Between Here and the Horizon(61)

“Glad to see you’re still capable of laughing at my expense, despite the blood loss,” I informed him. I was smiling, too, though. Just a little. Just enough to fuel him on.

“I could be laid out on my death bed and I still wouldn’t be sick enough to resist taking a pot shot at you, Lang.”

“I’m honored. And why does sparring with me bring you such immense joy, I wonder?” I was only half joking when I asked this; his constant need to be baiting me, cajoling me, or just being downright rude to me seemed to be his only goal when we were around one another.

Sully’s smile shrank. It went from a blazing level ten, to a much more somber level four. It still lingered at the corners of his mouth and around his eyes, though, like a fire that wouldn’t go out. “It does bring me immense joy. And you know all too well why I do it, Lang.”

“I don’t.”

“Now that is bullshit.”

I shook my head, folding my arms across my chest, and Sully sighed. He looked resigned. “Why does any little boy pull a girl’s pigtails in the school yard? Why does any teenaged guy with hormones pretend to ignore the prettiest girl in school?”

“You do not have a crush on me.”

“Sure I do.”

“You’re playing with me.”

“I’m not.”

“The way a cat toys with a mouse, you *.”

“If it’s safer for you to believe that, then okay, Lang. I’m playing with you.”

“It’s not safer. It’s the truth.”

Sully didn’t open his mouth again. He simply stared at me with that little half smile on his face, taunting me. Or at least I thought he was. Damn it! Things were crystal clear before—Sully Fletcher hated me— and now they were so muddied, I had no idea what was going on.

Sully smirked, obviously enjoying the fact that I was squirming. “So. Are you gonna stitch me up or what?” he asked.

“Absolutely not. I’m not doing that. Are you crazy?”

“Well, I can’t do it myself. I tried to last time, and look how that turned out.”

Why was it no surprise that he’d taken a needle and thread to himself? I could almost imagine the conversation he’d had with the doctors on the mainland, when he’d told them all to go to hell.

“I can always superglue myself back together if you’re squeamish,” he continued. “I have some Gorilla Glue around here somewhere.”

“You can’t!”

“That’s how we patch people up out in the field. It’s the most effective method there is to prevent blood loss.”

I wondered if he realized he wasn’t in the field anymore, and that there were other, safer ways of doing things. “How about some food instead?”

He sighed, resigned. “Sure.”

He allowed me to pass when I tried to enter the kitchen this time. He didn’t follow after me. I put the chicken casserole in the fridge and went about heating up the bolognese sauce, rifling through his cupboards once more, hunting for dried pasta. When I couldn’t find any, I stuck my head back into the living room to ask Sully where it was kept and nearly screamed when I found him naked, standing in the middle of the room. Thankfully his back was to me—I got his ass instead of anything more…well, more.

Sully didn’t turn around, but I could see his shoulders were shaking. He was laughing. The bastard was laughing! “You can help me get dressed if you like?” he offered. “I’m having trouble with the bending part. If you could hold my boxers out, it’d make it a hell of a lot easier to step into them.” I saw then that he was holding a clean t-shirt in one hand, a pair of rolled up boxer briefs in the other.

“I think I’ll pass. Uhh, where do you keep your pasta?”

Sully must have been all too aware that I was still staring at his ass, because he flexed, making his left cheek jump not once but twice. Slowly, he angled his body, almost turning around, at which point I studiously glared at the kitchen tile at my feet.

“I don’t have spaghetti,” he said. “There are pasta shells on top of the fridge, though.” He was trying not to laugh, but not very hard by the sounds of things.

I disappeared back in the kitchen, shaking my head, trying to dislodge the image of Sully’s ass that had burned itself into my retinas. It wasn’t all that easy, though. I got the feeling I could bleach my eyeballs and the sight would still be there every time I blinked.

When I took the steaming hot food back into the living room, clattering and banging and making enough noise to wake the dead, just to make sure he heard me coming this time, Sully was sprawled out on the couch, fully dressed (thank god) and he had my cell phone in his hand.

I stopped dead. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He tapped something into the phone, and then looked up at me. “Don’t panic, Lang. I wasn’t reading your texts.”

“Then what were you doing?”

“Prank calling myself so I have your number. Next time you bring food over, I want to be able to make requests.”

“Who says I’ll be bringing anything over ever again?” I placed the plates of food down on the small coffee table in front of him, scowling. “No one ever tell you it’s rude to mess with another person’s phone?”