Nobody Likes Fairytale Pirates (7 page)

But Ransom had walled off one tiny
little piece of herself from him and she fully intended to guard it at all
costs.  And as long as she held onto it, she was safe.  She didn’t have to
worry about putting herself out there or being hurt.  She wasn’t risking
anything.

And no matter how much she trusted
the man, she still worried about that.

She ran her hands over her face, feeling
the scars which marred her skin and took away her sight.

And then there was
that.

Ransom genuinely didn’t care about
the scars.  Not at all.  She neither loved nor hated them, because they simply
were.  They didn’t bother her because they’d always been there.  They were who
she was, and like Uriah, they’d been there every moment of her life.

Sometimes though… just sometimes…
she worried that what Uriah felt was pity, rather than friendship or… whatever
else he might feel for her.

She couldn’t see her own
reflection, obviously, but she could feel the raised lines and she could
imagine the horrific sight they probably presented to him.

Appearances meant very little to
her, but sometimes she was glad she was blind, just so she didn’t have to see
the scars every time she looked in a mirror.

She had no real idea if she was
pretty before, but she was certainly not pretty now.

Again, Ransom was a confident
woman… about most things.  But every now and then, she felt self-conscious
about her face.  Not that “being pretty” was really her biggest concern in
life, because that was completely stupid, only that she sometimes wished that the
scars weren’t there.  She wanted Uriah to be able to look at her and not feel
nauseous.  She couldn’t actually see the people staring at her marred face, but
she knew that they did.  She could feel them watching her.

It wasn’t really the scars themselves
which bothered her or even people’s disgust.

She simply
hated
being
pitied.

Being blind was bad enough, but
having such grotesque scars too?  It typically evoked two types of responses
from people: they were either horrified or they started treating her like a
helpless child. 

And Ransom didn’t like
either
reaction.

She preferred to keep to herself
and chose to really only talk to Uriah.  The rest of the world was just an
annoyance which she didn’t have the energy to deal with.  They were idiots.  He
was the only person she had any real interest in interacting with anymore.

Unfortunately, that just made
matters worse, since it meant she placed
more
of herself into his hands. 
It made her more and more dependent on him, using him to do all the stuff she
didn’t want to do herself, which in turn made her feel more and more like she
was becoming an object of pity.

She wanted Uriah to look at her and
see past the scars and the blindness.  She didn’t want to feel exposed or
afraid at the possibility of telling him how she felt.  She wanted to feel…
safe.

But that was stupid.

Because you could say a lot of
things about her partner, but he was not the smart choice in this situation. 
He wasn’t “safe” because crazy and random things seemed to happen to him every
day and he seemed to take a childlike joy from that fact.  The man was the kind
of person who tried to nurse injured seagulls back to health, for fuck’s sake. 
He was always looking for some new lost cause to throw himself after, the only
cynic in the world who wore his heart on his sleeve. 

She sometimes suspected that he
thought he felt something for her, but he really didn’t.  He didn’t
actually
feel anything, no matter what he thought or what he sometimes seemed like he
was about to tell her.  She knew that.  It was just his own dedication to
fighting the losing battle.  She was the living embodiment of his supposed
failure and the project he’d been unable to scrape off or entirely heal.  So,
he felt… responsible for her.

But it wasn’t love.  It was simply
pity and boredom and misunderstood feelings of friendship.  She was certain of
that.

And Random didn’t want that.

She wanted Uriah to want
her.

Well, technically speaking, she
didn’t even really want that either, because it would mean that she’d have to
admit to him that she was feeling… whatever it was she was feeling… which would
make her vulnerable. 

The situation was pathetic and sad
and
utterly
not who Ransom was.

But it was the truth.

All in all, she wasn’t doing the
best in regards to her personal life.  She had no idea what it had been like
before five years ago, but it couldn’t possibly have been worse than the mess
she’d made of it now.

She put her scarred face in her
hands again and let out a long breath.

She’d really messed things up.

She was too weak to let Uriah go
and too strong to let him in.

Or maybe it was the other way
around.

Ransom had no idea what she really wanted. 
Or why she was feeling the things she was feeling.  Or if Uriah was really
feeling what she thought he might be feeling.

And that terrified her.

A lot of aspects of her personal
life scared her, it seemed, and she wasn’t sure why.

Without warning, several men
started screaming at each other to her right.  There was the sound of a
struggle and someone got tossed directly into the table where she was sitting, knocking
over her chair and sending her sprawling.

The tavern erupted in pandemonium
around her, echoing off the ceiling and walls, destroying all sense she had of the
space.

She pulled herself to her feet,
trying to remember how many steps it had been from the door to the table, and
estimate how far she had tumbled away from it.  Unfortunately, her job was made
difficult because of the people fighting around her and the fact that the
furniture she was using as anchor points was now being tossed and thrown aside
by the drunken patrons of this hellhole.

It was her own fault.  She’d been
distracted by bickering with her partner and hadn’t been paying enough
attention to the world around her.

She relied on him too much and had
left herself open.

Someone broke a bottle somewhere
close by, showering her with an unknown liquid.  Hopefully it was just beer and
not blood, although she had no way of knowing since she couldn’t see what color
it was.  Unless she wanted to try tasting the mysterious lukewarm wetness
dripping down her face, its identity would remain a mystery.

She swore and turned to the side,
automatically bringing a hand up to cover her face and then laughed at herself
for the utterly useless action.  There was nothing about her face that one scar
more or less was going to hurt, and it wasn’t like she really needed to worry
about glass getting in her eyes or anything.

