by Stella Rhys
Within ten seconds, Max was at the door. He was silent as he let me in, but once I was in the warmth of the foyer, he wrapped an arm around me in a hug.
“I’m sorry about everything you’ve been though,” he murmured. From the tone of his voice, it sounded like he was talking to more than just the Facebook post. It occurred to me only then that all the people who knew me personally had just discovered my past with Owen. And those who knew my character as well would know my true role in the situation, and thus the abuse I’d suffered at the hands of that man, and indirectly, my mother. It was another aspect of the humiliation, but oddly enough, I didn’t feel as bad about it as I imagined I would. If I did, I was hurting in too many other ways to make room for that pain.
“Is Liam upstairs?” I asked Max.
“I’ll let you up,” he said.
I followed him up to the third floor, my nerves ascending with me. In my eagerness to see Liam, I kept forgetting that he was minutes from hating me.
“Probably in there,” Max nodded toward the bedroom when he opened the door to the apartment. Once I went in, Max closed the door behind me, and I walked across the shiny hardwood, past the white vintage fireplace and all the pretty white moldings. There was so much white it reminded me of the conversation I had with Liam that felt like ages ago already. In the Jacuzzi at the Vail house, he told me he wanted to see me in a white dress for him. That he pictured himself marrying me.
It was only two days ago, but I suddenly missed that memory as if it was all I had left to hold onto.
Closing my eyes, I lifted my fist to knock on the bedroom door. But before I could, it swung open, and my lashes fluttered when suddenly, I was two inches from Liam’s chest. Stretched over his muscle was a grey sweater I didn’t recognize. I figured it belonged to Max – that Liam’s own clothes had become quickly un-wearable, too spattered in Ethan’s blood.
“Baby. Hi.”
I made the first greeting, a strain in my voice because Liam was as devastatingly beautiful as ever, and he looked so physically perfect for someone who had just beaten another man half to death. As far as injuries went, his knuckles were bandaged, and there was a single jagged cut on his cheek bone.
“You found me,” he murmured.
“Of course.” I felt the trembling start in my bones as I resisted the urge to throw myself against his body and suck up all his warmth and comfort. I knew I didn’t deserve that, so I only stood there as his emerald eyes studied me.
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
He nodded. “Me either.”
Tears rolled down my cheeks. Liam reached to touch me, but I dodged him.
“You need to know something,” I whispered, agony already wrenching my stomach. He frowned at me, that torturously handsome face waiting so patiently for me as always. “But before I say anything else, I want you to know that I love you more than I can ever describe, because there are no words for us. There’s no measurement to show how much you did for me, and sacrificed for me. I am so, so incredible grateful for you and everything you’ve ever done for me. Including what happened yesterday with Ethan.” I wrapped my arms around myself as I spoke, trying to hide how hard I was shaking. “It was exactly what I always feared you’d do, and exactly what I asked you not to. But I get it. I get that you can’t help it when it comes to me, and I’m so sorry that I do this to you. I’m sorry I immediately put a red mark on your new chapter, and I’m sorry that there are all these disgusting articles about you, and I’m so, so sorry that they’re out there hunting you now.”
As much turmoil as there was behind his eyes, Liam’s voice didn’t waver as he spoke. “I knew they’d be after me, Sasha. I knew what I was doing when I went there yesterday. I knew exactly what I was going to do to that piece of shit the second I saw what he did to you.”
I shook my head. “I meant the media. Not the police. Ethan didn’t go them.” I let my gaze fall to his chest as I felt myself nearing what I was about to say. When he reached to pull me into him, I backed up again. “Don’t.” Inside, my body screamed and fought me as I looked up into Liam’s hurt eyes. It thrashed with anger and torment and begged me to just accept Liam’s comfort, but I told myself no. That it was time to confess. “I don’t know if you’ll want to touch me once you hear what I have to say, ‘cause I’m afraid you’re going to hate me once you hear it. But I need you to know I made this choice because I love you.”
“Talk to me,” Liam urged.
So I did.
I told him about Ethan’s offer. I told him that my agreement bought his ability to walk away from this whole entire bloody mess.
It meant he could really and truly start over. He could train for his match against Walsh. He could make his return to fighting at Madison Square Garden. He would win and start completely anew.
His career would be back. His gym would flourish.
He’d be without me. He’d know that I was somewhere with Ethan, living in his apartment, sleeping in his bed at night.
But at least he’d be free of my drama – free of the constant obligation to protect me, and sacrifice for me. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the only way to ensure that he could get that new start we both knew he deserved. There was no other option. Because if I didn’t return to Ethan, Liam would be forced to lose everything. He would be sentenced and thrown into jail. He’d lose his time to train, and his fight with Walsh before he even stepped in the cage. He’d lose his entire life, possibly his gym.
But he’d have me.
And only me.
“The thought just makes me hurt so bad,” I whispered tearfully to Liam. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand the thought of court and trials and you thrown into jail like a criminal.” He was shaking his head now, reaching for me. But I continued. I told him everything – I explained to him as best as I could, and when I was done, I cried. I had cried so many anguished tears in the past few months, in the past few years and my whole life, really, but combined, none of them compared to what I cried as I sat on the floor of the strange apartment with Liam, his arms wrapped around me, somehow the one to comfort me despite what I had just confessed.
