by Lily Zante
That’s why I’m surprised when he texts me late at night.
He asks me what I’m doing, and when I say I’m about to go to bed, he tells me to come over.
I don’t even pretend to fight this one. My good intentions of not being a distraction are discarded in an instant. He meets me in the hallway, and we tiptoe to his room—I wouldn’t have been able to find it in this maze, and I’ve never been to his side of the house.
Once inside, we manage to close the door before we’re kissing again. We’re not just kissing, he’s lifted me up and I cling to him like a leech, my arms and legs around him, as if I’m sucking the life force out of him.
He claims my mouth with such hungry abandon that I know nothing except for the feel of his body against mine, and the warmth of his mouth.
Soon, we’re on the bed, rolling around like teenagers.
Within seconds, I feel his arousal. I want this, and I ignore everything he told me, I reach for him, but he takes my hand away, and rolls us so that he’s straddling me, only he’s not completely resting on top of me because he’d flatten me. His strong hands pin my arms over my head and he smiles down at me.
This is a new Eli, and I love him.
“We can’t do anything,” he says. “Remember my commitment.”
“You’re not a monk,” I counter, even though for all intents and purposes, he might as well be, for now.
I jiggle my hips, waiting for his magic fingers to roam all over me. I wait for his lips to savor my skin. He grins at me as if he knows what I’m thinking, then shakes his head. “You can help me stay on the straight and narrow.”
I make a pouty face, but I’m up for the challenge. “Seriously? No fooling around?”
“You can help me.”
I wonder why he called me to his room then, if he wasn’t going to fool around. “You called me at this time of night to tell me this?”
“I called you because I wanted to fool around, because you’ve managed to chip away at my restraint—”
“Hey,” I reply, trying to sit up but I can’t because he’s on top of me. “We both had a part in that yesterday.”
“Simmer down,” he says, as he sets my heart on edge again. It’s as if he’s ditching me even before I’ve had the chance to become his girlfriend or lover. I hate that he has this power to make me feel happy or sad. Then he kisses me, confusing the heck out of me again, but I don’t mind, in fact, I’ll take whatever he gives me. His tongue swirls around my mouth and his hand cups the side of my face.
I love this.
My confusion gives way to elation, and we kiss like before, hard and rough, as if we’re new to it. I sigh with contentment and hold onto his shoulders as if they belong to me. I savor every beautiful second of this; Eli, in a good mood, desiring me. All that’s missing is the sex but, like a dog thrown a bone, I’ll take this over nothing.
After a long kissing session that has me grinding my hips against him in a subtle effort to wrest more from him than he’s willing to give me, he lies down beside me. I turn and snuggle against him, and my hand starts to slide down towards his hardness. But I force myself to stop. I need to respect what he’s asked of me. So I slide my hand back up again, and rest it on his T-shirt. I suppose it helps, us both being fully clothed, even if I was hoping to be in some state of undress by now.
I move my hand up and down his chest slowly, just reveling in the notion that I can do this; that he’s allowing me to. We lie in silence, and it’s nice.
“What did Callum tell you?” he asks after a while.
“You’re still going on about him?” He has nothing to worry about, if he still mistakenly believes I have any interest in that guy.
“He said he was lucky he met you when he did, and that he knew you when Lou spotted you.”
“He was lucky. We both were. We used to fight in some shady places with the fight club.”
“I was wondering when you’d tell me about that.”
“Fight clubs are vicious.”
“And the boxing you do now isn’t?”
“What I do now is professional, and it’s much safer than what I used to do. I wasn’t just fighting there, I was also fixing fights.”
“Really?” I lift my head up slightly.
He dismisses it easily. “We needed rent money, or rather, Nina did, otherwise we wouldn’t have had a roof over our heads. I threw some fights to get extra money in backhanders.”
I don’t understand, so I say nothing. I don’t know what it’s like not to have money. I’ve never been that stuck in my life that I couldn’t make ends meet. And even if I were to ever find myself in that position, my father is always there, as is my mom. I have the security of my family to fall back on.
Because I don’t know what to say, and because I want to empathize with him, I kiss his chest again. This is a pathetic response, and I’m fully aware of that.
“We’ve had completely different lives, you and I. We started off differently, and we’re going to go our separate ways and have our own different endings.”
I swallow because I don’t like what he’s saying. I don’t know where this will end, and I can’t see beyond this moment, but I am willing to take each moment as it comes.
Second by second.
With him.
I’ll take this moment here, because with Eli, I never know if he’s going to give me another. So I say nothing, even though he just pierced a hole in my heart by talking about me as if I’m expendable.
“I don’t always understand you,” I say, because it is safer to say this than to tell him I want to be with him, even when I’m done with this assignment. I can’t get up to anything now while I’m covering this story, Merv would accuse me of giving a biased account and he’d probably fire me, because all he needs is a reason to.
“You won’t. You were born on a different side of the track.” I can see in his eyes that he’s wandered off again, gone somewhere else. I touch his chin gently. “Hey, you. We’re not so different. Our past doesn’t define us, it’s who we are now that matters.”
