“You don’t have to do this,” Adam started. He was obviously uncomfortable, but I didn’t have time for this. I thought that the longer we waited, the higher the chance that my dad would regain consciousness and kill this boy. This boy that had saved my life.
“When he wakes up you’re dead,” I said angrily. I didn’t have time for his pseudo-hero act to continue on any further. He’d done enough just getting my father to stop. We would have all be dead if he hadn’t, it didn’t matter if the cop had a gun on him or not, the way I saw it was that we’d be dead before he could make it to the cop. “Take my help and go, I’ll be there in an hour,” I stated. I wasn’t asking him to listen to me, I was telling him to.
“When he wakes up then you’ll be the one that’s in danger,” he replied. He looked angry and concerned. I’d had enough with his hard-headedness and enough with all the damn time he was wasting. Valuable time.
“Get the hell out of my house. Run. We can handle ourselves, there’s a chance he won’t recognize your face if you get out now,” I explained, grabbing his arm and dragging him to the back door. I didn’t have time for him to squabble with me. I didn’t have time to change my mind.
“I can’t just leave you here like this,” he said, his eyes wide as I opened the door. He was all muscles and masculinity, but in that moment he looked so damn tired and so damn worried.
“I’ll be fine. Remember, Ash and Gladstone,” I said as I pushed him out the door and slammed it closed behind him. The second the door closed I could feel sobs and panic bubbling up in my throat and strangling me.
What a damned mess.
5
Brooklyn
I watched him walk away across my back yard, breaking into a sprint as he hit the alleyway. Holding my breath, I grabbed some napkins, wet them and cleaned the blood off my face. The blood had begun to crust and my nose stung as I removed all traces of my father’s violence. I hated the bastard. It was bad enough that he put his hands on my mother, but now he was making it a regular thing to hit me too.
I felt like I was preparing for war.
My mother had been going through this for years. She’d been through hell and yet she was still able to hold her head high. She was still trying to find love and a life outside of my father. I felt like I could at least act like I could handle this. I did love my mother, despite how horrible she’d been to me in the past and I wanted to be sure that she knew that. I wanted to keep her safe.
I steeled myself, wiping the rest of my face with a clean paper towel before heading back to my dad’s hunting room.
He was no longer alone in the room. My chance to protect her had been taken away.
My mother was leaning over him, her fingertips against his neck. Her eyes were focused and she was trembling slightly; this was the most intimate I’d ever seen her act towards me father.
“Mom?” I asked, confused. Looking up at me, her expression was blank. Something wasn’t fucking right with my dad. Something was wrong.
He wasn’t breathing.
My mom was touching him voluntarily.
“He’s dead?” I breathed out the words. It felt like someone had taken a bat to my chest. My mom’s mouth trembled, somewhere in the uncanny valley between a grimace and a smile. Fat tears started to slip down her face and she walked over to the lamp.
“You hit him with this?” she asked, picking it up with a towel and wiping it off a little.
She didn’t know Adam was there.
“Yes, I cracked it, sorry,” I said. I didn’t know why I was apologizing for a broken lamp while my father lay dead on the ground. I couldn’t cry and I could hardly move or talk. He was dead. This man, this horrible man, my father, was dead and permanently out of my life. It felt unreal in every sense of the word. Only minutes ago he had slapped me, not long before that he had been yelling, and less than an hour ago he had still been on his way home from work.
A slight odor began filling the room, and at the time I had thought it was too fast for him to be decomposing. I didn’t know then that when people die, their bodies relax completely and let everything out.
Fucking disgusting.
My dad, this man who had forced me to grow a thick skin and learn how to properly carry myself, was laying here in his own filth, killed by a lamp with pastel flowers on it.
“Honey, you have to get out of here,” my mom said, wiping away her tears with a trembling wrist. She stepped away from my father and out of the room. In a daze, I followed her as she walked out and up the stairs to her room. The house was horribly quiet and some of my blood still glimmered on the floor at the bottom of the stairs.
“Where’s the cop?” I asked. I knew I had seen him here earlier.
“When your father came into the house, Jim climbed out the window and left,” she explained. Shit. This was worse. This was way fucking worse than anything. The cop wasn’t in there when my dad was yelling at me on the stairs. If I had just let my dad go up the stairs he would have found my mother alone in bed, probably acting like she was sleeping. Instead he hit me and then we… Adam… I couldn’t find a train of thought that didn’t make me wish it was me laying in that room full of animal carcasses. That would be so much easier.
It sunk in deeper that I’d just told my mother I killed my dad when I hadn’t.
Grabbing the nearest trashcan I puked into it, heaving hard until tears stung at my eyes and my throat hurt. Dead! Dead. Fucking Dead. I heaved again before setting the trash can down and sobbing. I wouldn’t miss him, he was a fucking bastard of a man, but there was a corpse in the same home as me. A corpse that was, at no small amount, my fault.
