Everything Carries Me to You (Axton and Leander Book 3) (18 page)

"Being stuck in a chair all day is bad for me," Leander said, spreading his hands out, gesturing. "And yet somehow it continues to happen."

"For fuck's sake, Lee," she said disgustedly, turning away from him and walking towards the window for something else to look at.

Lee
, Leander noticed. Not
boss
anymore, even though she was upset at him, and not even his full name, because their professional boundaries were quickly eroding.

Silence again.

He had access to scientific journals now, but still. There were books he had to read. Relevant articles were not enough. Distantly, he was aware that he was being very unfair to Sarah, and that he'd become progressively difficult to deal with as his patience for his broken body and forced inaction burned up.

There had to be something for him to
do
.

Right now, the forward propulsion of the plan rested in New York's hands. Jesus
fuck
, that was hard to live with. This was a man who routinely refused to write two page memos. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Sarah broke the silence, while staring out the window at the LA night, and not even twitching in Leander's direction.

"You should have filed a report," she said, voice leaden.

"I can't," Leander said, which was what he always said, and this was already an old argument.

"It looks like he left you," Sarah said.

That stung. It always did.

"He did," Leander said, "but not like that. Not how you make it sound."

"It looks like there was an accident and some violence and then he panicked and
left
," Sarah said.

"Coercion," Leander replied immediately, and he'd said it enough times that it almost didn't sound defensive.

Sarah sighed.

"If you'd explained that to someone who isn't me," she said, "if you'd told anyone in a position of power or investigation that--"

"I can't," Leander said. "You know I can't--"

"If you had done that, then
maybe
I could believe you," Sarah said. "But you
didn't
, and you
refuse
to, and this is
fucking crazy
."

"Leave, then!" he shouted, because he always lost it at this point, always felt abandoned and hurt.

Sarah massaged her temples.

"I know you," she said, "and I know you don't really mean that. But for the night, yeah. I'm gonna leave."

She grabbed her purse and stalked out without looking at him.

"Have fun reordering your fucking books."

In the softening twilight shadows, Leander wheeled around his apartment restlessly, aimlessly. Inaction was killing him. Even if he'd already started to crunch the numbers and gather the data, thanks to New York's committees, even if the necessary work had begun, the lack of hands on action was killing him. It would kill him, he thought, just as surely as getting hit by a bus would, or being struck multiple times by lightning. And yet--

It was a failure of tactics to be so upset, so agitated. It was unwise to push Sarah away. Alienating her was an unsound strategy. If he discarded every ounce of
feelings
from the equation, he could see that she was right, and that, furthermore, if he really was to scheme and plan without emotion or morality in the way to stop him--it would be beneficial to act as if she were right, to tell her so, regardless of the truth. But if Leander had been willing to calculate free of emotion and morality--then he would have given up on his rescue mission and gotten on with his life already, so the point was moot. There were so many things to balance: Sarah's utility against the ethics of having someone with feelings for him aid his reunion to his lover; Sarah's willingness to give him nearly anything against how much his sense of right and wrong would allow him to take; the uselessness of his own negative emotions against the probably healthy idea of letting it all out--and those were merely the abstractions of daily life. Overall, he had much more to plan.

So far, he had resisted the idea of seeing a psychiatrist for the nameless traumatic event in his life. Leander didn't know how much longer he'd be able to worm his way out of it, but he didn't feel like he had to energy to lie to a professional for a solid hour or two every week.

God, this would take time. He knew it would take time. He had told himself it would take time. His awareness of this did nothing to help him feel less desperate. So far his plan was going well, and yet that did not lessen his desperation.

Even if his data collection and search parameters found him likely werewolf settlements immediately, even if he dispatched some private investigator or whoever to confirm the presence of someone like Axton in a sleepy little town somewhere, even if a plan of escape was readily available and obvious--even if Leander executed all the preliminary steps
perfectly
and hit the correct answer on the first try, he still couldn't have done a fucking thing about it. His bones were still broken. Very likely there was some hard ass murderball playing motherfucker who could launch a search and rescue mission in a wheelchair, but Leander knew that he wasn't it.

Besides, his body was still so preoccupied with healing that he wanted to sleep ten hours a day.

He scrubbed a hand over his face.

Fuck.

It would probably help to do normal things. Workout. Eat. Shower. Jerk off. Sleep. And he could still do these things, for which he was very grateful--at least Dana hadn't wrecked his motherfucking
spine
, the shitbag--but they were all different now. For starters, Leander had never been in the habit of skipping leg day. Few martial artists were. The idea of sitting in his chair and doing bicep curls for half an hour just made him feel angry, and it wasn't like he had a home set up for bench press or rows or anything else useful. It wasn't like his arms needed the workout, either, since they were his main means of propulsion right now.

Eat. Food. He should eat. At very least, he should eat.

He wanted to punch something--anything. But true power punches came from the hips, the twist there, and from pushing off the ground with the legs. Really, arms were the least of it.

Besides, if he punched a hole in the wall, he wasn't going to repair it. And Axton, who could have, and who would have--

He was so
angry
, still, between the bursts of sadness. And if he was too angry--at least, if he was the wrong kind of angry--he couldn't think. And if he couldn't think, then Axton would be gone forever. Because Leander understood something that perhaps no one else did: Axton was a man of his word. If he'd agreed to go with Dana, whatever the set of conditions had been, he meant it. He meant it deep in his bones. Axton would stay and suffer any number of tortures or indignities if he believed he'd made a true bargain for Leander's safety. And seeing as how Dana having a change of heart was as least as unlikely as Axton breaking any promises--

It was all up to Leander, and he knew it.

"No pressure," he muttered to his empty apartment, just to hear the sound of his own capacity for speech. He cleared his throat, and pretended he hadn't heard the urge for tears in his voice. He swallowed the threat of tears down.

