A Fighting Chance

by Sand, A. J.

  ****

  I take a blue pill, and it helps, all right. I wake up in an empty room to the nightstand clock displaying four p.m. at me. With pain nestled in every part of my body, it hurts to get myself into a sitting position. I reach for my cell phone and call Lydia. This bed is a lot emptier without her; I’m used to waking up next to her.

  “Hi, baby!” she says when she answers.

  I really miss her, especially after a night like the one I had. She’s my beacon. She’s how I’ll get back home. “Lyds. Hi, baby. How are you?”

  “Getting ready to go meet Andrea for an early dinner and then a movie. And just going a little crazy without you, not knowing where you are and if you’re safe. I keep flipping to Spanish channels, trying to see if there’s anything on the news in Mexico. Reading some newspapers, too.”

  I laugh. Even that hurts. “Shit. I hope nothing I’m doing ends up on the news. And I’m staying as safe as I can.”

  “You’re not helping me not freak out, Jess.” She pauses for a moment. “So…are you in Guadalajara or Mexico City? Those are the places where fighting is big, right? I was Googling.”

  For once, I wish she’d give me every detail on where she and Andrea are planning to eat and what movie they’ll see. “Yeah.”

  She sighs. “I’ve been scaring myself with the Internet, I guess, but I just have so many questions now that everything has had some time to sink in.”

  “Okay, understandable. What do you want to know?”

  “Do the fights get really, really bloody?”

  “Yes.” I work my jaw until the pulse catches up with my heart.

  “I saw some pictures of MMA injuries and they were bad, and those are licensed. Have you ever beaten someone up bad enough for them to be really hurt? Like end up in the hospital? Can you knock someone out?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Oh,” Lydia says. A drawn out pause follows, inducing a rise in my anxiety.

  “But that was a long time ago. I’m doing things differently, and right now, this isn’t for fun or for sport.”

  “But it was before? You had fun back then? Did you do it because you liked hurting people? Do you like hurting people? I don’t really understand what’s so awesome about beating other people up and getting beat up on purpose…” Well that’s a one-fuckin’-eighty. Sadness twists my gut. When my dad showed up and crashed my old life into my new one, I knew I’d never be able to untangle them completely. This is almost worse than having her glamorizing it.

  “Are you serious right now? You’ve never seen me hit anyone except for the one time that guy grabbed you, and you didn’t seem to mind violence so much when I was defending you,” I say, doing my best to keep irritation from dripping into my voice.

  “It’s a lot, Jess…it’s a lot to take in. One minute you’re the only guy I’ve ever dated who doesn’t mind cuddling and watching Netflix on the weekends, who actually just likes to literally sleep with me, and the next you have this secret violent past. You sprang it on me. I thought I knew you. That’s all.”

  What the fuck? I tense up, refueling all the soreness from the fight. “You do know me,” I whisper, fearing she’ll hear the hurt and confusion in my voice. Another round of silence falls over the conversation. “Lyds, you know me. I am that guy. You get that, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s just a lot.” Lydia sighs. “So…is your friend, Drew, taking good care of you?”

  It’s my turn to pause for an eternity, but it’s not out of hesitation; it’s from the rush of delayed anger that consumes me. “Drew’s not a guy. She’s a she.” Admittedly, I’m telling her because I’m pissed off.

  She doesn’t speak right away. We’re having a competition to see who can make silence last longer in a conversation, apparently. “Uh…wow. Okay. So, there’s a girl with you…but you wouldn’t let me come. I see.”

  “She’s not here ‘cause she’s a girl. She’s here because she knows the fights and she knows people in Mexico. She’s an old friend, and she’s—”

  “Then why didn’t you just tell me about her from the beginning?” Lydia’s voice goes up a notch when she interrupts me. It does that when she’s really angry. And she didn’t even hang out at “mildly irritated” beforehand. “Why’d you let me think she was a guy?”

  My anger shoots up right alongside hers. “Because I didn’t want to have this argument. I knew you were going to make a big deal about it. Just like you’ve been doing about my fighting.”

