Chapter 6
Chapter Six
I left the gym limping more than walking.
The cool night air hit my sweat-damp skin and did absolutely nothing for the throbbing in my ribs. My right eyebrow pulsed in time with my heartbeat, and my shoulders felt like someone had poured concrete into the muscles and let it harden.
I should’ve beaten the guy.
Just like I should’ve beaten the guy before him.
Just like I sure as hell should’ve beaten JJ.
That one still stuck in my craw. JJ might have had me fair and square, but there was a part of me that still whispered I could’ve found a way. That I used to be the guy who could dig deeper, push harder, drag a win out of nowhere.
Lately? Every time I stepped into that ring, it felt like I was already behind before the bell ever rang.
If I kept this up, Cappy was going to start pairing me with guys half my size. Let me beat on some kid whose biggest worry was student loans and not whether his marriage was circling the drain.
I snorted under my breath and winced when the movement tugged at the cut above my eye. Yeah, that’d be a sight. Me, the sad old firefighter, finally getting a win on somebody who still got carded at bars.
I slid into my truck with a grunt and sat for a minute, hands loose on the wheel. My knuckles ached beneath the wraps. I should’ve taken them off in the gym, but I didn’t have the energy to do it now either. I couldn’t do more than sit here and breathe.
The interior smelled faintly of bad coffee, sweat, and takeout. My life in three scents.
I turned the key and pulled out of the lot, not really paying attention to the road at first. My body knew the way home. I could’ve driven it blindfolded.
Halfway to the house, my brain finally engaged enough to drag up something from earlier that day.
Simon had stopped by the station between calls.
He had leaned in the watch room doorway like he belonged there, big and solid and steady the way he always was. We’d shot the shit about nothing for a few minutes—weather, town gossip, one of his cases at Onyx Security and some idiot who’d tried to barbecue on a wooden balcony at the apartments.
Then he’d dropped it.
“Family barbecue next week,” he’d said. “Everyone’ll be there. Little Grandma, her sister Miss Gladiola, Florence, and more Averys than you can shake a stick at. Even the California crew are flying in.”
I’d made some noncommittal noise. Barbecues used to be my thing. Meat, beer, chaos. Chloe laughing with her sisters while I tried to stop Bella from talking Evie’s two boys into climbing the tallest tree in the neighborhood.
Now the idea made my throat tight.
“Trenda’s worried about you,” Simon had added, voice gentling. “She says you’re ghosting. And Bella…”
He’d paused then, like he was pulling out the big guns.
“Bella keeps asking where you are. Says Uncle Zarek doesn’t come to play anymore.”
That one had landed like a sucker punch.
Simon knew exactly what he’d done. I loved that kid like she was my own. Tiny hurricane, nine going on forty.
I told him I’d think about it. He’d clapped my shoulder hard enough to jostle my bones and left.
Now, driving down Chloe’s and my street with my ribs screaming every time I breathed too deep, I replayed that conversation on a loop. Maybe I should go. Maybe I owed them that much. Maybe I owed myself five minutes of pretending everything wasn’t broken.
It wasn’t until the bend in the street that I saw it.
The little blue Mazda sitting in my—our—driveway.
I damn near yanked the wheel hard enough to clip Larry’s mailbox. My foot hit the brake instead, and the truck lurched before I got it under control.
Chloe’s car.
My first thought was stupid and simple and pure: She’s here.
Joy shot through me so fast it almost knocked the wind out of me harder than JJ’s last takedown. I hadn’t felt anything that bright in over a year. It washed through my veins, hot and dizzying, like the first deep pull of oxygen when you come out of heavy smoke.
My second thought slammed right into it.
Stop it.
I didn’t get to feel this way. Not anymore.
I was bad for her. I knew that down to my bones, the same way I knew how fire behaved when the wind shifted. I was a walking mess of grief, anger, and guilt. She’d finally started sounding better. Lighter. Stronger.
I had no business dragging her back into my storm.
I should turn around. Drive away. Call her from the street and tell her I wasn’t home. Let her leave, let her keep healing wherever she’d managed to carve out a little peace.
But my heart did not give a shit what my head thought.
I pulled into the driveway and parked next to her car. My hands shook a little on the wheel. For a long second, I just sat there, staring at the familiar curve of her hood, the dent near the back where she’d gotten too close to a grocery cart three years ago.
Then I shut off the engine and forced myself out of the truck.
