Page 99 of Whiskey Throttle
Neither of us gets a good grip until we crash against the old piling. The hard wood digging into my spine. A hard grunt leaves him as I knee his thigh. He counters with a hook to my ribs. Another to my stomach. I double over, breath gone, stars spinning in my vision.
He goes for my face again.
No finesse, just fury, but I catch his wrist.
Spin. Use my shoulder to throw him off balance. We both go down. Hit the dock with a thunderous thud. Wood groans beneath us. My knee hits something sharp. Doesn't matter.
He groans when my fist connects with his face. Bone on bone, pain shoots from my knuckles through my hand. We're rolling and wrestling. A tangle of limbs and punches. Blindly hitting wherever we can. My elbow hits his jaw. He snarls, struggles to flip us over, but I hold him down. Leveraging my heavier weight against his feral fighting.
With a guttural cry, I surge forward.
Pin him.
One knee in the center of his chest, both his wrists locked under my palms. My chest heaves above his. We're panting and bleeding, spitting rage and pain at each other.
“Get the fuck off me!”
He twists and squirms. His chest rises hard against my weight. He bucks once. Twice. Still trying to throw me off, but I don’t budge. I don't yell. I just breathe. Let his roars sound between our snarls and heaves. Let him feel it. Feel how powerless he is in the situation. This is between Babs and me. Not him. As much as that pains me to realize now, it's true.
“GET OFF!”
My cheek hurts like a bitch. My black eye is swelling again. His lip is split. His eye is red and rising. His wrists twitch under mine. And for a second, just one, I swear I see it.
The kid.
Not the man.
Not the genius.
Not the grudge.
The guy who cut ties with his father. Now, struggling to keep ties with the only other parent he has left. Even if he treats her like shit and talks horribly to her. The one family member who still can tolerate him around. His father is gone. Sister fled. He's hard to like. Harder to love.
Yet, here he is defending his first love.
And her second love.
My grip tightens. His chest caves on a breath. Not surrender, just grief and sadness. He stops fighting. Stops moving. Locks eyes with me.
“I just don't get it. She's my fucking mom.”
There is a plea in his words. A plea for everything to be different. With her. With me. With all of this. I remember a promise I made to somehow bring them two closer. Even if we are miles apart from each other, together it could be great. Healing.
“I know. And I know I can't take back what happened. But I need you to understand, I never set out to hurt you. I never wanted any of this.”
I shift, letting one of his wrists go. My knee at his chest moves to the dock, bracing myself. His arm doesn't move. Doesn't haul off and hit me. He stares up, throat working. Jaw flexing. The fire inside him dims a little. Enough to keep me from swinging again. Enough to make him stop trying to throw me off.
“Why her, Hollister? Of all the fucking women in the world?”
Decades of pain and hurt etch across every single line in his face. His big brain is trying to work this out. But we're not labs and experiments that make sense. People are unpredictable. We like who we like.
“You think I don't ask myself that every day?” I run a hand through my hair, gripping the back of my neck as I try to find the words to explain something I barely understand myself.
“She's not just some woman, Dom. She's strong, she's smart, and she's damaged. And yeah, maybe that's part of it. Maybe I saw something in her that needed fixing, or maybe I saw something in her that I needed. I don't know.”
Dom's expression shifts slightly. A flicker of curiosity breaks through the anger.
“Did you just call my mom fucking damaged?”
