The Last Thing You See (4 page)

I managed to get from my car to the gym Nick had chosen without being seen, as far as I could tell.  It had a room with padded mats on the floor that he said was suitable for the kind of training he had in mind.  After contacting the owner, I was able to hire out the room for our sessions.  Privacy was essential.

Nick was sitting in a small reception area just to the right of the door and threw down a magazine he had been browsing when he spotted me.  He picked up a big sports bag and slung it over his shoulder as he stood.

The t-shirt he was wearing was just a little on the tight side, and the arm holes stretched around his biceps when he flexed them to sling that strap on.  I hadn’t seen him standing up since I’d first spotted him on the sidewalk, and I was struck again at just how imposing he was.  It took no small amount of willpower to not lick my lips.

“Hi!  Wow, look at you!  Looks like you’re moving pretty freely.”

“Yeah, I just gotta keep the burns out of the sun for a while longer.  How have you been?”

“Good.  Busy.  Pandora Rising did better than expected, so I’ve been booked solid with extra promo to keep the momentum up as much as possible.” I shrugged.

“Good problem to have.”

“Yeah it is.”

“You ready to get started?” he asked.

“Sure, which way?”

“It’s up those stairs over there.”

I walked ahead up the stairs with Nick following behind and soon found myself in a rectangular room maybe forty by fifty feet with permanent mats in a rectangular configuration right in the middle.  Nick unslung his bag and knelt by it on the floor, taking out a couple of plastic-wrapped bundles and handing them to me.

“What are these?”

“This is your gi.  We’ll be doing most of your training in it.”

I wrestled with the plastic and eventually uncovered a pair of white pants that had the same kind of feel as jeans, but with a drawstring, and a heavy white jacket made from similar material, which had a Brazilian flag on the left breast and some incomprehensible logo on the back.

We went to our respective changing rooms to get ready and then met back in the center of the mats.  Nick was wearing a gi in the same style as myself but appeared to be wearing a rash vest of some kind underneath, whereas I had nothing but a sports bra under the jacket.

My face maintained perfect innocence when I saw him glance down my body, the lapels of my jacket were open enough to show a
bit
of skin after all.  Nick looked back up and smiled, and that broke my concentration enough that I smiled back.

“Your belt is tied up wrong,” he said.

“It is?”

“Yeah, a knot like that sticks out too much, and when you’re down on the ground it can dig in and be uncomfortable.  The ends are too long and loose, not to mention it’ll probably come undone a lot.  Of course belts are always coming undone when you roll.”

“Roll?”

“When you spar.”

“Oh.”

“Here, this is how it’s done.”

Nick tugged at my white belt and undid the simple knot I had tied and then moved behind me with the belt in his hands.  Was he putting the moves on me?  I turned my head to the left and kept him just in the corner of my eye.  Was this the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu equivalent of the chivalrous man helping the love interest with her pool shot or her golf swing?

“Left side over right,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Your jacket, left side over the right side, nice and tight.”

“Oh, right.”

My jacket hung loose without the belt to hold it closed and I pulled the right side over my torso before pulling the left side over the top of it.  Nick lifted the belt over my head from behind and brought it down to waist-level.

“OK, watch.  You pull both sides around the back and then to the front again, the belt goes around twice, see?”

“Yeah.”

Nick was close behind me and I leaned back an inch or so, feeling the rear of my shoulders touch his chest as he bent down to tie my belt.  My eyes were on my belt, but my mind was on him.

He showed me how to tie the belt and then stood back and got me to do it by myself.  I looked at my knot, then at his, and saw they looked more or less alike.

“You’re not a black belt?” I asked.

“Excellent observation.  Purple.” He pointed at the purple belt.

“What does purple belt mean?”

“It means I can beat most of the blue belts.”

“I… see.  You don’t have to be a black belt to train people?”

“Nope.  Don’t get me wrong, they’d be better, but I trained people when I was a blue belt.  It goes white, blue, purple, brown, black.  It’s not like some other martial arts where you get your next belt because you’ve punched through a hundred pieces of plywood, then two hundred, and so on.  You generally progress by beating the majority of other people in your weight and belt-level in tournaments.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be entering any tournaments,” I said.

“No, I didn’t think so, but that doesn’t matter.  I thought what we’d do is get a good grounding in the basics, and then I’ll show you a few moves that might look pretty cool on the big screen.  Let’s get warmed up.”

