Brawler (27 page)

“See,” she said quietly, her eyes openly admitting everything I’d said. Everything I feared. “You pay very close attention.”

“Are you still mad at me?” I asked bluntly.

She lowered the mitts, shaking her head. “I wasn’t mad at you, I’m disappointed. In both of us.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I didn’t plan that.”

“I was in that room too. You weren’t alone in what happened.”

I stared at her standing there in my Zen and I thought of all the times I’d seen her there before. Of the times she’d been there when she was a kid and things had been easier. Clearer. Of the times when she got older and she was so beautiful I worried I’d have to beat asses for the looks she was getting. Of the times when I’d looked down at her from inside the ring and I’d let myself imagine, just for one sliver of a second, that she was mine.

Now here she stood, both of us free and clear of restrictions, and I felt less sure of us than I’d ever felt before.

“Jen, I don’t know where we go from here,” I admitted, my voice low and deep.

She sighed sadly. “Me either.”

“I know what I want.”

“Me too.”

“I also don’t know how to be what I want.”

“Same shit, different day,” she whispered.

I nodded, my eyes intent on hers. I was worried she would think I was running again and I couldn’t do that. That wasn’t my intention. I was trying so hard to make the right decisions, but my session with Ben had opened my eyes to a glaring weakness in me. I craved Dan’s approval and opinion, valuing it above my own and that was no way to live my life. I needed more time with Ben to get my head straight and get on my own course before I committed to anything else. I hated to admit it, but I needed my friend more than I needed anything else from her right then.

“It still seems like a big risk to me,” I told her reluctantly, terrified of how she’d take it. “And maybe it’s selfish, but I need you right now. I can’t afford to fuck this up any more than I already have.”

She forced a small smile. “We’re good, Kellen. You’ve got a lot on your plate. You have physical therapy, boxing, you need to get a job, you just came out of an engagement. I’m not looking to jump into anything with you right now. I’ll be here for you while you work on all of that, though. Just like I’ve always been.”

“Is that a dick thing for me to ask, though? Am I asking you to wait?”

“I don’t know, are you?”

I sighed, rubbing my hands over my face and trying to erase the annoyance that was building. I wanted to bail. I wanted to hide. I wanted to slip into the darkness and hit autopilot until all of this was resolved for me, but it’s what I’d done before and look how well that’d turned out. What would the world look like when I surfaced this time? I doubted Jenna would still be there. No one deserved that kind of devotion, certainly not me.

I dropped my hands and looked at her, feeling a little helpless. And scared. “Yeah. I think I am. Is that something you can do?”

She snorted lightly. “Like I haven’t been doing it for years already.”

I groaned inwardly. “See, now that makes me feel like shit. I never meant to do that to you.”

“But you didn’t like me with Alexander.”

That douchebag.

“No.”

“Okay, well, honesty time. I didn’t like you with Laney. So we’re even.”

“Was it a competition?”

“I wouldn’t count it as one until I’m in the lead,” she said slyly. “Let’s just do what we do and we’ll see where it goes. No Laneys, no Alexanders, no age restrictions, no expectations. Just you and me being you and me.”

I grinned at the idea, at the freedom of the thought. “I can handle that.”

“Good. Now get back to work. We have to figure out how to hide your right hand.”

Jenna watched silently from beside Tim as I ran through my workout. The hardest part was being in the ring. I felt it the second I stepped inside – I was off. It wasn’t the strength I was missing, because I was quick to find out I wasn’t missing that much. It was the strike. The animal who had stayed so quiet lately. He wasn’t coming out and taking control, and without him the instinct was gone. I was overthinking and generally cocking everything up. The worst, though, was the pain. It hurt like hell to hit with my right hand and I felt the hesitation every time I went to use it.

And everyone in that gym saw it happen.

Afterward, I walked Jenna out to her car, trying not to let the workout haunt me. I was coming back from a horrible accident. There was going to be recovery. I knew I wouldn’t be perfect right off the bat, but I hadn’t realized I’d be this far gone. I didn’t know where the animal had gone, and the scary thing was that I was trying to figure out how to bring him back.

“Practice tomorrow?” Jenna asked when we got to her car. She’d parked next to my bike. “Same time?”

I grinned faintly. “Same Bat channel, yeah. That’s a long drive for you.”

“Two and a half hours,” she shrugged. “I can handle it.”

“Do you like Bakersfield?” I asked suddenly, a wild idea forming in my mind.

“It’s where work is.”

I sat down sideways on my bike, settling in. “That’s not what I asked.”

“I don’t know. It’s alright. I miss being right next to the ocean, but like I said, it’s where work is.”

