“Might surprise you, sunshine, but Jasmine isn’t property,” Ava replied softly, stepping in front of her.
“You think that injury means anything to me? You come between me and what’s mine, we have a major problem.”
“That a threat?” Ava asked casually.
“And what are you going to do about it?” came the reply. “Who do you think you are, you fucking half-crippled has-been? I’m not going anywhere without my wife.”
“Then you’ll be waiting outside until the cops come. Coz, right now, you’re a trespasser.”
Adam gave a sinister grin, looking anything but happy. He moved without a sound towards the car as Ava gently escorted Jasmine inside. There were no words between them because none were really needed. Jasmine placed her head on Ava’s shoulder, holding her for support. Comfort. The thing Ava had always been.
Jasmine couldn’t hear any sounds in the house and figured they were alone. She leant back and briefly locked eyes with Ava but then glanced down at her lips. Instinct had her moving forward, and Ava didn’t stop her. Their lips met in a tender kiss that soon exploded into full blown animalistic passion on Jasmine’s part.
She had just tasted Ava’s tongue when she pulled back and screamed. The glass of the door behind them had shattered. Adam stood beyond the large missing chunk glaring at them, crowbar in hand, then began backing away from the door, down the front steps.
“Adam! What the fuck?” Jasmine yelled, bursting out of the door.
“You fucking dyke slut,” he sneered, clenching the crowbar in his fist.
“Hey!” Ava yelled, hobbling past the door and down the steps.
Adam pointed the crowbar at her. “Fuck you, cunt. Kissing someone’s wife? Back the fuck off unless you want your face rearranged.”
Ava reached for her phone. “I’m calling the cops.”
Before she could press a button, the crowbar had been thrown, striking her face hard. She dropped her phone, fell back against the house and crumbled to the ground. The concrete was quickly sprayed with her blood, and the pain in her leg hummed. She heard Jasmine screaming her name but couldn’t respond. Hard kicks were being cannoned into her ribs as maniacal laughter floated on the air.
“What are you gonna do, washed-up MMA bitch? How do you like that? And this... huh... and fuckin’ this—”
Suddenly, Ava’s mind was back in the ring facing Nash. Nash advancing, snarling at her. Beating her senseless. Her eyes were wide open, staring at an opponent that wasn’t there, and she was frozen in place, unable to snap herself out of it. Punches that Nash had thrown during the exhibition were taking priority over the ones currently hitting her, and she couldn’t cover herself adequately, her mind frozen in a past that held on to her with iron talons.
The only thing that stopped the lunatic was Jasmine jumping on his back, screaming, “Leave her alone!”
Ava saw flashes of reality through a haze of red tears. Adam became enraged, backing up and slamming Jasmine against the side of his car. He flung her to the ground as soon as her hold on him loosened, then bent over her and delivered a sharp right across her face.
Shaking off more of the flashbacks, but still on the ground, Ava’s hands fisted. She ran the back of one of those fists across her mouth and came away with blood. Pressing her lips together, hard, her head down, she pushed through the pain, and using the wall of the house for support, rose to her feet, then looked up to see Adam repeatedly punching his wife.
“Stop, please!” Jasmine shrieked, covering herself.
“You used me! I fucking trusted you all these years. I loved you! And this is what you do to me?” he bellowed, gripping her by the hair to get a clear shot at her face.
A fire began to grow in Ava’s gut as she started toward them. Two steps forward, she tripped. Glancing down, she bent and came back up with the arsehole’s crowbar, shining with her own blood, in hand.
Adam must’ve heard her move and turned to face her, breathing heavily. “You just don’t know when to stay down do you?”
Ava looked at him square in the face and spat out a glob of blood on the ground in front of her. She looked at the crowbar again, a question burning in her brain. Not because of anything this meaningless piece of shit had said. It was a question raised by Ruben: who do you want to be?
A question she had never answered, for him or herself, until right at this moment.
She was a fighter.
No matter what doctors told her, or how badly she’d been hurt or how devastated she had been in defeat that had never changed. She was still standing. She was still here. It was who she was born to be and who she would always choose to be.
She dropped the crowbar with a clang and cracked her neck just as Adam advanced with a crisp right hook that she dodged, sending an uppercut right into his heart, if he had one. Before he had time to cry out in pain, she’d sunk two fists into his face, left and right, sending him to one knee. Her punches were still floppy, but were aimed true, where she needed them. She wrenched his arm and held it out, flipping him over and holding him down with her legs, his arm still in her grip. He screamed with the pressure she applied, but she didn’t care.
There was no referee here. Tap outs meant shit. She placed her foot on his cheek for leverage and pulled hard, hearing a huge, crunching pop as she viciously separated his shoulder. His scream echoed down the driveway. He tried to break free, but Ava held on, gritting her teeth and pulling back even further. Biting her lip and tasting the blood that flowed from the injury the crowbar had inflicted, rage and a sinister form of satisfaction flowed through her at having the power to hurt the one that had hurt her.
That thought snapped her out of her fury, and closing her eyes, she let him go. That wasn’t who she was. She was better than that.