by Lewis, R. J.
“Been teachin’ you how to fight for a while now and you still can’t man up about this. Fucking pussy.”
I tensed and glared up at him. “The man’s three time’s my size, Reap. There’s a reason nobody’s fucked with him, you know. If you had two fuckin’ eyes, you’d understand.”
He still laughed, like this was fun to him. Dickhead. Reaper was a sadistic bastard, and after a while of being tortured by him, I’d had enough and held my own. He didn’t get pissy about it like I thought he might. He seemed to enjoy my attitude when it was thrown at him. I guess that’s what happens when you spend a lot of time with someone. You get used to each other’s shit.
“Still a pussy,” he repeated.
“Got any new words there in your obviously limited vocab?”
He shook his head. “Not when it comes to Ryker Pussy Lawson.”
I gritted my teeth and watched him eat his breakfast. I was going to be doing laundry duties – the shittiest job there was in a cunt of place like this – while Reaper got to kick back on gardening duties. Sometimes I wanted to scream at him and tell him he didn’t know what a rough day really was, especially if he could buy up everyone around him and make a prison sentence seem like a cosy holiday.
“I’ve been where you are now,” he then said, reading my glare easily. “The difference is, I grew a pair of balls and did what was necessary to make it. This world’s going to eat you up otherwise. You want them Nazis over there having a crack at you? You wanna be on your knees, begging for help when they’re stuffing their meat junk down your throat? You gotta show the world just what you think of it. You gotta prove you’re not weak and that you’ll put up a fight even if it means taking a pounding for it.”
I glanced across the cafeteria where the Nazi crew were terrorizing some passer-by. Pieces of shit, the lot of them.
“If my own gang was in here,” I muttered under my breath, “I’d be untouchable.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” he disagreed, scoffing at me. “They’d have been abandoned, just like you. You were too small time, Ry. No reason to protect you. Bet that boss of yours is waitin’ to see just how you fare in here on your own. Like I said, this could make or break you. Come out of here with guns blazing and he’ll welcome you in with open arms.”
Yeah, I needed that to happen. It was the only path I had outside of this place.
“Yeah, alright,” I finally said. “I’ll jump the fucker. I just don’t know how I’m going to take the pain.”
He paused eating his buttered toast for a moment and stared hard at me. “You think of a time in the past that hurt,” he said quietly, his eyes growing distant as though he was recalling something of his own past. “I’m not talking in a physical way. I’m talking emotionally. Use it as if it were fuel. Pain is in the mind, and if you’re too busy angry at a memory, you won’t feel it.”
I wondered about that for a moment. I saw Allie’s face in my mind and recalled what she said to me when I saw her in the visiting room. I’d been so hopeful I could mend things between us. I’d also been delusional to think she’d fall right into my charms forever. I thought of her and Heath together, and her abandoning me in a shit place like this while she went off and fucked him.
But that didn’t make me feel angry anymore. It just made me… sad.
I don’t know why they say your heart breaks in two when you’re heartbroken. For me, it broke into a million jagged pieces. It couldn’t be put together again, and even if you tried, it was going to look like a sad looking piece of muscle with thousands of little holes in it.
If only I’d been honest with her from the start…
“Don’t think of her,” Reaper stressed, sensing my thoughts. “Because she won’t make you feel that anger. Think of something else. Think of your brother. Didn’t you say you wanted to cut that boy’s throat? Think of what he did to you.”
“I think about it every day,” I weakly responded. “I think about our conversation when he came to see me. I run it through my head all the damn time, but… it doesn’t make me angry.”
“Then what does?”
With a heavy exhale, I replied, “I don’t know.”
But I did know. I just didn’t want to tell him. That memory was reserved for me, and it was going to fucking suck having to relive it.
