18. How deep of shit am I in?
18
How deep of shit am I in?
Exton
“I’m home, angry elf. Miss me?” I shout as soon as I walk inside the cabin, shaking off all the snow from my jacket.
It looks like a snowstorm is coming our way and I keep telling myself that was the reason I rushed to get back like my ass was on fire but maybe I should stop pretending—at least to myself—that it wasn’t about her. That I wasn’t pulled back to Iris Lake by more than responsibility.
“Do you see how wet the floor is?” Electra shouts back from the room and I turn around, looking at the tile, confused, because it’s not wet at all. Apart from beneath my own snow-covered boots. “That’s how many tears I’ve cried while you were gone,” she adds, and I shake with silent laughter.
That little shit.
“Oh hell, little star. All this for me? It’s gonna take me the whole evening to clean up your mess.” I don’t even bother to hide the not-so-subtle innuendo in my tone and just as soon as it sinks in, I hear something fall in her room.
A shit-eating, satisfied grin pulls on my face.
Damn it, I needed her. Needed this snarky elf who’s so much more than a mere responsibility. I was away for all of six hours, but they were the longest six hours of my life. Even though my foot didn’t step off the gas paddle once. Not after I got pulled over the first time and not after the snow started falling too heavily to be driving this fast. But my whole body was brimming with that need, aching to get back. It’s maddening and stupid and so confusing, but it doesn’t change the fact that Electra Monroe is way deep under my skin.
I couldn’t even call her because I remembered too late that I left my phone at home, in between those couch cushions where I threw it last night.
And right after that proceeded to get way more than I gambled for, forgetting about the little device.
I went into last night wanting to learn more about her, to dig deeper into her life, find out what makes her tick. What was she like before all this happened, but I just ended up falling into her ice, right alongside her.
I was reluctant to leave Electra after all that transpired, after the scars she showed me and peeled away a few of my own scabs. But this couldn’t wait.
I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night because my blood was humming with thirst and I had to sate it. I had to feed the monster inside of me. And I did.
I should’ve used more finesse, but whatever, I got my point across or at least I served the prologue because I’m sure I’ll be back for more.
Just then my little angry elf rolls out of her room. “Why are your knuckles red?” Electra asks, eyeing my hands when she comes closer.
“Checking me out, Miss Monroe?” I lean in, whispering and she rolls her eyes, despite the little shiver I did not miss going through her body.
“You wish.” That I do.
“So, what’d you do while I was gone?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Hmm, careful, angry elf, or I’ll think you might care about me.” I send her a smirk to which I get another roll of those beautiful blues.
Fuck, I missed her.
“And there’s my delusional Exton.”
“All I heard was ‘my’ in that sentence.” Am I avoiding answering her questions by pissing her off? Possibly. But I don’t particularly want to discuss what I went to do this morning with her.
“Whatever.” She wheels away from me toward the kitchen. “You left your phone at home. It rang when you were gone,” Electra says casually while reaching for a water bottle but I stiffen.
“Oh, who was it?” I start toward the couch to find my phone, but she stops me.
“It’s in the room.” I lift my eyes from underneath my lashes.
“Why?”
“Because I picked it up.” My nostrils flare automatically, my already raw fists curling at my sides.
“You picked it up?” I ask her slowly, trying to gage what she knows. How many of my fuck ups were disclosed while I was gone.
“Mm-hmm, it kept ringing and ringing, and I just wanted to tell them to stop calling because you were gone.”
“You could’ve silenced the phone.”
“Sure. But you’re all up in my business so I got into yours as well.” Her casual tone continues as she shrugs but my jaw hardens. My heart starts racing, the hatred and rage screaming to be let out.
“It was your father’s lawyer.” The words slip past her lips and before she can continue and tell me how she wants nothing to do with me and my fucked up past, my first punches through the hallway wall.
The drywall crunching and falling through under the force of my blow, sending dust to the floor.
My eyes are wild, nostrils flared, chest heaving as I turn back to face her. “What did he tell you? How much of a fuck up I am? How I’m to blame for it all?”
“Shut up, Axe,” she interrupts me but never once raises her voice. “Shut up and don’t say anything you don’t want me to know. Because all he wanted was to get a message over to you to come pick up whatever it is he has for you. That’s all.” I’m still breathing heavily but the anger slowly dissipates. Every calm, simple word out of her mouth, breaks through my red haze.
