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

Chapter Sixteen: Three Months

On the drive back, Jane says, "The kids were sweet."

"Yeah."

She looks over at him, almost smiles at the way a few hours earlier he'd eased his way into his new role as 'uncle.' "You were really good with them," she tells him.

He looks ahead. "You sound surprised," he tells her.

"I am surprised."

He's not the kind of guy who seems like he'd have the patience or gentleness to be able to work with kids, none of the sense of fun, either, and he knows it. He kind of shrugs. "My best friend back in the Corps got married and had kids early on, and they all became kind of like a surrogate family to me. Kids aren't bad." He keeps focusing on the road. "They're at a fun age," he adds. "Both of them."

"And then they get to be teenagers and suddenly they're a pain in the ass."

And once again, he's focused on the road, perhaps more than necessary. She's guessing that maybe he hit a brick wall of sorts; that he's upheld a social façade long enough and now he just wants to retire it, kind of like she does after most of her waitressing shifts. And while it's understandable the silence is still uncomfortable.

After a moment she tries again: "Did you know Tess back in the day?"

Tommy shrugs. "Kind of. I never really talked to her. She was the first girl he brought over to the house, the first girl he trusted to see that part of him."

Jane hesitates. She's not sure if this is a button too hot to push, if this is something she should avoid mentioning in case it causes him to freak out. "Did you have a high school sweetheart?"

Tommy shakes his head, scoffs at the idea. "Nah. Freshman year, up until Mom and I left, I was too focused on wrestling to go out with anyone. After that…" he looks over at her and turns her attention back at the road. "After that it was all I could do to try and keep my mother alive."

"And when you were sixteen?"

"You mean after she died." Jane says nothing. "I worked. Got my GED, dropped out, and worked, just like I told you. There were a couple of girls between then and when I joined the Marines, but nothing serious. Nothing close to what Brendan had." And there's no real bitterness in it; not many people meet and start dating the people who will one day be their wives or husbands, the people with whom they start families, when they're still in high school. He's starting to shut down on her. But this isn't about her.

Tommy just spent a few violence-and mostly rage-free hours with his estranged brother. That's the important thing here. "Do you think the two of you will be able to stand talking more often? I mean…all things considered, you looked like you were getting along okay."

"I don't know."

F

Eventually Jane falls asleep in the seat next to him. In order to avoid doing the same, he gets a coffee from the convenience store next to the gas station just off the freeway where he refuels. When he comes back he takes a moment just to look at her, thinking of the small bits and pieces of information she's given him, the things she's done, the things she's seen and lived through, and it's easy to forget how young she is. Right now, head tilted against the back of her seat, the moon highlighting her profile and the almost-black hair falling against her forehead, he thinks she's beautiful. He also thinks she saw him emasculated, saw him scared and it bothers the shit out of him.

And when he reaches her apartment and gently shakes her awake, he doesn't want her to bring any of it up. She seems a bit tired for it anyway. Instead what she does is smile sleepily at him and start to lean in, but he must not look friendly at the moment because she pulls back, eyes slightly wider, and hesitates. She says, "Good night," and gets out of the car, stretching out her legs as she heads to her apartment.

E

A week goes by, and then two. She wonders at first if he had no interest in seeing her again beyond using her as a safety net when he saw his brother, next if the absence is out of resentment; he asked her for help and she saw him vulnerable and he simply cannot have that. Tommy Riordan don't ask for nobody's help. The thought annoys her, and while a part of her figures she ought to take the initiative and call him out on it, the rest of her life, a minimum of five meetings a week, four college classes and now nearly fifty hours a week at the diner, is catching up with her, and he's fading farther away. Two weeks grows into one month as schoolwork piles up and she fights to maintain a 4.0. When a waitress quits without giving a two-week notice, she picks up a weekend shift that occupies her Saturdays from two to eleven. She doesn't have the time on those days to get depressed about it, about how she used to look forward to those days.

Most importantly, though, she talks to Dionne, and they agree that she needs to work the fourth step again, ("we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves") address her former sex life and all the fear that stems from it. She goes back to the rage that terrified her when she was first getting sober and couldn't drink it down; the kind of chaotic fury that made her realize, at that time, that she was indeed capable of torture and murder, when she remembered the Future Frat Brothers of America comparing their latest conquests.

