“You making a fool out of yourself… Now that’s something I’d like to see,” she says with the first real, full smile I’ve seen from her.
“Ask and you shall recieve, princess,” I say. “Come on.”
We go inside, where Darla is waiting by the front doors with her arms crossed. Judging by the look on her face, she ran out of patience about a millisecond after she stepped inside. “Great,” she says dryly. “You’re ready.”
I look to Miley, who gives me a warning look not to antagonize her friend, so I hold my tongue as we get checked in and brought to one of the bays on the top floor, where a digital screen displays the rules and our scores. A few of what I guess are the basic golf clubs are stored at every bay. We also have a table with seating and menus.
“Nice place,” I say, looking out over the view of the driving range below. Huge nets stretch at least two hundred or three hundred feet in the air all around the range, protecting the freeway in the distance from rogue golf balls. The sound of clubs cracking into balls rings out all around, and a constant spray of white balls flies out from below and beside us.
“Miley says you’re a golfer,” I say to Darla, trying to ease some of the awkward hostility that seems to radiate from the woman.
She rolls her eyes at me before walking to the touch screen panel beside the clubs. She taps her long black fingernails on the screen a few times, grabs a club, and then waves it over a sensor that sends a ball rolling onto a small patch of green near the edge of the driving bay. She gives me a look that I don’t think is supposed to be comical--a smug glare is what I would call it--then takes a monstrous swing at the ball.
Her club buzzes over the top of the ball and sends it bouncing twice before it rolls into the net at the edge of the platform.
“Fuck!” she shouts, causing a mom with her young daughter in the bay beside us to cover her daughter’s ears and shoot a nasty look our way.
I lurch forward, failing to hold back a laugh as Darla tosses her club down and stomps over to take a seat at the table. “Shoulder injury,” she says flatly. “My swing hasn’t been the same since last January.”
“I see,” I say, but I still can’t keep the amusement from my voice or my face. Miley seems like she’s able to hold her own composure until she looks at me, which causes her to almost burst out laughing.
“Your turn,” she says shakily, barely holding in a laugh.
I grab the biggest club I can and look down the range toward the back wall, where I imagine it won’t be that hard to hit the thing. After all, I’m holding a big ass metal stick… how hard can it be?
I wind up, swing as hard as I can, and hear a disappointingly quiet sound as I barely catch the edge of the ball and send it careening so far to the right that it hits the net at the edge of the range.
I sigh, laughing a little at myself. “Guess there’s a reason people practice this,” I say, handing the club to Miley, who takes it and moves to line up her shot.
She sets up in a way that makes me think she might actually know what she’s doing. She pulls back the club and even my untrained eye can tell she’s about to hit a great shot. Sure enough, the sound rings out, putting my own dinky shot to shame. I watch the ball sail until it dings against the farthest target. The screen above the clubs shows that she earned twelve points.
I give her a round of applause. “So this is why you wanted to come here?”
“I like the atmosphere,” she says.
“Right.”
“If you two are done eye-fucking,” Darla sighs. “I’d appreciate some peace and quiet so I can concentrate.”
“Darla!” Miley gasps.
The corner of Darla’s mouth actually twitches up at Miley’s outrage. “You’re right. It’s pointless to broadcast the obvious.”
Darla sets up to take her next shot while I give Miley a long, you seriously brought her, kind of look. Miley at least has the decency to look like she regrets it now, if only just a little.
Despite Darla’s constant drone of depressing, melodramatic one-liners, the night is one of the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Somewhere along the way, I forget I’m supposed to be proving my worth to Miley and I just enjoy spending time with her. But when Darla rolls her eyes at us for the hundredth time and says she’s going to the bar to get drinks, Miley and I are alone for the first time since we got here.
I let out a long breath once Darla goes inside. “You feel that?” I ask.
“Feel what?” asks Miley.
“It’s hard to say. Like a dark cloud just parted… like the sun is shining for the first--”
“Stop it!” laughs Miley, who swats at my arm. “Darla is really sweet once you get to know her.”
“You’ll have to pardon me if I find that hard to believe.”
Miley smiles, picking at a loose chip of paint on the table. “I guess it’s hard to go through what she and I went through together and not feel connected somehow, no matter how different we are. Some days I’d just excuse myself from class to go to the bathroom to be alone, and more often than not, Darla was already there. She laughs distantly. “We spent so much time talking about how much people suck in those bathrooms.”
“Why did they tease you?” I ask, genuinely not understanding. From where I’m sitting, I see a beautiful woman. When she lets her guard down, her personality shines through so clearly it’s like a beacon, and I can’t wrap my head around what there would be not to like.
Her finger digs more forcefully at the chip of paint and her head tilts with the effort, lips pursing. “It depended on the year. When I was really little, it was my glasses--” she pauses at my confused look. “Contacts,” she says, pointing to her eyes. “Then it was how bad I was at sports.”
I nod, seeing something of a pattern. She got contacts because she was teased for her glasses. She practiced golf--and maybe other sports--because she was teased for not being any good.
“Then things really got ugly when the rumor started.”
“The rumor?” I ask.
