Free Nobody Likes Fairytale Pirates by Elizabeth Gannon

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