“What about opening your own shop?”

She laughed loudly, covering her mouth with her hand as her keys dangled down from her palm.

“Why is that funny?” I asked seriously, not laughing with her. “I thought that’s something you wanted to do.”

“It is,” she agreed heartily, “of course it is, but really that’s a huge undertaking. Finding the money to rent or buy the shop space, buying all the equipment, getting licenses, branding, hiring and paying employees, the list goes on and on. I don’t have the money for that.”

“You know people who do.”

You’re talking to one right now.

She groaned unhappily. “Dad, yeah, he has money and I know he’d give it to me but… I don’t know.” She worried her keys in her hands, avoiding my eyes. “What if it fails and I can never pay him back? What if it fails and that means
I
failed and my dreams go swirling down the toilet right in front of me.”

“That’s stupid. You have the talent to make it happen.”

“A lot of people have talent, it doesn’t mean they open their own shop.” She pointed to the dilapidated brick of Tim’s Gym behind me. “You have talent but you’ve never tried to go pro. I couldn’t even convince you to try out for the Olympic Team, something you could have done, by the way.”

“I know” I agreed solemnly, feeling uneasy with the confession on my tongue, “and I should have listened to you. I should have gone, but that wasn’t what I was doing with my life then and I regret it now. I don’t want you to regret anything.”

“I won’t,” she replied weakly.

“If you don’t give this a shot, you will,” I insisted. “I know you. You’ll always wonder. You have the talent and resources to break out and make it big on your own, things that not everyone has, Jen. It’s a waste. It’s a slap in the face to life if you don’t use all of it to its full potential. Take everything you can from life and put out everything you’ve got. Otherwise what’s the point?”

She smiled. “Are you telling me YOLO?”

“Don’t be a jerk,” I laughed. “I’m being brilliant here.”

“I know, sorry. And you’re right. I’ll think about it.”

Not good enough. I wasn’t buying it.

“Don’t think about it,” I told her. “You’ve obviously already done that. Now it’s time to do it.”

“Actually,” she countered, glancing down at her watch, “now it’s time to get on the road and get to work or I won’t have a job to fund this big dream of yours.”

“Ours,” I corrected her. “Do you work tomorrow?”

“No.”

“Good.”

I stood up, feeling my body move before I could stop it. I touched her bare arm with my hand to ground myself, then I kissed her lightly on the cheek. When I pulled away we both looked surprised, but she didn’t slap me. That was something.

“We’ll look at shop spaces tomorrow,” I told her.

“Wait, what?” she chuckled nervously.

“I’ll find some online today and we’ll check them out tomorrow.”

“Kellen, slow down. I’m still in college. Don’t you think I should finish that first?”

“You can do both.”

“
You
could do both. I can’t manage all that alone.”

“You’re never alone,” I told her, settling onto my bike. I felt wild the way I had the afternoon in the park when she’d been looking at me,
really
looking at me, for the first time in years. I felt that thrill of being with her. The best part of me rising to the surface to see her. To bask in the glow of her eyes. “I’ll help you.”

“I don’t know my budget,” she persisted. “I haven’t even talked to my dad.”

“It’s a business proposal. We’ll come to him with the budget.” I grinned at her, revving my bike. “You better get moving! You’re gonna be late!”

I drove away, leaving her standing there with a shocked look on her face and a smile plastered on mine.

“Did you see
Magic Mike
?” Callum asked.

I scowled at him. “No, because I’m a heterosexual male. Why? Did
you
see
Magic Mike
?”

“Homework, dude,” he told me, passing me a tray of silverware on to be wrapped in thick linen napkins. “It’s research into what ladies want, and what they want is hot bodies. You’ve got a hot body and the face to go with it. Girls go insane over you.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Two of my waitresses have asked me if you’re single,” Brett informed me from across the restaurant. “One of my waiters too. They’ve all asked me to hire you.”

It amazed me every time I saw him just how much Callum looked like his dad. Brett was Callum twenty years from now, down to the color of his eyes and the well-trimmed beard that gave him a button down look, completely belying his staunch ability to drink like a freaking fish.

“
Are
you hiring?” I asked with a grin.

He laughed. “No way. Dan would never forgive me. Don’t be a lawyer if you don’t want to, but a waiter in a floundering dream is not your next step.”

“I need to do something.”

“And I’m trying to tell you what that is!” Callum insisted.

“So far you’ve told me to be a gigolo, and I’m guessing from the Channing Tatum tangent you’re taking off on, you want me to be a male stripper too?”

“
I
don’t want you to be, but the ladies do. Answer the call, fool. They want
you,
” he said, pointing at me in the Uncle Sam pose.

