False Start: A Roller Derby Romance (Beautifully Brutal Book 1)

by Casey Hagen

  Zara nodded toward the bar. “Patti used to do banked track…maybe she knows where there might be one.”

  “Nothing is near here and I would have thought if there was one, we would have heard about it by now. Even if there was one in Boston, you’re talking a four-hour drive,” I said.

  “And we have no experience, guys. Seriously, a few weeks on a banked track, even if we could find one to practice on, it’s not going to be enough to have a shot. And who would coach us?” Sean asked.

  “Maybe Patti would,” Zara said.

  “Except she’s got a business to run. Listen, I love Patti and all, but she’s already spending too much time here. She’s been stretched thin with the holidays coming and the extra crowds, covering shifts when bartenders don’t show. I’ve tried to be available to help, but sometimes by the time I get here, she’s wrung out,” Rory said, casting a worried glance at Patti behind the bar.

  I spied Patti over my shoulder, taking in everything. She leaned over the counter, attitude in her cocked hip and crooked grin. But if I looked closely, really looked, I spotted the way her smile slipped a little too soon, the way she rubbed at her temples, and the slump of her shoulders as she pulled on tap handles, filling beer orders.

  Patti could offer knowledge, but when it came to hours wrangling a derby team, she just wouldn’t be up to it. Not that I’d ever dare say the words outright.

  If she caught wind that I even noticed a hint of exhaustion on her face, she’d mount my ass over the bar with her derby memorabilia.

  “We need to think realistically, guys. Let’s start with sponsorships from our employers. Maybe we can get something going there, especially when we tell them that Patti is putting up 10K for the cause. They might just follow suit,” I said.

  “It’s worth a shot, but this is a hard time of year with Christmas coming in a couple of weeks. But maybe we get them excited about some last-minute tax deductions?” Rory said with a glance at Marty.

  Marty stopped tapping her fingers on the table and shrugged. “It’s worth a shot.”

  We spent the next hour making a list of employers and agreed to check in with one another tomorrow to determine if we were getting any nibbles.

  One by one we said our goodbyes after our first round. No one wanted to reject Patti’s offer of free drinks for the night, but none of us felt right about taking advantage either.

  For a few minutes, at least…while we made the list, a buzz of excitement hummed over our group.

  We could do this. We had a starting point.

  By the time the list was made, and we all stared down at it, the buzz had morphed into the worry settling over us. Like we all knew this might be our only decent shot.

  None of us mentioned the obstacles with our plan. How some companies had a process for this and getting an answer could take months or longer. Time the kids didn’t have.

  This was it. We had no plan B.

  I took a trembling breath.

  When you didn’t have a plan B, you ended up at the mercy of others. You ended up packing your meager belongings and piling them high in the trunk and back seat of a rusted-out sedan.

  With no plan B, your mother tells you this is another adventure. New places. New people.

  She tells you that you’ll love a new school.

  You’ll have a blast making new friends.

  But really, your stomach gnaws on itself in the dark while you try to keep yourself from throwing up the generic SpaghettiOs you had three hours before.

  You force a smile.

  You pretend to be asleep so you don’t have to lie about being excited.

  When really, you’re one mile closer to the unknown and one mile farther from that little girl who thought she might have finally convinced her mom to let you sleep over. The girl you didn’t dare tell your mom about until you knew for sure.

  The girl who didn’t matter now, because you’d never see her again.

  My heart raced in my chest. A wave of dizziness cascaded through me.

  “Hey, you okay?” Marty asked. She’d been trapped in the middle of the booth, making her the last one left.

  I’d never said a bad word about my mother. I’d never confessed to anyone how many times she broke my heart. I loved her so damn much. Even after all these years without her, the thought of saying anything that stained her memory cut me to the core.

  So I smiled, and I buried it.

  And I focused on what I had the power to change. Right now, that meant saving the program for the kids. For Rylee. “Yeah, I’m good. Just tired.”

  “You’ve had a rough day. You should go get some sleep.”

  “I will. I just want to check in with Patti first.”

  “Okay.” Just a few steps away, Marty turned back to me. “Maisy…you should probably have a talk with Eve. I thought she was fine, but with all of this—with whatever might be happening with you and anyone else—she’s not fine.”

  “I know,” I said quietly, trying to ignore Priest in the background watching us.

  “If you need to talk, just hit me up.” Marty smiled and turned for the door again.

  But I didn’t see her leave. I only saw him.

  I took a seat at the bar, several stools away from his penetrating stare.

  Needing a minute. Just a damn minute.

  “That was fast…how did it go?” Patti asked, stopping in front of me and slapping her bar towel over her shoulder before she started scooping ice into a highball glass.

  “Not great, but not horrible. Depends on how good we’ll be at talking our bosses out of their money.”

  “Well, that sounds about as fun as a root canal. Give me just a second, honey, and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Sure.” I studied the black and white images over the bar of Patti in her heyday. It was the action shot all the way to the right, with her arms thrown wide, hair billowing out from under the hideous cap helmets they used to wear, when they chose to wear helmets, and her feet midair as she jumped over a pile of fallen skaters that called to me.