The shoving got worse and someone
bumped into her, knocking her down again onto the dirty floor and further
destroying her ability to navigate based on memory.  Her palms skidded across
the damp sawdust covered floorboards, trying to stop her fall.  It felt like
some sort of grease or thick mildewy grime covered the floor, drenched in what
smelled like months of spilled alcoholic beverages.

She got back on her feet, trying to
clean her hands off on her poncho as quickly as possible before she got sick. 
The smell of the floor was enough to make her retch and she wanted it off her
skin
immediately
.  

She started to make her way back
towards where she thought she and Uriah had been sitting, feeling for
obstructions.  Unfortunately, she bumped into a table on the way there and dumped
its contents.

Hopefully the table was unoccupied…

A man’s gruff voice swore viciously. 
“Goddammit, woman!”  The man rose from his seat quickly, the sound of the chair
violently hitting the floor behind him.  He pushed her roughly, causing her to
stumble backwards onto the floor again because she hadn’t been expecting that. 
“You blind or something, you little bitch!”

Ransom’s hands fisted at her sides.

The man’s voice was deep and he was
tall, judging from how far over her head the words had come from while she was standing.

But he had picked the
wrong day
to mouth off to her.  She was already feeling a little scared and upset about
her life, and when she got scared, her natural reaction was to get
pissed
off
.

“Yes!”  She shouted back, getting
to her feet.  “
I am!
”  She stepped forward towards him and drove her
knee into his groin, then shoved him backwards with her full weight as a
reminder to him not to start shit with a pirate, whether or not she was blind

The man took a step back to regain
his balance, tripped over his chair which Ransom knew had fallen behind him a
moment before, and went sprawling.  His large form hit the floor with a
satisfying thud.

Several other people immediately
rose from his table, but Ransom had no way of knowing how many or what their
intentions were.  They could have been fleeing the scene, rushing to the man’s
aid, or drawing weapons to strike her down. 

They could have been his young
children, his bodyguards, or a herd of fucking
centaurs
.  She had no
clue.  They were simply noises in the dark.  And all she could do was brace herself
and wait.

“
I wouldn’t
.”  Someone
warned menacingly from behind the table’s mysterious unseen occupants.  The
voice was low and dangerous.

“U-u-uriah?”  She asked, uncertain.

*WHAM!*

She jolted as something hit the
table in front of her with tremendous force, scattering the remaining tableware
across the floor in an explosion of breaking glass.  An instant later, someone
started screaming in agony and horror.

The sound of a scuffle; punches
thrown and feet scrambling on the floorboards.

A heavy blow.  Bone hitting bone. 
A groan of pain.

Another.

A gasping choking sound, which cut
off abruptly.

Footsteps and muffled cries as
several people ran for the exit, barely audible over the hysterical sobs of an
unknown man, who had slipped to the floor for some reason.

The table jerked, as if someone had
just wrenched free something which was embedded in its surface.

The sound of a sword being put
away.

“You okay, Dove?”  Uriah asked over
the chaos in his distinctive sonorous bass voice, as if he didn’t have a care
in the world.

She let out a long breath, relief
washing over her.

Uriah was back, which meant they
were both safe.  And it also meant she finally had the rough position of their
table again and could get her bearings in the unfamiliar tavern.

This was why Ransom hated new
places.  She was very good at moving around the familiar, but if she was stuck
somewhere she’d never been before, she was going to have a problem.

“Fine.”  She started picking her
way around the table and towards the sound of his voice.  “Just fine.”

She might not always be able to easily
move in unfamiliar spaces, but for some reason, she’d always been able to tell
where her partner was and what he was feeling.  She wasn’t certain why, but she
could almost always…
feel
him.  It wasn’t a perfect system, obviously,
as evidenced by her confusion a moment ago, but it was still something she
relied on.

If you put her anywhere, she
remained fairly confident that she could track down her partner and have a
pretty good idea of what he was doing.  It might take her a little while, but
she could do it. 

It was like they were connected.

“I leave to get food and you
decide, what?  That you’re bored and want to start a bar fight with that lumberjack
looking gentleman and his four burly compatriots?”  He gave a soft whistle.  “
Bold
decision, Rance.  Unexpected.”  She could literally hear his teasing smile.  “I’ve
always liked your style.”

She snorted in amusement and
wrapped her arms around him.

The man’s body stiffened, unused to
this type of thing from her.  Truth told, she wasn’t really a “hug” kind of
person.  In an average week, she might only touch the man once or twice, and
even then just for a second or two.  Generally, she avoided it whenever
possible because it made it so much harder to keep herself from continuing to
touch him.

Ransom had serious personal space
issues.

She didn’t like being touched. 
Ever. 
Especially
not without warning.

Except
by him.

She could have spent the rest of
her life quite happily in that man’s arms.  Just quietly listening to his
stupid ideas and bizarre vocabulary.

He smelled like leather and the huge
trees of his homeland, as if he could never quite wash them away.  Which was
fine with her, because she found the clean scent so utterly pleasant.  It
smelled wild and fresh and free.

Uriah rarely buttoned his shirt,
which meant that her ear was pressed to her bare chest and she could hear his
heartbeat.  His pulse audibly quickened as she pressed against him, and a flush
of excitement filled her when she heard it.

She found it so
erotic
that
he responded to her like that.  It made her feel powerful and in control and
utterly turned on.  The fact that his chest was so warm and muscular and
comforting didn’t hurt either.

Her body responded in kind, her
breasts tightening as she pressed against him, her skin tingling.

He just felt so
good. 
He
always
felt good.  It was unfair how incredible it felt to be in his arms. 
Because it made resisting him so much harder than it should have been.

“You okay?”  He asked her softly, a
note of worry in his tone.  He moved his arms awkwardly, obviously not quite
sure if he should return the embrace or not, so his hands just sort of hovered
inches from her.