*
After a morning of sorting out laundry, I trailed behind Animal as he strode into the cafeteria. He seemed confident in his step, as if the danger had long passed and he was indeed untouchable. I caught Reaper’s eye as he sat atop of one of the lunch tables, like he was already planning his front row seat. He motioned me to him with the jerk of his chin and I left Animal who was waiting in a line-up for food.
“You ready, man?” Reaper asked, jumping off the table to stand in front of me. His eyes were twinkling bright. I wanted to fuckin’ kill him for being so excited.
“Yeah, as ready as a 70 kilo man could be against one that’s, what, 120?”
Reaper looked past my shoulder and deliberated for a second. “130, maybe?”
That feeling of panic swept in. Fuck, I couldn’t do this. This man was going to absolutely wipe the floor clean with me.
“What if he kills me?” I numbly asked.
“Then hope for a swift, pain free blow,” he answered.
“Fuckin’ hell, Reap!”
He barked out a laugh. “Where’s your sense of humour?”
“It kind of fuckin’ disappeared when I realized I’m minutes away from jumping a Viking by the name of Animal.”
He grinned. “Would you rather get fucked in the toilets? Because I can take you there right now. We’ll walk past it and you can bask in the joyful sounds of sobs and skin slappin’ skin.”
I snarled at him. “Fuck you, Reaper. You’ve been by my side for months now, and you don’t give a fuck about what happens to me, do you? You still don’t care for my protection. Still don’t care when I get pushed around. All you care about is yourself.”
That grin fell off his face in a heartbeat. “If I didn’t care about a little shrimp like you, I’d have kicked your ass the second you approached my table talkin’ shit about apples and blades like a little smartass punk.”
“You looked at me as a hobby.”
“Do you expect me to go all bromance on you right now and tell you I changed my mind along the way? Wait here and I’ll ask a guard to pick up a pink flower for you.” He let go of his sarcasm then and pointed his finger at my chest. “Once you do this, you’ll be thanking me for not protecting you a long time ago. The second you start standing up for yourself, you won’t have to depend on anybody but you.”
I sighed. He was right. I needed to grow a backbone. I’d been going on and on all my life about being a man, yet I shrunk away in every difficult situation.
It was time to stop.
“Remember,” Reaper then said in a low voice, “hit him first. Do it when he’s least expecting it. I suggest right after he’s grabbed his food and is on his way to a table. Hit him hard, Ryker, really fucking hard. It’ll jumble him up for a bit and he’ll lose his edge. And after he’s beaten the shit out of you, if you still have it in you, go for an uppercut. That shit’ll knock him out good.”
My mouth dropped open. “After he’s beaten the shit out of me, did you say?”
Reaper nodded, like water off a duck’s back. “Yeah. Good luck.”
Stunned, I went to leave when he grabbed me by the arm.
“By the way,” he added, “I forgot to give you this.”
I turned my head to look at him when –
THWACK!
White, hot searing pain shot through the side of my face. I let out a breath of air as my vision scrambled to right itself.
Fucker just slapped me!
“You need to be a little more aggressive,” I heard him say through the whooshing of blood in my ears. “You need that adrenaline firing through your body. You can feel it now, can’t you? That anger? Yeah, fucker, feel it. A good hit
to the face where the nerve endings are close to the brain is a sure fucking way to get you going. Now jump the bastard while I eat my apple.”
He was right. I felt angry. My body shook from the sudden adrenaline coursing through my system. I needed to move while it lasted. Needed to get this done and pray I didn’t end up in a body bag on the other end. Half of my face was numb by the time I hurried to Animal just as he left the line-up.
He didn’t see it coming. Why should he? I wasn’t anyone here. And for that brief second before I raised my fist the way Reaper trained me and sent it flying to his face as we passed each other, I thought of what Allie said to me once after I’d talked about trying to fight like Heath.
“You don’t need to be like your brother, Ryker. Being tough doesn’t mean bashing someone’s face in and getting money for it at the end. Being tough can come from inside of you too.”
I never really understand that until now. I didn’t have to be physically big to be strong. Allie was right. I had to show people I was strong from within.