His jaw tenses, and right away I can see he doesn’t like this. “Not all of us have had an easy life like you, Princess.”
That name is like a slap to my cheek, I don’t like it, and I hate that he doesn’t see that. But this is new, him and I, the most unlikeliest of people getting together, and I’m not about to ruin this moment.
In a way he’s right.
My life has been easy. I’ve never known the threat of being homeless. I never went through the foster care system. I’ve never stepped into the world of child protection.
My parents always told me they loved me. I have always been needed and wanted.
I kiss his chest, because I want him to know that he is needed, too. That I love him, even though love might not be the right word to describe what we have, I feel a lot of love for him right now.
“You’re going to win, and then your life will be on a different path. And I believe in you. I don’t care what anyone says, I know you can do this.” I kiss his chest again. He looks at me as if he not sure what to make of me. It’s not a flirtatious look, or a hard stare, it doesn’t look as if he’s torn and can’t decide on whether he wants me to stay or leave. He’s looking at me as if he wants me here. “Is this allowed?” I ask, dropping another kiss on his chest. I’m unclear about our boundaries but a kiss on a T-shirt seems tame in comparison.
“It’s allowed.”
I drop another kiss on his chest.
“I could get used to you being around,” he says. It’s the closest he’s come to saying he likes me, and my insides turn all gooey. I want to move up and kiss his mouth, but that would set up a domino effect that would get us aroused again, and if we couldn’t hold back, it would ruin everything. I have to respect his wishes, before the fight, that is. After that? He’s mine.
“Look how far you’ve come,” I say, in an effort to lift his mood, because he seems somber again. The playfulness of yesterday
is missing. “You fought for money, to help Nina with the rent, and now you’re fighting Trent Garrison.”
“I sometimes wonder if I could have had it sooner if I hadn’t messed up.”
“Messed up how?”
“I almost had a chance to try out for the Olympic team, but I took a bad beating after one of the fights, and I missed the tryout.”
I am horrified and put my arm around him. But I don’t understand. “You took a beating after a fight?”
“I could have won. I would have won, but the organizers wanted me to lose. So I threw the fight. Some guys found out and beat the crap out of me later that night. It was four of them against me. They broke my ribs, and beat me up real good. Nina almost fainted when she saw me.”
My head goes to a dark place, and I see him in my mind’s eye. “Eli,” I say, and hug him.
“It wasn’t so bad.”
Shock hurtles through me and I lift my head. “Sounds pretty bad to me.”
“I was used to it. I had my aunt’s boyfriend to thank for that. He used to beat me black and blue because he hated that he had two mouths to feed and he and my aunt had two of their own. He hardened me up. A leather belt and a seven-year-old don’t go so well together, but after his beatings, it didn’t hurt so much.”
My jaw is in danger of hitting the floor, and I try to curtail my horror. I want to cry, and instead I swallow to brace myself.
Eli seems removed from it, like it has no effect on him. I want to tell him that I love him, and that he won’t ever have to go through that again, and that he’s older now and has escaped that nightmare existence, and that stuff is in his past, and it’s better left there, but I don’t say that yet, because he seems to be somewhere else. His eyes look faraway. So I just listen, for now, but I understand him some more. I know the things that have shaped him. I even understand why he calls me Princess.
I had never expected such awful beginnings for him. I shift my body up a little and rest my head just under his chin. Then I squeeze his arm and listen, because that’s all I can do. “But you went to Grampton House, after. That was nice, wasn’t it?” I ask, wanting him to think of better times.
“Is that what you think, Princess?”
He doesn’t like this. So I don’t pry. I wait. But he remains silent. We stay like this for the longest time.
And then he speaks. “Grampton House wasn’t so bad at first, but…” His mouth twists and a line forms between his brows.
“But what?”
“There was a man who worked there. He wasn’t a good man.”
I lift my head again but I’m too scared. “He wasn’t a good man to who, Eli?”
He stares at me.
It’s written all over his face. The pain is too great, and he doesn’t speak.
“He did things … to me. Things a child should never know about.”
Bile forms in my stomach and threatens to run back up my throat. I open my mouth, but Eli shakes his head. He doesn’t want to talk about it. “Lie back down,” he orders, and I do, but this time, I hold onto him.
When I lift my head, Eli is asleep. I stare at him for a while, because he looks so peaceful, and as much as I would like to stay here all night, I can’t risk falling asleep in case Lou finds us both in bed. It would be entirely innocent, but I don’t think we’d convince Lou.
I slowly unwrap myself from him and get ready to leave.
* * *
ELI
* * *
I feel her get up and leave me, and I open my eyes. Harper’s staring down at me. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t.” I wasn’t asleep. I just wanted to lie there and have her snuggled up close to me. “Stay a while,” I tell her. Harper makes me feel the kind of peaceful I haven’t felt for a long time. Which is strange, and I don’t understand it, but some things just are. I told her something I haven’t told a soul. Not even Nina, and I don’t know why I did that.