“I dated a guy in seventh grade named Jake, if you could even call it dating. He asked if I wanted to be his girlfriend, I said yes because I was stupid and lonely. He got his parents to take us to the movies and drop us off. I thought he was going to try to kiss me or hold my hand, but maybe he was too nervous, because we just watched the movie and that was it. It felt weird and awkward, so I broke things off with him the next day at school. That afternoon, I started noticing people acting weird around me. Girls were giving me dirty looks. Guys were leering at me and laughing. It was mortifying.
“It wasn’t until Darla told me about the rumor going around that I knew why. She said Jake was telling everyone I gave him a blowjob during the movie and that I let him finger me. It didn’t matter what really happened. All that mattered was the stupid lie he told because he wanted to save face.”
I clench my teeth when I imagine her younger self dealing with all that bullshit. “Let me guess, I’m not allowed to find this Jake asshole and punch him in the face?”
She smiles. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
“How did someone who went through so much hell end up so sweet?”
“Who says I’m sweet?” she asks with a devious little smirk.
I laugh. “Okay then, Miss Wild Thing. Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
She leans forward, lowering her eyebrows dramatically. “Ninth grade. I was riding the bus on the way home from school and tossed my gum out the window without thinking. A second later, I heard a scream. I guess it went out my window and got sucked right back in a window near the back. It landed in Jenny Fisher’s hair.”
“Oh shit,” I say, laughing.
“Yeah. And she went raging around the bus, screaming and threatening to get the principal involved if someone didn’t fess up, but no one talked. I guess no one saw anything. And I didn’t say a word. And,” she adds with a satisfied little smile. “I laughed my whole way home once I got off the bus, too. Ho
w’s that for sweet?”
I grin. “That’s it? That’s your worst story?”
“What? You’ve got a better one?” she asks.
I tilt my head, mind immediately touching on some of the darker moments in my life--moments I don’t care to bring to light right now. I haven’t always been a good man, and I have the stories to prove it. There will be a time to share those stories with Miley, but our first real date isn’t the right place, so I think back to when I was younger.
“Maybe,” I say after dredging up an old memory. “I was a small kid back in middle school, and some of the other guys used to pick on me.”
“Seriously?” asks Miley. “It’s kind of hard to picture you having ever been small.”
I chuckle. “Seriously. My older brother Leo was always big, though. So I knew most kids wouldn’t take it too far when it came to bullying me. They all knew if any of it ever got back to my brother, he’d beat the shit out of them. But one day I got tired of it, of knowing my brother was the only thing standing between me and the other kids.
“So I made a plan. There was this hill the kids would ride their bikes down on the way home from school. It was a pretty steep road, but naturally, they liked to go as fast as they could. One afternoon, I hid on the side of the road in a bush with a bucket of loose gravel and rocks. I waited until I saw the kids who were always giving me shit at the top of the hill and gaining speed.”
I pause, feeling a dark sort of guilt and ugliness rise up inside. I chose this story on a whim, only remembering it as the time I got those kids back--but in the telling of it, I’m realizing I was wrong for thinking some of the truly fucked up things I’ve done didn’t reach back even to my childhood. My face twists a little as a finish the story.
“I threw the bucket of gravel out. I still remember the way their eyes bulged at me just before they hit the rocks. I could see so much in so few seconds: fear, regret, anger… Then all hell broke loose. The four of them went skidding and flipping down the hill. It must’ve been another ten feet to the bottom, and by the time they all got there, they were bloody and bruised, limping to their feet like they had just survived a bomb blast.”
I laugh softly, but there’s no humor in it. “They didn’t even try to come after me. They just hobbled off, dragging their mangled bikes behind them. It was the last time anyone messed with me. The most fucked up part is I couldn’t make myself feel bad for them. I just kept thinking to all the times they had tried to mess with me and what they would’ve done if they weren’t afraid of my brother, and no matter how I looked at it, it felt like they got what they deserved.”
I can imagine how it all must sound to Miley. She sees me now and probably can’t imagine me back then, lanky and small, always trailing in my brother’s shadow. If you looked at he and I side by side now, you’d never guess we were so different when we were kids. I caught up to him, but we took completely different paths to where we are today.
Instead of looking disgusted or appalled like I expect, Miley reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. The gesture surprises me--shocks me, even. I look down at her small hand on mine and know with more certainty than I felt before: she’s the one. She’s not just the perfect submissive for me, she’s the perfect woman.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “You know the most messed up part?” she asks. “Somehow you have to feel like the bad guy when you stand up to the bullies. It doesn’t really make sense, does it?”
I shake my head. “I think it’s guilt. Guilt that there was probably another way to solve the problem without stooping to their level.”
“Maybe. But should a dog feel guilty if it’s backed into a corner and bites when it feels like it’s run out of options?”
I grin. “You’re really something, you know that?”
Her cheeks turn bright red and she looks away. A smile plays at her lips, but it seems like her shyness is winning the battle, because she smooths her features. “I don’t know about that.”
“I do,” I say, taking her hand this time. “And I need to know this isn’t the only date you’re going to let me take you on.”
