Rags 2 Pitches: A Secret Baby Sports Romance

by Jessica Evans

  The dinner was so false. Unnerving. I was never made to have dinner with them. It was always supposed to be their alone time when he walked through the door. Mom would be expected to wait until he decided to come back, and then they would sit down and have dinner together.

  That suited me fine.

  I didn’t feel like eating, especially because he had a personality like Jekyll and Hyde. He would get angry at the slightest thing and start throwing punches. That part of the night was always predictable. What wasn’t known was what would set him off.

  “The two prettiest girls in the state of Ohio are having dinner with me tonight,” he proudly said as he closed his eyes and started to pray. The words were always the same. Blessing his family, thanking God for keeping him in a job and getting the bad guys off the street and, last but not least, for the meal that we were about to have. I joined in the prayer, in my mind begging God to make sure that he didn’t get angry until he finished his meal, begging for this to be the last time I had to sit and hear his voice and smell his cheap cologne, that after tonight I would no longer be abused by this monster.

  My dad.

  “Right. Grace, serve us the delicious meatloaf. You did good, kid.” He winked at Mom. Anyone that watched us at the table, seeing Mom in her blue chiffon dress, would have thought that we were a lovely family. The quiet, well-respected police officer with his wife and daughter, serving him his favorite meal on his fortieth birthday.

  Never mind the fact that, the night before, he’d smashed a bottle near my face and I'd had shards of glass removed from it, and the cuts were still visible. Mom had been beaten many times. The scars and bruises were everywhere on her body, including her face. He used to do the same to me. His excuse was that I was a teenager - and a clumsy one too. He could get away with punching me when he felt like it, because no one would believe me. And he was right.

  No one did, on the two times I’d tried to tell people that it was my dad. They laughed. Dad was the quiet cop, the one that stayed out of any type of trouble. The problem was, he was quiet because he had us to take his frustration out on.

  “Grace, you forgot to put on my favorite song.” Mom headed to the iStation and put on his favorite song, “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green.

  I hated that song so much. The words used to stick in my mind.

  He sung along with Al Green, and Mom whisked around the table, serving us our meal as he had said women who were housewives should do. Dad didn’t hesitate in taking a few mouthfuls of his meatloaf. It didn’t take long before he sipped his brandy, the Remy Martin that Mom had made sure was in front of him before he sat down. He collapsed, and we watched as he slumped out of his chair and on to the floor. My stomach started to turn knots because it had all felt so perfect and easy. I’d thought that he would whine and scream or even stand up and try to hurt us as he had done so many times before.

  He didn’t care.

  And, as I watched him struggle to breathe, neither did I.

  ***

  “Mom, what are you doing?”

  She was walking around the house as if she had just stepped in here for the first time, confused and bewildered, like something in her mind had triggered.

  “Okay, we’re really doing this. We’re really doing this?” I didn’t know who she was talking to, but she ran and got the phone. Then she rang the missed call, or so I assumed she had rang it.

  “It’s done,” were the only words that came out of her mouth, and then she hung up.

  “Mom, who was that?” I chased after her like a lost sheep. She’d told me that she had a plan. I could see that she either didn’t have one, or was too scared to play it out. Either way, I was feeling really nervous. I avoided looking at Dad, thinking that any moment he would get off the floor and beat us to death. He probably knew what we were up to, like the last time I’d tried to run away.

  He'd sat at the Kentucky train station, waiting for me to arrive. I never had understood how he got there faster than the train. Later, I found out, when he purposely left the plane ticket in my room, that he had booked his ticket the day after I had booked my train ticket.

  Dad left it in my room to make a point.

  That I could run.

  But never hide.

  Now he was lying on the floor like a lump of wood. Not moving. Not shouting. Part of me didn’t think it was real. I expected him to get up, laughing, bragging about how much he would make us suffer for what we had done.

  But he didn’t, and that was when the door was flung open.

  It was Kane, one of the guys on the force, saying, “Grace, get Sadie and let’s go.”

  Chapter Two

  Kayla

  Three years later…

  Every year.

  Every fucking year on this day, the day it had happened, my thoughts reverted to him.

  Mom had picked his birthday of all days to leave. I’d been only sixteen at the time, yet I remembered it as if it were yesterday. Especially today. Especially on his birthday. I managed to get through the day by going to classes and hanging with a few friends until eight o'clock. That was when I had to go back to my room to study.

  Memories of that night flashed through my mind. I shook them off and tried to study. It didn’t work, and something drew me to the bar. I could have gone to Starbucks, or even gone to my best friend, Sara’s, room. But, I didn’t.

  As I opened the door to the bar that I worked. I expected the see the normal scene; the dim lighting, the college students that had a few minutes of self-indulgence and would spend that time playing pool. College students wanting to inflate their egos by trying to beat their rival in class. Or girls wanting to lay one of the sports heroes, hoping that they wouldn’t have to get a job after college. Their fate was set from the moment their soon-to-be boyfriend would play professionally. And then there were the quiet ones; wanting to be part of some crowd, huddled together hoping to get noticed, but too shy to talk to anyone.

