“Even if you’re right,” she whispers between clenched teeth, “he’s not the one who’s going to have to deal with your violence.
Look at him
.”
I do. I look, and I look back at her looking at him, her light blue eyes jumping from side to side with anxious worry.
I lift my fists. The crowd cheers, not for me, of course, but because the fight is unofficially going to start now.
“
Akos, stop it,” Benelli pleads, keeping her distance. “Don’t hurt him over this.”
He spits, cracks his neck to one side, then the other, and says, “Maybe you shouldn’t have run your mouth. Get back before you cause more trouble than you already have.”
And he pushes her.
It’s barely a push.
In any other circumstance, it wouldn’t warrant more than an annoyed look.
In this particular case, I pull my fist back and slam it into his jaw as hard as I can.
Akos’s head flips back when I connect, my fist missiling nicely into the square line of his jaw. I’d been hoping to hit more his cheek area, but my rage was a little blinding, and it’s incredibly hard to take aim on a moving target.
His howl of rage matches the scream that I bite back. I’m fairly sure I broke my hand. It’s throbbing badly, and turning red on the knuckles. Before I have a chance to check it for breaks,
Akos runs at me, slamming his head into my stomach and throwing me on my back. Wind knocked out of me, I blink up to see his fist raised high, over his shoulder, and the back of my head registers the cobblestone under it.
It less than a second I realize that if his punch connects, my skull will split open and, if I’m lucky, I’ll be dead instantly.
I roll out from under him just as his fist plummets down and crashes into the stone. He lets out a fresh and ferocious roar and shakes his hand out, jumping back and yelling a stream of curses in Hungarian that make some of the ladies in the crowd gasp.
I give a sigh of relief, feeling lucky that the playing field has been somewhat evened. I’m lucky that we’re both equally maimed now.
I may have a fighting chance after all.
I jump back up and pull my left hand back like I’m drawing a bow, and I pray my shaky understanding of physics is right and the momentum of my hand will do some damage to his
face. I let my fist fly and punch him under the jaw as hard as I can; I know I can’t do as much damage as I could have with my right, but it’s a hit. And that counts, right?
How
does one tally points in a street fight, exactly?
Now the pain in both my hands is explosive, and the sounds from the outside world are slowly breaking through the bubble of my adrenaline. I hear the jeers and screams from the crowd, notice the rush of several older men from restaurants and shops in the neighborhood yelling, “
Rendőrség!”
The police.
Benelli
grabs me behind my elbow to drag me away, but, just as I’m about to dash off with her, Akos draws back and delivers a punch that feels like it shatters my eye socket. There’s been nothing similar to movie fights in the entirety of our scuffle, but I do definitely see the smattering of revolving cartoon stars in front of my eyes, the same kinds that always accompany some animated villain’s crack to the skull.
With an anvil or a piano.
Which is what I feel like I’ve been smacked upside the head with.
Akos sticks his face close to mine and prepares for another direct hit when Benelli runs fast in the opposite direction, dragging me along with her as the police car bumps down the cobblestones and the crowd parts.
I try to keep pace with
Benelli, but she has the grace and speed of a deer in the forest. I’m half-blind, stunted with pain, and keep knocking face-first into things since my perception is wonky.
“Are you okay?” she calls over her shoulder as I smash my shoulder into a
lampost.
“Of course.
Run!” I insist through gritted teeth.
We run. We run like the devil is chasing us, and it occurs to me that I should have tried to smash his ankle before we took off.
She ducks into a hedge, and I follow her along a back garden and in through a rusty gate. I realize we’re at the backside of her aunt’s home, and I stand on the pavers as she swings the door open and walks into a small, warmly lit kitchen. It takes a beat and a half before she comes back out, squinting at me, standing still in the dark.
“Come in,” she says, her voice dipping low and tired into the well of her disappointment.
With me.
“I’m going to head back to my apartment. I think I’ve given you enough trouble tonight and made a decent ass of myself in the process. I assure you, neither outcome was my intention.”
She lifts one foot free of her little shoe, runs it up and down along the long, smooth curve of her leg, and knots her arms tight over her chest.
“You could have been hurt,
Cormac. You could have been
killed.
”
“That’s hyperbole, love,” I scold and pray I’m half right.
I take a few cautious steps towards that rusty gate that will lead me back to a lonely evening of miserable pain and regret in my tiny apartment, but the sharp double intake of breath that gasps from her mouth has me at her side before she can clap a hand over her lips and hide her sob.
“Oh no, no, no, please,
Benelli, no,” I plead, my arms around her, my swollen, aching hands running over the dark rivers of her hair. “I never wanted to hurt you.”
She cuddles against me, her head on my shoulder, her body nestled close to mine for a scant second before she puts her hands up to my chest and shoves me backward.
“Hurt me? You’re lucky your brains aren’t plastered all over the street right now. I told you to stay away from him, not hunt him down to have a pissing contest in the middle of the town. You’re supposed to be...you’re a professor for god’s sake! You’re supposed to be the one person with some sense in this town full of freaking asshole barbarians!”
It’s
like sparks are flying out of her eyes and her hair is lifting in some unseen wind. It’s like she’s transformed into some harpy or siren or malevolent goddess right in front of my eyes.
And I’ve never been more fantastically turned on than I am in this moment.
“I apologize.” I hold my hands up to her, surrender-style and duck my head down, bowing to her awesome fury. “I was an ass. A total ass. And...I apologize.”
A cry comes half unstuck from her throat, and she shakes her head back and forth vehemently. “Look at them. Look at your hands.”
She closes all the limited space between us and cradles my hands in hers, running her fingertips over my bruised, torn flesh.
