“Theresa,” I finally said, not looking over to her. The memory hit me right between the eyes, and my head actually hurt saying her name out loud. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t talk about this shit, so I skipped ahead a couple years.
“I ended up on the streets when I was seventeen,” I continued. I saw Raine’s eyes narrow slightly, realizing I had just skipped over a big chunk of time. Tough, she was just going to have to deal with it. “One night, I watched a fight between a couple of kids in an alley, and when it was over, all the people standing around them started passing money back and forth. The guy that won the fight got a big wad of it handed to him. Next thing I knew, I was street fighting for cash.”
“About three months afterwards, I was in a really nasty fight. The guy I took down was a big name in street fighting, and all the bookies and shit had ten to one odds against me. When it was over and he was still lying in the street bleeding, there was only one guy besides me collecting any money.”
“He came up to me and started asking me a shitload of questions. How long I had been fighting, how I ended up on the streets – lots of bullshit like that. Then he asked if I wanted to make some real money fighting, and I said ‘hell yeah.’”
“He asked me two more questions, and my answers changed everything.”
I stopped, running over the scene from my memory a few times, wondering how things would be different if I had said yes instead of no.
“What did he ask you?” Raine prompted.
I was rocking back and forth again and seriously doubting whether or not I should be saying any of this to her. I also knew our chances of survival were going down really, really quickly. Maybe I needed to tell this shit to someone before I actually died.
“He asked me if I was afraid to kill. Then he asked me if I was afraid to die.”
“What did you say?”
“I said no to both,” I told her. “That’s how I met Landon.”
I paused and thought again about all the shit I was contemplating telling her. Once I kept going from this point, there was no turning back. She’d have enough information to get herself killed if she ever talked about it to the wrong person.
“You can’t ever tell anyone about this,” I reminded her. “No one – ever.”
“I won’t tell anyone, Daniel. I swear.”
“Okay,” I nodded. Maybe I needed to trust her with this. Maybe I needed to tell her. Maybe that’s why she was here with me. “We probably need to start right there. My name’s Bastian, not Daniel.”
I guess I was going to tell her everything after all.
Chapter 6 – Game
There. I did it. I told her my real name. I didn’t know why, but it felt good saying it.
“Why did you say it was Daniel?” Raine cocked her head to one side and looked at me quizzically.
“I’ve gone by Daniel for years – ever since I quit fighting.” I looked down at the floor of the raft, as if there was something interesting there.
“Why did you change your name?”
“You’ll have to wait until I get to that part,” I said. I tilted my head the opposite way of hers and gave her a half smile.
“Go on, then.”
“Are you sure you want me to?”
“Yes, I am.” Raine stopped twisting her fingers around long enough to look up at me through her dark lashes. Some of her hair had fallen into her face, creating a curtain in front of her eyes.
I took a couple of deep breaths and wondered what I should say next. I didn’t want to go into a lot of detail. She might think she wanted to hear this shit, but the particulars were pretty ugly. While I was trying to decide, Raine spoke again.
“I ended up adopting one of those pit bulls, you know. His name was Mister Fluffy.”
“Mister Fluffy? Seriously?” I laughed and Raine laughed along with me. I tried to picture that name on a tag hanging from the studded metal collar of a short-haired pit bull. “Mister Fluffy, the pit bull.”
“He was my best friend,” she said with a glorious smile that jumped from her face right to my dick. “He had a really rough start in life, but he ended up with a yard to play in and a basket full of tennis balls, so it wasn’t all bad. I think he ended up pretty happy, but he was always skittish around strangers. I always felt bad that he could never tell me what happened to him.”
“So I’m back to being a dog again?” If she thought she was being subtle with her analogy, she was seriously wrong.