Total pages in book: 111
Estimated words: 105665 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 528(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 352(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105665 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 528(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 352(@300wpm)
“He told me he did something—a mistake, an accident. He begged me for help.” Chris grimaced. “I … I told him he needed to go to the police. If…” his voice shook “…if it was an accident, then there wasn’t anything to fear. Right?”
Chris met Jersey’s gaze with pleading eyes as though he needed her to agree.
“No.” She shook her head with sharp jerks. “Running over innocent people and then just … taking off is not okay. What if they weren’t dead? What if he could have called for help and saved them? But he didn’t!” Jersey’s heart hammered with anger. “He left them to die. That he did on purpose. That wasn’t an accident.”
Resting his elbows on his bent knees, Chris dropped his head into his hands. “He didn’t go to the police. He must have told his parents. And I know they helped him. His wealthy … influential parents. Then he just disappeared. We were supposed to be friends, but he just left.”
“Left?” Jersey whispered. “You didn’t turn him in? You didn’t go to the police?”
“No … no … I just …”
“You just what?” She shoved him.
He fell to the side, pressing his hand to the icy floor to keep from losing the rest of his balance.
Jersey shoved him again. “What is wrong with you? He ran over Dena and Charles. You knew, but you didn’t do one fucking thing?”
“Stop!” He held up his arm to protect his face. “I don’t … I don’t remember. Just stop! I-I just remembered my own name today! My name. Do you get that? Do have any idea what it’s like to really have nothing?”
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, eyes red with emotion. “I wasn’t just homeless. I was nameless. Unrecognizable, even to myself, in every way possible. Look at me!” He pointed to his face. “I …” his voice lost all fight, falling to a whisper “…I’m tired. And I hurt all over. I’m physically lost and emotionally hollow. So can you give me one night? And maybe when I’m not so cold, exhausted, and hungry … maybe I’ll remember more.”
Jersey had a mat. A roof. An occasional meal. And boxing … She had an outlet to fight her past, a method to defend her future—no matter how insignificant it seemed to most people. And even if her name was nothing more than a sad statistic, it was hers.
“One night?” she whispered, studying the vacant eyes of the lost soul in a battered body.
“One night.”
One night turned into one week. One week bled into the next month. She couldn’t kick him out over the holidays. Even Jersey wasn’t that awful. And he managed to scrounge a cake for Christmas, which was also her birthday. Her first cake since Dena and Charles died.
“Firefighter, huh?” Judd stared at Chris sitting in the office with George. Neither one talked to the other, but they shared a mutual fondness for coloring—two fucked-up adults armed with a shit-ton of issues and a broken palate of crayons to bring superheroes to life.
“Yup.” Jersey sprinted through a hundred sit-ups as Judd held her feet.
To keep Chris from getting killed for being at Marley’s without the willingness to step in the ring, Jersey told everyone that he used to box—truth—but he had to quit after he was badly burned in a fire. The PTSD ruined his marriage, and he ended up losing his job too. Truth? No one knew, not even Chris and Jersey. But it seemed like a solid story.
Chris possessed a patchy memory at best, a crazy man’s chattering about voices, and a Jekyll and Hyde personality. But Jersey let him stay because they shared a bond. That, and Chris agreed to do the shit work like cleaning and keeping an eye on George so Jersey could spend more time in the ring training for fights she’d never see, goals she’d never reach, and a future that most likely included jail time.
Everyone who hung out at Marley’s ended up doing time, and most were repeat offenders. Crime sort of rubbed off in that place.
“Ya fucking him?” Judd smirked. “He sleeps with ya, yeah? Does his wiener look like the rest of him?”
“I’m not going to say. If you want to know about his wiener, you’ll have to ask him out like a real gentleman. You’ll have to buy him dinner and give him some sort of intelligent conversation. Chris is smart.”
“Smart? Like he don’t says ain’t?” Judd coughed a laugh.
When she reached her hundredth sit-up, Jersey collapsed, resting her arm across her sweaty forehead. “Yeah. Smarter than all of us put together. When he’s not bat-shit crazy, he’s smart. Uses big words. I think he might even use them correctly.” Dena drilled Jersey on proper grammar. Six months wasn’t long enough to amass a large vocabulary, but it was long enough to get rid of ain’t and gonna.