Out of Nowhere(56)

“Man. I thought you were going to beat the crap out of that guy. He was so fucking scared of you he was practically shitting himself.”

“Yeah, well.” After a few minutes of silence, Rafe says, “I can’t get in fights. It’s, um, it’s what I went to prison for.”

“Wait. I thought you went to prison for drugs.” I realize, though, that Rafe’s never told me the story of what happened exactly.

“Yeah, well, I got in a fight because I was high.” He sounds so tired. “Bar fight. Idiotic. I was there with guys from the neighborhood. We were drunk, messing around like idiots. I was high so I thought we were hilarious.”

Every time Rafe talks about drugs, it’s like he’s forcing himself to say that he used them. I wonder if that’s an NA thing.

“There was a guy there. He was hitting on some girl who wasn’t interested and he was being a total jackass about it. Showing off for his friends. Embarrassing her.” He shakes his head. “Anyway, I threw the first punch. I don’t remember that much of the actual fight. But I… man, I hurt him really bad.”

Rafe runs both hands through his tangled hair. “He—I broke a bunch of ribs and one of them collapsed his lung. He had to get his spleen removed. Knocked out a few teeth. Broke his nose.” He’s reciting it like some horrible grocery list, his voice flat and choked, like he’s forcing the words out through sand. “Cracked his skull. Fuck.” His fists are clenched against his chest.

I pull up outside my house and turn off the car, turning to look at Rafe. He’s holding himself carefully, like he doesn’t trust himself not to bolt.

“Well, look,” I try, “he was acting the fool, got in a bar fight. You do that, you deserve what you get, right?”

When Rafe turns to me, he looks miserable. He shakes his head. “No. He didn’t deserve that. I was out of my mind, Colin. I was a fucking monster.”

I can tell he truly believes that. He’s pushed himself against the door, as far away from me as he can get. Clearly, he doesn’t want to be let off the hook.

“You served your time,” I say. “You quit using.”

For me, there’s nothing else to say. Rafe is the best man I’ve ever met, and finding out that he’s made mistakes… well, it doesn’t change that.

He pulls himself together and nods, but he doesn’t touch me as we walk inside.

“What was it like?” I ask, not sure he’ll answer. He hasn’t told me much about his time in prison. I know he doesn’t like to think about it.

He sighs, toes his shoes off, and sits down on the bed. “It was boring. And terrifying. Almost always one or the other. Boredom—having nothing to enjoy, feeling like there’s nothing to look forward to—it’s dangerous. Makes people do… things they wouldn’t, otherwise. Half the violence was just boredom, just blowing off steam.”

He’s looking at the floor as he talks and he trails off for a minute, watching as I get undressed.

“I was a kid,” he says. “Twenty-one. When the sentence got handed down and it actually sunk in that I was going to prison….” He shakes his head, eyes distant. “You have no idea how fucking terrified I was. I wanted to cry and hide at my mother’s apartment. I’m not kidding. I wasn’t rational. All I could think was that I had to run away somehow.”

It’s so unlike the Rafe I know that I can only imagine how scared he’d have had to be to consider leaving his family.

“And, of course, the idea that I might not be able to use whenever I wanted… that was almost as scary.” He sits on the side of the bed and wiggles his fingers at Shelby, who bats at them halfheartedly until Rafe picks her up and cuddles her. Then she takes a swipe at his hand and jumps off the bed. Rafe sucks on the scratches she raised.

“The first night I was there—shit, the first week—I didn’t sleep. I was so damn scared, Colin. Honestly, I only got clean because I was too scared to try and score in prison. You could do it, but I just wanted to keep my head down. Didn’t want to owe anyone any favors, step on anyone’s toes. Shit, I barely even talked to anyone. Anyway, it was…. You know, you just… you can get used to almost anything, if you have to.”

He sits up straighter and holds out a hand to me, pulling me so I’m standing between his knees. I put my hands on his shoulders.

“Listen,” he says, leaning his cheek into my arm and looking up at me, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know. But can we be done for now?”

“Yeah, course.”