Chapter 5
CHAPTER
FIVE
WILDER
Each time my knuckles touch the bag, the bruised and battered skin threatening to split open from the force behind each hit, I will myself to make the next harder.
Hits that hold so much power that my teeth chatter together, over and over again, attempting to bleed out every ounce of aggression that’s been festering inside of me for the last few days.
It’s still not enough.
It’s never fucking enough.
My vision blurs from sweat as it drips down my forehead, soaking my T-shirt completely through, and even though every muscle in my body is screaming for relief, I won’t allow myself to stop.
Not until I’m too exhausted to stand, too exhausted to even think.
Most nights, it’s the only way I get any sleep at all, sheer exhaustion taking over and quieting my head for a few hours, a reprieve from the thoughts that never seem to end.
Vaguely, I hear the sound of my phone ringing somewhere across the room, but I ignore it and focus on the bag, on pushing my body to the limit.
Hit.
Jab.
Hit.
“Fucking harder,” I grunt to no one but myself.
Jesus fuck, this goddamn phone.
The incessant ringing sounds again.
Huffing out a frustrated sigh, I stop the bag and flex my fingers as I cross the room and grab my phone off the counter.
When I see Camila’s name on the screen, I consider ignoring it like I have for the last few days. But if there’s anyone capable of making me experience any semblance of guilt, it’s her.
My stomach clenches, and my chest pulls tight when I think about how my fucked-up avoidance bullshit continues to hurt her, so I begrudgingly decide to answer.
Despite how much I’d rather turn the phone off and pretend she’s not the only person on the planet who gives a shit about me, I swipe my finger across the screen and put it to my ear.
“Thank God you finally answered,” she scoffs before I can even say hello. “I was going to send the cops over for a welfare check if you didn’t.”
“Do not send the cops to my house, Cam.”
She laughs lightly. “Do not tell me what to do, Wilder. You’ve been ignoring me, and you should know by now that’s not going to work. You’ve been avoiding me since you got back to New Orleans. I want all the details.”
Yeah, I have been avoiding her. Every time she calls, I send it to voicemail. I leave the texts unread. Half the time, I don’t even check my phone. She’s the one and only person who texts me anyway.
I don’t need to bring Cam down with me. I can’t, and I won’t.
Not when she’s clawed her way out of hell to a better life. I don’t want to be responsible for her worry and stress. It only makes the guilt worse.
I’m the grown-ass man whose life is a fucking dumpster fire.
“Not much to report. I go to work, come home and work out, eat, go to sleep. Repeat.” I sigh, dragging my hand through my sweat-drenched hair.
I can practically see her eyes roll through the phone.
“Wilder.”
“Cam.”
Her breath huffs into the speaker. “Are you okay?”
There it is.
The worry heavy like lead in her words. If this were anyone else, literally anybody, I’d tell them to fuck off and hang up.
But it’s Cam. And no matter how much I want to push her away, keep her as far away as possible from me, from all of the fucked-up shit in me… I can’t.
Mostly because she wouldn’t let me. After years of trying, it’s clear that it’s not happening.
We met when I was ten and she was eight.
It was the first time I’d been put in a group home. I was old enough to hate my mom after beginning to fully grasp her neglect and abuse, but still young enough to be terrified of new places, new people, new nightmares.
It wasn’t the first time family services had taken me. No, I was already a fucking pro at the age of ten.
But it was the first time I was put into a group home with other kids.
Cam… she was just this little thing. Mousy and quiet.
Her skin hung on her bones like she hadn’t eaten for weeks, and yet, she offered me her chocolate chip cookie at dinner because she said I needed it more than her, not knowing that it was my favorite or that that cookie made that first night bearable.
She was the only friend I ever had, until she was taken too.
Put in a foster placement home.
And I didn’t see her again for a long time, until the next time we both ended up back at the same group home again at the same time a few years later. Both older, more hardened to the fucked-up shit we’d been through since we last met.
She’s been here in my life ever since, no matter how much I tried to push her away. No matter how many times I said fucked-up things to her to get her to leave.
The only family I have is the girl who never gave up on me.
A sister, but not by blood.
“I’m good, Cam,” I say.
“Wilder, do not make me get on a plane from New York and come to NOLA just to beat your ass. Don’t you dare lie to me.”
I laugh. “First of all, you’re the most unintimidating woman on the planet. Second, you’re not leaving Lily with Brennan. He’d shit a fucking brick.”
“My husband is very capable, thank you very much,” she retorts, and I hear him say in the background, “Thank you for that, baby, but please do not leave me alone with this tiny terror.”
Her laugh fills the speaker, and fuck, if I had a heart? It would be squeezing beneath my ribs right now.
After everything we’ve been through, she’s found happiness. She has a family and a career that she loves, in a city that isn’t full of fucked-up memories that haunt her.
Cam deserves the life she’s built. The happiness that lives in her.
Out of the two of us, she’s the only one who has ever deserved anything good from life. Because she is good.
A heavy silence stretches between us before she adds, “I know this sucks, Wilder, and it’s not what you thought would happen, I get it.
You thought things would go differently, and I know you don’t want to be back home, but maybe this…
” She trails off, and suddenly, my throat feels tight, something foreign gathering at the base.
