In The Aftermath
Title: In the Aftermath
Author: Kate, k4writer02
Rating: PG-13? Some adult language and themes.
Word Count: 2,663
Disclaimer: I don’t own them, and I’m not profiting.
Spoilers: Mud Bowl and State for sure.
Summary: After State, Billy Riggins finds out about what happened to Tyra Collette during the Mud Bowl.
Characters: Billy, Tyra
Pairings: none, but there’s some Billy/Tyra fantasy and references to past Tim/Tyra
Billy lounged on a barstool. It was Tuesday night. Dillon had won State Sunday-his brother had a ring of his own to show. Billy didn’t quite know what to make of Tim, who seemed to be spending every waking moment with their neighbor and the neighbor’s kid, but he knew he wasn’t going to mess with the boy this week.
Billy was swapping stories and jokes with the guys he was working with. He’d hired onto a construction crew that was building a new Wal-Mart. It was honest work. Sure as shooting he wasn’t going to do this for long-there were better things to come, he knew. Maybe in real estate, maybe in oil, maybe by riding Tim’s coattails, maybe in golf (though to be honest he was starting to give up that dream).
But for now, with Dillon repainting signs to tell everyone they were State Champs? Billy Riggins could sit back and shoot the breeze while others bought drinks for 33’s big brother. The men were reliving the game and making predictions about next season-they were losing Coach Taylor, and for all that Saracen had completed plays that boys in college had trouble with, he was skinny and small. Billy’d been enjoying it, but he was starting to eye two girls in the corner. They weren’t quite beautiful-not in Tyra or Lyla’s league, nor even Jacky and Mindy’s-but they were pretty enough, at least for a night.
Billy told Jimmy, the bartender, to send a drink to the blonde. There wasn’t a reason to choose the blond over the brunette-neither was better or worse than the other, to be honest. But there’d been too many brunettes in and out of the Riggins’ house lately. And the last blond had been Tyra Collette, who left Timmy and partnered Billy in that Homecoming party.
Not that Tyra Collette had anything to do with him buying a drink for a blonde stranger.
Billy was just getting ready to cross the bar (the girls were giggling and glancing at him and his buddy expectantly and who was he to disappoint a lady?) That was the moment, of course, when Deputy Lester Flanagan-Les-swaggered in. They’d been Panthers together, back in the day-Les had been a senior when Billy was just a freshman. He was still in uniform, so he might even be on duty. Billy scowled and scanned the bar for underage football players. Tim wasn’t around, thank the Lord for small favors, and none of the others were there. Too busy with celebrating outside of town, he hoped.
Les swaggered up to the bar, looking faintly bored and completely ridiculous. “Get me a Miller.”
“Tap?” Jimmy looked over.
“That’s fine.”
Les turned to Billy. “Hey, now. Some game, Sunday.”
“Sure was.” Billy agreed, “So you’re off duty?” he heard himself ask.
Les glared.
Billy put his hands up, “I’m just teasing ya. I bet you got real important work here.” Then, because he couldn’t resist razzing a jerk from high school, “Hunting down some speeding ticket?”
One of his work buddies guffawed. It was well known that Dillon’s police force chose to look the other way on underage drinking and most other crimes that they could shut their eyes to. Except speeding-if there was money to be made from it, they’d pursue it.
Les waved an annoyed arm. “I’ll talk to you later, Billy. I got questions for Jimmy.”
“Me?” The bartender-forty-something, missing half his teeth, with bloodshot eyes that suggested he sampled what he served-pointed at his skinny chest.
“There another Jimmy in here?” Les cracked.
Jimmy shrugged. “What can I do you for?” He pushed the beer across the bar to the waiting officer.
The guys from the construction gig weren’t listening-the arrival of law and order hadn’t disrupted their memories of the glory days.
“You got someplace more private?”
Jimmy snorted, “You want me to leave them alone in here when they still got money from payday? They’ll drink me dry.”
“Suit yourself.” Les shrugged. “You seen any strangers about town, couple Fridays ago? Mud Bowl time.”
“I was at the game, same as everyone else. I didn’t notice no one unusual, if’n you’re not counting the Brant folks, but they didn’t come back here.”