  The worn out wooden flooring and tired decor didn’t mean a thing to the students. But tonight there was a man talking to the waitress that I worked with most of the time, Brooklyn. Her fake blond hair and blue eyes were batting as if she had won the lottery as she talked to the one man that I thought was dead: my dad. I wondered if he was a ghost or a figment of my imagination. He should be dead. Not here in the flesh. Breathing. Smiling. What was he doing here?

  He seemed to like the attention of Brooklyn, who was nearly half his age. He didn’t see me. They were talking, standing too close to each other. Acting as if no one else was in the bar. My heart skipped a beat as I tried to focus on him alone. I blinked my eyes, feeling like my feet were stuck in quicksand.

  Why today of all days?

  Was he looking for me?

  He couldn’t be. He would look for Mom first, surely.

  I had too many questions running through my mind. But the thing that turned my feet around and had me heading back out of the bar was fear. He still scared me. I had a new name and my hair was different, but he might still recognize me. I couldn’t take the chance. I had to leave. Not only the bar, but the campus. I had to get out of there and pretend that the last few weeks of being with my boyfriend, Chase, were a fantasy, something that I only wished could be real between us.

  When we’d lived in Dallas, Chase and I had pretended that we didn’t have feelings for each other. We’d confessed our love after we went to college. I couldn’t explain to him why I had to leave. He would never understand why I was using a fake name. One that wasn’t given to me at birth. If I did tell him the truth then he would not only put my life in jeopardy, but Mom’s too. When he found out that I was missing then, he would report Kayla as the girl that is missing. Not the real me.

  Mom!

  Should I call her? I didn’t know what to do as I ran to my room. As soon as I got there, I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I took what I needed - a few clothes and cards - like I’d done when I was sixteen.

  No one knew who I
really was, and our family thought that we were dead. Mom had planned it all. I wondered how successful she had been, because Dad was standing in my student bar. Then again he was a cop; he had been trained to hunt and all I knew was I had to run.

  I grabbed my cards and went to the ATM on campus. I took out as much cash as I could out of them. I broke the ATM cards with my bare hands and threw them in the trash.

  “Are you really doing this?” I asked myself. I didn’t know who else I could talk to. Someone to reason with was out of the question. It was me, myself and I, I thought as my hands trembled as I started to walk away.

  The craziness wasn’t in my actions, but in my thoughts. I started to sweat uncontrollably about my fate.

  “It was him, wasn’t it?”

  I had asked myself a thousand times.

  I was no stranger to being on the run.

  I dropped my phone on the floor and stomped on it.

  “Damn iPhone!”

  Any other phone would have been easy to break. But as I stomped on it repeatedly with so much force, there was only a crack in the screen. I smashed it against the brick wall, using all my strength to throw it, and then it started to crack, until it eventually broke.

  I was no stranger to changing my identity.

  I had done it once before.

  The only problem was I had never done it alone.

  God, I wish my mom was here.

  I felt a chill run down my spine, knowing that I was doing it alone.

  Knowing that, from this moment onwards, I was on my own.

  Chapter Three

  Kayla

  I made it to New York. The city where no one asks your name. A place where I could be invisible while I figured out what to do next. I just needed time, and moving out here would buy me that. I decided to check into a motel and the next day it was all about seeing where I could make some cash.

  It didn’t take long for me to find a job, after asking a few diners and bars if they had any work. I got a few regular shifts at a particular diner, because the waitresses seemed to be constantly sick. I wasn’t like them. I couldn’t give them my social security number and get a permanent job. I was a girl on the run. I had to keep a low profile. That meant working here for a while and then… who knew? I certainly didn’t.

  “Hey girl, those abs are tight,” one of the waitresses said in the changing room.

  “Yep, you can’t be too careful. I’ve always trained.”

  I kept myself to myself; I had learned that from Mom when we were first on the run. ‘Only talk to those who you think you can trust and even then, you still have to be careful’… those were her words of wisdom when we first were on the run.

  Right now, I was alone. I had been in the city a few weeks and usually, after a shift in the diner, I would go and change in the motel. But, tonight I just didn’t feel like being alone.

  “Lately I’ve got a bit of an appetite, so my 6-abs are turning more into 2-abs.” I said as I rubbed my stomach. It was growing a little bit. Something that I hadn’t really taken any notice of until now.

  She laughed as she lifted up her shirt and said, “Well, I’ve always been a 1-ab type of gal.” Sheryl was sweet, and always had a smile on her face. I knew the other girls hated her, because of her plus size.

  ‘The food is for the customers, not you,” some of them would smirk as Sheryl would gasp as she took out the owner's famous steak and mash potatoes. Even my eyes lit up when holding one of those plates.

  Damn, it always looked so good.

  But, that didn’t stop Sheryl smiling at the clients and even the other waitresses.

  “You know there were a couple of girls here who left. They used to fight.”

  She managed to spark my interest. Fight. That was like music to my ears at the moment. Besides my pokey bedroom in the apartment., the diner and the odd conversation with a client, I spoke to no one. Not until today.

  Having this conversation in the dingy changing room, where some of the girls managed to change out of their black uniform and come out looking as if they were going on the catwalk.