Somehow in my heart I had begun to mourn him. That made me feel even worse. It made me feel dirty and disgusting. There was a huge chance that he would have killed me if he had gotten to that gun case and an even bigger chance that my mother would have also been killed also. He had abused us, he was a horrible man, and yet he had still been my father. Somehow I still loved this man that had made my life a living hell, and messed with my head until I hadn’t even known who I was anymore. Yet, I still loved him.
Catching my breath, I let my gaze settle on my mom’s purple paisley luggage that was sitting by her dresser. It looked full.
“Mom, you packed already?” I asked, my brain fuzzy with panic and the swirling emotions from everything that had happened. Was she planning on us running off right now? Was she going with me? My mom sat on the bed and shook her head.
“That was packed this morning when your dad left for work, we were supposed to go around 7:45, but we wanted just one last time here,” she explained. It was spite, of course it was. Who wouldn’t be spiteful? I stared over at the luggage, tracing the familiar pattern with my eyes before I realized the problem with them. The two suitcases would hardly hold enough for just her, much less anything of mine. My hate and fear of my father bled into my feelings for her a bit.
“Were you going to tell me before you left me here with him?” I asked, looking over at her. Sitting there on the bed, she looked pitiful, closing in on herself as she stared at a patch of carpet a few feet ahead of where her feet hovered above the ground. Her bottom lip was trembling, her fingers closing around and releasing each other thoughtfully.
“I had to go, you know that—he’s never laid hands on you as much as he did me,” she started to say, to explain away how she could leave her freshly turned seventeen-year-old daughter in the home with an abusive psychopath. He’d only beaten me a handful of times, and each time had been because my mom either wasn’t home or was locked up in her room. He was the one who physically assaulted me, but I still shoved some of the blame off on her. Something in my face made the words catch in her throat.
“You weren’t even going to say bye,” I observed. The bitch. She sobbed out loud, and I could feel my drying tears cool against my cheeks.
“I love you,” she excused, softly. I shook my head, not wanting to hear her bullshit. I deserved better than her lies.
<
br /> “You were going to leave me with him,” I repeated, my blood now felt like ice. She was going to vanish into the night and leave me to deal with the aftermath, to deal with this train of a man that had been bulldozing through my life for the last seventeen years.
She looked up at me, her eyes tracing my face.
“I think you should go stay with Jo for a while,” she said, turning her eyes back to the floor in front of her. My Aunt Jo lived miles away in New York. “I’ll buy you a plane ticket, I just need another moment,” she was staring in a way that made me feel like she could see through the floor.
“I don’t think the cops will let me,” I said, not sure what she was doing. I couldn’t figure out how the hell she’d benefit from me skipping town when the cops were after me. She shook her head.
“I’m going to tell them I did this,” she explained. I would have heaved again if there were anything left in my stomach.
“You can’t do that,” I said, uneasily. I hated her, and I was angry with her, but she wasn’t even actually protecting me. She didn’t even realize Adam had been here.
“I can,” she replied immediately. “I’m going to tell them I planned on running off, that I fell in love and I needed to get out,” her voice was unsteady. “I’ll say that he beat me, the truth, and when he went to turn his gun on me I hit him in self-defense,” she didn’t sound too sure of her plan, but I was in no position to argue with her. I wasn’t willing to go to jail for Adam.
Standing up, she went to her suitcase and pulled out her wallet, pulling out more one hundred dollar bills than I’d seen in my entire life, and handed me all of her money. She looked uncomfortable standing in front of me, like she was unsure of what to do.
“There’s more on top of the fridge in the breadbox,” she offered. I didn’t want to tell her I’d already given it away. “I only ever wanted the best for you,” she said softly, combing her fingers through my hair in what was almost a caress.
“I know,” I lied. If she wanted to go to jail for me, I was going to fucking let her.
As she bought my ticket and handed me the information, she hugged me and sobbed. None of this felt real. She sat on my bed with me as I filled a suitcase and backpack with anything and everything I thought I would need. It felt just like it had when I was a kid and I’d leave for sleep-overs, my mom would school me the entire time on how to act and what to say so people would like me.
How to be as agreeable as possible.
She called Jo and told her there was an emergency and I was on my way, and that she should pick me up from JFK first thing in the morning. I could tell that Jo was concerned on the phone, but I also knew it wasn’t completely sincere. My aunt had been trying to talk my mom out of her relationship with my father since before I was born. Not because my mom was abused, but because my aunt got a thrill out of whatever drama she could surround herself with.
I finished packing, and with a bus ticket to take me off into the night, I sat on the bed beside her and let her paint my face with the same camouflage she’d always worn. The makeup perfectly blended and devoured the bruises blossoming around my nose and under my eyes from the slap and fall.
I tried not to think of the possible outcomes she could face from implicating herself. I never thought she would do anything for me, I never thought she actually cared this much. I kissed her forehead and let her cry; her shuddering breath rocked the bed and made my uneasy stomach worse.
“I need you to know I love you,” she said softly. “And that I’m sorry,” she didn’t mean it in any way for me to actually feel better. She was easing her own guilt, feeding into her own needs, and I completely understood that. All the same, her throwing herself under the bus wasn’t going to just make me forgive her. She had planned on leaving me to die.
