by Sunniva Dee
We were invited out to dinner. The invitation had everyone slapping Keyon’s back and a small flame igniting in his eyes. The inviter wears an expensive suit among the informal fighters and coaches, and he’s American. Located in Vegas. Working with—
“The big league,” Markeston leans in to murmur over the glasses of champagne we’re both toting. “He’s very impressed with our man here.” He nods to Keyon who’s on my other side at the table.
White damask covers my hand in Keyon’s lap, and his fingers curve mine over his thigh. He rubs absently, stirring goose bumps at the base of my neck. There’s talk of visiting Vegas, of starting out with a few fights “to get acclimatized.”
Markeston’s inputs don’t make sense to me. He’ll shoot in jovial but clear practical suggestions that seem to have nothing to do with the fights in Keyon’s future. Dawson sends him small approving glances in return, and the man in the suit responds with measured ease, as if knowing he could lose a deal if he hastens through his answers.
But then the dinner is over, and I realize how impatient I’ve been. We’re in Mexico, and my boyfriend is safe with only a few cuts and a swollen eye. I’ve wanted so badly to be alone with Keyon, and now we’re almost there.
“I have a reservation for us at a small hotel on the coast. I booked our flights for tonight, but shit, Paislee. I’m so exhausted,” he murmurs in the limo back to the hotel.
Dawson hears and reminds him of the strike he took to his head in the first round, hence the cut to his eye, and how he’d prefer him close to medical facilities for now.
“That’s fine with me. I don’t care where we are,” I say and watch his smile rise and his eyes travel low. I cross my arms over my chest, playfully blocking cleavage, and his smile grows into a grin.
“Okay, we’ll sleep here. But we won’t be sharing the suite with the guys, I promise you that much.” He jerks his head in the direction of Robbie and Dawson. “I’m about to make this trip worthwhile for you.”
A sting of lust warms my lower belly. “Oh? More expensive champagne waiting for me?” I ask.
“Mm, no. That’s not what I’m planning to watch you ingest,” he husks.
“Guys. Please,” Robbie mutters.
“They’re affectionate,” Markeston says obliviously from his seat at the front. “Very affectionate couple.”
“No shit.”
PAISLEE
Our night starts out so beautifully. Keyon kisses me in through the door, frames my face in his palms the way he does, controlling me how he’s happiest doing. I’m relaxed and warm in his arms as he sheds piece after piece of my clothing to the floor and adding his own.
I titter at a shoe that ends up precariously balanced on the threshold to the bathroom, but then he’s got my breasts in his hands, and this big, muscular, hard man that could break me the way he broke the hulk in the ring today, bends to suckle on a nipple and make currents of pleasure drift through me.
It’s wild to see him like this, dedicated, feeding from me, and groaning under the spell of my body. “You do things to me,” he whispers, easing me down on his thighs. “Things no other girl has ever done.”
We make out like this, naked, with his hardness beneath me in his lap. He released a lot of frustration and energy in the ring tonight, and now he savors me in slow ways he hasn’t before.
He needed to get the fight over with. I’m glad it’s done, because that guy, Sanchez, had an air about him I couldn’t stand. After the fight, he seemed nice enough, very sportsmanlike with Keyon, but his eyes seemed familiar, and the way he hunched his shoulders into the violence made me shudder.
Our bed is too big, a waste on fused bodies that move as one. You don’t need space for kisses that tangle and never let up.
An air diffuser spices the air with musk-tinted flowers, but Keyon’s scent fills my nostrils as he pushes into me with the gentle rhythm I taught him in Florida.
He speeds up when I start to pant, eyes heated and fixed on mine. My love pumps fast strokes, going deeper, deeper. His hold tightens, limbs vise-gripping me and squeezing air from my lungs.
Keyon could squash the life out of grown men with the same hands that give me pleasure. His strength is tethered. For now—
What if he loses control?
“Keyon…” I start, heart palpitating. Fear and excitement mingle in my veins, shooting adrenaline through my body as he engorges inside of me. I sting with the sweetest pain.
