Chapter 2 #2
The first one comes at me and I put everything I've got into a right hand that catches him across the jaw and snaps his head sideways.
For half a second I think, stupidly, that I can do this, that all those years of learning to take a beating taught me something about giving one back.
Then the second one hits me in the kidney from the side and the floor comes up to meet my knees.
After that it stops being a fight and starts being math.
There are too many of them and one of me, and I do the only thing my body knows how to do, the move it learned on the staircase, which is curl down around the soft parts and let the hard parts take it.
A boot finds my ribs and something gives low in my side with a wet crunch I feel more than hear, and the pain whites out everything for a breath, and then a fist splits my lip against my teeth and my mouth floods hot copper.
Knuckles catch my eye socket and the kitchen swims, the light smearing sideways, my own pulse loud and sick in my skull.
I fight anyway.
I keep trying to get up, keep swinging at legs, keep making them work for it, because some animal part of me won't lie down even when lying down is the only sane thing left.
"Stop fighting it, son."
My father's voice, from very far up, bored and almost gentle.
"Why are you even bothering? You're only making it worse on yourself. You always did. You never once learned that fighting back is what breaks you."
Another boot. Another rib. The taste of the floor.
And through the white noise, one clear thought, cold and steady as the lake outside: he's wrong.
He's got it backward. Fighting back never broke me.
The years I didn't fight are what broke me.
* * *
They stop when my father tells them to, not a moment before.
I lie on the kitchen linoleum I grew up on and I breathe in sips because full breaths light my whole side on fire.
My father crouches down to my level with his elbows on his knees, easy, patient, a man with all the time in the world.
"One week," he says softly. "You've got till the end of them to change your mind.
Go home, think about your sister in this house, think about how easy I could make all of it.
Then you call me and you say yes." He pats my cheek, once, and it's worse than the boots.
"You know the way back now. And you know I know the way to you. "
He stands. He steps over me like I'm a spill.
"Marit," he says. "Say goodbye to your brother."
I get my one eye open and find her still in the corner, both hands over her mouth, and above her fingers her eyes aren't flat anymore.
They're wide and wet, the little sister I left, drowning right in front of me and not allowed to reach.
I try to say something to her. All that comes out is blood.
She shakes her head, tiny, don't, and I understand it.
Don't make it worse. Don't let him see you care. Caring is what he uses.
Getting up is the hardest thing I've done in years.
My ribs scream when I get a hand under me, and my vision grays at the edges, and halfway up my arm buckles and I nearly go back down into the blood I left on the linoleum.
Nobody helps me.
My father watches with his hands in his pockets like a man waiting on a bus.
But I get one knee under me, and then a foot, and I drag myself up the side of the counter an inch at a time, because there's a sixteen-year-old girl in the corner who's spent years watching this house break everything that walks into it.
I need her to see one person get up off this floor and walk out on his own legs.
When I'm finally standing, swaying, one arm clamped across my ruined side, I look at my sister one more time and I put everything I can't say into it.
I'm coming back. Not for him. For you. Hold on.
I don't know if she reads it.
She's already pulled the flatness back down over her face, gone empty again, gone safe the only way she's got.
Then I walk out of that house on my own feet, because I'll be damned if I crawl out of it, and I get on my bike with a broken body and head to the only place I’ll call home.
The cold rides with me the whole way down.
Every mile that should warm me doesn't.
Every hour the ribs get louder, until breathing is a thing I do around the pain instead of through it.
I stop when I have to, sleep when I can, and somewhere in Georgia I catch my own face in a gas station bathroom mirror and understand there's no version of walking into Tindra's apartment where she doesn't see all of this.
Swollen mouth. Eye gone black and half shut. The way I'm holding myself around the middle.
I'll have to give her something. A story. A lie with enough truth in it to stand up.
And that's the part that guts me worse than the ribs, standing under a buzzing fluorescent light a thousand miles from the kitchen where my father crouched over me like a patient man.
Because they already know about her.
They know her name, her shop, where she sleeps, and who she sleeps with.
The only thing standing between Tindra and the exact horror this club was built on the ashes of is me, a lying prospect with a stolen name and two cracked ribs, who can't tell his brothers the truth without handing them a reason to kill him, and can't stay silent without handing my father a daughter to sell.
Marit or Tindra. Not both. Never both.
I get back on the bike.
I ride south into the heat that won't reach me, toward a locked door I'll finally be able to walk through, and I start building the lie I'll tell the only person I've never wanted to lie to.