no amount of settling into her body, into herself, could change that. She would forever be the scrawny girl with too many freckles and broken noses.
It was easy for Ope and Jax, no one fucked with the Sons. Sara, was a completely different story. Freshman year she showed up for the first day in baggy hand-me down jeans and one of Opie's work shirts. The rest of the girls had labeled her "dyke" and from then on it was the title she couldn't shake. None of the boys would look twice at her, except the ones who'd meet her under the bleachers to sneak third base and laugh at her the next morning in the hallway. In a town like Charming,if you acted different you got put into a box and left there. It made things neater for the lazy stupid teenagers that grew up with fathers that would smack their sons for crying in public, and mothers that told their girls to be thinner, prettier, cleaner.
She had been angry at Piney at first, for not having the sense to raise her different, for not being rich enough to buy the clothes, the shoes, the things that would make her look like the rest of them. Piney had told her one night, after she had come home with bruises on her knuckles and scratch marks on her face, that she was who she was, and to say anything else would be a lie. "And that's worse than anything." He had told her, a finger prodding her angrily in the shoulder. "Be proud of yourself. You aren't some sissy bitch that'll fall over if the wind hits her too hard. I didn't raise you like that. You're a Winston, goddamnit girl, and if you try to be anything else it'll kill you on the inside."
Sara was who she was. She wasn't pretty, or delicate, or dependent on anyone. She had good roots, she didn't blow over when a storm came.
She kissed Kozik roughly, hands in his hair, hips rocking against his.
She was who she was, and she wanted what she wanted. The man in front of her, the man who had no problem with who she was, who had patched her up when she was done, that was what she wanted, goddamnit, and to hell with the rest.
Kozik shifted his hands against her hips. "You whole enough for me to pull a caveman?" He asked, eyes glinting.
"I don't see a club for you to hit me over the head with." Sara laughed.
"Oh I'll show you a club." Kozik told her, hoisting her up by her hips as Sara's legs wrapped around his waist and held him tight.
"Can't believe you actually said that." She snorted, as he hauled her down the hallway with ease, and kicked the door closed behind him.
"Believe it, babe."
They fumbled with their clothes, in the dim light coming off the highway and through the bedroom window.
The first thing she noticed was his tattoos. Just in case she wasn't absolutely sure who she was getting into bed with, he had S.O.A scrawled across in big, blocky calligraphy. Sara ran her fingers over it. His hands wrapped around her wrists and he looked at her curiously.
It had been a long time since she'd seen ink like that and he made it look good, the letters stretched out over his broad chest. She stretched up onto her toes and kissed him, taking her time. He was a Son, and Sara knew what would happen next. He'd be gone the next morning, and life would keep going as it had been for both of them.
Didn't mean she couldn't enjoy herself while she had him.