Les shrugged. “You got any cameras out on the parking lot out there? The one faces Alamo Freeze?”
“Something happen, Les?” Billy asked.
“Some girl says she got grabbed, comin’ out the Alamo Freeze. Now, not that I’m saying it happened and not that I’m not, but the kid working was in the back, watching the game on a little TV and he didn’t see it. Girl’s got a few bruises, can’t even see it when she’s got her face on, and really, she could just be trying to make some cash or punish some guy didn’t treat her nice. Awful sensitive too, when you ask her questions about it. Waited six days to tell anyone, too, and then she didn’t even have her mama around, just some guidance counselor from the school.”
Billy’s jaw tightened. He could imagine why she’d be reluctant, with Les’s attitude being what it was. Not that he cared about some stranger. But the only girl he could think of who hadn’t been anywhere near the Mud Bowl was Tyra. Tim had told him, in passing, that she was studying all of a sudden. Well, maybe Jackie hadn’t been there either. He couldn’t recall. And that set him on edge.
“Who was it?” Jimmy asked, rubbing a glass lazily.
“Now that’s official police business.” Les answered, sipping at his beer. “Confidential.”
“Huh.” Billy took a long pull off his beer, realized it had lost its flavor. “You got anything to go on?”
“Besides her story?” Les snorted. “Girl says she fought the guy off. Burned him good with a lighter out of the truck. Thinks she shut the door on his hand too.”
Billy drank more beer. Les’s partner-some rookie from North Texas-chose that moment to join them. “It’s the middle of the shift.” He sounded irritated. “One other places on the street was open that night, other than Alamo Freeze, and three had video cameras running.”
“So go get them tapes, Rookie.” Les took more beer.
“That’s how Dillon’s finest gets things done?” Billy felt the words fall out of his mouth.
“Well, shee-ite, what you want me to do? I mean, I know she was running round with Tim, but that don’t oblige you to her.”
Billy felt like he’d been kicked in the gut, worse than one of dad’s blows. Tyra? Or Jackie. Lyla had been at the game. Considering Billy couldn’t remember which Rally girls Tim had carried on with, there was no reason Les should. So the women Tim had been with, who weren’t at the game-Tyra and Jackie.
Oblivious, Les continued, while his partner squirmed and Jimmy backed away from Billy, who was starting to steam. “But the girl don’t have a good track record see? Her family ain’t good people-”
So it was Tyra. No one knew much about Jackie’s family. But Billy didn’t want to think about that.
“The way I see it, she likes boys she thinks will get her somewhere. I don’t know but what I heard she was running round with that Smash boy. She ain’t picky, so I’m figuring this one tried to stiff her or he got a little rough and now she’s wanting-,”
“Shut up.” That was the rookie, who was looking at Billy the way most of us would eye a snarling Doberman as we tiptoe backwards.
Billy saw red, but somehow (maybe by the grace of God, maybe good sense saying that if he got locked up for hitting a cop, Tim would probably let him stay in jail overnight and they couldn’t afford bail) he restrained himself. He slammed back the rest of the beer, swallowed, then growled “You taking it out on her that Mindy hasn’t fucked you since sophomore year? Cause that don’t seem particularly professional, Lester.”
“The day you can start telling me how to do my job is the day--,” There it was-pity and disgust, scrawled across Les’s face.
The rookie grabbed Billy’s shoulder, “Hey, what say you give me some backup while I go those other stores? Les can stay here and finish his beer and…”
Billy never remembered consenting, but he knew he got hustled out of there by the rookie, a kid he didn’t know.
When he got outside, the kid turned his back when Billy kicked at the wall, slugged it with his fists, and poured some of his rage into the unmoved concrete. “It’s about Mindy, you know?” he finally growled. “He never got over it, and now he thinks he can hurt her back, and…” He ranted, the rookie didn’t answer, and then when he could breathe again, Billy asked, “Did she really have the guidance counselor with her?” Billy liked Mrs. Taylor, even though he could tell she was looking down her nose at him a little. Billy was used to that by now, but he wasn’t sure Tyra would tolerate it.
