“Apparently you’ve never transacted business with him before. He was excited to share with Grace.” Noah sped up, and we ran as fast as we could for five minutes, and then slowed to a jog. Interval training sucks. I’m not sure why I do it other than it seems like a thing Noah enjoys. “Mike says she has issues.”
“Mike says she has issues?” It took Noah about a minute before he realized I’d stopped running.
“What the hell, man?” Noah asked, jogging back to me.
“Since when do you take Mike’s word on a woman? Consider the source,” I fumed.
“Wow, okay, that was probably not well done of me.”
“Not well done? Not well done is drinking the last Shiner Bock and not replacing it.”
Noah clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Say no more. You like her; I like her.”
“Sorry, just on edge.” I rubbed a hand down my face and launched into a pace too fast for either of us to talk.
Noah didn’t let it go, because when we arrived back at the house, panting and sweating like pigs, he asked, “So you like this girl or what?”
“Or what,” I muttered. I didn’t know what I was doing with AM. At first, I thought she’d be a good way for me to pass the time this semester, but after hearing Mike’s story and learning about the showdown at the commons, I knew that I didn’t want to be one more shitbag in a long line of shitbags she’d encountered at Central.
When I saw her in biology, I noticed things about her I’d missed all last semester. She was careful to walk without touching another person. She didn’t acknowledge anyone, not the other students, not the TA, not the professor. She looked straight ahead, focused on one thing, and pretended that the world around her didn’t exist.
AM deserved a guy who could act like a grown-up, and I wasn’t sure that was me.
But the more time I spent with AM, the more intrigued I became. She was reserved, but as she talked, I could see her—her humor and her willingness to challenge me. My “type” were girls who couldn’t remember my name the next day. Who were looking for one night of feeling good. Hell, one of the girls I hooked up with over the summer used some other guy’s name in bed and cried after she came. She was suffering through a bad breakup, and I didn’t mind being rebound guy. We had spent more than a few nights with each other until she kindly told me that while I was the best she ever had, she was looking for something serious and it couldn’t be with a guy who made her cry while she orgasmed. I didn’t let it bother me. After all, the goal was to feel good, and she did when she left me.
AM was so different than the rest of those girls. She wasn’t going to fall into bed for a one-night stand. I had a feeling she’d be reluctant to get involved with me for reasons having nothing to do with my fighting, my past history, or my propensity for hookups. Hell, reluctant was too mild. Scared shitless would be more appropriate.
I had to figure out what exactly I wanted from AM before I spent any more time with her. For both our sakes.
Finn was in the kitchen throwing something together as we walked in.
“Why are you always up so early?” I asked him, waving Noah into the shower. He was heading upstairs, presumably to wake up Grace and take her back to campus. I headed straight for the sink and drank a gallon of water.
“Got shit to do,” Finn replied, his mouth half full of scrambled eggs that he must have prepared for himself. Noah and I couldn’t cook for shit and if it wasn’t for our other roommates—Finn, Adam, and even Mal—occasionally cooking us a meal, we’d eat microwaved foods and take-out only. Actually, I take that back. I could make a mean dessert out of MREs, but other than cereal breakfast escaped me. “Every morning?” I asked Finn, wondering if he would make me some eggs if I asked.
“Yes, every morning. That’s what working stiffs do. Get up every morning and work.” Finn wiped his mouth with a dishtowel and carried his dishes to the sink.
“But at the asscrack of dawn?” I’d lived with Finn for nearly a year now but didn’t know much about him other than that he drove a truck, had a lot of tools, and came home covered in dust and grime. He seemed to work nonstop, kind of like Noah. They both made me tired just listening to their twenty-minute recap at the end of the day.
Mine could fill two minutes, maybe five, if I took the time to describe a few of the chicks in class.
Quickly cleaning the dishes, Finn dodged my question with a repeat of his own, “What’s your problem this morning?”
