Amongst the whispers in the hall, and the hum of the television in front of him, he heard the boy get to his feet. He heard the pieces of the broken table gathered up. Heard the boy limp past the doorway and up the stairs. He wanted to look over but was unable to look away from the commercial currently whirling in front of him, phosphorescent and technicolored. So he stared forward, eyes unhinged, and pretended that fabric softener was more interesting then the 16-year-old boy he had just beat the shit out of.

He clenched and unclenched his hands, raw skin pulling over bruised knuckles. Now on the screen: a sleek black car gliding through an illuminated city. He had never understood cars, though he had pretended to. He sat there and struggled to understand why this one was so great, better then all the others. Struggled to understand the reasons why he should care about this car.

She had told him during the game, and he had been pissed at her. Her long, fervent fingers prodding at him until he snapped his head in her direction and growled, 'what?' She knew better then to disturb him during a game, and her very presence made his skin crawl. But when he saw her face, so very pale, her eyes red and wide and pleading, he suddenly held his tongue. In all their years of being married, he had never, not once, seen her this way. She was…vulnerable. And it unsettled him.

He tried again, and asked, "what", softer this time, calmer, though he felt as though he was speaking around his stomach, lodged suddenly into his throat. She worked her hands, pulling on her fingers nervously, but all the while staring him straight in the eyes. He swallowed, suddenly aware of his heart beating out of his chest, and spoke again, "Sara, what is it?"

And then she told him. Told him the kid he had been feeding and housing and keeping off the goddamn street had tried to fuck his wife. Every bitter resentment he felt toward her, her nagging and belittling, was all swept away in that moment. She was his wife. She was his wife. And she was kneeling in front of him, clutching his arm and crying, goddamn crying, and all he could do was sit there and let her words wash over him. And when they had, he turned off the TV, and turned to her and said, "I'm going to make this right."

And he had. Hadn't he? He had done what any man would do. The kid was lucky he hadn't killed him. He hadn't even thrown him out into the street. The kid tried to sleep with his wife, under his roof…the very thought dredged the anger up, washing bleary redness into his eyes, blurring the program already in progress, though what he was watching, he couldn't even remember. On screen a family was sitting down to dinner, father mother, son and daughter. Perfect and complete. A life he had never, and would never be a part of.

He felt sick. Lurching out of his worn armchair, he stumbled towards the front door. Taking a minute to hall his boots out of the closet and force his feet into them, he glanced up. Sara was there, stiff and solemn, staring at him with blank eyes. She said nothing, and neither did he, as he turned and forced the door open, his boots unlaced, his jacket half on, and stumbled out into the night.

He found himself, later, in a bar. After driving around for a while, he wasn't even sure what bar he was in, but somehow it didn't seem to matter. It was warm, and full of smoke, and more importantly, serving alcohol. He downed honey brown liquid until the worn wood in front of him was decorated in tall, empty glasses and lost droplets of foam. That was when he switched to whiskey.

Glass after glass passed through his fingers. He had expected the liquor to numb himself to his feelings, but instead they amplified everything he had hoped to escape from. He saw the kid's face flicker in front of him, eyes wide and uncomprehending. Saw that same expression shattered beneath his fist. A voice in the back of his head pleading ceaselessly, He's just a kid, just a kid… until he couldn't take it anymore. The glass in his hand cracked as the tension he didn't even know he was feeling was released physically. The bartender looked up at him, opened her mouth to say those finite words,

"Listen, I think you've had enough…" But he knew it was coming, and was already standing up. He steadied himself on the bar as all the alcohol rushed to his head, and his knees and threw some money on the counter as he turned to leave.

He wasn't sure how he managed to get home, but one thing was certain: he had forgotten to open the garage door. As he stood in the frigid air of 4 am, watching snowflakes fall gently onto the mangled hood of his truck, he was also sure of one other thing. This was the kid's fault.

It took a little over two weeks for the pain to diminish to a dull roar. Fifteen days of waking up in the middle of the night with a flinch, body throbbing, scabs cracking slightly, muscles pulling the wrong way; all of this secondary to the fear that she would be standing in the doorway, her smile a visible twinkle in the moonlight.

But fifteen nights had passed and she was never there. He was beginning to think that he had imagined her threat. That the poisonous words flicked into his ear were merely the manifestation of getting punched in the head one time too many. But something about the way those words still resonated in his mind told him they were not a figment of his imagination. That the line between his nightmares and the real world was beginning to blur, and soon reality would cease to exist.