“I wasn’t there, but I don’t think so.” The boy answered, and if he wasn’t as wet-behind-the-ears as Matt Saracen had been back in September, Billy wasn’t a burned-out nowhere-bound drunk. “I, uh, we just got the file tonight. Lieutenant said, ‘find out what you can,’ but, it ain’t like there’s witnesses. And it wasn’t no one the victim knows, and no one came into an ER in fifty miles with a burn or busted hand, as far as anyone can remember.”
Billy nodded, swallowed back bile and temper. “She okay?”
The rookie nodded. “Didn’t see her myself. Think so, though,” He paused. “We got photos,” The rookie offered in a low voice.
“What?” Billy felt like he’d had more than three beers.
“Of the bruises. Well, her, and the bruises. If we find him, we need photo proof, to show she fought. Also, it gets sympathy, if it went to a jury. Pretty thing like her, with marks like that on her throat.”
Billy gurgled. Her throat? Oh god, where else had the man’s hands been?
The rookie continued, relentlessly, “Seems like a tough girl though-just covered it up with makeup and went about her business. Desk sarge has seen just about every domestic in this town and he said this was first-class work.”
Billy wanted to scream and punch the wall again. When and why had Tyra learned to cover up bruises with makeup and brittle courage?
But then, that was a stupid question. Billy had seen some of the men in and out of Angela and Mindy Collette’s lives. He’d be willing to bet that her mother knew the art of concealer and powder. Tyra’d learned it the same place he learned that frozen peas are better for a black eye than steak (cheaper, too). She’d learned it by experience. At her mama’s knee, as it were. “Why tell me all this?” He asked, finally.
“That guy in there? My partner,” The rookie’s mouth quirked down. “He’s gonna sit on his ass. So is anyone else whose desk this lands on. But you? I don’t think you’ll sit on your ass, as long as he’s out there.”
“You don’t even know me.” Billy growled, “Or her.”
“You so sure?” The rookie asked.
“I know you’re too young to have played with me.” Billy said. “And too old to have played with Tim. I don’t think you’re from around here.”
“Doing a training stint here, then out to Abilene.” The rookie smiled. “I’m tired of speeding tickets and leash laws and shit. I want to do something that matters.”
Billy nodded understanding. “You wanna know…anything? If I find him.”
“Far as I know, you hustled out of the bar and I gave you a sobriety test. You passed, but decided to go home.”
“You got the file?”
Wordless, the rookie handed over a file. “That’s copies, not originals, but don’t let ‘em out just anywhere. Girl didn’t want anyone to know.”
“I’ll handle it.” Billy said, tucking the file away. He drove out of town, to hit cans with a club and to work out what he was going to do.
And later that night, he knocked on Tyra’s door, carrying a jug of milk and a tube of store-bought raw cookie dough-but so what? He thanked her for going to State and apologized that she’d been up in the cheap seats, [that Tim had broken another promise]. And he stayed till Mindy got there and looked at him strangely, but all it meant was that Tyra was a good girl and he didn’t want her to get lost.
He didn’t try to touch her-not to ruffle her hair or kiss her cheek, though she wasn’t acting any different. He left her with raw cookie dough, milk, and her sister.
And he didn’t let himself think about his motivations too hard, while he started combing the file and calling round.
Didn’t let himself think about why he wasn’t ever going to tell Tim, why he’d needed a drink to look at each photo, at the marks a man had left on her body. At the expression on her face, the way she was refusing to cry.
He didn’t think about why there were tears in his eyes when he called yet another free clinic and finally got a yes, they had seen a man with a burn and a busted hand a few Saturdays and he had seemed awful confused about how it happened. He hadn’t settled his bill, and they couldn’t reach him at the phone or address he’d provided, which was the only reason anyone remembered anything. Billy called the rookie, left a voicemail, hoped the boy could find out more, but Riggins knew his resources had panned out.
So he drank himself into oblivion that night, trying not to think about the brassy girl who could, in fact, bruise. Trying not to think about her body, marked now, as it was.
