Page 15 of Protected

I groan out loud. I really can’t help it. What the hell ishe even trying to accomplish here? I can’t defend myself by hitting a big man in the shoulder. My best punch didn’t hurt him at all.

He glares and points one more time, so I step closer and pull my arm back. I hit him hard in the shoulder with the heel of my hand.

It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as with my knuckles, but it obviously doesn’t faze Deck. At all.

“See? I can’t hit hard enough to do anything.”

He makes a face at me and raises both hands, slamming one of his hands into the other fiercely.

“Fine,” I tell him, sounding as impatient as I feel. “I’ll try to do it harder. But there’s only so much harder I can get.”

He drops his hands and waits for me. I change my stance, pull my elbow back, and then throw my hand forward and upward, hitting his shoulder so hard it makes a loud smacking sound.

He nods and gestures for me to do it again. So I do. Then again.

Then he raises his hands and counts out ten on his fingers.

“Fine. Ten times, and then that’s it. This is a ridiculous exercise.”

He lets out a breath and waits.

I hit him once as hard as I can. My palm hurts, but I do it again and again, letting out a little grunt each time.

On the fifth hit, something weird happens. That twisty tension that’s always lurking, always pushing at the edges of my selfhood, suddenly rears up. Swells. Grows. Startslashing out. Until I’m hitting him fiercely with helpless, choppy sobs of effort.

He takes it. Stands motionless. When I’ve gotten to ten, I’m so out of control I almost keep going, but he moves out of my reach and leans over to pick up the towel. He winds it around his hands again and holds it up, nodding toward it like he did before.

So I hit there and keep doing it. And with each blow all the brewing anger that’s been trapped inside me finally has an exit point. An escape hatch.

It feels so weirdly, twistedly good as I unleash blow after blow on Deck’s wrapped hands that I can’t stop. I let loose, getting louder and louder as I hit him.

He stands motionless, braced on parted legs with his hands up defensively, and he takes it. All of it. Even as it feels like I’m attacking him.

Even as his big body becomes everything that’s wrong in this world. The unknowable force that’s stripped everything away from me. My family. My friends. My community. My future. My safety. And finally Hal, the one person I had left who knew me. Loved me.

Only a few years ago, I was happy in college. Taking classes. Hanging out with Hal and my friends. Taking spring break trips. Planning to be a lawyer. To have a good life.

If Impact hadn’t happened, I could have had it. All of it. A career I loved. Success. A man who loved me enough to marry me. Maybe children. Or even grandchildren.

I could have had what millions of other people hadwho had the good luck of being born a few decades earlier than me.

But it was all ripped away from me, and I have absolutely no one to blame for it. To hate for it. Call it fate or reality or the brutal will of God, it’s done this to me, and it remains completely inaccessible.

And Ihateit. I hate all of it. I throw everything I have into lashing out, as if I might somehow beat a merciless world into compliance.

Eventually I’m sobbing for real as I flail out at Deck. Tears are streaming down my cheeks, and my nose is running.

And it’s that—that small detail of a runny nose—that triggers a sliver of recognition. Because I’m not somehow battering cruel reality. I’m lashing out at Deck.

A real man. Who might be annoying but who has also been good to me.

I jerk backward, sniffing and shaking my aching, tingling hands.

His expression is completely composed, and his eyes are far too knowing. They see far too much. He gestures back toward himself, urging me to keep going, but I shake my head.

I turn my back to him and work on composing myself, sucking all the emotion that got unleashed back inside where it belongs.

And it’s strange.

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