When Miley insisted on driving separately to meet at the place she picked, I wasn’t sure what to think. It was only yesterday that I punched out her sleazy ex, but it already feels like I’ve been waiting weeks to see her again. As much as I’m dying to get her back into the club, or better yet--my personal play room, I know that’s not what she needs. Not quite yet, at least. She needs to see that this isn’t another mistake, and I’ll be damned if I don’t prove it to her.

I look up at the place. Galaxy Golf. It’s a huge, ten story driving range that looms above a green expanse of astro-turf, but there are electronic targets scattered across the range. I looked the place up before we came, and apparently it makes some kind of game out of it. You get more points for hitting the center of the target or for hitting targets farther away, and you get the most points for hitting the back wall.

I have to admit, it sounds kind of fun, even if I’m absolutely shit at golf.

When I finally see Miley walking toward the front of the building, she’s flanked by a woman wearing black fishnet stockings, some kind of black coat with metal rings, and enough makeup that she looks like she’s about to walk on stage to perform at a rock concert. I feel my eyebrows creeping upwards. She brought a friend? Fucking seriously?

My annoyance is forgotten for a moment as I take in Miley. She’s wearing tight, dark wash jeans that make her legs go on for days and a short leather jacket over a dark blue corset that pushes her perfect breasts up and shows just the slightest amount of skin at her waist. She’s the perfect vision of subdued and sex kitten.

Damn. She’s lucky she brought a friend, or I might lose my conviction to keep this date PG. With annoyance, I wonder if that’s why she decided to bring a friend in the first place--to keep me honest.

As much as I wish I had her to myself, I have to give her credit for her cleverness.

“You must be Jayce,” her friend says. “I’m Darla.” Her voice is a surprisingly deep, monotone, and her sleepy eyes never seem to blink.

“I see,” I say, looking to Miley. “I didn’t realize you were bringing a friend. I could’ve invited one of my own.”

“Yeah,” Darla quips. “Maybe you could have set me up with them.” She rolls her eyes and walks inside with this strange, stiff posture and slow but forced grace.

I turn to Miley once we have a moment of privacy. “What are you playing at?”

I can tell she’s working hard to keep her nerve, but she stares right back at me. “I brought her because I don’t trust myself. She’ll keep me from doing anything stupid. And…” Miley says with mild reluctance. “Darla loves this place.”

I look toward her friend with more than a hint of skepticism. “Seriously?”

“What?” Miley asks with a mischievous glint in her eye. “She doesn’t look like a golfer to you?”

I chuckle. “Where exactly did you two meet?”

“I’ve known her since Pre-K. We were both always getting bullied, so it was one of those unlikely allies kind of things.”

Miley says it so offhandedly, but I can tell her childhood isn’t just a memory to her. It’s a scar she carries with her every day. An irrational anger rises up in me at the fact that I’m only now finding her, that I wasn’t there to shield her when she needed it most. But I know all I can do is be good to her now and give her the life she deserves, if she’ll let me.

“Any of these bullies still around?” I ask. “I could pay them back, with interest, of course.”

Miley eyes me. “Don’t take this the wrong way, because I know the thing with Cade…” She chews her bottom lip for a second, searching for the right words. “I needed you last night. But having a guy in my life to punch everyone who wrongs me in the face isn’t what I need, not in the long run.”

“I could always punch them in the neck,” I suggest.

She plants a fist on her hip and gives me glare, but she can’t keep from grinning a little. “I didn’t take you for the type to have much of a sense of humor.”

“Well, the first time we met, I was… distracted. And the second didn’t exactly seem like the place for humor.”

“Distracted?” she asks.

“I had more important things occupying my mind,” I say, letting my eyes rove over her body for emphasis.

Her cheeks flush the most beautiful shade of red. I smirk, which makes her take a sudden interest in her shoes. “Sorry. It still doesn’t feel like that was me.. I hardly recognize the me that did something so… reckless.”

