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“I know you need a catchy headline, but step outside your sex scandal for one second and think about the fact that your story involves a thirty-eight-year-old man, and a fifteen-year-old girl, and you’re making the girl the villain instead of the survivor.”
That started a whole new wave of articles.
Suddenly, the headlines moved from “FAMILY SEX TAPE” to “THE FIGHTING COUPLE.” They speculated, and not completely inaccurately, about why Liam and I found ourselves together. They dug into who Owen was. People on the Internet hunted him, finding his job and his location and going as far as to retrieve handwriting samples to verify the letters. I received wailing voicemails from my mother, telling me I had ruined her life, because that morning, she woke up to her name in the papers. They were calling her, asking her about her relationship with Owen – why she would have stayed with a man who abused her daughter. I wanted to call back and ask if she gave them answer, because I was dying to know, too. But I resisted.
Obviously, after my quote, the media circus only grew, and it didn’t make my life easier. But it did make me less bitter and angry about what the world was seeing when they looked at Liam and me. It let me sleep the slightest bit more at night, curled up in Aria’s spare bedroom because I couldn’t stand to be alone in Liam’s apartment. It finally got people looking past my shameful secrets and toward the fact that they were callously leaked by someone on Facebook. After some digging, the gossip site Dirthawk traced the post back to Ethan, and the thousands of comments vilified him better than I ever could, and for longer than I ever could. Suddenly, his name was as much a part of the story as anyone else’s, and suddenly, we had a second villain.
While Ethan was still on trial against Liam, his company terminated his employment. I wasn’t surprised to read also that his parents – rather “real estate mogul Walter Kirk and wife Alice” – spoke to the press about being “humiliated” and “disappointed.” From what I heard, they had put a hold on contact with their son.
That was satisfying. But more satisfying was the fact that Aria’s father fought tooth and nail for Liam in court, working desperately to lower his sentence from second-degree assault to third. At sixty-eight years old, Mr. Pettit had come out of retirement to personally serve as Liam’s attorney, having been called by Aria the day Liam turned himself in to the police. He had showed up minutes before Liam did, and I couldn’t really thank her enough for that.
She was my rock through the ordeal. She and A.J both, really. For starters, A.J had his brother, Danny, run my bar while I took a leave. Despite the fact that A.J had asked her to move in with him, Aria stayed in her apartment so I could move in with her and have a cozy home to return to, as well as an end of the couch with my name on it. There were nights where she and I fell asleep on the couch together, making sure to turn the channel to cartoons before we did, so we didn’t wind up waking up to news about Liam.
Everyone was salivating over the story. The MMA world was already asking Walsh what he thought about having their fight delayed. Fans were already speculating over a rematch date, the sentencing and if jail time would make Liam the new underdog.
Riley got in contact with me. She had actually called me the day news broke about Liam’s arrest. I was still lost in the madness of everything, so we had little time to speak, but she revealed that her divorce was ongoing, and that Mom’s had just begun. Having learned the truth about Owen, Vic had served her with divorce papers and removed her from the house. She had stayed awhile at Riley’s, but as Riley followed the news coverage and began to see herself that Liam and I were no fluke, she found herself getting past her anger and bitterness towards us. “And suddenly, I had no desire to help Mom anymore. Let’s be real, I only ran back to her because I thought I’d lost you two,” she said.
She hadn’t lost us. Not completely. But for once, Riley and my mother were afterthoughts because I needed to stand by Liam throughout the trial.
The judge eventually ruled the case third degree assault rather than second, lowering Liam’s maximum sentence from seven years to one. It was a relief, but since it wasn’t his first arrest, he was bound to serve jail time, and while I’d been strong throughout the trial, I was back to crying my eyes out the day they took him away.
“Hey. You know what your tears do to me,” Liam murmured, urging me not to cry. His hands behind his back, the cuffs already wrapped around his wrists, he still managed to give me a smile, those green eyes gleaming at me like this was no big deal. “I’ll be back for you, Sash, and I fucking love you more every day. Just remember that.”
I did my best.
And I did my best not to get my hopes up, but there was always talk of Liam getting out early. It never manifested – at least not until late February. And once word leaked, the world was buzzing about Liam possibly returning right in time to still fight Damon Walsh, who was back to his trash-talking ways.
“I’m not worried,” was his favorite thing to say. “We’ll see if he makes weight with all that prison food. It’ll still be a miracle if he wins. He’s gotten used to fighting with shanks made out of fuckin’ toothbrushes and socks with batteries in them. He’s gonna wish he could crawl back in jail once I’m done with him.”
I found his quotes hilarious. Considering me and the media still locked on “the stepsister story,” Walsh could have gone with much lower blows. He could have gone well below the belt and backed up his quote about Liam having skeletons in his closet named Sasha. But he didn’t, and I appreciated that.
Unfortunately, Liam was released from jail three days after the original date of the rematch. Fortunately, he was out.
Back in my arms.
We spent three entire days holed up in his apartment, barely able to leave each other’s arms. I soaked in his warmth again. I ran my hands all over the body I had memorized before he left. I never thought he could get leaner, any more ripped, but I noticed the new knots of muscle in his biceps, and the new lines along his ribs and six-pack. I really hadn’t thought I could be any more attracted to him. But here we were.
“You have no idea how hard I missed you,” I couldn’t stop saying to him. But with his weight on top of me on the couch our affair started on, Liam slid my hand down to his rock of an erection harder than I’d ever felt it in my life. He grinned against my neck.
“Trust me, Sash. I have an idea.”
The day we finally made our way back into the real
world was the day Liam’s fight with Damon Walsh was rescheduled for June Fifteenth. The media was in a frenzy about that, and to keep them off our trail, Liam gave them loads of quotes to print, and finally, some trash talk that was short, sweet and just controversial enough.
“I think he forgets that I spent four months eating prison food because I got tossed in jail for fighting. Trust me, I’ve been waiting long and hard for a fight where I know I won’t end up in handcuffs. I’m waiting for him.”
It caused a delightful little uproar. There was so much trash talk coverage that day that no one noticed we made a trip to City Hall to apply for our license. And conveniently, the day Walsh pulled out of the fight for unknown reasons was the day Liam sold his apartment – quickly and quietly, without media speculation as to why, since everyone was covering Liam’s quote.
“I think he talked circles around himself and got into his own head. But whenever the kid’s ready, I look forward to beating him.”
The day Aria officially bought out Riley’s share of The Queen, Liam beat two-time middleweight champion J.J Nixon in his first fight out of retirement. Weeks later, Walsh beat the reigning champion Joe Pineda, and Cage-Walsh Two was rescheduled again for December Twelfth, exactly one year after Liam’s arrest.
The flashbulbs were still chorusing around me as I stared at the date on the black backdrop behind the podium.
December 12 On Pay-Per-View.
I bit my lip, watching Liam take his seat for the post-fight press conference, looking sleeker than ever in a light grey shirt and charcoal grey suit. His dark hair was only slightly done, because he’d let me comb some gel through it before running out of patience and pulling me onto his lap. The room cleared as we kissed, drowning out the rest of the world for at least a minute before diving into the pure madness. I didn’t care about the results of the fight. We still had what we both knew was the most important thing in our lives. And I still got to see him looking ridiculously handsome for the cameras, my warrior dressed as a prince.