Every step toward the front door reminded me why this was a terrible idea. My ribs protested. My eyebrow throbbed. My shoulder pulled. I was bruised, taped together, and exhausted. The last thing she needed was to see me like this.
Too late.
I opened the door and stepped into the house.
“Chloe?” I called, my voice rougher than I intended.
No answer at first. For a heartbeat, panic flickered—what if something had happened? What if she’d come here and…
Then she stepped out of the bedroom into view.
I stopped breathing.
She just stood there in the hall, looking at me.
I drank her in like a man who’d been crawling through the desert and finally found water.
She was thinner than she used to be, but not in that hollowed-out, starved way she’d had right after we lost the second baby. Her dark hair fell around her shoulders, shiny and healthy. Her skin had color again, not that awful gray pallor that had haunted her for months.
Her eyes—God, her eyes. Brown and wide and so very bright. They didn’t look lost. Not like before. There was fear there, sure, and worry and about eight thousand things she wasn’t saying yet. But there was also something else I hadn’t seen in too long.
She looked… glad to see me.
For half a second, I let myself soak that in. Let myself believe it.
Then I remembered what I must look like.
Her expression shifted in real time—relief to something almost like joy, then straight into panic, then hard into concern.
“What in the hell happened?” she gasped, moving toward me before I could get my mouth working. “Were you attacked?”
Ah, shit.
Right. The face.
I’d forgotten about the butterfly bandage holding my eyebrow together. The faint purpling around my eye that was going to be a lovely shade of black by morning. The way my left arm hovered close to my ribs like I was trying to hold myself in place.
To me, it had already faded into background noise. To her, it was probably a flashing siren.
“I’m fine,” I said automatically.
“Bullshit, you’re not fine.” She stopped just short of touching me, hands hovering like she wanted to check everything but didn’t know where to start. “Tell me what happened.”
That was the last thing I planned on doing.
I shrugged with my good shoulder. “It’s nothing. I just… caught a bad step.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You ‘caught a bad step’ into someone’s fist?”
I didn’t answer.
Something in her face shuttered a little. Not completely. Just enough for me to feel it.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “You don’t want to tell me. Got it.”
The distance in her voice sliced right through my already busted ribs. I deserved it. Hell, I’d been trying to push her away for days. But wanting distance in theory and seeing her actually step back from me were two very different things.
“Chloe, wait,” I said. “Can we… sit? I need to talk. Just—would you listen?”
She folded her arms, and for a second I thought she was going to say no.
Then she exhaled and nodded once. “Fine. I’ll listen.”
I led the way to the couch, moving more carefully than I wanted her to notice. We sat at opposite ends, the space between us was huge and small at the same time.
Up close, I could see the faint shadows under her eyes. The ink smudge along the side of her hand. The way her fingers picked at a loose thread on a cushion before she stilled them by force.
“You stopped calling,” she said before I could start. “For a week. Then I show up, and you’re bruised and bleeding, and you won’t tell me why. I don’t know what to do with that, Zarek.”
God, I was a stupid mess.
“I know,” I said. My voice came out rough. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Chloe. None of this is on you.”
Her laugh was short and humorless. “Right. I just moved out. That’s all.”
“You moved out because you were drowning,” I said. “And because I was dragging you under with me.”
She flinched, and I hated myself a little more.
I scrubbed a hand over my face and immediately regretted it when my knuckles brushed the cut. “Look, the face… it’s nothing. I’ve been going to this place called Cappy’s.”
“I know about Cappy’s,” she said. “Big guy. Runs the boxing gym. Zarek, I grew up here too.”
“This isn’t just boxing,” I admitted, staring down at my hands. “It’s… MMA. Mixed martial arts.”
Her silence was louder than a shout.
“How long?” she asked finally.
I didn’t want to tell her. Didn’t want her to picture me face-down on a mat with some kid half my age tying me into knots. Didn’t want her to know I’d willingly climbed into another kind of fire just to feel pain I could hit back.
“Not long,” I lied. “A few weeks. I tried it. Got in over my head tonight. It’s done.”
Her breath hitched. “Done?”
“Yeah.” I forced myself to look at her. “I’m not going back. It was a dumb idea. I just… needed something.”
“You needed to get beaten up by strangers?” she demanded, anger finally sparking through the worry. “Zarek, you run into burning buildings for a living. You really thought you needed extra danger?”
“It’s not about danger.” I wished I had the words. “It’s… controlled. There are rules. There’s a ref. It’s a fight I understand.”
