Chapter 9 - Jonah - Past
nine
Jonah - Past
A BLOODIED ANGEL.
I wasn’t sure how Becca convinced me to come to this. Crowds weren’t my thing, neither were drunks or violence, but when she’d mentioned that Archer’s group always came, I couldn’t fight the weird pull at the thought of seeing him again.
I was no closer to understanding the strange feelings now than I was that first day in the diner. All I knew was that when he was around, I found it difficult to focus on anything else.
Becca noticed, of course, but I shut her down immediately when she tried to bring it up, so she’d taken to simply rolling her eyes at me instead when she noticed me staring.
It’s not that I liked him. I didn’t even know him. He just had the kind of presence that demanded attention. Without even trying. It pissed me off.
There were far too many people here, so it wasn’t like I could even find him if I tried. Which I was definitely not doing. Not at all.
Becca pulled me by the arm through the crowd. She seemed to be looking for someone too, but I had no idea who that could be. If she found them, then I was leaving. I shouldn’t have come here anyway.
We parted our way through all the excessive shouting, smoking, drinking, and the bodies grew denser the closer we got to what must have been the fighting ring. I hated it. Every time someone pushed against me, I wanted to give them their own fight if they were that fucking excited about it.
Someone to my left shoved me hard, and just as I was about to turn and shove them back—fuck the consequences—my eyes were drawn to the ring. Like a magnet. Like a homing beacon. An irrefutable pull I was helpless to defy.
It was him.
It was his fight.
Breath evaded my lungs as I took him in.
He was shirtless. It was the first time I’d seen him without that old worn-out leather jacket, not to mention shirtless.
I could see more of him than I ever had.
All that tan skin, bathed in the glow of the barrel fires, which made the sweat running down his abs look like molten gold. Fuck. Of course he had abs.
He also had more tattoos, just as I’d expected, over his arms, his chest, his back.
Where else? My eyes were particularly drawn to the scorpion on the right side of his lower abdomen.
There was a tattoo of a knife on the left, the handle positioned just above his hip, and the blade followed the natural contour down and inward until it disappeared beneath the waistband of red boxers sitting slightly higher than his low-hanging jeans.
That weird fluttering feeling I was getting familiar with in my gut transformed into an anvil.
He was a mess—bloody nose and knuckles, covered in sand, scrapes, and bruises—but he was smiling. Smiling like this was exactly where he wanted to be, and he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Dex Weller fought like he had nothing to lose, and suddenly I was wondering if that was true.
The guy he was fighting was bigger. He looked meaner. But there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Dex had this fight. There was a spark in his eyes, an unhinged madness that made up for any difference in size. He knew it too.
Then his eyes met mine and I couldn’t remember how to breathe.
Look away, I willed him. Focus and win this.
Unfortunately, whatever this magnetic pull was between us, it didn’t include telepathy. Because he didn’t look away, so he didn’t see the hit coming that had his head whipping back and his body falling heavily into the damp sand.
Fire. Burning. Blazing. Raging. Scorching.
It started in my chest and filled my veins like molten metal. My skin was hot, and my head was empty, and all I saw was red. Red. Red. Red.
His opponent didn’t stop, was right there on top of him. Straddled him. Rained down pain over his beautiful face.
Get up. Get up. GET UP.
“GET UP!” I was screaming before I even realized, shouldering my way to the front of the ring. Further still until a hand yanked my hood to hold me back.
“Where are you going, idiot?” Becca hissed in my ear.
“GET UP!” I screamed at him again.
Punch after punch. But he wasn’t done. I knew he wasn’t.
Unlike Dex, this fuckhead was wearing a shirt, and Dex dropped the guard he held over his face to grasp at the fabric.
Instead of trying to haul the guy off, he did just about the last thing I would have expected.
Using his new hold, he yanked the fuckhead down at the same time as he pushed himself up off the sand—just enough to lick a wet stripe over the guy’s cheek.
