Picking fights, p.1
Picking Fights, page 1
PICKING FIGHTS
REN BOYLE
Copyright © 2023 by Ren Boyle
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
I have written and re-written this note too many times. When I first wrote Picking Fights, several months ago, the idea of a public library being defunded was a bizarre thing that had happened in one or two isolated places.
Now we have entire state library systems being defunded, and large library systems in liberal areas are under threat of, at least, drastic budget restrictions.
What comes next is not a political statement:
Banning books and harming public libraries is wrong. It is a moral wrong that damages all of us, but especially the most vulnerable.
Librarians across the country are facing the kinds of challenges that Martha faces in Picking Fights. It seemed wrong, at this moment, to set a book in and around a library without addressing the ways in which conservatives are seeking to harm public libraries, schools, and the LGBTQ+ community in one fell swoop. But, at the same time, I know that I am not the writer who should be writing from the perspective of a queer character.
I hope that I have struck a balance in respectfully writing about issues of censorship, attacks on library funding, and the rising persecution of the LGBTQ+ community. If you think I haven’t gotten that right, I’d love to continue the conversation. You can find me at @rensboyle on Instagram.
Book banners are counting on the larger community to abandon LGBTQ+ people in the hopes that they will leave everyone else alone. (Spoiler alert: they won’t.) If you’d like to stand against that, here are some places where you can donate, volunteer, or get involved in your community:
The Brooklyn Public Library’s Books Unbanned initiative provides access to ebooks for young people anywhere in the United States:
https://www.bklynlibrary.org/books-unbanned
How to Start a Banned Book Club, from the Florida ACLU:
https://www.aclufl.org/en/news/how-start-banned-book-club
GLAAD works for fair, accurate, and inclusive representation and works for LGBTQ acceptance:
https://www.glaad.org/about
We Need Diverse Books has a resource page for dealing with book banning:
https://diversebooks.org/resources/book-banning-resources/
Pen America has a resource page for students dealing with book bans:
https://pen.org/how-to-fight-book-bans-a-tip-sheet-for-students/
Unite Against Book Bans is an organization providing tools and leading campaigns to fight censorship:
https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/
The American Library Association organizes Banned Book Week to raise awareness about and promote the reading of banned books:
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/bannedbooksweek/ideasandresources/activity
And please, please pay attention to your local elections!
To all the prickly girls.
We know we’re worth it.
PROLOGUE
Martha Bainbridge rubbed the spot between her eyes where her tension lived. There was nothing new on the Connecticut Citizens for Traditional Values Facebook page. Nothing real anyway—just a bunch of the usual rants about globalists. It was weird. Two months without any protests or actions planned, nothing since that awful special election. She doubted they’d given up; she worried they’d moved their planning to a new spot, one she wasn’t familiar with. Maybe they wouldn’t come here again. Maybe.
She clicked out of that window and checked the clock. It was almost time.
For a moment she stared at the icons on her desktop. Rows of tiny folders. If she opened one, she’d find more folders, each full of spreadsheets, checklists, tidy information organized with tidy labels. Neat and easy to find.
She had a few minutes… Quickly, she reopened the browser and typed a few letters. The rest of the URL populated immediately. This just couldn’t be bookmarked. No label possible. She watched, face impassive, as a broad shouldered man in a purple checked suit spun for the camera, giving his butt a little shake and then laughing toward the older man standing next to him, who covered his eyes with one hand and shook his head. Finally, the man in the purple suit looked into the camera, slid his jaw to one side, planted his tongue in his cheek, and winked.
When the clip ended, Martha pressed replay. She watched it four more times, then closed the browser completely.
“Ugh, gross,” she said to herself.
There was a light knock on the door and it pushed open. Jess poked her head in.
“It’s time. They’re here.”
Martha sighed and squared her shoulders.
I can do this.
CHAPTER 1
Paul Poitiers, better known as Pit Bull, was not a library kinda guy. He probably never would have been, but his mom had sealed his fate on the first day of the first grade.
Claudine Poitiers, diligently preparing her son for school, had labeled all of his belongings with his initials so that they wouldn’t get lost. The family wasn’t wealthy, far from it. They didn’t have the money to replace his brand new Canadiens lunchbox and it was sure to be one of many Canadiens lunchboxes, even at their tiny, rural school.
It was Quebec, after all. Hockey and the Canadiens were pretty much the only show in town. Maybe someone, somewhere rooted for the Nordiques, but if anyone did, they didn’t mention it around town.
Claudine had the foresight to label his lunchbox with a thick, black marker, writing his initials—P. P.—three inches high on the back.
No one could miss those initials, which was the goal, and no one in his first grade class missed the chance to call him Tête Pipi—Peepee Head—which could have been foreseen if Claudine had been a woman of equal imagination and diligence.
