Jersey Six - Jewel E Ann Page 0,8
it’s like to really have nothing?”
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, eyes red with emotion. “I wasn’t just homeless. I was nameless. Unrecognizable, even to myself, in every way possible. Look at me!” He pointed to his face. “I …” his voice lost all fight, falling to a whisper “…I’m tired. And I hurt all over. I’m physically lost and emotionally hollow. So can you give me one night? And maybe when I’m not so cold, exhausted, and hungry … maybe I’ll remember more.”
Jersey had a mat. A roof. An occasional meal. And boxing … She had an outlet to fight her past, a method to defend her future—no matter how insignificant it seemed to most people. And even if her name was nothing more than a sad statistic, it was hers.
“One night?” she whispered, studying the vacant eyes of the lost soul in a battered body.
“One night.”
One night turned into one week. One week bled into the next month. She couldn’t kick him out over the holidays. Even Jersey wasn’t that awful. And he managed to scrounge a cake for Christmas, which was also her birthday. Her first cake since Dena and Charles died.
“Firefighter, huh?” Judd stared at Chris sitting in the office with George. Neither one talked to the other, but they shared a mutual fondness for coloring—two fucked-up adults armed with a shit-ton of issues and a broken palate of crayons to bring superheroes to life.
“Yup.” Jersey sprinted through a hundred sit-ups as Judd held her feet.
To keep Chris from getting killed for being at Marley’s without the willingness to step in the ring, Jersey told everyone that he used to box—truth—but he had to quit after he was badly burned in a fire. The PTSD ruined his marriage, and he ended up losing his job too. Truth? No one knew, not even Chris and Jersey. But it seemed like a solid story.
Chris possessed a patchy memory at best, a crazy man’s chattering about voices, and a Jekyll and Hyde personality. But Jersey let him stay because they shared a bond. That, and Chris agreed to do the shit work like cleaning and keeping an eye on George so Jersey could spend more time in the ring training for fights she’d never see, goals she’d never reach, and a future that most likely included jail time.
Everyone who hung out at Marley’s ended up doing time, and most were repeat offenders. Crime sort of rubbed off in that place.
“Ya fucking him?” Judd smirked. “He sleeps with ya, yeah? Does his wiener look like the rest of him?”
“I’m not going to say. If you want to know about his wiener, you’ll have to ask him out like a real gentleman. You’ll have to buy him dinner and give him some sort of intelligent conversation. Chris is smart.”
“Smart? Like he don’t says ain’t?” Judd coughed a laugh.
When she reached her hundredth sit-up, Jersey collapsed, resting her arm across her sweaty forehead. “Yeah. Smarter than all of us put together. When he’s not bat-shit crazy, he’s smart. Uses big words. I think he might even use them correctly.” Dena drilled Jersey on proper grammar. Six months wasn’t long enough to amass a large vocabulary, but it was long enough to get rid of ain’t and gonna.
“Ain’t gonna ain’t going to college.”
Judd laughed, standing and offering his hand to Jersey.
She took it, letting him pull her up.
“So if ya ain’t letting him get you off, then why ya letting him hang out here?”
“He does the shit work. And he’s helping me with something.” She started to wrap her hands, ready to kick Judd’s ass in the ring.
“Helping ya what? You two gonna make weird porn videos in the back room?”
Jersey let Chris stay for several reasons, but revenge sat at the top of that list. Eventually, he’d remember more details about his friend. They would find him. And they would kill him.
An eye for an eye.
“Might be the only way to keep the gym open.” She winked.
Judd frowned as Derek, one of the older guys, tied his gloves for him. “Ya heard?”
She nodded. “Marley’s is closing. Developers want to make this part of town safer, which means we’re getting kicked out. Yeah, I heard.” Jersey slid between the ropes and tapped her gloves together twice. “Ding. Ding.” She smiled with her black mouth guard puffing out her lips.
Judd threw the first punch. Predictable.
Jersey bobbed to the right and returned with a quick one-two combination, knocking Judd off balance.