My fist connected to the side of his face with a sickening crack. Completely unprepared, he stumbled to his right and the tray slipped from his clasp and crashed to the floor. The cafeteria immediately went quiet and all eyes fell on us. Animal balanced himself as what I did began to dawn on his face. The rage surfaced in him and I realized all hell was about to break loose.
I glanced quickly behind me and at Reaper. He had his hand up at the guards that had come to step in, stopping them from intruding. They obeyed him and watched us, and it was then I knew I was completely alone.
Animal lunged at me and I fell back to the ground, my head slamming against the hard floor. He straddled my hips and sent fist after fist to my face. I struggled against his iron grip, fumbling with my arms as I covered my head with them. Panic gnawed at me from within, and in the chaos, I shut my eyes for a brief moment and tapped into the worst thing that ever happened to me.
I thought of that baby I found.
Dirty.
Soiled.
Barely moving.
I thought of Ricardo’s desperation to abandon her.
Abandon a helpless baby…
The anger. The fucking anger that possessed me was indescribable.
And it was then I felt a surge of power within me. A kind of explosive rage that amplified my strength like nothing else before. I opened my eyes and with all my might, I head butted Animal when he leaned down to shove my arms away. He growled out in pain, half his body falling to my side, and I managed to push him off my hips. I felt like my head was going to crumble from the force of the hit, but I was operating solely on my newfound ability feel that anger – anger that numbed me from the pain’s intensity.
We fought, balled up in each other, hurling punches at one another while the crowd walling us in began to scream from all angles. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even breathe as I defended myself against a man I’d never have thought of crossing before.
He beat me to a pulp, and even when I was too hurt to breathe and too tired to swing my arms, I still gave it all I got. This was my message to everyone around me. You want to fight me? Be prepared to work for it. I wasn’t going to back down. I wasn’t going to be a pussy and cower in fear of being beaten.
No, I was using my rage and painting his face red too. Proving to everyone that just because I was smaller than him, it didn’t mean I was weaker.
It was strangely empowering. It made whatever fear I had in this place disappear.
The guards eventually broke us up when the intensity of our hits died off, and I figured it was probably under Reaper’s authority to end the fight. I went straight to the medical room, and the entire time they dragged me away, cuffed like an animal in front of all the stunned prisoners, I smiled a sloppy, bloody smile at anyone that could see.
They called me mad as a hatter after that.
*
“You did well,” Reaper said, giving me a pat on the back.
I let out a hiss from the pain and smiled brightly at him. He shuddered at my puffy lips and swollen face. I couldn’t open my eye, and the other only lifted halfway.
“You also look like a fucking blowfish.”
I shrugged, and even that hurt like a motherfucker. “At least I did it, right?”
He just stared at me for a moment as I attempted to eat my morning porridge. And then, out of nowhere, his mouth widened into a grin – one, that I was sure all the ladies flocked to – and he laughed. Just laughed. A real fucking laugh for once. And he shook his head at the same time.
“Ryker,” he said, in between his laughter, “you’re a fucking psycho, man. I really didn’t think you were going to go through with it. Fuckin’ hell, I was just gonna give you a fuckin’ pat on the back for getting near the fucker. You… surprised me. And I’m not usually surprised.”
“See, I’ve got fight in me.”
“And now you’re letting your ego get to your head.”
I chuckled and stopped immediately. God, the pain. “Well, you were right, and I wanted to be like you. I wanted to have your spirit.”
He contemplated my words before sighing. “Yeah, well, fuckers like me don’t have a spirit, Ry. We’re dead on the inside. But bein’ here with you… it’s been a fucking great ride.”
I knew he was telling me this because he was due out in a matter of weeks. The thought of being without the guy I spent my days with had me panicked and torn. He was a good friend despite how frightening he could be.
“If you ever need help out in the real world,” he added, solemnly, “you can trust that I’ll be there for you, right?”
