Shifting Gears: The Complete Series (Sports Bad Boy Romance)

by Alycia Taylor

  “You poor thing,” Debbie said. I didn’t need a mirror. The horror that was my face was apparent on Debbie’s. “Are you in pain? Do you want me to call the nurse?”

  “Not yet. Sam, have you heard from Paul?”

  “No honey. But we did get some good news from the police officers who were here earlier. They arrested Mitch.” That was good, the best I’d heard all day.

  “Good,” I said.

  “Do you need anything sweetie? I can go by your apartment and get anything you need…”

  “Um…I don’t think so, thanks.” I was really worried about Paul…and Marie. If Mitch would do…this to a complete stranger, I can only imagine what he did to them when he found them. “Greg, they told me you called 911? How did you know?”

  “You called me.”

  “I did? I remember trying to reach the phone, but I don’t remember actually making it there.”

  “You called me earlier about the appointment. Maybe my number was the last one on there. Anyways, all I could hear was you crying and moaning. Scared the shit out of me so I called 911 before I went over.”

  “Thanks,” I told him with another half-assed, painful smile.

  “I’m just glad…I’m glad you’re gonna be okay.”

  They visited for a few more minutes before the nurse came in and told them only one visitor at a time. They all kissed me on my forehead. I hadn’t seen my face yet, but that was the only place that didn’t hurt. They were gone about five minutes and I had just closed my eye again when I heard another familiar voice. I opened my eye and saw Justin…the good one.

  “Hi gorgeous.”

  I laughed. “Yeah right. I’ll bet I look like something out of Tales from the Crypt.”

  He came close to the bed and kissed my forehead like the rest of them had done. “You’re beautiful, as always. I’m so damned sorry this happened to you.”

  “Thanks, me too.” I tried to smile again. I really needed to stop doing that.

  “Did you know this guy? This isn’t the one that you were seeing, was it?”

  “No,” I said, licking my lips. He immediately picked up the water off the bedside table and brought the straw to my lips. I drank and swished because everything was just so damned dry. “Thank you,” I said, grateful for his kindness. “It wasn’t Paul. It’s a really disturbed man who thinks Paul’s wronged him in some way.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question? I don’t want to upset you…”

  “It’s okay, as you can see I’m kind of tough-skinned.”

  “I just wonder why this Paul guy isn’t here. Obviously this wouldn’t have happened to you if you weren’t seeing him. Shouldn’t he be standing vigil?” I was instantly ready to defend him, even to Justin who I knew wasn’t a malicious guy.

  “He has bigger worries right now, I’m afraid. He’s a good guy, honest.”

  “Okay. If you say so I will believe you.” I felt my eyelids getting heavy again and Justin must have noticed because he said, “I’m going to go and let you get some sleep. I’ll be back to see you.”

  “Thank you, Justin.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, kissing my forehead again. “By the way since you’re in ICU they won’t let you have flowers and balloons and all of that, but don’t let them jip you when you leave. There’s a whole room full of them out there.” That made my heart warm. One thing some creep who likes to beat on women could never take from me was my amazing friends. I drifted off then for a while, I’m not sure how long before I had more visitors. Mark came to see me and he was sweet and kind and a perfect gentleman. My other gym buddies all showed up one at a time too. I was exhausted, but I was touched and so blessed to have so many good people in my life. The best news I got came at the end of the day when the detective came back to see me. He told me that Mitch was being charged with assault and he was locked up tight at the L.A. County jail. His knuckles were scuffed from beating on me and he still had blood on his clothes. Stupid fuck. He really didn’t deserve to be a cop…or a human being. The next time I closed my eyes I was actually able to sleep peacefully for a while. The only thing still bothering me was not knowing if Paul and his family were safe.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I made it through the night being woken up every half hour so they could take my vital signs. The irony of it was that every time they left the room they would say, “Get some rest.” Then they’d be back in five minutes. They also casted my right arm and took out the chest tube because my lung was doing well on its own. I still had a tight band around my ribs that made it hard to breathe, but it was nice knowing there wasn’t a little container of green gunk next to the bed any longer when people came to visit. The feeling was back in my left arm, they had put it back into its socket. I decided I preferred the numb, it hurt like a bitch.

