Crazy but Sweet, Sweet but Crazy

35: disposables

"You better do, because if not, you're going to have the life of a boy, on me."

The words of Dr. Maloney, Ian's friend, hit the back of my head, as I watched Elliot, unmoving and very still on the floor.

"You suddenly barge in with a boy who looks like he was beaten up with an object I presume to be something like a golf club or a baseball bat- and has a fractured rib, clear signs of sustained physical abuse on his body."

I felt sick.

"Fuck. Shit, fuck my life. Fuck!"

After a good scream, Landon glanced at me, sighed, and bent down, his back to me. "Put him on my back. Hey, hey, you- Horan."

He snapped his fingers. "I'm a fucking alcoholic and I'm old. I can't fucking carry two of you, so don't you faint. Faint a bit later, all right? Put him on my back."

I couldn't remember how, but the next few moments, I found myself hauling Elliot onto Landon's back.

Landon was cursing at the men to get lost and open the "goddamn door". As Gerald rushed out of the house, Landon outstretched his hand.

Gerald lowered his hand, the car keys in his grasp, shaking his head. "You're not in-"

With a grunt, Landon steadied himself, Elliot on his back.

"Give me the keys, and you're not following," Landon said with the most calmness I'd seen in him, "or you're not going to see your daughter again. You know Richard Lockwood is held up, don't you?

"I might be an alcoholic but I have a bloody lot of money, and I'm a fucking Lockwood. You know what that means in this fucked up world, right?"

Without hesitation, Gerald handed over the keys to me. It seemed threats ran in the family too.

"Fucking idiots always need us to spell out everything, fucking annoying. Ah, fucking waste of my breath," muttered Landon, jerking his chin towards the car doors.

I opened the car doors, and Gerald put down Elliot onto the back seats.

The next thing I knew, I was in the passenger's seat, and Landon Lockwood was driving us off, away from the three-story house that was Isabella Lockwood's world.

~ * ~

Landon drove at the speed of a fugitive. After tightening the strap of my seat belt, I looked back at the back seats, where Elliot was, unconscious.

"Where're you going? To the hospital? I know a doctor who-"

"He's alive." Popping a cigarette into his mouth like one would a lollipop, Landon glanced at the back mirrors. "You can open your eyes now."

Through the rearview mirror, I saw Elliot rise to a sitting position. I turned my body back and stared at him.

Nonchalantly, Elliot comfortably strapped himself onto the backseat. When our eyes met, he shrugged with a flash of his smile.

"I don't know what this is, but it seemed important. She gave it to me as soon as she heard people coming up the stairs."

"You're smiling? Smiling? After-"

After all that he heard, about his biological father, and what his adoptive mother had done to his biological mother?

Only when I saw Elliot sitting upright and looking out the window, did I realize my heart had been thumping hard in my throat.

"Some dramatic fate you have, Clare Horan." Slowing down, Landon drove around a familiar juncture of a road. "Your father, mother and even...boyfriend. All this goddamn mess you're in."