“The real question isn’t if you recognize her. It’s if you liked her.”

Miley raises her eyebrow thoughtfully. “Better than the usual me,” she says softly. “The usual me seems to only find ways to wind up the victim.”

“Don’t do that,” I say firmly. “You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for. You say you needed me last night? Fuck, Cade needed me. If I hadn’t shown up I think you would’ve gutted him in the middle of your living room.”

She laughs, but the humor quickly drains from her face as she realizes I’m right. “I really do appreciate what you did. I don’t know if I properly thanked you. And I’m sorry for how I’ve been. I guess we just met at a weird point in my life.”

“You’re apologizing?” I ask in disbelief. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m over here jumping through hoops to keep you from running off. The only thing you need to apologize for is being so goddamn irresistible that I’m willing to make a fool out of myself for you.”

“You making a fool out of yourself… Now that’s something I’d like to see,” she says with the first real, full smile I’ve seen from her.

“Ask and you shall recieve, princess,” I say. “Come on.”

We go inside, where Darla is waiting by the front doors with her arms crossed. Judging by the look on her face, she ran out of patience about a millisecond after she stepped inside. “Great,” she says dryly. “You’re ready.”

I look to Miley, who gives me a warning look not to antagonize her friend, so I hold my tongue as we get checked in and brought to one of the bays on the top floor, where a digital screen displays the rules and our scores. A few of what I guess are the basic golf clubs are stored at every bay. We also have a table with seating and menus.

“Nice place,” I say, looking out over the view of the driving range below. Huge nets stretch at least two hundred or three hundred feet in the air all around the range, protecting the freeway in the distance from rogue golf balls. The sound of clubs cracking into balls rings out all around, and a constant spray of white balls flies out from below and beside us.

“Miley says you’re a golfer,” I say to Darla, trying to ease some of the awkward hostility that seems to radiate from the woman.

She rolls her eyes at me before walking to the touch screen panel beside the clubs. She taps her long black fingernails on the screen a few times, grabs a club, and then waves it over a sensor that sends a ball rolling onto a small patch of green near the edge of the driving bay. She gives me a look that I don’t think is supposed to be comical--a smug glare is what I would call it--then takes a monstrous swing at the ball.

Her club buzzes over the top of the ball and sends it bouncing twice before it rolls into the net at the edge of the platform.

“Fuck!” she shouts, causing a mom with her young daughter in the bay beside us to cover her daughter’s ears and shoot a nasty look our way.

I lurch forward, failing to hold back a laugh as Darla tosses her club down and stomps over to take a seat at the table. “Shoulder injury,” she says flatly. “My swing hasn’t been the same since last January.”

“I see,” I say, but I still can’t keep the amusement from my voice or my face. Miley seems like she’s able to hold her own composure until she looks at me, which causes her to almost burst out laughing.

“Your turn,” she says shakily, barely holding in a laugh.

I grab the biggest club I can and look down the range toward the back wall, where I imagine it won’t be that hard to hit the thing. After all, I’m holding a big ass metal stick… how hard can it be?

I wind up, swing as hard as I can, and hear a disappointingly quiet sound as I barely catch the edge of the ball and send it careening so far to the right that it hits the net at the edge of the range.

I sigh, laughing a little at myself. “Guess there’s a reason people practice this,” I say, handing the club to Miley, who takes it and moves to line up her shot.

She sets up in a way that makes me think she might actually know what she’s doing. She pulls back the club and even my untrained eye can tell she’s about to hit a great shot. Sure enough, the sound rings out, putting my own dinky shot to shame. I watch the ball sail until it dings against the farthest target. The screen above the clubs shows that she earned twelve points.

I give her a round of applause. “So this is why you wanted to come here?”

“I like the atmosphere,” she says.

“Right.”

“If you two are done eye-fucking,” Darla sighs. “I’d appreciate some peace and quiet so I can concentrate.”

