Page 119 of The Promise Of Rain

Pacing in a circle, I held my head in my hands.

I didn’t want a hard life; a life of fighting and punching and drinking and crying my eyes out in the dark.

I couldn’t be my mother.

I just couldn’t.

There are girls they marry and girls they fuck.I’ll let you guess which one we are.

That’s how they saw me.

That’s how they treated me.

The rain beat down on my head, the coldest of cold showers, and I welcomed every fat drop that bounced off my shoulders and the top of my head.

Every drop that stung my face.

Every drop that plastered my dress to my body.

I needed to get away from Moose Lake; leave and never come back.

Deacon.

“Oh, God, Deacon,” I cried, shaking my head and covering my ears to dislodge the sound of Adam’s nose breaking, his grunt of pain when his tooth hit the floor.

Turning around to head home, I looked up in time to see Deacon step through my door and jog down the stairs.

As soon as he clocked me watching him, he slowed his pace, sticking his hands in his front pockets.

I stood and faced him.

He was everything to me, he always had been.

My mouth trembled.

Could I be with a man like him?A hard man to whom violence came so easily?

I’d worked so hard to build a life where I could be soft.

He stopped a few paces away.“Are you okay?”

“I don’t like what you did,” I began, my voice shaking.

“I know,” he replied evenly, dipping his chin to meet my eyes.

The whole ordeal replayed in my mind.

My body trembled with the echo of Deacon’s fist slamming into Adam’s face.

I looked to him for comfort even as I planned to run away from him as far away and fast as I could.

His soaked button-down shirt turned transparent and adhered to his wide chest.His jeans turned navy while his dark eyes, warm and concerned, fractured with pain old and new, locked on mine.

“Oh, God,” I cried, scrubbing at my neck once more before smacking the heel of my hand to my forehead.“I can still hear it!”

“Hear what, baby?”He stepped closer, that wide chest shielding me from the pelting rain.

“His nose,” I gagged and covered my mouth as the nauseating sound of cartilage crumpling under Deacon’s fist assaulted my mind.