Fighting Silence (On the Ropes #1)(17)

“That I didn’t come again.”

“Don’t apologize for that. I just covered you in cum.” I laughed, rolling to retrieve my boxers and using them to clean up her stomach while she giggled and squirmed under me.

With my boxers out of commission, I pull my jeans on and settled on my side, propping myself up on an elbow to face her. While she had put her panties back on, she remained topless. There was no way I could leave while she was naked. I nabbed my hoodie off the ground and handed it to her. With an eager smile, she tugged it on.

Apparently, she didn’t feel nearly as awkward as I did because as soon as she relaxed on the pillows, she curled into my chest. I dropped my arm under her head, and she snuggled in tight. It was absolutely perfect. But I knew it was fleeting.

“You okay?” I asked, slightly concerned that I had been too rough.

“Mmmm, very,” she mumbled against my chest, punctuating it with a kiss.

“Eliza?”

“Yeah.”

“I meant what I said.”

“Me too.” she responded lazily, squeezing me.

I held her for several minutes before I heard her take a deep breath and release it on a sigh as she fell asleep. It was music to my failing ears. It was also gut wrenching because it signaled the end.

Our goodbye was bound to happen. People like us didn’t get handed happiness on a silver platter. We had to work for it. Her working for it meant going away to college, and mine would be hustling and busting my ass just to squeak by.

I didn’t want to let her go, but the end was near. She was leaving. I wasn’t about to be the one sitting around, watching her go. It might have been considered selfish to some, but to me, it was self-preservation. I’d remember that night. The highest of the highs.

I lay there for a while longer, grieving my loss. I didn’t regret having taken the risk for one second though. Even if she forgot me in time, I’d always have one night where, for a brief moment, my fantasy had merged with reality into a world where Eliza was mine in every way possible.

When I was able to slip out of her grasp, I walked to the window and pulled in the easel I had made her as a graduation present. It wasn’t anything fancy. Really, it was just the spare scraps of wood I had collected from my job at the construction site. I had one of the guys do me a favor and lend me a sander and some stain so it at least looked nice. It wasn’t much, but I knew she’d love it. So I left it there for her to find. I couldn’t be there in the morning to see her face when she saw it, but I wanted her to have it anyway.

I considered walking out of the door when I left that night—closing that fantasy world once and for all. Coming in the window might have been a silly superstition I’d started all those years earlier, but it felt real to me. I went so far as to grab the doorknob, but at the last second, I couldn’t follow through. So after one last glance over my shoulder at Eliza as she slept in my hoodie, I crawled back out of that magical window for the very last time.



The first few days in the real world were excruciating. My mom was a bitch, and my dad was an idiot who was always up to some bullshit, most of which was illegal. Social services were there once again about Flint and Quarry. It was the same old song and dance, but this time, I had to deal with all of it without the escape that Eliza and our little apartment provided me.

I didn’t know how I forced myself to stay away. I started taking a different route to work so I didn’t have to pass that abandoned building every day. She could have been there . . . but she probably wasn’t. She was moving on, and I was floundering.

Boxing was the only thing that kept me sane. When I missed her, I worked out. When I needed her, I trained. And when the world became too much, I imagined her. Her smile. Her laugh. That one f*cking freckle haunted me. Which only made me miss her, so I trained some more. My life was a never-ending cycle that both began and ended with On The Ropes—with Eliza.

However, my body could only take so much abuse. Ten hours was the max a kid could work at the gym, but I was easily putting in at least twenty-five hours a week. Slate started forcing me to leave each night. I would have rather been cleaning the jockstraps than go home though.

Three months after I left Eliza, I was laid off from my job at the construction company. Not only did I become hard up for money, I was suddenly overflowing with free time. It was a nightmare. I couldn’t pay the rent and had nothing but time to worry about it. Thankfully, a kid at the gym helped me get a job cleaning up at the auto repair shop where he worked. The money was okay, but I learned a ton from the mechanics. They helped me buy a piece-of-shit truck from a customer who couldn’t afford to fix it. It took months to get it running, but as I drove out of the parking lot in a truck that was completely mine, I felt like the biggest success on the planet.

After that, a whole world opened up for me. Being able to travel more than a mile from my house gave me a freedom I had never experienced before. Sure, there was public transportation, but when life went to hell in a handbasket, I didn’t have to check the bus schedule now. I could just hop in my truck and drive as far as my usually empty gas tank could take me.

That truck was the reason I ended up with my father the night when everything went wrong. The night when he turned on me and I left him for dead.

The same night Eliza saved me all over again.





I WAS STARTLED AWAKE BY a loud knock on my window. My heart began to pound from the surprise wake-up call, but as I managed to rouse my lagging mind to consciousness, I automatically knew who was on the other side. I could picture his straight, black hair barely sticking out from under the edges of a beanie and his hazel eyes—the ones that could stir something inside me with only a single glance. I could clearly envision the sexy grin that only tipped one side of his mouth while his thumb nervously toyed with his bottom lip in that way that drew the attention of every woman in a fifty-mile radius.