Surge (78 page)

Olivia snatches her hand away quickly, and begins inspecting my bandage. I try to hold it, but I can’t, and start laughing. Looking up from my hand, she scowls before pinching my chest.
‘Not funny,’
she signs out furiously.

“Come on, sour puss, lighten up. I was only kidding.”

Olivia still looks ticked, so I try a tactic that I’ve used with Sarah in the past. Reaching over slowly, I squeeze her hip and grin when I see her squirm away in a ticklish reaction. I start using both hands, and I’m concentrating on the sound of her husky laugh; which admittedly sounds a little strange, so I don’t see her tiny hand but feel it when it grazes just under my ribs and squeezes. I jerk my elbow to try and catch it, but am unsuccessful.

Next thing I know, I’m on my back with my arms pinned by my sides, and a sexy pixie straddling my abs. Olivia grins at me as she wiggles her fingers before attacking my stomach. This is so not a good position to be in right now. One, because I am unfortunately cursed with being extremely ticklish. Two, she’s mere inches from grinding against my crotch. And three, because I’ve never found a tickle fight to be so arousing. I’m helpless to do much of anything but lay there and laugh as she holds me captive. I can’t even lift a hand to wave the white flag, but my dick sure could.

Fuck. If she feels that, it’s curtains for me. Our easy relationship will either end up awkward, either because I’m harvesting feelings that she doesn’t return, or I’ll spook her for good. I swivel my shoulders left and right hoping to shake a hand free, that earns me muscled thighs clamping down on my waist. Sweet Jesus, would I love to be between those thighs under different circumstances. I need to get the hell out of here before I embarrass myself by coming in my boxers like a dry humping virgin. The sad part is that she isn’t even touching my groin area, and I’m still about to blow my load. In a final act of self-preservation, I wiggle my right arm and manage to hook it under her knee and flip her onto her back. I don’t make any move to touch her wrists or hold her down in any fashion, since I know that would trip a trigger without even trying, so I hold up my hands in defeat.

“You win,” I pant out.

I sound like I’ve just run a marathon, but I’m hoping that she accounts it to the tickle beat down she just laid upon me and not the severe state of arousal I’m in. It’s almost painful how hard I am right now, and that right there tells me that I’ll have to squeeze one out before I come to bed tonight. Why, you ask, would I have to spank some spunk out before going to sleep? That would be because Junior can hold a grudge with the best of them. I’ve learned from past experience that if he ain’t happy, no one’s happy. I can become snappish, cantankerous and downright impossible to be around; so I don’t want to be an angry bear around my teacup badass.

“I should probably leave before Tommy comes.” Olivia’s brows furrow, but she nods. “Okay, see you in a little while.” Climbing off the bed, I discreetly adjust my crotch as I pretend to adjust my clothes, and walk toward the door.

“J-jared?” I hear a rasp call out. Turning at the sound, I look over at Olivia. “T-tr-ain?”

“We’ll train later, alright?”

She nods and sits back on the bed with a perplexed look on her face. I’m about to ask her what for, when I hear footsteps coming in fast. Looking back at the door, I see Tommy with still damp hair slightly curled over his ears after not having cut it in a while, his jaw’s shaved of scruff and he smells a hell of a lot better than he did half an hour ago. He’s thankfully changed his clothing to a pair of clean jeans and a button up plaid shirt with a white tee underneath and sneakers. It’s the most casual I’ve seen him in a while. Usually, he’s in his Carhartt overalls, Under Armor and boots. Tommy pauses at the door and looks to the bed before he sees me, and when he does notice me, he immediately looks down at his sneakers.

“I was just leaving,” I tell him.

It’s obvious that he is embarrassed, and I’m guessing it’s because I saw him at his lowest. Seeing the slight nod aimed at his toes, I slip past him and close the door behind me, since Olivia has locked the door anytime she’s visited him this week. The door clicks shut, and I immediately hear Olivia’s music player turn on. And the two hour countdown commences.