And it was not a hospital room where a doctor said “I’m sorry” and everything tilted sideways.
She stared at me for a long time. I could see the thoughts moving behind her eyes.
“Has this happened before?” she asked softly. “Like this? You coming home looking like this?”
I thought of JJ. Of the other guy. Of the soft tissue swelling nobody saw because I hid it under clothes and fake ease.
“No,” I lied, letting her think this was the only time. After all, I’d answered her question, it’d never been this bad.
She didn’t look convinced, but she let it drop. For now.
Instead, she glanced around the room. Her gaze moved over the spotless coffee table, the perfectly folded afghan, the vacuum lines in the carpet.
“Why is the house so clean?” she asked.
I blinked. “What?”
She gestured vaguely. “This. All of this. It looks like a model home. It’s not you. The Zarek I know doesn’t make the bed unless it’s laundry day.”
I frowned, really looking for the first time. It did look… organized. Weirdly so. The pillows lined up, everything in its place. The faint smell of lemon cleaner I hadn’t noticed earlier filling the air.
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I was just… keeping busy, I guess.”
“Keeping busy,” she repeated. “Like… obsessively vacuuming and lining up magnets busy?”
I bristled. “It’s not a big deal, Chloe. I just cleaned the damn house. You always said you liked it when it looked like this.”
“I liked it when we did it,” she said quietly. “On Saturdays. After you’d track mud through the kitchen and pretend you didn’t.”
That memory hit me square in the chest. I could see it—her hair up in some messy knot, music playing, her hips swaying as she wiped down counters while I pretended to complain but secretly loved every second.
I swallowed hard and looked away. “Do you want something to drink?” I asked abruptly, grasping for something normal. “Lemonade? I’ve got those bottles you like. The fancy ones with real sugar.”
I pushed up off the couch and my ribs screamed. A groan slipped out before I could stop it.
Chloe was on her feet in an instant. “Are your ribs taped?”
“What? No. They’re fine.”
She didn’t bother arguing. She just stepped closer—so close I could see the flecks of gold in her irises—and grabbed the hem of my T-shirt.
“Chloe—”
“Don’t.” Her voice shook just enough to warn me not to fight her.
She lifted my shirt carefully. Cool air hit bruised skin.
Her sharp inhale sounded like a stab.
“Well, that explains your groaning,” she murmured. “Zarek, this is bad.”
I glanced down. The entire left side of my rib cage was a mess of purpling shadows and angry red, the kind of bruising that promised I’d feel every breath for days.
“I’ve had worse,” I said automatically.
“That doesn’t make this okay,” she snapped.
I opened my mouth to tell her again that it was fine, that I’d walk it off like everything else. Before I could, she let my shirt fall and stepped back, squaring her shoulders like she’d made a decision.
“That’s it,” she said. “I’m staying.”
The words hit me like another punch. “Staying?”
“Here,” she clarified. “Tonight, at least. In the guest room.” She held up a hand when my heart leapt at the thought of her in our bed. “Guest room, Zarek. I’m not…” She swallowed. “I’m not ready for anything else. But you’re not patching yourself up alone.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t have to,” she cut in. “I want to. You’d do the same for me.”
She was right. I would. I had. Every time she’d come home from an appointment pale and shaking, every time she’d curled into me in the dark and tried not to cry, I’d held her and whispered that we’d figure it out.
Now she was standing in my too-clean living room, looking at my bruised ribs and busted face like I was the one who needed care.
I didn’t deserve it.
But I wanted it so badly it hurt.
“Okay,” I said finally, the fight going out of me. “Yeah. You can stay.”
Her shoulders loosened a fraction. “Good. Now, where’s your first aid kit? And don’t tell me it’s at the station.”
I gave a humorless huff. “Hall closet. Top shelf.”
She nodded and moved past me, the familiar scent of her shampoo trailing after her. For a second, I closed my eyes and just breathed it in.
My wife was here.
Not in a memory, not in a dream, not on the other end of a phone line I was too scared to call.
Here.
Staying the night.
To take care of me.
I watched her open the closet and reach for the kit, standing on her toes the way she always had, muttering under her breath when the box didn’t come down easily.
I knew I should tell her no. I knew I should insist she go back to her safe little apartment in Gatlinburg with its walls covered in drawings and its distance from me.
Instead, I eased myself back onto the couch and waited for her to come back, feeling something I hadn’t let myself feel in a very long time.
Hope.