Wes sat on a cold metal bench in the corner of a public park watching dead leaves drift across the concrete, trying to decide if he should actually go home.
He hadn’t been back since last night, a full day, and a dark little part of him wondered if they’d even noticed he was gone, or if the house had just hummed along without him the way it always did.
Walt counting his money at the table, Paige upstairs with her door shut, Colleen shrinking at the sink.
And under all of that, heavier than everything, sat Colleen herself, because every time his brain reached for last night it flinched back like the memory was a stove.
His aunt’s voice in the dark, you’ve always been mine, and he still could not wrap his head around what he had done, could not look at it directly, like staring at the sun.
“There’s nothing else to do, so I have to go face my destiny,” said Wes, to nobody.
He stood up, and then came the moment he would think about later, because he had $3,720 sitting in his account and a black card in his wallet that Reggie swore opened doors, and his thumb was already hovering over the rideshare app when his hand, all on its own, dug into his pocket and came out with coins.
Bus fare.
Counted and held in his palm like something precious.
Eight years of wiring didn’t uninstall in a day, and standing there between the park and the fancy district, Wes realized he didn’t want it to, because the suit was for them and the coins were for him, and he was going to ride the same dirty bus he’d always ridden, on purpose, with both feet in both worlds.
The bus arrived with a long hiss of its brakes, smelling like old vinyl and diesel, and Wes climbed the steps, dropped his coins in the slot, and grabbed a leather strap as the whole vehicle lurched forward.
A few stops later, a crowd of students from the high school on the corner piled into the narrow aisle, backpacks and elbows and noise, and among them was a small girl with a heavy backpack trying to squeeze into a spot near the rear exit, and a man in a dirty jacket slid in right behind her, using the crowd as an excuse to press way too close.
Wes watched it from the corner of his eye without meaning to, and then he couldn’t stop watching, because the man’s hand drifted down and his fingers caught the hem of the girl’s skirt and started to lift it, and the girl went completely rigid, face draining white, trying to pull away and having nowhere to go in the packed aisle.
Two days ago, Wes would have looked down at his shoes.
He knew that about himself the way you know old phone numbers.
Two days ago his whole body would have locked up, the motel lobby, the laughter, the freeze, and the man would have gotten off at his stop and done it again tomorrow.
But his mind didn’t reach for the old Wes.
It reached for the week he’d just had, for every character he’d run, and it found the one it needed, already waiting, already dressed.
He stepped into the Shepherd the way other people step into a shower, all at once, and he shoved through the students, took the man by the collar of his jacket, and slammed him back against the metal handrail with a CLANG that turned every head on the bus.
“Get your hands off her before I break them,” said Wes.
His voice didn’t shake.
It came out low and flat, a growl with the engine roaring under it, and it didn’t sound like anything Wes had ever heard come out of his own mouth, and that was fine, because it wasn’t his voice, it was the Shepherd’s, and the Shepherd did not negotiate.
The man looked up at him, at the height and the cold fury coming off him in waves, and his hands shot up so fast he nearly lost his balance.
“Get off at the next stop,” said Wes.
He didn’t let go of the collar until the bus slowed, and then he walked the man to the folding doors and watched him scramble down into the street without looking back.
The girl stood there with her chest heaving, and then she let out one long shaky breath and pulled her backpack straps tight.
“Thank you. So much.”
“Are you okay?” said Wes, and his voice was normal again, warm even, and the switch cost him nothing.
“Yes, I’m fine now. Thank you,” she said, and a moment later she stepped off at her stop and gave him one last grateful nod from the sidewalk, and Wes stood by the exit with his knuckles white around the handrail, realizing his heart was hammering, and that it wasn’t fear.
It was shock, pure shock, at the machine he’d just felt himself become.
He had never been a fighter.
Not once, not in eight years of Walt, not in two years of a campus that called him a monk.
But he’d stepped into a character, and the character had handled it, and his hands were steady.