“I’ll survive,” he said.
But I wasn’t sure I would.
I had no idea how I’d adjust to the changes that were about to come. All I knew was that I would miss Liam more than I knew how to cope with, and that there would be many days during which I sat alone, regretting my decision.
It made it almost worse that Liam understood.
He forgave me. Despite his pain, he smoothed his hand over my hair and pressed his lips to my forehead. “There’s nothing you can do to make me stop loving you,” he murmured. “I told you that you could drag me to hell and back, and nothing would change. You don’t need to be next to me for me to stand by you. And no matter how fucking hard this is going to be, I still stand by you through this.”
* * *
I was inconsolable as we made a last trip home, and my emotions only tore at me harder as together we packed a bag, preparing to say our final goodbye. Before leaving the house, I called Aria to let her know of my decision. It was an hour-long conversation with no shortage of panic, but eventually, there was understanding, albeit a tearful one. And then with Liam, I got in the car, and the entire way there, our fingers were entwined, our hands held so tight I thought it might cut off our blood circulation. But I hardly cared.
When we arrived, I stared at the façade of the building, the reality setting in once again. In my horror, I considered running away – fleeing from my promises and living free with Liam on some remote island. But then I thought about the last few months – how the chaos chased us around every corner, meeting us at every turn. I was never able to predict it, and so I knew that even if we ran, I’d never live without worry – without suspecting that sometime, somewhere, the hammer would drop on us, and our lives would spiral again into drama and suffering.
So I went back with accepting my decision.
Still, I could barely leave his side.
“Do you want me to go in with you?”
“No. You shouldn’t.”
Breathing steady, in and out, I gathered every last ounce of strength in my body to give him only one more kiss, and a last word for us to end on.
“I love you too,” Liam murmured, bits of snow falling onto his lashes as he gazed down at me from under that knit cap I always liked. “I want you to be at peace with your decision, baby. It’s the only way you can keep going. And we’re going to survive it. I promise.”
I nodded.
And with that, I watched him turn around, his long frame making its way up the stairs and inside the precinct, leaving me to stand on the snowy sidewalk. I watched as the blue door closed behind him, and I cried alone as he turned himself in to the police.
EPILOGUE
Twelve Months Later
The sounds of flashbulbs were going off all around me like a swarm of bees. Instinctively, I shrunk back, trying to hide away from it all. Despite everything I’d been through, despite the media hounding me, A.J and even Aria for months after Liam’s arrest, I wasn’t used to the noise. I wasn’t used to the crowd and the cameras and all the strangers just waiting to pounce with questions. It still set off tension in my bones and put me in fight or flight mode. It made me think of being chased down the street by camera crews and grinning strangers asking whether or not I was a “serial step-offender.” Of course, it took only one solid week of that before I went from flight to fight and snapped back with the quote that turned the media around.
“I know you need a catchy headline, but step outside your sex scandal for one second and think about the fact that your story involves a thirty-eight-year-old man, and a fifteen-year-old girl, and you’re making the girl the villain instead of the survivor.”
That started a whole new wave of articles.
Suddenly, the headlines moved from “FAMILY SEX TAPE” to “THE FIGHTING COUPLE.” They speculated, and not completely inaccurately, about why Liam and I found ourselves together. They dug into who Owen was. People on the Internet hunted him, finding his job and his location and going as far as to retrieve handwriting samples to verify the letters. I received wailing voicemails from my mother, telling me I had ruined her life, because that morning, she woke up to her name in the papers. They were calling her, asking her about her relationship with Owen – why she would have stayed with a man who abused her daughter. I wanted to call back and ask if she gave them answer, because I was dying to know, too. But I resisted.
Obviously, after my quote, the media circus only grew, and it didn’t make my life easier. But it did make me less bitter and angry about what the world was seeing when they looked at Liam and me. It let me sleep the slightest bit more at night, curled up in Aria’s spare bedroom because I couldn’t stand to be alone in Liam’s apartment. It finally got people looking past my shameful secrets and toward the fact that they were callously leaked by someone on Facebook. After some digging, the gossip site Dirthawk traced the post back to Ethan, and the thousands of comments vilified him better than I ever could, and for longer than I ever could. Suddenly, his name was as much a part of the story as anyone else’s, and suddenly, we had a second villain.
While Ethan was still on trial against Liam, his company terminated his employment. I wasn’t surprised to read also that his parents – rather “real estate mogul Walter Kirk and wife Alice” – spoke to the press about being “humiliated” and “disappointed.” From what I heard, they had put a hold on contact with their son.
That was satisfying. But more satisfying was the fact that Aria’s father fought tooth and nail for Liam in court, working desperately to lower his sentence from second-degree assault to third. At sixty-eight years old, Mr. Pettit had come out of retirement to personally serve as Liam’s attorney, having been called by Aria the day Liam turned himself in to the police. He had showed up minutes before Liam did, and I couldn’t really thank her enough for that.