I shook my head. “Answer it for me. I’m not taking that call.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“I’m not a beggar. I’m looking for something that I’ll actually like doing.”

“What was it about being a lawyer you didn’t like?” Brett asked.

“Everything,” I answered immediately. “The suites. The office. Being inactive.”

“He’s a gym rat,” Callum supplied.

Brett nodded slowly. “What did you like about it?”

I shrugged, not really sure. “The reason I wanted to do it in the first place was because of what Dan did for me. He didn’t have to go to bat for me like that, but he did. He saved my life and I thought that’s something I wanted to do for someone else. But then I really wanted to do it for the money.”

“I hear that.”

“Is that why you did it?”

“No, I started off doing it because I loved it. I loved the entertainment industry and it was exciting being part of it, but after a while it lost its shine and once that was gone, I didn’t know what I was doing it for anymore. The money wasn’t worth it.”

“It was to mom,” Callum muttered.

“So you wanted to help people?” Brett asked me, ignoring his son.

“Yeah, initially.”

“Lot of professions you can do that in, and most don’t require a suit. What about a doctor? EMT? RN?”

The words all reminded me of my accident and the stay in the hospital. The specialists and nurses, everyone who had worked to help me survive, especially the first responders. The men who I was told had shown up at the scene of the crash and kept me alive until the EMTs got there.

“What about a firefighter?” I asked.

“There you go,” Brett agreed heartily. “It’s physical, it’s challenging, and it’s all about helping people. Strong kid like you, you’d do great at it.”

“And women love firefighters almost as much as they love male strippers,” Callum added. “Maybe even more.”

“I’m not looking to get laid,” I told him.

“Not now, no, but it doesn’t hurt to think of the future.”

My phone beeped. I picked it up to find a message from the realtor I’d contacted a couple weeks ago about finding Jenna a space for her shop. A property we’d seen that felt promising had sold. Jenna had stalled too long.

“Shit,” I muttered, dropping my hand and phone to the table.

The nerves in my right hand sang with a painful discord at the jolt.

“What’s up?” Callum asked.

“Another property sold out from under us. She needs to loosen up and look at more expensive places. We’re sifting through shit holes here because she’s scared to ask her dad for more money. We’re looking for a place budgeting with her income and it’s good, but not enough.”

“Have you told her yet that you’re the real sugar daddy holding the purse strings?”

I scowled at him. “No, and I shouldn’t have told you either.”

“Hey, I can keep a secret. Like that party I threw Junior year when…” he glanced up at his dad standing at the end of the table, watching him. “When, uh, we celebrated Kwanza to enrich our cultural understanding.”

I smiled. “Yeah, I remember that one. Rager.”

“You’re an idiot,” Brett told Callum before disappearing into the kitchen.

Callum snagged napkins from my pile. “So, you gonna tell her?”

“Not yet. She’s nervous about spending her dad’s money. Think how rigid she’ll get when she finds out it’s mine.”

“I can’t believe you’re loaded,” he chuckled, shaking his head.

“I’m not. My dad is and he keeps throwing it at me like I’m center stage at a titty bar. I have to do something with it.”

“You ever going to contact him? Say, ‘hey asshole, thanks for the dough and ditching me for my whole life’.”

“No.”

“Never?”

I looked at him pointedly.

“Alright,” he relented. “I get it. No means no. What about the firefighter thing? What are you gonna do about that?”

“I’ll look into it. Make sure it’s something I want to do, but it sounds right.” I thought of Dan and his advice. “It sounds fulfilling.”

***

“Alright, captain,” Ben told me, settling into his chair with a grin. “What are we talking about today?”

I’d been seeing Ben a couple times a week for two months now and he’d taken to calling me ‘captain’ because of my strict rule about always knowing where our conversations were going. I was very clear that I didn’t like surprises.

“Jenna,” I answered immediately, no hesitation.

“What about her? What’s new? Have you found a spot for a shop yet?”

“No, not yet. She’s still being picky about her price range and it’s making it difficult.”

“And she’s still concerned about taking money from her father?”

“She’d be even more stubborn if she knew it was from me. That’s not what I want to talk about, though.”

“Alright, what then?”

I shifted in my seat, unable to get comfortable on the little couch. “It’s about what she said.”

I told him how Jenna and I had been shopping the slums, checking out shithole after shithole, and I was having no luck convincing her to look at other buildings. The latest one had been the worst. It wreaked of debris, water, sewage, and some scents I couldn’t identify. It made my gut clench forcefully thinking of her in a place like that. I couldn’t stand it.