“They’ll mend.” They will. But I never want her to stop touching them.
Her eyes, once she lifts them, are brimming with emotions too gorgeously, femininely complicated for me to comprehend, so I don’t try. One perk of the massive amount of schooling I’ve had is that it puts into perspective just what a tiny speck of a moron I am in the sea of genius that is this world. I don’t attempt to tackle the secrets of a universe that’s too overwhelmingly complex for me to fully understand; sometimes it’s best to approach life’s craziest mysteries as an appreciative observer.
“Come inside,” she commands.
I follow without argument because I am a man who knows better than to ignore my fate, especially when it’s being beautifully orchestrated by Benelli Youngblood.
She presses down on my shoulders, and I sit in one of six charmingly mismatched kitchen chairs. She pulls her hair into a neat ponytail and edges her sleeves up to her elbows, then digs through the cabinets, juggling rolls of gauze and a few unmarked bottles of god-knows-what in her arms.
“Sorry. My aunt keeps a lot of herbal remedies in here, so it’s a little bit of a guess about what’s what.” She turns to me, so beautiful, so tired, so ready to knock my ass back if I try any shenanigans, I’m not even tempted.
Not very tempted, anyway.
“So I should pray that whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger?” I ask, holding my hands, palms down, flat on the crazy tiled table.
Benelli
bends one leg under her body and sits perched on the edge of her chair, an intent look on her face as she spills something that smells peculiarly noxious onto a piece of gauze and dabs it on my torn knuckles.
“I think you should thank whatever gods you believe in that you’re still a coherent, functioning human, because you could have been obliterated tonight,” she chastises, her brows furrowed with intense aggravation.
I’m attempting not to faint.
The scalding home-brewed vodka, the gut-wrenching fight with a titan of
assholish brutality seem like child’s play next to the chemical singe of my skin as Benelli nurses me.
“What...
er...what kind of, uh...holy gods...what kind of herbs did your aunt use for this?” I’m gritting my teeth into nubs and firmly telling myself not to scream, because that would be a catastrophically wussy thing to do in front of a beautiful girl toiling over my war wounds.
“I’m not sure, actually.”
Benelli interrupts her malicious dabbing and examines the bottle, while I flex and unflex my hand, shaking it out as if I can unloose the tornado of atomic pain radiating over my skin. A small, tiny groan of pure agony loosens from my throat before I can collect myself.
Benelli
gasps, squints at the bottle, and yanks me to the sink by my wrist with a sudden panicked force that lets me know a scream might be an appropriate reaction to whatever we’re dealing with here.
“Bloody fucking holy shit mother of a son of a goddamn bitch!”
I scream as water sizzles over my skin like a stream of potent acid.
“I’m so sorry,”
Benelli cries, blowing desperately on my hand through the torrent of icy water as if her action can mitigate the agony. It’s completely ineffectual and may be driving me towards an unrelenting hardon, which adds a new dimension of discomfort to this situation.
“
It’s fine,” I manage to gasp. “It’s completely fine. What was it, exactly, that you put on my raw, bloody knuckles?”
She stops mid-blow, and her blue eyes are wide with horror. She stands up straight as an arrow, shoulders squared, like she’s facing a very accusatory jury. “Um, it was a very old label, and pretty worn away. I assumed it was iodine. Apparently it was...uh, it was...wart remover. Seriously, I’m so sorry!” She squeezes her temples and shakes her head.
I man up as fast as I can. “No worries.” I reach out with my unmutilated hand and touch her shoulder. “I appreciate the gesture, and, honestly, it made me forget the pain of my probably broken bones.”
She turns off the tap and examines my abused flesh. “So I replaced the pain of a break with the pain of a chemical burn?” Her laugh is embarrassed and adorable. “Let’s just be glad I never signed up for nursing school.”
“I think you’d make a terrific nurse,” I say, and I mean it absolutely. Of course, I might mean it more in relation to her giving sponge baths than to cleaning wounds, but I do mean it.
“You’re a desperate man in a desperate situation,” she answers, leading me back to the table. “Can you trust me to attempt this a second time? I promise
, I’ll sniff the bottle before I go dumping it all over your skin.”
I let my eyes meet hers for a long few seconds. “I trust my life in your hands, no question.”
She breaks eye contact, stares intently at my hands, and raises her brows high. “For a professor, you’re kind of a half-wit.”
There’s no possible way she can see my grin, but she smiles like she’s returning the expression. “Your insults are as accurate as they are painful.”
“Someone needs to tell you before you go David and Goliath yourself into a coma.” She smears some kind of cooling, nontoxic ointment on my knuckles, wraps the gauze around my hand, and ties if off. “Will you be able to do your work with your hands like this?”
“I’ll manage.” The soft tips of her fingers are still brushing along the swollen edges of my hand. “I’m honest when I say that I never meant to make trouble for you. You can’t imagine how angry it made me to think of you being mistreated in any way. I guess I went out of my head just a little, and I apologize.”
She drops my hand and shakes her head back and forth, her ponytail swishing. “It’s fine.” She chews on the bottom edge of her lip, like she’s considering her next move. And then she pulls the chair she’s sitting on closer to me, leans in and presses her lips against mine with a soft urgency.
My aching hands finally forget their pain when they grasp her hips and run up along her back, reeling her closer until she’s mostly off her chair and on my lap. Her mouth opens and her tongue makes a slow, hot slide over my lips. My fingers trace the skin at her shoulders and press her jacket down and back, so it falls away and exposes so much soft skin I don’t know where to touch first.
I open my mouth to her and answer the press of her tongue with mine. I kiss her lips, drag across to the delicate line of her jaw, down the column of her neck and suck gently on her shoulder.