Caged(101)

"Biker bar. Guy beat the fuck out of me. But during the fight I figured out that's where I could channel my rage to block out my grief. Fighting became my coping mechanism."

"It still is, isn't it?"

"No. Now I fight because I'm good at it. But Jesus fuck. I couldn't get away from myself or my family connections or the accident. As if being sprawled on the ground, eating dirt, bleeding, and sobbing like a fucking girl wasn't enough"-he paused to swallow-"some asshole in the bar recognized me."

"No," she breathed.

"Oh yeah. The douche fucker worked for my old man and called him."

"What happened?"

"My dad showed up, loaded me in his car, and took me home. Then he disappeared for a few days. Without him as the buffer, my mother didn't have to hold back."

"This is the ugly part, isn't it?"

Yes. This was his private shame.

"Deacon. You have to believe I'm the last person who'd ever sit in judgment of you."

"I do believe that, which is why I'm here pouring my guts out and not hiding in the bottom of a bottle of Jäger at the strip club at the thought of losing you."

She squeezed him hard. "Tell me."

He had to force the words out through gritted teeth. "My mother told me she wished I had died instead of him."

Molly's distressed gasp sliced through him. She ducked under his arm and plastered herself to the front of his body, her shoulders heaving as she tried to muffle her sobs against his chest.

Deacon's heart turned over then, at having this beautiful, sweet, loving woman here with him, crying for him. It loosened the lump in his throat so he could go on. "I was devastated." The isolation his mother had caused with her words had tainted everything in his life and had haunted him for years. As he'd grown older he'd understood them for what they were, but the broken child in him couldn't forgive her or forget.



       
         
       
        

Molly continued to sob as if her heart had been split open.

He wiped the tears from her cheeks. Then he pressed his lips to her forehead. "I left shortly after that."

"Left? Where'd you go?"

"Everywhere. And nowhere. I was dead inside. I changed the way I looked-shaved my head, started getting tats-so I wouldn't be reminded of him every time I looked in the mirror." He'd obliterated the image of who he'd been so completely that it pained him to admit he couldn't remember what he-they-used to look like. Dante had been a disembodied voice in his head for so long, not a physical presence, that was how Deacon remembered him.

"But you were fifteen," Molly said. "How did you support yourself?"

"I turned sixteen two weeks before I left. I'd taken a couple hundred dollars out of my bank account before I took off. I washed dishes or worked as a janitor for cash under the table. Menial-labor jobs ensured I wouldn't have to interact with anyone. I moved around a lot. I had no interest in anything-sex, women, booze, or drugs. The only thing I cared about was bulking up so when I turned eighteen I could start fighting. I found a sketchy dojo that offered to train me in jujitsu. The underground fight scene is illegal, so I had to keep traveling farther away to find decent opponents."

"How long did you stay away from home?"

"Almost five years."

"Did your family look for you?"

"At the time I didn't care. I legally changed my name a week after I turned eighteen."

"Why did you ever go back?"

He rested his chin on top of her head and closed his eyes. "I heard that my dad had a heart attack. By the time I'd found out-I don't remember how that crossed my radar-it'd been a couple of months, so I knew he wasn't dead. I showed up at his office. With the extreme change in my appearance, the receptionist refused to believe I was Bing Westerman's son. We argued, and he came out of his office to see what the commotion was about."

Deacon paused, letting the memory from that day solidify. His father had run toward him. Run. In his three-piece suit. And he'd wept. Openly. Repeatedly.

"What happened?"

"He hugged me. I . . . It'd been a long time since I'd had anyone touch me not out of anger, so I balked. Then he said, 'Lemme have a look at you, son.' I'd grown two inches, packed on forty pounds-mostly muscle-shorn my hair, and inked my skin. I honestly hadn't expected him to recognize me."

"What did he say when he finished inspecting you?"

"'You erased all traces of him, didn't you?'" 

"Whoa. Did he mean you'd erased the old you? Or that you'd erased any resemblance to Dante?"