by Rye Hart
“So he fought?” says Sam.
I nod. “Right before it started I saw the other guy tuck a roll of quarters into one of his fists. There was a lot of betting action going on. I tried to tell Andrew what I had seen but it was too late. I could have broken it up. I should have. I trusted that he’d be able to dodge, or grab the guy, get his hands open if they went to the ground, and then everyone would see that he was trying to cheat. You can really fuck someone up with even a little extra weight in your hand.”
“I’m sure.”
“The irony is that, as soon as the fight started, it happened just like I hoped it would. Andrew wasn’t the best striker yet, but he was a devil if he could drag you down. Grappling with Andrew on the mat was like being in the water with a shark, even if you were good. There was no margin for error. Just like I had hoped, he got wrist control, popped the guy’s hands open, and out rolled that pack of quarters.”
“Was that the end of the fight?”
“Ha! You didn’t know Andrew. That was just the beginning. Andrew jumped up, grabbed the quarters, handed them back to the guy, called him a little bitch, and told him to feel free to use them because he was going to need all the help he could get.”
“Sounds like I would have liked him.”
“Everyone liked Andrew. Except the guy he had just humiliated. And it didn’t stop there. They fought for another six rounds with only fifteen second breaks in between. It was brutal. The other guy was getting the worst of it. Totally outmatched. Andrew was punishing him for trying to cheat. That’s one thing most people don’t know about fighters. At least, people who think we’re all just dumb thugs. They think there’s no honor, no code. But most of us got into martial arts for the ethos. There’s something pure in it when you start, even if you forget it.”
“That makes sense. I used to love Bruce Lee.”
“Who doesn’t love Bruce Lee? But Andrew was punishing the guy. I could tell that he could have finished the fight at any time. Put the guy out of his misery. But he wanted him to suffer, so he dragged it out to teach him a lesson. Unfortunately, he created an opponent who had nothing to lose. Then he got him so blind with rage that...it went bad. Oh God.”
I rub my face. It’s like no time has passed at all and I’m right back there in that warehouse, waiting for what I can’t stop.
“Do you want to pick this up again later?” says Sam.
“No. If I stop now I might never start again…Andrew finally took the guy down for the last time and got him in a rear naked choke. There was no way out but the guy was tough. He wouldn’t tap and soon he was asleep. Andrew got up and collected his money while the guy’s homies picked him up and tried to revive him. As soon as he was mobile, he came up behind Andrew and kicked him in the side of the head.”
“Oh my God!”
“It was a hard shot, but nothing that we hadn’t seen before. But it knocked him sideways. Just one of those freak things. Andrew fell and hit his head on the side of the table that people were using for their drinks. One of the corners hit his temple and that was it. He died minutes later of a massive brain hemorrhage.”
There it is. Out in the open. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more Andrew.
Sam wipes a tear from her eye. “So that’s why you quit?”
“Not entirely. First of all I wanted revenge. Of course. But that kind of thinking isn’t sustainable. The guy who killed Andrew was plugged into a couple of gangs. That was a fight I eventually would have got the worst of. I wasn’t going to start carrying a gun and getting in shootouts every day. But the other part of that was that cops raided the warehouse right then. They rounded us all up. Medics saw what happened to Andrew. One of them, a fan, recognized me and took me over to talk to a couple of detectives.”
“Did they help you get the guy?”
“No, that guy was done either way. He wound up going to prison. The whole thing was illegal. None of us were clean, guilty by association just by being there, including me. My agent would have gone berserk if he’d known I was there. Sponsors would have dropped me in a flash unless they put some gross ‘bad boy in underground pit fighting scandal’ spin on it, but that’s not what I wanted my championship reign to be about. Not that that’s what mattered. Andrew was what mattered and he was gone.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she says.
“I should have stopped him.” There’s nothing she can say to change what I know, but it’s nice to hear. I want to believe her, but she’s wrong. “And I could have.”
“We make our own choices. It’s not our friend’s job to drag us away from things. He would have resented you.”
“But he would have lived.”
Sam turns off the recorder. “Look at me.”
I look at her. She’s staring back with all the conviction a person can have. “I want you to say “It’s not my fault,” she says.
“I can’t, Sam. And even if I could, I let those detectives let me off. I should have taken my lumps for being there in the first place. Everyone else had to. I had always sworn that I would never play the ‘I’m an important guy’ card to get out of trouble. But I did and I’m fucking ashamed of it.”
“Does being out here help?” She gestures at the basement walls. “Do you feel like you actually escaped?”
“Of course not. But I don’t have to deal with the memory of him everywhere I go.”
“It doesn’t sound like that’s true. You’ve got a picture of him on the wall. You can’t atone forever, Hugh. What do you want from your life now? There’s got to be more than this. You’re more than a beard and an ax and a cabin. That sounded dumb, I know, but you’ve reduced yourself to less than you should be. You’re a special person and I don’t need to know you any better than I do to know that. So I’m going to ask you again, what do you want from your life?” Her fiery speech has lit up her cheeks with a sexy flush. Her rapid movements make her body sway and bounce in all the right ways.