“Are you trying to use the Socratic Method on me? Usually I only allow girls to grill me this hard.” I lobbed back a nonsense answer. Finn just shook his head.
“Fine, if you don’t want to talk about it, I’ve got plenty of other shit to do.” He wiped his hands and threw the used towel in the laundry room.
“What kind of shit?”
“I’m demoing a house today. Want to come? You can be in charge of knocking down three walls with a sledgehammer,” Finn offered.
“That’s the lamest come-on I’ve ever heard,” I said, but given that I wasn’t allowed to fight anyone decent in Noah’s gym, wielding a sledgehammer did sound like a good invitation.
“Ladies like my sledgehammer,” Finn replied.
“It’s too early for dick jokes.” I ran upstairs and threw on some clothes. When I returned, I gestured for Finn to lead us, but he just stood still, looking me up and down. “What’s wrong? I’m not pretty enough for you to take to bed?”
“Just wondering if you were going to class in those clothes?”
I looked down at my sweatpants and T-shirt. “Sure, it’s not like I’m trying out for best dressed or I’m going to have some points deducted by my frat bros for not wearing the right stuff.”
Finn shrugged. “Your funeral, but this stuff gets messy.”
Messy sounded good at that moment.
“Hold up,” I heard Noah call, followed by thunder on the stairs. He jumped the last four steps and handed me a gym bag. “You can shower at Grace’s if you want. There’s a key in there.”
“Thanks.” I took the bag. It was Noah’s unspoken apology for earlier.
Finn drove us to the north side of town where a dozen tiny houses looked like the builder had gotten his plans from the Monopoly game. The only thing different about these cookie-cutter buildings was that they weren’t all green. We swung into the driveway of one that had been painted white at one time. Nearly every exterior board was peeling and the paint still clinging to the wood was a dingy gray. Shingles hung drunkenly off the side of the roof.
“This house looks like it was fucked six ways from Sunday by the other houses on the street and then left to molder,” I observed, unbuckling my seatbelt and hopping out of Finn’s truck.
“She looks gorgeous to me,” was his reply. I shook my head.
Inside didn’t look much better. The kitchen was dirty and the smell of the house was rank. The floor was some kind of plastic that stuck to my feet.
“Smell that?” Finn said, taking a deep whiff. Guy was obviously insane.
“Yeah, it smells like someone was slaughtering animals in here and left the carcasses to rot.” I pulled up my sweatshirt to cover my mouth.
“Nope. It smells like money.” Finn handed me a sledgehammer and a face mask. The iron hammer was heavy and made me feel like I could knock down the entire structure with one well-placed blow. AM, Thor here. I’m coming over and bringing my hammer.
“How’s this work?”
“The sledgehammer? You knock shit down with it, like a baseball bat.”
“No, dumbass, your house flipping.”
“Oh.” Finn laughed. “You buy an unrenovated house in good neighborhood for low amounts of money, put a lot of sweat equity into it and not a lot of materials, and sell it for a sweet profit four weeks later.”
“Like what kind of profit?”
“I bought this crackerjack box of a house for fifty grand and most of the houses along this road sell for ninety or more. I’ll put maybe fourteen grand in upgrade
s into this place and pocket the rest.”
I gaped at him. I had no idea it was so profitable. “You have to pay anyone?”
“Yeah. My crew and my realtor.” Finn placed a round white bucket on the floor and pulled out a tool belt, buckling it around his waist. “I used to have a great one, but then Adam slept with her. Now she won’t talk to me.”
“Ouch.” When he shook his head at me, I asked, “What?”
“You and Adam are a lot alike.”
“How so?”
“You both have a hard time keeping it in your pants. I know what Adam’s problem is. He’s trying to live up to his father’s legacy. What’s yours?”
What was I doing with all those women? I hardly knew anymore. “Trying to forget my father’s legacy.” That was the best truth I could come up with. Sunk deep in the soft embrace of a woman or feeling the sick give of a man’s flesh against my fist were the best ways to forget that I spawned from the gene pool disaster that was my dad. I didn’t want to talk to Finn about the fact that the only way I knew how to cope was to fight or fuck. It sounded bad enough when I thought about it. Verbalizing it would only make me look like a two-dimensional caricature.
