Page 85 of The Next Lie

I swing harder.

My shoulder jolts. Pain shoots up my arm. The bag rocks half an inch and settles back into place, patient and smug.

“Asshole,” I mutter.

I hit it again. This time, I see Delia.

Not my Delia. Not the girl who made bubble beards with me in a clawfoot tub. Not the sister who stole marshmallows from my cereal and blamed ghosts.

The woman in Noir Night. Cold eyes. Rosary tattoo. The look she gave me when she said my name like it hurt her mouth.

I punch her face so hard my glove slides sideways off the bag. The bag barely shifts.

I punch again.

Cal replaces her.

Cal, with his careful silences and his steady hands and the life he built for me out of locked doors and edited truths. Cal teaching me how to change a tire. Cal sitting beside my hospital bed after a panic attack when I was fourteen. Cal knowing my sister was alive.

I hit him hard enough that pain snaps through my wrist.

“Damn it.”

I shake out my hand inside the glove and keep going.

The next face is the man with the rosary.

Not Deacon exactly. Not anymore. That would be easier, and apparently the universe has decided I do not get easy. The rosary becomes a flash of ink. A hallway. A shadow. A truth that keeps moving every time I get close enough to grab it.

I hit the bag until my breath starts scraping at the walls of my throat.

Then Deacon is there, anyway. His mouth on mine. His hand at my face. His voice telling me I have been trying for fifteen years.

Mine.

I punch him, too.

I punch the letters. Ash. Every page I answered without knowing who was on the other end. Every time I told a stranger something I couldn’t say to Cal because strangers were safer than fathers.

The bag moves this time.

Barely.

It makes me furious.

I step in and swing again, too wide, too wild. My body is all anger and no technique. Cal would tell me to stop throwing from the shoulder. Ever would tell me to set my feet. Shiloh would make some irritatingly useful observation about leverage.

None of them are here, so I do it all wrong. I do it wrong with everything I have.

Punch.

Punch.

Punch.

The gloves slip on my hands. Sweat runs down the back of my neck. My lungs burn. The bag thuds and sways and comes back at me every time, because that is what everything in my life does. It absorbs what I give it and returns.

I kick it.