The soup, then. Sarah had left him soup because Sarah's stress response was to take care of everything and the worse she felt, the more neurotic and meticulous she became.

She cared for him. It was a problem. Leander knew this. He knew that this was going to be a growing problem, to the point where they'd have to talk about it soon. He knew also that he couldn't find Axton without her. Or, at least: it would take twice as long.

And it was wrong to take out his frustration on her, even if he didn't need her. He should call. He should apologize. He should do any number of useful things.

Leander dropped his head in his hands and forced himself to take deep breaths.

The soup.

Small things. Small things.

Leander ate.

"So," Leander said into the phone. "Breakfast? I'll make you breakfast."

On the other side of the line, Sarah was quiet for a moment.

"I'm not sure that's a good idea," she said.

"I'm sorry," Leander said, "for everything I said last night."

"I know," Sarah said, and then they were both quiet.

"Actually, I don't know if I can make you breakfast," Leander said. "The kitchen--I haven't really figured out how to maneuver."

"The chair height's all wrong," Sarah agreed.

Leander heard a fuzzy, muted sound.

"Is that Prada?" he asked.

"Yeah," Sarah said. "She's so fucking loud. Purr like a buzz saw."

Leander pictured Sarah's biggest and most demanding cat head-butting the phone until she got the attention she wanted.

Silence.

"We can't just not talk about it," he said finally.

"No, I totally can," Sarah said. "I can keep on not talking about it forever. I could do that if we put it the fuck down. You can't."

"Liar," Leander said. "The curiosity alone could kill you."

"My sense of curiosity is muted by the fact that yours nearly
did
kill you," Sarah said sharply.

"Come on," Leander said. "I mean, it sucks, sure, and I'd like to not do it again, but I wasn't in much danger of dying. No central nervous system damage, no significant blows to the head, just enough blood loss to be inconvenient..."

"You delusional fuck up," Sarah muttered. "Both of your legs are fucking broken. The blood loss alone
would
have killed you."

"Only one's a full break," Leander said with manic cheer. "The other one's just a fracture!"

Sarah let out a tangled string of curses, but then--

"Are you
fucking
with me?" she asked.

"Never," Leander said, which meant: yes.

Sarah sighed.

"Well, as long as your sense of humor is recovering," she said. "Sure, yeah. Let's go get breakfast."

The tension climbed faster than Leander could release it and relief was hard to come by. He felt like he spent all his time angrily asleep, and then he woke up no less angry and no less tired. Everything was moving so slow that Leander was convinced that nothing was moving at all but time. His legs were still fucked. He still didn't know where Axton was. His dreams were still jagged heart pounding things, filled with car crashes and shadows elongating into monsters, claws wrapping around his wrists, pinning him down, introducing him to a world of pain. Yet Leander always woke up with the overwhelming feeling of being torn away from something he desperately wanted to hold on to--

Something. Wordless. Unknown. Unseen.

There wasn't even the mercy of seeing Axton in his dreams. The absence of Axton haunted him even in the most abstract of nightmares. Trapped in darkness without even a body, Leander still felt a thrumming panic as he tried to look for something that he never got even got a glance of.

"So anyway," Sarah was saying, "I asked them to move your standing desk into storage for now, so we could--"

"Why?" Leander asked. "Why would you do that?"

Sarah paused. Part of Leander felt small and ashamed, because he could tell that she was reacting to the immediate harshness of his tone--but the guilt he felt only edged him closer to raising his voice, because he only felt more upset about everything. That he was also upset at himself now only made things worse.

"Why?" he demanded, unable to stop himself. "Do you think I'm going to be stuck in this chair forever?"

"No," Sarah said carefully, "but for a while, you won't be able to use the--"

"You think I'm going to be stuck in this fucking chair forever," Leander accused.

"No, I--" Sarah tried.

"You're just trying to keep me like this--"

"No, but we're getting the new monitors in, and I thought--"

"You
want
me to be in this chair forever!"

"I was just trying--"

"That's
fucked up
, you doing that to me--"

"Leander, I'm not--"

"You are!"

"Calm down," Sarah said.

"I'm perfectly fucking calm!" Leander shouted, which was the classic line of solidly not-calm people everywhere.

The silence was thick and suffocating.

"Okay," Sarah said finally.

"Don't use that voice on me," Leander said.

"Well then don't fucking yell at me!" she shouted.

Leander bit the inside of his cheek. He didn't want to yell--he really didn't, but--

"Maybe you should leave," he said.

"Oh, here we go the fuck again," Sarah said, and that was it, she had apparently been pushed past some internal breaking point, because she threw down the notebook she'd been holding and stood, flinging her arms to emphasize her shouting. "Every other fucking day you tell me to go. Each fucking time you get frustrated, you make a pissy show about me going. But you don't mean it and we both know it. Maybe I shouldn't be here at all, did you ever fucking think of that?"

"Yes," Leander snapped. "I--"

"Well you don't have much of a fucking
choice
, do you?" Sarah asked. "You've cut everyone else out of your life. Anyone who might be a potential caretaker. Everyone who loves you--no, everyone
you
love."

"It's for Christina's own good!"

"Yeah, send her away. Send fucking everyone away but keep
me
here, and because why, I'll fucking tell you why--"

"I need you!" Leander yelled, but the phrase no longer had any magic in it.

"No! You need more than me. It's just that you don't care if I live or die, you son of a bitch!"

"That's not true!"

"Is the apartment going to burn down? Are you going to get shot? Am
I
going to get shot? I don't fucking know, because there's some fucking
psycho
running around out there that wants to hurt you, probably wants you fucking
dead
, and you won't even go to the cops--"