The dumbfuck recoiled, as if that action had hurt him more than any punch to the gut. He tried to pull away, but Dex kept his hold until enough distance had passed between them that he could twist his body to slam the guy down into the sand beside him.
Dex’s face was bloody, but he was still smiling. It wasn’t a nice smile; it was unhinged. Deranged. Manic. Like he was high on the pain. I wasn’t sure how anyone could find it in them not to be afraid of him when he looked like that. Like something certain. Something inevitable. A bloodied angel.
Limbs twisted. Fists landed. Sand sprayed up as the crowd cheered and hollered, and I understood for the first time in my life why people enjoyed watching violence.
I leaned closer. A magnet. An invisible rope. Pulling me to him. Each time Becca yanked me back by the hood, scolded something in my ear. I couldn’t hear her. I couldn’t hear anyone. Only the sound of every hit inflicted upon Dex as if it affected me personally.
On and on it went until my fists ached from clenching them so tight and the match was finally called.
Mason, the fuckhead, was called as the winner.
“That’s bullshit!” I screamed, stepping forward again closer to the ref.
Becca yanked me backward, this time grabbing my arm and dragging me away. My eyes found Dex as he spat blood onto the sand, and someone I didn’t quite recognize approached him looking furious. Who was that? What were they to him?
“Jonah!” Becca snapped, taking my jaw in her hands and physically forcing me to look at her.
My face turned in her direction, but my eyes still attempted to stay on him.
“Jonah!” she barked again, her voice dropping, and I finally looked at her.
She looked bewildered. “What the actual fuck is wrong with you tonight? I swear you’re one step away from getting into your own fight. Is that what you want?”
I tried to turn my head away.
“Is. That. What. You. Want?” She didn’t release her hold on my face, and I grunted in frustration.
“No.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I don’t know, okay?” I shrugged her off me.
“Maybe this was a bad idea. Let’s just go.”
I went to argue, but she silenced me with a glare.
I rolled my eyes at her. So what if I got a little heated?
Didn’t mean anything. That’s what this kind of sport did to people.
That’s why people liked it. Her expression dared me to talk back to her, and with another groan I tamped down whatever this pull was to go in the other direction as I followed her away.
Before we got far, some girl from one of our classes called out to Bee, taking her attention away from our exit. I didn’t remember her name, but she seemed very excited to see Becca. She ran over with a beer in hand and practically hung off my best friend. Who the fuck was this bitch again?
I glared at them talking as if they were close. They weren’t. Not like me and Becca were. All thoughts of the fight extinguished until, from the corner of my vision, I caught a big figure making his way through the crowd.
It was the fuckhead. He was scrubbing at his cheek as if he were trying to rid it of a disease.
“That stupid fucking cocksucker. I’ll fucking kill him if he comes near me again. You hear me?” he said to another large man—probably equally a fuckhead—to his right. “I’ll kill him.”
RED.
That feeling—so big and ugly and uncontrollable inside me—twisted, like a beast attempting to break out of a cage. Clawing. Lunging. Thrashing. It was breaking free. I was powerless to hold it back as it burst out of me, swallowing me whole as it did.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
My heart thudded in my ears, louder with every step he took toward me. I couldn’t think clearly. It was stupid. I knew it was stupid, and yet… I still did it.
My body moved on its own, leg swiping out, foot meeting foot, and the next moment he was crashing into the gravel with a grunt.
There was a beat of silence as I stared. He turned and stared back at me. His friend stared too. So did Becca and what’s-her-name. All of us stared like idiots in stunned silence.
“Did you just fucking trip me?” he growled as he came out of his shock.
Unfortunately, I was slower to recover from mine.
He was up on his feet again with a fist full of clothing—my clothing. He yanked me toward him. I did the only thing I seemed capable of these days and glared. I wouldn’t cower to this homophobic piece of shit. Instead of responding, I spat on him.