"Yeah. Nothing special, though. Just fucked Jane at Peter's house party on Saturday."

And she'd have not clear memories of these things, nothing smooth or concise, but sensations, sounds, smells. She'd remember the itchy fabric of the couch scraping against whatever skin was bared. She'd remember the pressure of sweaty hands pinning her wrists down, the sound of labored breathing close above her, the smell of stale beer on hot breath on her face, feeling, no matter how much she wished she didn't, the clumsy and sometimes violent roughness of a slightly drunk and entirely uncaring boy pushing into her, making her joints feel as though they may break apart like wax. Indeed that boy had fucked her, but, like he'd said, it was nothing special. A depressed girl with an agonizingly low self-esteem was easy to fuck if you got her wasted enough that even if she wanted to turn you down, she wouldn't be able to. Easy as fucking a blow-up doll or a hole in the wall.

And she'd be dehumanized, humiliated, and furious until the next time she'd get drunk at a party and find the whole fucking thing happen again. The same pain, the same shame and humiliation not just at the stigma the whole thing gave her, but at the fact that she was letting it happen. No matter how much she hated it, she was powerless over it.

"I was never going to be able to get into a physical relationship without doing this, was I?" she asks Dionne at one point.

Dionne considers this. "Probably not. There's a kind of trauma that still has a hold on you. Even if you wanted to take things further with him, chances are you would've panicked before things could start."

"If you want to say, 'I told you so' I won't mind."

"I don't."

Somewhere between the first and second month, between revisiting the worst parts of her interactions with the opposite sex and learning to let go, when she and Carlos are both quitting out for the evening and he asks, "What happened with the guy you were dating?"

She finds the implications stop her several times before she's able to answer. "We're taking a break," is the best she can come up with. She'd like to think that she sounds nonchalant, unemotional, just fine with it.

"You guys have a length of time in mind or did you just decide to wing it and see what happens?"

It's a fairly innocent question, nothing loaded with a silent test to see if it will hurt her, but damn it, it does. Not terribly so, but enough to let her know that while she's in this silent battle of wills or whatever the hell this is and not quite ready for a full-fledged relationship, she isn't ready to call it quits, either. "We didn't really talk about it."

The look Carlos gives her is one she has never seen on him before. And while she'd like to push away the hug he gives her, her barrier falls and she finds herself fiercely hugging him back, wanting to hold on to something.

One month becomes two, and it's starting to hurt less when she has the time to think about him. She and several other waitresses still juggle extra shifts, and the manager's…refined tastes…don't help.

One afternoon a girl with waitressing experience but is without a doubt several sizes above the unofficial 10 limit comes in and asks if they're hiring. Jane glances behind her and her manager, safe from scrutiny behind his office, takes one look at the girl and vehemently shakes his head. Holding back a scowl, she turns to the girl and says, "I'm sorry, but we're not hiring at the moment" and feels a small part of her soul disappear. She really fucking hates her job.

As the second month trails on, a distraction in the form of a lanky U-Pitt lacrosse player passes through. Since the Oldies Diner is a downtown attraction with decent-looking, younger waitresses and a variety of thick, hearty, carnivore-lover's food, it's a frequent stop among college boys. Specifically college jocks. Every waitress gets at least a few in her section, and though the teams change with the seasons, the personalities are often identical. After a wonderful Saturday shift of baby-sitting a group of these boys who loudly compliment the appearance of her ass in her uniform and leave her with a combined ten percent tip, the quietest one, the one who refrained from calling her "sweet tits" and left the largest portion of the tip, doubles back after the others head out and catches her before she heads to the kitchen, head down and voice discreet. She thinks his name is Rob. He bears an uncanny physical resemblance Ethan Hawke's character in Dead Poet's Society, so very youthful though he couldn't be younger than she, and he's not that much more outgoing as he asks her if she's free the next day.

For the life of her she doesn't know how to respond. He's a genuinely nice, physically attractive person whose interest is actually quite flattering. She hasn't heard from Tommy in nearly three months, and hasn't had the guts to call him. For all she knows, he's moved on. Probably found a nice girl with long blonde hair, a tan to suit the spring, and a flawless bikini bod.

The thought pisses her off more than she can stand to admit, and could very well be the reason she tells him yes.