  My favorite shot.

  The look on her face, hungry, determined, and…fulfilled. With old-school classic white roller skates on her feet laced only halfway to give them more flex. Barely any knee pads or elbow pads to be seen, and the ones who did have them? They were nothing more than bulkier material like what you’d see from a thin winter jacket. As for gloves? What the hell were those?

  How much skin did they leave on those banked tracks anyway?

  The black and whites left me wondering the color of their polyester shorts and shirts. I’d put my meager earnings on orange, olive green, and brown, some of the less fortunate color combos of the seventies.

  Only now did I notice how little Patti talked about the details from those days. Sure, she told stories about getting fancied up in rockabilly clothes, their hair up in pompadours with barrel curls and bandanas. She fondly bitched about the painstaking accuracy needed to execute the perfect exaggerated winged eyeliner and red lips for photo shoots and tours.

  But when it came to the down and dirty, when the sweat dragged streaks of mascara down their flushed cheeks, their scuffed uniforms hiding the bruises and track kisses, she let her legacy live in a series of eight pictures hanging over fancy liquor bottles.

  Frozen moments in time when women balanced on the cruel hand dealt to them of being paraded around in all the trappings of pageantry as they tried to command attention long enough to show them their power, hunger, and resilience on the track.

  They made so much out of a sport with so damn little and virtually no control.

  Drawn back to the one picture, my eyes caught on something, something I’d never noticed before.

  I narrowed my eyes and leaned in struggling to make out the details.

  Black metal piping climbing up exposed brick in the background.

  I blinked and blinked again. The pieces in my head sliding together.

  Glancing in the direction of the door of Banked Tra
ck just past Priest’s shoulder, the same kind of piping running up the same kind of exposed brick.

  The same kind or the same?

  The voices in the bar became a dull hum in the background as I leaned in for a better glimpse.

  And found a familiar face.

  My ears burned and my stomach fluttered.

  A familiar wool cap.

  Adrenaline surged through me as my focus narrowed down to one single point.

  It couldn’t be.

  Pushing my drink aside, I scrambled onto the bar and leaned in closer.

  Holy shit.

  He was decades younger, but I’d know that crooked grin in the front row of the crowd along the edge of the picture anywhere.

  Milton.

  “Hey, young lady, no shenanigans in my bar!” Patti said as she hurried over.

  I looked down to find an irate Patti glaring up at me. “Where was the banked track you played on?”

  She glanced at the wall and back at me. “Right here, girlie. Now scoot off my bar, thank you very much. You’re a health hazard up there. I won’t have you messing with my A rating,” she muttered with a huff.

  But I didn’t move. “You played here? In this very room?”

  “Sure did. You can still see the scuffs in the wood floor from the support beams,” Patti said, glancing down at her feet, stomping her purple Doc Martens against a deep groove cut into the wood. “Now are you going to get off my damn bar and tell me what in the hell is wrong with you? You sure as hell aren’t drunk, you only had one drink.”

  “I know how we can get the money for Crossroads. Where was your practice track?” Goosebumps raced over my skin as excitement, hope, the makings of a damn miracle bloomed in my chest.

  Patti leaned in and propped her hands on the bar. “We practiced here.”

  My breath stuttered in my throat. “There’s no other track?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Patti said, her lips twitching, her gaze sliding over to Priest. “Seems like I remember there being one more around these parts.”

  Priest glowered at the two of us, slapped his beer on the bar, and dragged his thumb along his bottom lip, his eyes narrowed in a one hundred percent I-think-the-fuck-not-glare. “No.”

  12

  I slammed down a stack of cash, snatched my jacket, and stomped out of Banked Track, leaving Mayhem on her hands and knees on the bar.

  I figured I had about ten seconds tops before she scrambled off and chased me down.

  Ten seconds to get to the parking lot, get in my truck, and get the fuck out of here.

  And never come to town again.

  My breath billowed before me, illuminated by the dull glow of streetlamps in the inky darkness of the frigid night. I pounded down the sidewalk, the image of her voracious eyes combing over Patti’s pictures playing through my head.

  My amusement at her climbing clean up on the counter swept away by an avalanche of bitterness for what they asked of me even without saying the words.

  The bitterness of what I couldn’t give them.

  But damn, I wanted to.

  Too much.

  I’d stay at the farm. I’d pay whoever I had to pay for grocery delivery. We’d survive, we could just call it quality time…so much quality, Lilith would be ready to murder me, but then my nephew would be born, Jordan would get home, and I’d be on my way out of town.

  “Hey!”

  Six damn seconds.

  I kept my pace as I whipped around, only to find her chasing me down in that sweater.

  That. Fucking. Sweater.

  My pulse pounded in my ears. My nostrils flared with the ragged breath I sucked into my lungs.

  It didn’t even cover her shoulders and the temperature had mercilessly dropped into the low twenties the minute the sun disappeared over the horizon. By now, we’d plummeted to the teens.

  I jabbed a finger in the direction of the bar. “Get your ass inside.”