Electra shakes her head and wheels toward the sink, snatching a towel and comes my way, wrapping it around the bleeding knuckles as she murmurs, “Lunatic.” But her touch is not angry. It’s gentle and caring and just like that every ounce of anger is dried up.
She’s not demanding answers I’m not ready to give. Even to myself.
She’s simply here, taking care of my wound and being the calm I need.
Electra wraps my hand with the towel and points to the mess I made. “Clean that up. And that wall better look brand new after you patch it up.”
She’s almost inside her room when I get my head working again, it was too stunned by her all this time. “We’re leaving for gym in ten,” I call out and she just shakes her head.
“Dude, that’s Exton Quinn,” someone calls out.
“Is that Elle Monroe with him?”
I hear these and more along the same lines hushed whispers as we roll through the gym, along with a few guys’ elbow jabbing their friends in the gut or ribs at the sight of us.
Now, how deep of shit am I in if I want to bash all their heads until they lose their sight and can’t stare at her? At her perfectly outlined curves in the white spandex long sleeve with what seems to be a built-in bra or some shit that molds to her tits like second skin and leaves her whole back naked. At her slender neck that just begs to be kissed, nibbled…sucked on, exposed to all with her hair up. At her plush, pink lips she keeps licking as a free invitation.
And the worst thing is, she doesn’t even realize how seductive she is. How gorgeous and alluring she is, thinking no one sees her as a woman because of that chair.
Not that she told me that herself, but I can read it loud and clear in her eyes now, just as I could this morning when we were watching the sunrise.
“This is stupid,” Electra mumbles while, giving the starers her evillest eye, oblivious to the lust in theirs and I suppress a sigh of relive and a chuckle at their panicked, quickly-averting eyes.
I doubted the sanity of my decision the whole drive here—hell, my every life choice as of recent—because as I was standing at the sink, washing off the dried blood and the dust from the drywall I didn’t recognize the guy staring back at me in the mirror above it.
Because that guy? That wasn’t me. Or not who I was used to seeing.
I don’t do caring or feelings or even weird tugging heart shit, yet here I was, experiencing all three, and then some, with this conundrum of a woman. Here I was, desperate to erase all the hurt she willingly shared with me last night as she took some of my own. Here I was barely surviving without her for six damn hours. And I wanted more.
I still don’t know the whole story of her accident, and Electra seems to guard it pretty well—or rather hide behind it—because once it’s out in the open, I will make her tackle it and show me what’s got her so twisted up. Show me all of those scars he put there, on the inside, and I burn with rage that she’s simply sweeping it underneath her trauma blanket, leaving it to fester there for days to end.
Something tells me that no one really knows what happened that day or the days following the fall, and I find myself desperate to be the one—the only one—she shares it with. I want to be her everything. Maybe this is just a part of the god-complex my teammates tell me I’ve got. But it wouldn’t explain why I need her on a deeper level, way beyond the surface one of just getting her up on her feet to make it back to my team.
And that’s just one of the many problems I’m currently facing. It’s getting harder and harder to keep my eyes off her. Harder to keep lying to myself that I am not attracted to her and that that weird feeling I have for her is a mere pity, because it’s not. In fact, pity is not even in the options menu in my head or heart. It never was. And it sure as fuck wasn't why I made that trip this morning.
She was always more even when she was stabbing me with that wooden spatula.
And now, after an invisible thread bonded us last night, there’s no going back. Only forward, thorough the rest of her fucking walls.
“Hey, we can always go back to playing hockey on that lake with you as a goalie.”
“Gym it is,” she grumbles. “But what am I even going to do here?”
“Get inspired.” Electra slowly turns around with another one of her dirty looks.
“By sweat and stench?”
“Mm-hmm.” I breathe in deeply as if I am enjoying it. “Don’t you love it? You must’ve loved it to spend hours every day in a gym.” I casually slip that comment in there, but she’s not fooled.
“That was part of my life back then, it’s not anymore.”
“But it will be once again. Soon. I can sense it.”
“I think the sweat curled your brain, let’s leave before it does permanent damage.”
I chuckle, shaking my head as we approach the stretching station where there is a set of weighted balls.
“Can you just trust me? For once?” Instantly, at the speed of snapping fingers, her whole body stiffens, her chest starts heaving as wheezing sounds escape her mouth and she turns white as that snow outside.
Shit! She’s having a panic attack! Just like that! What triggered her?