“Shit, I’d live in you,” he groans. “You feel so fucking good around me.”
Instinctively, I press my thighs together. I can’t fend him off. He’s too big, too strong, so perfect—so freaking… much. I moan from him, tightening and struggling against an orgasm, but then I can’t hold back anymore. I let out a pained sigh, drop my legs open for him and hug him closer, dearer than my life. We both rush on, sighing our release into pillows and skin.
He doesn’t object when I pry free of his grip, when I pull him back in a gentler embrace and allow lazier fingers to settle around my breast. The pulse thudding in his exhale quiets, and to me he is the king from his song.
“Hail to the king,” I whisper against his ear.
Relaxing into heavy, sleep-soaked man, he slurs out his appreciation for me. His presence inside me has diminished but not enough to stop the aftershocks drumming in my abdomen.
“Hail to my queen,” he whispers back, his groin jutting halfheartedly, feeding my tiny contractions. “I’ll kneel to your crown. You make it all better. You make it all worthwhile.”
Entwined, we fall asleep, my knee safe between enormous thighs. Nothing can rock my happiness. Nothing can rock us. Now, the future is bright, now, now my life is moving on.
I wake up to darkness. I listen for the even breaths of my love, but in their place is a tense silence I don’t want to interpret. Keyon is beneath me, arm stiff and strange around my body.
We’d drifted off sated and heavy-lidded. I remember bliss in my tired warrior’s eyes. I topped his victory with icing and red cherries last night, and I fell asleep blissed out that I had caused that bliss. Just, life speaks of lessons that remain the same even when a girl becomes brave. I prepare for the worst, reminding myself: you got too comfortable.
Keyon hides behind inscrutable masks and dilated pupils, but I’m so tuned in to him, I notice his change. This man, he has dimmed the happy-air in the room. Is it wrong that I take my time now, not wanting to absorb his tension? I’d rather not know. I could remain in my fragile bubble of beautiful.
Though I have my back to him, I’m sure his eyes are open. I’m afraid of what I’ll find when I meet his gaze. My heart hammers, fast, fast, like it does at the prospect of doom. Survival instinct demands that I bounce from his arm and run, just—
I won’t run away from Keyon.
Often, the trepidation of not knowing what he’s got planned for me makes me burn in ways I do with no one else. For so long, I’ve repaired violence with faceless men and gentle hands. But with Keyon, it’s brazenly personal. He spoons out unpredictable ferocity spiced with heat that makes me feel alive.
For me, there’s no one like him.
Maybe I’m wrong, I think. Maybe everything is fine. Heck, he often jump-starts my system with an adrenaline rush.
Cautious, inconspicuous, I turn on my side.
He’s watching me. In the darkness, his eyes are black orbs of confusion. On instinct, I reach for his face, but he inhales a sharp breath and blocks my hand before it meets skin.
My heart’s rebelling. It wants to leap from my chest, knowing before I do that I’m losing him. I need to fight, find out what I can do. Oh God, oh God, I can’t lose him.
“Keyon?” My voice is a midnight whisper, low, so I don’t interrupt the darkness. He doesn’t object when I hike up on my elbow and steady a palm over his thigh. “Please, baby. Tell me what’s going on.”
“Nothing!” he lashes, whip-like. I want to tell him that no, there is something, but then he flips the s
witch on the night lamp and pierces me with his stare. “Did you see your attacker?”
He throws the train station at me?
My heart skips, but I answer because it’s Keyon and he needs it. “I didn’t. He took everything he wanted from behind.”
“Not even when he entered your stall?”
I recall a pale face and obsessed, peering eyes. Woolen red in a ponytail. I tell Keyon. “But most of all I remember how roughly he turned me and the way he loomed over me while he did his thing.” Until I was nothing but pained flesh.
I don’t have room for the film clip winding at the back of my brain. I push, wanting it gone, but it plays in weak sepia colors while I focus on my man, who’s barely holding it together. “Why do you ask?” I say.
He shifts out of our covers. Kneeling, he crouches his body, an anxious predator with his fists around wadded-up sheets between us. “I’ve watched Sanchez’s videos for months, ever since I began preparing for the fight.”