  When the light began to stream into the room, I woke up slowly. I was happy that both of my eyes seemed to open now. They were still a little blurry at first, but when the blur cleared this morning they were in for a welcome treat. Paul was sitting in the chair next to my bed, asleep. I just lay there quietly watching him for a long time. He had such a beautiful face…and it didn’t look harmed at all, so I’d like to believe that meant Mitch didn’t find them. I don’t know how long I stared at him before he finally opened his eyes. He looked a little disoriented at first but then I saw him focus on my face…and wince.

  “Hey,” he said, sitting up straight in the chair.

  “Hi,” I didn’t try to smile. I still wasn’t sure what it looked like.

  “God Jessie…I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I got angry at you on the phone. Shit! Look what the fucker did to you. Of course you had to tell him…and then he hurt you anyways for calling me, right? I’m so sorry.” He looked like he was going to cry. It was hard to watch. He was always so tough and stoic.

  “It’s okay…I told him where you were because I had to protect my Mom. I didn’t want to, Paul. I was so afraid that he’d hurt you, but he had her in jail and I was afraid for her…”

  “Shit! Mother fucker! I’m so sorry!”

  “It’s really okay. It’s not your fault…”

  “Are you kidding? Of course it is. It’s all my fault. If I wasn’t being stupid and calling your mother a “druggie” in the first place, I may have been there with you when he showed up…”

  “We can’t do “what if’s.” It is what it is. The good news is that he’s in jail. He’s right where he needs to be. Are Marie and Victor okay?”

  “Yeah, they’re fine. Thank you for warning me that he was coming. Now that I see what he did to you though, I’m sorry you did. I would have rather he attacked me instead. I’m so sorry.” He reached over and lightly touched my face with his fingertips. His hand was shaking. “I’m going to make Mitch sorry that he was ever born for laying a hand on you.”

  I hated that. I didn’t want him going after Mitch. I wanted this to be over. “He’s in jail baby. He’s not going to hurt us any longer. Let’s just forget it and move on.”

  “Forget it? No fucking way. Jail is too good for him. They better keep him there though…for his own protection. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll go out into Gen Pop and they’ll find out he’s a cop.”

  “Paul, please,” I begged. “I don’t want to have to keep worrying about you getting hurt. Please leave it alone.” He didn’t confirm or deny that he’d be willing to do that. He did get up and plant a soft kiss on my sore lips. It was the sweetest pain in the world.

  *****

  They kept me in the hospital for several days. I was moved out of ICU to a regular room and I found out that Justin hadn’t been kidding…it was filled with flowers and balloons and get well cards. It made me feel good to know so many people loved me. I had been calling the rehab every day and checking on my mom. I was glad that she wasn’t ready for visitors yet because I really didn’t want her to know what had happened. She would worry and maybe even leave her treatment and that was the last thing I wa
nted. She sounded content on the phone and her therapist told me she was doing great. It did my own mind good to know she was in a safe place. Rationally I knew Mitch was locked up and couldn’t hurt us…but the trauma was still fresh in my mind.

  On the day I was scheduled to be discharged, Paul was there to pick me up. He took three loads of stuff down to the car. He’d brought his Sensei’s car so that I wouldn’t have to climb up into his truck. When he helped me in the whole thing smelled like roses. We went to my apartment first and stayed there the first night. I could smell the cleaning products as we walked in the door. The place was spic and span. Paul told me that my friends from the gym had all pitched in and cleaned it up. They didn’t want me to have to come home to the mess that Mitch and I had left. They had even patched the hole in the wall. That was good, no visual reminders of having my head put through the wall.

