Dirty Fighter: A Bad Boy MMA Romance by Roxy Sinclaire, Natasha Tanner Page B

creaked like it was trying to convince me to stay. The walk to the door was awful, I felt like I was having the shit kicked out of me before I even got to it.
    No sooner had I unlocked it and he was on me.
    Shouting things like “YOU USELESS PRICK”, and “UNGRATEFUL SHIT”, as he just wailed away on me. It hurt, it fucking hurt. No matter how much you work out your mind and your body, you’re still made of flesh and skin, you don’t become stone. I was angry and tired of being blamed by him. I was tired of being blamed by myself. I was tired of being beaten up by a fifty year old trust fund child for the cardinal sin of being born.
    I just wanted him off me.
    So I pushed him hard, I pushed him so fucking hard that he lifted off his feet. He hit the wall and then tumbled down and bashed his head in on the table that my book was sitting on. I knew he was dead before he even stopped breathing. The smell of blood was so thick, so bright. He’d been drinking so his blood was thinned out already, and it just didn’t stop. I shoved some sheets under his head and paced back and forth for what must have been an hour, the top of the sun was now flirting with the horizon.
    I took some deep breaths, had one of his beers, and then started the longest night of my life.
    His car was already in the attached garage, out of sight of the neighborhood, so I wrapped his head in sheets so he wouldn’t drip too much. I wasn’t completely able to carry him out to the car, he was a floppy mess which is hard to grip, hard to direct as you’re walking backwards through a house while trying not to get too much blood on yourself. I got him onto the floorboards of the backseat, wedged in there like a duffle bag someone was bringing on a trip.
    It didn’t feel real.
    The sun was down but it was still too early to do anything without being seen, so I spent a lot of the night cleaning out what blood I could. I puked until I didn’t have anything left in my stomach to offer up. The floor was hardwood so I had that going for me. I used sponges and bleach to get any speckles of blood off the furniture and wall that I could. The table took almost half of the cleaning time,
    It was pretty common knowledge that he liked to leave town—liked to travel and vanish for days or weeks at a time. I knew if I made him disappear that nobody would question it until I had time to get myself out of town for real.
    At two in the morning I decided my cleaning job had been done well enough.
    I got into his car after showering. I had put gloves on. It was summer but I never drove this car. If they found my hair in the car it wouldn’t matter, but with my finger prints on the wheel there would be no doubt what happened.
    I drove slow, careful not to miss a stoplight, careful to stay at the speed limit, anything that would keep the eyes of cops off me. I couldn’t imagine the people passing me on the road, their normal lives. Their cars that didn’t have a parent’s body in it.
    I drove the car into a lake no more than three miles from the house. I had the windows cracked open just enough to let water into them, not enough for his body to float out. As I watched it sink in the light of an almost-full moon I realized I’d now killed both of my parents. A self-made orphan. On the jog back home I started to feel there were eyes on me.
    Eyes that don’t exist.
    I could feel them now and then, it was the middle of the night and I hadn’t slept. I was running down grown over back alleys and roads to get back home. It’s no surprise that I felt paranoid at the time. I hadn’t sleptat all that day. I had packed a small bag of belongings and set it by the front door. I knew there was no chance of anyone finding the car that quickly, but my eyes kept wandering to the front door, expecting someone to knock and come in.
    Almost expecting my dad to come back.
    It was in this sleep-deprived state that I decided to go and see Brooklyn for the last time.
    I didn’t have any