  She growls in frustration. “A big deal? Wow. Real nice, Jess. I don’t like this, I don’t get it, and I’m trying really, really hard to be supportive, but my bad for giving a shit about your life.”

  “This isn’t my life, Lydia, but it makes sense that you wouldn’t know that. You seem to be way more interested in the person I don’t want to be anymore than who I am right now.”

  She gasps repeatedly and I barely hear her over my heartbeat. “Andrea’s here. I should go.”

  “Lyds…Hello?” But she’s already gone. And I wish I knew just how far exactly. But what did I expect? I gave her all half-truths when we met. Nothing built on lies can be sustained once the real story comes out.

  “Fuck!” I slam my cell phone down on the nightstand. The door opens, and Drew has lunch (breakfast to me) propped up in both hands. There’s also a plastic bag dangling from her wrist. She plucks out a first aid kit and waves it at me with a kind smile on her face. Shivers of lust undulate through my insides. She looks as gorgeous as she did last night. Drew’s in tight jeans and a tighter black t-shirt. Her hair’s high up in a bun, and she’s glowing from a light sheen of sweat on her face. I swallow down the twinge of guilt in my chest as I watch her set things down. I know right then exactly why I didn’t tell Lydia about Drew, and it has nothing to do with not wanting to argue. It’s about me still being very attracted to her, period.

  “I’ve been standing outside for a few minutes, waiting for you to finish your call. Shitty place. I could hear you through the door. It sounded like things got intense,” she says.

  I shake my head because I don’t want to talk about it, so instead, I say, “Last night…that wasn’t Vicodin...”

  Drew laughs as she tosses foil-wrapped food at me, and then she sits next to me on the bed. “I know. It was a sleeping pill. You needed it.” She sets a box of tortilla chips between us for sharing.

  I bump her shoulder with mine. “Fine. I did. Now you should probably figure out which ones are actually for pain.”

  “The red ones.” She holds up three fingers, and one side of her mouth curls up. “Scout’s honor.” As she lowers her hand, her smile fades, a thought stealing her attention. “You and Lydia were arguing about me. Is it because we’re exes and we’re here together?”

  “She doesn’t know we’re exes. But, yeah, she’s not happy that you’re a chick.”

  “Next time you talk to her, put me on…”

  “Uh…I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “She can give me the address for the wedding invitation. That should clear the air that there’s nothing between us anymore. But I do wonder, what does one wear to their boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s wedding?” Drew giggles.

  “To the guy she used to hate,” I blurt out. Fucking shit. Drew’s laughter withers into open-mouthed silence. I’m not at my best right after waking up, and apparently I’m trying to make every woman I know hate me. “Uh, yeah, probably shouldn’t waste the rest of the day,” I add quickly as I get out of bed. I hop in the shower, tend to my cuts, and get dressed. I join Drew in the room again and devour the turkey sandwich she brought for me. She’s on her own bed now, watching a talk show.

  “So how are your mom and dad?” I ask.

  “Fine, I guess.” She glances at her phone when it vibrates but doesn’t respond to it.

  “Are they excited about the wedding? I bet your mom is.” This is my attempt to recover from earlier, and show that I can address her relationship like an adult.

&nbs
p; Well, I’m going to fucking try.

  “She might be. I’m sure she’s heard about it. We don’t really talk.” Her tone is too ominous for this to be some petty argument, and there were a lot of those back in the day. I think Angela Hallisay, with her outdated beliefs about how women were supposed to be, didn’t know how to handle her outspoken, headstrong daughter.

  “Since when?” I ask.

  Drew’s gaze drops to her phone when it vibrates again. “The last four years.” I’m glad she’s not looking at me, because when my mouth falls open, it takes me a while to close it. Our junior year, I was the fracture in that family, and to this day I carry a lot of guilt about it. Drew’s parents put every obstacle they could in our way—a brand new car, a trip with her friends for her eighteenth birthday, any bribe—to end the relationship. She always chose me. I wonder if things just continued to disintegrate after that.

  Prying further into the situation feels like an invasion, so I change the subject. “Any word from Miguel today?”

