A Fighting Chance (25 page)

Is he fucking serious?
“No, I don’t. Nico just died...” For the life of me, I want to add, “So show some goddamn respect,” but the rational and self-preserving part of my brain talks me down off the stupidity ledge.

“Will be taken care of. You stay. You fight. You maybe win money…”

“I’m not fighting,” I say with conviction, while tempering my frustration when my gaze falls to the lethal weapon swinging at his neck. “He just
died
.”

Daniel
Killian strolls up on my left and pulls me away. “But
you
didn’t…and that kid was just too fuckin’ eager to get noticed, you know? Trying to impress that fine ass bitch of his in every fight.” He’s unnaturally ripped, his bushy blond brows sit over blue eyes, and his neck is branded with tattoos. “Shit like this happens, and these people didn’t come here for a tea party. We don’t chase balls or go for nets. We punch each other ‘cause we’re having a good day, and we punch each other ‘cause we’re having a bad day. You know what we are, and they know, too. That’s why they’re here to see us wreck each other. They’re
all
secretly hoping one of us dies in there. This shit
is
great
for business.” Like the asshole he is, he’s completely unfazed, not shaken up in any way. If he has fucks to give, they aren’t here tonight.

“This isn’t
my
business…”

“Not the way I heard it.
So, Ramón Vega didn’t have to break up a fight between you and Cocodrilo because he was afraid you would destroy his prizefighter in public?”

I inch closer to him and we’re almost nose-to-nose. “I
said—
”

“
Whatever, dude. Look, I want my money, and they came to see us fight. No one leaves until the last fight is over, anyway. We’re both still breathing, so…” When he pats me on the shoulder as he walks away, I almost swing at him, but Drew steps out of the crowd right then.

“What’s going on? I thought you were coming back?” she asks. She’s trembling when I pull her against me and press my lips to her forehead. My protective instincts are
urging me to just lift her up and run through the doors until we’re in a safe place, but right now, trying to break out of here is actually the most dangerous thing we could do.

“How’s Christiana holding up?” I whisper
, and she shrugs into my chest before her arms tighten around my torso.

“She’s not. But she doesn’t blame you at all. She told me to tell you that. He’d been complaining about headaches all week she said. God, I can’t believe he was fighting through something like that just to make money. It makes me think about what could happen to you in there…” She trails off into a whimper
.

“I’ll be fine,” I assure her, even as
Daniel’s words continue to plague me.
They’re all secretly hoping one of us dies in there. This shit is great for business.
“Are
you
all right, Drew?”

She nods.
“But I just want to get out of here, Jess.”

“I know, and I want to get you out of here, but we can’t leave…” 

Drew tears herself from my arms, and a puzzled look flickers across her face, until anger burns through. “
What?
They’re still expecting you to fight?”

I sigh. “
Rules are rules.” We find a spot on a wall and stand there together, neither of us in the mood to talk. Before long, the announcer yells our names and it’s time for me to get in the cage with Daniel. Within a few steps I’m back in the very place another man just died, and the strange thing is, it’s not the image of him falling to the canvas that’s stuck in my head. What I can’t escape is the one of Nico coming up to me to introduce himself—so courteous, so friendly…
so alive.

The crowd goes wild when
Daniel and I approach the center, and the sound of their cheers grates my nerves. For them, Nico’s death is already filed away as a consequence of the cage, and it triggers a series of memories I have never been able to bury deep enough.

When I was younger, getting Henry to notice me became my waking obsession. One of my best and worst memories of him is from when I was eight, and it was one of the days my mom let me go to the park by myself. I told her I was meeting
Bucky there, but I had other plans. I knew my half sister, Kady, always came out to play around that time, and so I knew
he
would be there, too. While she was playing tag with her friends, he was sitting on a bench nearby, flirting with one of the moms. I had never spoken to him before and I really wanted to. Every time I had asked my mom why I couldn’t just go to his house, she gave me excuses. I was angry at her, not understanding then what she was protecting me from.

I had spent
hours picturing this moment, but I had no idea how to go about initiating a conversation. With an impulsive thought, I kicked my soccer ball as hard as I could in his direction, and it rolled to a stop right in front of the bench. When he picked it up, the blood flow to my brain was so much of a surge that I got dizzy. This was it. I was going to talk to my father. Then, Kady would invite me to play tag with her friends, and I’d be visiting their house in no time.

Happily ever after and all that shit.

It was clear that Henry was startled when he realized whom the ball belonged to. I jogged closer to him, slowing to cautious steps when he rolled the ball back. Then he smiled. And I smiled, because he
saw
me. I stopped the ball with my scuffed black Reebok and after I picked it up, I started to say hello, but he was already back on the bench and talking to the woman. A few minutes later, I tried again, intentionally kicking the ball at him, but he called one of the other kids to retrieve it. He didn’t look my way the rest of the time I was out there. He flat-out ignored me. It was the first time and certainly not the last.

The more he ignored me, the more I wanted that moment back
. And the more I wanted that moment back, the more obsessive I became, especially when I entered my teens. At the same time, the kids my age were getting better at understanding what an affair was, and what a child whose father wasn’t married to his mother was called.
Holy shit
, did they run wild with that one. The biracial thing only added fuel to the fire. But I just
knew
if Henry accepted me, everyone else would, too. I still wanted to know him and I started emulating him as a way to connect us in my own head. Henry was always with women, so I was always with girls. He smoked cigarettes, so I smoked cigarettes…for about a week. I only took my first sip of alcohol, stolen from the 7-Eleven in Renshaw, after I saw him drinking at Murphy’s. I also got aggressive about injecting myself into his life by stopping by the dealership when I knew he was there. But nothing worked. He never went further than a forced greeting. In time, my fascination with him became loathing for myself, a giant question mark floating over my entire identity, my entire existence: why wasn’t he interested in me?