  For the first few nights I was home Paul would order us dinner and we would watch movies…cuddled up together under a blanket on the couch. I was healing but still too sore to do anything other than light kissing. He seemed okay with that and he was sweet and gentle and he was a lot less wound up than he was before…again I think that was due to Mitch being in jail and everyone he loved being safe. I wondered if I was amongst those he loved. I was falling deeper in love with him every day but I resisted telling him. I didn’t want him to have something new to be so tense about.

  We didn’t really talk about anything serious either. I told him my mom was in rehab and he told me Marie and Victor were now in Long Beach with some old family friends. He was considering setting them up somewhere out of state after his big fight. He’d have the money to do it then and that way when Mitch did get out their trail would be cold…hopefully. I still had so many questions for him though…what was it about a son who died? Was he married before? How did he have such intimate knowledge of the drug treatment program and where the druggies hung out? But those were all for another day…another time. Time was something we seemed to have on our side these days. As long as Mitch was in jail, and Mom was in rehab, and Marie and Victor were tucked away safely, life was good.

  I got tired quickly of sitting around the house though. I was used to being active. I couldn’t even run or work out with the cast and the bound ribs. My ribs felt better. I think they were healing well, so about three days after I got out of the hospital Paul showed up to find me dressed in my gym clothes and not wearing the brace for my ribs. If I could have used a knife with my left hand without cutting off my arm, the cast would have been gone too.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

  “I’m going stir crazy,” I told him. “I know I can’t do a lot, but I thought I’d go into work for just a little while…I can just talk people through their work-outs, I don’t have to do any hands-on.”

  “No. You’re not going to the gym, crazy girl. You’re still healing.”

  “I feel better, really.” He didn’t look like he was buying it, so I got close to the side of his face and whispered, “Maybe if I can’t go to work, you could help me work-out here.”

  He smiled and said, “We’ll see. I’m a little freaked out about hurting you.”

  “I’m all better,” I whined. “I promise.”

  Grinning, he said, “How about we go for a ride first? Then later, if you’re still feeling up to it…”

  “I will be,” I told him, definitively. I wasn’t just stir crazy; being this close to him day in and day out without having him inside of me was driving me crazy as well. “Going for a ride will do…for now.”

  He showered and dressed and then we got into his car and he got on the 101 Freeway. I didn’t ask where we were going and he didn’t tell me. He drove us out towards the valley and finally into a residential area. The houses were older…probably built in the seventies or eighties, but the lawns were neatly trimmed and it looked like a nice, peaceful place. He parked the car near the curb between two houses and came around and opened the door for me.

  “Where are we?” I asked. I wondered if this was where Marie and Victor were staying, but that couldn’t be right, he said they were in Long Beach.

  “This is where I grew up,” he said. I noticed as he walked me up to one of the houses, a single-story white western style house with a small front porch and attached garage that there was also a “Foreclosed” notice on the front door.

  “Your whole life?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, until I was old enough to leave.”

  That was something for me. Mom and I moved a lot. Every time she used the rent money for her “entertainment” instead, one too many times, we would get an eviction notice and have to move to another creepy apartment.

  “No one lives here now?”

  “No. When my parents left for Florida after my dad retired, they sold it. The people who bought it lost it in a year. It’s been empty since then.” He had ahold of my hand and he led me around the side of the house. We went through a wooden gate that he reached over and unlocked and we were standing in the back yard.

  Smiling, I said, “So what are we going to do, break in?”

  He laughed and then said, “Yep. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  “Paul…”

  “It’s okay. I’m not going to break anything.” He went over to one of the big windows and took off the screen. He pressed his hands against the glass and raised it up. As he climbed through he said, “I’ll be right back.” A few minutes later, he opened the sliding glass door and said, “Welcome. Please come in.”

  I followed him in, but once we were standing in the empty kitchen I said, “You’re a little bit crazy, you know that?”