  “Yes, actually,” Drew says as she stares at the television, picking through the broken pieces of her tortilla chips. “He wanted to know if you’re still crazy.”

  “Crazy? Why? ‘Cause of my panic attack? First fight jitters. Is that all he said?”

  “Yup…” Her eyes dart away from the television for a beat.

  “Drew…what else?” I sit on the bed next to her, and I notice her cell near her elbow. “You know your eyes always give you away, right? What happened? Does he not want to help us anymore?”

  “No, it’s not that. He’s still helping us.” Her gaze swings away from the television again. She’s still holding back.

  “What is it, then?”

  “Nothing. He doesn’t have anything right now. It’s been a day. God. And he has to work—” I hop over her and snatch up her cell, running to a corner of the room. “Hey! Give it back!”

  I scroll through her text messages and there are at least six unanswered ones from Miguel, all about where we can get better prize money. “Drew…he’s been trying to reach you all day about going to Mexico City or Monterrey!”

  She drops her hands on her hips, unapologetic. “Fine. He’s lining things up. He’s excited about you. It’s me, okay? I think you need more time. I didn’t like what happened last night, Jess. You said you could handle it.”

  Everything from the night before comes barreling into my mind—choking José, my panic attack, and the cheers from the crowd—but I shove it back out, even as a viselike sensation clamps over my chest. “It was one fight. I’ll be fine.” I don’t know which one of us I’m really trying to convince but, hopefully, I’m doing a better job with her than with myself. “Call him.” I hand her cell phone back to her.

  She doesn’t take it. She just stares at it like I’ve pulled it out of the toilet. “And soon it’ll be three and four fights, and I’m afraid of what you’ll be then, if we don’t take it slow.”

  I don’t budge. “Call him, Drew. Or I will.”

  With a sigh, she jerks it away and does what I want, and a few days later we find ourselves headed for Mexico City. It’s a five-hour drive in theory, but the sheer number of cars trying to enter the city adds a few more, and then it’s miles and miles of vehicles crawling through urban sprawl: trendy restaurants, fortress mansions, museums, majestic cathedrals, nightclubs, panhandlers, skyscraping hotels, and pushy vendors tightly packed together. I’d read that there are about nine million people in the actual city limits, but there are twenty million total in the metropolitan area, and I swear to God they’re all on the street. At once. I’ve never seen anything like it. It makes Glory seem like a lawn with six people standing on it.

  We opt for a decent hotel in the Centro Historico, choosing comfort over cost because this city is a hotbed for not just fights but the high-paying ones. We’ll be here for a while. It’s awesome to switch on the lights in the room and not see the remnants of everyone else who stayed there. And it’s really great to fall asleep without the sound of scampering on the walls.

  “Are you awake?” Drew asks the next morning, knowing damn well I wasn’t until she shook my bed. She’s standing over me in a black sports bra and hot pink running shorts, fresh-faced, and all smiles at…eight fucking a.m. My gaze grazes her toned stomach and heat flares up in my pajama pants, hardening my morning wood a little more. Yeah, definitely awake now.

  “No,” I grumble, hugging a pillow over my head, as if that’s going to deter her. She tugs the top sheet off me then opens all the curtains in the room, forcing me to join the living, the many thousands of them that are probably out there right now, even at this ungodly hour. As I sit up, she starts digging through my bag and throws clean clothes at me.

  “Come on. I noticed something about your fighting technique the other day. We need to work on it.”

  “Work on it? Who am I going to spar with?” I say with a smirk. “You?”

  Drew nails me with a wide confident smile. “Exactly. Now move your ass.”

  After I shower and put on workout clothes, we get breakfast and then we go to Alameda Central, a gigantic park nearby. It’s bustling, just like I suspected. Tourist families clutching cameras and their children’s hands, city dwellers already in need of a break in their day, and backpack-wearing college students have all converged here, seeking any available space on the grass or a bench to enjoy the warm, cloudless morning. It could be a scene in an American city. Or anywhere, really. In my experience, people like to think we’re all so different and make sure to point out those differences, but I imagine that sometime today, a place in Paris and Johannesburg will also look exactly like this.

