He turned into a side street to find a place to park. Audrey looked at her hand resting on the door moulding. It was perfectly still, an ordinary arm lying there, but on the inside she couldn’t stop herself shaking. If her teeth started chattering it would not be a surprise.
Reece sat still, his hands resting on his thighs. He wasn’t the least bothered by his knuckles. She’d thought the scars on them came from his days bricklaying.
“I haven’t always been like I am now.” He kept his face averted. He didn’t want this. He wasn’t getting an option. He talked or she got a taxi home.
“There was a time when I was angry and thought the world owed me because I’d had to cook for a family instead of hang out at the skate park. I was a selfish little prick, acting out. I finished school and didn’t know what I wanted to do, except drink, get high and get laid. Polly and I moved into a dive together. We didn’t know what we were going to do with our lives. We did labouring jobs to get the cash for rent and to buy booze and weed, meth, Es. We messed around with women. Polly’s dad hassled us to get it together. He never quit on us. We were dickheads, young and dumb as cement. One night two guys jumped me. I was so high I was flying. I beat them both till I thought I’d killed them.” He took a breath, slow and uneasy. “I liked it.”
He twisted his head to look at her. She felt sick. But he was a kid and there was nothing of that in him now—until tonight.
“I had this body, but I had more experience with baby formula than being a man.” He looked away again. “It felt good to be the man for once. Good to get away from the stink of kids. To have no responsibility for anyone but myself. I took mixed martial arts classes. I learned to how to fight. In the gym, people would bet on me and I always won. And I liked that, being a sure thing. Polly started an illegal fight club. That makes it sound worse than it was, bigger. It was just me taking on any challenger for any bet.” He moved his hands to the steering wheel. “We should get home.”
“We’re not finished here.”
He sighed. “We made a shed load of money. I mean we really cashed up. We didn’t need jobs. We only needed me to win and I liked to win, and so long as I was high in some way, I didn’t mind hitting blokes so it all worked out.”
“There’s not a mark on you.” She was well qualified to know. She’d been over every surface of him but never picked the blackness inside. How could she have missed it?
He held his hands up. “Except these. That was our thing. To see if I could stay unmarked while I beat other guys till they cracked and bled. I’d be covered in tatts like Polly otherwise. We wanted the bruising to show up.”
“I can’t process this.”
“Charlie disowned me.” He took a shaky breath. “Wouldn’t let me come home, not even to visit or see the girls, till I cleaned myself up. But the easy money, the life, the women, it was hard to give up. I thought I was King Shit.”
“Why did you give it up?” Or was it simply buried, this urge to hurt people. He’d walked into that fight with something more than calm, more than the knowledge he could win. He’d wanted her to wait to call the police. He wanted that fight.
“I hurt someone badly.”
Audrey’s lungs felt too small for the amount of air she needed. He might’ve said he killed someone. He could’ve killed someone tonight. The efficient way he’d checked they were all breathing was as practiced as his use of her oven.
“I got so good I could tell how to best hurt them, so they went down and stayed there. These big guys used to come at me and think they could use their bulk, outmanoeuvre me. And these little guys would think I was stupid or slow. I learned how to take them down quickly, how to make it so they didn’t want to get up again. After a while I had to learn to dance around a bit otherwise it was over too quick, not enough of a show and the punters got annoyed.”
“One night I didn’t get that sum right and this guy, he kept getting up and getting up, and I had him on his arse five times and he wouldn’t stay there. I even tried holding him down with my foot. I hit him too hard, too often.” Reece slammed his head into the back of the headrest. “He lost an eye.”
Dear God.
“And somebody filmed that fight. They loaded it to a website, they made money off it. Of this film of me fucking pulverising this guy’s face, hitting him over and over and over. I’ve got this expression. Fuck, Audrey.” He covered his eyes with a scabbing hand. “I could’ve been mowing the lawn, it was nothing to me, but there’s blood everywhere and the guy’s eye is exploding out of his head.”
She swallowed bitter bile and violent awareness. She was crowded against the door to get as far away from Reece as possible. The pain in his voice was not enough to overcome her revulsion.
He dropped his hand to his lap. “And then the whole fucking city wanted to hit me. The cops got involved. I could’ve been charged for assault and battery, grievous bodily harm at a minimum. But the guy had bet on me. He bet big. He meant to lose. He said he knew I tried to stop him getting up, but he was high too and he had a side bet on marking me. He didn’t want the cops involved. He’d borrowed the money from a safe at work, not legally. He needed it to go away. I was lucky. I paid his medical expenses, paid for a prosthetic eye. If I’d been charged, let alone convicted, I’d never have been able to work with kids.
“I stopped the drugs. I stopped drinking. That wasn’t who I was. I missed home and Charlie and the girls. That was it. We quit. Polly went to work for his dad, I went to uni. I’m not that guy anymore, Audrey. You have to believe me. I still have his skill. I still have his body, but I am not that man. I haven’t hit anybody again until tonight.”
“Did you take something tonight?”
He looked at her directly for the first time since they’d pulled over. “I?
?m not drunk. I’m not high. I don’t have a substance abuse problem. I wasn’t going to let them near you. They could’ve done anything to you.” He shook his head. “Six fuckers. I didn’t see another option. Cops would’ve taken too long. Didn’t trust the bouncers.”
“They’d have hurt me?” She hadn’t focused on that. She’d seem peripheral to it.
“Maybe. No knowing. They wanted me because I stopped their fun in the bar. They’d have hurt me anyway they could.” He shrugged and it hit her, how dangerous that situation had been for her. He reached for her. “Come here.”
“No. I don’t want to. I can’t. I don’t. I want to go home.” She wanted to see Mia, wake her up and hug her. She wanted to shower away the liquor on her legs and the stench of fear and hate, and the vision of Reece checking pulses.
Her nanny knew how to check to see if he’d killed someone.
Reece couldn’t do anything about his appearance. The noise Etta and Flip made when they saw him woke Mia, who cried when she saw his hands. Audrey hugged Mia till she got irritated and put her back to bed, sitting with her until her breathing evened out.