Raw Deal

by Cherrie Lynn

“Keeps me up at night sometimes. He’s defending in a couple of months and I hope he gets the shit kicked out of him.”

  “I don’t know him, but from what I saw, I didn’t like him.”

  “He was one of the main ones running his mouth to the press after Tommy died about the safety of the sport and how we couldn’t let a handful of accidents dictate its future. I mean, I don’t disagree. But he can’t let one damn opportunity go by without throwing his two cents in or taking cheap shots at me, when I doubt anyone who really knows this business gives a fuck about his opinion.”

  Yeah, as if she didn’t already have reason enough not to like him . . . “Wow. I didn’t know about that.”

  “I’m glad. Don’t look it up, either; it won’t improve your feelings about the guy.”

  She’d seen enough social media comments when she dared to pull up an article about the matter—Sad for the guy who died, but no reason to fuck with the sport, or Must’ve never learned to take a punch, or Dugas sucked, can’t say I’m surprised he bought it in the cage—to know the human race could be pretty horrible when cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, or untouchable because of their elevated positions. She didn’t need further proof.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.” She leaned back in her chair, bringing her knees to her chest. “Where are you now?”

  “Home.” Something else she’d been imagining since leaving him—his beautiful apartment. And, of course, his mouth between her legs while the Houston cityscape sparkled beyond his windows. Rolling across his four-poster bed, making love on his kitchen floor.

  “Wish I were there,” she said softly.

  “You could be, you know, anytime you want.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me that. You might open your door in the morning to find me standing there with all my luggage.” God, that sounded desperate, but it was so close to the truth.

  He laughed, seemingly not put off by the idea at all. But he didn’t pursue it further. “Are things better with Rowan?”

  And just like that, her mood dimmed to black. “I haven’t talked to her.”

  “I know I told you I’d make him keep his distance, but Zane has been asking if he can talk to her. I didn’t like the idea, but I’m tempted to let him try. Not so much because she can think better of me, you know, but because you guys have to repair this. He thinks he can help.”

  “I don’t know if anything can help.” Except calling this off between you and me . . . whatever it is.

  “Maybe you should try showing up at her door with your luggage,” he joked. It was an idea. If Savannah knew Rowan, she had a ton of things to say, and getting the opportunity to say them all—screaming or crying or throwing things or whatever she needed to do—was sometimes all she needed. This was a little different, though.

  “I don’t know about letting Zane talk to her,” Savannah admitted. “I know he’s your brother, but—It’s the whole rock star lifestyle thing, I guess. It would be so easy for her to get caught up in it. I still want to look out for her, you know.”

  “Completely understood. I said the same thing.”

  Then again, Rowan was a big girl. If Savannah wanted freedom to make her own choices without intruding family members looking over her shoulder, she had to afford her sister-in-law the same opportunities. “She would probably love it, though. Can’t deny that.”

  “Well, if you want to give me her number, I’ll pass it on to him. With strict instructions to back off if she tells him to.”

  Savannah chuckled. “Will he listen?”

  “That’s what I’m worried about.”

  She didn’t know what to expect when the text came from her mother the next night. No preamble, no explanation. You need to come over.

  Groaning, Savannah tossed the phone down and rolled over in her bed, clutching Oscar the Ninth. It was only six thirty, but she was exhausted and already in her pajamas waiting on Mike to call. And this was the summons she had been dreading, having avoided her parents like the plague ever since getting back from Houston.

  She didn’t doubt for a second that Rowan had finally ratted her out. Not that she could blame her—Rowan had to be as sad and confused and Savannah herself was, and she had no one else to confide in. Her primary confidante had betrayed her.

  Well, this is it, she told herself. You’re cut off, disinherited, on your own. She could hear the words now. Either that, or there would be an ultimatum of some sort, and she could easily guess the terms.

  Savannah would almost prefer the former, rather than being forced into a choice she didn’t think she could make right now. In absolutely no hurry, she dressed and made the too-short drive from her apartment to the Lakefront, where her parents had lived for the past fifteen years. The stately house they called home had been spared the brunt of the flooding from Hurricane Katrina despite sitting directly across from Lake Pontchartrain—had they lived farther south by a mere few streets, they might have been under ten feet of flood water from the Seventeenth Street Canal levee breach.

  She wasn’t sure why she thought of that terrifying time as she pulled into their drive, except that it was one example she could think of where her family had pulled together and leaned on one another. They’d had to flee everything they owned and watch the city they loved become mired in death and destruction, another one of those scars that time couldn’t seem to fully heal.

  They’d gotten through that. Scarred, yes, different, surely, but they’d gotten through it. She hoped to God they could get through this too.

  Along with thoughts of the hurricane came inevitable memories of Tommy, the way he’d been like a rock for them during that very dark time, and she found herself pleading with his image in her head, even if doing so was a sort of sacrilege in itself. A little help here, please, brother? You always handled them so much better than I could.

  Yeah. Tommy would probably remain silent on this one. She really was on her own.

  As she was trudging to the front door with a warm breeze blowing in off the lake, her phone rang from the depths of her purse. Mike. She pulled it out and shot him a quick text letting him know she would talk to him later. If he knew where she was going, he might start to worry. She didn’t want that.

