Dirty Fighter: A Bad Boy MMA Romance (3 page)

I
was trembling
, still shaken, from my father hitting me, from the yelling.

The boy had told me to go outside, to get out of the house, but what was the point? Once my dad reached his guns, no amount of running would save me. He’d have a bullet in my back or head in no time, he was a hunter and that’s what he did. If he wanted me dead, I’d be dead.

I waited for a gunshot. I expected it. My father was always the one to get his way. Not once in my life had he ever been made to wait or had even been disappointed in anything. He wanted my mother and she was his. He wanted promotions, businesses, fame and they were handed to him on a platter. He could have looked at a mountain and it would have jumped out of his way and apologized for the trouble.

Instead of the gunshot I was waiting for, I heard a loud crack, followed by a heavy thud. It didn’t sound like it did when he’d hit my mother or me, slapping and punching. Those were softer noises, punctuated by her sobs, this was hard and sudden. This was completely different.

I stayed there, glued to that spot on the ground as I tasted the blood from my nose making its way into my mouth. Taking in a sobbing breath, I was terrified. I felt like I was that seven year old who first saw my father slap my mom, I stood up.

I knew the smart thing to do would be to run. If he killed that kid, if he hurt that kid, it’d be me and my mother next. I knew that. I could make it out the door, down the front steps and out to a neighbor. I could have them call the police and tell them what was going on. If I could also manage to evade his bullets and do it in a matter of minutes, then maybe I could save my mother and her damn cop. Yet my feet carried me deeper into the house, setting a groove into the recording of that day that haunts me more than anything else. I felt like I was being pulled to the back room. To my dad’s hunting room.

That room had scared me as a kid. If I was honest, it scared me now even as a teenager. Boars, bears, and deer had their heads mounted and hung on the walls, looking still very much alive; they looked like they were peering through the walls to see what life was like for humans. A stuffed fox sat in front of the fireplace, its glass eyes reflecting your every movement. On the walls were dozens of pictures of him hunting and a few of me fishing with him. There was even one of me carrying a mourning dove back from a hunt.

A couple glass cabinets showcased other trophies, arrowheads and old weapons, and a compass that looked older than the earth itself. The gun safe was his pride and joy, though. When I was younger he’d joke to me that he was better armed than some small countries, I thought that was hilarious at the time. It wasn’t until I hit my teenage years that it scared the hell out of me.

The gun safe was closed when I walked in.

My father, the unstoppable force that molded the world around him, was knocked out on the ground. A Goliath lying defeated, his David wielding a cracked lamp. I started shaking so hard that I could have collapsed right there. My father and I looked like more trophies to decorate the room.

“Fuck, what did you do?” I asked, horrified. My father wasn’t one to be fucked with. “You knocked him out—oh fuck—when he wakes up he’s going to fucking murder you,” I said, hardly able to look away from my father’s face. I felt like puking and laughing at the same time. My father, the infallible, laying on the ground like he had decided that was the perfect spot to take a heavy nap in. Defenseless and even harmless when unconscious. In that moment I was both relieved and so, so, anxious.

“I had to, he was going to shoot us,” the kid said. I know now that his name is Adam, but at the time it wasn’t on the top of my priorities. He was still holding the lamp and he paused for a moment before setting it down.

“I know,” I said, shaking. He had just saved my life. I need to protect him and return the favor. “Follow me,” I said, rushing out into the hall and into the kitchen. The house loomed around us like it knew more than we did. Rushing into the kitchen I pushed a chair to the fridge, climbed on it, and shoved the junk out of the way until I found an old plastic Wonder Bread box. “I need you to take this,” I said, grabbing the plastic bag of money out of it and shoving it against his chest. “Meet me at the bus stop on Ash and Gladstone.”

I’d found out about my mom’s stash when my friends and I first got into alcohol. My asshole parents were happy to drown themselves in the awful bitter stuff, but they kept the rest locked up in the office. I had searched everywhere for the key to that cabinet: tops of door frames, insides of drawers, even in their bedroom. I’d tried keys from all their key chains. Nothing. Finally on a weekend they weren’t in I tore apart the kitchen, and found my mom’s breadbox full of “dough”.

I stole a hundred or two here or there, which allowed me to pay people to buy me whatever booze I wanted instead of stealing their awful stuff. I don’t think she ever noticed, but even if she did, she wouldn’t ever tell me. It would mean admitting to my father and to me that she was saving up in secret. Secrets weren’t allowed from him, much less ones that implied she was planning on taking off without him. He’d kill her a thousand different ways before he would ever let her go through with the idea of leaving without him.

“You don’t have to do this,” Adam started. He was obviously uncomfortable, but I didn’t have time for this. I thought that the longer we waited, the higher the chance that my dad would regain consciousness and kill this boy. This boy that had saved my life.

“When he wakes up you’re dead,” I said angrily. I didn’t have time for his pseudo-hero act to continue on any further. He’d done enough just getting my father to stop. We would have all be dead if he hadn’t, it didn’t matter if the cop had a gun on him or not, the way I saw it was that we’d be dead before he could make it to the cop. “Take my help and go, I’ll be there in an hour,” I stated. I wasn’t asking him to listen to me, I was telling him to.

