“So?” she asked again.
“The charges are being dropped.”
From behind my closed eyelids I heard Skylar take a breath as deep as mine and let it puff out. She flopped down, resting her head under my arm and continuing those mesmerizing patterns on my torso. Relief all around.
“Thank goodness.”
“Yeah, NHBFC spares no expense on lawyers. The security footage from the club and that bruise on your stomach gave them some serious pause.”
“Lucky I bruise easily, huh?”
“Fuckin’… anyway… there’s going to be some kind of under the table settlement for some of the medical costs, and property damage to the club that’s coming out of my purse for the next fight, but after that it’s all basically being swept under the carpet. Robbie and his team are spinning some White Knight Hero storyline bullshit about it, and it’ll roll into everything we’ve been doing anyway.”
“It’ll be so good to put this behind us,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“It’s not such BS anyway.”
“What isn’t?” I asked.
“You may not have had a white horse and shining armor, but you did charge in and save me. My hero-“
“Don’t.”
“What?”
“Don’t call me that,” I said.
“Why not?”
How the fuck was I supposed to explain that? That the one time in my life I actually thought I was going to run in and save the day that things got even more fucked than this?
Skylar kept on prodding. She hadn’t done much of that since the night in Vegas, maybe now, with the charges dropped, she felt like the stress was sufficiently lowered that she could finally get to the bottom of it. “It was… kind of brutal, Austin. What happened?”
“I saw. I saw that guy getting close, saw that mean look in his eye. Then I saw the way he moved and you jerked forward. I fuckin’ knew what that meant. I had, like, a flashback…”
Skylar propped herself up on her elbow. “Of what?”
I didn’t answer straight away. Nothing good could come of dredging up the past. Not this past. If she thought what happened in that club was brutal, she’d run for the fucking hills if I told her about this.
To tell her would be to lose her right now, instead of when her contract was up. I never talked about those days with anybody.
Of course, nobody had ever asked. I thought about it for a second. Maybe nobody ever cared as much as Skylar.
“You can tell me,” Skylar said quietly.
I gulped and my mouth opened slowly like it was on rusty hinges. “Dear old Dad.”
“He used to…?”
“Oh man,” I dragged the word out, still horrified by the memories after all this time. “My mom’s face was… unrecognizable every weekend. My arm had been broken twice by the time I was seven. The hospital reports said I fell. I fucking didn’t.”
Peeking out from behind barely open eyelids, I saw Skylar’s brow furrow as she took it in, and her own eyes tracked the path of her fingertips around my chest. I closed them again and went on.
“Every weekend and half the week, parties, and so-called business meetings that escalated into parties. Booze, cigarettes and ass-kickings. Dinner not ready on time? That’s a slap. Disrespect him? Imagined or not, that’s a split lip. He remembers some shit that might have happened months ago? Oh fuck.”
Those sounds came flooding back from my memory, I swore could almost hear them. There was a small but violent tornado that lived in that house, and the path it cut, tearing the place the fuck up as it went, had no concern about how scared the people were. It could touch down anywhere and leave pure distilled pain in it’s wake.
“Even now I remember those nights, too scared to sleep, listening for that moment when the drunken banter took a turn. If my mom hadn’t passed out yet, then I heard the thuds, the screams and the sounds of breaking furniture. I heard him beating the shit out of her and I knew I was next. And I couldn’t do shit.”
“Oh, Austin…”
“After a while, it used to get quiet down there, like that pause before somebody gives you real bad news. Mom was done, but he didn’t feel like he’d been respected enough. So… what? I hear these footsteps on the stairs. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Steady, just like that, no hesitation. He knew where he was going.”
“What did you do? Could you hide?”
“There was nowhere to hide. I haven’t been afraid of anything since… well… since him, but I remember how hard it was to breathe, how my heart used to beat so fast I thought it was going to explode. So much blood being pumped through me that my skin was hot, prickling with pins and needles. I was no doctor, but I knew you could get hurt so bad that you died. I knew he had that power over me.”