I do not own "Warrior." It belongs to director Gavin O'Connor.

Chapter Fourteen: Second Test

She gets a call after a step meeting the next Wednesday. She knows without having to see the number who it is.

"You got plans for Saturday?" he asks.

A fair amount of the anger has dissipated, just as she expected. Now she feels resolved. More focused than she's felt in a very long time. It feels odd that her head should feel clear at a time like this, but it's better than rage. "Why?" As if she doesn't know.

"I'd like to take you out," he says.

"To another party?" Jane says, silently adding 'Asshole'.

"Nah. I don't like parties."

"So, what, a wine-tasting convention?" she wants to keep the edge in her voice as much as possible even if she's not on the verge of spilling obscenities. It doesn't matter, because he sounds almost amused by it, encouraged by it.

"I was thinking a restaurant."

And Jane's thinking, 'There must be a catch.' "Really?" she says. "Is that such a wise decision, considering what happened last time?"

"Might as well give it another go. It's a little more low-key, a little farther away, though. We'll have to drive. It's called the Royal Mile. You heard of it?"

"Yeah. It's not too far from the diner." She's never been there. Until that…date…with Tommy, she hadn't dined out in Pittsburgh.

"I'll pick you up at seven?"

Fuck it. "All right." After she hangs up, she thinks grimly, 'Bring it on, G.I. Joe.'

F

"That was some seriously fucked up shit you pulled, man."

These are the first words David says when he calls Tommy at work Thursday.

"What?" That's not the kind of greeting you expect at any time, least of all work.

"You brought a recovering alcoholic with a low self-esteem to a party filled with alcohol and big-tittied girls rubbing up on you. You knew what that was going to do to her. You were trying to taunt her into a relapse."

And, of course, he plays innocent. "Oh, come on. It's not like I was forcing her to drink or going after those big-tittied girls. Besides, how do you know she has a low self-esteem?"

"I talked to her while you were too busy getting your ass kissed to realize she'd gone outside, remember? She has no idea what you found attractive in her and is convinced you don't like her anymore."

Here Tommy's at kind of a loss. Does he? He says the first thing that comes to him. "If I didn't find something worth liking, I wouldn't even have bothered talking to her after she told me she used to drink."

"That's what I told her. She came close to relapsing. You ever seen someone with over a year's sobriety relapse, what it does to them?"

He thinks of Pop, thinks of his haunted, pained, panicked eyes; he remember seeing him sway and fall; he remembers thinking without a trace of satisfaction, 'I have finally broken this man, after spending over half my life wanting to hurt him. I broke the old man's heart and his clean little world.' "Yeah," he says. "My old man."

"You saw what it did. I bet you sealed the deal on a break-up with a nice girl who's trying to get her life in order at a young age."

Tommy grins a little, thinks, 'Wrong.' "Actually, I asked her out again yesterday and she said yes."

There's a little silence on the other end. "Then she's crazy about you. She must love you."

The word "love" catches. It tugs and pulls. "How would you know? She tell you?"

"She didn't need to. I know because if she didn't she'd have dropped you like a stone. You're a lucky man. See you in a month." And he hangs up.

Love? He's not about to be guilt-tripped into blindly trusting a drunk. He doubts Jane is likely to give him a concussion or throw him down a flight of stairs like his Pop did during blackouts, but right now he can't not believe she'll do something to fuck him up. Some female equivalent. He can't put aside what he remembers; try as he might to forget.

E

She meets him outside Saturday at seven. She notices the car parked outside. It belongs to Patrick.

"Nice car," she says, because she doesn't feel the need to say "Hello" or any other such pleasantries. Not sure she'd be able to even if she did.

"You recognize it?" he says as they walk to the car. He surprises her by continuing to act the gentleman by opening the passenger-side door for her.

She might as well be honest. "Yeah. It's your father's."

"He lent it to me," he says simply. "So you do know him from meetings."

"Yes."

"What the two of you talk about?" he asks as he starts driving. She notices his knuckles are white on the steering wheel.

"That is none of your business," she says, sitting back and looking over at him. His coat's in the back seat and he's wearing a black sweater that fits snugly over a body she still can't stop ogling. 'If he's going to be a prick, he might as well look good doing it.' He clenches his jaw, stares straight ahead. "You don't talk about what goes on in meetings outside of them. If you talk about something in a meeting, it's meant to stay in confidence."

"That one of the steps?"

"One of the traditions, actually."

