Takedown Teague (Caged #1) (18 page)

“Get the job if you want,” I said, “but you don’t have to move out.  It will be easier for both of us if you stay, with or without a job.  Besides, I…”

My voice trailed off.  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say that wasn’t going to equate to wanting to get between her legs, even though that wasn’t the real reason.  Well, not all of it anyway.

“You what?” she asked quietly when I didn’t continue.

“I’m used to you being here now,” I admitted.  “It’s nice to have someone to talk to and someone to watch movies with me.  I don’t want you to leave.”

Well, that remark put it all out there.

“Okay,” she finally whispered.  “If that’s what you really want, I’ll stay.”

I hoped my relief wasn’t too obvious.

“I also don’t want to go back to subsisting on cheese sandwiches and breakfast cereal.”

Tria laughed and playfully smacked my chest.

“Ow!” I cried as I grabbed her hand and held it flat against my skin.  I could feel my heart pounding through both of our hands.  “No beating the pillow.”

“You make a good pillow,” she said.

I had no idea how to respond to that, and Tria didn’t seem to be inclined to say anything else, so we dropped into silence.  Mostly I was just glad she didn’t seem to be planning on leaving quite so soon anymore.  Maybe now she would actually unpack something.

I was never one for sharing my life with anyone else, but thinking about Tria leaving hurt my chest.

A damn good left hook sent me to the floor on my back.

A second later, there was a big black guy with a long, dreaded goatee on top of me, slamming punch after punch into my face.  I kneed him, kidney punched him, and tried to get a leg wrapped around him so I could flip us over, but most of my efforts were concentrated on protecting my head.

The guy was an animal.

Screaming from the crowd filled my ears, and with a final shove I managed to flip us over.  Where my arm had been defensively protecting my face, it was now in the perfect position to move over his throat and cut off his airway.  He kept punching feebly until he passed out, and I got up off the floor.

Yolanda’s hand was wrapped around my wrist and holding my arm up high as she announced my victory and pulled me back to the locker room.

“You need stitches.”  She made the decision as soon as the door was closed.  “It’s more than I can do here.  I need to take you to the ER.”

“Fuck that,” I muttered, but then I realized the gauze she had given me only seconds before was already soaked through, and there was a decent trickle of blood running from my temple down the side of my face and down to my shoulder.

“You are bleeding a lot,” she said.  “You are going to the hospital.”

It didn’t happen often, but I knew once those words were out of her mouth, I wasn’t going to have much of a choice.  She helped me get my clothes on and dragged me out the back door to her car.

“I don’t have the money,” I informed her.

“I got it,” she said.  “This one’s on me.”

Friday night, and the hospital was a fucking zoo.  We waited for about two hours before anyone was available to look at me, and then they decided I wasn’t bad off, and I could wait longer.  I borrowed some change from Yolanda and tried to call Tria a couple of times, but oddly enough, the phone rang busy.  Neither of us had cell phones, and the landline was unreliable.

By the time my temple was stitched and Yolanda dropped me off at home, it was almost six in the morning.  I was pretty much the walking dead at that point, and my head pounded despite the maximum dose of ibuprofen the nurse had given me.

Yolanda wouldn’t let her give me anything stronger.

The key didn’t seem to want to go into the lock, but I figured the fatigue-blurred vision was mainly to blame.  Before I managed to get it in, I heard Tria’s voice on the other side.

“Liam?  Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I called through the door.  “I tried to call—”

The door opened, and Tria’s eyes scanned me, and she reached out to pull me inside by my hands.  She led me over to the couch, where she sat me down and turned the side lamp a bit so she could see me better.

“Oh my God,” she mumbled.  “Can this day get any worse?”

“I’m all good,” I assured her.  “Just needed some stitches, and the emergency room was packed.”

“You have blood all over you,” she informed me.  “Give me your shirt, or it won’t come out.”

I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled my arms out of the sleeves.  I winced a bit and looked down at my shoulder where there was a pretty good-sized bruise forming.

“You lost, didn’t you?” Tria assumed from my appearance there could be no other conclusion.

“Nope,” I replied.  “I told you—I always win.”

I grinned at her, but she didn’t return the smile.

“Your T-shirt, too,” Tria said.  “It’s got blood on it as well.  My God, how many stitches did you need?”

“Only seven,” I said.  “It really isn’t that bad.  Head cuts bleed a lot.”

I pulled off the white T-shirt I had under the other one, and Tria collected them both from me.  She took them into the kitchen where I could hear her running water over them.  I leaned over the arm of the couch and closed my eyes.

I don’t know how long I remained passed out on the couch, only that I awoke to Tria’s voice and figured out pretty quickly that she must be talking on the phone.  It was odd because I didn’t recall her ever getting any phone calls before.

“I know what you are saying… just…just let me talk to her, okay?”

I tried to open my eyes, but the bright light coming in through the window was blinding and made my head pound.  I closed them again immediately.

“Five minutes, that’s it…fine…”

There was a longer pause, and then a change in Tria’s tone.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said quickly.  “I’ll find a way to come and get you…but…I know that, but…if you stay…yes…yes…”

She sighed heavily.

“Your grades didn’t suck that bad…I know, but I can’t help but try to find a way…are you sure?”

I heard her sit down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs.  Even though I didn’t really understand what she was talking about, there was something about her tone I didn’t like at all.  Partially covering my eyes with my hands, I sat up and looked through the cracks in my fingers until my eyes got used to the sunlight.

“If you are sure,” Tria was saying.  “No…no way. I wouldn’t dream of it.  I’ll be there….not sure yet, but I’ll figure it out...love you, too…No, I don’t want to talk to him again.  I’ll find you when I get there.  Bye for now.”

