Dirty Fighter: A Bad Boy MMA Romance Read Online Free PDF Page B

sure if she knew my name.
    She was taking forever though.
    I didn’t really know what I expected of her. Did I think she would just run away with me? I wouldn’t have complained if she wanted to though. She was beautiful and intelligent. We wouldn’t get bored. We could run off to some giant city and get lost there, starting entirely new lives from the bottom up. New names, new career paths, new goals. We could be friends, or even more.
    I would have loved to be more.
    I knew I didn’t deserve that though, I had done too much to be able to just ride off into the sunset. I wasn’t exactly religious but I knew I had sins that I needed to atone for.
    The thought that she might be setting me up had flooded through my mind more than a few times. Maybe she was mad at me for knocking out her dad. She’d given me the money and what if she sent me out here so that she could tell her dad I’d stolen from them and knocked him out? He’d murder me. She could turn me in to the cops, the creepy dude who stood outside of her house all the time staring in. The guy who broke into their house.
    She never asked for help. She never told me that she needed me to step in. She could side with her dad and decide it was all my fault. That it could have been settled if I hadn’t of escalated it. I couldn’t blame her for it if she did, brains are messy things.
    Abuse victims can have weird ways of coping with having no control over their own lives.
    The sound of the lamp cracking down on her father’s head mingled around with the other sleepless noises in my mind. They echoed there, feeding off my own self-doubt. I was a fighter, a trained fighter who knew the importance of using it as self-defense. There were other ways I could have handled that, other routes I could have taken to take the situation down a couple pegs. I hadn’t though, I chose to grab that lamp and knock him the fuck out. He hadn’t even had a gun in his hands or the safe open yet.
    He couldn’t have defended himself. I could have just subdued him until they could call the cops. He would have been arrested, probably charged with abuse. Brooklyn wouldn’t have had to see me like that. I would have had to have been around cops, though, and at the moment I wasn’t so keen on that idea.
    I remembered seeing him slap Brooklyn, her nose bloodied, and it eased up a small fraction of my guilt. Nobody who abuses their children deserves to have any. When you have kids, you’re agreeing that you’re going to care for them for life. You don’t get to be a coward and beat on them just because they’re there.
    The shadows of the night drew longer, until only the streetlamps kept me company.
    The short hairs on the back of my neck would rise and prickle against the collar of my shirt every time I’d hear a noise. The start of a car, the closing of a house door, someone talking. When cars passed by, I felt like their lights went right through me, exposing me for everything I’d done in the last day.
    I felt my nerves setting in deeper and deeper until I was no longer content with just switching from foot to foot uncomfortably. I wasn’t sure if it was the paranoia from not sleeping the night before that had me antsy, but I couldn’t just stand there.
    I had to move.
    Trying to remember where exactly the bus station on Ash was, I started to walk along the shadows, not letting the lamps tattle out my whereabouts. Suddenly there were loud footsteps running up to me. For the second time that night, I steadied myself for a punch, or a police siren, or someone who had seen what I’d done, but when I turned it was only Brooklyn running towards me.
    She was carrying a suitcase with a backpack strapped to her back, and my brain retraced the idea of her running away with me. Sometimes I still think about where our lives would be now if she had.
    “Where are you going?” she asked, panting and setting down her suitcase for a moment to catch her breath. She’d been crying, her eyes