Unspoken (The Woodlands) (10 page)

“Ouch.” When he shook his head at me, I asked, “What?”

“You and Adam are a lot alike.”

“How so?”

“You both have a hard time keeping it in your pants. I know what Adam’s problem is. He’s trying to live up to his father’s legacy. What’s yours?”

What was I doing with all those women? I hardly knew anymore. “Trying to forget my father’s legacy.” That was the best truth I could come up with. Sunk deep in the soft embrace of a woman or feeling the sick give of a man’s flesh against my fist were the best ways to forget that I spawned from the gene pool disaster that was my dad. I didn’t want to talk to Finn about the fact that the only way I knew how to cope was to fight or fuck. It sounded bad enough when I thought about it. Verbalizing it would only make me look like a two-dimensional caricature.

“You do one a month?” I asked, changing the subject.

Finn cocked his head and eyed me curiously, but answered my question. “Right now, but I hope to be doing four or more a month once I get a few crews running for me. No one else will show up before nine, so for the next three hours, it’s just you and me.”

Finn showed me the supports he’d jacked into place to hold the ceiling up when the walls came down. “Take the tip of the sledgehammer and poke it through the sheetrock carefully, like you’re doing a virgin. Look for wires or ducts. If there’s something there, leave it alone. If it’s all clear, bang the shit out of it.”

“The walls are female?”

“Anything you push a long hammer into is a female,” Finn replied, his voice fading at the end as he went down the hall.

When I swung the sledgehammer into the walls, the impact and resulting destruction felt awesome. Almost as good as hitting someone in the face. Definitely not as good as sex. I made quick work of the wall and bellowed for Finn.

“Geez, aggression much?” He inspected my work from the other side. I could see directly into the opposite room, only vertical slats of wood separated the two of us.

“Now what?”

“Now you knock down that wall.”

“The boards?”

“Yup.”

This demo was the shit. After knocking down the wall, I realized how much larger the house seemed. Before, it was a rabbit warren, with tiny closed-off spaces. Now, I could envision relaxing and having a beer without feeling as if I was going to be crushed like a can in garbage compactor.

We took down one more wall, which required the both of us because on the other side were appliances and stuff that had to be moved first.

“Are some of the houses you flip totally rotten? Like nothing can be salvaged?” I asked him as we wrestled a refrigerator away from the wall.

“No, most houses just need cosmetic work. A new bathroom. A new kitchen. Sometimes new flooring.”

“But sometimes the house’s foundations are destroyed?”

“Some homes have termites or mold or stuff and require some structural work, but there are few that can’t be salvaged.”

“But some of them, right, should just be razed to the ground?” I pressed.

“No, Bo, most of them can be salvaged,” Finn said quietly, seriously. “Almost all of them can. They may have been put together by shoddy builders, but they can almost always be saved.”

That was in Finn’s estimation, but I heard what he was trying to say, just as he had accurately interpreted the meaning of my question.
Am I salvageable?

Chapter Nine

AM

I
RECEIVED
ANOTHER
NASTY
HATE
note from Clay and avoided campus for the rest of the week. The commons confrontation left me feeling uncertain and a little afraid, which I absolutely hated. My only solace turned out to be biology. Bo acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I was still acutely aware of his presence next to me in the classroom, but his broad shoulders acted like a buffer between me and the rest of the students. No whispers reached us. No cutting remarks were cast my way. He waited for me outside the classroom and walked me down to our shared table. After class, he escorted me out.

Never once did he bring up the commons incident and other than his watchfulness before, during, and after class, his treatment of me was quite ordinary. Whatever rumors he’d heard about me, he seemed to be saying silently, mattered not at all.

I could feel myself thawing toward him, yearning for him. I knew it was dangerous, but I needed something sweet in my life. If I didn’t act on my longings then I’d be safe. When he turned to share a smile at me over the nonstop innuendos during the discussion of fertilization and pollination, I felt hot and prickly. During the discussion of common parasites, we both grimaced. Bo whispered that there wasn’t a lot that put him off his feed, but tapeworms in the stomach might be it. He was charming and
decent
, and I could feel myself weakening with every minute that passed. But he also didn’t flirt with me, smell my hair, or make a suggestive comment, as he had in the past. More than once, I caught him staring hard at the lecture stage as if he were engaged in some internal struggle.

At the end of the week, Ellie met me for lunch at our usual place off campus with breathless news. “You want to see Bo fight?”

My eyes must have gotten as big as saucers because Ellie laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

As we stood in line to order, Ellie whispered the details to me. “I heard there’s a fight tonight in the warehouse district. Someone is supposed to text me directions.”

“Do you have to pay to get in?”

“When Tim and I went, the cover was twenty-five dollars per person and then there are bets made inside. I didn’t bet, but Tim did.”

I whistled. “Wow. That seems steep. No one complains?”

“Not yet, I guess. Who wants to be the person that shuts something like this down? It would be worse than your ordeal.”

“Worse than me?” I grimaced. “Thanks.”

“You know what I mean.” She lightly punched me on the shoulder. I did. No one welcomed that type of treatment. The guys on campus would be particularly rough. I think fight night was responsible for at least fifty percent of them getting laid.

“So I take it Bo said nothing about it in class yesterday?”

“No. We haven’t really talked about anything other than class stuff lately.”

“Like?”

“What’s more gross—tapeworms in the stomach or parasites in the ear?”

Ellie shuddered. “So glad I took Rocks for Jocks.”

“Yeah, that might have been a good decision.”

“So you and Bo, in class?”

“There just isn’t a ton of time to talk. Plus, he’s got more moods than a preteen who just got her period.”

