Crash!
The memory of the way he used to burst through my door hit me like a hammer.
“He’d kick that door open and see me there, shout something about why the fuck wasn’t I asleep, disobedient little fucking good for nothing piece of shit. Get the fuck over here! He made me walk over to take my licks. Made me stand up to take more as many times as I could. It was worse if I didn’t. I was forged in hell.”
“When did you get away from him?” Skylar asked.
“Started when I was ten.”
“Started?”
“That’s when I started sleeping on the streets. I stayed away more and more as the years went by.”
“At ten?”
“Yeah.”
“Did your mom manage to get the two of you away in the end?”
My heart, flooded with adrenaline just as my mind was flooded with these nightmares, had been building up to a crescendo, almost like those nights when I was a kid. It almost ground to a halt when Skylar mentioned my mom. And the end.
“No. She was a drunk. Her body was there, but who knows where her mind was? I begged her to take me away and she couldn’t. I promised myself that when I was big enough, I’d fucking save her. Well, I met Ross and he started training me. I got pretty big. I went back one night.”
“What did you do, Austin?”
No doubt reliving the comparatively tame events of the club in Vegas, Skylar could barely get her question out. She would pull her hands back in horror if she knew.
Those soft hands. The softest touch I’d ever felt in my life. The quiet words in the dark after we fucked, when we talked as if this marriage wasn’t going to end when NHBFC told us it was. All gone, if she knew.
A lump formed in my throat and my surprise at that fact jump-started my heart again. How the fuck did this woman get under my skin? All I’d wanted was a tight pussy to put my cock in, but damned if she didn’t feel like a… what? A wife? A… partner? Like she was a part of me? Fuck.
“There was a party going on, as usual. I stormed in there and I fucked him up in front of his friends, anybody that tried to stop me too. All those years being paid back all in one righteous fuckin’…” I trailed off.
Skylar sat up and turned to face me, sitting cross-legged. Another peek out of the tiniest cracks in my eyelids showed me she was crying.
“Did he leave after that?” asked Skylar. I could hear the hope in her voice.
“The police said he committed suicide. Guess he couldn’t face the humiliation of being destroyed by a fifteen year old kid,” I mumbled.
“What did your mom do?”
I didn’t answer for a long time. “She… she barely did anything. Except drink. It was almost as if the only thing that had ever stopped her from drinking herself off the edge of the world were those beatings that signaled party-over. When I tried to sober her up… she got nasty. She said the kinds of things he used to say… and one thing that was completely new. Holy fuck.”
“What?”
“She said I wasn’t even really their son. I was the worst fucking thing that ever happened and she wished they never bought me. Bought. Me.”
“No.”
Skylar spoke the word in a long groan as if my pain was her pain and I felt the bed shaking as she struggled to contain the sobs. My own breath was on the border of hitching every time I inhaled too.
“So I left again, and she drank herself to death. That’s what happened when I thought I was some kind of hero. I fucked it all up.”
I had to shut up now. I had to shut the fuck up before I did something stupid, like tell her everything.
That police report. It said suicide. That much was true. What was curiously missing from the report was how Leon Aquila had been beaten to a pulp and found at the bottom of the lake wrapped in chains and with broken legs.
It didn’t mention the water in his lungs that showed how he was still alive when he went under. It couldn’t show how he begged for his life.
Either the police were glad that the asshole who used to spit in their faces every weekend when they were called about the noise got what he deserved, or they were just that corrupt and it looked like a mob hit. I had no idea, but suicide it was.
Chapter 18
Skylar
Austin’s story had me in tatters. I noticed that he had no family at our wedding, just like me, but I never brought it up, because that would have lead the conversation to the topic of my own parents. Best to let sleeping dogs lie, I’d thought.
Now it was different. From the way Austin spoke, with a waver in his voice I’d never heard from him before, I could tell this wasn’t something he shared often. If ever.
I’d wondered what kind of life it took to make a man like Austin, and now I knew. All the years spent in becoming a nigh-on invincible fighter, all the power and confidence relentlessly built up, and the take-shit-from-nobody attitude, these were the tools he needed to survive.