“I can’t,” she says. “I don’t want to go, but I can’t stay.” I wonder if she’s keeping her distance from me because she can’t trust herself around me, or because she feels sorry for me, on account of what I just told her.
I like that she doesn’t ask anything more, because I want to forget the things that should never have happened but did.
As it is, I don’t trust myself around her. It's not lost on me, the irony of the situation, given how I felt when she first arrived, but now there are things I want to do to her, kiss her for longer, kiss her everywhere. Make her come with my mouth and my fingers.
But I can’t.
She blows me a kiss as she gets ready to leave. “Are you going to be okay? I can stay for a little bit.”
I shake my head, and I don’t blow a kiss back. “I’m okay.”
“Goodnight, then.” She closes the door behind her and I pinch my eyebrows. Why did I tell her? She’s like a pill I take, one which relaxes me and makes me open up.
But this doesn’t feel as bad as I thought it would. I feel no shame, only relief.
She leaves tomorrow, and at least the temptation will be out of my sight. I seriously don't know if my balls can take another night like yesterday. I'm here for another few days, and then I have a week before the fight. I'm probably going to have a boner the entire week at this rate.
The fight is on the horizon, now. I can see it. I can feel it. I am already prepared for Garrison's face in my mind, his demonic look as we face off standing in front of one another for the pre-fight weigh in.
In a few weeks’ time, there will be a new world heavyweight champion. I can almost feel the belt in my hands. It's not the adulation of the crowd I crave. I learned a long time ago how fickle people can be. How they change allegiance and loyalty in a heartbeat.
This belt is for me.
I grew up being told that I was a worthless piece of shit, and winning this title will prove that I’m not.
People look at me like I don't stand a chance against Garrison, but they don’t know me. They don’t know what made me who I am.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
HARPER
* * *
I tiptoed back to my room. Miraculously, I remembered the way back, and then I lay in bed for hours unable to sleep. Eli’s confession set up home inside my brain and refused to leave.
That poor, poor child.
That poor, poor man.
On the surface, he’s a hard-as-nails fighting machine, but inside, he’s as broken as the most fragile flower.
He’s never struck me as someone who has suffered so much. I never understood the motivation that makes a man voluntarily step into a ring and want to physically hurt another man in the name of sport. There has to be an easier and safer way to earn money, but boxers—my research has shown me—often come from tough backgrounds. A lot come from broken homes, and many have suffered sexual, physical and emotional abuse.
Everything that previously confused me about Eli now starts to make sense. It makes me want to protect him more than ever, even though I am not the protector. I want to make him smile, and forget, and move on, and I vow to myself that I will do all these things for as long as he and I are together.
In my mind, there is a future.
The next day we keep up our charade, barely talking to one another. Eli concentrates on his training, and I help Margrit prepare lunch. After that, I bid my farewells and leave. Eli and I never get a moment alone to say our goodbyes, and perhaps it’s better that way.
Leaving the boxing camp is hard and on my drive home I think of Eli all the way home. I even text him a few times when I stop to take a break, but he doesn’t reply back.
I understand, even if I am slightly deflated. After two intense nights, I’m not prepared for the sudden cutoff. It’s Eli, and I should know better, but I tell myself that I’m out of sight and out of his mind. He’s concentrating hard, and I have to let him. I also have a better understanding of who he is.
I get back home around midnight, and as I’m ab
out to get into bed, he calls me.
“Hey,” I say, a permanent smile already on my face.
“Hey.”
My heart lifts at the sound of his voice. “I texted you.”
“I didn’t get a moment to myself.”
We’ve gone from being almost mortal enemies when I got there to being so intimate with each other by the time I left. Now we’re talking as if we’ve been seeing one another for weeks. I have a feeling this smile will be on my face forever. “Where are you?” An image of the hot tub and the sauna room pops into my head. I close my eyes and wish I was there.
“In the sauna room.”
“No.” I stand up and gasp. “What are you doing in there?”
“Reminiscing.”
I exhale louder than I intended. “Which part?” Excitement snakes through me as I relive our last few nights.
“All of it.”
My mouth falls open, and I’m transported there again. But I’m also skeptical. I know about his determination and his commitment. Even though it feels good for me to know that I snatched a few moments of his concentration, I know what it is that Eli wants the most. The title. The belt.
Everything else is secondary. “You’re not in the sauna room,” I say, lying on the bed with my arm splayed out, feeling the cool satin against my skin. I so badly wish he were here lying next to me. “I miss you.” It comes out, just like that, like my next breath would, and there follows an awkward silence.
“You’re right. I’m not in the sauna room. It would be too much of a distraction,” he says, completely ignoring my ‘I miss you.’ “I'm in my room, getting ready to go bed. I saw your texts. Wanted to know why you called.”
I don't know what to make of this about-face. I couldn't resist him before and now that I've had a taste of what it is like to be with him, I'm addicted. I miss him and I was excited when he called, but now my hopes start to sink like the Titanic and I feel the chill of his cold words.
“It was to see how you were,” I said, hoping my pseudo-cheery voice hides my disappointment well.