“Really? I would never have guessed that.”

“I’ve decided that flirtatious is Bo’s default mode and his other setting is broody.”

“Still want to go?”

“Hell yeah.” When I was a kid, I’d asked my mom why the moths kept moving in droves toward the light, almost hugging the exterior despite witnessing the death of their fellow insects. Mom said that sometimes temptation was just too great to resist. Zzzzap. That was me. Bo was the light and I was the dumb moth.

Ellie was prattling about the details of the fight she’d gone to with Tim. We had to stick together, she said, because mini fights could break out in the crowd.

“Do you bring something to drink?”

“They don’t sell it, and Tim brought a flask when we went. No one’s doing a bag check there.”

I’
M
NOT
SURE
HOW
B
O
SPOTTED
Ellie and me in the crowd. People were packed into the space. I had a hard time believing something this well attended could remain a secret, but we were told nothing illegal was going on here. This was private property, and we were all invited to the party. The cover was actually a donation, per the bouncer’s instructions.

A stamp in the form of a clenched fist was slapped on the backs of our hands, but we were warned that if we left, we would have to repay the money if we wanted to come back inside. The point of the stamp was never explained, but I wasn’t going to ask anyone with arms the size of my thighs and no apparent neck why I needed a mark on my hand.

The fight was being held in the basement of a restaurant in the East Village. The owner was a friend of the guy who set up the fight and more than one underground shindig took place here, although never more than once in a month or even once every six months. The fights required some luck and coordination. Or at least that was what I gleaned from listening to the crowd around me.

I didn’t know when Bo was fighting or even if he was fighting. It was only rumor. Even tonight, inside the building, there were just hopeful mutterings. But rumor became reality when he walked in and his name was carried on a wave of whispers from one end of the long narrow room to the other. I saw him almost immediately, the bangs of his messy blond hair peeking out from the front of his sweatshirt hood. The basement was lit by a string of bare lightbulbs strung like hormonally enhanced Christmas lights along the sides of the rock walls. Toward one end, a number of what looked like halogen lights hung from the ceiling, brightly illuminating a single space. That must be the fight ring.

It smelled musty and earthy, as if we were in a cave rather than underneath a ritzy establishment. I wondered what the patrons upstairs, in their pearls and worsted wool, would think if they knew that behind the wine racks and cheese rounds, two guys planned to beat each other bloody. Probably they’d be thrilled. Maybe everyone knew and this was part of the cachet?

Ellie had found a barrel we could share against the wall. While it was farther away from the center where the fight would take place, the barrel allowed us elevation and a heightened sight line. Or, in simpler terms, we could just see a heck of a lot better by standing on the barrel. I tracked that blond head moving in and out of the crowd until it stopped right before me and the barrel. My legs gave out and I sat down before I fell off.

Bo had on a zipped hoodie with the hood flipped up. The sketchy lighting and hood made his appearance seem nefarious. Maybe that was the point, though. For some reason, I felt compelled to reach up and push his hood off. It was a brazen, forward act. He looked at me with surprise I’m sure was echoed in my own eyes. I’d never initiated any contact with him, I realized, not physical or emotional. I was always reacting to him, and he was always pushing me.

He raised his hand to capture mine, but not because he wanted me to stop pushing off the hood. No, he held my hand in his and used it to draw me down from the barrel. I didn’t see who was with him or how Ellie was reacting. In spite of the crowd, with him only inches away, we seemed cocooned from everyone else.

“I didn’t know you were into this sort of thing,” he murmured. He placed my hand on his chest and leaned toward me, one hand bracing against the top of the barrel right next to my thigh and another against the wall. The vibrations of his words teased me. The heat of his body warmed me. Desire took control of my body and I watched as my fingers clasped his sweatshirt zipper and pulled downward, just a bit. Just enough so that my hand could touch his shirt, so I could feel the flex of his muscular pectorals against my fingers. I ran my fingertips over the ridged cotton of his tank. His muscles flexed and released when I kneaded my fingers against his chest.

“I don’t know if I am into this sort of thing,” I said hoarsely, looking at my hand as it followed the rise and fall of his chest. I was mesmerized, enthralled, by his simple act of breathing. A cough sounded, and I was jolted out of my mini trance. Snatching my hand away, I noticed Ellie staring at me, her mouth forming a comic little O.

I pulled my hands together and clenched them front of me, grateful the darkness hid the heat in my cheeks. Bo leaned down to my ear. His breath was warm and his voice, deep and strong, raised the hair on my neck. “We’ll have to test the hypothesis. I’ll ask again when it’s over.”

As he drew back, it felt like his lips dragged across the top of my lobe, and a shiver shook me from head to toe. He removed himself slowly, one arm pushing upward and off the barrel. I looked at him and bit my lip, trying to suppress any dumb statements. He grinned and brought his thumb up to draw my lower lip out of my teeth and rubbed his thumb over the abused area. My lip plumped up under his ministrations.

I wondered for a breathless, endless second whether he was going to kiss me, here in front of all these people, but he didn’t. Instead, he motioned for Ellie to get down from the barrel. Bo introduced us to his two male friends, whom I’d barely noticed. Finn, whose hair looked black as tar, and Mal, dark and serious, both gave us chin nods of acknowledgment.

Bo pulled me behind him through the crowd. Ellie grabbed the belt loop on my jeans and we proceeded forward like a mini conga line.

Bo’s progress was unimpeded as person after person stepped aside. We reached the makeshift ring that was simply movie theater metal stands at four corners with rope tied between them. The posts were unstable, which was probably why there was a large guy stationed at each one to shove the crowd back. Bo led us over to one corner manned by a bald man with a dark goatee.