Playing Patience

Page 63

Without thinking, I jumped. I latched onto his dad’s arm and held on tight as he tried to shake me off. Once I released his arm, I jumped in front of Zeke and stared into his dad’s eyes.
He was a big man, much bigger than my own, and he smelled awful, like beer and cigarettes. His grease-covered shirt was too tight and his hair was disheveled like he’d just woken up.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
His hot breath struck my cheek and I accidently breathed it in. The smell made my stomach roll and I thought for sure I was going to throw up all over him. The room spun as fear smashed into me, but I’d known fear many times in my life and I wasn’t going to let it get the best of me, not when Zeke needed me.
“Don’t you dare hit him again!” I growled back at him.
My voice surprised me. How was I able to stand up to this stranger? How was I able to get past the deep-set fear that had taken over me? When faced with my dad I couldn’t do this, and I knew how far I could go with him. I didn’t know this man from a hole in the wall, yet I stood toe to toe with him and dared him to touch Zeke.
He towed over me and his chest bumped into my face. From behind me I could hear Zeke coming to and getting up from the floor.
“No, snowflake,” he said through a bloodied lip. “Just let it go and get out of here.”
Just like that, so many things made sense now—the bruises I’d seen on him, his anger toward everyone, his quickness to fight another human being. Just as I had my defense mechanisms, Zeke had his. He had shields just the way I did.
Our lives weren’t so different. Abuse was abuse no matter its form. One wasn’t easier than the other; either way it hurt. Either way it scarred the person on the receiving end. It scarred them and broke them into tiny pieces. Zeke and I were both broken parts of a whole person and no matter what piece you put where, it would fit, because we fit. I’d always known it. We fit.
“Mind your own fucking business, little girl,” his dad said.
And then he pushed at my chest with big, meaty fingers and knocked the breath out of me just that easily. Still, I stood my ground.
“You’re not going to touch him again!” I said with more strength than I felt.
The room spun when the back of his hand connected with my cheek. I landed face first into the foul, shag carpeting. There was a scuffle behind me, so I quickly turned onto my back and tried to get up. My mouth filled with blood and the room continued to spin. Zeke had to be one tough guy if he went through this all the time.
When my vision finally cleared, I looked up to see Zeke beating his father unmercifully. His dad didn’t give up and went back in with a punch to his cheek. The thin, paneling wall cracked when Zeke slammed into it, but he shook it off and kept punching his dad in the stomach and face over and over again.
His dad caught him in the stomach and I heard the air squeeze from his lungs as he fell to his knees.
“Come on, you little fucker.” His dad baited him. “Is that all you got? I bet your little bitch hits harder than you!”
Zeke crawled from the floor and went on the attack again. He threw punches so fast his hands started to blur. Once his dad fell to one knee, Zeke attacked harder and then out of nowhere, he reached over for the guitar his mother bought him and brought it up over his head. Things started to move in slow motion.
I saw where this was going and I heard myself scream for him to stop, but before the words left my lips, he brought the guitar down and slammed it into his dad’s back. There was a loud crack and then tiny pieces of guitar flew everywhere.
He brought it up again and this time he brought it down and cracked the already broken guitar over his dad’s face. His dad fell hard and the trailer shook.
Zeke pulled back a broken piece that still had the strings attached. The larger, shattered part of the guitar hung above his unconscious and bloodied father. He looked down at his guitar and then he looked down at the heaping pile of asshole he’d managed to knock out. Sorrow seeped into his big, brown eyes and then he looked over at me. He held the pieces of the guitar up as if to show me what he had done.
It was broken beyond repair, his most prized possession. The guitar his mother bought for him years ago was gone… irreplaceable… gone. I couldn’t help but feel like it was my fault. I was the reason he’d lost something that meant more to him than anything else in the world and once he realized that he’d hate me. I hated me.
Dark, unreadable eyes looked back at me before he looked down again and shook his head in what I assumed was aggravation.
“Are you okay?” he asked roughly as he wiped at his bleeding lip.