A Light Touch (Eustass X Reader)

Chapter 8: Love and Hate

A/N: Fair warning, things will get intense, but not graphic.

Your life gets into a little bit more a routine as your second week of being out of the hospital begins. Kid and Killer are becoming morning and evening staples, coming by with breakfast and dinner on a regular basis. A couple times during the week they don't stay to eat with you, business is picking up and they're needed, but you don't hold that against them, even though the little apartment seems impossibly empty without them.

You did get a schedule for your prosthetic. You go in next Monday to have your stump examined, and mapped, so they can create the connector for your neural hand. Then you'll have that surgery, recovery, and the fabrication of the hand attachment, and after almost a month since your accident you'll start going through rehab for the actual prosthetic and learning how to use it.

Your only real big issue was Decken.

You'd exchanged an unfortunate number of texts with him and you were starting to run out of ways of trying to get him to go away. You considered actually going out to coffee with him, but you hadn't promised that you would, only that you'd think about it, and the more you thought about it the less you wanted to do it.

Since then, every time you tried to get him to let it go, he'd just get more persistent, and start saying that if he couldn't take you for coffee then he could bring coffee to you. Having him at your apartment again was absolutely not an option. You hadn't even wanted him here the first time, and if he had an invitation from you in record form - like a text - you'd never get rid of him.

The whole debacle was coming up on a week. It was Thursday, one more day it and would be 7 days of dealing with these terrible texts. If you couldn't get him to drop things before Kid and Killer showed up for dinner tonight you were going to tell them, and however Kid wanted to deal with him then you'd just be okay with that.

Decken: It's just a coffee. A quick cup.

Your patience with this back and forth was beyond thin. You'd been trying to be civil and polite and nice during the entire thing, because you knew full well how these sorts of things could go south fast. You were expecting Kid and Killer soon and you didn't want to have bury your phone in your bed again just to avoid the deluge of texts.

You: At the risk of sounding rude, I want neither your company nor your additional apology.

Decken: I'll be on my best behavior.

You felt your eye twitch, and your blood pressure go up. How dare he try to trade on good behavior when his very actions up to this point already showed how terrible his behavior was. This whole deal was harassment, it didn't matter if he wasn't being cruel or vicious with his words, the persistence alone was the definition of harassment.

You: You haven't listened to me this entire time, your behavior is atrocious. Go away. I tried to be kind in turning you down, but you're clearly not getting it. Buzz off.

You hit send and set the phone down, walking away from it for a moment and trying to cool your head. If there was a response you needed to be level-headed about it, to avoid any sort of escalation beyond what you'd already opted to push things to.

A minute. Two minutes. Ten minutes. Your phone was silent. You let out a small sigh of relief, and then decided to text Eustass. You were shaking with nerves, and you wanted him to be here sooner rather than later. You needed to tell him and Killer about all this anyway, in case it wasn't actually the last of it. You just hoped neither of them would be too mad that you hadn't said something sooner.

You: Hey, can you be by sooner?

Red: Packing up as we speak. Should be there in twenty. Soon enough?