A

Tommy doesn't call. He supposes that she could stand to man up and call him, and kind of expects her to as the second week passes by, slower than it has before. It occurs to him that in the past, he's always been the one to call, but this isn't the 1950s and Jane's not spineless. She'll call if she wants to, even if it's to say something like, "I was just checking to see if the number was still working" but she doesn't. Maybe the tests were the last straw. She did this one favor and that's it. She's done.

He's not sure what it is about that night that makes him avoid her. And while he doesn't recall making the decision that she's seen too much too soon, that he needs some time alone, he does realize it's a great excuse. He's insured and has a bank account as Tommy Riordan, and as the time spent out of the limelight increases, the paranoia; the fear of someone discovering Thomas Conlon starts to fade.

The mediocre salary he bring in at the gym starts to add up; enough, in fact, that he's able to take his few belongings and move into a shitty studio apartment on a street pretty similar to the one Jane lives on. It's more or less in the same neighborhood. He tells himself repeatedly that that's not why he chose it. Paddy, for his part, doesn't say much about it, lets him know without ever having to say it that he'll keep Tommy's secret as long as he lives. He pulls a few favors with friends from AA meetings, one of whom has a one-ton truck, and ships a little furniture, a dresser, a few chairs, a full-size mattress, over to his apartment, no questions asked.

Not all people in AA are as bad as me is the note he gives along with the furniture he claims he won't miss.

He balls up the paper. He knows.

But he has to be realistic. She's not ready for things to go farther. And even though he learned to go celibate for long stretches at a time when on active duty, stationed in Iraq, it seems so weird to him that he's celibate now, and has been since he was training for SPARTA, when in a civilian environment where there are tons of available women.

Two months in. A few times he goes to bars on the weekends like normal guys in their twenties and early thirties. And he realizes that he won't have to look hard for someone who's interested. Without trying, without giving the impression that he's at a bar to do anything except drink, he finds girls come up to him and offer more than just drinks and phone numbers. But there are two problems with this. The first is that most of them recognize him, fawn over him, call him a hero, and use pick-up lines that usually involve the words 'naked rear end' and 'tap me.' And while to most guys this wouldn't be a problem at all, he didn't like the attention when he was fighting and he likes it even less now.

The second problem, one that's too embarrassing to admit but too real to deny, at least not to himself, is that none of them are Jane.

He's pretty sure he makes history when he turns down sex from all-American good-looking women who treat him like a god because of his upper body strength. But it doesn't matter; when enough time passes, when another annual UFC tournament pops up and if another single MMA fighter comes through town, they'll forget all about him and that suits him fine. It occurs to him, like with the nameless girl at the bar the night he found out about Jane's former life as a drunk, that he doesn't need to care about any of them in order to find physical release, that he can pretend that their bodies actually belong to someone he's wanted to but never slept with. He doesn't, though. His brain tells him to go for it as long as he uses protection but his body pulls him away; isn't it supposed to be the opposite?

What he likes about this time is the continuing strength and improving range of motion; the fact that he can do push-ups without any pain, that he can lift something more substantial than weightless pulleys. The fact that the act of throwing a punch doesn't hurt when he passes six months healed.

And something else. Not long after he gets what isn't quite a cell phone but one of those disposable trac phones he picks up at a 7-11, Paddy drops by the gym one day and tells him that Brendan called and asked if there was a number other than work where he could reach his brother.

He gives his father the number, tells him that Brendan appreciated the books.

R

The date with Rob is absolutely fine. A movie—he seems relieved beyond words when she chooses an action film over the latest Katherine Heigl-or-Jennifer Aniston-or-Sandra Bullock romantic comedy, and she guesses he probably would've gone along with it if that had been her preference—followed by Pinkberry. His head is nowhere near as inflated as that of his friends, and she doesn't have some of the same fear as she did on her first-ever date. She doesn't expect him to pressure her into anything, and isn't afraid that if he does and she turns him down that there will be some huge argument. Working the fourth step again has helped some with that. She doesn't feel any spark of any kind with him, though. His quietness doesn't hold intrigue for her, a need to delve deeper, though she does get a few words out of him without trouble, and finds that he's twenty-two and a business major from Baltimore who got into U-Pitt on a partial athletic scholarship. Even she knows that while Pittsburgh is wrestling country, Baltimore is lacrosse country. He's a bit quiet, kind of shy, but really there's absolutely nothing wrong with him. He doesn't seem to look down on her for being a part-time community college student like other people her age have often done.