“Maybe this is what you need to finally stop running. Maybe being home, you can finally work on healing those broken things instead of trying to beat them into submission.”
I hate hearing this shit. I hate when she brings up the past like it’s something to conquer and not something to bury and try to forget ever happened.
I don’t want to even think about the shit I’ve been through. It’s bad enough I have to relive it in nightmares that plague me every goddamn night.
I don’t need to do it while I’m awake.
Clearing my throat, I unlodge the lump that’s settled, fighting the urge to hang up and toss my phone across the room.
“I hate being here, and I would do just about anything to get the fuck out of here and burn everything to the ground on the way out,” I finally say.
“I know. But you can’t do that. This isn’t something you can push down and bury with the rest,” she says quietly, and I hear the rocking chair in Lily’s nursery creaking as she speaks. “Maybe I can come for a visit, and you can show me your new office, and I can help you unpack?”
“No. Fuck no. Absolutely the fuck not. You’re not coming anywhere near this shithole,” I say, about both the entire goddamn city and the apartment, but she has no idea that I live not far from where we grew up.
In the worst part of the city.
Cam also has no clue that the only thing in my apartment is a mattress on the floor, a moving box I’m using as a nightstand, a dresser, and four boxes of clothes and random shit.
My entire life fits in those five boxes.
The psychologist that I was forced to see at the start of my professional career, once my coach had realized that my aggression went far beyond the ice, told me that my “trauma” is poverty PTSD.
He said it’s the reason that, despite multiple contracts, a decade in the NHL, and the sum of money sitting in my accounts, I still live the way that I do.
With the bare minimum.
I thought he was a fucking idiot, but apparently, he has a PhD, so that makes him the smart one in this scenario.
That’s the thing though. Guys like him? They’ll never understand the shit that Cam and I went through. That the millions of kids who are lost in a broken, fucked-up system go through.
People like him, people who have never lived this life, who have never experienced the gnawing pains of hunger in the pit of their stomach night after night or sleeping on a bus stop bench when their foster parent of the month decided they no longer wanted the burden of them, they will never fucking understand how it feels to suffer at the hand of your mother, the one who is supposed to protect and nurture you.
They’ll never fucking understand what it was like to not know where you’ll lay your head the next night or when you’ll eat again. They’ll never understand that no matter the amount of money you have, the bone-deep fear of having to live that way again will never go away.
It’ll always be there in the back of your head, a constant voice that never wanes.
There’s no amount of money or therapy that’ll ever cure it. That’ll ever make me feel secure enough to know that I’m not going to end up on the street again, desperate for food and shelter.
No matter what fancy name they put on it, with some medical jargon bullshit, they’ll never truly get what they’re preaching about.
So fuck that guy, and fuck what they think they know.
“Don’t tell me what to do, Wilder,” she repeats from earlier.
“I do what I want, and you should know this after how many years of friendship? I’m going to come visit, but I can wait until you’re settled.
Lily is going through a horrible sleep regression, and I’m barely hanging on.
I think she must be cutting new teeth or something. ”
“She wouldn’t be your daughter if she wasn’t giving you hell, Cam.”
She sighs. “So true. I love you, you know that, right? And if you tell me you need me, I’m there, no questions asked. I’ll strap Lily to my chest, and we’ll both be there in a heartbeat. She’d love to see her Uncle WyWy.”
A groan rumbles out of me, but I’m smiling, and thank fuck she can’t see it. “Jesus, Cam, I told you, do not call me that shit. Don’t even put that in her head.”
“She’s three months old, dickhead—she can’t understand me…
yet. But you know, if you keep ignoring me and pretending that we don’t exist, she’s just going to think of you as her rich uncle who sends her presents but doesn’t answer when she calls.
You wouldn’t want that, would you? You better answer the damn phone. ”
“Fine. I’ll pick up, alright?”
I don’t specify how often, but I’ll try. For them, I can try.
“Okay, well, I’ll let you go only if you promise to answer. And Wilder?”
“Yeah?”
She’s quiet for a beat. “Try and find peace while you’re there, okay? At some point, those demons are going to catch up with you, no matter how fast you run.”
After we hang up, I keep hearing her voice in my head over and over, the conversation on an annoying fucking loop as I walk back to the bag and pick up where I left off.
My chest heaves as the heavy body bag sways in front of me, and I suck in a breath as I reach out with bruised, aching knuckles to steady it.
Only then does my gaze catch the middle knuckle that’s split open, the wound raw and seeping with fresh blood trickling down the top of my hand.
I was so lost in my head that I didn’t even feel it happen.
So numb that I didn’t even register the pain from having finally accomplished what I set out to do.
Driving my body to a breaking point.
Except now, after the conversation with Cam, I can’t shut my brain off.
Not even as I fall into bed later and cover my face with the pillow, forcing my eyes shut.
The harsh, fucked-up reality is that I’m stuck in this goddamn city, the one I said I would never fucking come back to, surrounded by memories that are so suffocating I can’t breathe.
Streets I can’t drive down, places that I can’t even look at without being haunted by a living, breathing nightmare. Everywhere I go, it feels like I’m going to drown from the weight of all of the shit I’ve spent a decade running from.
And I’m going to keep running… because what’s the alternative?
Letting them bury me the fuck alive.