  There were few formalities at her parents’ house; she had a room there (for now, at least) and could always come and go as she pleased. Opening their front door, she called out a “hello” she hoped was cheerier than she felt and left her bag and phone in the foyer closet. There near the front door was the same family portrait she had at home, the Dugas family smiling in the sunshine. For perhaps the first time in a while, though, she focused on her own image, the fifth wheel, noticing how her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  “In here,” her dad called from the living room. He didn’t sound himself, but neither did he sound as if he was in a thunderous rage, so that was a positive. She plastered a smile across her face as she entered the room, but felt it freeze in place when the couch came into view and Rowan was sitting on it, her face red, her eyes teary. She didn’t meet Savannah’s gaze, instead keeping her own trained on the wad of tissue she was worrying in her hands.

  Regina sat beside her, one leg tucked beneath her, one hand on Rowan’s shoulder.

  Play dumb. For now. “Is everything okay?”

  Her dad stood and gave her a long hug, which she returned fiercely, still looking worriedly at Rowan and her mother over his shoulder. “Are you okay, Van?” he asked her, using the nickname he’d given her when she was knee-high to him.

  “Oh, sure, I’m making it,” she said cautiously as she released him and looked into his assessing eyes. Hell, if they knew about Mike, what did they think? That he had abused her somehow?

  “Sit down. We need to tell you girls something.”

  Surprised, Savannah perched on one of the wing-back chairs as her dad reclaimed his own across from her. It was weird and pretty icky that her parents were probably about to lecture her about her sex life. She wanted to run from the room,
but somehow resolved to keep her butt on the chair while her dad exchanged glances with his wife as if they weren’t sure which of them should speak first.

  Savannah also noticed that Rowan looked a little confused as well. And she realized that whatever her parents were about to drop on them, she was as in the dark as Savannah. “What?” she asked weakly, looking back and forth between them.

  “It was never our intention,” Regina began, “to not tell you girls everything about how Tommy died, it just worked out that way. He was gone, that’s all that mattered. It was a brain bleed. But what the doctors told us while he was still hanging on in ICU—you weren’t there, Rowan, you were inconsolable at his side while we spoke with the doctor in the hallway—was that it could have been second-impact syndrome.”

  “What does that mean?” Rowan asked, her breathing picking up, a high, hysterical quality entering her voice.

  “It means that their scans showed he might have suffered a light concussion in the weeks leading up to the fight with Larson,” Savannah’s dad said. “It could have been something simple, minor, something that happened in training that he barely even noticed, or just ignored. But all it took was the right hit in the right place a few weeks later, and not even a hard hit. It’s rare, they said, but it happens. He never should have been in the fight. He had a ticking time bomb in his head.”

  “But Mike Larson set it off!” Rowan said, shooting an accusing look at Savannah.

  “It’s not as black and white as that,” Savannah shot back, completely forgetting her play dumb strategy. “This could have happened no matter who was in the cage with him. Aren’t you listening?”

  “Stop,” Regina snapped, and both of them fell into a sullen silence. “It would break Tommy’s heart to hear you two fighting like this, don’t you know that?” Her eyes were filling with tears. “It broke us to pieces to hear it was something that could have been avoided, and we spared you from it. We all know how stubborn he was. Never in a million years did we ever think something like this would come up where you would need to know that it was just a horrible accident. Rowan?” Regina took her daughter-in-law’s face between both her palms, making her look at her with streaming eyes. “It was an accident. It was a terrible, senseless, freak accident.”

  Savannah hadn’t realized before now that she was crying as well, a little from relief, mostly from sadness at what they all had lost.

  “But it wasn’t his fault,” Rowan was sobbing, throwing herself into Regina’s arms.

  “No, honey, it wasn’t. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just . . . a perfect storm of catastrophic circumstances.”

  “My entire life has been a perfect storm of catastrophic circumstances,” Rowan said, shredding Savannah’s heart further, and she couldn’t take anymore. She left her seat to wrap both of the women in her arms. And they accepted her, even Rowan clutching at her fiercely. “I love you, Savvy.”

  “Love you too, Ro. Always, no matter what, okay? I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Rowan sniffled.

  Savannah caught sight of her dad over her sister-in-law’s blond head—he was staring at the wall opposite them, a hand to his mouth, no tears or any sign of emotion on his face whatsoever. Only the people who knew him best would see that he was as devastated as the rest of them.

  And it was all her fault, really, that they were having to relive this again. Her fault for being interested in someone she shouldn’t be. Even if, at the end of the day, Mike wasn’t as responsible for Tommy’s death as Rowan liked to think, he was still a trigger, wasn’t he? The mere mention of him would make it all come back for them. Things would never be normal. She would have to respect that.

  Or let it go.

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Savannah ventured. “That’s the last thing I want. That’s the last thing he wants.”

  Mike had been brought into the conversation already, but not really. They could still talk about him but keep him at a distance. Her voicing his thoughts, giving him life, made a stillness travel through the room. Confirming her fears. Even if Tommy had a ticking time bomb in his head, as her dad said, it didn’t matter. Mike was the catalyst. He had set it off. Nothing would ever change it.

