Black and Blue by Paige Notaro Page A

heads, but I couldn’t read a damn thing off her.
    “Why do you think we don’t?” she said finally.
    “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
    “Bad stuff?”
    “Nothing horrible, just not up to your standards.”
    “My standards aren’t what you think you are.” She leaned in like a spy. “I just thought you might be too dangerous for me.”
    She had a twinkle in her eye that made me lose track of my words for a moment. “Too rough maybe.”
    “I like how rough you are.” She looked thoughtful a moment, then added. “I like the way you shake me up.”
    I started to explain that I wasn’t talking about my body or my fighting, but I left my own head and caught sight of her. She looked totally keyed in to the conversation, eager to part the sea to get to me.
    I smiled and decided to let it go. “You date any other rough guys?”
    “My last boyfriend played a mean saxophone.”
    I chuckled. Girl had wit. The waitress dropped off a clear martini glass, but I paid her no attention.
    “I never got into music as a kid,” I said. “Tried strumming my friend’s guitar a couple times and ended up breaking the strings.”
    “I can imagine. You probably didn’t need the music to woo girls though.”
    “This was back in ninth grade when I could use all the help I could get. I grew up super late.”
    I shook my head at the memories of fighting in my scrawny body. Lot of beatings. Pop never did teach me to hold my own - or much of anything else.
    “That’s hard to imagine.” Gabi sipped at her drink. “I was kind of the complete opposite. I grew up super early.”
    “Did those things come in in third grade?” I stared pointedly at her breasts.
    “Hah, no, though they did come in earlier than most. I’m talking more about the way I saw the world.”
    Saw the world. Everything outside of Detroit was still almost a distant haze to me - a complete fog of war if you took out my knowledge of MMA. Thinking about the world was a distant concept, but I wouldn’t mind learning.
    “Why’s that?” I asked.
    “My dad really. He had a way of drilling ideas into me, like I were just another engineering design of his. My sister didn’t get it nearly as bad as I did.”
    She went on about her upbringing. Her father was a manager at one of the big three car companies. They were well-off, but they’d only got there cause the man took his time charting a course for his life and building it up brick by brick.
    “So yeah,” Gabi concluded. “You’re kind of the antithesis of what I was raised to believe in. I mean the opposite.”
    “I know what antithesis means, Cadbury,” I said. “And I’m glad I’m a taste of the exotic for you, but our upbringings weren’t all that different.”
    “Really?” Her glass paused at her lips.
    “You’re your old man, plus a little risk. Well, I’m mine plus a bit extra too.”
    Gabi’s dad was a negative imprint of Pop. He’d been a machinist in the same company, ok at it, but he didn’t spend the money well. When Mom had run off, he’d gone totally AWOL, letting what little structure there was in his life fall to shambles. I guess he had kept a roof over our head, but that was mostly by virtue of living on property too shitty to be worth being foreclosed on.
    “The only thing that made me turn out different was discipline. I found out that I could fight, and I stuck to it.”
    I’d given Gabi the sanitized version. I watched her face carefully as I finished talking. This was just a medium dose of the poison in my past.
    “You have a younger sister?” was all Gabi asked.
    “I do.” Her name had been all I mentioned in passing.
    “You really care about her.”
    I must have been smiling without really knowing. Even Sarah’s memory had that effect on me. But I didn’t feel like scoring points on account of her.
    “Having her to take care of kept me sane growing up. I don’t know if I’d have the discipline to be where I am without her.”
    Gabi just