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So I deflected.
"My ass?" He looked taken aback for a second before a slow, strange smile pulled at his lips. "Because you can't seem to let go of it," I added, giggling when he squeezed the cheeks.
"Well, that, yeah." He was looking suddenly devilish, a glint in his eye that made my belly wobble deliciously. "And your tits. Your pussy. Your sweet mouth. That fucking face."
"Especially the chin," I piped in, knowing he always ended up touching the cleft before letting me go.
"This chin?" he asked, bending down and biting into it comically, making a wild animal growling noise as I threw back my head to laugh. "Yeah," he said with a grin as he pulled back, "I guess you can say I'm a fan of that too. But that wasn't what I was talking about."
The weight was back in his words and that time, it made my belly do a flip-flop. "What were you talking about then?"
"You, sweetheart. I'm a big fucking fan of you."
Told you he was the one, my heart said, warm and melty.
Can't argue with that anymore, my brain agreed.EPILOGUEBethany- 8 daysIt was what one might expect from a local NA meeting.
Whether that was good or bad was up to personal tastes, I guess.
To me, the common room in a local Baptist church felt cold and informal. The walls offered nothing but sterile whiteness and morbid pictures of Jesus nailed to a cross. The floor was well-worn and I imagined thousands of worshippers congregating there for Christmas and Easter services or prayer groups- their fancy formal shoes scuffing up the wide-plank wooden floors, the lacquer long faded.
There were simple gray and beige metal folding chairs lined up in short rows with a narrow aisle down the center for speakers to get up and down from their chairs.
Lazarus' hand squeezed mine hard enough to snap me out of my own swirling thoughts for long enough to be led over to the last row where he pushed me in and sat at the aisle.
"We're just here to listen," he reminded me, pulling the top of my hand on top of his knee, still holding it tight in his wide palm.
He had made good on his promise; he took me to bed for a week.
I was pretty sure I truly did need some Pedialyte to make up for all the fluids I had lost with the wild, rough, hard, inventive sex as well as the slow, sweet, passionate kind that could be called nothing other than lovemaking.
But that very morning, he came back out of the bathroom after giving me hard and rough, my body still a puddle of uselessness, and told me that that night we were hitting our first NA meeting.
Maybe there had been a part of me that had hoped he forgot about it. I should have known better. Lazarus, because he had been there himself, knew there was no other way out of an addiction than through it. That meant not just staying clean and away from old contacts, it meant going and hearing stories and eventually telling your own.
Burying your head and ignoring the addiction wouldn't help. That was how relapses happened.
He was looking out for me.
So even though my skin felt creepy-crawly and my heart was slamming in my chest at being in a room full of (anonymous) strangers who still knew just from my presence that I was an addict, and my hand was sweating against his hand, I knew he was doing what needed to be done.
To ensure my sobriety.
To build a future with me.
And that right there was why I was going to suck up my fears and nerves and general distaste for the very idea of being at a NA meeting. Because for the first time in far too long- I had someone other than myself to care for, to have be proud of me, to have the possibility of disappointing.
That, well, it meant everything.Lazarus - 3 months"Come on, one more fight."
Ross and I were sitting in his office at Hex, legs propped up on his shiny desk, his pristine dress shoes across from my beat-up leather combat boots.
"She doesn't like seeing me in there."
It really was that simple for me. Since that first night at Hex with her, she had been to two other fights while Ross struggled to find some decent guys to fill in his empty spaces. She had happily gotten dressed, slipped into uncomfortable shoes, and rode my bike in with me. She would stand there and watch the other fights somewhat impassively and go to the bar when Pagan got into the ring because she just wasn't a fan of his particular brand of brutal, telling me one night that it would make her view him differently to watch him fight and that she didn't want that because she liked the crazy fuck.
