Dirty Fighter: A Bad Boy MMA Romance by Roxy Sinclaire, Natasha Tanner Read Free Book Online Page A

coming up for the ‘Southfield Axis’ series—”
    “Please stop bothering her, she’s been through a lot,” my aunt cut him off, tugging on my arm to lead me away from Chet. Just another fucking relative doing whatever they assumed was best, not bothering to even ask how I felt about any of it. I saw my luggage on the carousel and couldn’t help but think about my mom’s luggage sitting beside her dresser. That damned purple paisley. I wouldn’t be able to look at a print like that again without thinking of her betrayal.
    I was sick and tired of my fucking relatives saying what they thought was best, when in the end they didn’t give a shit about how I felt. Stepping away, I grabbed my luggage and hauled it back to the two of them.
    “Chet, tell me more about what you can do for me,” I said, much to my aunt’s chagrin. Chet smiled and began to rattle on information I’d need to know. The airport was swimming around me in an almost dream like state as I had my hands on the reigns to my own life for once. It felt incredible.
    Fuck my mom.
    Fuck my aunt.
    They didn’t want to take into account what I wanted—I sure as hell wasn’t going to give a fuck about what they wanted from me.

9
    Adam
    W hen you have nowhere to go it can feel helpless. Hopeless.
    People always say all of these things they’d do if they didn’t have to work, didn’t have family tying them down, or a job to hold them accountable. However when you have nothing in the world that’s yours it isn’t like that.
    I had money, but what the hell was I going to do with that? Maybe a couple thousand at most, and that wasn’t going to get me an apartment without an ID card, it wasn’t going to even last me a month of motels. I couldn’t go back home, and I couldn’t just follow Brooklyn. So I stayed on the bus. It became a dizzying game of musical seats where I’d get off on random stops, or when the buses hit their final stops before turning around, and then I’d buy a ticket on a bus I’d hadn’t been on before.
    I went places I’d never been.
    Saw landmarks and states, through the vibrating windows of those buses that I never saw before. The people were never the exact same people, but they were always the same in other ways. There would be people my age, some homeless, some going home because after a couple weeks of living on their own they gave up. Older people visiting family, entire families moving. I never had the same bus driver twice.
    The buses were revolving doors of glimpses into possible paths I could take.
    I didn’t see any people that reflected me or who I wanted to be. I didn’t see any paths that looked like they would fit me. I know that everyone else has their troubles but I felt truly alone.
    Every now and then I’d find myself spending a week or two in a town I’d never seen before. It made me feel a little more human, going to the same diner every morning for a week, jogging through a park with a dozen others. It connected me with other people more than I could have hoped for.
    One of the cities I wound up in was right on a river, almost built right on top of it, and it was amazing to see how a city could grow and thrive so close to something that could destroy it. I thought about Brooklyn a lot while I was there. I wondered what she liked to eat, what kind of jokes made her laugh. Once I decided not to get too carried away in my thoughts of her, I let a bus do it instead.
    If you circle around a revolving door enough, it’ll spit you out eventually.
    I was spit out onto the hot cement of California. I stuck there, somehow just knowing that my time on the busses was over. My legs weren’t used to walking so much after getting off the buses, at first, but I got used to it. I wasn’t angry, wasn’t sad, shit I don’t think I even let myself feel anything those days. I was homeless but I don’t think I gave a shit about even that back then. I remember thinking about Brooklyn’s beautiful and sad face a