Didn’t stop him from swinging by her house again the next night, after work, bringing a sack of Krispy Kremes, like he really couldn’t help himself. She wasn’t there-Angela said she’d gone somewhere with a Christian boy, who talked too much, was very nice, but “not quite as handsome as Tim.”
Sometimes, Angela scared him. Hadn’t the woman learned her lesson? How could Tyra, at seventeen, be more practical than her mother?
He’d gone by instinct and found Tyra with Tim’s tutor (now her tutor too, apparently). The boy was tripping over himself trying to impress her, which Billy sympathized with. Billy found himself laughing a little, because didn’t the boy know that Tyra respected strength, not groveling? Billy wanted Tyra to have a strong man, one who knew that she could be strong too, that a strong man wouldn’t overpower her, even though he wouldn’t give her her own way whenever she spoke.
And Billy drank himself to sleep so he wouldn’t dream of her. That wasn’t new, but he’d started to lay off the beer, started to hope there was a future for the Riggins brothers. No more of that, not now. There were two types of dreams, and he didn’t know which was worse--Tyra screaming and struggling against a faceless shadow, while Billy hovered in the shadows, paralyzed worse than Jason Street, unable to help her. Or dream 2, Tyra in his bed, writhing and gasping.
One left him furious and sickened. The other left him confused and sickened and harder than a rock, or, worse, limp and sticky. After the second kind, he tends to feel like he soiled her, like he used her without permission, like he’s just forced her to do something. Like he’s almost as bad as the man who bruised her.
It’s not that he never thought about her that way before-he’s a man, and when she was with Tim, she had a distracting habit of running around in a shirt without anything under it. There’s a reason he made Maxim magazine cracks about her. But he tried not to put her front-and-center, because she was his little brother’s girl and Mindy’s baby sister and too young for him and, even temporarily, a business associate. Usually she just slipped into fantasies, somewhere after a Cowboys cheerleader and shortly before the explosion. Not that the connection between her image and his coming bears thinking on.
Longer hours working, that’s what the situation calls for.
More drinking, until maybe his dick stops working or trying to think for him.
More drinking, more working, less looking at photos taken under a fluorescent light.
Less thinking.
He’s never had trouble with that before.
Author: Kate, k4writer02
Rating: PG-13? Some adult language and themes.
Word Count: 2,663
Disclaimer: I don’t own them, and I’m not profiting.
Spoilers: Mud Bowl and State for sure.
Summary: After State, Billy Riggins finds out about what happened to Tyra Collette during the Mud Bowl.
Characters: Billy, Tyra
Pairings: none, but there’s some Billy/Tyra fantasy and references to past Tim/Tyra
Billy lounged on a barstool. It was Tuesday night. Dillon had won State Sunday-his brother had a ring of his own to show. Billy didn’t quite know what to make of Tim, who seemed to be spending every waking moment with their neighbor and the neighbor’s kid, but he knew he wasn’t going to mess with the boy this week.
Billy was swapping stories and jokes with the guys he was working with. He’d hired onto a construction crew that was building a new Wal-Mart. It was honest work. Sure as shooting he wasn’t going to do this for long-there were better things to come, he knew. Maybe in real estate, maybe in oil, maybe by riding Tim’s coattails, maybe in golf (though to be honest he was starting to give up that dream).
But for now, with Dillon repainting signs to tell everyone they were State Champs? Billy Riggins could sit back and shoot the breeze while others bought drinks for 33’s big brother. The men were reliving the game and making predictions about next season-they were losing Coach Taylor, and for all that Saracen had completed plays that boys in college had trouble with, he was skinny and small. Billy’d been enjoying it, but he was starting to eye two girls in the corner. They weren’t quite beautiful-not in Tyra or Lyla’s league, nor even Jacky and Mindy’s-but they were pretty enough, at least for a night.
Billy told Jimmy, the bartender, to send a drink to the blonde. There wasn’t a reason to choose the blond over the brunette-neither was better or worse than the other, to be honest. But there’d been too many brunettes in and out of the Riggins’ house lately. And the last blond had been Tyra Collette, who left Timmy and partnered Billy in that Homecoming party.
Not that Tyra Collette had anything to do with him buying a drink for a blonde stranger.