  Drew takes me down one of the crisscrossing paved walkways, passing a crowded gazebo, and more fountains, statues, and food vendors than I can keep track of, until we find what might be the last empty plot of grass. “You’re good on the ground…” she says as I start to remove my shirt. The air feels combustible today and I’m already sweating.

  “Drew?” I ask once my shirt is off completely. Her gaze roams my bare torso then holds where my shorts are exposing the V-lines below my abs. I take pride in the way her eyes stretch. I have worked hard as fuck for these, so I find every chance I can to show them off. But spasms, twitches and warmth—basically any and all possible responses to the way she’s looking at me—ravage me beneath the surface. “You were saying? My ground technique is good?”

  “Right…um…but your holds aren’t what they used to be,” she says, gulping down, then shaking away whatever dirty thought she was so obviously lost in. “These guys are out to hurt you, so you need to focus on getting them down as quickly as you can—”

  “So I can choke them until they pass out…”

  “Yes,” she says without any hesitation. “Your other option is a knockout. I think it’s the lesser of the two evils. And the faster you do it, the less bloodshed. That’s what we want, right?” Drew gets into fighting stance. “Okay. Come on.”

  Ha, ha. It’s hard not to smile at her, and I don’t bother putting my fists up. As much as I like the idea of getting all tangled up and sweaty with Drew, I can’t fight her. I duck her jabs, which she throws with full power, and I give her a gentle push back. “Quit it.”

  “We used to do this all the time…” she says, laughing.

  “Yeah,” I say with a smirk, “but that was always foreplay.”

  Her mouth falls into an “O” shape, and I can tell her mental bearings are thrown off for a moment. “Okay…so, now you’re scared?” she asks as she swings a roundhouse kick at my chin. I block it and catch her leg, holding it so that she’s hopping around.

  “No. I don’t want to hurt you, and all those guys have, like, seventy, eighty pounds on you. Let’s just jog a lap or two around the place. Push me to run as hard as you want. I’ll do the toughest workout you’ve got in mind,” I say, and she lowers her leg. “Okay?”

  “Okay.” Drew, disappointed, drops her hands, but in a swift move they’re back up. S
he pulls my nose and hammers me in the throat with her fist.

  Goddamn, she’s fast. I push away from her, coughing. She’s laughing, of course. “Fuck, Drew, was that necessary?”

  “Yes! That’s what they’re gonna be doing!. And also much, much worse.” She kicks my shoulder once and my chest next. She shoves me hard enough to knock the wind out of me, and then jumps onto my back, wrapping one arm around my neck and pulling my head back with the other. It hurts like a bitch.

  “Drew!” I yell, but she tightens the hold and ignores my plea. People walking by slow down. I’m sure we look so fucking crazy.

  “Everything’s fine!” Drew shouts at them, and in my ear she says, “Don’t wuss out. Get me off you.” With a shitload of reluctance, I grip both her arms, swing her around, and slam her to the ground. She bounces a little from the impact. “Ow, dammit, Jess, you didn’t have to do it like that.” She begins to whimper, arching her back in pain.

  Fuck. She’s still grimacing when I kneel down beside her, and I brush away the hair stuck to her forehead. “You okay?”

  She grabs my wrist as a sly smile hits her face. Extending my arm along her torso, she curls her legs over one side of my neck as her knees squeeze my upper arm. “I don’t cry that easily,” she says, laughter overtaking her words. Sharp pain explodes at my elbow when she twists my wrist, and I howl out. People aren’t even pretending not to stare anymore. The only thing that makes this marginally less painful and embarrassing is that my shoulder is in her crotch. Okay, okay, maybe it’s not awful at all. Not a bad way to get your arm snapped in half, if you absolutely have to. Hey, and maybe I’m into the freaky stuff because I’m definitely getting a stiffy.

  She rolls her eyes. “Are you…are you smiling? Well, then. Who knew you liked it so rough, Jesse Chance? We should’ve picked out a safe word.”