He inhales air and wheezes it out through his nose, and I recognize his effort to relax. Bright with unease, his eyes flick back to me. “It was hell, Paislee. I’d never been in a situation like that before. I couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t stay objective or focus on strategy. All I wanted was to kill the guy. All because he reminded me of the creep on the train.”
“Which is why you beat two men instead of one yesterday,” I tell him, wanting him to bask in his accomplishment. “You did it. You’re done.” I’m completely unprepared for his reaction.
“It’s not fucking over!” He lunges off the bed, his first target an open water bottle, which shoots through the room and hits the wall so hard it explodes.
“Keyon!” I scream and clamber out of bed. My desperate man grabs plates, shoes, whatever he gets a hold of, muscles twitching and on autopilot.
I cup my mouth, stifling my cry while whatever’s in sight flies at paintings, the mirror, the TV. “Baby, please—I don’t understand.”
A rumble chokes in his throat as his rage works its way through the room. The wooden curtain rod splinters with a squeal that sounds like dying prey.
“What do I do?” he roars, shredding the drapes with bare hands. “I can do nothing!”
“Baby,” I whisper, too quiet for such a loud room. Will security come? It’s not my worry. He is. “Let me help you. Just—talk.”
The TV is massive. He slams his suitcase over it but isn’t satisfied until it crashes to the floor, a purposeless, fruitless act. Someone bangs on the wall. He heaves the cracked box of plastic and metal up in the air and hurls it to the ground again in a groaning, breaking mess.
I know his despair. When he’s grunting with misery, his size and power can’t intimidate. To me, he’s suddenly little and fragile, my beautiful, sad boy of back when.
“I can do nothing!” he repeats, not making sense to me. He’s loud and bending for the TV again. Muscle memory makes me fling myself over his back and clamp around his torso. I’m the girl of before too, the tentacle friend he couldn’t hurt as he threw punch after punch into his bullies long after they’d surrendered.
He feels me, my lungs heaving with exertion and adrenaline while I cling to his back on the floor. He stills around the TV, locking it against the carpet like he’s trying to hold back, like he doesn’t want me in the crossfire.
My hurricane. What is happening to you, my love?
The knocks are on the door now. They’re loud, insistent, broken English asking for reassurance and for us to open.
“Let go of me,” he says, tears in his voice. “Let. Go.”
“Not until you’re under control,” I say, as brave as I feel. “I can’t help you unless you talk.” He hears the tears in my voice too, because tense muscles give and shoulders relax, the hardness of his back pliable in my hold.
“Don’t be sad,” he whispers. To me.
Even now he cares for me.
“Everything okay in there?” It’s an American voice, not one of ours. Keyon’s body inflates with shuddering oxygen beneath me. I’m still holding on, limbs of never-letting-go tight around him, the way we used to be.
“S’all good, man,” he manages, voice gruff but loud enough to be heard. I see his fingers clench around the corners of the television set.
“Ma’am? Are you okay?” the unfamiliar voice insists. It’s eerie that he knows I’m here too.
“Yes, no worries. Just… something fell.” I sound too awake for the hour, but calm. I say it loudly, and all air expels from Keyon.
I lessen my weight over my boy. Use my chin to caress the nape of his neck. It elicits a sob from him, a small one that’s almost not there.
“Please, Keyon, baby. Come back to bed?”
I want to say that everything will be all right, only it might trigger another breakdown. I wouldn’t know, now, would I—who am I to predict the future? I slide off his back, down to his side. He doesn’t object when I stroke hair from his cheek and use two fingers to tilt his face up from the TV.
Encouraged by his docility, I kiss the corner of his lip, then lift enough to kiss a puffy, discolored eye. “I love you,” I whisper, my declaration causing his shoulders to tense, his only response. “Come. Tell me all. It is a good thing to share stuff with people you trust. If you trust me, then tell me. I promise; you’ll feel better.”