Then I found out about the fights in Perry’s barn when I was fifteen
and how he used to fight, too.

And
everything
changed.

I didn’t
like
the idea of fighting, but I wanted something—anything—about me to earn his acknowledgement. The first time I climbed into the ring, on a really stupid whim, he stood in the front row. He
saw
me again that night, and he never took his eyes off me. I got my ass handed to me in the fight, though, and he went right back to looking at me like he always did. Like I wasn’t even there. I went home and cried that night. Not because I had lost the match but because I had lost my father.

F
or an entire month, I worked as hard as I could, training and learning about all different kinds of fighting styles. MMA, boxing, Jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, Krav Maga. You name it; I studied the moves. Eventually, I got back into that ring, ready to fight for my father’s attention. He wasn’t in the front row this time, though. But I knew he was there, and that belief helped me destroy my opponent that night. With all the years that have passed, the guy I fought is nameless and faceless today. I left him in a bloody heap on the canvas and walked back to the center of the ring in awe that an entire barn full of people, most of whom had dragged
my mother’s name
through the mud, were now chanting
mine
in unison. As I looked around, wondering if I was dreaming, I spotted Henry within a group of people, and he was cheering for me, too.
Everyone
in the place was cheering for me.

From then on, every time I won a fight, every time I left someone battered at my feet,
I thought it offered me a chance to shed a piece of my bastard identity. And along with gaining Henry’s approval, I had finally figured out what everyone else wanted from me, too.

But I also realized then that
everything
came with a price. Love included. And I wanted it. I was willing to pay for it. Even if the currency was someone else’s blood. What I didn’t know was that with fighting came the other cost I would have to pay.

I lost who I really wanted to be.

I'll always be what they made me, what I let them turn me into. I feel like the person I want to be just exists in the shadow of who I am in the cage.

A poisonous mix of contempt and anger brews in my chest, and it drowns out the
explosion of cheers as Daniel and I touch gloves.

Ding.

****

I pace the hotel parking lot in impatience
, gripping the cell phone at my ear. There’s silence on the other end, but it may as well be shrill shouting. I’m reacting to it the same way: wincing, clenching my teeth, and feeling my heartbeat in my ears.

“So,
you guys kissed a bunch of times and…?” Lydia says finally. “What? Did you do that thing with your tongue that always makes me come?”

Holy shit.
She’s drinking; I can hear the slight slur in her voice. “C’mon. Let’s not do this. You really want to hear about Drew and me?”

“
Don’t fucking say her name on the phone to me!” Lydia shouts after a growl. “Fuck her! But I bet that’s what you want to do anyway, isn’t it? If you haven’t already. Don’t you, Jesse?”

I sigh. “Lyds…”

“Oh my God. Oh my God… You can’t answer because you want to say yes and you know how it’ll sound. Oh God. I bet she’s the one who calls every year on your birthday, too. Oh my God. My brother was right. I told him you were there with
some bitch
, and he just knew there was something going on between you two.”

As much as it’s
shredding my patience, I let the name-calling go because she’s well within her right to be pissed off. “There wasn’t…not initially. And I’ve been calling you, Lyds—”

“So, because I’m wasn’t answering my phone
, and I needed time to process this hidden life—”

“This isn’t my
goddamn life, Lydia!” My raised voice sails into the night air. To say I’m short-tempered right now would be like calling Jaws a goldfish. I haven’t slept through the night since Nico died a few days ago. My brain just can’t shut anything out, and a dark, quiet room is the perfect environment for my worries to float up to the surface, and then slowly tow me under until I’m smothered beneath all the things I can’t escape. Even when I manage to fall asleep, I’ve been having this dream where I’m in the cage again with Nico, and after he dies, he turns into Kerr, Arturo and José, before finally morphing into HJ. I cradle my little brother in my arms and hear his voice in my head.
Look at what you’ve done. How can you save me?

“
Nothing
I did gave you an excuse to do
anything
with another woman!” Lydia yells back. “
Nothing.
I don’t know what to think or feel right now. God. I
never
thought you’d do
this
, Jesse…”

“I could say the same. I dropped a lot on you,
truthfully, but I
never
thought you’d react the way you did to my past, either. A past I was finished with
years
ago. All of a sudden you’re acting like I’m some goddamn stranger…glorifying fighting one minute and being scared the next.”

“Don’t turn this around on me.”

“I’m just telling you how I feel. I didn’t say the two things are related, Lyds.”

She gasps
then lets out a flat laugh. “Whoa. Wait. So you didn’t cheat because you were mad at me? Is that what you’re saying? Because in a sick way I could almost deal with some kind of revenge fuck with that slut. I get it. You used to bang her. Men like old, reliable pussy.”

“Lydia—”

“And I
have
been weird about the whole thing. But would you have done this even if I
had
been completely supportive? Is that the
real
truth? Do you still have feelings for her?” The sound of her voice breaking lasers straight through my heart. “Are you…are you in love with her? Have you been in love with her this whole time?”