“This is not the one,” I told her decisively.

“You’ve barely looked at it,” she replied, her nose involuntarily scrunched up in disgust as she stepped carefully over the piles of crap strewn everywhere. I couldn’t even see the floor. I started to wonder if the place really had one. “There’s a bathroom back here, I think.”

“This entire place is a bathroom.”

“Now you’re being a pessimist. What is it they always say on
House Hunters
about places like this?”

“’Thanks to the triple homicide, it’s priced to sell?’”

She glanced at me, smiling. “I think we’re watching different shows.”

“
House Hunters: Inner City
?” I asked, feigning confusion. “Is that not the one?”

“I was thinking of, ‘It has potential.’”

“For contracting hepatitis.”

“Pessimist!”

“Pisser,” I grinned.

She paused in the open door of the supposed bathroom and her face paled. “Alright,” she said, backing away slowly, “maybe this isn’t the one.”

“Are we done here?” I asked, inching toward the door. I was hoping to ride the wave of her disgust to somewhere more expensive. And cleaner. “Can we go see one of the properties I picked now?”

“We’ve been over this. You pick expensive ones, so no.”

“I pick good investments.”

“The money for which I do not have. This,” she said, gesturing to the hell hole engulfing us, “is what I can afford.”

“On your own, but we talked about that.”

“No, you talked.”

“And you clearly didn’t listen.”

“I really don’t want to ask my dad for money,” she replied glumly.

“Do you want to own a space like this?”

“Hell no.”

“Then you need to ask him for a loan. Pay him back with interest if he’ll let you, but if you want to hit the ground running, you need his help. Don’t be so proud.”

She laughed. “Are you serious? Pot calling the Kettle black, Kel! You’re the proudest person I know.”

“But I’ve taken his help before, haven’t I?”

She looked at me for a long time and I wondered what she was thinking. “You have, yeah,” she eventually admitted softly.

“He wants to help you,” I said, skirting a fine line between honesty and deception.

“How can you know that?”

“Because we’ve talked about it.”

Her eyes shot wide. “What?!”

“He’s all in.”

“When did you talk about this?”

“A while back and then again last night.” Solid, one hundred percent lies. I hated telling them, but I swore to myself that I’d come clean as soon as I could. “I know what your budget is, Jen, and I didn’t pick any properties outside of it. So can we please leave this dump and see something worth looking at?”

She looked at me again, her face going soft and pensive. I looked back, waiting and wondering what she was thinking. What she was feeling when she put her eyes on me that way, looking past my face and body, down below the surface to the murky waters underneath.

“I love you,” she said plainly.

I’d known it but I’d never heard her say it. I’d felt it, but now I could taste it, smell it, hear it, see it. It was everywhere. In her eyes, in her mouth, on her lips, in my ears, on my skin. It settled over me like a gentle wave washing onto the barren shores of the desert I’d made of my heart years ago. It was all encompassing because it was real. It was honest. She knew what no one else knew, what no one else was allowed to see, and still she stood there in all her glory and beauty and she loved me.

I took two shaky breaths, not trying to fall inside myself, but trying to keep myself grounded. To stay in the moment with her while I felt like I was floating. It was that wild feeling. The untethered freedom she gave me just standing near me, but now she wasn’t near enough. I closed the distance between us, pressing my mouth softly over hers, sighing down into my soul with the feel of her. With the sheer relief of touching her and knowing it wasn’t wrong. Of having her kiss me back with the same slowness, the same patience that I felt, as though we had all the time in the world.

As though there were nowhere else on earth either of us ever needed to be but there with each other.

“So what’s the problem?” Ben asked when I finished my story.

I stared at him blankly. “Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously. What’s wrong with her telling you she loves you? You already knew it.”

“I didn’t say it back.”

“But you know that you do?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she knows?”

“Yes.”

“I still don’t see the problem.”

“Why didn’t I say it back?” I demanded, getting frustrated.

He shrugged. “You tell me.”

I rolled my neck, trying to relieve the tension building in my shoulders. “I’m not ready yet.”

“From what you’ve told me about your arrangement with her, it sounds like she understands that. You agreed to take it slow and not go stickering labels on things until you felt like you had everything under control again. Is that not still the arrangement?”

“I thought it was, but doesn’t this change that?”

“Not unless one of you says it does. Did she ask you for anything?”

“No.”

“Then you didn’t fail to deliver. Stop worrying about it. The woman you love was honest with you about how she feels, and what she feels is love for you. Stop trying to twist something beautiful into bad news. Take it for what it is – a gift.”

I wrung my hands uncomfortably. “I’ve never been good at accepting gifts.”