Sobering up, he scanned my face. “You have nightmares, too, don’t you?”
Chewing on my lower lip, I nodded, watching as the tension filled him again.
Finally, he rolled us back onto our sides, right back into the position we’d been in before, including his thigh between mine. Balls!
“Full disclosure, I know some of what happened,” he said quietly, and my eyes closed of their own volition. “Pixie,” he shook me gently, waiting for them to open back up again before he continued. “I only know what was reported in the local newspapers from the area you lived in that I could find online. Even then, they didn’t give a name because of your age, but I put two and two together.”
I could lie, but I didn’t want to. “I sometimes have nightmares about it, and I don’t usually sleep well at night.” Usually being the keyword here. Last night I’d managed to fall back to sleep and had slept deeply and soundly for the first time in forever.
Seeing this on my face, he nodded and kissed my forehead softly. “I slept better last night than I have in months, too, baby.”
“Even though you got the shit beaten out of you?” I snickered, gently tracing over one of the bruises on his ribs.
“I didn’t get the shit beaten out of me,” he snorted, gently tucking a chunk of hair behind my ear. “The other guy got it worse.”
That I could believe. “If you say so.”
Pressing another kiss softly on my forehead, he picked up a strand of my hair and rubbed it between his fingers. “I can’t believe you’re naturally as blonde as this. Don’t women pay a lot of money to get this shade?”
“They can have it,” I muttered. “I couldn’t get an appointment to get my eyelashes and eyebrows dyed, so I look like a freak. And don’t even get me started on how many times I get asked if the carpet matches the drapes at work.”
Wrong thing to say. “What the fuck? Who asks that?”
Wincing, I went to pull away from him, but he tightened the muscles in his arm, holding me hostage—the big bully.
“Just people”—twats—“and women being bitchy.”
Angling his head down, he stopped when his nose was almost touching mine. “You working today?”
Shaking my head as much as I could, I saw him drop the hair he was still holding out of the corner of my eye, and then his arm moved to join the other one around my back.
“Good. Elijah and Sadie’s day of fun.” The tone he said it in wasn’t suggestive, but that didn’t stop my brain from turning into some sort of porn channel, each movie starring Elijah and me.
Not wanting to give away any more secrets because my face was expressive, and that sucked, I heaved out an exaggerated sigh and pushed against his arms. “I guess, seeing as how you got the shit beaten out of you, I can do that.”
Then he went and pushed his luck too far, tickling me in the side. I hated to be tickled—hated it with a fucking passion—so I kicked out and started slapping him on whatever area I could reach.
It was when I raised my knee to move away from him that I discovered something that was well hidden on Elijah—either he had a killer case of genital warts, or he had a piercing.
Here was the other nugget of information that hit me during the discovery, I was disappointed. Yeah, I was that shallow.
See, men got their peckers pierced through the head, right? A Prince Gilbert, or something like that. Well, where I’d felt it was relatively close to where his balls were, which meant that the god Elijah Townsend-Rossi, had a teeny weeny.
And wasn’t that just the cruelest thing in the world?
Unable to stop the words tumbling out, I mumbled, “You’ve got your weeny willie pierced.”
His mouth open and closed a couple of times before he sat up and glared down at me. “It’s not small.”
Figuring shrugging was a sympathetic and blasé move to make, I did the best I could with one shoulder buried in the mattress. “I’m sure. I mean, men are small until they’re hard, so…” I waved my hand around, cringing when it skimmed the area in question.
Narrowing his eyes, he ground out, “It’s not fucking small.”
Why wouldn’t this conversation just end so I could open up a pack of toaster strudels and eat myself into a depressed coma? We didn’t have those back home, so sue me—I was eating them every day because I loved them so much. That was the definition of comfort, and I needed a lot of it after this.
“Did it hurt to get done?”
A small smile lifted the corners of his mouth, but I can’t say it made me feel comfortable. More likely wary of what he was about to divulge. “I’ve got two.”