Billy was just getting ready to cross the bar (the girls were giggling and glancing at him and his buddy expectantly and who was he to disappoint a lady?) That was the moment, of course, when Deputy Lester Flanagan-Les-swaggered in. They’d been Panthers together, back in the day-Les had been a senior when Billy was just a freshman. He was still in uniform, so he might even be on duty. Billy scowled and scanned the bar for underage football players. Tim wasn’t around, thank the Lord for small favors, and none of the others were there. Too busy with celebrating outside of town, he hoped.
Les swaggered up to the bar, looking faintly bored and completely ridiculous. “Get me a Miller.”
“Tap?” Jimmy looked over.
“That’s fine.”
Les turned to Billy. “Hey, now. Some game, Sunday.”
“Sure was.” Billy agreed, “So you’re off duty?” he heard himself ask.
Les glared.
Billy put his hands up, “I’m just teasing ya. I bet you got real important work here.” Then, because he couldn’t resist razzing a jerk from high school, “Hunting down some speeding ticket?”
One of his work buddies guffawed. It was well known that Dillon’s police force chose to look the other way on underage drinking and most other crimes that they could shut their eyes to. Except speeding-if there was money to be made from it, they’d pursue it.
Les waved an annoyed arm. “I’ll talk to you later, Billy. I got questions for Jimmy.”
“Me?” The bartender-forty-something, missing half his teeth, with bloodshot eyes that suggested he sampled what he served-pointed at his skinny chest.
“There another Jimmy in here?” Les cracked.
Jimmy shrugged. “What can I do you for?” He pushed the beer across the bar to the waiting officer.
The guys from the construction gig weren’t listening-the arrival of law and order hadn’t disrupted their memories of the glory days.
“You got someplace more private?”
Jimmy snorted, “You want me to leave them alone in here when they still got money from payday? They’ll drink me dry.”
“Suit yourself.” Les shrugged. “You seen any strangers about town, couple Fridays ago? Mud Bowl time.”
“I was at the game, same as everyone else. I didn’t notice no one unusual, if’n you’re not counting the Brant folks, but they didn’t come back here.”
Les shrugged. “You got any cameras out on the parking lot out there? The one faces Alamo Freeze?”
“Something happen, Les?” Billy asked.
“Some girl says she got grabbed, comin’ out the Alamo Freeze. Now, not that I’m saying it happened and not that I’m not, but the kid working was in the back, watching the game on a little TV and he didn’t see it. Girl’s got a few bruises, can’t even see it when she’s got her face on, and really, she could just be trying to make some cash or punish some guy didn’t treat her nice. Awful sensitive too, when you ask her questions about it. Waited six days to tell anyone, too, and then she didn’t even have her mama around, just some guidance counselor from the school.”
Billy’s jaw tightened. He could imagine why she’d be reluctant, with Les’s attitude being what it was. Not that he cared about some stranger. But the only girl he could think of who hadn’t been anywhere near the Mud Bowl was Tyra. Tim had told him, in passing, that she was studying all of a sudden. Well, maybe Jackie hadn’t been there either. He couldn’t recall. And that set him on edge.
“Who was it?” Jimmy asked, rubbing a glass lazily.
“Now that’s official police business.” Les answered, sipping at his beer. “Confidential.”
“Huh.” Billy took a long pull off his beer, realized it had lost its flavor. “You got anything to go on?”
“Besides her story?” Les snorted. “Girl says she fought the guy off. Burned him good with a lighter out of the truck. Thinks she shut the door on his hand too.”
Billy drank more beer. Les’s partner-some rookie from North Texas-chose that moment to join them. “It’s the middle of the shift.” He sounded irritated. “One other places on the street was open that night, other than Alamo Freeze, and three had video cameras running.”
“So go get them tapes, Rookie.” Les took more beer.
“That’s how Dillon’s finest gets things done?” Billy felt the words fall out of his mouth.
“Well, shee-ite, what you want me to do? I mean, I know she was running round with Tim, but that don’t oblige you to her.”
