I’d never physically initiated sex between us. Obviously I’d told him straight up in the past that I wanted to have sex, but I never made the first move physically. See, the thing was, I didn’t actually like sex that much. I mean, I liked being that close to Kane, and I liked him wanting me that much, and everything around it like the kissing and touching, I liked all of that, but depending on how into it I was, sometimes the sex itself didn’t feel good – or it just straight out hurt.
What I’m getting at was it was a big deal for me to initiate it. Physically. Now, having looked at his biceps a lot, and the flex of his muscles as he changed position on the couch, I began studying the broadness of his shoulders, and how his t-shirt fit firmly across his chest. Apart from when Kane really went to work kissing and touching me, I don’t know that I’d ever really been turned on before. And now just looking at him was doing it for me.
I placed a hand on his forearm and then slid it up to where the sleeve of his t-shirt drew tight around his arm. He didn’t respond.
I went to kiss him but he looked around me, saying, ‘Nat, I’m watching this.’
I sat back on the couch beside him. Hurt flared, and with it the feeling of rejection. And frustration. I uncapped a marker from my pencil case and drew a thick blue line down his arm.
‘What did you do that for?’ said Kane, frowning as he looked from his arm to me. He was expecting words. Instead, I quickly drew a blue line from the top of his cheekbone down to the edge of his jaw.
Kane grabbed my hand, and forced me back on the couch and the marker from my hand. He held it threateningly near my face.
‘Say you’re sorry.’
‘No.’
The marker came closer to my cheek. ‘Baby, you better apologize.’
‘I’m not sorry. You were ignoring me.’
‘So, you want this?’ he said drawing a line down my cheek so lightly that it tickled.
I began squirming and laughing and trying to protest all at the same time, but his body had me completely pinned. I blindly felt around on the floor until I found what I was searching for: another marker. This time, a black one. I swiped at his hand. That led to an all-out marker war.
I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed that hard before or since. It went on and on. Kane kept getting the upper hand, so then I’d call a truce. He’d make me promise to keep it, and I would, only to renege the moment I was free of him and able to grab another marker.
It ended up with him on one side of the couch and me on the other. Kane had decided he’d had enough, and had managed to confiscate all of the weaponry except for the two markers I was holding in each hand. He was trying to negotiate my surrender across the couch, but I just kept laughing and saying no.
So then Kane leapt over the couch, but he must have put too much weight on the back of it, and it toppled over backwards. I was laughing so hard I had tears streaming down my face. Kane was on the floor laughing too, and I collapsed beside him because my stomach muscles were hurting too much to stay upright.
Kane plucked the markers from my hands. I gave them up without a fight. We both stopped laughing and just lay there looking at each other. There was a draft coming in under the front door, and it gave me goosebumps. The carpet we were lying on was worn, and ingrained with the sort of dirt that takes years to accumulate and can never be vacuumed out.
I was happy to lie there though, in that draft and on that dirty carpet. Just to look at him and be with him. I wondered where he had come from. What people, throughout the history of the world, had created him: his strong body, his height, his smile. How part of each and every one of those people had contributed to make the face I was gazing at.
While I was admiring Kane, he must have been admiring me.
‘You’re beautiful, woman.’
‘So are you.’
‘Say what?’
‘I think you are.’
‘A man ain’t like that.’
‘How’s he like?’
‘Tough,’ he said, grinning as he rolled over on top of me.
We did it right there, in the cold draft and on the dirty carpet. I liked it. More than I had ever liked it before then. Kane noticed. He didn’t say anything about it, he just gave me this look afterward as he righted the couch, and it was the sort of look that made my face heat up.
Kane went back to watching what was left of the game. I made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner because that was just about the only option. I ate two. Kane ate five, and drank a quart of milk.
Kane then watched the post-game analysis while I lay with my head in his lap. Partway through the commentary he found an overlooked marker between two of the couch cushions. Uncapping it, he bent his head and drew a graffiti-style heart over the mess of lines he’d left on the side of my face.
I stayed absolutely still. He finished the heart, then wrote on my neck.
When I went and looked in the bathroom mirror, I could only make out part of what he’d written. The last word was too far round the back of my neck for me to be able to see it. I could guess it was his name though, because the other words, written in his perfect script, were ‘I belong to’. And I knew who I belonged to.
Kane turned eighteen the following week, but I couldn’t hide my new tattoo from him for that long. I let him find it himself. It was fall. We were in the gym storage room, and due to the leaves falling onto the roof from the surrounding trees the skylights let in even less light that usual. We were making out on one of the discarded gym mats, and Kane tugged on the scarf I was wearing.
‘Lose this.’
I unraveled the scarf then turned away from him to dump it on the ground behind me.
‘What’s on your neck?’ asked Kane.
He stopped me turning back to him, his hand going to the letters tattooed to the right down the back of my neck.
‘Fuck. Is that my name? Is that for real?’
‘Yes.’
Kane pulled his phone out of his pocket and turned on the flashlight.
‘I wrote that,’ he said, shining the light on his own perfect script.
‘I got it inked.’ I smiled over my shoulder at him. ‘I left out the “I belong to” bit. It was supposed to be a birthday present, but I think it’s more a present for me.’
‘That’s gonna be there forever.’
‘I can always get it covered,’ I teased.
The light from his phone disappeared, and his lips pressed gently against my neck.
‘You like it?’ I asked, tilting my neck to give him more room.
‘Yeah, I like it.’
That was how we were when something bad happened to Kane.
I thought at the time it was too hard on him. That it wasn’t fair – his life was hard enough. But then, it took fighting from him, and maybe that was good.
If he’d stayed fighting, who knows how far he would have gone. I know Wayne was convinced he’d be a professional fighter. And in the ring even I could tell he had an edge over his opponents. Every hit he landed, every kick he made: they almost always had maximum impact, with minimal cost to him. He always won.
I heard one of the guys at the gym say when he was watching Kane spar with another fighter, ‘That nigga strikes harder, moves faster and fights smarter than anyone I know.’
Fighting was Kane’s strongest connection to Wayne. Kane never said anything much to me about Wayne, but I know he really cared what Wayne thought of him. Wayne never showed him much love: nothing physical like a hug, or even a handshake. Probably the only time they touched was when Wayne was training him. And when it actually came to Kane’s training, Kane carried Wayne. Like, Wayne would tell him to do something, or give him advice, and Kane would have to ‘redirect’ his idea. Or Wayne would lose his place counting Kane’s reps. One time when Kane was supposed to do a quick fifty push-ups, I counted him do seventy-two. