by Fields, MJ
I move back until my shoulders hit the wall, and I cross my ankles, pulling my phone from my front pocket and flipping open a few news apps so I can pretend to read. The world is an ugly place, and the news spoon-feeds tiny morsels, a bite at a time, in an app that lets people actually click to love a story about a black boy beaten in an alleyway behind his school.
Forty-two people have clicked to heart this story, and I wonder how many of them did it because they have rotten souls. It only takes four more swipes for me to get to a story about Enoch. I skim the first few paragraphs, and I close the app when I don’t see my name. My omission actually washes my stomach with a sense of relief, and I feel my shoulders physically drop an inch or two.
“Pretty ass!”
The groping jackass is trying to bait me, his mouth puckering into loud kissing sounds. I force myself to look straight ahead to the machine with my clothes. I won’t engage.
“Bro, you see how she likes me? Yeah, pretty ass there likes me. She’s playing all cool and shit, pretending she doesn’t hear me. But you hear me, don’t you, baby? Yeah, you like my hand on your pussy.”
I sneer in reaction, my mouth releasing an audible hiss as I take steps closer to the door, but keep my backside against the wall. Another thing that hasn’t changed about this place is the side of sexual harassment that comes with it. I hate it, and I hated it when I was a little girl and watched men say things like this to my mom. She’d giggle, and when they touched her, she laughed it off. There was some tortured part of her that fed off the negative attention. My dad wasn’t living with us at the time, and she was desperate to feel like someone wanted her.
Self-hatred is such a wicked cycle. I’ve ridden it myself.
“Oh come on, baby girl…” The man’s voice trails off, and I brace myself for his next taunt. When it doesn’t come right away, I glance to the left. My eyes flash wide when I see Memphis standing in front of him, his hand wrapped around his neck, pushing the man’s shoulders flush against the wall.
“Come on, we were just messing with her…”
The man’s plea comes out gravely, and Memphis pushes into him a little harder, the man’s face blushing and a guttural choke escaping his throat.
Memphis looks over his shoulder to me, his eyes capturing mine for a solid two seconds. He then glances back at the man he’s holding. With his head falling to the side, Memphis slowly lets go of his grip and begins to step back. He raises a finger and points at the dude while he walks away, eventually returning to his laundry. This time, he sits on the counter, his eyes facing the entire room so he can stand guard. A minute later, my harassers leave.
Stragglers come and go over the next two hours. A mom with two kids takes the machines next to me, and her children begin pounding the window of the dryer whirling around my clothes. The mom is on the phone with someone; her volume is loud enough for me to hear the full conversation. It’s about her custody battle. The sleeping woman has started to wake up, and she’s shouting every few seconds, her body jolting violently. My head pounds with the excess sound, and my pulse races with the stimulation, my hands quaking due to jacked-up nerves.
“You’re done.”
“Huh?” I startle hard, surprised to see Memphis now standing in front of me. His eyes are off to the side, hands in the pockets of his gray joggers.
“Your dryer just stopped when I walked up.” His eyes slide to mine briefly.
“You’re watching my dryer now?” I puff out a short laugh and push forward, stepping around him to swing open the machine’s door.
“I was just making sure those guys left you alone.” My upper body deep in the dryer, I wrap my arms around my clothes, bringing them to my chest.
“You know that’s actually how my dad won over my mom. He went nuts on some guy that was hitting on her at a bar; he beat the shit out of the guy in the parking lot. Knocked out two of the guy’s teeth. My mom just melted for that shit.” I swing my hip into the door to shut it and dump my clothes on the counter to begin folding, but take a moment to shift my gaze to Memphis. “I don’t melt for that. That…” I nod over to the wall where he had the asshole pinned by his throat, “is exactly the kind of thing Archie Valentine would have done.”
It’s only partially true, because my father wouldn’t have passed up a chance to make a bigger scene. He would have sworn loudly, and there’s no way he would have walked away without throwing a punch. But the alpha-animalistic Tarzan nature of it all—definitely in the Valentine playbook.
“I don’t like bullies or guys that think it’s okay to harass women.” I note that he didn’t mention the words help or rescue.
“Noble.” I hear him take a heavy breath behind me, and I make a lopsided smirk as I fold my last shirt and stack my clean clothes together so I can slip them back in the bag. “You should come here more often, because guys like that are here all day and night. You could step in and stop them from harassing the other women, too. Not just me.”
I smile with tight lips as I tie the handles of the plastic bag, then walk past him. I get a few steps away, to the trash where I toss in the detergent sample wrappers, when Memphis responds.
“Jesus, you’re impossible.”
I chuckle to myself, planning to keep walking and leave it at that—at impossible—but with a few long strides, he catches up to me and soon passes me, turning around with his arms outstretched.
“I’m not impossible. I just don’t need your help, Memphis.” I can’t even speak his name without wondering what it was before he changed it, and the fact that I spend time wondering about him frustrates me.
“Clearly!” He shakes his head, and his eyes stare into mine. I’ve been foolishly waiting for him to look at me all week, but now that he is, I realize exactly what kind of danger I was toying with. His lashes are dark, which makes the golden brown of his eyes a hint more powerful. He needs to shave, or rather…he doesn’t need to shave, because fuck me is his face sexy like that. There’s a small pink bruise on his right cheek—a mark left behind when Leo tagged him at workouts two days ago. I was watching him then. He was refusing to look at me. The whole cat-and-mouse situation is making me mental, and it feels…it feels like the way my dad was with my mom.
His head cocks to the side, and his mouth curves.
“I don’t even get why you’re mad.” He chuckles through his words, and I lose it.
“I left this place for a reason. Men like you. That’s the reason, Memphis. No…it’s more than men like you; it’s the women you turn us into when we’re around you. I’m never going to become one of those women. I won’t be her.”
I shake my head and blink, recalling all of the times I watched my dad flirt with my mom. He’d make her feel special by standing up to some drunk at a bar or by hovering over her protectively, like a bear, everywhere they went in public. Then he’d leave her in the morning, and come home days later smelling like smoke and booze and sex clubs. The fights between the two of them were epic. She’d throw things and make holes in the walls with glasses or ashtrays. The fights never scared me, though. What scared me was watching my mom sob as she patched up the damaged wall all by herself—knowing that she’d wait for him to come back and grace her with his protective company again.
Glancing behind Memphis, I see the mom with the rowdy kids staring at us with her mouth agape. My focus darts around to the woman in the corner who just arrived, and she’s staring too—though trying to pretend she isn’t by pushing her pile of towels around the folding table. I swallow hard and bring my gaze back to Memphis, and those tempting eyes are waiting, slanted with confusion.
“Look, I’m tired. Working for my mom…she and I…we just…”
“I’m Memphis,” he interrupts, reaching his palm toward me to shake. I bunch my brow staring at it. “I hear your name is Liv? You’ve been working at the club where I work out. I’ve seen you. Anyhow, I thought I should introduce myself.”
My lip gets twitchy. It’s twitchy because motherfuck,
he’s charming. He’s actually, genuinely charming. And I’m falling for the act. I give in to the slight smile and breathe out a quiet laugh before taking his hand and gripping it tightly for a shake.
“Liv Valentine. I’m the cleaner.”
His right eyebrow lifts.
“If you saw the books I’m working with, you’d get what that means. I’ve been gone for seven years, and I can tell. Leo and my dad know their way around the ring. My mom…she knows her way around a soap opera.”
He laughs at that. I join him. Soon I’m walking alongside him to his laundry basket, and without even thinking, I let him take my things and put them inside it to carry my stuff for me.
“It’s a good thing you’re here then, I guess?” He glances at me sideways, holding the door of the laundromat open while I step out into the warm air of the Phoenix streets.
“There is nothing good about me being here. I assure you.” My mouth draws into a serious line, leaving nothing for him to do but shrug at my response.
We walk the first block in silence, and I start to cringe at how upset I got over Memphis defending me at Suds. I’m leaping to conclusions that aren’t even real. Memphis is kind, he is a fixture at my temporary home, and he’s made an effort to be my friend. I need to quit looking at that like it’s an invitation from the devil.
“I’m sorry.” My teeth grip my lip the moment the short sentence passes. I’m not good at humility. That’s another trait I got from my dad. We’re stubborn, and we’re right—even when we’re wrong.
I glance to the side and catch Memphis pushing his tongue against the inside of his cheek. He twists his head a little and nods to me.
“And thank you for putting those guys in their place,” I continue. “But—”
He slows his steps, and I hold up my hand.
“Those guys are just going to do it again. It’s awful, but they are. Unless you follow them around everywhere they go and smack them down every time they act like assholes, it’s not going to do any good. They’re ruined already. You can’t rehab a guy who thinks it’s okay to act like that.”
He’s stopped, and I stand next to him as he stares at me, digesting my bleak truth. His mouth draws in tight and his head begins to nod with whatever resolution he’s come to. When he begins walking again, I match his step.
“Then you’re just gonna need to learn to fight.”
I laugh out loud at this suggestion.
“Absolutely not,” I say.
“Why? I mean, I can’t believe you don’t know how to already. Your dad is The Heavy.” I sense the sincerity of his shock, and I hate to pop his bubble, but if we’re going to be friends, then I can’t let him go on thinking my dad was as good at parenting as he was at right-hook combos.
“I can count the conversations I had with my dad on two hands, and I’d have fingers left over—and half of those were either when he was punch drunk or whiskey drunk. Either way, there really wasn’t much of a difference. Teaching a girl how to throw a punch wasn’t a priority for that man. I mean…maybe if I was a stripper at his favorite club. But his daughter? Nah. That kinda shit was never in his skills set.”
Memphis’s eyes dip and his gaze falls to the basket in his arms. We make it to the main drive and the walkway that splits off to my parents’ home and Leo’s. I reach into the basket as he slows and take out my bag of clean clothes and hold it up in thanks.
“Appreciate the lift,” I say, my smile real, but small.
I turn and reach for the unlocked front door.
“I’ll teach you then,” he says.
A strange rush travels from my head to my knees, like morphine. It’s delicious. It’s dangerous. I lean into the door with my hand on the knob, then turn to face him.
“We’re the last people in that gym in the evening anyhow. I don’t mean anything heavy or like hours-long lessons, just some strength training. We’ll work on emergency-type situations; just enough so you can hurt some guy and get the hell out of trouble.”
I take a heavy breath. I’m tempted.
“Please,” his eyes rock mine with that single word. I think Memphis might actually be a decent man. “Please,” he repeats, quieter, and leaning in enough that I instinctively turn the knob and step inside.
“Maybe,” I relent. A weight bounces around my insides, squeezing my lungs tight and making my stomach heavy.
His smile inches up.
“Maybe,” he nods and winks, and I get a tinge of regret. “Maybe she says,” he hums out loud as he turns and heads down the dark path out to the parking lot where his RV is parked. Why does he live in that? Why did he name himself Memphis? Why, if he has promise, did he come here of all places? How did Leo suck him into this crazy place?
“Hey,” I shout, stopping him before he disappears around the corner. He crooks his neck and steps back under the streetlight’s glow. “If…and that’s a real if. If I let you teach me, I want your real story.”
The shift in his expression is subtle, but it’s there. His jaw tightens, and his eyes haze ever so slightly. His lips fall into a near frown, masked carefully while he pretends to be thinking about my offer.
“I want to know why Memphis. The real reason.”
With a blink, he looks down, his foot digging into the concrete a few times, weighing how important it is to him that I learn to fight. I won’t be surprised if he lets this idea go. I won’t be upset either, because the less he shares, the less I share, and that means this distance—which is already too close—will stop right here at polite.
“Memphis is the last place I know my real father was alive. We’ll start tomorrow.” By the time I catch my breath and let his words sink in, he’s disappeared into the dark alley and rounded the corner.
The heaviness has returned to my chest, but this time it feels different. It’s curious, and it’s sad. It feels like it does when I want to help someone and make them feel better.
It’s the sense of putting someone else before me, of a promise I made myself slowly slipping through my fingers.
“You’re just like me, you know.”
I don’t frighten when my mom speaks. I saw her sitting on the steps of her porch in the dark. She was waiting for me to come home. Not because she cares that I get home safe; I’m her sport—her distraction from the depressing existence that waits for her upstairs.
“All right, well goodnight, Mom.” I don’t even turn toward her. It took me years to learn, but I’ve mastered the art of not completely engaging in a battle with her. Just being around her brings out my worst. Memphis saw some of that tonight.
“You still haven’t gone up to visit him.” She sneaks that last bit in before I can get inside. I pause at the door, lips parted and ready for response, but halted by wisdom.
I know better.
It’s not like my father told her I haven’t been up to see him. He doesn’t talk, and there hasn’t been some amazing turn in his condition. My mom seldom leaves this house, and when she’s in it, she rarely leaves her room. She hears everything that happens up those stairs, and she’s been watching for me to visit him. Probably, so she can pounce and fill his ears with lies about all of the ways she’s trying to help me get back up on my feet. Shelter and a job—that’s all she’s given me. I still haven’t gotten paid for the job part yet, and technically Leo is giving me shelter.
Mom hasn’t given me shit.
“Tomorrow. I’m tired tonight,” I say, stepping inside and closing the door with only enough time for her to shout that she’ll tell him to expect me.
He was never expecting me.
I was the biggest goddamned surprise of Archie Valentine’s life.
Four
Memphis
She isn’t dressed for a workout. That’s the first thing I noticed when Liv walked through the gym door this morning. The next thing I noticed was Leo’s black eye. The hostility brewing between the both of them is so thick, I can chew on it. I’m fairly certain both of those things are connected.
>
Liv’s kept the office door open all day, and she’s listening to classic rock, her lips moving with the words, but only half the time, like she only knows bits and pieces. A few times, Leo walked by and slammed the door shut. Without missing a beat—and without glancing his direction—Liv just got right up from her chair and opened it again.
Heatedly.
I tried talking to her when Leo disappeared for a four-hour lunch break, but I got the firm sense she wasn’t in the mood. I was getting that same cold shoulder she was dishing out to her uncle, which means whatever Leo did seems to have screwed all men over in general. I ended up catching up on a few hours of sleep before my afternoon routine.
Leo’s been gone for an hour now, the afternoon light fading and turning the frosted glass windows in the gym orange. The tank top from my workout is cold from hour-old sweat, and my muscles are even colder. If I tried to workout with Liv right now, I’d probably get an injury. I have work in two hours anyway.
Without saying anything, I rip the tape from my hands using my teeth and wad it into a tight ball that I toss into the metal can by the exit. I have to slide my back along the wall as I stand, my legs threatening to cramp. I was so preoccupied with Liv and her ditching our plans—and beating the shit out of her uncle—that I let my hydration slip.
Gnashing my lips at the threat of pain, I make a mental note not to slip again—no matter how distracting she is. Even in jeans and an over-sized gray T-shirt that I’m pretty sure once belonged to a man. Without looking her way again, I shove my things in my gym bag, including the training pads I planned on using with her, and toss the duffle straps over my shoulder as I head toward the door.
“He deserved that.”
Her voice practically echoes as I flip the switch on the gym’s main fan, killing the hum and leaving nothing but this glorified warehouse space and the sound of her voice. Her tone doesn’t seem angry, so I stop and turn to acknowledge her. I’m surprised when she’s leaning on the office doorway and looking right at me, waiting for my eyes. It’s the first time she’s looked at another person all day.