If Nick
was
unqualified to be an instructor, it was certainly beyond my ability to tell the difference.  The first hour of our session was essentially a cardio workout, starting with a few minutes of running around the perimeter of the mats, all kinds of different abdominal workouts, and drills of certain movements that were apparently pretty common in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, or ‘BJJ’ as he referred to it.

Finally, after ‘snaking’ along the length of the mats I don’t even know how many times and the ‘upa’ drill, he showed me a couple of techniques and we practiced them until our time was up.  From my position flat on my back, a sweat-soaked mess, I knew I
wanted
to stand, but it was easier said than done.

Nick extended his hand and helped me to my feet.  I hunched over with my hands on my knees, feeling like the temperature in the gym was somewhere around a million degrees.

“Oh my God,” I breathed.

“You did really well,” he said. “Your fitness levels are right up there, you could join the Marines.”

I looked up, glad to see that he was at least as sweaty as I was, and managed to stand straight again.  Transferring my hands to my hips, I pretended to ponder the idea.

“Hmm.  No.  Must get changed.  See you out here in a bit,” I wheezed.

I hobbled to the changing room and shrugged off my jacket.  It was a heavy jacket to begin with and, going by the sloppy thud it made when it hit the floor, I judged it had doubled in weight due to my perspiration.  I emptied my water bottle and then filled it up in the sink before slumping on a bench and getting halfway through it again.

The changing room had a couple of showers.  I pulled out my shampoo and conditioner and then carefully adjusted the water temperature as cool as I could stand it.  By the time I stepped back into the room with the mats in it, I felt mostly human again.  Nick was waiting for me.

“So I’ll see you again same time next week?  You’ve booked it all, haven’t you?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’ve booked it.  But, um, I was wondering…”

Suddenly I felt tongue-tied, and it took me a second to realize why.  Any guy I’d been remotely interested in had always made the first move.  The first obvious one, anyway.  I was more than a little interested in Nick, but I was breaking new ground for myself here.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Um.  I know a place pretty close to here, and they make a mean smoothie.  I was wondering if you’d like to have a smoothie.  With me.  Hot day and all.”  I was thankful I was still flushed from the BJJ session and shower.

“Well…”

Nick dragged the word out and I felt weighted down with the crushing certainty that he was going to decline.  I remembered when he first woke up in the hospital, the way his eyes shone for a moment, then that clouding over, the shutting down.  Maybe I had imagined that first spark and just saw what I wanted to see.

“Yeah.  I’d like to have a smoothie with you.  My treat though, OK?” he said.

The weight came off in an instant and I felt buoyed.  I didn’t know where the energy came from, but I was smiling so wide I thought my cheek muscles would be as sore as any other by the end of the day.

“OK.”

Keep it professional.  That’s what I said I’d do, and I would, but holy hell, every moment with Harper made me wish more than anything that things were different, made me wish I could let myself feel that way again.

It was like she had no idea about the kind of effect she had on people.  On me, at least.  The image of her lying on the mat, the jacket of her gi hanging loose and showing off her flat, glistening navel as she panted at me with half-closed eyes would stay with me forever.

Then she came out of the changing room looking fresh as a daisy, if a little on the flushed side, and asked me to have a smoothie with her.  I had to remember she was Harper Bayliss, too good for the likes of me, and this wasn’t what it might look like to the casual observer.

She was just being nice, being friendly.  She was grateful to me, sure, because I happened to be at the right place at the right time.  It was nothing more than that.

I could see why Harper would like this place.  In addition to lots of outdoor seating for people to enjoy their smoothies in the sunshine, there were also several surprisingly secluded and private booths inside.

After telling me the name of the smoothie she wanted, stressing she wanted it large, she made a beeline for the side of one of the booths that gave the fewest people possible an angle to see her.  I brought the smoothies back and slid into the booth opposite her, pushing her cup across the table.

I could have watched her suck on the straw and say ‘Mmm’ all day, but I made my eyes wander around the smoothie bar a bit instead.  There was only so much a guy could take.

“So what was it like being in the Marines?” she asked.

“It had its moments, you know, highs and lows.  I don’t know what to say, most of the time was spent training, keeping fit and waiting, and then short bursts of the shit hitting the fan.  No offence.”

“Don’t worry about me, I’ve heard worse.”

At the counter, a drag queen nearly as tall as me, taller if you measured to the top of his-or-her fluorescent green peacock feathers, was ordering a smoothie and flirting flamboyantly with the uncomfortable-looking employee.  I wondered if Harper was glad for something so eye-catching to draw people’s attention anywhere but to her as we watched the young man’s predicament.

“I can’t tell you when I get off, company policy,” said the cashier.

“I’ll tell you when you
can
get off… “ Began the drag queen before Harper started talking again and I couldn’t hear any more.

“Get much of that in the Marines?” she asked.

“You’re not allowed to modify the uniform like that,” I said.

“No room for personal expression, huh?”

“Well… it’s not so much about personal expression as it is about not going out in the field dressed like a bright green bull’s-eye in a sequined bikini.”

Harper laughed.  “I suppose that’s a decent reason for the uniform rules.  So, no gay Marines then?”

“Well, there was
one
that I knew of.  Sex Change Steve, that’s what we called him.  He was a badass when we needed him to be, but off duty he had some, uh, identity issues.  He was sort of like one of those I’m-Not-Gay-But-I-Am-A-Woman-Trapped-In-A-Man’s-Body types.  Only it was a hell of a lot more complicated than that.”

“Wow.  How does it get more complicated than that?”

“Well, he was married for a start.  To a woman.”

“Oh!  Like a marriage of convenience?”

“Nope.” I shook my head.

“She didn’t know?”

“There’s ‘not knowing’ and then there’s the degree to which his wife didn’t know,” I said, holding my hand out flat at one level and then raising it much higher.

Harper sucked on her straw and then licked her lips before leaning forwards across the table.

“How deep does this rabbit hole go?” she asked.

“All the way, Harper.  Get this, OK, he wasn’t gay in any run of the mill sense of the word.  He believed that his, uh… what did he call it… oh yeah, his ‘true self’ was a lesbian.”

“He told you all this?” Harper said with disbelief written all over her face.

“Oh yeah, he was a buddy of mine.  For some reason he thought I’d have some good advice for him on the topic.  I don’t know why.”

“Well, did you?”

“Um… well, I said words to him.  I don’t know whether it was advice.  Or good.”

Harper laughed and rested her forehead on her hand for a moment, her elbow propped on the table as her shoulders shook with the giggles.  When she looked up again, her dark eyes had a heart-melting sparkle to them.

“Oh my goodness.  What did you tell him?” she asked.

“He had this whole plan, right?  When he got home he was going to have a sex change, hence, Sex Change Steve.  However, he saw no reason to consult with his wife before he did this.”

Harper’s jaw dropped.

“So I remember when he came to me with this question about the operation and I thought it was so obvious that I must have misunderstood.  He asked me if I thought his wife would notice.”

Harper laughed until she had no more air left to laugh with and twisted to the side to face the wall, away from any prying eyes in the smoothie bar, so she could double over.  For a moment all I could see was her back, her hair, and her white-knuckled grip on the table as she cracked up.

When she came back up again there were streaks of tears running down her face and when she tried to talk, the words were broken up with snorts and giggles.

“So, like, they’re in bed and she takes off his clothes… to see… to see a vagina and he thinks she’s going to be like ‘this all seems normal’?”

I thought back to my reaction at the time and laughed along with her.  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, but apparently that’s not quite what he meant.  Um, what he was really wondering about was if she would, and I quote, ‘notice that he was becoming more beautiful’.”

Harper shook her head.  “What do you say to that?”

“What
can
you say?  I dug deep, I got all philosophical on him.  I said, Steve, a man marries a woman hoping that she’ll never change, but a woman marries a man hoping that he
will
.  So, I think she’s going to be about as pleased as punch.”

The two of us laughed, Harper fighting to swallow rather than spit out her sip of smoothie at first, and then spluttering out some hybrid cough-giggle.  Then she reached across the table and touched my arm, and the contact was like a jolt of electricity.

It only lasted a moment, but it was long enough to remind me about who she was and who I was.  It was enough for me to check myself.

I picked up my smoothie and took a big gulp as Harper congratulated me on my deep thinking.  How she managed to get me talking so openly like that I didn’t know, but talking to her had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do.