Page 17 of Longing for Liberty
The guy slightly swayed as he stood there, staring down at me with this lewd, wet smile.
“You’re coming home with me,” had been his first words.
I had laughed straight in his face out of sheer surprise, and then becauseew. Not because he was ugly. He looked like a beefy football player and had a nice face. So maybe his aggressive approach worked with some girls, but it wasn’t what I was after. He didn’t appreciate my laughter and wasn’t accepting a possible no.
He’d grabbed his crotch and said, “You’ll want this, believe me,” before reaching down and cupping hard between my legs, digging his middle finger up into the soft fabric of my leggings and yanking me toward him with his other hand around my waist.
I’d let out a scream that got swallowed up in the packed, loud bar. I tried to step back, shoving at his chest, but the guy had had a hold of me, and it hurt. Two of his friends were standing close and cracking up with amusement. I was about to go into megabitch mode when Jeremy was suddenly there. He’d been wearing a backwards baseball cap with wavy brown hair sticking out.
“Dude, let go of her,” he’d said to the guy who probably had fifty pounds on him.
The guy grinned in Jeremy’s face, his hand digging deeper and making me jump with ayelp.
What happened next was so fast. Jeremy punched the guy twice.Bam. Bam.His arm had moved so quickly that I couldn’t even see exactly where the guy had been hit, only that there’d been a squelchycrack, and he was suddenly letting go of me as his head snapped back. It had seemed like slow motion that his eyes rolled in their sockets and he teetered backward before crashing down on a bunch of unhappy people behind him.
“Come on.” Jeremy grabbed my hand and pulled me to the exit, not stopping until we were around the corner outside, both of us leaning against the brick wall of the bar. I was breathing hard, panic rising in my chest now that the shock was wearing off. Jeremy had looked me over in a careful way. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I told him, catching my breath.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
A situation like that would normally send me into a full-on attack, but his presence was so calming. I visualized him punching that guy again, and a bubble of laughter rose up, making him give me a small, inquisitive grin.
“What’s so funny?” he’d asked.
“Do you always go around knocking people out like that?”
He shrugged and readjusted his hat, the dimple in his cheek coming out to play as he smiled. “I do a little amateur boxing. But it’s been a while since I hit someone without gloves. That was…whew.” He shook out his hand. I looked over his grungy white T-shirt with a tear in the middle and bottom edge, and his filthy jeans and work boots. I’d later learn he was in town as part of the construction team working on the new building on campus.
I’d picked up his hand and looked at his knuckles, which were reddened. I brought that total stranger’s hand up to my lips and kissed his knuckles. “Thank you for helping me. I’m Libby.”
“Yeah, no problem.” He’d squeezed my hand. “Jeremy.”
Coming back to the present, I finished the story and smiled at Rebecca and Stanley, who may as well have had cartoon eyes.
“And I pretty much knew I wanted to marry him that night,” I admitted. I’d been in awe of the handsome carpenter with his mountain man accent and smart, self-taught brain. Jeremy was two years older than I was and had never attended college. He was a voracious reader, mostly nonfiction, and could converse on just about any topic.
Stanley clapped his hands together, and Rebecca said, “I never knew you boxed.”
Jeremy waved it away like it was nothing, but he had beengood. He started at twelve and boxed in a lightweight division until he was twenty-five, when I got pregnant with Summer. I’d watched so many rounds of him in the ring as I’d held my breath, even covering my eyes at times. But when it was time for him to be a family man, he decided it was time to stop knocking people out. And that was that.
The four of us got quiet, a lull filled with unspoken memories—memories we would have shared if things were different. Jeremy and I didn’t ask about how Rebecca and Stanley had met, and they didn’t offer to share whatever story they’d made up for others.
A scream came from somewhere nearby in the neighborhood, and the four of us shared wide-eyed glances before we stood and ran toward the sound. The scream morphed into the sobs of a woman and shouts of a man. We turned the corner and saw a couple. Other people were coming out of their homes to see what was going on, too.
The woman, just a girl really, was on the ground, scrambling backward away from her husband, who was shouting over her about burning their food. Rebecca and I immediately went to the woman, who had blood running from her lip, while Jeremy went to the young man, putting a hand on his chest.
“Okay, brother, hold on just a sec,” Jeremy said in a soothing tone. The guy scowled down at his wife with an anger that twisted my stomach.
I urged Rebecca to go stand back with Stanley while I helped the girl to her feet. Thankfully Rebecca didn’t argue, though her face looked like she wanted to do thebam, bamknockout punch to the husband as she walked further away from him.
Two State forcemen came running over, making the crowd step back.
“What’s going on here?” one of them said, his voice sounding too young to be someone of authority. To make matters worse, a stupid drone sped over and hovered to capture the scene, filling my ears with its incessant buzzing.
The girl clung to me, trembling and repeating, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I had to go to the bathroom. It was an accident.”
Everyone, including the forcemen, remained still and listened.