He looks over at her. She herself wasn't sure how well or casually she should dress, and with her jacket in her lap along with her purse the top she's wearing has a neckline that exposes the top one of her tattoos, one on her left shoulder blade that catches his view as she leans down to set her purse on the floor by her feet. She catches him looking, and he looks back at the road, as if ashamed for showing any interest. She sighs. This is going to be a long night. It's more awkward and impersonal than the night they met.

"You look pretty," Tommy says finally.

"Thanks," Jane tells him. "You don't look so bad yourself." He never does. Even with his inability to shave on a regular basis and his crooked teeth, she's never seen him fall below a nine in terms of looks. If anything, it adds to a certain raw appeal. She thinks about what David told her. Does he prefer someone who looks like her, someone tall, awkward, short-haired and pale-skinned to someone who looks like, say, Sienna Miller? And if so, what is wrong with him? No one prefers her to that.

Is he still interested? There's a lot to be said for the argument that if he wasn't, he'd have stopped talking to her altogether. But his interest no longer seems to be romantic. Putting her into tempting, uncomfortable situations as if conducting an experiment is not something one does to a girlfriend.

A couple of minutes later they pull into a public parking lot and, as they get out, Jane notices the quaint sign reading, "The Royal Mile Pub and Restaurant."

Oh, shit.

She plays it by ear. If he tries to lead her into the bar…shit. They drove. This isn't going to be good. She'll find a way out. He isn't going to get away with doing this to her.

"I'm not going to a bar," she tells him before they reach the door.

He seems to have expected this reaction. And he acts completely nonchalant, as though he'd never given her reason to think he'd so blatantly shove alcohol under her nose. "Hey, fine with me," he says, opening the door for him.

"I was taking you to the restaurant part of it, anyway."

And he does. A smiling seating hostess who could very well still be in high school leads them to a table for two next to the wall. Neither of them talks for close to thirty seconds, and Jane finally says, "I like the décor of this place. It has kind of a rustic feel. Have you been here before?"

"Yeah, when I was a kid. I hear it's pretty much the same place, even with new management. It looks about the same."

A server not much older than the seating hostess comes by and passes them both menus, asks if they know what they'd like to drink.

"Water," she says.

"Water and a beer," Tommy says. He gives a sideways glance towards Jane, like, what? You thought I was done testing you?

"What brand?"

"Guinness Draught, please," he says, still watching Jane, even as he opens his menu.

She opens hers, and as she keeps her eyes on laminated entrée options and prices, she says, "So what's good here?"

"Everything, from what I remember," he says.

"What about the salmon? Is that good?"

"Probably."

It's excruciating, sitting there in silence, wanting to say something without really knowing what. She peeks over at him a few times and is certain he's going through the same conflict.

Their drinks arrive. They're both ready to order. The server looks confused by their brusque interactions as Tommy folds up his menu and says, "You want an appetizer?"

"No. You?"

"No." He nods at her as if telling her to order first.

She smiles at the server, who by now is wondering if maybe he interrupted an argument they were having. "The North Atlantic Salmon, please," she says, handing him her menu.

"Roasted chicken, please."

As the boy scurries off Jane takes a sip of water. "I'm so used to the diner it seems weird when there are male servers."

"So, what, there aren't any guys dressed like greasers trying to talk like they're from the fifties?"

"No. Just waitresses. And while he's not technically allowed to do it, I'm pretty sure the manager has weight and age restrictions as part of his hiring policy. But I mean, with your gym Boyd probably only hires people who've fought before."

"Not necessarily. Fenroy's never fought. He'd probably die in the first round of a match. And Colt's sure as hell's never fought."

"Just out of curiosity, what ended up happening to the guy you beat up twice?"

"He moved to Chicago after Sparta."

Even with the tense small talk and her determination to not look at the beer in a beautiful glass mug resting across the table, Jane can't help but laugh. "He moved to the Midwest so he wouldn't have to face you again?" she says, thinking that given just how genuinely brutal and without show Tommy is, fleeing hundreds of miles away in fear and humiliation kind of makes sense. She doesn't feel the least bit sorry for the guy, but still.

Tommy shrugs as he takes a sip of beer. "That's not what he said, but it's been suggested."

This isn't as obvious a test as the one before, but it's a test all the same. He knows she can't and won't drink. Step one. Step two: see if she can stand someone else drinking in front of her. Not just mingling with people holding beers but sitting across from someone for an extended period of time, someone who's drinking and doesn't care if it makes her uncomfortable. She wonders, given his level of fitness, if he drinks much if at all when he's not testing her.

And he breaches the topic, the dirty, awful thing that keeps her tainted in his eyes. "Do your non-AA friends know?"

