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begins to grow above your lie.
    It was at my third home that I finally came alive again. That’s when I started boxing in earnest. I was trying to learn to defend myself but I was a small kid, most of my strength and height not coming around until I was thirteen and it was too late. The damage was done. I was who I was and I absolutely knew who I wasn’t. Eventually boxing became a coping mechanism. I used it to funnel the rage, hate, and disgust that lived in my blood and seeped from my pours. I put it all in the ring, threw it all at the bag, and finally I started to detox from it. I found relief, though it never lasted long. The briars always found me.
    I hit the gym hard after my meeting with Dan. After the fight in the woods, the black cloud cast over my future, the beating from the Asshole, and the cold shoulder from most of the guys I’d called friends at school, I was feeling the animal begin to growl. I needed to give it its day or risk succumbing to the rage and getting myself in even more trouble. I needed to let it run.
    I needed to hit something.

Chapter Four
     
     
     
    I didn’t go back to Dan’s office. At least, never to discuss my case. Our next appointment was scheduled for after school a week later at his house.
    That shit blew my mind.
    “Be careful,” Callum warned me at school that day. “His daughter is hot.”
    “Thanks for the warning, but I’m not going there to meet girls.”
    He snorted. “Yeah. Sure. Good luck with that.”
    “What’s funny?”
    “Girls trip over their tits to get to you, dude!” he exclaimed.
    Heads all around the quad turned to look at us.
    “Keep your damn voice down,” I growled at him.
    “Tell me it’s not true.”
    “It’s physically impossible, is what it is.”
    “It’s still true,” he insisted.
    “Fine, okay. I swear when I get there I’ll keep it in my pants.”
    “Or whip it out. That sometimes sends them running in the other direction.”
    I looked at him sideways. “You know that from personal experience, don’t you?”
    “Only way to learn, man. By doing.”
    And I was the one with the arrest record. Perfect.
    Dan lived in the posh ocean side neighborhood of Rancho Palos Verdes. His house was huge, the driveway long and sprawling. It didn’t faze me, though. This wasn’t my first mansion. I’d been friends with Will for years. Slept at his house, swam in his pool, and went to house parties around that very neighborhood with him a thousand times. But when I walked up to the large front steps of my lawyers house and rapped the broken, scabbed skin of my knuckles against the heavy oak door, I felt truly like trash for the first time in years. I almost turned around and went home. I could call him and tell him that I wasn’t able to find the house – though a blind man could have found it – and insist we meet at his office again.
    Before I could bail, the door swung open and a striking blond woman a few years younger than Dan stood in front of me. She smiled when she saw me and the warmth in her eyes knocked me back a step.
    “You must be Kellen,” she said brightly. “I’m Karen. I’m so glad to meet you. Dan has said wonderful things about you.”
    She reached out for me and I took her manicured hand in mine. It was ridiculously soft. Like a baby bathed in lotion. Gentle. Strange.
    “Nice to meet you.”
    She pulled me inside and closed the door behind us, the air conditioning enveloping me and my sweat coated skin in a chilling embrace that nearly made me sigh with relief. It was September, deep into fall, but try telling the weather that.
    “Dan is in his study on a conference call,” she told me. “It’s running long and he asked me to apologize to you but he’ll have to keep you waiting for a bit. I hope that’s okay.”
    “Yeah, of course. He doesn’t need to apologize. Definitely not to me,” I said, trying to stop myself from staring at the massive crystal chandelier hovering two stories above me.
    Karen