“Darla!” Miley gasps.

The corner of Darla’s mouth actually twitches up at Miley’s outrage. “You’re right. It’s pointless to broadcast the obvious.”

Darla sets up to take her next shot while I give Miley a long, you seriously brought her, kind of look. Miley at least has the decency to look like she regrets it now, if only just a little.

Despite Darla’s constant drone of depressing, melodramatic one-liners, the night is one of the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Somewhere along the way, I forget I’m supposed to be proving my worth to Miley and I just enjoy spending time with her. But when Darla rolls her eyes at us for the hundredth time and says she’s going to the bar to get drinks, Miley and I are alone for the first time since we got here.

I let out a long breath once Darla goes inside. “You feel that?” I ask.

“Feel what?” asks Miley.

“It’s hard to say. Like a dark cloud just parted… like the sun is shining for the first--”

“Stop it!” laughs Miley, who swats at my arm. “Darla is really sweet once you get to know her.”

“You’ll have to pardon me if I find that hard to believe.”

Miley smiles, picking at a loose chip of paint on the table. “I guess it’s hard to go through what she and I went through together and not feel connected somehow, no matter how different we are. Some days I’d just excuse myself from class to go to the bathroom to be alone, and more often than not, Darla was already there. She laughs distantly. “We spent so much time talking about how much people suck in those bathrooms.”

“Why did they tease you?” I ask, genuinely not understanding. From where I’m sitting, I see a beautiful woman. When she lets her guard down, her personality shines through so clearly it’s like a beacon, and I can’t wrap my head around what there would be not to like.

Her finger digs more forcefully at the chip of paint and her head tilts with the effort, lips pursing. “It depended on the year. When I was really little, it was my glasses--” she pauses at my confused look. “Contacts,” she says, pointing to her eyes. “Then it was how bad I was at sports.”

I nod, seeing something of a pattern. She got contacts because she was teased for her glasses. She practiced golf--and maybe other sports--because she was teased for not being any good.

“Then things really got ugly when the rumor started.”

“The rumor?” I ask.

“I dated a guy in seventh grade named Jake, if you could even call it dating. He asked if I wanted to be his girlfriend, I said yes because I was stupid and lonely. He got his parents to take us to the movies and drop us off. I thought he was going to try to kiss me or hold my hand, but maybe he was too nervous, because we just watched the movie and that was it. It felt weird and awkward, so I broke things off with him the next day at school. That afternoon, I started noticing people acting weird around me. Girls were giving me dirty looks. Guys were leering at me and laughing. It was mortifying.

“It wasn’t until Darla told me about the rumor going around that I knew why. She said Jake was telling everyone I gave him a blowjob during the movie and that I let him finger me. It didn’t matter what really happened. All that mattered was the stupid lie he told because he wanted to save face.”

I clench my teeth when I imagine her younger self dealing with all that bullshit. “Let me guess, I’m not allowed to find this Jake asshole and punch him in the face?”

She smiles. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“How did someone who went through so much hell end up so sweet?”

“Who says I’m sweet?” she asks with a devious little smirk.

I laugh. “Okay then, Miss Wild Thing. Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done.”

She leans forward, lowering her eyebrows dramatically. “Ninth grade. I was riding the bus on the way home from school and tossed my gum out the window without thinking. A second later, I heard a scream. I guess it went out my window and got sucked right back in a window near the back. It landed in Jenny Fisher’s hair.”

“Oh shit,” I say, laughing.

“Yeah. And she went raging around the bus, screaming and threatening to get the principal involved if someone didn’t fess up, but no one talked. I guess no one saw anything. And I didn’t say a word. And,” she adds with a satisfied little smile. “I laughed my whole way home once I got off the bus, too. How’s that for sweet?”

I grin. “That’s it? That’s your worst story?”

“What? You’ve got a better one?” she asks.