“I know,” I said gently, not feeling completely up to saying it back. I sat there quietly after that, listening to her breathing fill the room with sound.
When I finally left I didn’t look back past the stairs to the hallway, I didn’t pause to think of the fact that I had just been laid out on that floor. I didn’t even hug my mother goodbye. I ignored that I could have been the corpse in the house.
It was dark out, and I let myself slip away into its warmth like a warm cocoon preparing me for a rebirth.
6
Adam
It was getting dark out. I had been standing on the corner of Ash and Gladstone, my backpack stuffed to the brim, for almost an hour at that point. My bag had been packed before I even left for Brooklyn’s home, but she didn’t need to know that. The summer air was full of the smell of honeysuckle and fresh cut grass, fireflies orbed through the air like little ghosts. It was too peaceful, too normal for what I had just done and for what I had confirmed about Brooklyn.
It’s not like I was glad I was right, I wouldn’t have wished what we’d been through on anyone else, but I was somehow relieved to be able to say I was correct. That Brooklyn wasn’t a monster. That she was like me and understood me as well as I did her. As I stood there, awkwardly shuffling my feet, I felt at peace with her, even if I knew she didn’t actually know me. I wasn’t even sure if she knew my name.
She was taking forever though.
I didn’t really know what I expected of her. Did I think she would just run away with me? I wouldn’t have complained if she wanted to though. She was beautiful and intelligent. We wouldn’t get bored. We could run off to some giant city and get lost there, starting entirely new lives from the bottom up. New names, new career paths, new goals. We could be friends, or even more.
I would have loved to be more.
I knew I didn’t deserve that though, I had done too much to be able to just ride off into the sunset. I wasn’t exactly religious but I knew I had sins that I needed to atone for.
The thought that she might be setting me up had flooded through my mind more than a few times. Maybe she was mad at me for knocking out her dad. She’d given me the money and what if she sent me out here so that she could tell her dad I’d stolen from them and knocked him out? He’d murder me. She could turn me in to the cops, the creepy dude who stood outside of her house all the time staring in. The guy who broke into their house.
She never asked for help. She never told me that she needed me to step in. She could side with her dad and decide it was all my fault. That it could have been settled if I hadn’t of escalated it. I couldn’t blame her for it if she did, brains are messy things.
Abuse victims can have weird ways of coping with having no control over their own lives.
The sound of the lamp cracking down on her father’s head mingled around with the other sleepless noises in my mind. They echoed there, feeding off my own self-doubt. I was a fighter, a trained fighter who knew the importance of using it as self-defense. There were other ways I could have handled that, other routes I could have taken to take the situation down a couple pegs. I hadn’t though, I chose to grab that lamp and knock him the fuck out. He hadn’t even had a gun in his hands or the safe open yet.
He couldn’t have defended himself. I could have just subdued him until they could call the cops. He would have been arrested, probably charged with abuse. Brooklyn wouldn’t have had to see me like that. I would have had to have been around cops, though, and at the moment I wasn’t so keen on that idea.
I remembered seeing him slap Brooklyn, her nose bloodied, and it eased up a small fraction of my guilt. Nobody who abuses their children deserves to have any. When you have kids, you’re agreeing that you’re going to care for them for life. You don’t get to be a coward and beat on them just because they’re there.
The shadows of the night drew longer, until only the streetlamps kept me company.
The short hairs on the back of my neck would rise and prickle against the collar of my shirt every time I’d hear a noise. The start of a car, the closing of a house door, someone talking. When cars passed by, I felt like their lights went right through me, exposing me for everything I’d done in
the last day.
I felt my nerves setting in deeper and deeper until I was no longer content with just switching from foot to foot uncomfortably. I wasn’t sure if it was the paranoia from not sleeping the night before that had me antsy, but I couldn’t just stand there.
I had to move.
Trying to remember where exactly the bus station on Ash was, I started to walk along the shadows, not letting the lamps tattle out my whereabouts. Suddenly there were loud footsteps running up to me. For the second time that night, I steadied myself for a punch, or a police siren, or someone who had seen what I’d done, but when I turned it was only Brooklyn running towards me.
She was carrying a suitcase with a backpack strapped to her back, and my brain retraced the idea of her running away with me. Sometimes I still think about where our lives would be now if she had.
“Where are you going?” she asked, panting and setting down her suitcase for a moment to catch her breath. She’d been crying, her eyes were red and puffy. She was still so beautiful though.
“I thought you bailed,” I admitted, not wanting to lie to her. She looked affronted, and then sighed.
“Sorry, I got hung up,” she explained. I truly wasn’t upset with her.
“What’s with the suitcase?” I asked, not wanting to get my hopes up. We started walking together. She looked thoughtful for a moment before she gave me an answer.
“My mom and I have decided it’s best if I stay at my aunt’s for a little while,” she told me. I wasn’t sure that I understood.
Dirty Fighter: A Bad Boy MMA Romance Page 3
