I couldn’t imagine how to rectify all the wrongs I’d thrown at Jude—I just seemed to keep adding more to the pile—so I folded my hand over his heart and let him carry me into his bedroom.
He walked me over to his bed, propping me in front of a mound of pillows.
“God, Luce,” he said, kneeling beside me and examining my face. I didn’t really want to know and I sure as hell wouldn’t be looking in a mirror for the next couple of weeks. “What the hell were you thinking?”
Running my fingers over my face, I winced at almost every place I touched. “I was thinking about giving that bitch a taste of her own medicine,” I said, “my fist doing the dosing.”
He exhaled, running his hand down the side of my neck.
“Don’t worry,” he said as I pulled my hands away to find blood spotting my fingers. “I’ll fix you.” Rising, he lunged across the room. “I’ll be right back,” he said, disappearing behind the door.
With Jude gone, the pain really started to eat away at me. I’d felt pain, and I wasn’t a huge wuss, but this felt like every nerve had decided to grow a heart that was pounding.
It had felt so good at the time—giving and taking a beating with Adriana—but now I was starting to question why I’d done it. I wasn’t regretting it, just questioning it. I’d never been a violent person—I had a short fuse, sure—but I’d never let my fists work out an issue I had with someone.
Why had I done it this time?
All the questions led to one answer: Jude.
He hadn’t made me go after Adriana, but my love for him and the pain I’d been caused at Adriana’s hand had been the fuel to my fire. I realized then it wasn’t Jude that was the problem. He wasn’t the reason our relationship was nothing short of explosive. It was me. It was the person I became with Jude beside me.
My anger peaked at new levels, exceeding his, but I didn’t have the self-control to douse that anger before it burned someone.
I couldn’t fix us until I fixed me. And he couldn’t fix me for me. It was a task that was all my own.
It was one I wasn’t sure I could face.
Jude was slipping back into the room before I could follow those thoughts down their depressing trail.
“Miss me?” he said, an armful of items tucked to his chest.
“Missed you,” I answered, dropping my head back into the pillows.
“Lucky for you, Luce, you chose to pick a fight around me,” he said, dropping the contents in his arms on the bed. “Someone who’s patched up, attended to, and sewn shut just about any wound man—or woman”—he smirked over at me— “could inflict on one’s body.”
“I had it all planned out,” I said as he doused some cotton pads with alcohol. “Did you really think that was a heat of the moment I-really-should-have-known-better smack down?”
“Oh, no, Luce. That looked like you knew exactly what you were doing.”
Dabbing my cheek with the cotton, he flinched before I did. It stung, but no worse than any other part of my body.
“You’re getting to be a worse liar with each passing day,” I said, wincing when he ran the pad over my eyebrow. Must have earned myself a nice little gash there.
He grinned at my eyebrow. “Truth through osmosis.”
I started to smirk at him, but it hurt my face too much, so I settled for a small glare. He ignored it, continuing to work over my face meticulously.
I shouldn’t have, but I watched him working over me, his eyes narrowed in their focus, the tip of his tongue bit between his teeth, as he attended to every scratch, bruise, and cut. I’d never experienced hands as gentle as his were.
“Do I look like a mummy yet?” I asked a while later, when he leaned back and investigated my face after slipping another bandage into place.
“Nah,” he said, capping the tube of first aid ointment. “You look like the most beautiful badass I’ve ever seen.”
“High praise coming from the king of badass,” I said, smiling through the pain it caused to move my mouth.
Collecting up the empty wrappers and blood stained cotton pads, he dumped them into the garbage can. “Mind telling me what that was all about?”
“I told you,” I said. “Giving Adriana Vix a piece of Adriana Vix.”
“Yeah,” he said, dragging out the word. “But you’ve wanted to stick it to Adriana since the night dumbass Tony mentioned her. Why did you choose to do it tonight?” Shaking a bottle of pain relievers into his palm, he handed me three. I swallowed them down without any fluid.