Swish

2.4

~Elodie~

"What are we going to do about my car?"

Matthew didn't want to answer me, eyes steeled to the road ahead of us while trying to nonchalantly double check on me and my 'head wound' as he'd so aptly described it. 

"I don't know.  I'm just trying to figure out where the nearest urgent care is."

I showed him my phone with the GPS already pulled up and en route. 

"Just follow this.  I'll call Eli and see if he can have someone come and get it for me, or maybe I can ride back up with Phoebe later this week and give Miller a piece of my mind about what he did out there."

"Wait.  Hold up.  Put this shit in reverse--you want to go back?"

The look on Matthew's face was incredulous, like I'd just told him that my favorite food was burned cabbage leaves. 

"Uh...yeah?  Why wouldn't I want to go back?"

I was surprised that he didn't pull over and immediately accost me instead of pinning me with a stare he reserved for Evie when she did something wrong, and the shrinking shameful humiliation in my gut threatened to wrap me in an eviscerating snake hold and never release me. 

"Because it's dangerous, and you've already been hurt!  What do you think will happen next time?"

"I guess I don't really care."

This time, Matthew really did pull over, although it was because we'd already arrived to the clinic that would treat my head injury, although I'd hardly call a cut barely a centimeter deep an 'injury'. 

"You don't really mean that," he condescended to me, which in the end just pissed me off. 

"Yes, I really do."

He regarded me as a rebellious teenager, a little sister that he needed to straighten out to the good path, but that was the problem-there was no right path for me, not anymore, and the sooner he and my brother figured that out, the better. 

"You can't keep doing things like this, Elodie.  You know how much your brother worries about you, and multiply that by ten and that's how much V worries."

"What, you're not going to patronize me about how much you worry, too?"

I couldn't help it.  Maybe I was a glutton for punishment, or maybe I just wanted to see what he would say, but that didn't mean that when the words fell out of his mouth that they didn't sting all the way down to my bones. 

"Of course I worry about you!  You and Eli are the closest thing to family that I have besides my actual family, but all they want is my money.  You're like my little sister, Ellie.  You can't keep doing this risky shit, it's not worth it."

How could I explain to him that it was, in fact, completely worth it?  Worth every death defying stunt that I sunk headfirst into, that it was worth every blood curdling scream, every heart skipping moment where I was suspended in reality, seconds from death, from escaping the reality that so maliciously stomped me into the ground day after day...

"When I'm free climbing, or paragliding, or bungee jumping, dirt biking, fighting in underground tournaments, it's like I can finally breathe, like I can be someone else and escape my own skin for a second, just a second, and then it's like I'm back to being me again, same old little Ellie, the little girl who everyone sees as this damaged flower who has to be sheltered and protected from the rest of the world, well guess what?  No one sheltered me the first fifteen years of my life, so I know damn well how this shit hole works, I definitely don't need to be protected from it when I can very well do it myself."