<~~~<~~~
~~~>~~~
>

Bang.
I watch as Olivia flinches at the last second and the shot goes wide. Her already tense shoulders slump in defeat. No way is she giving up on my watch.

“Come on over here,” I say. Olivia flips the safety and checks it twice, before setting the gun down on the table. She takes the seat I pointed at across from me and looks at me curiously. “We’re gonna try something different.” Olivia nods for me to continue. “Why don’t you tell me about your nightmare from last night?”

She rubs a hand over her wrist but nods. Taking off her leather coat, she sets it on the back of her chair, then she lifts the t-shirt I gave her and points at a narrow scar on her stomach. It’s about an inch long and a couple millimeters wide, so I can tell that it’s a knife wound without her having to tell me.

“Where’d that come from?” In answer, Olivia points at her throat. “Icky Vicky.” She gives me a nod to confirm it, and lifts the shirt a little more to point out other knife wounds out mixed into the numerous scars on her lower torso. It pisses me off to see some of the physical damage done to her, but I keep my anger in check in favor of watching Olivia sign out her words.

‘She came in after Cole left with The...’

“Wait, I don’t understand who he left with.” Olivia mouths out,
‘The Don.’

“Who’s
‘The Don’
?
You had a mafia boss there?” Olivia shakes her head and signs out that she’ll tell me about him later, I nod before she continues with the current memory. Most of its signs, but words that she can’t mouth out, she mouths; so I’m able to understand it as if she were really speaking.

‘Eddy was supposed to be on watch, but Victoria gave him a blow job and he took a break.’
There’s another man I’ll have to ask her about, and Olivia motioning out blow job did not affect me in the slightest, since it ties in to the red head, and anything that involves Icky makes me want to gag.
‘I didn’t really give a fuck about what she would do to me now that she finally got inside. You see, she’d come to the tiny window every day and curse me for “Stealing” Cole. I was actually kind of hoping that she’d be my guardian angel and cut me loose, since she didn’t want me there.’
Olivia barks out a humorless laugh.

‘Turns out she was more like Lilith. Vicky had this butter knife that she sharpened to a dull point.’
Olivia picks up her braid.
‘She tried to chop off my hair, but her knife couldn’t do it, so she pulled it out in clumps.’
I look at Olivia’s hair now, and it looks really long, so how much was torn out? She must read the question in my eyes, because she undoes the braid, and pulls aside a few inches to reveal a patch of hair that is several inches shorter than the rest.
‘She could only reach this much because the rest was tucked behind my back.’
I remember the position she told me about, so I nod for her to continue.

‘Vicky stabbed me a few times, the first few didn’t go in all the way.’
Olivia points to one of those. It’s not a raised scar like the other knife wounds.
‘So, she added a little more force to it and took her anger out on me.’
Olivia’s eyes are a little distant, I’m guessing that she’s visualizing the scene again, so I reach over and grip her shaking hand. She blinks a few times before meeting my gaze.

“You alright?” Olivia gives me a firm nod and I see her eyes are now that smoky steel color they take on when she’s pissed. Her motions are choppy and quick, but I can keep up with her now that I’ve been reading them for days.

‘The bitch sliced me up, and couldn’t even finish the job right.’
Olivia balls her right fist in a white knuckled grip.
‘I just kept thinking, “Do us both a favor and cut a little deeper.’”
I squeeze her hand and scowl at her. Olivia shows me her haunted eyes, that have now bled to that cool grey color I hate. She speaks the next part out loud, but it’s no more than a raspy whisper. “Unless you’ve been there, you don’t know how it feels to have nothing left to live for. For every day to be worse than the one prior. To think that it would be better to be buried in the ground, to have to force yourself to take a breath, even when it burns your soul.”

Olivia wipes furiously at her eyes, so I reach over and pull her onto my lap. I know that she’s keeping the pain inside, and is pissed at herself for
‘showing weakness,’
but as I’ve said before; she isn’t alone anymore and I refuse to sit back when she’s hurting. Taking one arm at a time, I wrap them around my neck and feel her squeeze me closer. I run my hand up and down her back, feeling the six ace bandages digging into her flesh.