She doesn't have many friends outside of AA anymore but the ones she has she trusts well enough with the information. "Yes, they know," she says.

"And…?"

"And they think it's kind of insane that I started so early. They're relieved I got help early. Beyond that, they don't really care."

"Oh, they don't?" Tommy shifts in his seat, a little farther away from her.

"No, they don't," Jane tells him. Not everyone has major family and rage issues that can't be helped with a non-professional, she silently adds. "They don't take me out to bars and they don't usually drink in front of me, but otherwise they kind of ignore it." She gives his beer a pointed look and thinks, you asshole.

He gets the look on her face and to let her know he both understands and doesn't give a shit he raises the mug to his lips, and takes a long sip, looking at her with a petulant look in his eye. She wonders why the hell she's still sitting with him.

She tries to fill the void. "You have friends from service, right?"

And Tommy takes a gulp from his beer, the largest she's seen so far. "A few," he says. "Most of them are dead. I don't want to…"

"You don't want to talk about it," Jane says quickly, silently cursing herself. "Right. Consider the subject dropped."

He's not good for her. He's not good for her sobriety.

She stays.

He takes a sip of water before taking a long look at her under heavily-lidded eyes and saying, "So what's the real reason you came to Pittsburgh?"

A man who keeps secrets from her unless it's in a fit of uncensored rage has no right to go prodding into her past. And then she recalls how he answered most of her questions after a series of tell-all clips on YouTube that turned him from a normal, albeit quiet, athletic man to a volatile fighting machine until she could calm down and remember the person she'd known is still the person he is. "Rehab," she tells him. "There was a center in downtown Pittsburgh. There was nothing for me back in D.C., so I figured I may as well stay and start off new here."

"What were you running from?" he asks her, quiet enough that the question could almost be mistaken for polite.

"None of your goddamn business," she tells him in an equally pleasant tone of voice. "Not while you think all addicts are scum."

"Try me."

"I don't think so. All you need to know is that there was nothing worth going back to at home."

"Not even family?" Tommy asks, as though it's a little joke between them. They both know how much families can suck.

She doesn't want to feed him some sob story, but he asked, so fuck him. "Dad died when I was in rehab, my mother and I weren't speaking, I'm an only child and I wanted to keep as much of a distance from my extended family as possible." She takes a sip of water, wondering how she can put this in a way that won't lead to him mocking her relentlessly, and finds she doesn't care.

"I found a new kind of family in rehab, and in AA," she adds.

"An even more fucked-up family?" he asks, with only a hint of scorn in his voice.

She overlooks it for now. "A family of people who understood what I was going through because they were going through it too, or had gone through it and made it out alive. They had my back and I had theirs. There wasn't any judgment of any kind. I found my sponsor here—"

"Your what?"

"My sponsor. A sponsor is someone who's had a long enough period of sobriety that he or she can help someone who's a little newer through withdrawal and into sobriety. She's a lifeline for me."

"And you love her like a mother."

"I love her more than my mother, to be honest," she says, even laughs a little as if to lighten the statement. "I mean, my mother's a good person, we've patched things up a lot in the past year, but…"

"But she can't relate to what you've been through," Tommy finishes for her.

"Or what I'm still going through," she says.

The server comes by with their food, and the following silence between them is separated into two measurements: the nervous picking at food because they're almost too uncomfortable to eat; the second is the hunger and the welcoming smell of a hot meal on a cold night and the first several bites of some of the best salmon she's ever had.

After a few minutes, though, she adds, "Some of the strongest friendships are built when a person's at their most vulnerable."

Tommy nods, not quite looking at her. "I know," he says, takes a sip of water and chases it with a sip of beer. It's not a terribly large mug. He'll need a refill soon.

She glances at the numbered tattoo peeking out of the V-neck of his sweater, the hint that there may be more, scattered across a taut, powerful body. No, this would not be a good time to mention her tattoo fetish. She's not sure where they stand anymore. She gets part of it though. What he's doing isn't a scheming plot to get her back on the bottle. It's fueled by rage that holds neither reason nor rhyme. She understands that rage. She's felt it before. It's not clean anger in which plans are formed in a clear mind.

"Hey, can I ask something?" he says. She shrugs. "Why a butterfly?"

He's talking about her tattoo. "Butterflies are many things that I'm not," she says. "They're vibrant, they're graceful and beautiful." She ignores how he raises his eyebrows when she says this. "But the main reason I got this was because in many cultures butterflies symbolize life and rebirth. I got this when I was six months sober because it just felt right. Felt as though the past twenty years were a past life and this was where my new life began." She doesn't care if it sounds stupid to him, either, just goes back to her meal, avoiding his gaze, though she senses him watch her before she hears the clattering of silverware across from her.