“When he wakes up then you’ll be the one that’s in danger,” he replied. He looked angry and concerned. I’d had enough with his hard-headedness and enough with all the damn time he was wasting. Valuable time.

“Get the hell out of my house. Run. We can handle ourselves, there’s a chance he won’t recognize your face if you get out now,” I explained, grabbing his arm and dragging him to the back door. I didn’t have time for him to squabble with me. I didn’t have time to change my mind.

“I can’t just leave you here like this,” he said, his eyes wide as I opened the door. He was all muscles and masculinity, but in that moment he looked so damn tired and so damn worried.

“I’ll be fine. Remember, Ash and Gladstone,” I said as I pushed him out the door and slammed it closed behind him. The second the door closed I could feel sobs and panic bubbling up in my throat and strangling me.

What a damned mess.

I
watched
him walk away across my back yard, breaking into a sprint as he hit the alleyway. Holding my breath, I grabbed some napkins, wet them and cleaned the blood off my face. The blood had begun to crust and my nose stung as I removed all traces of my father’s violence. I hated the bastard. It was bad enough that he put his hands on my mother, but now he was making it a regular thing to hit me too.

I felt like I was preparing for war.

My mother had been going through this for years. She’d been through hell and yet she was still able to hold her head high. She was still trying to find love and a life outside of my father. I felt like I could at least act like I could handle this. I did love my mother, despite how horrible she’d been to me in the past and I wanted to be sure that she knew that. I wanted to keep her safe.

I steeled myself, wiping the rest of my face with a clean paper towel before heading back to my dad’s hunting room.

He was no longer alone in the room. My chance to protect her had been taken away.

My mother was leaning over him, her fingertips against his neck. Her eyes were focused and she was trembling slightly; this was the most intimate I’d ever seen her act towards me father.

“Mom?” I asked, confused. Looking up at me, her expression was blank. Something wasn’t fucking right with my dad. Something was wrong.

He wasn’t breathing.

My mom was touching him voluntarily.

“He’s dead?” I breathed out the words. It felt like someone had taken a bat to my chest. My mom’s mouth trembled, somewhere in the uncanny valley between a grimace and a smile. Fat tears started to slip down her face and she walked over to the lamp.

“You hit him with this?” she asked, picking it up with a towel and wiping it off a little.

She didn’t know Adam was there.

“Yes, I cracked it, sorry,” I said. I didn’t know why I was apologizing for a broken lamp while my father lay dead on the ground. I couldn’t cry and I could hardly move or talk. He was dead. This man, this horrible man, my father, was dead and permanently out of my life. It felt unreal in every sense of the word. Only minutes ago he had slapped me, not long before that he had been yelling, and less than an hour ago he had still been on his way home from work.

A slight odor began filling the room, and at the time I had thought it was too fast for him to be decomposing. I didn’t know then that when people die, their bodies relax completely and let everything out.

Fucking disgusting.

My dad, this man who had forced me to grow a thick skin and learn how to properly carry myself, was laying here in his own filth, killed by a lamp with pastel flowers on it.

“Honey, you have to get out of here,” my mom said, wiping away her tears with a trembling wrist. She stepped away from my father and out of the room. In a daze, I followed her as she walked out and up the stairs to her room. The house was horribly quiet and some of my blood still glimmered on the floor at the bottom of the stairs.

“Where’s the cop?” I asked. I knew I had seen him here earlier.

“When your father came into the house, Jim climbed out the window and left,” she explained. Shit. This was worse. This was way fucking worse than anything. The cop wasn’t in there when my dad was yelling at me on the stairs. If I had just let my dad go up the stairs he would have found my mother alone in bed, probably acting like she was sleeping. Instead he hit me and then we… Adam… I couldn’t find a train of thought that didn’t make me wish it was me laying in that room full of animal carcasses. That would be so much easier.

It sunk in deeper that I’d just told my mother I killed my dad when I hadn’t.

Grabbing the nearest trashcan I puked into it, heaving hard until tears stung at my eyes and my throat hurt. Dead! Dead. Fucking Dead. I heaved again before setting the trash can down and sobbing. I wouldn’t miss him, he was a fucking bastard of a man, but there was a corpse in the same home as me. A corpse that was, at no small amount, my fault.

Somehow in my heart I had begun to mourn him. That made me feel even worse. It made me feel dirty and disgusting. There was a huge chance that he would have killed me if he had gotten to that gun case and an even bigger chance that my mother would have also been killed also. He had abused us, he was a horrible man, and yet he had still been my father. Somehow I still loved this man that had made my life a living hell, and messed with my head until I hadn’t even known who I was anymore. Yet, I still loved him.

Catching my breath, I let my gaze settle on my mom’s purple paisley luggage that was sitting by her dresser. It looked full.

“Mom, you packed already?” I asked, my brain fuzzy with panic and the swirling emotions from everything that had happened. Was she planning on us running off right now? Was she going with me? My mom sat on the bed and shook her head.

