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Before I could do anything except make the text disappear from my screen, another one came in. I breathed through my mouth, nearly panting, until I saw the new message was from Tray.
I can make dinner. You on your way home?
Home. As if we were a normal couple with a normal life and a normal dinner routine. My thumbs moved to reply before I stopped them. Dammit, no. I couldn’t keep pretending I was the little woman. Clearly I had issues the usual girls he dated didn’t.
Like stalkers and a past so lurid that reporters had chased me for weeks, trying to get me to tell my side of the story.
Except there weren’t two sides to this one. Darren was dead by my hand. Darren, the gorgeous monster who’d kidnapped me and made me live in a mansion and dressed me like a doll in beautiful clothes for three interminable months. I’d had sex with him and sometimes I’d even come. I was that girl, utterly fucked in the body and the head and everywhere in between.
Tray acting like I was a regular chick didn’t make it so.
I loved that he wanted to make dinner, but if I made myself available to him constantly, I would lose the version of myself that I’d fought so hard to reclaim. It was already happening. Next thing I knew I’d start buying tanks topped with lace, for fuck’s sake. I’d skip shelf bras for push-up ones that made my tits look like airborne missiles.
The bottom line was I wouldn’t be what he wanted forever. I still couldn’t figure out how I’d been what he wanted even for a moment. Maybe I’d been able to pretend for a while that we could be a regular couple, even with our unusual interests. But those phone calls had reminded me swiftly that regular would never be a part of my vocabulary. And if I didn’t retain my sense of self, how would I pick up the pieces when he went away?
The cabbie sighed. “Lady, the meter’s running. You in or out?”
I needed to go somewhere just for me. Do something I wanted without checking in with anyone first. I didn’t have money to waste, but I had to get this frustration and helplessness out in a way that wasn’t fighting or fucking or therapy. That limited my options to exactly one.
“I’m in.” I tucked my phone in my backpack and slipped inside the cab. “Take me to Underground Ink.”
2
Tray
The heavy bag in the corner of the living room taunted me. Just one hit. You know you want the pain. Come and get it, you stupid bastard.
I whipped off my shirt and stalked toward my intended target. I hadn’t put it there. This wasn’t my place. I was just a temporary squatter, though Mia hadn’t actually spoken those words. She didn’t need to. I understood my woman.
I couldn’t find her at the moment, but I understood her.
Balling my fists, I kicked out, barely checking the need to howl with pleasure, with relief, as the kickback sang up my calves. I didn’t fight anymore, even if I still trained like a fighter. That world wasn’t for me. I wasn’t old in the scheme of the sport, but I’d felt like I was aging by the minute every time I stared down an opponent in the cage. There had been a time I’d loved MMA’s beautiful brutality. Years ago, back when I was fighting for reasons I still hadn’t fully resolved. To beat my father. To conquer him—and myself.
Sometimes they seemed like the same thing.
But I’d walked away. I turned my back and I was building a new life, taking classes in sports medicine. I wanted to help people, even if the person I most wanted to help insisted on shutting me out at every turn. She’d helped convince me that I shouldn’t slot myself into a role that didn’t fit anymore. Even without knowing the particulars, she’d helped me see that I couldn’t live in a world of denial when it came to my folks because my mother chose to live in an abusive situation. I had never told Mia exactly how abusive it was, but what she’d lived through had opened my eyes.
Life was too short to abide by things silently. I couldn’t do it anymore.
For years, I’d told myself that they were still my parents no matter what happened in their relationship. The hours I’d spent trying to convince my mother to leave the bastard—and the arguments I’d had with the bastard himself the last few times he’d dared to try to touch my mom in my presence—hadn’t added up to anything. So now I was walking away. If making myself an orphan was the only way I could take a stand against their dysfunctional marriage, then I would.
I also intended to not have a dysfunctional relationship of my own, despite how difficult Mia made that some days. She was worth the fight.
With my parents, not fighting was the kindest thing I could do for them—and for me. It wasn’t my battle to win. They understood where I stood and if things changed, they knew where to find me. Until then, I was finished. I wouldn’t watch my mother do a suicide-by-husband, not after watching Mia struggle just to get through the day. She was a survivor. My mom was an endurer. My father held all the blame, but my moth
er had to choose to walk away.
She hadn’t and probably never would. So I was. Finally.
I leaped at the bag, doing a series of razor kicks and punches until my muscles screamed. My fights were mostly mental nowadays. I worked as a trainer at my old gym and that was enough. Yet Mia seemed to want to crawl right back into the fighter’s sandbox.
Yeah, my girl was a fighter too. Or she had been up until shortly after we met. She’d dropped out of the sport shortly after I did, and though she never mentioned going back, I could tell it was in her head. She thought she was so impossible to read. Not to me.
I kicked and punched the bag, circling it until my knuckles throbbed and my calves burned. Harder and harder I attacked it, pouring all of my frustration into the blows. She wouldn’t fucking talk to me. That’s all I wanted. I knew she’d faced some horrible shit in her past and she couldn’t just tuck it away. I didn’t want her to. But what I did want—for her to lean on me, to trust that I could handle whatever was brewing behind those gorgeous dark eyes that were both my devastation and my salvation—might never happen.
At first it had seemed like we would be okay. She gave so much of herself physically to me that I started to tell myself I didn’t have to have all of her. A little bit was enough. Besides, the books had said progress would be slow. Two steps forward, one step back. We could spend hours together, sleep in the same bed and share the same oxygen and the same painful pleasure, but she might never let me at that part of her she held sacred.
Her thoughts. Her mind. Her heart.
