Chapter 6 Alison #2
The anger welled up inside me, and I let it fill me, power me. Being mad was better than being scared.
I slowly got to my feet, soaked to the bone but standing tall.
And I walked further down the block, to a place I’d passed many times, a small building with a faded sign that said Master Sun’s Tang Soo Do.
Classes were finished for the night, but I found Master Sun sweeping the mats.
He was in his late fifties, but aside from his gunmetal-gray hair, you wouldn’t have known it.
He had that lean toughness that comes from fighting your entire life. “I need you to teach me,” I told him.
“I’m sorry,” he said gently. “All my classes are full. Come back in September.”
I stepped closer. “I need you,” I said, my voice cracking, “to teach me.”
He looked at me more closely: at the fading bruises around my eyes and the fresh ones on my arms, and his mouth tightened. Then he nodded.
“I can’t pay,” I warned him.
He nodded again. “That’s okay.”
My chest seemed to open and lift: it was the first time anyone had shown kindness to me in years. “W—When can we start?”
He laid his broom against the wall. “Now.”
Master Sun trained me, and I discovered that martial arts, with its precision and speed and endless practice, wasn’t so different from dancing.
My freakish balance helped, too. I trained every day, getting stronger and faster.
After a year, I was good enough to break Wyatt’s arm when he cornered me in a hallway, and he left me alone after that.
But I didn’t stop learning. That anger I’d unleashed needed to be let out, or it would consume me.
So I sparred with Master Sun every night, all through my teens.
The guy who ran the group home had an old scooter, and as soon as I was old enough, I started delivering pizza so I could pay Master Sun. But he refused to take my money. “Save it,” he told me. “Use it to get out of this neighborhood.”
As the end of high school approached, people started to ask me what I wanted to do. I already knew: I wanted to stop the gangs. So I joined the Chicago Police Department.
At the Police Academy, I discovered I was lousy at the parts of policing that required gentle, tactful diplomacy and other people skills I’d missed out on learning.
But I excelled at unarmed combat, and my obsessive brain meant I’d follow up every last lead until I finally made progress.
I eventually made detective and threw myself into my work, even picking up a few commendations.
But what nobody saw was that I was achingly lonely.
Those walls I’d built around myself in the group home left me unable to trust, unable to make friends, and I didn’t know how to dismantle them.
I became known for always being the last one still working.
Partly, it was my obsessive brain: I couldn’t quit until I’d caught my target.
But partly, I was burying myself in my work because I didn’t want to come home to an empty apartment.
Then my success caught the attention of Carrie Blake, head of the FBI New York office, and she encouraged me to join.
For the first time, I felt like I’d found a home.
An agent named Sam Calahan took me under his wing, and for years, I worked with him, Kate, and Hailey.
They accepted my weirdness and became my friends.
But one by one, they all found love and moved on.
First, Kate met Mason and moved to Alaska.
Then, even perpetual bachelor Calahan fell in love with the mathematician and hacker, Yolanda.
I could feel my new found family disintegrating, and I was terrified of being the last one left.
So when a position opened up at the Chicago office, I transferred.
And now here I was: burying myself in my work because it was all I knew how to do.
I’d found a friend in Caroline, but her kids meant she didn’t exactly have time to go for after-work cocktails.
And it wasn’t like I was going to meet a guy.
Even before the fire, I wasn’t much to look at.
I don’t have the curves men love: hell, I’ve barely got anything up top.
If a man is interested in me, he gets scared off as soon as he finds out I’m an FBI agent, let alone when he learns that I can kick his ass in a fight.
And if by some miracle we do get to a second date, I have to gently tell him about my leg.
Do you know what it’s like to dig up the courage to reveal something like that to someone you really like.
..and then have him stop calling you? After it happened three times in a row, I just stopped dating.
Plus, there was my obsessive nature. Sure, if I did have friends and romance, I’d cut back on work a little.
But I’m always going to be pushing myself and working late, and no halfway normal guy is going to be okay with that.
Sometimes, I think the only man I could be with is someone who understands.
Another workaholic, someone as obsessive as I am.
And where the hell am I going to find someone like that?