“That was packed this morning when your dad left for work, we were supposed to go around 7:45, but we wanted just one last time here,” she explained. It was spite, of course it was. Who wouldn’t be spiteful? I stared over at the luggage, tracing the familiar pattern with my eyes before I realized the problem with them. The two suitcases would hardly hold enough for just her, much less anything of mine. My hate and fear of my father bled into my feelings for her a bit.

“Were you going to tell me before you left me here with him?” I asked, looking over at her. Sitting there on the bed, she looked pitiful, closing in on herself as she stared at a patch of carpet a few feet ahead of where her feet hovered above the ground. Her bottom lip was trembling, her fingers closing around and releasing each other thoughtfully.

“I had to go, you know that—he’s never laid hands on you as much as he did me,” she started to say, to explain away how she could leave her freshly turned seventeen-year-old daughter in the home with an abusive psychopath. He’d only beaten me a handful of times, and each time had been because my mom either wasn’t home or was locked up in her room. He was the one who physically assaulted me, but I still shoved some of the blame off on her. Something in my face made the words catch in her throat.

“You weren’t even going to say bye,” I observed. The bitch. She sobbed out loud, and I could feel my drying tears cool against my cheeks.

“I love you,” she excused, softly. I shook my head, not wanting to hear her bullshit. I deserved better than her lies.

“You were going to leave me with him,” I repeated, my blood now felt like ice. She was going to vanish into the night and leave me to deal with the aftermath, to deal with this train of a man that had been bulldozing through my life for the last seventeen years.

She looked up at me, her eyes tracing my face.

“I think you should go stay with Jo for a while,” she said, turning her eyes back to the floor in front of her. My Aunt Jo lived miles away in New York. “I’ll buy you a plane ticket, I just need another moment,” she was staring in a way that made me feel like she could see through the floor.

“I don’t think the cops will let me,” I said, not sure what she was doing. I couldn’t figure out how the hell she’d benefit from me skipping town when the cops were after me. She shook her head.

“I’m going to tell them I did this,” she explained. I would have heaved again if there were anything left in my stomach.

“You can’t do that,” I said, uneasily. I hated her, and I was angry with her, but she wasn’t even actually protecting me. She didn’t even realize Adam had been here.

“I can,” she replied immediately. “I’m going to tell them I planned on running off, that I fell in love and I needed to get out,” her voice was unsteady. “I’ll say that he beat me, the truth, and when he went to turn his gun on me I hit him in self-defense,” she didn’t sound too sure of her plan, but I was in no position to argue with her. I wasn’t willing to go to jail for Adam.

Standing up, she went to her suitcase and pulled out her wallet, pulling out more one hundred dollar bills than I’d seen in my entire life, and handed me all of her money. She looked uncomfortable standing in front of me, like she was unsure of what to do.

“There’s more on top of the fridge in the breadbox,” she offered. I didn’t want to tell her I’d already given it away. “I only ever wanted the best for you,” she said softly, combing her fingers through my hair in what was almost a caress.

“I know,” I lied. If she wanted to go to jail for me, I was going to fucking let her.

As she bought my ticket and handed me the information, she hugged me and sobbed. None of this felt real. She sat on my bed with me as I filled a suitcase and backpack with anything and everything I thought I would need. It felt just like it had when I was a kid and I’d leave for sleep-overs, my mom would school me the entire time on how to act and what to say so people would like me.

How to be as agreeable as possible.

She called Jo and told her there was an emergency and I was on my way, and that she should pick me up from JFK first thing in the morning. I could tell that Jo was concerned on the phone, but I also knew it wasn’t completely sincere. My aunt had been trying to talk my mom out of her relationship with my father since before I was born. Not because my mom was abused, but because my aunt got a thrill out of whatever drama she could surround herself with.

I finished packing, and with a bus ticket to take me off into the night, I sat on the bed beside her and let her paint my face with the same camouflage she’d always worn. The makeup perfectly blended and devoured the bruises blossoming around my nose and under my eyes from the slap and fall.

I tried not to think of the possible outcomes she could face from implicating herself. I never thought she would do anything for me, I never thought she actually cared this much. I kissed her forehead and let her cry; her shuddering breath rocked the bed and made my uneasy stomach worse.

“I need you to know I love you,” she said softly. “And that I’m sorry,” she didn’t mean it in any way for me to actually feel better. She was easing her own guilt, feeding into her own needs, and I completely understood that. All the same, her throwing herself under the bus wasn’t going to just make me forgive her. She had planned on leaving me to die.

“I know,” I said gently, not feeling completely up to saying it back. I sat there quietly after that, listening to her breathing fill the room with sound.

When I finally left I didn’t look back past the stairs to the hallway, I didn’t pause to think of the fact that I had just been laid out on that floor. I didn’t even hug my mother goodbye. I ignored that I could have been the corpse in the house.

It was dark out, and I let myself slip away into its warmth like a warm cocoon preparing me for a rebirth.