“Morning,” Dean said, his voice quiet. He pushed a plate of eggs across the counter. Leo didn’t look at the food. He sat down heavily on a stool, staring at his hands. “I don’t want to go back to school today, Dad.” “You aren’t,” Dean replied. “Take a sick day. Drink water. Watch TV.” Leo nodded, wincing as the movement pulled at his bruised face. He finally looked up at his father. “Am I off the team?” Dean took a slow sip of his coffee. The black liquid burned the back of his throat. “No, you’re going back to the dojo this afternoon.” Leo’s eyes widened in sheer panic, his breathing hitched, catching in his chest. “Dad, no. Trent will kill me. He said I was a quitter.” “If I walk back in there, Trent isn’t going to touch you,” Dean said. The absolute certainty in his voice stopped Leo’s rising panic dead in its tracks. “We are going at four. You’re going to put your gi on. You’re going to stand on the mat and you are going to listen to what he has to say. What did you do?” Leo asked, his voice a tight whisper. He had seen his father angry before, but it was always a cold, distant anger. He had never seen his father violent. Dean set his mug down in the sink. He looked out the window at the neighbor’s overgrown lawn. “I had a conversation. Eat your eggs.”
Ten miles away, in a cramped, overpriced apartment that smelled of stale beer and protein powder, Trent was discovering the limits of his own body. He woke up on his living room floor. He had passed out there around three in the morning, unable to make the walk to his bedroom. As consciousness returned, so did the agony. It didn’t arrive gradually. It hit him like a freight train. Trent groaned and tried to sit up. Fire ripped through his left side, his fractured ribs ground together, sending a spike of blinding white pain straight into his brain. He gasped, falling back onto the carpet, clutching his chest. He lay there for twenty minutes, taking shallow, ragged breaths, sweat beading on his forehead. Eventually using the edge of the coffee table,
he pulled himself to his feet. He hobbled to the bathroom. Keeping his left arm pinned tightly against his side, he flipped the light switch. The fluorescent bulb flickered, illuminating the mirror. Trent stared at the reflection. He barely recognized the man looking back. His nose was a swollen, asymmetrical lump of dark purple flesh shifted noticeably to the right. Both of his eyes were blackened. The whites of his left eye had burst vessels, bleeding red into the sclera. There were deep, dark bruises forming on his throat where Dean’s fingers had dug in. He looked like a victim. Trent gripped the edges of the porcelain sink. His hands were shaking. Anger, hot and venomous, began to boil in his gut, temporarily overriding the pain. He remembered the feeling of Dean’s hand on his throat. He remembered the complete humiliating helplessness. He remembered the sound of his own rib snapping and worse. He remembered the sound he had made afterward, a pathetic whimpering squeal. And his two students had seen it. They had seen their god bleed.