  He smiled and nodded. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

  The house wasn’t huge but it was a lot nicer than any place I had ever lived. I know you never know what went on inside someone else’s family behind closed doors but I know when I was a kid I would have given my right arm to live in a “real” house like this. It was four bedrooms and two baths. He showed me Marie’s old room and his parents room and told me the extra bedroom had been his dad’s home office. There was a living room and a den. The living room had a fireplace that took up one whole wall. He looked at it fondly and said, “When I have my own house someday, it’s going to have to have a fireplace.”

  “I’ve never had one,” I told him. We had fire pits outside for the homeless in some of the places I lived.

  “Some of the best memories I have as a kid are about the fireplace. Marie and I used to roast marshmallows in it when my mom would make a fire and my dad wasn’t around. He was always bitching at us that we’d start a fire and he took all the fun out of it. At Christmas we would peel pine needles off the tree and toss them into the fire and watch it flare up. We couldn’t do that when he was home either. Luckily, he was gone a lot. I used to sit on the bricks there and do my homework when it was cold. And lay in front of it for hours when I was home from school sick…Come on.” He took my hand again and led me to the other end of the hall. We went into a bedroom that was smaller than the others and he said, “This was my room.”

  “You were at the complete opposite end of the house from everyone else.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “The old man liked it that way. He and I fought…a lot. Argued, not physically. He treated my mom and my sister like shit. He had no respect for them at all. He tried to do it out of my earshot as I got older. Especially after I started fighting. I think he was never sure when I was going to snap. I always tried to get my mom to leave…but she never would. They’ve been married over thirty years now and I’d be willing to bet he’s still dishing it out and she’s still taking it.”

  “I’m sorry. That had to really suck.”

  “It did. It kept me from being a normal teenager. I would take girls out once and never call them again. I was so afraid that I was like him. I didn’t want to get into a relationship with a girl and end up treating her like dirt the way he did. I guess it wasn’t just my te
ens that were messed up from it. I’ve still never had a real relationship. Just so you know I have a reason behind my weirdness.” He smiled, but it was a sad smile. He went on to say, “Marie went the opposite direction. She picked boys just like him. Her boyfriends were all verbally abusive and she and I didn’t have a good relationship as she got older because it bothered me so badly. I would go off on them if I heard them talking crap to her. I even got in a few physical fights with them. She always got mad at me and took their side…Then later she would tell me she was sorry and she loved and appreciated it. She was so much like my mom.”

  “But before that, when you were kids the relationship was good?”

  “Yeah, we were so close in age that when we were little we did everything together. It’s easier not to notice how dysfunctional things are when you’re young. My mom did her best to be a good mother. She had issues; she was depressed and anxious a lot. I didn’t know it until I got older, but I’m sure living with my asshole father was ninety-percent of it.”

  “I don’t think you would mistreat a woman.” I hated that he thought that. I was still in awe at the difference between the fighter in the cage and the lover in my bed.

  He smiled and brushed the hair off my face. It was a simple gesture, but an intimate one. It made me feel all warm and tingly. “Thanks,” he said. “It hurts me to look at your bruises and think about what Mitch did to you. I can’t imagine ever wanting to hurt something as beautiful as you.”

  I reached up and put my hand on the back of his neck. I pulled him down so that our lips could meet. It was the first really passionate kiss we had shared since I’d gotten out of the hospital and I felt it all the way to my toes. He took me gently by the waist and lowered us to the floor, breaking the kiss long enough to look into my eyes and say, “Are you sure about this?”

  “Absolutely,” I told him in a breathless voice.

  “You’ll stop me if it hurts.”

  “Promise,” I said, finding his lips with mine once again.

  As we kissed I could feel him unhooking my bra and unbuttoning my jeans. I lie back on the carpet and let him pull it all off. With my right arm still casted, it was nice to have the help. He was kneeling over me when he leaned down to kiss me again. I got hold of his t-shirt with my left hand and pulled on it. He took the hint and pulled it off. The sight of his hard chest and abs sent shock waves straight through me, culminating in my panties being soaking wet. It never failed to have that effect on me.