Dirty Fighter: A Bad Boy MMA Romance (2 page)

M
y mother had always been
a beautiful woman. She had a certain grace about her that she had been desperate to pass on to me. My hair wasn’t allowed to be cut short and I had been told from a young age to watch what I put into my body.

I was also told to be careful what I put into my mind.

She was proud, she did what she thought would benefit herself; she did what she could to ensure her own happiness. A perfect family in a perfect house. The whole nine-yards. I had grown up knowing only the image of her that she wanted me to, with snaps of bruises and booze swirled throughout it.

That is why I was disturbed by what was sitting in front of me.

I had walked in on her kissing a cop in the kitchen a few weeks before, leaning against the table that I had done homework on all throughout elementary school. Who he was didn’t matter. That she was doing it didn’t matter. She was just being so blatant about it. I was frustrated and confused, because I couldn’t blame her. I’d seen what my dad had done. I knew what she was going through, and knew that I wouldn’t be able to stand it myself.

Wanting to check in on her, since I loved her and she was my mother, I confronted her after I saw the cop leave.

“Stop spying on me,” she said, her lip snarled into what was almost a grimace as she filled her glass with more booze. “You’re being stupid as hell, it’s none of your goddamned business,” she added. She didn’t want to talk about it, which was fine. I’d act like I hadn’t seen it, I’d let her deal with it. She hadn’t seemed scared at the time.

Currently, though, she was sitting in front of me at that same kitchen table, her perfectly made up face streaked with tears. She was trembling? Actually trembling. This woman, who never even let me see her flinch from anything besides my father, was sobbing and I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t used to seeing her like a defenseless fawn, something small and to be protected. I pushed the box of tissues I had grabbed towards her.

“Mom,” I began, not sure what to say. What the hell do you say in this situation?! “Oh I see you’re upset, how about you don’t be?” isn’t exactly the best way to respond. She grabbed a tissue, crumpling it with her perfectly manicured nails, and wiped her eyes. My heart ached. “Mom, tell me what’s wrong,” I managed, taking her free hand in my own.

“I think he knows, Brooklyn,” she uttered, shaking. Her eyes traced over the tissue she was holding, blurs of mascara had created nonsensical patterns on it.

“There’s no way,” I immediately replied, squeezing her hand. “He would have done something by now,” I added. I could smell her poison on her sobbing lips, the flavor of the night was gin. I was only allowed this close to her, allowed to see this unfiltered woman, when she was completely drunk.

The first time he hit her, that I knew of, was when I was seven. I was so hurt and confused, and when I asked her if she was okay she called me that same nickname. Stupid. A part of me blamed her for the abuse after that, I was a kid! I was a child forced into this dumb situation where the people I needed to trust were the monsters most kids would check under their beds for. I was so fucking young and I hadn’t deserved that pressure. I was just a child.

It took me years to come to grips with the fact that my mother didn’t deserve it either, and for that I didn’t think I would ever forgive myself. Since then, my feelings for her have changed again, but nobody deserves to be abused.

She was lucky she loved makeup so much. You could hide anything with it.

I didn’t know the cop. Like I said, he wasn’t important to me, he didn’t matter. He was just some poor sucker that cared too much and got caught up in drama that would break his heart.

I wasn’t sure what my mom saw in him besides the fact that he wasn’t my dad. I had no way of telling how long they’d been together or how serious they were. If he knew about my dad’s tendencies, why hadn’t he arrested him already?

He basically didn’t even exist to me.

A few weeks after I’d found her teary-eyed in the kitchen is when it all came to a head.

I had just gotten home from a friend’s house, Jamie Schwartz; we had spent the day lying around watching a series of horror movies. Lifeless Treeland had just come out. I can’t tell you how I remember it, but not a single detail of that damn day escapes me anymore. Like a groove in a record my brain was constantly tracing over it, memorizing it and playing it over and over. I wish every day that the damn track would skip.

The neighborhood had been coated with kids just getting out of school, people getting home from work. A cop car had sat two yards away from our home, on the side of the road in front of the only home for sale in the neighborhood. I’d noticed it, but hadn’t fully realized that it was there until I walked up to my house and saw a man being led up the stairs by my mother’s hand through the glass wall.

I paused there for longer than I realized. I didn’t count the heartbeats over the roaring of my thoughts.

“She deserves how he treats her”, the old chorus I had beat down hundreds of times popped up. I hated it, hated myself for feeling it. She didn’t deserve any of it, nobody deserves to be abused, but it reared its ugly puce head at me again. Squeezing my keys tightly in my hand, I kept increasing the pressure until the pain drowned those thoughts.

My mother wasn’t a good person, but she didn’t deserve to be a victim.

She deserved to be able to live without fear, and maybe with this cop she could have found this.

Maybe with this cop she wouldn’t have to flinch at closing doors or the smell of beer.

She could have been happy; she could have made her life better.

I’d waited until they were out of sight and then let myself in, quietly closing the door and sliding off my shoes. I wiped the blood from my punctured palm on the jean shorts I was wearing and tried not to think about it.