Nevertheless, she realizes she's not interested. No matter how much she wants to move forward, she realizes her body, at least, wants only one thing; one person, anyway. She's still interested in Tommy. In that aspect, she hasn't moved on, and this guy is too good for her to lead him to think otherwise.

So, at the end of the date, she tells him that she's recently been through a messy break-up and that she hasn't moved on, isn't ready for a new relationship. He looks slightly crestfallen, maybe a little annoyed, but somewhere she reads in his expression a kind of understanding and maybe relief that she didn't make him pay for her ticket with the now-broken promise of sex later on. That she didn't try and use him as a rebound.

She's still looking back. But at this point she doesn't know how to reach back.

A

When Tommy calls his brother up it's easier to manage a conversation on the phone than in person; they both know now that they can actually get through something like this without major collateral damage. He talks more than he has in months; tells Brendan about things slightly less personal than what's been bugging him most. He tells him that he's now living in an apartment on the outer edges of Larimer; that it's not much of a place but it's his. Tells him that he's thinking of getting another job. Preferably something that pays a little better.

"Doing what?"

"I don't know. That's the problem." He'd make even less money at the mills and it seems like every job requires at least an Associate's degree. He'd lose his mind in a sedentary job; even the work at the gym, where he's on his feet for a fair amount of the time, is too still for him.

He tells Brendan this, who says, "How about working in security?"

"What, you mean like at a bank, or at a nightclub?"

"Nah, not at a nightclub. It varies depending on the club, but bouncing usually doesn't pay much, and with the hours you wouldn't be able to live off it; it would only really work as a second job."

"And working as a security guard would?"

"Just a thought," Brendan says. "You could look into it, though. I mean, you're far enough healed that you'd be able to do something more selective than mall-cop work."

It's not until later, when Tommy's sure neither of them will bring it up, that Brendan mentions her. "I didn't think she was your type," he admits.

He bristles. "How'd you know what my type is? You never saw me go out with anyone."

"Just a hunch. I'd thought you were more interested in classic, kind of All-American looking women. Or women who're more interested in sports."

"You mean women like Tess." There's an awkward stretch. "I don't have a 'type', Brendan. It was just something about her. Everything about her." He corrects himself, hoping that this will end the topic, "It doesn't matter; we haven't talked in three months."

But it doesn't. "How come?"

He doesn't say anything, just breaths into the receiver.

"That's a shame. She seemed good for you, even if she didn't seem like the obvious choice. Maybe because of it."

Once again, he's quiet, at least until Brendan drops the subject and moves onto another one. Even talking about Pop is easier than talking about Jane.

He gets it, he knows why, and he doesn't need Brendan to hint at it. After the conversation's done and he's once again alone in his crappy apartment with the mattress against the wall and the peeling paint that he finally lets himself think it.

He misses her.

The kind of 'off' sense of humor, the deep-down goodness, the interest that had nothing to do with him as a fighter or a soldier and everything to do with him as a person, the sound of her voice and the big, dark eyes and every other fucking thing. It's too late for a few words over the phone. What he does instead is leave work half an hour early on Friday and takes the bus to the diner. He makes it there fifteen minutes before her shift ends and makes his way to her section.

N

The new girl, Kelsey, says to Jane, "A guy just came into your section," as they pass each other in the kitchens.

"Well that's just fucking great," she replies. "I always love it when people come in a few minutes before my shift ends." She senses the figure towards the back as she heads out and first attends to a couple who are getting ready to leave, giving them their check before heading to the new asshole.

And she sees him.

The clichés are true, apparently. Her heart stops for a moment and when it resumes goes at thrice the normal rate. She's frozen to the spot, looking like a comical statue. It's only as she starts to come forward that she can breathe again or even realize that she'd stopped in the first place. She wipes shaking, sweating hands on her apron, all too aware of the pulse in her ears, the tingling in her breasts and lower body as she reaches his booth. Her mouth is dry, and it takes a couple of tries to speak coherently.

"Hello, Tommy."