He comes to bed with me then, but it doesn’t feel like a victory. A gaze has never been more broken, irises more shattered, with those green shards of agony gleaming in erratic spheres.
I haven’t seen an invincible mouth quiver the way his does now. All I want is to branch around him again, not to stop him from demolishing his surroundings but to keep him safe from self-destruction.
I open the comforter for him to join me. I’m not surprised when he doesn’t accept. From atop the sheets, he stares at me and whispers, “He broke into the bathroom while I was peeing.”
“The train creep?”
“Yeah.” Keyon gasps the word out, a thick fist wiping his healthy eye. The move is so awkward. He isn’t used to drying tears.
“Shhh, it’s okay,” I whisper, my thumb making circles on his calf.
“He said I was pretty. That he’d watched me in the train corridor, that he couldn’t believe his luck when I left the door unlocked. He peeled my pants down all the way, Paislee. I wanted to scream for help, but he slapped a hand over my mouth and forced me up against the door. But I wasn’t forced to touch his dick, see? That didn’t happen.”
I’m glad that didn’t happen, I think, but his expression tells me I shouldn’t be.
I swallow compulsively, because what good would it do if compassion stole my composure? My Keyon needs me strong.
“I thought it happened!” His words mesh together in a hiss. “Oh God, I wish that was it, me touching his damn junk. My messed-up brain had the size of it right though, because when he forced himself in, the pain ripped through me like a thousand needles.”
Shocked air inflates my lungs. “Oh baby…”
“I tried to scream, but he had me gagged and I couldn’t produce the smallest sound.” His face disappears into the crook of his elbow. “I didn’t shout insults at the train creep, Paislee. I didn’t kick him in the nuts and run off.
“I never fucking broke free!”
My strong man is falling apart. His pain is so big it slices me open. I’m bleeding for him like it was me.
It was me.
We’re the same.
“I didn’t leave that bathroom unscathed and pissed. I left it wrecked, hours later, on an end station way past Rigita. Because even though he finished fast and got off the train, I was never done cleaning myself up.”
I wiggle closer, the sheets slipping down. My nudity is nothing compared to Keyon’s. He’s a rape victim like me, a survivor like me, a man working fiercely to feel like a man after what he has been through.
I understand. Oh I understand.
This beautiful survivor once urged me to keep fighting, while every d
ay he fought his own battle to keep the trauma under wraps. Keyon’s mind spun up stories that were easier to bear than the truth.
“He ejaculated inside me, that son of a bitch. I spent hours cleaning up. Blood, semen—hours with water, toilet paper, soap, so much soap. Anyway.” He draws wet air in through his nose, accepting my arms around his waist as I lay my head in his lap. I close my eyes, feeling the tremors in his body.
“That’s why you were gone from school for a week.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you tell your parents?”
“I told no one. I was going to handle it. I’d be fine. With it, I took the last of the homo allegations at school too. There’d be no more bullying for looking like something I wasn’t.”
“You were hurt. How…?” I mumble against his stomach. He knows what I mean, knows we’ve both been there.
“I found remedies in Ma’s cabinet, painkillers, leftover antibiotics and such. I was still in a lot of pain when I came back to school though.”
“And then you wasted no time becoming the new bully,” I say. “Everyone was afraid of you. And you didn’t care that the principal kept calling your parents over your infractions.”
“I didn’t give a shit about anything but asserting myself. I needed revenge, and I took it from whomever was in my way.”
“Did you ever search for him?” I ask.
“No. The only fear I had left was of the train creep cornering me and attacking me again. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
I wind my arms tighter around his hips, my own past seeping in strong. “I bet it was the same guy who abused us,” I murmur. Our connection rushes in, the pull so strong it vibrates in my chest. Keyon must feel it too, because he brings me up into his arms, buries his face against my throat, and rocks me close.
“We’re survivors, Paislee. The fittest survive. That’s us.”
“You told me to keep fighting every day.” I’m hoarse with tears. “You said it because you do too.”
He lets out what should be a laugh. It’s not. “I guess. Shit, I wish I could wind back time and do something about what happened. I can’t. I can do nothing.”