“Wipe that one off too, fuckhead.”
I expected the punch that followed, but I still couldn’t have braced myself for the white-hot pain of Mason’s fist. Searing. My brain shook in my skull. I’d never been punched before.
“Jonah!” Becca shrieked behind me.
He shoved me backward. My leg flared with pain as my ass met the dirt. Through blurry vision, I glared.
“Stop fucking looking at me like that,” he growled, lifting a boot, no doubt to stomp or kick or whatever else he deemed suitable. Still, I glared.
Rather than his boot coming down on me, Mason grunted as a body slammed into the side of him, taking him down like the sack of shit he was. Then Dex fucking Weller rained down pain twice as furious as anything he’d delivered during their fight.
It all spiraled pretty quickly from there. Mason’s friend got involved, trying to pull Dex off, which got Bryce involved, which got someone else I didn’t recognize involved, and then another person, and another, and pretty soon it was an all-out brawl.
The crowd dispersed, people running away from what quickly became more than they’d signed up for.
Becca pulled at my arm, attempting to hurry me away, but I pulled back, away from her.
My feet wanted to take me in a different direction, but she pulled again, and fuck was she strong when she wanted to be.
We scrambled away just as the sirens and red and blue lights came into view, running through the surrounding forest as fast as my limp would let me.
“Fucking spill,” Becca demanded as she slapped a bag of frozen peas to the side of my face.
I winced and glared at her, but she remained unperturbed.
“What the fuck were you thinking tripping Mason fucking Bates?”
I shrugged, and she pressed the peas harder to my face as punishment.
“He said homophobic shit,” I confessed after an argument that took place entirely through glaring at each other. I wouldn’t specify who he was saying homophobic shit about, though. That was irrelevant.
Her expression softened a little at that. “Yeah, he’s an asshole. But you can’t just start a gang war because he said something fucked up, Jonah. You aren’t violent like that. Are you?”
I looked away.
“Are you?” she repeated in a sterner voice.
“No. I don’t know why I did it. Okay? I just… I had to do something.”
Becca flopped back on the bed beside me with a sigh.
I did the same. Side by side, we lay looking up at the ceiling, at the shitty glow-in-the-dark stars my mom had put up there after I’d begged her for them.
They’d dulled over the years, or maybe they’d always been that shitty and I just hadn’t noticed when I was so pleased she’d finally given in and got them for me to stop my nagging.
There were a few long minutes of silence before she broke it. “Well, that wasn’t how I expected the night to go.”
After a beat, I heard her snicker, and despite trying to hold in my own, I failed. The next moment we were both laughing so hard my stomach hurt.
“I swear it looked like Bryce was flying for a moment,” she cackled, and I groaned as my lip split again. “No, but actually…” She turned on her side to face me, and I mirrored her. “What the fuck was that, Jonah? Dex literally came out of nowhere to save you after just getting his ass beat.”
I scowled. “He didn’t get his ass beat. That fight was clearly Dex’s win.”
“He only had a chance at the end because he licked the guy, JJ.”
“So? That fuckhead didn’t have to react like he was poison or something. Why? Because he’s gay?” I paused for a moment, not able to meet Bee’s eyes as I asked, “Is he gay?”
“Dex? Yeah. That’s not a secret. I don’t think he’s ever tried to hide it from anyone.”
Okay. So Dex Ice-Eyes Weller was gay. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Didn’t matter to me at all. I didn’t care, and it wasn’t like it affected me in any way whether he was or wasn’t. So yeah. Not sure why I even asked, really.
“Jonah.” Bee frowned. “I told you to stay away from him.”
“I’m away!” I snapped back a little too quickly. “Haven’t even said a word to him.”
“But you want to.” Not a question but a statement. I needed to defend myself. I opened my mouth to speak, but she beat me to it. “Oh, shut up!” The bag of peas in her hand smacked against my bruised cheek again.