She was my rock through the ordeal. She and A.J both, really. For starters, A.J had his brother, Danny, run my bar while I took a leave. Despite the fact that A.J had asked her to move in with him, Aria stayed in her apartment so I could move in with her and have a cozy home to return to, as well as an end of the couch with my name on it. There were nights where she and I fell asleep on the couch together, making sure to turn the channel to cartoons before we did, so we didn’t wind up waking up to news about Liam.
Everyone was salivating over the story. The MMA world was already asking Walsh what he thought about having their fight delayed. Fans were already speculating over a rematch date, the sentencing and if jail time would make Liam the new underdog.
Riley got in contact with me. She had actually called me the day news broke about Liam’s arrest. I was still lost in the madness of everything, so we had little time to speak, but she revealed that her divorce was ongoing, and that Mom’s had just begun. Having learned the truth about Owen, Vic had served her with divorce papers and removed her from the house. She had stayed awhile at Riley’s, but as Riley followed the news coverage and began to see herself that Liam and I were no fluke, she found herself getting past her anger and bitterness towards us. “And suddenly, I had no desire to help Mom anymore. Let’s be real, I only ran back to her because I thought I’d lost you two,” she said.
She hadn’t lost us. Not completely. But for once, Riley and my mother were afterthoughts because I needed to stand by Liam throughout the trial.
The judge eventually ruled the case third degree assault rather than second, lowering Liam’s maximum sentence from seven years to one. It was a relief, but since it wasn’t his first arrest, he was bound to serve jail time, and while I’d been strong throughout the trial, I was back to crying my eyes out the day they took him away.
“Hey. You know what your tears do to me,” Liam murmured, urging me not to cry. His hands behind his back, the cuffs already wrapped around his wrists, he still managed to give me a smile, those green eyes gleaming at me like this was no big deal. “I’ll be back for you, Sash, and I fucking love you more every day. Just remember that.”
I did my best.
And I did my best not to get my hopes up, but there was always talk of Liam getting out early. It never manifested – at least not until late February. And once word leaked, the world was buzzing about Liam possibly returning right in time to still fight Damon Walsh, who was back to his trash-talking ways.
“I’m not worried,” was his favorite thing to say. “We’ll see if he makes weight with all that prison food. It’ll still be a miracle if he wins. He’s gotten used to fighting with shanks made out of fuckin’ toothbrushes and socks with batteries in them. He’s gonna wish he could crawl back in jail once I’m done with him.”
I found his quotes hilarious. Considering me and the media still locked on “the stepsister story,” Walsh could have gone with much lower blows. He could have gone well below the belt and backed up his quote about Liam having skeletons in his closet named Sasha. But he didn’t, and I appreciated that.
Unfortunately, Liam was released from jail three days after the original date of the rematch. Fortunately, he was out.
Back in my arms.
We spent three entire days holed up in his apartment, barely able to leave each other’s arms. I soaked in his warmth again. I ran my hands all over the body I had memorized before he left. I never thought he could get leaner, any more ripped, but I noticed the new knots of muscle in his biceps, and the new lines along his ribs and six-pack. I really hadn’t thought I could be any more attracted to him. But here we were.
“You have no idea how hard I missed you,” I couldn’t stop saying to him. But with his weight on top of me on the couch our affair started on, Liam slid my hand down to his rock of an erection harder than I’d ever felt it in my life. He grinned against my neck.
“Trust me, Sash. I have an idea.”
The day we finally made our way back into the real
world was the day Liam’s fight with Damon Walsh was rescheduled for June Fifteenth. The media was in a frenzy about that, and to keep them off our trail, Liam gave them loads of quotes to print, and finally, some trash talk that was short, sweet and just controversial enough.
“I think he forgets that I spent four months eating prison food because I got tossed in jail for fighting. Trust me, I’ve been waiting long and hard for a fight where I know I won’t end up in handcuffs. I’m waiting for him.”
It caused a delightful little uproar. There was so much trash talk coverage that day that no one noticed we made a trip to City Hall to apply for our license. And conveniently, the day Walsh pulled out of the fight for unknown reasons was the day Liam sold his apartment – quickly and quietly, without media speculation as to why, since everyone was covering Liam’s quote.
“I think he talked circles around himself and got into his own head. But whenever the kid’s ready, I look forward to beating him.”
The day Aria officially bought out Riley’s share of The Queen, Liam beat two-time middleweight champion J.J Nixon in his first fight out of retirement. Weeks later, Walsh beat the reigning champion Joe Pineda, and Cage-Walsh Two was rescheduled again for December Twelfth, exactly one year after Liam’s arrest.
The flashbulbs were still chorusing around me as I stared at the date on the black backdrop behind the podium.
December 12 On Pay-Per-View.
I bit my lip, watching Liam take his seat for the post-fight press conference, looking sleeker than ever in a light grey shirt and charcoal grey suit. His dark hair was only slightly done, because he’d let me comb some gel through it before running out of patience and pulling me onto his lap. The room cleared as we kissed, drowning out the rest of the world for at least a minute before diving into the pure madness. I didn’t care about the results of the fight. We still had what we both knew was the most important thing in our lives. And I still got to see him looking ridiculously handsome for the cameras, my warrior dressed as a prince.