The house was huge. Two stories and spread out like a labyrinth. I never realized how big it really was until I had friends over and then their reactions always made me feel like I lived in the White House. When I snuck in boys in the middle of the night they never heard. If they had my dad would have been hideously angry. I could play music, sneak out through the front door, smash plates on the kitchen floor, and they wouldn’t even know I was home from their bedroom.

Though even if I did make noise they could hear I doubt they’d acknowledge I existed.

I made my way upstairs and closed myself off in my bedroom, shutting the door and sliding on my headphones, I stared out into the back yard from my window. A perfectly manicured yard of dying grass. It suited the house, seeing how nasty it really was in here, even if it looked nice from the outside.

I’m not sure how long I sat there. It could have been a couple minutes, or a couple hours, but I knew it sure as hell couldn’t be eight pm already when my dad pulled up. Yet, there was his car, oversized and red, pulling into the driveway from the back, out of site from my parent’s room.

Shit.

Shit … shit … SHIT.

I slammed down my headphones and paced my room for a minute, not sure what to do. What the fuck was he doing home? He didn’t get home until eight? It was only seven. Fuck. I could taste my fucking heart in my throat as I watched him get out of his car and head to the back door that lead through to the kitchen.

My dad had always been an angry man. The kind of guy that if you got one thing wrong on his order at a restaurant he’d yell until you cried or were fired. He didn’t have patience for anyone messing up exactly how he envisioned his life to be.

Rushing from my room, adrenaline flooding me like ice water, I headed to the stairs and tried to act naturally. I couldn’t let him know something was up, I couldn’t risk it. Setting my right hand on the banister, I began to walk down. I could hear him stomping toward the stairs and into sight. His face was already red as he tossed his keys to a side table and missed, jangling down to the floor.

“IS HE FUCKING HER?” my dad said. I was his seventeen-year-old daughter, and here he was asking me that shit. My stomach rolled so hard I was surprised I could stand up straight.

“Dad, mom’s not home,” I said, trying my best to maintain a confused expression. I was a cheerleader, a performer, and I had to stick this landing.

He didn’t buy my act.

“Fuck your ‘she’s not here’. I see his fucking car,” said the man who’d taught me how to ride a bike, the man who helped me blow out my birthday candles every year, my dad. He started coming up the stairs towards me.

“Dad, she isn’t,” I repeated, almost halfway down them, but frozen with terror as he approached me. My mom wasn’t a good person, but she sure as hell didn’t deserve to catch his fists anymore. He wasn’t stopping as he came up, this angry bull of a man who was supposed to be nurturing me as I made my progression into adulthood. He was basically having a temper tantrum.

When he slapped my face, any semblance of the voice that ever blamed my mom for her abuse died. Any semblance of the child that had once loved my father was forever tarnished.

The hit was hard, and God it hurt so much that I was sure he’d broken my jaw, the surprise of it knocking me down. I could feel the stairs catching me and tumbling me past him, down to the reprieve of the cool floor away from him.

I was face down. I had hit my nose on the fall and I wasn’t sure if it was bleeding from that or the slap.

It hurt so bad, I couldn’t believe he’d actually done that to me again. He had only hit me twice before and he’d promised after each time that he would never do it again. My ass, my stupid “daddy’s girl” ass had to go right back to believing him. I felt so stupid, so useless. I was so angry and so fucking hurt in both my heart and body.

“Brooklyn!” a voice was saying. Great, now my dad was going to tell me he was sorry. I expected as much. A pair of strong hands found me and was slowly picking my face up from the ground, and as that voice said “Brooklyn” again, the name my father had chosen for me, I realized it wasn’t my dad.

The world around me exploded into sound and reached full speed, my head swimming as I looked at a classmate I hardly knew. My head was throbbing and my dad was rushing down the stairs toward us.

“What the fuck?” someone said, I wasn’t sure if it was my father or myself.

I
found
the window that had let me hear them, in an office that was near the kitchen. I roughly hoisted myself through, scraping my hands in the process. Clumsy and rushed from panic, I slid down the wall, knocking a diploma down as I sped my ass out of there. HE hit her. He HIT her. I was furious. Madder than I’d ever been in my life, more mad than even when I’d been hit. He was her father and he hit her.

I had almost left just minutes before he got home.

I’d almost missed this and then what?

As I rounded the corner I could see her, her dark hair like a veil to hide her face. She looked dead, face down on the tile, there was blood and one of her arms looked uncomfortably twisted. Her father watched me, not doing anything, as I quickly crouched down to her side.

I’d never touched her before and she seemed so delicate in that moment, not the firebird that was so quick to destroy other people at school. Slowly I was able to get her to sit up some; her body was tense and uncomfortable. She peered up at me with those large eyes, and confusion and relief both seemed to fight for residence on her expressions.

“What the fuck?” Brooklyn’s dad said as he turned to me. He was angry and a few steps up on the stairs. Actually, he was intimidating as hell once I got a good look at him. I started to help Brooklyn up, but for a moment there I wasn’t completely sure why the fuck I put myself in this situation again, so soon after the last time.

