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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Eight needed Marcella to give him a chance, and it was really fucked up if she’d cut him off completely over one lousy word.
Yes, he’d said the ‘n-word,’ but only because it pissed people off when he did. He didn’t actually think about Black people that way, and he didn’t think he’d ever directly called a Black person that word. Maybe he had, but he didn’t remember. It was just a word that made people flinch, and that had always satisfied something in him—like it felt better to do something to make people dislike him before they disliked him for a reason he couldn’t name.
Not ‘like’ that. Exactly that.
Eight didn’t like to think about the past, or wonder much why he was the way he was, but he’d done enough self-reflection over the years, and especially recently, to have come up with at least that much insight. It had helped, no doubt, to have had Becker to talk to as well. Beck had had his own fucked-up childhood, so he got it.
When Eight was a kid, never knowing when pain and fear was going to come flying at him out of nowhere, unable to figure out what the hell would make it stop, what it was he’d done to make them hate him so much, he’d eventually realized that it was just him. They hatedhim. Not for anything he’d done, or failed to do, but simply because he existed.
That had been far too big a horror to face. Nothing he could do, or change, or control to make his life better. No way he could escape. They would hurt him whether he deserved it or not—so he’d decided to deserve it.
Once he’d had that epiphany, at the tender age of ten years old—Ajax’s age, he thought now—and he’d started acting out and mouthing off, the beatings and other torments had gotten worse, but he’d felt better, even when he was lying on the floor in the pitch dark of the locked attic closet, bruised or bleeding or burned. Once he could attach an act to a consequence, he’d been able to survive the consequence.
He supposed that had shaped his whole worldview, all the way into middle age. So yeah, he did and said shit to piss people off, he went for the thing he knew would cause the most outrage, and that had been fine by him.
Until it wasn’t. Now, he was lonely and empty, and that way of being only carved a bigger hole in him.
What had changed? He didn’t know. Maybe losing Becker. Maybe becoming the Bulls’ president and having all those eyes on him, all those people relying on him. Maybe reckoning with the fact of Ajax. Maybe he was just getting old and morose.
Maybe all of it. Whatever had changed, he wanted to change with it. He didn’t want to live like this anymore. He wanted to be a better man.
And maybe, if he did what Marcella said and sat with it for a minute, he could understand what it was to be hated just for existing. She’d tell him it wasn’t the same thing, no doubt, and she was right, but it was close enough to give Eight pause.
To finally see the damage he’d been inflicting while he was trying to protect himself.
So sitting here at his kitchen table, with Marcella, the mother of his son, at his side, Eight said the best truth he could. “I know I’m not a good man, Marce. I’ve been an unapologetic asshole since I was a kid. I was fine with the life that gave me. But I’m not fine with it anymore. I want more. I want to be a decent dad. I want to be a better man.”
She sat there and considered him. Eight felt judged, but he stiffened his spine and let her judge him.
There was something catching between them, he could feel it. When they touched, that catch was a literal feeling, almost like an electric charge, but he felt it, too, in the way she looked at him. Even when she argued or pushed him back, he could feel something pulling her close. Maybe she thought she shouldn’t get close, but something in her wanted to.
“I just want a chance, Marce. If I fuck it up, then kick me to the side. But I’m asking for a chance.”
“Why do you think I owe you that?”
“Fuck! I don’t think you owe me shit. I’masking.” Did she not understand how hard this was? He was crawling out on a limb, feeling it crack beneath him. It would be so much easier, so much more familiar, to tell her to fuck off and be done with it all. But that would leave him stewing in whatever this poison was in his head, and he thought it would eventually kill him. So he was trying.
But he wouldn’t let her bust his balls much longer. At some point, it was just masochism.
“Look,” he said, giving it one last push. “I think you’re hot. I think you think I’m hot. We fuck like champions. That ain’t nothing. We got a kid together, and that for damn sure ain’t nothing.”
She scoffed, but he talked over it before she could turn that annoying sound into something that truly pissed him off.
“I know I should’ve been around for Ajax from the go, but I want to be there for him now, and I think he wants me to be. Right?”
It took her a second, but she nodded. “So far, yeah, he does.”
“Good. I’m gonna try not to change his mind. And it seems to me, if you and me can work, that’s good, right? Maybe we make a family, if we work. Maybe that’s good for everybody, then. You don’t owe me shit, Marce. I’m not saying you do. If anything, I owe you—and more than that bag of cash. I’maskingfor a chance to see if we work.”
Marcella dropped her eyes and focused on the empty mug before her. She spun it around a few times but didn’t speak.
Eight sat there quietly, too. He’d said all he had to say. If she swiped his request away again, so be it. If he really wanted to be in a relationship, she was hardly the only woman in the world.
The thought of actually looking for a woman who legitimately wanted him was bleak as fuck, but hell, his whole life was bleak as fuck these days.
“Listen,” she finally said. Eight girded himself; usually when she started with that word, she intended to yell, or at least say something he didn’t want to hear. “You’re an outlaw, Eight. I know enough about your past—and your present—with the Bulls to know what you do for a living is violent and … not normal.”
