Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [50]
Tommy was used to me saying exactly what I had to say. He made an act of contrition out of his face.
—I better get those tickets, he said.
That’s when I noticed a skirt and blouse draped over the desk chair. A blouse Allison wouldn’t be caught dead in. As soon as he realized I was looking over at the clothes, he said, —Hold on, and closed the door on me.
I wanted to take off but I had to tough it out, for the tickets. A minute later, Tommy opened the door again and handed them to me. The water had stopped. The clothes had been removed. I could tell he was trying to figure out what to say.
—Allison might have come back to the room for these, you know. You get that, don’t you? I said.
He made a fist with his right hand and rubbed it into the palm of his left. All the cuts. The man was a walking scar.
—Not a very heroic moment, is it, Kitten?
—She calls me that and I don’t really like it from either of you, I said.
I turned and started down the hall, heard the door click shut. That’s the way I’ve always been when there’s nothing left to say. I walk. I drive off. I part the sea and run, as far and fast as possible. But this time I turned around, strode back down the hall, and knocked hard. Again I waited for him to open up.
—You have no idea what we’ve been through! I shouted at his dumbstruck expression. —NO IDEA! Allison drives me crazy, but she’s always been there for me and she hangs in with Thad while everyone else goes off to work or dies or goes to school or the club or gets lost.
Someone had to defend her. I hoped the people down at the front desk would hear me, the women bent over cleaning the rooms on the floor below, the waitstaff in the small café.
—Allison knows, he said quietly. —This woman is no one. But it was wrong to bring her here. It will never happen again.
—Screw you, I said.
Then I realized I had to run and find a taxi or get into a whole thing with Allison. That was Rome. Messed up Rome. If you ever wanted to spear love through the chest, this was it. I don’t mean I had romantic feelings for him, but Allison did. And anyway, I’m talking about the whole idea, the whole rotten business of love.
After we got through the museum and had some lunch and saturated our cork brains on ART until they could no longer float, Allison said it was time to take Thad back to the room. I told her I wanted to do some shopping, so maybe she could drop me off. I was seventeen then, had my phone. She wasn’t keen on the idea, but she had her hands full and said yes.
I went to the nearest American Express, converted some travelers’ checks to Euros and asked this man at the desk to help me look up the location of the GSA training school in Rome. I don’t think anyone recognized me there, and no one seemed to think twice when I signed up for a training session. I didn’t do it to be something—I had no thought of being a gladiator—I just wanted to get back at Tommy, and maybe at Allison for always going along. I knew it would mess with their heads if they found out.
The place was pretty well cleared out. I didn’t know they don’t practice on Saturdays in Rome. But there was one guy hanging out. A lean Italian man named Giancarlo, maybe six or seven years older than I, and he offered to put me through some paces. We were the exact same height, and he was all about the eyes. He showed me some moves, and talked about how to psyche an opponent, how to manipulate a shield. In some ways, I felt happier than I had in a long time that afternoon. Because I began to get why people do marathons, triathlons, kick boxing, I don’t know. It’s this thing of finding a quiet zone, and then breaking out from that place in bursts of concentrated energy—that’s how Giancarlo described it. He told me I was a natural, and that made me fight harder.
We used blunt wooden swords, yet my body bruised up and even bled a little. When I got back to the hotel room, I went straight for a bucket of ice, and made sure Thad didn’t see me fresh from the shower. If anyone called Tommy to let him know I was over at the school, I never heard.
Giancarlo