Bulldozer (Hard to Love 3)

“What are you doing?”

I spin around so fast I almost lose my balance, grasping onto the desk to avoid tripping over my own feet. He’s standing in the doorway and his expression speaks of one and only one thing––guilt.

“You lied to me.” I can barely muster the energy to speak. “I can’t believe you would lie to me about this.”

His shoulders drop. Slowly, he walks into the bedroom, sits at the end of the bed, and rubs his face.

“This could kill you and you lied to me about it?” My disbelief can’t be measured. Never in a million years could I have anticipated this.

“I didn’t want to worry you,” he says in a low, quiet voice, his gaze cutting away from me to the floor.

“You didn’t want to worry me?! Do you hear yourself? You’d rather I find out when they carry your lifeless body off the field? Would that be more convenient for you?”

“You don’t understand––”

“What the hell is there to understand, Grant?!” I jump in before he goes any further. “It’s right here in the doctor’s report!”

“I don’t have anything else!”

That one hurt. It took a while for the words to sink and get a foothold, for them to do their damage. And now that they have, a dull pain remains. “I guess I’m nothing then.”

Regret flashes on his face. It doesn’t stop him for long, however. He gets to his feet and starts pacing.

“I’ve been doing this since I was seven and you know why? Because I got in a fist fight with another kid on the playground and beat him into unconsciousness. I punched him in the face repeatedly because he shoved me off the jungle gym, Amanda,” he nearly shouts. “I put him in the hospital and my piece of shit father paid off the family to not get the authorities involved. Then he decided I should channel all that anger into something more productive so he stuck me in Pop Warner.”

He takes a step back and sucks in a deep breath, runs both hands over his short hair and shakes his head. “The girl I dated sophomore year at Alabama––I caught her texting some dude on the baseball team. He’d sent her a dick pic. I was busy with football so it took a while before I caught on. I went to his place and broke his arm while his roommate watched because he was too scared to step in.”

He stares at me like he’s expecting me to bolt from the room, daring me to justify or argue. What he did was horrible and he should’ve been punished, but I won’t agree that he’s the monster he thinks he is. I know this man. I know the fabric his soul is made of. I lean against the desk and cross my arms and he shakes his head again.

“I emptied out my trust fund to pay him off, five hundred thousand. That’s when I knew I was just like my father, that people weren’t safe around me,” the man I love tells me. “I poured everything I had into football, took all that anger and turned it into something useful, something of value.”

I learned a lot in rehab. One thing that really stuck was the notion of self-perpetuating beliefs. We believe we are weak, violent, stupid, fat, lazy––fill in the blank––so we look for any small evidence to substantiate that belief. It’s a closed system––and one that’s very hard to break.

“Grant––”

Turning, he drops back down on the end of the bed and rests his elbows on his knees. I’ve never seen him look so lost. Whether he’s being a jerk, a saint, a lover, a friend, he’s always been supremely sure of himself. Grant does everything with clarity of purpose, a quiet confidence that few people possess.

Not now, though. Now he seems as mortal as the rest of us.

I walk over and drop to my knees between his legs. Taking his face in my hands, I force him to look at me.

“That team, those people are my family,” he says in a low broken voice. “That game is my life. Without it, I’m just another asshole who likes to hit people.”

I think of all the times he couldn’t lost his temper with me, with Ronan, even with Horvat all he did was take him by his clothes and shove him out the door. I think of how sweet and caring he is with Sam and Roxy and all the people he helps through his charity work.

I guess I have more faith in him than he does in himself and if anyone understands not trusting oneself it’s me. Sometimes all it takes is someone that knows and loves you to shine a light on the truth, to make you see that you’re capable of more than you think you are. I guess that’s what love is at its best.