The nickname didn’t last for more than a day, but by the end of that first day of school, he had become someone more familiar with the inside of a principal’s office than a library, at least in the minds of everyone around him.
By the end of the week, his refusal to back down from a fight, even with a fourth grader who had tried to resurrect Tête Pipi on Friday, had earned him two more trips to the principal’s office and a new nickname—Pit Bull.
“Pit bull” is the same in French and English, but when he left his hometown to join his first travel team, his new, English-speaking teammates had shortened it to Bull, then lengthened it again to Bully. The nickname had stayed with him, all the way to the NHL and beyond.
Bull wasn’t actually a bully, not to his thinking. He was an enforcer. A protector.
He kept the other team from going after their stars, lightweight speedsters who could score goals but couldn’t protect themselves and relied on his bulk—and his fists—to keep the other guys in check. And he lifted the entire team when they were down. When they didn’t have the energy to fight anymore, he fought and gave them his energy.
But to his opponents, and the people who wanted to get fighting out of hockey, he was just a bully on skates. A far cry from the cherubic six-year-old starting first grade with a hand-me-down sweater and a shiny new lunchbox. He became a hulking brute, not overly tall but solid, with a flattened nose and scarred chin, whose tough-guy exterior tried to hide behind fancy suits and smart-ass comments. A goon.
Actually, Bull wasn’t anything anymore, and hadn’t been for a few years. Now he was nothing but a washed-up former hockey player, retired after his body began to give out after sixteen years in the NHL. Now he was just a commentator on the local channel, doing analysis for the Hartford Whalers.
Which was why he was here, in a library, crouching next to a librarian, staring down a crowd of preschoolers with a puppet on each hand—expensive suit wrinkling and spotting with sweat, knees popping and protesting—regretting every decision he’d ever made that had brought him here, right back to the first grade.
He took a deep breath, attempting not to glare at the librarian—Martha—who was running this event. His agent had informed him that his face looked “scary” if he so much as frowned in concentration and that he needed to work on looking “approachable”.
Ostie. As if he didn’t know that. As if he hadn’t capitalized on it for his entire career, as a junior then as a pro in the minors and finally the NHL. But now he was here, with a new career and old habits that died hard, trying to make a grimace look like a smile.
A few feet to his left, Martha didn’t seem to have any trouble smiling, despite the four children who were draped all over her, one of whom was using her sweater to wipe his nose. She was reading a picture book, holding it so that the other twenty children in the room could see the pictures, which meant that she was reading upside down and b ackwards.
She made it look easy. She looked serene, even when a child launched herself backwards, head first, off her lap. The woman just snaked an arm under the kid to break her fall and then asked if she could see the pictures. Magically, the child responded by crawling around and sitting sedately in front of the book.
The librarian hadn’t even broken a sweat. And Bull was close enough to see if she had, crouching as he was just a few feet from her, waggling the unicorn puppet in response to her pointed look. He thought he’d be able to tell whether or not she was sweating from across the room, and if he couldn’t, he’d just move closer. He found he was enjoying looking at her, the closer the better.
The child with the runny nose buried his face in Martha’s right shoulder and finally his parent came up and wrestled him away. He began to howl, grubby hands reaching out for Martha.
Bull, making the goat puppet sing along this time, sympathized.
Having found his role early in life, Bull had proceeded to fulfill every aspect of it, both on and off-ice. When he was a teenager and started to really notice girls, girls started to notice him, too. Maybe not as many as the higher-scoring, higher-profile—and, later, higher-paid—stars he protected, but enough so that he didn’t have to try too hard. In fact, he never had to try too hard, at girls or hockey. Everyone thought of him as a work hard and play hard kinda guy, but actually it had all just been easy. That was the beauty of finding your place in life early. And he seemed to have the same pattern with the women who sought him out or drifted into his orbit, never staying long.
Easy come, easy go.
He somehow never got the script that many of his teammates did, that led them to settle down and start families. That had always looked like a lot of work and it was much simpler to let the women glide through his life. He liked easy; easy was skating, checking, punching, fucking.
But now his life was harder. Talking. Smiling. Doing puppetry in a suit.
Looking at Martha, he could see that she would be harder too. She wasn’t like the women who let themselves flow into his life and his bed and out again. Tall or short, thin or curvy, they all had one thing in common. Their goal was to make things uncomplicated for the man they wanted. And when they wanted him, his life was fun.
