Page 76 of Hard Hitter
“I’m sorry, baby.”
“I should havebecomea lawyer. Two hours of private massage equals one hour of lawyering.”
He petted her hair. “But then you’d only live half as long because lawyering sounds boring as shit.” And he’d pay for her fucking lawyer if she’d let him.
She giggled. “I don’t know iflawyeringis a word.”
“It is when you’ve drunk a lot of tequila.”
Ari sighed against his chest, and he thought she was done talking for the night. But a couple of minutes later she spoke again. “I heard you telling Crikey how you learned to fight.”
His hand froze on her head. Fuck. “Yeah. It was a long time ago.”
“Where were your parents?”
He resumed stroking her hair, and tried to decide how much he was willing to say. Not much.
“Just tell me, Patrick. You want me to trust you, but everything is on your terms.”
Fuck. She sounded a lot more sober all of a sudden. “You know, you’re the only one who calls me Patrick since my mother died. Since you want to know so bad, I was eight when it happened. I watched my father shoot my mother in the head.”
“Oh my god.” Ari lifted her face off his chest.
He did not want to have this conversation. Not ever. But here it was. He tucked her head back down, because it was easier to talk without looking her in the eye. “Obviously my father went to prison. I went into the state’s care. For a couple of years they found foster homes for me. But foster parents are usually people without a lot of stability, too. When I was ten they sent me to a group home, and it was a disaster. I was the youngest kid there. Never got enough to eat because the teenagers would take my food, my school supplies. Once they sold my shoes to buy beer. I started trying to fight back but they outweighed me by a hundred pounds.”
Ari gripped his wrist, as if trying not to react. His shitty childhood wasn’t her fault. And if he could have avoided talking about it, he would have.
The next part of the story was sort of fun, though. “That’s when I found that boxing gym in the neighborhood. I passed it every day after school. I started staring into the window watching these guys train. And I was just a kid who had nothing to lose, so I started imitating them—right there on the sidewalk. I’d shadowbox in front of the plateglass window. They must have thought it was hysterical. So after this goes on for a while the owner invites me inside. His name is Rick, and he’s got tattoos covering like ninety percent of his body. I thought he was so big and scary and so badass. I wanted to be just like him so I could scare the shit out of the guys who keep taking my stuff.”
This got a small smile out of Ari. But still, her body language went all stiff and weird.
“‘What are you doing, kid?’ they asked me. ‘Do you have to train for a fight?’ So I told them yes. And Rick asked, ‘When’s your fight, kid?’ And I said, ‘Every morning at breakfast and every night at dinner, but lunches are at school and the big kids can’t steal my lunch except for Saturday and Sunday...’”
He’d known right away that he’d said something weird, because all the men stopped grinning and just stared at him.
“...So, anyway, Rick put some protective gear on me and let me kick off my shoes and get into the ring. And I just about pissed myself with glee.”
Ari wrapped her arms around him. Tightly.
“Those guys taught me to fight for real. How to punch, and how to keep my head up, and how to move. I went there every day and they didn’t kick me out. I didn’t always get time in the ring, but there were bags to hit, and people standing around to tell me what to do. And then I decided I’d learned a lot, right? So one night when this high school kid decided he was going to eat my piece of meatloaf I socked him right in the eye. He still weighed twice as much as I did, so he picked me up and threw me into the bookcase face-first...”
He hated remembering this shit.
“I had bruises all over my face and a broken tooth. When I went to the gym the next day, the guys were so fucking mad. They wanted me to tell them who did it, but I was afraid to rat the guy out. So they started teaching me to fight dirty. How to stomp on feet and pull ears and knee somebody in the nuts.
“It only took about two more weeks for the bigger kids to figure out that I wasn’t worth the trouble anymore. They stole other kids’ food instead of mine. But I never stopped going to that gym. The owner gave me a job. He let me clean all the mirrors in the bathrooms, and put away all the free weights and equipment. He’d slip me a couple of dollars for a couple of hours work. This went on for a couple of years. Then, one Friday when I was fourteen, I told Pete that I wanted to play hockey, but I couldn’t because you had to have skates. On Monday afternoon, the guys gave me my first skates. They tried to say that somebody had an extra pair, but they were brand-new out of a box.” He cleared his throat. “So it wasn’t all bad, you know?”
He waited for her to say something. But maybe it would be better if she didn’t. If she fell asleep right now, she might not even remember this conversation tomorrow.
“That’s just about the shittiest childhood I’ve ever heard of,” Ari said quietly. “That’s why you don’t like to be touched.”
“Probably,” he admitted. “Spent a lot of time trying to keep other people’s hands off me. Whenever they got close enough to touch me it was never good. They’d doanything, too. No violence was too much. No line was too far to cross. Every kid there had nothing to lose.”
She slid a hand clumsily up his chest, onto his neck, cupping his jaw. “Thank you for letting me touch you. I like it a lot more than I wish I did.”
That awkward endorsement made him grin into the darkness. “Sure like touching you, baby. Don’t ever make me stop.”
“We’ll see.”