I tilt my head, mind immediately touching on some of the darker moments in my life--moments I don’t care to bring to light right now. I haven’t always been a good man, and I have the stories to prove it. There will be a time to share those stories with Miley, but our first real date isn’t the right place, so I think back to when I was younger.

“Maybe,” I say after dredging up an old memory. “I was a small kid back in middle school, and some of the other guys used to pick on me.”

“Seriously?” asks Miley. “It’s kind of hard to picture you having ever been small.”

I chuckle. “Seriously. My older brother Leo was always big, though. So I knew most kids wouldn’t take it too far when it came to bullying me. They all knew if any of it ever got back to my brother, he’d beat the shit out of them. But one day I got tired of it, of knowing my brother was the only thing standing between me and the other kids.

“So I made a plan. There was this hill the kids would ride their bikes down on the way home from school. It was a pretty steep road, but naturally, they liked to go as fast as they could. One afternoon, I hid on the side of the road in a bush with a bucket of loose gravel and rocks. I waited until I saw the kids who were always giving me shit at the top of the hill and gaining speed.”

I pause, feeling a dark sort of guilt and ugliness rise up inside. I chose this story on a whim, only remembering it as the time I got those kids back--but in the telling of it, I’m realizing I was wrong for thinking some of the truly fucked up things I’ve done didn’t reach back even to my childhood. My face twists a little as a finish the story.

“I threw the bucket of gravel out. I still remember the way their eyes bulged at me just before they hit the rocks. I could see so much in so few seconds: fear, regret, anger… Then all hell broke loose. The four of them went skidding and flipping down the hill. It must’ve been another ten feet to the bottom, and by the time they all got there, they were bloody and bruised, limping to their feet like they had just survived a bomb blast.”

I laugh softly, but there’s no humor in it. “They didn’t even try to come after me. They just hobbled off, dragging their mangled bikes behind them. It was the last time anyone messed with me. The most fucked up part is I couldn’t make myself feel bad for them. I just kept thinking to all the times they had tried to mess with me and what they would’ve done if they weren’t afraid of my brother, and no matter how I looked at it, it felt like they got what they deserved.”

I can imagine how it all must sound to Miley. She sees me now and probably can’t imagine me back then, lanky and small, always trailing in my brother’s shadow. If you looked at he and I side by side now, you’d never guess we were so different when we were kids. I caught up to him, but we took completely different paths to where we are today.

Instead of looking disgusted or appalled like I expect, Miley reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. The gesture surprises me--shocks me, even. I look down at her small hand on mine and know with more certainty than I felt before: she’s the one. She’s not just the perfect submissive for me, she’s the perfect woman.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “You know the most messed up part?” she asks. “Somehow you have to feel like the bad guy when you stand up to the bullies. It doesn’t really make sense, does it?”

I shake my head. “I think it’s guilt. Guilt that there was probably another way to solve the problem without stooping to their level.”

“Maybe. But should a dog feel guilty if it’s backed into a corner and bites when it feels like it’s run out of options?”

I grin. “You’re really something, you know that?”

Her cheeks turn bright red and she looks away. A smile plays at her lips, but it seems like her shyness is winning the battle, because she smooths her features. “I don’t know about that.”

“I do,” I say, taking her hand this time. “And I need to know this isn’t the only date you’re going to let me take you on.”

“Hey,” she says with mock anger. “The deal was that I get a whole date to decide.”

I lean across the table inching closer to her. “I had something planned for the end of our date, but it’s not going to work with her,” I say, nodding toward Darla, who sits inside the building and is throwing back a glass of something brown.

“Then I guess it’ll have to wait until date number two,” says Miley.

I lick my lips. “You’re a goddamn tease, do you know that?”

She aims her big, innocent baby blues eyes up at mine in the most irresistible way. “It’d only be teasing if you weren’t going to get what you wanted.”

“Then I get to pick the next date,” I say.

She swallows, eyes still trained on mine as she regards me. “Deal.”