Mongrel [bxb] | Bad Moon Book III

Chapter 10: whiskey

It worked like a charm, Bailey's plan. A scrimmage in the field for fun, that's what Matt had told his father. They were fighting, the way boys fight. A happy game of fisticuffs that snowballed out of hand.

His father took one look at Bailey's black eye and said, "That's the Richards blood in you, alright. But learn to block a hit, boy. You look like shit." Then he tossed them each a beer from the box in his truck and disappeared into the house—probably to drink the rest of it himself.

Bailey healed fast. A couple of days and the purpled flesh peeled away. His broken lip mended full and mauve again, but the cut on his brow did scar like Matt expected. Seeing it made him feel several kinds of terrible. He wondered who the hound had paid to beat him so badly. How he'd gotten that scar and if, in the end, it was worth anything at all.

For Matt, on the other hand, it took three days for the swelling in his left eye to go down enough that he could see properly. A week before his face was a normal shape again. Most nights, he laid in bed and watched the window of Bailey's barn change with the flickering lights of the television screen. Nearly every night, Matt would deliver food to the hound when he didn't come in for dinner—only to find him tucked in the corner of the sofa, a blanket thrown over his huddled shape and an xbox controller in his hand. It seemed every moment he wasn't slaving away on the field, Bailey was playing video games. A deficiency that he'd been starvedof for too long. Occasionally, he'd ask if Matt wanted to play, and occasionally, Matt wanted to—but not so occasionally, he thought back to what Bailey had said that night in the Wrangler.

Tonight's not one of those nights when we pretend we're friends.

So he refused.

Jess didn't come onto him after that first night she saw him broken and bruised to a pulp. After a week, Matt was starting to thinkthat maybe being beaten in a 4AM parking lot might've been more of a blessing than a curse. Eventually, he'd have to talk to her about the birth control. He'd save the discussion, he decided, for a day when he didn't ache so badly.

Sleep was difficult, knowing the rogues had him pinned—but Bailey would see 'em coming before anyone. He was putting too much trust in a hound he didn't trust at all, so Matt snuck his pop's retired shotgun from the shed of the house and kept it in its case, tucked in the closet beneath shoe boxes and old jackets.

Still at night, despite how wounded he felt, Matt watched the shadows move in that old beat-down barn and he let that empty feeling in him expand. Hollower and hollower until he felt the edges of him crumble in, weak and impressed at every touch and thought. His emotions changed with the tides—anxious, angry, then lonely. Anxious that a wolf would break down his door any night now and tear the flesh from his bones. Angry that he laid beside a woman who was playing his future like a pawn in the game of Life. And then lonely. The kinda lonely he had no idea he'd stopped feeling since Bailey came to the barn. The kinda lonely he couldn't stand to feel anymore.

When Quentin called about a new den location nearby, Matt packed his gear before he'd even ended the phone call. Maybe he just needed to get out of this place—needed to breathe air that hadn't been tainted by the city. Smell the wind when it didn't wreak of corporate America and Jess's too-sweet kiosk perfume.

This time, Matt didn't initiate any kinda conversation with the hound. They listened to the radio and stopped only once for bottled waters, then they drove in sweet silence toward the coast. Westport's stony beaches stunk of fish and the cold sea air was an icy out-of-season mist that made him gnash his teeth whenever he breathed. Though the lights that rode the water were beautiful at night, Matt found himself huddling in his windbreaker while Bailey braved the cold without a chill on his flesh. It was a biker bar they'd arrived at—paint peeling from the exterior and a closed sign hanging from the front window. Matt had started toward it when Bailey caught him by the arm.