Four
KATRINA
PRESENT DAY
It was another Tuesday evening in anger management class.
Six weeks into my eight-week course, I couldn’t wait for it to be over.
The room always smelled faintly like stale air, dry erase markers, and whatever fast food someone had eaten before they walked in.
The folding chairs scraped against the floor every time someone shifted, and the fluorescent lights hummed overhead.
But tonight felt heavier than usual. There was a weight sitting on my chest I couldn’t shake, because it was Dane’s last night.
He’d started classes two weeks before I arrived, which meant after tonight, he was done.
Normally, he got there before me, but I kept glancing up at the clock, wondering where he was.
The hands ticked away, and still no Dane.
I had just about given up hope he was going to show when his large frame strode into the room with a minute to spare.
Smiling like he knew exactly what he was doing to me, he took the seat next to mine.
Then he leaned into my personal space and whispered so only I could hear him, “Worried I wasn’t going to make it tonight? ”
It wasn’t really a question. It was more like a statement, because somehow Dane had gotten good at reading me.
Too good, honestly. I shifted in my chair and tried to act like my heart hadn’t jumped when he walked in.
“I knew you’d be here. You can’t pass the class if you don’t show up for the last day,” I replied, flustered and irritated with myself for sounding that way.
“Liar,” Dane said, smirking at me. His shoulder brushed mine as he settled back in his chair. “I saw the fear written all over your face.”
The instructor cleared his throat. “Let’s get started,” he said, his booming voice filling the room and cutting through the low chatter.
He moved toward all of us, passing out papers as he walked by.
We were sitting in rows that formed a half-moon around his podium, all of us pretending we wanted to be there.
“Tonight we are going to pair up for this exercise. Look to your left. That will be your partner for this session. The two of you will work together to read each scenario on the sheet I just handed to you. Assess the situation and respond with how you’d handle it, leaving all the aggression you would have felt six weeks ago aside.
Use the tools we’ve learned in class and find a solution that would solve the problem without escalating it out of control.
When we’re done, each of you will present what the issue was and how you were able to amicably resolve it.
I looked at Dane and smiled. I knew we’d be able to ace this exercise.
Over the weeks we’d spent sitting next to each other in that awful room, I’d learned his situation—the one leading to jail and landing him in this class—wasn’t because he couldn’t control his anger like most of the people there.
Dane had a four-year-old daughter and a teenage stepson.
He’d come home from work one day to find his stepson and his friends sitting at the kitchen table with guns resting on the glass beside the drugs that had no business being in the home, especially while his daughter sat in the living room just feet away.
Dane, exhausted from a long day at work, had grabbed his stepson by the collar and slammed him into the wall.
An argument followed, loud and ugly, and Dane threw his stepson out the front door, but not before threatening the other teens and sending them running from the house.
See, Dane was very protective of his daughter, Lyla.
He’d been a single dad when he met Emily, his second and soon to be former wife.
He had filed for divorce right after his arrest. Dane’s first wife, Lyla’s mother, had passed away when Lyla was only eleven months old after a fatal misdiagnosis made by an emergency room doctor at the regional hospital.
Unable to save his wife, he’d become fiercely protective of his daughter.
It was an endearing quality, one which attracted me to him even more when he told me about it.
“Want to grab a drink after class, maybe shoot some darts?” Dane asked, keeping his voice low while the instructor moved on to the next pair.
My good sense told me I should say no. Not just because I was married, although that should have been reason enough, but because my attraction to him would have me doing things I shouldn’t.
I knew it. I felt it in the way my stomach tightened when he looked at me too long.
But there I was, anyway, nodding my head and agreeing before the smarter part of me could stop it.
Just as I expected, Dane and I mastered the assignment.
We bounced ideas back and forth easily, finding answers that sounded calm and reasonable even though neither of us had always been good at it in real life.
The instructor shook Dane’s hand as we walked out the door, congratulating him on successfully completing the course.
I felt a twinge of sadness watching it happen, knowing next Tuesday I’d walk through those same doors and not find Dane sitting next to me.
Later, I tossed my dart at the board and watched it land nowhere near the area I’d been aiming for.
The bar was dim and noisy, the kind of place where neon beer signs glowed against the walls and old school rock music fought with the sound of people laughing over cheap drinks.
Dane stepped up beside me, relaxed and sure of himself, and tossed his dart like it weighed nothing.
It hit dead center in the bullseye. “How do you do that every time it’s your turn?
” I asked, staring at the board like it had personally betrayed me.
“I’m just good,” Dane replied, that mischievous twinkle lighting up his eyes. He leaned one hip against the edge of the table and looked at me like he was already planning trouble. “How about we play the next round and the winner gets a wish the loser has to fulfill. Nothing’s off the table.”
I knew Dane was as attracted to me as I was to him.
It was there in the way his eyes lingered, in the way he stood close enough I could feel the heat coming off him, in the way the air between us seemed to ignite every time we were close to each other.
The thought of nothing being off the table excited me and scared me at the same time.
Could I satisfy his request if it was something I lusted for?
“That’s a sucker’s bet,” I laughed trying to keep my voice light.
“You obviously play ten times better than I do, so it’s a guarantee I’d lose. ”
“I’ll use my left hand to even the odds,” Dane teased.
“Yeah, I think I’ll pass. If it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck.” I laughed, but deep down I knew declining was the easiest way to keep us both in check. It was the only way to keep us from regretting a bad decision fueled by lust and alcohol.
After several rounds of darts, we sat at a small table near the back, our drinks sweating against the wood.
The conversation came easily between us, too easily, like we’d known each other longer than a few weeks in a court-ordered class.
Dane took a slow drink and then looked at me over the rim of his glass.
“So, you never said what caused you to end up in those classes.”
I thought about my answer. I could be honest and pray he wouldn’t look at me differently, or I could lie and keep the ugliest parts of myself tucked away where they belonged.
In the end, I went with honesty because he had been honest with me when I asked him the same question.
Dane sat quietly, listening while I explained how my piece of shit husband had cheated on me, and how, in desperation to keep him in my life, I had allowed him and his side piece to move into my home with me and our two-year-old daughter.
It wasn’t my finest moment or the best decision I could have made, but I was desperate to hold on to my marriage.
Our living arrangements were unconventional, which was a nice way of saying completely fucked up.
My daughter and I slept in one room, his girlfriend’s two sons slept in another, and the two of them slept on the two sofas in my living room.
They remained there for nine long, suffocating months, until I could not take the tension, noise and constant intrusion anymore; after that, he got her an apartment and drifted back and forth between the two places, splitting his time and his life between us.
“Are you shitting me?” Dane looked me dead in the eyes, and I saw the sympathy resting behind them. I hated that look. I hated seeing pity on a face I wanted looking at me for completely different reasons. “That’s kind of fucked up, Katrina,” he said.
I answered in a quiet voice, staring down at the ring of water my glass had left on the table.
“I know. I don’t know how I let myself get to this point of codependency. I used to be a strong, independent woman, but over the years, I bent to his will. Little by little, I stopped recognizing myself. I hate myself for it.”
Dane nodded slowly, but his face had changed. The teasing was gone. “So you finally toughened up and gave him a swift kick in the ass out the door, and that’s how you ended up in class?”