Billy felt like he’d been kicked in the gut, worse than one of dad’s blows. Tyra? Or Jackie. Lyla had been at the game. Considering Billy couldn’t remember which Rally girls Tim had carried on with, there was no reason Les should. So the women Tim had been with, who weren’t at the game-Tyra and Jackie.
Oblivious, Les continued, while his partner squirmed and Jimmy backed away from Billy, who was starting to steam. “But the girl don’t have a good track record see? Her family ain’t good people-”
So it was Tyra. No one knew much about Jackie’s family. But Billy didn’t want to think about that.
“The way I see it, she likes boys she thinks will get her somewhere. I don’t know but what I heard she was running round with that Smash boy. She ain’t picky, so I’m figuring this one tried to stiff her or he got a little rough and now she’s wanting-,”
“Shut up.” That was the rookie, who was looking at Billy the way most of us would eye a snarling Doberman as we tiptoe backwards.
Billy saw red, but somehow (maybe by the grace of God, maybe good sense saying that if he got locked up for hitting a cop, Tim would probably let him stay in jail overnight and they couldn’t afford bail) he restrained himself. He slammed back the rest of the beer, swallowed, then growled “You taking it out on her that Mindy hasn’t fucked you since sophomore year? Cause that don’t seem particularly professional, Lester.”
“The day you can start telling me how to do my job is the day--,” There it was-pity and disgust, scrawled across Les’s face.
The rookie grabbed Billy’s shoulder, “Hey, what say you give me some backup while I go those other stores? Les can stay here and finish his beer and…”
Billy never remembered consenting, but he knew he got hustled out of there by the rookie, a kid he didn’t know.
When he got outside, the kid turned his back when Billy kicked at the wall, slugged it with his fists, and poured some of his rage into the unmoved concrete. “It’s about Mindy, you know?” he finally growled. “He never got over it, and now he thinks he can hurt her back, and…” He ranted, the rookie didn’t answer, and then when he could breathe again, Billy asked, “Did she really have the guidance counselor with her?” Billy liked Mrs. Taylor, even though he could tell she was looking down her nose at him a little. Billy was used to that by now, but he wasn’t sure Tyra would tolerate it.
“I wasn’t there, but I don’t think so.” The boy answered, and if he wasn’t as wet-behind-the-ears as Matt Saracen had been back in September, Billy wasn’t a burned-out nowhere-bound drunk. “I, uh, we just got the file tonight. Lieutenant said, ‘find out what you can,’ but, it ain’t like there’s witnesses. And it wasn’t no one the victim knows, and no one came into an ER in fifty miles with a burn or busted hand, as far as anyone can remember.”
Billy nodded, swallowed back bile and temper. “She okay?”
The rookie nodded. “Didn’t see her myself. Think so, though,” He paused. “We got photos,” The rookie offered in a low voice.
“What?” Billy felt like he’d had more than three beers.
“Of the bruises. Well, her, and the bruises. If we find him, we need photo proof, to show she fought. Also, it gets sympathy, if it went to a jury. Pretty thing like her, with marks like that on her throat.”
Billy gurgled. Her throat? Oh god, where else had the man’s hands been?
The rookie continued, relentlessly, “Seems like a tough girl though-just covered it up with makeup and went about her business. Desk sarge has seen just about every domestic in this town and he said this was first-class work.”
Billy wanted to scream and punch the wall again. When and why had Tyra learned to cover up bruises with makeup and brittle courage?
But then, that was a stupid question. Billy had seen some of the men in and out of Angela and Mindy Collette’s lives. He’d be willing to bet that her mother knew the art of concealer and powder. Tyra’d learned it the same place he learned that frozen peas are better for a black eye than steak (cheaper, too). She’d learned it by experience. At her mama’s knee, as it were. “Why tell me all this?” He asked, finally.
“That guy in there? My partner,” The rookie’s mouth quirked down. “He’s gonna sit on his ass. So is anyone else whose desk this lands on. But you? I don’t think you’ll sit on your ass, as long as he’s out there.”
“You don’t even know me.” Billy growled, “Or her.”
“You so sure?” The rookie asked.
“I know you’re too young to have played with me.” Billy said. “And too old to have played with Tim. I don’t think you’re from around here.”