Wes got off at his own stop and started the long walk toward the house with heavy steps, because some honest part of him truly didn’t want to arrive, and the evening air was turning colder and the streets were getting quiet, until they weren’t quiet anymore, because heavy boots echoed off the buildings from the dark corner behind him.
He turned around.
The man from the bus was standing under the broken streetlamp, and he wasn’t alone this time.
Two massive drunks flanked him, big shoulder-to-shoulder slabs of men, each one holding the neck of a broken glass bottle with the jagged end out.
“Hey, look, it’s the little hero from the bus!” the man shouted down the street.
“Let’s see if you can talk big now, pretty boy!”
Before Wes could even drop his bag, the first drunk lunged, swinging a wild heavy fist that caught him hard across the jaw, and the world whited out at the edges, his vision swimming as he stumbled back into a brick wall.
A kick landed against his ribs, burning pain, his lungs seizing, and every animal instinct he owned screamed at him to curl up on the ground and beg.
His mind did something else instead.
It went quiet, and it opened a script.
The Lead.
The one from the old boxing film they’d studied his freshman year for movement, the protagonist in the final act, the man who cannot lose, and Wes felt the script slide over his body like the suits slid over it, footwork first, because the Lead always starts with the feet.
The second drunk threw a massive right hook and Wes snapped his head back, the fist grazing his chin by a fraction of an inch, and suddenly he was up on his toes, dancing, creating space, blood running hot down his lip. The source of this chapter is novelping dot com.
“Is that all you got?” said Wes, and the hiss that came out of him was mocking and bloody and completely insane.
The bus guy charged him like a bull, and Wes read the trajectory like a sentence, ducked low, and let the man’s own momentum carry him forward into a brutal uppercut straight to the solar plexus.
WHUMP.
The man folded around Wes’s fist with all the air leaving him at once and collapsed onto the asphalt, done.
“You motherfucker!” the first drunk screamed, rushing in with a frantic flurry of punches.
Wes kept his guard up, forearms absorbing the heavy clumsy blows, and he stopped thinking about the pain and started reading the rhythm, because drunks have rhythm, sloppy, telegraphed rhythm, and he tracked it, waiting, waiting, until the man overextended on a left jab.
Wes slipped right, ducked under the arm, pivoted on his back foot, and put his whole body, his whole week, his whole eight years, into one counter-hook that caught the man flush on the jaw.
CRACK.
He went down face-first onto the curb and stayed there, out cold.
The last man standing looked at his two friends on the ground, and then at Wes, at the bloodshot eyes and the bloodied grin and the space between his feet, and the alcohol visibly cleared out of his brain in real time, and he started backing up.
Wes didn’t give him the chance to run.
He closed the distance with a lightning-fast shuffle, head weaving side to side, snapped a sharp blinding jab into the man’s nose, and before the guy’s hands even got there, drilled a straight right into his temple that buckled his knees and put him down in a heap.
Silence.
Wes stood over the three of them with his chest heaving and his knuckles split and bleeding, and he wiped a streak of blood off his own lip with the back of his wrist and looked down at the groaning pile of men he had just dismantled with choreography from a movie.
His body was aching everywhere and his ribs felt like they were on fire, and underneath all of it a dark manic thrill was washing through him in waves, because he had never won anything in his life, and he had just won three fights in ninety seconds.
He had fought like a wild animal and won entirely, and standing there in the cold with the streetlamp buzzing, Wes chose to believe something he’d never once believed about himself.
He could not fail.
He picked his bag up out of the dirt, threw it over his shoulder, and turned back toward his street, and the fear of going home was simply gone, replaced by a dangerous loose confidence walking beside him like a friend, because the stage had finally bled all the way through into reality, and the characters weren’t costumes anymore.
They were load-bearing.
Take one away and something in him would come down with it.
Wes walked up the drive toward the house with his knuckles dripping onto the pavement, and the porch light was on.