“Hey,” she says with mock anger. “The deal was that I get a whole date to decide.”
I lean across the table inching closer to her. “I had something planned for the end of our date, but it’s not going to work with her,” I say, nodding toward Darla, who sits inside the building and is throwing back a glass of something brown.
“Then I guess it’ll have to wait until date number two,” says Miley.
I lick my lips. “You’re a goddamn tease, do you know that?”
She aims her big, innocent baby blues eyes up at mine in the most irresistible way. “It’d only be teasing if you weren’t going to get what you wanted.”
“Then I get to pick the next date,” I say.
She swallows, eyes still trained on mine as she regards me. “Deal.”
30
Miley
You’ve got to talk to me sometime,” Kyle says. He’s yanking the laces on his shoes so hard it’s a wonder they don’t snap. “I was trying to protect you. That’s all.”
I cross my arms. It’s not like I’ve been deliberately not talking to him, but after my date with Jayce last night, I came straight home and went to bed. “Protect me?” I ask. “You lied to him and me.”
“I know.”. He at least has the sense to look guilty, which wins him a few points. But just a few. “Look, it’s just not the life I want for you. Hooking up with some BDSM club owner? What brother would want that for his sister.”
“Did you you ever stop to think maybe what I want for myself is more important than what you want?”
He grimaces. “Of course it is. But look at your last few boyfriends. An alcoholic, a drug-addict, a guy who was secretly married, and a lowlife who bea--”
“I get it,” I snap. “But this time feels different. I don’t expect that to sound convincing or for you to believe me, but I can tell you this much. Every time you try to push us apart, some irrational, stubborn part of me is only going to want to get closer to him. So like it or not, you’re going to just have to let this play out and see where it goes.”
“What if where it goes is you getting hurt again?” he asks. “I can’t just sit by while that happens.”
“I can take care of myself, Kyle,” I say more softly. He doesn’t deserve my anger, not after everything he’s done for me, so I push down all the negativity I might be feeling and make myself think back to all the times I’ve needed him and he’s been there. “You’ve bailed me out of so many shitty situations, and I’m so thankful I have a big brother looking out for me. But you can’t protect me forever. You’ve got to let me start figuring things out for myself, or I never will.”
He lowers his head, resting his elbows on his knees as he sits on the couch, one shoe still untied. It’s a long time before he looks back up and speaks. “I’ll stay out of it as much as I can, but I swear to God. If he hurts you, I’ll fucking kill him.”
“Kyle…” I say.
“Fine, I’ll just break his legs or something. Is that better?”
I laugh. “I guess that’s fair.”
Kyle grins. “Damn right it is.” He laces up his shoe and gets up to give me a quick hug. “You’ll tell me if you need my help, right?”
“Yes,” I say. “Now get out of here. I’ve got plans today and I need to get ready.
He looks like he wants to say something--to ask what they are, but he impresses me when he ends up just nodding and leaving with a quick wave over his shoulder.
It’s just a few minutes before Jayce is supposed to pick me up for our date tonight when my phone buzzes. I grab it off the counter and see I have a text from a number I don’t recognize. I click to read it.
This isn’t over. -Cade.
I set the phone down quickly on the counter. I blocked his number after we broke things off, so he either had to get a new phone or text me from someone else’s to get that message
through. For some reason, the extra effort makes it that much more ominous than if he had just drunk texted me. It makes me think he’s completely sober, and still fuming over what happened when he tried to attack me in my apartment.
I make a quick call to block the new number, delete the text, and do my best to put it from my mind. As chilling as the threat was, I try to tell myself it’s just his bruised ego talking. He probably wants to feel like he got the last word in and will now slink away like the snake he is.
I feel my stomach cramp in the oddest way, almost like I’m on my period even though it’s not due for another week. I know it can’t possibly be symptoms of a pregnancy yet, but my mind immediately goes to that night with Jayce. I got tested afterwards, but I’m still waiting on the results. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I don’t even know if my reckless night is going to lead to a baby.
I try to imagine Jayce’s reaction if I am pregnant. There would be no doubt as to who the father is because Cade and I hadn’t had sex in weeks before the break-up. He was content with beating me and forcing himself in my mouth to “shut” me up anytime I cried out. My bruises have faded to the point that I can cover them with makeup now, but I still feel the slight soreness every time I move. It’s a shameful reminder of how bad I let things get, and it’s also a wake up call about how careful I need to be with Jayce. I can’t just let him charm me into complacency. I won’t sit by and let things get out of hand again. Not that I can really imagine Jayce being like the men who came before him.
I feel like I got a glimpse inside that head of his last night at Galaxy Golf. I never would’ve thought a man like him could’ve had a childhood even remotely like mine, but he did, and he’s more like me than I could have ever guessed. We’ve both suffered at the hands of others. We’ve both had our faces pressed to the ground and been told to give up, to quit. The difference is he overcame it. In so many ways, I still feel like there’s a knee in my back, that constant force of oppression telling me I’m not good enough and I don’t matter--saying I deserve all the things that have happened to me.
Baby for the Beast Page 19