“Chill out,” I said to him, lost for any word that didn’t sound like it would send him back down on us. I didn’t want to force Brooklyn to stand, so I picked her up and carried her over to a chair near the front door. I was fucking furious, but I knew that I wasn’t much in stature compared to this man. He had a good few inches of height on me, and his arms and torso looked thick but I couldn’t be sure if it was muscle or fat. I’d been working out for ages, but if he was angry he would be unpredictable.

He wasn’t that much of a man if he had to slap around his fucking daughter,

“You want me to calm down? He’s FUCKING MY WIFE,” he said angrily, turning and shouting the last few words up the stairs so he could be sure she’d hear him. His face was almost purple with fury.

“Who are you, anyway?” he asked.

“I’m Adam. I am friends with Brooklyn. We go to school together,” I answered.

“Is that so?” he asked.

“Yup. Alright, talk to me about it,” I said, trying to diffuse the situation. My hands were up, open with the palms out to show that I wasn’t going to be violent, I could listen. I wasn’t sure what the fuck I had just climbed through a window into, but Brooklyn’s nose was bleeding and her eyes looked mostly blank. She didn’t look like she completely knew what was going on either.

“And tell you what?” he asked snidely, his brows were so furrowed that the surrounding wrinkles were white against his angry red skin. “That my wife is fucking some fucking cop, so that she can turn around and fuck me in a fucking divorce?” he spat, almost literally. His right hand gripped the stair banister, his knuckles protruding from the back of his hand like the spine of an arching pissed off cat.

Brooklyn shifted and as I looked over at her, she stiffened up, straightening her back and gaining some semblance of composure.

“She’s not here,” Brooklyn said, shaking her head. She didn’t look like she could convince even herself, but it was amazing that she could still lie straight faced with that monster right there on the stairs. I was in awe at her bravery.

“Don’t you fucking say that,” her dad said in a steadily raising voice. “Don’t you fucking sit there and lie to me,” he said. I wanted to knock his goddamn lights out for talking to her like that. Who the fuck was he to just go around punching and terrorizing his damn child like that? I didn’t want to make things worse though, so I forced my voice to stay calm.

“Brooklyn has no reason to lie,” I said, trying to be somewhat more convincing than she was.

“Oh fuck you,” her dad said, looking me over like I was a piece of shit as he took a couple steps down the stairs. “Her fucking mom, the slut up there in MY bedroom having sex with a fucking pig cop, is going to try to take all of this from me,” he motioned around us. “I’m not paying her for fucking someone else! I’m not going to fucking—to fucking let her come in here, screw the first man who walks by, and then waltz off with my hard earned money!” he said, angrily stumbling through his words.

He was half yelling, half grunting out whatever came into his mind.

“I built this home from the fucking dirt up; fuck I have money in every goddamn business in this town. She wouldn’t even have a cop to fuck if it wasn’t for me.” He wasn’t making any sense at this point.

“So take her to court, but don’t pull this shit here,” I said, trying to calm him down. “You can hire a good lawyer with all of,” I motioned around, “this. Get back at her in the courtroom.” I was just trying to get him to calm down. Brooklyn’s nose was bleeding a lot and I was pissed. So fucking pissed that I could hear my pulse in my ears as I waited for his reply.

“No. Fuck you, they always pay off the wife—it’s fucking impossible to be a man without being looked at like a piece of shit in the courts these days,” he said, borderline spitting his words at me. I didn’t really know how to respond to that, and was caught off guard when he started barreling down the stairs. “I’m not going to fucking see her ass in court. I’m not going to sit around and wait for her to screw me like she’s letting him screw her,” he said. His chest was heaving under his strenuous breathing, like a steam engine.

“Look at yourself, this isn’t how you win,” I tried again. I usually didn’t get the chance to try to talk someone down from attacking someone else. He didn’t look like he gave a shit what I was saying though.

“Fuck you! Fucking trash! Get the fuck out of my house,” he shouted. He was almost directly in front of me. I steadied myself, preparing for his punch. If he was going to punch me he’d better be ready to catch my return punch as it headed directly for his damn ugly face.

Nothing.

Instead he went past me, heading to the hall by the kitchen. I could feel Brooklyn’s panic spike immediately. I turned to her and she seemed to pop out of her trance. Her wide bright eyes were horrified as she looked at me, almost helplessly.

“The hunting room is down that hall. His gun, he’s getting his gun, oh my God,” she said, her body seemed to shrink. “He’s going to fucking kill all of us,” she murmured sounding like she’d already accepted it.

My heart stopped.

I had to do it again.

I had to.

“You need to go outside. Get out of the house,” I said, panicking. She didn’t look like she was going to listen to me; she was frozen with fear.

I got one last good look at her before I had to turn away. My legs carried me as if operating on their own, like a train on its tracks, my pursuit was hot and immediate. My heart was hammering, I was tired, and I was angry.

I rounded the corner. He was in front of a gun safe, turning the combination knob. I didn’t pause, I didn’t think, there was no time. I grabbed the closest heavy thing, a lamp with a white base, decorated with a light blue floral print. And after that day, I’d never be able to forget it. I lifted it high and cracked it down hard against his awful balding head.

The smell of blood was strong and immediate.