I grit my teeth, holding in a laugh. That was the problem, wasn’t it? How together can you be with phone calls and inmate visits? You can’t. It’s a ghost of a relationship. You could wish the person on the outside well, but you literally couldn’t be there to catch them when they fell.
“Please, Christos,” she said in a trembling voice.
My heart was about to snap in half.
I wanted to bolt. I wanted to stay.
Fuck!!
“Agápi mou,” she said, holding her hand to my cheek, gazing up at me. “Tell me. Please.”
The look of love in her eyes was breaking my fucking heart. I was a fucking piece of shit for holding back on her. She’d given me everything and I wasn’t giving her anything.
“I’m here, agápi mou,” she said.
Man, the tables sure had turned.
I hissed a hard sigh as my heart calmed.
I’d held out on her long enough. It was grinding us both down. She deserved better. At the very least, she deserved to know the truth.
I ran a frustrated hand through my hair and said, “Remember last year, before we starting going out, I told you my life was a shit storm waiting to happen?”
“Yeah? I never understood that,” she said skeptically, as if it couldn’t possibly be true. “You have a grandfather who loves you, you live in an awesome house, and you have all that new work from Brandon. Your life and career is what I dream of having twenty years from now, if I’m lucky.”
I stifled a laugh.
The grass was always greener, wasn’t it? I didn’t want to spoil the fantasy for her. I was pretty sure every job had aspects that drove people nuts, but that wasn’t the bitter truth I needed to reveal to the love of my life right now.
I took a deep breath.
It was one thing to tell someone that dream jobs had thorns, but another when you had to tell your beloved you were a bad person. “I never told you why my life was about to become a shit storm.”
She gazed up at me courageously, ready for anything. I was in awe of her strength. Maybe I was the idiot, and telling her really would somehow fix things.
“I’ve been awaiting trial for the last several months,” I said. “I’ve been out on bail since the day I met you. There’s a good chance I’m going to end up in jail. Or prison.” I winced, ready for her to tell me what a fuck-up I was.
“For what?” she asked with zero judgement.
It was then that I realized the person judging me most harshly had always been myself. Looking into Samantha’s eyes, I saw only her belief in me. It gave me the courage to continue. “For aggravated assault and battery,” I answered.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means I punched a guy out,” I said, expecting the worst.
“How come you never said anything?” Her brows cinched together and she looked heartbroken.
“Because of the look on your face right now,” I muttered, sensing her acceptance had gone up in smoke a second ago.
“All you did was punch a guy out?” she asked skeptically, holding both my hands in hers.
I nodded. “One punch.”
“Did he die or something?”
“No,” I smiled.
She hugged me tightly. “Christos, it doesn’t matter. It sounds like it was nothing. You should’ve told me. I still love you. You have no idea how much I love you.”
The thing was, there was way more to my story than punching out one guy one time. “That’s because you don’t know me, Samantha,” I said quietly. “You don’t know about my past.”
“What past?”
Up to this point had been the warm-up. Now it was time for her to hear the cold, hard truth. “All the times I’ve been locked up. There have been many. I’m a convict, Samantha.”
She scoffed. “What, like a drug dealer or gangs or something?”
“No, not like that. But I’m a guy who’s been in jail enough times that it’s normal. I’m on a first-name basis with more criminals and corrections officers than I can count.”
“What have you been in jail for?”
“For racing and doing crazy shit on my motorcycle, some of which has caused other people to get seriously injured and in one case, killed.”
“Oh my god,” Samantha gasped, holding a hand in front of her mouth. “Wuh—what happened?” she stammered. “Did…did you, I don’t know, run him off the road or something?”
“No. But I may as well have. Guy tried to keep up with me on a canyon road, but he didn’t have the skills to follow. High-sided his bike right over a guard rail at sixty miles an hour. Tumbled down a rocky hillside. He was probably dead by the time he hit the bottom two-hundred feet below.”
Her face knotted with horror as she backed up a step and hugged her elbows against her chest.
Who wouldn’t be horrified? I know I had been. I couldn’t sleep for three days after the guy died.
“Oh, no,” Samantha said. “That’s…that’s awful, Christos.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “It is.”
“But you didn’t cause the accident, right?”
I clutched my fists in front of me, squeezing the air in frustration. “You’re missing the point, Samantha. The thing is, I was watching the guy in my rearview for three miles. He was lagging farther and farther behind after every turn. He started trying to make up lost ground by coming into the corners too hot. All I would’ve had to do was slow my bike down, let him catch up, keep a pace he could safely manage. If I’d done that, we would’ve been toasting beers at the end of the day. But I didn’t. I had an ego about the whole thing. I wasn’t gonna let some hothead beat my shit, no fucking way.”
Holding fingers against her lips, Samantha searched my eyes. “When did this happen?”
I could see her wheels turning. She was desperately trying to make sense of this. But there was no sense to be made.
I indulged her. “Three years ago,” I sighed.
She took a step toward me, resting one hand on my arm. “Oh, Christos. You were nineteen. You were just a kid. I’m nineteen. I still do stupid things all the time. If that guy hadn’t followed you that day, the next time, he would’ve followed someone else he shouldn’t have been following. It wasn’t your fault.”
“But that’s not what happened,” I argued, shaking my splayed hands in front of me. “He died when he was following me,” I sneered, dropping my arms to my side in defeat, “because I got too competitive. Not some other rider. I wasn’t thinking to myself, ‘Oh, this young fellow is terribly outclassed. The responsible thing for me to do as a grown-up is take the poor boy aside and set him straight before he injures himself. Teach him to mind his own limits, and follow the rules of the road responsibly.’ Nope. I was just thinking that his sorry ass wasn’t going to catch me. Now he’s dead.”
Samantha chewed on her bottom lip and frowned. She was silent.
Because there wasn’t a good argument in this case, was there? That’s why they called it reckless driving and criminal negligence.
I rubbed my hand across my face and tipped my head back in frustration.
“And that’s just the tip of my iceberg,” I sighed. “I’ve been in so many punch-ups, I’ve lost count. I’ve hurt a lot of people, put them in hospitals countless times. Broken bones, knocked out teeth, all because deep down,” I was seething now, “I’m a fucking hot-head who didn’t know how to control my shit for years before I met you.”