I nodded. “I appreciate that.”
But he wasn’t finished. He was troubled by something. He ran a hand through his dark thick hair and whispered, “Don’t go down the same road as I did, either. Don’t fuck up your life. Don’t go down the shitter just because you’ve been burned, Ry. The world’s a fuckin’ dump, sure, but if you look hard enough, there’s good there.”
I nodded again, but in my heart I knew he was wrong. There was no more good in this world.
I had already come to terms with that.
Ten
Allie
I always prided myself on trying to be honest every step of the way. Even if the truth was hard to deal with, I owed it to anyone that wanted to know.
Ryker damaged me. He fed me lies and hid parts of himself that were still a mystery to me. I felt him slipping through from my fingers long before he was arrested. I’d always known a relationship could only function when honesty was fundamental. Because with honesty there came communication, and when you could communicate everything with the person you were meant to share your life with, miscommunication became a thing of the past.
I wondered if Heath was slipping through my fingers too. Maybe I’d been naïve to think that everything between us had been perfect. Maybe I’d been grasping for a happily ever after and I ignored all the signs the way I did with his brother.
All I kept thinking about was the way he effortlessly lied to me. It came out quick and easy, like he’d done it before. Had he? If he lied to me about where he was all night, what other lies could there be?
I swallowed a lump, pondering the possibility while wanting nothing more than to clench my chest and ease my aching heart. I couldn’t deal with him hurting me. God, if he broke my heart… I’d given it to him so willingly – so blindingly!
Ever since that night he came home with questionable scratches on his face, he’d become closed off around me. While he’d been adamant I had no right not to trust him, I begged to differ. He was carrying a big secret in front of me. He continued to leave some nights, only this time he didn’t offer an explanation – or a lie – about his whereabouts. After, he would come home, barely say a word to me, and spend most of his time with Kayden.
Then, to make it worse, I heard strange rumours when I was in class before a random girl came up to me and said, “I’m sorry about Heath. Men are dogs
, huh?” I didn’t understand it for some days, not until I heard from a class friend that filled me in on the gossip. Apparently for a while Heath’s fangirls had thought that because I hadn’t showed up at his fights, I’d probably caught him with another girl.
At first, I was a little relieved that Heath was genuinely fighting still. But then they said the name Trudy and all relief turned into bitter anger. That anger for the possibility of his unfaithfulness with that bitch grew inside of me every night he came home late. I wondered if he was with her, even walked into the rooms he’d leave and see if he left the smell of perfume behind.
I was turning into a crazy, paranoid girl.
The gap in our bed grew bigger, and neither of us were willing to close it. I was hurt and angry and suspicious of everything. I was dying to know what was so important to be shoved aside like I was. I felt pathetic and needy, and soon I was depressed by allowing a man determine my happiness!
Regardless of how in love I was with him, I refused to be treated less than I deserved. I wasn’t going to be another doormat for someone to walk all over, and I was not going to live with being lied to either. I fought the depression by hardening my heart and focusing every bit of my energy in my classes and Kayden. I ignored the rumours and the stares. Stares that dripped of pity or amusement. I wasn’t going to let it get to me – after all, I put myself in this position to begin with, and I should have known what to expect.
Being with someone always means risking having your heart broken, and at the end of the day, it’s nobody’s fault but your own. You made the leap. You chose to step in, blind but with both eyes open. That’s what it takes to fall in love, and it’s scary but wonderful at the same time.
It also hurts like a motherfucker.
One week later, we started clearing out the apartment for the move. Heath was reasonable to deal with. He didn’t lock his jaw around me like he was fighting to hold back words. He packed most of the stuff while I looked after Kayden, and at random times he’d stop and just look at me. I wouldn’t look back. I pretended to be busy, but I could feel the heat of his gaze on my back, and it felt like we’d rewound the clocks and were now stuck in our old pattern of awkward interactions.