“You do one a month?” I asked, changing the subject.
Finn cocked his head and eyed me curiously, but answered my question. “Right now, but I hope to be doing four or more a month once I get a few crews running for me. No one else will show up before nine, so for the next three hours, it’s just you and me.”
Finn showed me the supports he’d jacked into place to hold the ceiling up when the walls came down. “Take the tip of the sledgehammer and poke it through the sheetrock carefully, like you’re doing a virgin. Look for wires or ducts. If there’s something there, leave it alone. If it’s all clear, bang the shit out of it.”
“The walls are female?”
“Anything you push a long hammer into is a female,” Finn replied, his voice fading at the end as he went down the hall.
When I swung the sledgehammer into the walls, the impact and resulting destruction felt awesome. Almost as good as hitting someone in the face. Definitely not as good as sex. I made quick work of the wall and bellowed for Finn.
“Geez, aggression much?” He inspected my work from the other side. I could see directly into the opposite room, only vertical slats of wood separated the two of us.
“Now what?”
“Now you knock down that wall.”
“The boards?”
“Yup.”
This demo was the shit. After knocking down the wall, I realized how much larger the house seemed. Before, it was a rabbit warren, with tiny closed-off spaces. Now, I could envision relaxing and having a beer without feeling as if I was going to be crushed like a can in garbage compactor.
We took down one more wall, which required the both of us because on the other side were appliances and stuff that had to be moved first.
“Are some of the houses you flip totally rotten? Like nothing can be salvaged?” I asked him as we wrestled a refrigerator away from the wall.
“No, most houses just need cosmetic work. A new bathroom. A new kitchen. Sometimes new flooring.”
“But sometimes the house’s foundations are destroyed?”
“Some homes have termites or mold or stuff and require some structural work, but there are few that can’t be salvaged.”
“But some of them, right, should just be razed to the ground?” I pressed.
“No, Bo, most of them can be salvaged,” Finn said quietly, seriously. “Almost all of them can. They may have been put together by shoddy builders, but they can almost always be saved.”
That was in Finn’s estimation, but I heard what he was trying to say, just as he had accurately interpreted the meaning of my question. Am I salvageable?
Chapter Nine
AM
I RECEIVED ANOTHER NASTY HATE note from Clay and avoided campus for the rest of the week. The commons confrontation left me feeling uncertain and a little afraid, which I absolutely hated. My only solace turned out to be biology. Bo acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I was still acutely aware of his presence next to me in the classroom, but his broad shoulders acted like a buffer between me and the rest of the students. No whispers reached us. No cutting remarks were cast my way. He waited for me outside the classroom and walked me down to our shared table. After class, he escorted me out.
Never once did he bring up the commons incident and other than his watchfulness before, during, and after class, his treatment of me was quite ordinary. Whatever rumors he’d heard about me, he seemed to be saying silently, mattered not at all.
I could feel myself thawing toward him, yearning for him. I knew it was dangerous, but I needed something sweet in my life. If I didn’t act on my longings then I’d be safe. When he turned to share a smile at me over the nonstop innuendos during the discussion of fertilization and pollination, I felt hot and prickly. During the discussion of common parasites, we both grimaced. Bo whispered that there wasn’t a lot that put him off his feed, but tapeworms in the stomach might be it. He was charming and decent, and I could feel myself weakening with every minute that passed. But he also didn’t flirt with me, smell my hair, or make a suggestive comment, as he had in the past. More than once, I caught him staring hard at the lecture stage as if he were engaged in some internal struggle.
At the end of the week, Ellie met me for lunch at our usual place off campus with breathless news. “You want to see Bo fight?”
