Page 37 of Sterling Fight

Be the bigger man, Clay told me when I complained things were getting difficult at home. He’d already moved out and I didn’t have the same rapport with our father. I didn’t have the cutting banter the two of them had. The one where Clay could blow off insults, and my father didn’t appear half as offended when Clay did mouth back.

Plus, my father was bigger than me. I’d been small as a child. Third smallest in my class. I’d had a growth spurt in high school, but I was still thin as a stick, lanky and willowy, back then.

“I couldn’t show up after what he’d done,” I admit, choking as if I can still taste the blood. Still feel the crack in my nose and the pain in my eyes. Holy hell, it had felt like my eyes were going to pop out of their sockets.

One hit hadn’t been enough. He went in for another and another, not believing me. He’d been right not to. I had been lying but I wasn’t going to tell him the truth.

“Not like that,” I clarify about my appearance. I did not want Genie to see me in the ruined clothes with my battered flesh.

“What happened?” Genie asks, setting down her own glass of wine and scooting to the edge of her chair. Our knees almost touch as we face one another. My elbows still balance on mine. My fingertips are still near my lips. Genie almost mirrors my position, but her hands reach toward my knees. Her fingertips are so close she could touch me, and yet not close enough that she does.

After all the insults and punches I took from my father, this woman could break me more than he ever did.

I’d deserve her rejection. I’d deserve her resentment. But I still want a fucking second chance to right the wrong.

I didn’t want to leave her waiting. I didn’t want to disappoint her.

I close my eyes.

Genie’s voice lowers to almost a whisper. “Why didn’t you call me? Or send me a note? Have someone else reach out? God, Judd, if I’d only known⁠—”

“You’d what?” My lids ping open, and I lower my hands, my fingertips breaching that distance between us and finally touching hers. At first, just the tips brush, but then Genie is linking our fingers together, and suddenly, we’re palm to palm, our hands clamped together.

“I could have been there for you.”

The shock of the thought has me lifting my head. She’d have felt sorry for me. Pitied me. And that wasn’t the setup I wanted when I had something important to ask her back then. When I’d wanted so much more between us. I wanted us to be together but not out of sympathy, not because of my father’s behavior.

“You disappeared,” she reminds me. “You didn’t even come back for your graduation.”

“I stayed with Clay for a while.” I’d needed time to heal. My nose was busted. My eyes were black and blue. My teeth ached for weeks.

The high school administration was understanding. I’d been in a car crash, I told them. I’d been near the top of the class with my grades and finished out my exams remotely when that was hardly a thing then. When my diploma came in the mail, I left for Knoxville with the intention of never returning to Sterling Falls again.

“I’m so, so sorry that happened to you,” Genie whispers, before scooting forward a little more and I spread my knees to accommodate hers between my legs.

“Judd,” her voice is hesitant and thick. “May I hug you?”

I almost shatter. Like a clay pot tossed to the ground, I’m practically breaking apart at the idea of Genie holding me.

“I’d like that,” I whisper, my voice shaky with the truth. I can’t remember the last time someone hugged me.

Genie comes forward, and she’s suddenly in my lap. Arms around my neck, tucking my head beneath her chin. Her knees pull up beneath my arm that wraps around her waist, and she settles into my chest.

And I realize this isn’t just a hug. This is an embrace. This is a full body cocoon.

She is light, and warmth, and a spark of hope in the darkness of my past, and she’s holding onto me like she might never let me go.

15

[Genie]

Last night, Judd looked like he’d been watching a horror film when he told me about his father. He’d gone sheet white, and my heart broke into a million pieces. If only I’d known. But now I did, and it was one more piece of what I was learning was a complex puzzle named Judd.

I sat in his lap, feeling too comfortable, before I finally pulled myself from him and sat in my own chair again.

“Thank you for telling me,” I eventually said when there wasn’t much else to say.

We finished our wine. The sky outside was a deep black. The silence between us heavy.