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Kids can be cruel when they want to be.
For months I’d ignored it. For months I’d let all the steam build up in my system until one day he smiled at me and barely opened his mouth to start his bullshit, and I exploded. I threw myself at him and took him down on the ground. I punched him and punched him and fucking punched him so many times that I forgot why I’d started in the first place.
All I knew was that I wanted him to shut the fuck up.
I wanted him to never ever be able to talk or make a sound or fucking smile at anyone.
Anyway, teachers had to be called and I had to be physically pulled away. They suspended me for a bit and I do remember my mother was told to find ways to get my anger under control. That while they understood our home situation wasn’t a hundred percent stable, they couldn’t have an angry kid wreaking havoc at school. I also remember my mother refusing and telling them that she could handle her own child and that there was hardly anything to handle anyway.
I think she had been the only person in my life who had ever thought that.
That I didn’t need outside influence to fix whatever was broken inside of me. Because nothing was.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that there was only one time in my life when I’d felt that way. The way I’d felt when I’d beaten up that kid. I’d never felt that amount of rage and fury coursing through my system, like I’d been experiencing it for the first time ever, except that night.
Thirteen months ago.
When I showed up at her dorm room with the intent of getting back at the asshole who had ruined my sister’s life. And no, it wasn’t fury at him but at myself. For finally crossing the line. For finally committing the crime that I’d been stopping myself from for the past two years.
For at last turning her into an object that I could use for my purposes.
I wasn’t lying to her when I said that I had, in fact, been stopping myself from doing what I did that night for years. Probably since the time she’d crashed back into my life — after I saw her on the hood of her brother’s white Mustang.
And she made it hard, yes.
She made it very fucking hard to be good and noble because not only was she everywhere I turned but she was also the only thing I could think about. She was the first thought in my head when I woke up in the morning and the last before I closed my eyes at night. Instead of thinking about soccer, running plays in my head, doing everything that I could to get out of this town and out from under the thumbs of my brothers, all I could think about was the color of her eyes, that freckle on the side of her neck, her tinkling laughter, her wind chime-y voice.
All I could think about was I could crook my finger at her and she’d come running. How I could make her dance to my tune, dance on broken glass barefoot and she’d do it with that goddamn beautiful smile of hers. How I could kiss her, bite her, leave her with purple bruises and my teeth marks and instead of being scared and cringing away from me, she’d bare her neck, offer me her wrist, find little corners on her tight body that I hadn’t gotten to yet.
Jesus, she fucked with my head.
My focus. My concentration.
That’s why I kept her at a distance.
That’s why every time I made her wait for a text from me or kept her on the edge of her seat while ignoring her at a party, I hoped and prayed that she’d go away. That she finally would get the message that I’d been trying to send ever since I found her hiding behind the bushes two years earlier.
The message that I was a loaded gun, see.
I was only a trigger away from lodging a bullet in her chest and murdering her heart.
But then again, it doesn’t matter now, does it?
Because I ended up doing exactly what I’d stopped myself from doing. I did fire the gun and I did murder her heart.
I loved you…
The moment I hear her voice in my head, a rush goes through my body and I remember where I am. At this 24/7 boxing gym called Yo Mama’s So Fit in a shady neighborhood of Bardstown. I’ve been coming here since I was fourteen. It’s owned by one of Shep’s friends, Ark Reinhardt. A tough looking guy from the wrong side of the tracks who’s now one of the richest men in Bardstown. Not only because of this very popular gym but also because he started his own security company.