I rubbed at my eye and accidentally rubbed against the bandage over the stitches.  I winced and hissed through my teeth.

“How are you feeling?” Tria asked as she hung up the phone in the kitchen and came over to sit on the edge of the couch.

“I’m good,” I replied.  I wasn’t sure if I believed it myself, but it seemed like the best response to give.  “Had a lot worse, that’s for sure.”

“Well, you look terrible,” Tria said.

“Thanks,” I said with a wry grin.  “What time is it?”

“Just past noon,” she told me.

“Still Saturday?”

“Yes.”  Tria shook her head at me.

“Hey, you never know!”  I would have laughed, but I was afraid it would hurt my head if I tried.

“You sure you are all right?” she asked again, her voice full of concern.

“I’m fine,” I said.  “Really.”

She looked me over, and I could see her gaze fluctuating between my eyes.  I wasn’t sure what she was looking to find, but apparently she found it.  She gave me a quick nod and then tried to kill me with her next sentence.

“Good,” she stated, “because I have to go home.”

I knew the whole “life passing before your eyes” was only supposed to happen when you were faced with death, but that didn’t stop the last few weeks from running through my head in a matter of seconds.  Everything from when I saw her surrounded by those animals in the street, to feeling her hand press against my chest when I confronted her douchebag ex, to wrapping her up in my arms the previous night, flashed in my brain as I considered what she was saying.

She was leaving.

Going home.

“What the fuck?” I yelled, which made my head pound more and made Tria startle.  “What the fuck are you talking about?  Going home?  What are you doing, dropping out of school?”

As much as I wanted to think school was the main concern, what I really wanted to know was why she was leaving me.  Had I done something to piss her off?  I didn’t think so, but I’d pissed people off before without realizing it, so anything was possible.  Maybe it was the fighting.  Maybe she was realizing with the way I looked, the other guy must look a lot worse.

Maybe she found some of that shit I still have shoved into the back of that dresser drawer.

More than anything, I didn’t want her to go.  I was just starting to think that maybe, just maybe, we could be more.  Maybe Yolanda was right, and it was time for me to take a chance again.

I hadn’t even tried to kiss her.

“No, no,” Tria said with a shake of her head.  “Nothing like that—just for a few days.”

Well, at least my heart was pumping blood again, but that just fueled my anger.

“Did Douchebag call and tell you to come back?  And you’re listening to him?  You said before he was going to try to come up with a reason for you to go back there so he could keep you from leaving again, and now you are going to let him?”

“It’s not him.”  Tria shook her head back and forth.  “It’s Nikki.”

“Who the hell is Nikki?” I asked.  I was suddenly annoyed that we did very little talking to each other about our lives.

“She’s my best friend,” Tria said softly.  “She was there for me when I needed her.  I can’t turn my back on her.  Without her, I wouldn’t even be here.”

I stared at her for a moment, watching the wetness coating her cheeks as it glistened in the light from the lamp.

“She got you out of there,” I said.  It wasn’t a question.

Tria nodded.

“I knew I couldn’t leave without a big confrontation.  Keith had already told me that he wasn’t going to put up with my moving away.  He even tore up the acceptance letter from Hoffman when he found it.  I had been so happy when I got it, and he just tore it up!”

Tria leaned forward and put her face in her hands.

“He wasn’t going to let go,” she said, “even though I told him I wasn’t seeing him anymore.  Even though I told him I wanted to go to school, he wouldn’t drop it.  I shoved all my stuff in my dad’s old suitcases and ran to Nikki.  She took me up near the Canadian border where her cousin lives.  They were all on some extended fishing trip up to New Brunswick, so she hid me there until I could arrange to come down here.”

“I had a little bit of money after Dad died,” Tria continued.  “I had been working at one of the local stores after high school and saved a bunch of that as well.  I used it for the deposit on the apartment and the bus ticket.  Nikki kept lying to Keith and Leo until I could move here, saying she didn’t know where I was.  Her husband, Brandon, is one of Keith’s buddies.  He was harassing her, too, but she still wouldn’t tell anyone.”

She raised her head and looked at me.

“I can’t just abandon her,” she stated definitively.  “I can’t, not when they’re going to…”

“Going to what?” I asked when she didn’t go on.

“I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” she said.  Her voice was reserved, but I wasn’t going to give in that easily.

“What the fuck?” I snarled.  “You can’t say something like that and then not finish.”

“I know,” she responded quietly.  “But I think I heard it about five thousand times when I was growing up.  No one outside the community was ever supposed to hear about the legends and rituals of the area.”

“About
what
?”  Nothing she was saying made any sense.

“Well, she and Brandon have been married almost two years,” Tria said.  “They’d been trying to have a baby, but nothing has happened.”

“Okay.”  I frowned.  I understood why that might be upsetting for a couple, but that shit happened all the time.  Usually it wasn’t anything serious.

“The doctor doesn’t think there is anything wrong with her, so they checked Brandon out.  He has low sperm count or something.  He isn’t going to be able to father any children.”

“Well, there are other options, right?”  I had the sinking feeling I was missing a major point.

“I told you,” Tria said, “the community is shrinking.  She has to have a baby from the Beals community.”

“So, who is going to father the kid?”

“All of them.”  Tria’s eyes met mine, and she nodded to me slowly as I comprehended what she was saying.  “They’ll just keep going until she’s pregnant.”

The implications of her words slammed into me, and images from a website Wade had found once rocketed around in my brain.  It featured this chick lying back in a chair while a line of guys waited to fuck her.  What I had considered kind of interesting at the time now seemed thoroughly sickening.

I was never one to bash another culture, but this was just fucked up.