He had contemplated going to the authorities, or to his caseworker, or to anybody, really, for help, but it was painfully obvious that Sara had control over the situation. She was the dutiful housewife, he was the troubled delinquent. In fact, he could see the only outcome of that scenario being his incarceration. And he wasn't sure he could handle jail right now, or some run down juvenile detention center, where he would end up with a tooth brush shank between the ribs one night he when was sleeping. No, she would manipulate anyone who came to investigate, the same way she had manipulated Roy.

Roy. His "father" for all intensive purposes. He hadn't looked him in the eye since it happened. Except for once. And the absolute contempt Jack saw there was enough to make him avoid eye contact ever since. On the night it happened, Roy had come home drunk and ended up in the garage the wrong way. The next morning, broken and still bleeding, Roy had made him take the car down to the mechanic. One arm on the wheel, the other holding his torso together, he had barely been able to see over the dashboard. When he got there, Mike had looked up briefly from his clipboard to tell him in a bored voice that he had something in his teeth. Looking in the side mirror before his 5-mile walk home, he saw that it was blood.

If Roy had ignored him before, he was giving him his full attention now. There seemed to be an endless amount of things to do around the house, and Jack completed all of them, wordlessly, without complaint. Yet still, Roy had been displeased with his work, and physical threats were thinly veiled behind his tirades.

The second blow-up occurred the night of that fifteenth day. The toilet was broken on the second floor, and while Roy was at work, he had been told to fix it. The only problem was that Jack didn't know the first thing about plumbing; that and the fact that Sara had stood silently watching him from the doorway, making him all too aware of how the spilt water made his thin t-shirt cling to his skin.

The door slammed shut, rattling the poorly constructed foundations of the house. Already this was a signal to Jack that something bad was about to happen. Sara slipped away down the hallway and quietly shut the door to her bedroom. He wasn't sure if she'd said a single word to him in two weeks…he certainly hadn't said anything to her. What was there to say? Roy's heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs; suddenly light from the hallway was masked and it seemed as though all that existed in the whole world was that tiny bathroom and its broken toilet.

Later, when he woke up in a mingling puddle of water and blood, and broken shards of porcelain, he wondered sensibly if he was going to die before he could make it to his 18th birthday. He considered moving to his bedroom, but thought maybe he'd wait a little bit longer for the swimming in his head to subside. Maybe he wouldn't even live until tomorrow. The first time had been bad, especially with no painkillers. This time, old and fresh wound bleeding out onto the tiles, a broken rib, possibly a concussion….with no medicine, he didn't see how he could survive. His eyesight went hazy and he felt himself being pulled back into unconsciousness. As the tunnel of black got more and more narrow, a single echoing thought erupted at the back of his mind:

Please, please. I don't want to die…

When he woke up later it was dark. He was laying on something soft and as he turned his head, he saw the bright orange illumination of his clock radio proclaiming the time as 3:57 am. He also saw someone sitting on the side of his bed, and he knew immediately it was her. But he was tired. Too tired and sore and too happy to be alive that in this moment, 3:57 am, he didn't care.

"You're awake." She said, not bothering to conceal her voice in a whisper. She saw his eyes flicker over to the door and replied, "He's gone out again. Hopefully this time he remembers to open the garage door." He didn't smile, and when she shifted her weight toward him, he shifted his away. In her new position, the streetlight was hitting her in the face, and he could see her frown. "That's what I thought…" She said, speaking more to herself then to him. She reached into the pocket of her housecoat and pulled out a small orange bottle. He could see the white pills within and felt relief wash over him. He reached out his hand, but she pulled them out of his reach. "I will give them to you," she said "but once I do, you have to give me what I want." She didn't say what that was. He didn't ask. Weighing his options, he pulled himself into a seated position. The clock clicked along. It now displayed 4:00. He reached out his hand again. She gave him the pills, and from his bedside table, a glass of water.

He took his time. He swallowed. He felt the water burning a pathway through his chest. Setting the glass down on the table once more, he leaned forward and slid his hands into her hair. Her eyes widened as he pulled her forward. And as their lips met he saw the red guitar, the explosion. And he wished he were anywhere but here.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Hey, again, sorry for taking so long with this. I feel as though I am perpetually apologizing for taking forever with this story. If my absence makes it seem as though I don't appreciate you patience and willingness to stick with me, then I am so, so very sorry. You have no idea how much your reviews mean to me…especially after that last chapter…I have more time now, and a better idea of where this story is going to go…so if you are still out there, and want me to continue, then I will and it will be a lot faster then last time! Thank you again for all of your support…hopefully this chapter didn't let you down…