“You really want to know what I want?” I say. Because I can suddenly think of something.
“Tell me.”
I stand up. “Come here.”
She stands up and walks over to me. “Now what?”
“I believe in fair play and I think you got some of my best earlier. Now I want you to get on your knees. And you’re going to take more than a minute.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: SAM
I can’t argue with his logic. Fair is fair. I drop to my knees, unzip him, and take his hard cock out. That’s when I realize that maybe this isn’t as fair as I thought. He’s working with a lot more than I am.
But I can do it. After hearing him bare his soul, knowing how vulnerable he has made himself to me--and only to me--I will do anything to make him feel better. I lightly trace my nails on the underside of the shaft, enjoying his low groan. It feels like power, a revving motor, and I’m causing it.
After I work him with my nails for a while I run my tongue up and down. He puts one hand my hair. Then the other. His hips rock gently and and I take more of him in. Feeling him get harder in my mouth makes every nerve in my body fire. There is a release and a liberation in being so uninhibited that I have never known. Soon I’m up taller on my knees, stroking him with both hands, sucking him until he sounds like he can’t take it anymore.
Suddenly he pulls me to my feet and turns me around. He pushes me against the wall and slides my legs apart by pushing his knee in between them. There is a stinging smack. He just spanked my ass.
“Do it again,” I say, nearly out of my mind with desire.
Hugh spanked me again, harder, then gripped the back of my neck with one hand. He put his chest on my back. The weight of him made me pant, but my breath quickened still faster when I felt the tip of his cock slide into me from behind. His grip on my neck tightened as he thrust in deep enough that I had to rise up on my toes. One of his forearms was around my neck, holding me in place as he fucked me.
“Are you okay?” he whispered hoarsely in my ear.
“Yes,” I say, barely able to get the word out. “Don’t stop.”
He takes a grip on my hair, pulls my head back slightly, and thrust in deeper than before, over and over. I am lost, oblivious to everything but the sounds and sensations of our bodies. Again and again, he slams into me, cupping my ass in one hand now, now reaching around to play with my clitoris. I come hard, then again before the exquisite convulsions of the first have stopped. This is all I have ever wanted to feel. Consumed. Taken away. Outside myself, yet inhabiting myself in a way that I never could have understood without Hugh inside me.
When he is about to come his hands tighten around my hips.
“Do it,” I say. “I want it.”
When he comes he puts his hands on either side of mine, against the wall. The tendons of his forearms stand out like steel cables. It goes on and on and then I’m coming one more time as his anguished shout takes us both over the edge.
We stay there, standing, panting, cooling off, for a couple of minutes. He withdraws and I am reminded that this will all end. All stories do. But whatever happened next, it had been worth it.
Hugh puts an arm under my knees and princess carries me out of the room, up the stairs, down the hall, and tosses me onto his bed. “Don’t you move,” he says. “You’re sleeping with me in my bed.”
He leaves, locks the doors, closes the curtains and returns, getting in beside me and turning out the light. “Turn over,” he says.
I give my back to him and he snuggles up against my ass. He reaches over and laces his fingers through my own.
I want to thank him for giving me the best orgasm of my life.
But he is already snoring gently in my ear.
The rain continues to fall, buying us more time.
I must have had the longest and most soothing rest of my life, because I didn’t wake up until the next day.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: HUGH
The rain has cleared up this morning. Shit. This means she might leave soon. I hope that doesn’t make me sound too much like Norman Bates, but this woman is a treasure. I allowed her to oversleep. She deserved it. I’m not sure what happened last night, to either of us, but it’s the kind of memory that could sustain me for the rest of my life.
Dammit. I don’t want the memory.
I want her.
Night after night.
Until she begs me to stop.
But damaged goods is more than she deserves.
In an attempt to push the thought of Sam leaving out of my mind, I begin to cook breakfast.
Fair’s fair, as we agreed last night.
Jesus.
Even the thought of it gets me hard. I have to tuck my suddenly interested dick into the band of my sweat suit so it doesn’t bump the hot frying pan that is currently full of sizzling eggs.
“What’s cooking?” she says, appearing at the bottom of the stairs. She’s glowing and I my heart beat begins to quicken at the sight of her.
“Eggs and bacon,” I say. “Coffee. Brought them up from downstairs. Thought we might try a normal meal away from the chamber of horrors.”
She bites the back of my shoulder and puts her arms around my waist. “What’s this?” she says, feeling my poorly concealed erection.
“The usual.”
She giggles.
God, that sexy giggle again. It would haunt me for the rest of my life.
We sit and eat.
“So the rain is cleared up,” she says. I can’t read her tone. She could be disappointed, bored out of her skull, or sleepy. “Does this mean you can take me through a fabulous walk in the woods and tell me all about what my boss calls the ‘animal sanctuary thing?’”
“What do you mean? I haven’t heard of anything like that.”
“Oh. She said she heard that someone was cutting down forest to make an animal sanctuary, but that would mean displacing all the animals that were already here. Nothing like that?”