“Doing a training stint here, then out to Abilene.” The rookie smiled. “I’m tired of speeding tickets and leash laws and shit. I want to do something that matters.”
Billy nodded understanding. “You wanna know…anything? If I find him.”
“Far as I know, you hustled out of the bar and I gave you a sobriety test. You passed, but decided to go home.”
“You got the file?”
Wordless, the rookie handed over a file. “That’s copies, not originals, but don’t let ‘em out just anywhere. Girl didn’t want anyone to know.”
“I’ll handle it.” Billy said, tucking the file away. He drove out of town, to hit cans with a club and to work out what he was going to do.
And later that night, he knocked on Tyra’s door, carrying a jug of milk and a tube of store-bought raw cookie dough-but so what? He thanked her for going to State and apologized that she’d been up in the cheap seats, [that Tim had broken another promise]. And he stayed till Mindy got there and looked at him strangely, but all it meant was that Tyra was a good girl and he didn’t want her to get lost.
He didn’t try to touch her-not to ruffle her hair or kiss her cheek, though she wasn’t acting any different. He left her with raw cookie dough, milk, and her sister.
And he didn’t let himself think about his motivations too hard, while he started combing the file and calling round.
Didn’t let himself think about why he wasn’t ever going to tell Tim, why he’d needed a drink to look at each photo, at the marks a man had left on her body. At the expression on her face, the way she was refusing to cry.
He didn’t think about why there were tears in his eyes when he called yet another free clinic and finally got a yes, they had seen a man with a burn and a busted hand a few Saturdays and he had seemed awful confused about how it happened. He hadn’t settled his bill, and they couldn’t reach him at the phone or address he’d provided, which was the only reason anyone remembered anything. Billy called the rookie, left a voicemail, hoped the boy could find out more, but Riggins knew his resources had panned out.
So he drank himself into oblivion that night, trying not to think about the brassy girl who could, in fact, bruise. Trying not to think about her body, marked now, as it was.
Didn’t stop him from swinging by her house again the next night, after work, bringing a sack of Krispy Kremes, like he really couldn’t help himself. She wasn’t there-Angela said she’d gone somewhere with a Christian boy, who talked too much, was very nice, but “not quite as handsome as Tim.”
Sometimes, Angela scared him. Hadn’t the woman learned her lesson? How could Tyra, at seventeen, be more practical than her mother?
He’d gone by instinct and found Tyra with Tim’s tutor (now her tutor too, apparently). The boy was tripping over himself trying to impress her, which Billy sympathized with. Billy found himself laughing a little, because didn’t the boy know that Tyra respected strength, not groveling? Billy wanted Tyra to have a strong man, one who knew that she could be strong too, that a strong man wouldn’t overpower her, even though he wouldn’t give her her own way whenever she spoke.
And Billy drank himself to sleep so he wouldn’t dream of her. That wasn’t new, but he’d started to lay off the beer, started to hope there was a future for the Riggins brothers. No more of that, not now. There were two types of dreams, and he didn’t know which was worse--Tyra screaming and struggling against a faceless shadow, while Billy hovered in the shadows, paralyzed worse than Jason Street, unable to help her. Or dream 2, Tyra in his bed, writhing and gasping.
One left him furious and sickened. The other left him confused and sickened and harder than a rock, or, worse, limp and sticky. After the second kind, he tends to feel like he soiled her, like he used her without permission, like he’s just forced her to do something. Like he’s almost as bad as the man who bruised her.
It’s not that he never thought about her that way before-he’s a man, and when she was with Tim, she had a distracting habit of running around in a shirt without anything under it. There’s a reason he made Maxim magazine cracks about her. But he tried not to put her front-and-center, because she was his little brother’s girl and Mindy’s baby sister and too young for him and, even temporarily, a business associate. Usually she just slipped into fantasies, somewhere after a Cowboys cheerleader and shortly before the explosion. Not that the connection between her image and his coming bears thinking on.
Longer hours working, that’s what the situation calls for.
More drinking, until maybe his dick stops working or trying to think for him.
More drinking, more working, less looking at photos taken under a fluorescent light.
Less thinking.
He’s never had trouble with that before.