  She skidded to a stop, propped her hands on her hips, and arched an eyebrow. I knew that look. Every man on the planet knew that look and all the variations whether it be aimed with stunning precision at them from a girlfriend, a sister, a mother, or a grandmother. “Excuse me?”

  “You don’t have a jacket,” I said, marching back to her, my hands curled into fists because fuck if I didn’t want to haul her ass off somewhere warm and private.

  Only I couldn’t trust myself alone with her. Warm and private meant giving in and tearing off every last shred of clothing so I could fuck her until neither of us could stand.

  Glowering down at her, I put every bit of anger and frustration into the force of my words, not caring if they hurt her, because they were the only way to save us from absolute disaster. “Get. Your. Ass. Inside.”

  Better to hurt her now before the stakes got higher.

  Before feelings got involved.

  Look at me pretending like they hadn’t already.

  We’d been nothing but feelings since our eyes met during her bout. We’d been adding good old-fashioned dry logs to that flame ever since, building the kind of heat that didn’t flash and die, but simmered, building a base of coals so damn hot it reached into the shadowed recesses of our lives.

  “Not until you agree to help us.” Her chin wobbled as she shivered before me. She clamped down her teeth, but the telltale tremble of her teeth trying to chatter in the blistering cold was there.

  “Goddammit.” I yanked my jacket off, wrapped it around her, and held it together so she couldn’t shrug it off. “I’ll walk you home. Which way?”

  She tried to yank away from me. “I don’t need you to walk me home; I need you to train us on your track.”

  I curled my fists tighter into the soft leather, shaking her with every bit of resentment coursing through me, making her rock on her heels before holding her steady. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You damn well know why not.” I growled. There’s no way she didn’t know.

  And the fact that she did made it damn near impossible to look her in the eye at times.

  “You didn’t do it,” she said quietly. “What they say about you. You didn’t do it.”

  The calm confidence of her words only fueled a dormant rage, now burgeoning inside me again since waking up the minute I rolled into Galloway Bay. I wouldn’t stand here while she looked at me with softness, caring, the hushed tone of her voice reverent, like I was some kind of hero.

  Not when all I had was a legacy of mistakes that brought others pain.

  I tugged her against me. “You don’t know a damn thing about what I did or didn’t do,” I said, seething with the fine edge of anguish cutting through me. “What I’ve cost the people I love.”

  My gaze dropped to her full pink lips and I closed my eyes. Her mouth wasn’t mine to taste, should never be mine to taste, and if I took, it would only prove what a selfish bastard I really was. “You’d do good to trust your instincts about me, Mayhem.”

  She turned her face up to mine. Unflinching, she stared me straight in the eye without so much as a blink. Full of stubbornness and ready for confrontation, she took me head-on. “The funny thing is, I do,” she said with quiet finality. “I know who I saw on that rink today. That wasn’t a man who’d put an underage girl at risk just to win.”

  Her eyes dropped to my mouth and I fought the urge to waver. I hung my head and turned away from her, away from temptation.

  How many more times would I scour my soul and find scraps of shredded honor before I ran out completely?

  “You didn’t do it. I don’t know why you don’t shout it from the damn rooftops. I don’t know why you didn’t defend yourself, maybe it’s time to—”

  I pierced her with a scowl. “Leave it alone,” I bit out the words in harsh warning. Fury pounded in time with the ripple of my beating heart.

  “If that’s really what you want, I won’t speak of it again…if you train us.”

  I dragged a hand down my face. She shivered even wit
h my jacket around her; meanwhile, I was all but positive steam billowed off my shoulders.

  “You’re freezing.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Which way?” I asked, the first stirrings that I might waver trying to take hold.

  She yanked away from me and hopped onto the threshold of the door leading to the small second-floor apartment over Banked Track. “There. You walked me home. Happy?”

  “Hardly. Now go inside.”

  She leaned her shoulder against the doorframe like she planned to settle in for a while. “Train us.”

  “No.”

  “I won’t leave you alone until you agree.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck, doing anything I could to keep myself from reaching for her. I still didn’t know if I put my hands on her if I’d throttle her or kiss her. I was equally worried about both. “You haven’t left me alone for a single second since I saw you on that track a week ago.”

  “I need you to train us. Please,” she said, the plea in her voice softer, more desperate.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “My sister always dreamed of living here. Raising her family at the farm. If this goes bad, they pay the price.”

  “What if it doesn’t go bad? Did you ever think about that?”

  “It always goes bad. If you knew me, you’d know that. But you don’t know me, Mayhem. One afternoon at a roller rink doesn’t change that.”

  Fire snapped in her eyes. “So, what about that? What about the kids you met today? My family,” she said, jabbing a thumb into her chest. “What happens to them when they lose the one safe place they have? How are you going to feel when that happens and you had the power to help them, but you were too damn scared to do anything about it?” Every word grew more and more raw until her voice broke.

  “I’m not scared.”

  “The fuck you’re not,” she snapped.

  The last of my control fractured and I stepped into her, my hand cupping her jaw, forcing her to look up at me. “You and that foul mouth. Someone should have done something about that a long time ago.”