AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She lets me go, and I roll up onto my knees. She sits back, leaning on her elbows.
“You’re a lot stronger than you look, Lynch. You take pain like a champ.”
Grabbing Luca’s sweatshirt I discarded earlier, I wrap it around my neck to absorb the sweat dripping from my hair. “You can just call me Willow, you know. You just had me between your legs, after all.”
“I’ll call you Willow if you call me Nadine.”
“You don’t like Nay-Nay?”
“It makes me want to punch a hole through you.”
I laugh. “That explains a lot.”
She packs her things away and throws me her disinfectant for my hands. On our way out of the gym, she asks, “Your mum’s boyfriend—you ever got to punch him back?”
It’s a funny question because it tells me Nadine, despite our differences, doesn’t think so differently from the way I do. It’s a funny question because I’ve never told anybody about Richard Thornton—and the only other person who knew the truth about what he did is dead now. I smile at Nadine.
“Not yet. But I’m working on it.”
Nadine smiles back.
“Alright, bet. I’ll keep training you, then. And when you finally get to hit him back, you’ll make it count.”
I tilt my head. “You’re not growing soft on me, are you?”
“No, I still want to punch you through the head.” Nadine turns off the lights in the gym and pauses in the doorway. “I just can’t stand men who hurt kids.”
“In general, or from personal experience.”
“Both.”
Well isn’tthatsomething sweet to bond over.
“Bad childhood, Nadine?” I ask, pushing my luck.
“Don’t we all, Willow?” she says.
I laugh. Don’t we all indeed.
I behave for therest of the week, agreeing to a stalemate with the cleaners for the sake of not pissing off Nadine. I like her; she’s exactly the kind of woman I wish I’d met when I was younger. Tough, smart, no-nonsense. A woman in a man’s world, carving a space for herself where she exists as a woman, her strength uncompromised by rejection of femininity. A woman, who, like me, hasn’t had a soft start to life.
And it doesn’t hurt that she’s hot, obviously.
Of course, things can only ever go so well until the world decides to remind me of my place in it. Being Willow Lynch is an odd thing: I wouldn’t want to be anyone or anything else. I like who I am and I like the choices I make.
Only, sometimes, it really fucking sucks to be me.
One such time is the Friday I’m supposed to be having my next training session with Nadine. Luca Fletcher-Lowe has been gone for almost three weeks; I’m missing the dogs, and honestly, I’m missing putting my hands on his face as well, which is unexpected.
But I’m keeping busy and coming out of the Swing Swan after a ten-hour shift. It’s ten in the evening, and I’m gasping for a cigarette. I make the mistake of stopping to cup my hand around my lighter. I hear the scratch of the spark wheel and the low roar of a car engine and footsteps drawing close.
I look up. The face I see is not one I saw coming.
“Oh fu—”
A blow to the back of the head sends me crumpling into darkness.
31