My eyes must have gotten as big as saucers because Ellie laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
As we stood in line to order, Ellie whispered the details to me. “I heard there’s a fight tonight in the warehouse district. Someone is supposed to text me directions.”
“Do you have to pay to get in?”
“When Tim and I went, the cover was twenty-five dollars per person and then there are bets made inside. I didn’t bet, but Tim did.”
I whistled. “Wow. That seems steep. No one complains?”
“Not yet, I guess. Who wants to be the person that shuts something like this down? It would be worse than your ordeal.”
“Worse than me?” I grimaced. “Thanks.”
“You know what I mean.” She lightly punched me on the shoulder. I did. No one welcomed that type of treatment. The guys on campus would be particularly rough. I think fight night was responsible for at least fifty percent of them getting laid.
“So I take it Bo said nothing about it in class yesterday?”
“No. We haven’t really talked about anything other than class stuff lately.”
“Like?”
“What’s more gross—tapeworms in the stomach or parasites in the ear?”
Ellie shuddered. “So glad I took Rocks for Jocks.”
“Yeah, that might have been a good decision.”
“So you and Bo, in class?”
“There just isn’t a ton of time to talk. Plus, he’s got more moods than a preteen who just got her period.”
“Really? I would never have guessed that.”
“I’ve decided that flirtatious is Bo’s default mode and his other setting is broody.”
“Still want to go?”
“Hell yeah.” When I was a kid, I’d asked my mom why the moths kept moving in droves toward the light, almost hugging the exterior despite witnessing the death of their fellow insects. Mom said that sometimes temptation was just too great to resist. Zzzzap. That was me. Bo was the light and I was the dumb moth.
Ellie was prattling about the details of the fight she’d gone to with Tim. We had to stick together, she said, because mini fights could break out in the crowd.
“Do you bring something to drink?”
“They don’t sell it, and Tim brought a flask when we went. No one’s doing a bag check there.”
I’M NOT SURE HOW BO SPOTTED Ellie and me in the crowd. People were packed into the space. I had a hard time believing something this wel
l attended could remain a secret, but we were told nothing illegal was going on here. This was private property, and we were all invited to the party. The cover was actually a donation, per the bouncer’s instructions.
A stamp in the form of a clenched fist was slapped on the backs of our hands, but we were warned that if we left, we would have to repay the money if we wanted to come back inside. The point of the stamp was never explained, but I wasn’t going to ask anyone with arms the size of my thighs and no apparent neck why I needed a mark on my hand.
The fight was being held in the basement of a restaurant in the East Village. The owner was a friend of the guy who set up the fight and more than one underground shindig took place here, although never more than once in a month or even once every six months. The fights required some luck and coordination. Or at least that was what I gleaned from listening to the crowd around me.
I didn’t know when Bo was fighting or even if he was fighting. It was only rumor. Even tonight, inside the building, there were just hopeful mutterings. But rumor became reality when he walked in and his name was carried on a wave of whispers from one end of the long narrow room to the other. I saw him almost immediately, the bangs of his messy blond hair peeking out from the front of his sweatshirt hood. The basement was lit by a string of bare lightbulbs strung like hormonally enhanced Christmas lights along the sides of the rock walls. Toward one end, a number of what looked like halogen lights hung from the ceiling, brightly illuminating a single space. That must be the fight ring.
It smelled musty and earthy, as if we were in a cave rather than underneath a ritzy establishment. I wondered what the patrons upstairs, in their pearls and worsted wool, would think if they knew that behind the wine racks and cheese rounds, two guys planned to beat each other bloody. Probably they’d be thrilled. Maybe everyone knew and this was part of the cachet?
Ellie had found a barrel we could share against the wall. While it was farther away from the center where the fight would take place, the barrel allowed us elevation and a heightened sight line. Or, in simpler terms, we could just see a heck of a lot better by standing on the barrel. I tracked that blond head moving in and out of the crowd until it stopped right before me and the barrel. My legs gave out and I sat down before I fell off.
Unspoken (The Woodlands) Page 7