It reminds me that I have to get her to stop binding her chest, because it must hurt, and it’s unnecessary. She has curves, and they aren’t going anywhere, nor does binding them do anything other than prevent her from taking full breaths. I didn’t even see her chest when I first saw her, and I was already lusting after her, so doing this to herself isn’t accomplishing what she thinks it is.

Regardless of her cup size, or how she dresses, men will always find her attractive. And it’s not a bad thing, she just has to be able to defend herself against unwanted attention, and be aware of her surroundings; which she most certainly is, since she pulls back from me and dives for her chair before I even hear the tread on the stairs. The footfalls are heavy, so I know it’s male, and don’t need more information than that to know it’s Cory; because who other than me follows her every move? I’m proven right, when he appears w few seconds later. Cory checks Olivia’s face first, and since she didn’t cry, there’s no evidence to be found of her lapse in armor. With her well-being visually accounted for, he looks at me.

“What’re doing down here? She should be resting.”

“You could ask Olivia, since she can speak for herself,” I reply after seeing Olivia scowl at Cory. Said scowl turns to a smile when I say that, but Cory adopts a scowl of his own. “But I’m sure that her answer would be something along the lines of,
‘I feel fine, and I made a deal with Jared that if I feel tired or in pain, we immediately go upstairs and cuddle in the clouds.’
” Olivia nodded at most of it, but gives me an elbow for the last bit, which causes me to grin.

“I’m just going to ignore everything you’ve just said, Kong,” Corry says with a wave at me and looks at Olivia. “Livs, do you really feel well enough to have Jared train you?” My eyes widen a little at his awareness of our training sessions; since I figured she didn’t want the others to know about her inability to shoot, but Olivia doesn’t seem shocked at all. Maybe because Cory already knew she was a bad shot, or maybe she told him that I offered to train her? I don’t know, doesn’t matter anyway, so just watch their exchange as she mouths out her answer to Cory.

‘I feel fine, but you can stay and watch if you want.’
It’s my turn to scowl; this is my time with her. With the surgery this morning, everyone visiting all day long, and then Tommy’s surprise visit that lasted
three
hours; I’ve barely had a minute with her. Okay, I snuck in time for a nap with her and a tickle fight, but training is
our
time.

“I’ll stay to see how you’ve improved, if at all, and then I’ll leave,” Cory says. “But I doubt that he could have taught you any better than Trav or I did.”

I swallow my retort, because dissing his skills would also be inadvertently insulting a deceased man, and I’m not that much of a bastard. There’s also the fact that Olivia would either never speak to me again, or kill me for saying anything against the love of her life, which I would never do.

Olivia stands with her chin raised at Cory, as she walks over to the table and picks up the gun. I don’t know who she took offense for, but it obviously stiffened her spine. Attaching the silencer with nimble fingers, she flips the safety, takes aim and decimates the styrofoam apple at the other end of the table. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Cory so stupefied in our year of acquaintance, well, minus the time he came back from a run to find Olivia amongst our ranks. On the other hand, I think that anyone who walked in to find a missing person to be suddenly found, would have been a little dazed under the circumstances. But this is different, it’s like he’s never seen a target destroyed before, which he undoubtedly has with his background.

“Holy shit, it’s a miracle,” he mutters. Running over to Olivia, he picks her up and spins her around. Thankfully her obsessive safety checks made her set the gun down first, so she’s able to hold on as Cory whips her around like a rag doll.

“It’s not a miracle, now set her down before you open her stitches, you damn giant,” I demand. Spinning immediately ceases and he sets her down to check her throat. Olivia bats his hands away, mouthing that she’s fine.

“Livs, you just fucking murdered the target,” Cory whispers with disbelief. Olivia nods, but he just keeps staring at her as if he’s never seen her before. “How the hell did this fucker teach you, when we couldn’t?” Olivia lifts a hand to her ear. “You weren’t listening?”