Page 74 of Dirty Fighter

Christ, the look of fear in her eyes when Marsha called a few days ago.

“Jason—” She twists a little in my hold, her hand resting against my chest. “Your heart is pounding.”

I swallow past the dread rising in my throat. “The night we met. When I came back to the baseball field for my phone and found you there.”

She blinks, and something guarded flickers in her eyes… then slowly dissipates. “What about that night?”

“Where was Marsha?” She told me her mom was stuck at work. That the whole night had been a series of unfortunate events. She joked and laughed… even as she’d shivered and gotten into a fucking stranger’s car because she didn’t have a single other option. “Why didn’t she pick you up when she knew you didn’t have a phone or a ride or even shelter from the rain?”

Marsha knew how scared she was of storms.

For a minute, she just stares into my eyes, and I don’t think she thinks she’s going to tell me.

But then, quietly, “A date. She was on a date. I couldn’t be at the apartment in case she needed to bring him back there. And we didn’t have the money for me to have a phone after things hadn’t… worked out with her last… solution.”

Christ, there’s something about the careful way she lays each word out. Something that has the hair on the back of my neck standing up and that thing inside me that’s more primitive than man starting to growl. “How didn’t things work out?”

“He didn’t like that I was there. Didn’t want a kid around. It wasn’t the first time. So we left. She was furious. At me. At him. At the world for being so unfair. And then she was looking for the next solution. And I was just trying to stay out of her way. But it wasn’t as easy for her as it had been when she was ten years younger. And that night… before the game… she was… different. In this kind of scary, calm way that she had when she was really mad at you. She’d been mad like that before. So when she didn’t pick me up after the game… I wasn’t as surprised as I’d been the first time.”

The first time. “When you were seven?”

Her lips part, whatever denial or defense she was about to give lost when she closes them and looks away.

That primitive thing starts thrashing against the cage I keep it in. It wants to flip tables and smash chairs, but mostly it wants to pull Rowan closer. Wrap itself around her and protect her in all the ways she hasn’t been protected before.

How scared and alone had she felt?

What had her life been like with no one putting her first?

“I wish you’d told me about her,” I say now, my hand on her face. “Not because I think you should have warned us. But because I would have protected you. I would have taken you with me, Rowan. Whatever we were. Friends, something else, nothing at all… You deserved someone protecting you.”

The next hours pass quietly. We sit together on the too-small loveseat that somehow, with Rowan tucked against my side and her legs over mine, suddenly doesn’t feel too small at all.

We listen to the rain and the crackling fire, watching each log burn down and then occasionally feeding in another. She confesses that she’s never told anyone about her mother. Not even Jill.

I ask about her life before she came into mine, and it’s so very different from the glossed-over rendition I heard in those first few dinners almost ten years ago.

She asks me about my mother and what it was like growing up without her. We talk about my dad and about Portland. About the hospital and Jill but not the ex. We talk about my grandparents and things we’ve talked about before, but this time, allowing in the parts of the stories that aren’t quite so light or funny. The parts that reveal things it’s sometimes hard to trust people with.

The afternoon shifts toward evening, and the lingering rain turns to a drizzle and then a light mist. Rowan pulls me into the kitchen, and we make a simple dinner by candlelight with the ingredients that haven’t been lost to the blackout.

When we’re mostly through eating, I notice that she’s pulled the list closer, and she’s tracing her fingertip over the page.

“What are you looking at?” I ask, pushing my plate away and setting my napkin aside. I move in partially behind her, so one side of my chest overlaps with one side of her back, and I can see over her shoulder. She peers at me with a soft smile and taps the page where I wrote and underscored a promise I’ve tried very hard to keep… but couldn’t.

ESCAPE

“Ah, that.” I wrap one arm around her waist and settle my free hand at her hip. “Harder than it sounds, huh?”

“This isn’t Escape,” she says quietly. “Not in the feel-good, no-messy-emotional-drama way we promised each other.”

Drawing a slow breath, I pull her closer. “Maybe not. But maybe… it’s a different kind of escape. Maybe giving in to the heavy, emotional messiness of a past we almost shared, and sorting through the shards and fragments together that we haven’t been able to make sense of alone… is what we needed.”

Her hand covers mine. “I think you’re right about it being something we needed. But I don’t want to call it escape.” She huffs a soft laugh. “I liked our other definition better.”

“Okay, so what should we call it then?”

“It feels like relief to me, finally being able to talk about what happened. To apologize. To explain. I know this sounds weird, but it feels a little like freedom.”