  I remembered there were a group of girls talking about a fight. But I assumed they were talking about the official MMAs, which I dreamt of signing up for, but the same problem: I would have to register with ID and I didn’t have any that I could use.

  “Really?” I questioned as I sat down on the thin bench and waited for her to continue.

  She lifted an eyebrow as she realized that she had caught my attention, “Yep, it’s not the MMA or anything clean like that. Some of those girls get beaten like crazy. One even ended up dead.”

  She stopped, probably thinking that her revelation had put me off. She had no idea where I came from. I had become immune to people and their actions.

  “Tell me more.”

  She did, and I listened. As tempting as it was, it didn’t feel like an option. I had a steady amount of money coming in from the diners and even on the weekend I would do the odd shit at a nightclub. The only thing that could completely turn things around was if I became broke. Right now, I wasn’t there yet.

  I listened, thinking it would be something to ease the pain.

  That was why I had started studying karate, when I was eight. To use it on my dad. I had visions of him hitting me and me retaliating. Finally, being able to fight back brought a sense of security. But, for all the times, he hit me, I never did fight back. He was too strong. His ferocity and the shock of my own dad doing this to me, put me off each and every time. I kept promising myself that the next time I would do it. But, by the time I finally plucked up the courage, it was time to escape.

  I don’t know if I ever would have used it.

  Probably not.

  ***

  Earl, the owner of the diner, had something that he wanted to talk to me about before I started my shift. I was sat in his office, which kind of made me nervous. Even when he’d hired me; he’d thrown me an apron and said, “Start. If you make it to the end of the night, then you’re hired.”

  Today, I had a feeling that the news wasn’t good.

  Then again, it was written all over his face.

  “Sorry, Carolyn, I can’t keep you on anymore. Not for cash. Unless you want to start letting me pay you socials.”

  I sighed, avoiding his gaze.

  Shit.

  “Taxes are getting higher and I need to offset all my damn expenses. The IRS are coming down hard on us all.”

  I wanted to cry. I’d been lucky getting this job on my third day in the city. No one wanted to hire someone who only wanted cash. I’d heard one of the owners say it normally meant trouble. Earl had hired me so easily. And just as easily, he was letting me go.

  I stood up, unable to speak. I couldn’t think; could only hand him back his apron, knowing that I wouldn’t be working that night.

  That was when I saw Sheryl. I had two hundred and fifty bucks stashed at the motel - and nothing more. I couldn’t afford to live on that for too much longer. I knew I had two choices.

  Prostitution, fighting or to go back home.

  Wherever that was, at times I used to think it was at college. But, that was only temporary.

  I had only given my body to one man. The idea of giving it to anyone who paid for it was impossible.

  Which meant I would need to get into black market fighting.

  Chase used to say that I worked out way too much. I couldn’t help myself. Even after years of being away from my dad, I still felt the need to stay in shape in case a man decided to use me as a punching bag. The man that used to tuck me into bed as a child became my enemy. I’d even taught self-defense classes in college.

  Sheryl smiled as her eyes lit up, “Girl, the other night you said you weren’t interested.”

  I whispered, “Earl’s had to let me go. So I need to get interested.”

  I did, because the clock was ticking. The first couple of nights I had thought about going back. But it had been eight weeks. Maybe I had made a m
istake and should have gone back to Chase. Begged for his forgiveness, and then told him the truth about my dad.

  The problem was I couldn’t.

  Maybe it was pride.

  Maybe it was stubbornness.

  But there was that feeling deep down inside of me, that kept me in New York.

  And right then I knew it was the same thing that had kept me going back home each and every night knowing that my dad could turn around and beat the shit out of me.

  Fear.

  Chapter Four

  Chase

  I didn’t feel like going. It was four weeks until the end of college, and the last thing I felt like doing was going to a black market fight. Seeing a couple of girls beat the shit out of each other wasn’t exactly my idea of fun.

  “Chase, you need to unwind. Shit, man, I went to the semifinals, and this thing is fucking hot. Hotter than hot,” Reg said. He’d been my best friend since high school. After Kayla left campus, I’d needed a change. I didn’t feel like going to Stanford anymore, so I’d switched to Yale. Dad was happy; it was the tradition in our family for all Logan men to go to Yale. As soon as I told him that I needed a change after the first semester, he didn’t waste any time making sure that my transfer happened.

  When you’re as rich and influential as my dad, shit like that happens all the time. I knew that for the average student this was near enough impossible. But for Dad, anything was possible.

  “Final year exams, man. We should be studying,” I blurted out as I got my scarf and coat. I knew that if I didn’t go, I wouldn’t hear the end of it. Going to any type of fight just reminded me of Kayla, and the last thing I wanted to do was have her on my mind.

  The first year had been painful.

  I’d finally confessed my true feelings to her the first night we’d started college. We had been playing a cat and mouse game for years. When she’d first moved to Dallas, she was an awkward, shy girl who didn’t want to talk to anyone, especially me. But boy, did she love to fight. The teachers told her to save it for the ring, but that didn’t stop her from trying to bully nearly every guy in school.