Shortly afterward the server comes by, gets a refill for both of their waters and asks Tommy if he wants another beer. She looks down, but when she hears the hesitation can't help but look up as Tommy glances at her before saying no.

If this is another test, she may well have passed it, although it would be stupid and in very bad form indeed to think she's in the clear yet.

The rest of the dinner goes by relatively quickly; they're both fast eaters and they don't know much of what to say. They're still entirely uncomfortable around each other and aside from when they push around the silverware and glasses to briefly switch plates, she can't really remember what they talk about; probably just trivial shit. The portion sizes are reasonable enough that neither of them want to get the rest of their meals boxed up and they divide the check—with some half-hearted protest on Tommy's part—and pay the bill.

She's the one who drives to her apartment. One medium beer isn't much but she's not about to take her chances. In any case, he'll have to take the wheel for several blocks to get home.

When she slides off her seatbelt and turns to wish him a good night—and, as far as she can feel, meaning it—she realizes he's undone his own seatbelt. Her mind goes blank, body unsure as he leans in and cups the side of her face with a large, calloused hand. And then she catches that unmistakable whiff of beer and reels back, flinching as though she's been struck. It's a smell that will always remind her of dizzy half-dreams that turned out to be memories of falling back, uncoordinated, unable to speak and an easy target, and the stench of beer-breath against her face, her neck.

"I—I don't think that's a good idea," she says, leaning as far away from him as she can.

He furrows his brow. "That bad?" he says.

"You know how people with dairy allergies will sometimes go into hives after kissing someone who's just had cheese?"

Tommy tilts his head at her. "You're saying you can get drunk from one kiss."

"Not drunk," she tells him. "Just…sparked and thirsty for more." Oh Christ that sounds suggestive. "A taste sparks a craving. All it takes is a taste, Tommy." And it's true in the accidentally suggestive meaning as well. She doesn't want to tell him that, though. She can't.

He can't be drunk. All he had was one beer and she's seen him down at least two shots of whiskey while remaining relatively sober, so why is he trying to…?

And a thought occurs. She looks away from him, as he's still poised to touch her somehow. "Whatever you're thinking right now," she says, "Stop."

She bets his eyes flash from the forced calm in his voice when he asks, "And what am I thinking?"

She can't quite look him in the eye. He's too intense right now and the subject too embarrassing, too impersonal. "That because I'm a drunk I'm a whore, and by extension, because I'm a former drunk I'm under the delusion that I'm some kind of asexual puritan. You think that I'll do any act you want once you start showing me an ounce of kindness again."

The slight hesitation is enough for her to know she's somewhere in the ballpark. "You're not a whore," he tells her.

"You're saying it but do you really believe it? It kind of goes along with your belief that all drunks are partiers, right?" She has to keep her distance. It would be too much for him to know that whenever she thinks about him, whenever she's near him she and her body remembers that she's far from asexual. That she wants to do all the things someone with years of experience should have done. She wants to undress him and see everything, every part of him; she wants to trace, among other things, his tattoos with her lips and fingertips, her tongue and teeth. She can't tell him that whenever he's in her proximity, her heart beats so hard it threatens to tear out of her chest, her mouth goes dry, there's a ringing in her ears and in the places she tries to ignore. Because she's terrified. Because the only people who've fucked her saw her as nothing other than a drunken slut; convinced her that that was all she ever was, and if she goes through with anything now, so will Tommy.

He looks her over, reads into her blatant fear better than she would have imagined. "What happened to you?" he asks.

How does she explain it without giving away too much and without him probing further? She takes a deep breath, looks down as if addressing her lap and, though she struggles, eventually finds the words. "All you need to know is that you're not the only one here who's been physically abused. It's just that what happened to me wasn't inflicted by a member of my family, and never took the form of a punch in the face." She doesn't want to look back up at him, for all the shame involved. Terrified, humiliated, and still angry, though, she looks him in the eye.

Tommy gets it. He gets it immediately, and slumps back in his seat. And she sees he's struggling with what the hell he could possibly say in this situation. She doesn't expect it of him. She takes her purse and opens the driver's side door. It takes every ounce of will to not go back and put her mouth on two of the most intoxicating things she's ever known: alcohol and Tommy Riordan.

Before she closes the door she adds, "If you stop seeing me as a stereotype and start seeing me as a person, give me a call."