  “He’s a good person,” she said, at once desperate and hopeless. “Please know that I wouldn’t be with him if he wasn’t. He wanted to contact you all from the start to let you know how sorry he was. I told him not to. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, I don’t know.”

  “I just don’t want anything to do with him, Savannah.” Rowan disengaged herself from the hug, but she didn’t look angry or defensive. She looked tired and lost. “You can be with him if you want. We’re fine, okay? But seeing him . . . no. I can’t do it.”

  “I have to agree,” Regina said quietly. “Maybe someday, eventually, we’ll feel differently.”

  Somehow, it hurt worse than an order or an ultimatum—something her parents were very good at. Why was that? Was it the silent disappointment on their faces alongside the grief? Had she completely and utterly let them down to the point that they couldn’t be bothered to deal with her?

  Was she just a kid crying for attention and not getting it? Jesus.

  “Okay,” she said, sounding small and more than a little lost herself. “I understand.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I need to see you.

  The message came at eleven as Mike was trying to get to sleep, and worry gnawed into his gut. It seemed like more than desire or late-night sweet talk. Savannah had been absent all night, which wasn’t normal for her, and now he sensed seriousness behind these words.

  When? he replied.

  Soon. Please.

  Is everything okay?

  She was a long time, an eternity, answering. I don’t know. I miss you.

  All right, enough of this. He couldn’t lie here and try to decipher her words; he needed to hear her voice. She answered when he called, but for an awful moment he thought she wasn’t going to. As he’d feared, her greeting was shaky, uncertain.

  “Hi.”

  “Baby, what’s the matter?”

  “I talked to my parents tonight.”

  Worry turned into full-blown dread as Mike’s heart lurched, and for just one god-awful split second, he didn’t know if he could take any more. All the guilt, the shame, the pointing fingers, would it ever fucking stop? He wished, and not for the first time, that he could actually be the cold-blooded bastard everyone took him for. Then maybe he wouldn’t give a shit. “What did they say?”

  “That Tommy should never have been fighting. He might have had a previous concussion that contributed to his death.”

  Fuck. He put the phone to his chest for a second, grinding the heel of his other hand into his forehead. Hearing that should have helped, kind of, in some small way. It didn’t.

  When Savannah’s distant voice reached him, asking if he was still there, he brought the phone back to his ear, his own words gruff and empty. “I’ll be there by morning.”

  Jon would flip his shit and cuss him six ways to Sunday; well, maybe Mike could in some small way be that cold-blooded bastard he wanted to be, because he honestly couldn’t give a fuck.

  “You don’t have to do that. I was thinking of this weekend or—”

  “No. Give me your address. I’ll get to you.”

  Relief in her voice, she gave it to him, along with the code to punch in the keypad at her gate and her door. The first flight probably wouldn’t leave out until five in the morning, and he could be there by then if he drove. “Try to get some sleep,” he told her, “and I’ll be there when you wake up.”

  “Thank you,” she said after a moment, but he wondered if at first she wanted to say something else.

  The idea of what that something else might have been would keep him up for the next five hours, easy. He probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway knowing she was distressed.

  Interstate 10 was long, dark, and lonely, though in no way desert
ed. He’d thrown a bag in the backseat of his truck with enough clothes for a few days, though he had no idea how long he would be gone. And then he was eating up the three hundred and fifty miles between Houston and New Orleans, with nothing to do but play music at ear-splitting levels, chug coffee, and think about her. The towns ticked by: Beaumont, Lake Charles, Lafayette. Then the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge, spanning almost twenty miles of wetlands and swamps.

  He’d made this drive a couple of times before while heading to Destin, Florida. That route bypassed New Orleans, though—I-12 taking over the passage through Louisiana in Baton Rouge while I-10 dipped down to the Big Easy. So once he left Baton Rouge in his rearview mirror, he was in unfamiliar territory. And he couldn’t wait to see where Savannah lived, where she liked to go, what she liked to do, all the things he’d wondered about but seemed impossible to discover while they had sipped coffee at the Café Du Monde a lifetime ago. He couldn’t wait to see a little piece of her life the way she’d glimpsed a little piece of his.

  At long last, he was easing through the historic New Orleans streets, following his GPS directions to where Savannah had told him to park. It wasn’t quite five A.M., but cities never slept.

  He wondered if she had ever managed to.

  “Tommy?”

  “Hey, little sister.”

  “Is it wrong?”

  “Is what wrong?”

  “I think I might love him.”

  “Can’t help who we love.”

  “We can choose whether or not to be with them.”

  “Well, then choose.”

  “Don’t leave.”

  “I’m always around . . .”

  It was a strange one, as dreams went—she couldn’t see her brother, couldn’t see their surroundings, only knew he was there. Her mind conjured his voice from the depths of her memory as plainly as if they’d spoken a day ago instead of months.

  She shifted restlessly in her sleep, and as a gentle weight squeezed her upper arm and a male voice whispered her name, she woke with a start. “Michael?”