This woman wouldn’t make things easy for a man. Even her clothes screamed that her priorities were her job and these children. She somehow toed the line between professional and adorable in pants and a sweater. The only word to describe her was contained. She was neat, self-possessed, calmly friendly to everyone she’d talked with. Nearly everyone. He would say she didn’t have a hair out of place, except her hair was the only unruly thing about her. It coiled around her head, a mass of soft, dark curls that looked untamable, bouncing down over the shoulders of her sweater. There wasn’t much hint of what lay beneath, but she moved with a litheness that made his heart thump. He’d seen it in the way she’d slid away from him earlier, as if he smelled.
He probably shouldn’t have said what he did when she’d said that the book they were reading today was weird, but in a good way. Up until that moment she’d been polite and professional. But then he’d cocked an eyebrow and made that stupid comment. And she was gone, her back to him, chatting with Haley, the public relations person who’d organized this stunt, and that smarmy looking politician.
He probably should’ve just dropped it at that point. Bull didn’t waste time chasing women who didn’t want to be caught. But something in her eyes made him want to know more. And then she’d lifted her arms tie back that mass of hair and he’d been transfixed. That’s when he’d gotten an idea of what was under that sweater, as it lifted with her arms to reveal curving hips and caught under her breasts, high and generous. Tabernac…
She’d been pulling her hair back into a severe bun on top of her head, although corkscrews of curls were already popping loose here and there. This wasn’t the most attractive hairstyle, but Bull could appreciate the practical aspects. More than one of these kids was probably a hair-puller and he didn’t even want to think about the damage Snot Face would’ve done. And nothing could hide the beauty of her dark blue eyes, which seemed to slide away from his whenever possible, or her wide, full mouth, which thinned into an insincere smile whenever she couldn’t avoid looking at him.
No, there was nothing about her that said Bull was anywhere close to the center of her attention and a whole lot that made him want to try to be.
CHAPTER 2
As soon as Bull walked in the room for the toddler read-along, Martha spotted him.
Ugh, that dick, she thought.
This sounded like, and was intended as, an insult. But her eyes drifted lower over the tight sweater and the ugly checked suit he was wearing, and she had to acknowledge that she’d put the emphasis on the wrong word and it was, in fact, not an insult. More of a lust-filled exclamation of dismay. A yodel of reluctant yearning.
Haley from the TV station, a willowy woman even taller than six-foot Bull, introduced them and Martha did her best to act professionally. This should be easy. Just another PR stunt, this time for the local sports affiliate to promote literacy and the station’s annual book drive. Nothing new. The only thing that was different was this guy who she really did not want to be lusting after. But the moment they shook hands and she felt Bull’s huge, smooth hand, she felt a jolt of desire between her legs. Instinctively, she clenched her butt and squeezed her legs together. As if that would do anything.
Martha talked them through the read-along procedure, the songs they’d sing at the end, and what Bull would need to do to help lead the program. She wasn’t sure what she was saying, but muscle memory must have taken over because Haley kept smiling and nodding as if it all made perfect sense. She risked a quick look at Bull, who looked… weird. His forehead was furrowed as if he was angry, but his eyes looked confused and there was a stiff smile on his lips. He seemed a bit lost.
This wasn’t too surprising. She watched a lot of hockey, and since they were the local team, she watched a lot of Whalers hockey in particular. She’d seen Bull talk plenty and, although he was perfectly coherent when talking about hockey, he didn’t seem like he had much else on his mind.
Well, that was okay. His success didn’t rely too much on brain function.
Bull was standing close to her, only a few feet away as she showed them the room where the reading would happen. Haley left them to confer with the cameraman who’d be documenting the stunt and he stepped even closer to let her pass. She’d made some comment about the book being a fun sort of weird and he almost growled at her, “Yeah, let’s get weird with it.”
And it was all too much, the ridiculousness of what he said and how wrong it felt to react to him like this while she was at work.
On top of that voice, Martha could smell him, and the combination of his scent and the warm softness of her hair on her neck was too much. Funny, she would’ve expected Axe, or whatever the more expensive version of Axe was. But he smelled like clean laundry and fresh air. She stepped away before she rubbed up against him like a cat and quickly threw her hair up into a bun. Normally she’d wear her hair down for a toddler read-along. It felt comfortable and approachable. But now she could feel each time a curl brushed her neck and it felt too much like a touch on her skin.
Putting it up ended up being a mistake because she turned back to find his eyes unfocused and his lips parted, the tip of his tongue darting forward to wet his bottom lip. Her nape felt suddenly exposed and vulnerable. The image that leapt to her mind made her flush, heat spreading through her body.
She turned quickly back to Haley, who was standing next to Brian Andrews, the town board member here to do the photo op. It was a little weird that he should be the one here. Brian’s main focus was lowering property taxes and he usually ignored the library. The two more library-friendly board members probably had been booked up today or maybe he was a big hockey fan.