“Nope. Sounds like someone’s pulling her leg. Or she was pulling your leg to get you out here. I’ve got a better idea, though. Why don’t you let me take you into town, buy a couple of things, and then we’ll take that walk in the woods?”
“Won’t the townspeople be terrified to see a big badass like you stomping out of the forest?”
“I doubt that very much. They see me about every four days, weather permitting.”
We drive to town after breakfast. Sam hadn’t seen it yet but I had a bronco parked out back. There’s a small road between the trees that you can’t see the beginning of unless you know how to spot it.
She holds my hand the whole way down.
On Main Street in Wahay, I nod and wave at people because they do the same to me. No one cares who I am here. They don’t know my past. Or if they did, they wouldn’t make a big deal of it. Simple. Lonely - I have to admit now that I’ve met Sam - but it has been simple.
I mainly need to buy supplies to reinforce any damage the storm might have done. I leave Sam in the car while I go into a hardware store and come back out with a new pack of shingles, some sealant that would keep rain out of the cracks, and a new whetstone. I also buy her her own hatchet, since she liked the throw I did at Jarom so much. I figure I can teach her how.
But she’s staring at her phone, muttering to herself.
“Everything okay?” I say, sliding into the driver’s seat.
“I forgot I had a phone,” she says. “Believe it or not, it’s absolutely full of messages from people wanting status updates about my story. Oh shit.”
“What?”
She holds the phone up so I can take a look. “This is from my friend Lacey.” The message says, I SEE YOU, YOU LITTLE SLUT! “It just came in,” says Sam.
Before I can say a word, someone appears at Sam’s window and starts pounding on the glass. Sam looks at me and mouths I’m sorry to me before rolling down the window.
“Hey you!” says a woman who can only be Lacey. “Why don’t you both take me to some fancy restaurant? I’m fucking starving.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: SAM
For about five minutes I’m excited to see Lacey. So much has happened and she’s the only one I want to talk to about it all. Then the novelty wears off and I realize how good she looks. I remember how she is with men. I start to dread the moment when she asks to come back and see the cabin, which will surely lead to her seducing Hugh and leaving me in the lurch.
I also have a ton of messages from Trinity wanting to know why Jarom is so “despondent.” Apparently he returned to New York and set up a massive pity party that is the cause of much speculation at the humble headquarters of The Inner Eye. I don’t respond. I can’t believe how good it has felt to not have my phone, and to totally forget that it exists. Hugh told me that he liked the simplicity of life out here. I can see how a certain kind of person could get used to it.
Maybe I’m that type of person.
Lacey builds a wall of words as she eats breakfast, not even noticing that we don’t order anything. She gapes at Hugh and compliments him on his beard, his arms, his shoulders, his thighs, his boots, his Bronco, and his fine eye for journalistic talent. “You have no idea how badly Sam here has needed someone like you,” she says. “She has been a total wreck.”
“I have not!”
“Tell me more, Lacey,” says Sam.
“Oh, hey,” says Lacey, ignoring him. “Sam, how’s the thing going? You know, the uh…” She raises her eyebrows and rolls her eyes back in her head.
“Now this I’ve got to know more about,” says Hugh.
“Don’t you dare,” I say. Something about my tone sinks in, because Lacey lets it go.
“So when do I get to see the famous hermit cabin?” she says. “Hugh, I’m assuming you’re the fighter that she came out here looking for. What does that make you, Sam? Like, a treasure hunter?”
“It makes me bored with this conversation. Hugh, let’s get out of here. We’ve got to work on the story.”
Lacey wipes her mouth daintily
with a napkin. “I can’t wait. I’ll ride with you two.”
“That’s fine,” says Hugh, and I can’t help but wonder what he’s thinking. Is he into her? Is everything we’ve done just a fling for him? I mean, I knew--we both knew--that it wouldn’t last forever, I think, but is he discarding me in front of me?
Soon we’re headed back to the cabin with Lacey chattering a mile a minute. She thinks there are too many trees. She’s worried about mosquitos. Does Hugh have any sunscreen? How does he make sure he never gets lost? How often does he take women back to his “lair?” What’s the tallest tree in the world? She has also recently heard on a podcast that trees can talk to each other and she seems legitimately anxious that they might all be gossiping about her.
Hugh takes this all in stride. He doesn’t say much, but he responds when she talks to him, gives me nudges with his elbow when she really gets going, and it all seems fine. Normal enough. But I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong.
When we get to the cabin she screams her head off and races around, saying it’s the most perfect place she has ever seen.
By the time Hugh locks the door behind us she has already found the wine and poured three glasses. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’ll be entertaining enough to pay you back for the wine.”
I bet you’d like that I think, feeling petty and jealous, though nothing has really happened yet.
I take Lacey up to my room--I’m already thinking of it as my room--when she says she has to pee. As soon as we’re up there she closes the door and locks it. “So what’s going on?” she hisses. “Are you two fucking? Oh my God, he’s so hot, and I think he looks really familiar? Who do you think he reminds me of? I can’t figure it out. He’s so hot! You’re so lucky!”