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"A beat-out."
Yep.
That was exactly the phrase that had been in my head.
"By your father?"
"By all of us."
The brothers.
Geez.
My back pressed into his chest slightly as I took a deep breath. "I'm sorry you had to do that."
"It was, as horrible as this sounds, just part of the job. Like all the other men I had needed to visit in the past when they didn't make a payment. But the thing is, I couldn't control it. I wasn't like my old man or my brothers. I couldn't stay connected and get the job done. I fucking... I raged-out. It was like a switch got flipped and the normal, rational, self-controlled me wasn't there anymore. Usually, when I went on a job, one of my brothers always came with me to pull me off."
Well.
That made a helluva lot of sense then, didn't it?
Sad sense, but sense.
"That was what happened the night with the woman getting beaten?"
"Exactly. Once I saw her, the switch flipped, and I wasn't even really aware of anything until a long time later when the shooting pain radiated up my hands. I have been beating people for a living since I was eighteen. Nothing ever made my hands hurt anymore. I guess that was what snapped me out of it. The man was just broken bones and blood. The woman was sobbing in a corner. And there was a small crowd."
"So you ran off."
"I figured it would blow over. The cops would take one look at the woman and agree it was one of those rare, fair eye-for-an-eye situations and put no effort at all into tracking me down."
"Except he wasn't just any man."
"Exactly," he agreed, fingers starting to trace absentminded circles over my belly. Well, to him they were absentminded. To me, they were, ah, distracting? Effective? Hot as hell? Yep, all those.
"It sounds like you and your family were close." Past tense.
"The tightest a family could get," he agreed.
"Were they mad about you going to jail?"
"No. Devastated might be a better word."
"I don't understand then..."
"When I got arrested, when I realized the ramifications of the part of me that was capable of raging out, I decided I couldn't be that person anymore."
I had a feeling I knew exactly where this was going.
"So, I cut off ties with my family. I rejected letters and visitation. I tried to shut it down, disconnect. I figured the only way for me to be a somewhat better man was to completely dissolve the man I had been before. Which gets me back to the point," he went on, making me try to scramble to remember what the point even was, where this conversation even started. "Last night, I had no business coming to see you, tainting your nice little world with my presence. And I sure as fuck had no right to put my hands on you."
But, God, it felt so right to have his hands on me.
It was taking actual concentration to keep from grinding my ass back into his crotch.
"Why?"
"Because I can't be around you and keep myself disconnected. And I can't be connected and still be sure that I won't rage-out again."
That was, well, fair.
It wasn't that typical 'you're too good for me' bullshit that guys tried to pull. It was somehow simpler, and much more honest than that. He didn't trust himself. He was scared about what might happen if he lost even a small bit of control. And a big part of me went out to him over that. I couldn't imagine how it felt to have something inside of you that you had never been able to control in the past, but wanted more than anything to be able to hold control over in the present and the future. It must have been terrifying to know that you were capable of such violence.
And it must have been absolutely devastating to know that to keep that part of you tamped down, the only solution you could come up with was to stop being the man you had been all your adult life, to cut ties with the people who knew you only as that man.
Life must have been hard and so, so cold for him for so long.
My heart went out to him.
And I wanted to maybe just be a little bit of warmth he could feel comfortable around.
He deserved that, didn't he?
"Have you ever raged-out on a woman?" I asked, and felt his whole body go tense behind me.
"Of course not."
"So, I don't have to worry about that with you."
There was a pause before his arm tightened around my lower stomach. "I'd never hurt you."
I wasn't sure why I was about to say it, why I was going to agree to something that, thus far in my life, had never been something I wanted. Maybe a part of me realized it was different. It wasn't exactly casual, in the traditional sense of the word, if there was meaning behind it. Right?