But I don’t have the time to ponder it, rushing over to her and falling to my knees until we are face to face. I cup hers in my hands, tipping our foreheads together until we share one breath. She’s cold—so, so cold.
“Electra, breathe. Look at me,” I order, but her gaze is lost, trapped under that ice of hers and I feel like I’m losing her. Each second she struggles for breath, she falls deeper and deeper into that numbing coldness.
Damn it!
“Electra!” I say louder, harsher but she’s still not here and then her body starts shaking, violently, and a fear like I’ve never known runs through me. Hell, I never even knew what fear was. I never experienced it, not on the ice when two-hundred-pounds of hockey muscle barrels into me and not when dad punished me. But watching her falling apart right here, right in front of my eyes, I realize that’s it. Here it is because I’m choking on the air same as her. I’m dying right alongside.
I don’t think. I just act, pressing my lips to hers and feel her breath hitch as my whole world tilts on its axis. It was supposed to be a distraction, something to juggle her out the state she was in, but it’s my body that goes into shock.
Just a kiss. That’s all it is and a PG version of it too, but it’s enough to set me on fire.
She’s so soft and sweet and warm, I don’t want to pull away. I don’t want to stop, and I feel my hands slipping past her cheek to the back of her slender neck, holding her. I need more.
I need her.
With each next thought my mind scrambles more and more. Her hands land on mine, halting me and I open my eyes, not realizing they were closed in the first place. But as soon as I do, I’m met with her wild, confused ones and it hits me.
It fucking hits me what I just did. I kissed her. I kissed Electra Monroe. And I liked it. Hell, I liked it too much based on the state of my sweatpants, but she looks at me like a deer caught in the headlights and it’s a fucking gut punch.
Fuck…
I pull away, swallowing a thick lump in my throat.
What the fuck had I done?
“Y-you…wh-what…kissed me…” she stutters, her fingers prodding her lips as if she can still feel mine on them.
I sure can feel hers, they are branded onto mine, adding some more to my already confused head, but she’s breathing, her panic attack long-forgotten.
“You were having a panic attack, so I had to do something to bring you back. A shock to the system.” My voice is extra thick and gruff as I come up with some bullshit excuse. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that…you know.” I gesture to her pink lips and some loose strands of hair that I evidently pulled on with my fingers.
Electra blinks away her confusion, shaking herself out of whatever stupor she was in and casts her eyes away from mine but not before I catch something in them.
Is that…disappointment?
She clears her throat, those pale cheeks turning a pretty shade of pink. “Oh, um, yeah, okay…thanks,” she adds quickly, looking anywhere but at me as she frantically fixes her hair.
A flicker of hope lights up my chest, same one as I’d imagine a boy in middle school would have when his crush looked at him. Yep, it’s official, Exton Quinn has lost his damn mind. Maybe Zima did more damage to my brain than I initially thought that day.
But…she likes me.
I feel that stupid, love-sick fool kind of grin pull up on my face and there’s nothing I can do about it. She likes me.
“So.” She looks up, her feelings well-hidden again. “Let’s work out or whatever?” We still have to get to the bottom of what triggered her just now, but for now I’ll let it go.
I pick the lightest ball as she eyes me and I see the precise moment Electra realizes what I’m going to do because those icy blue eyes widen and she opens her mouth to yell at me, but the ball is already flying her way, and she has no option but to catch it. And she does.
“Exton!”
“Please don’t start with your ‘Are you insane’ stuff.”
“Oh, no this time I was going for the ‘I’ll kill you’ kind of stuff.”
“Mm-hmm, good luck with that.” I pick up another ball and send it her way. Electra keeps yelling profanities my way, but she catches each one, not realizing how well her upper body is moving and twisting each time because I change the angles every time I throw, challenging her and it works.
Electra is as stubborn as they come, and it works great for her professional career, but it sucks when it comes to getting her to do something. Once her mind is set, there is no breaking it. Well, not for others, I smirk internally, but I love me a challenge and I found the key to unlock hers.
Playing.
I put her though a few exercises, mostly for her upper body and then we go to the mats where I help her to one and start working on her legs, stretching, massaging, bending, and just doing whatever comes to my mind to get those muscles in there warmed up again—all while having my hands on her. Touching her and feeling her like she’s mine. And that simple, almost platonic touch does what nothing and no one else could do. It calms the storms in my heart, cools the rage in my blood, and I’m feeling the lightest I’ve felt in days. Years…
Because A, my hands are on her body, and B, she likes me…