Heather in Small Heath

Tender Times

"But something about it felt like home somehow." ~ Taylor Swift

November, 2020. Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. 

The sound of pages being flipped and the muttered voice of Theodore Rosewall were the only noises which filled the small bedroom of an apartment in the town of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania that cold, late Autumn evening. 

The couple, each at their own task at the desks beside each other, would occasionally look up from their grading of essays or their balancing of equations to give each other a soft smile, their warm gazes shining past the glasses the pair of them wore upon their noses. 

And it wasn't until, a few hours later when they were in bed underneath the quilts, that they voiced what their eyes were speaking. 

'I love you.'

And all was at peace.

*******

March 29, 1919. Small Heath.

Heather Tremblay took deep breaths in as she and her opponent both circled around the make-shift fighting ring in the abandoned warehouse. The tips of her fingers were red and slightly numb from the cold, mid-March air, and her bare feet were tingling slightly from the icy, concrete floor. 

The adrenaline coursing though her veins meant that Heather felt none of the chill currently assaulting her body. Instead, she felt nothing but the trickle of sweating dripping down her back and neck and the slight burn of her lungs as she continued to match her opponent's footing.

'He's gotten better,' the Tremblay woman thought to herself, sending Arthur Shelby a bloodied grin from an earlier upper-cut in response to his own grotesque smile, his white teeth stained a slight pink from his own blood. 'He hasn't flipped out lately. That's good.' 

The man before her was also taking deep breaths, his shoulders lowered and his eyes narrowed in search for an opening in Heather's defenses as they continued to slowly circle each other, both of their hands up in preparation for the other's inevitable attack. 

'Ah crap,' Heather thought a few moments later, watching as the man before her moved suddenly with a kick towards her ribs, knowing that 'restraint' was not in Arthur's vocabulary. 'Some days I am convinced he wants me dead.'

Quickly angling her body away from the incoming foot, Heather shot her arm down and blocked the kick, her left arm slightly throbbing from the force Arthur had put behind his attack. 

'That makes bruise number eight,' the Trembly woman inwardly sighed, easily blocking Arthur's quick jab he had sent right after he had thrown that kick her way. She then sent a speedy kick of her own towards Arthur's shins. 

The eldest Shelby man let out a stream of curses when her foot landed on its target, the meat of Heather's foot aching for a moment before she used that same leg, hooking it behind Arthur's knees and pushing his leg forward to the point where the man had no choice but to fall towards the unforgiving concrete below them. 

"I've told you many times," Heather huffed out, watching Arthur as he quickly regained his footing; she could hear the rest of the Shelby siblings hooting and hollering off to the side of the fighting ring. "You have to guard your legs. You always leave them open to an attack, which is dumb. Legs are your balance."

"And without balance, I'm done for," Arthur finished, knowing exactly what Heather was about to say, as he must have heard it a dozen times. "I know, luv. Hard to teach teach an old dog new tricks though, eh?"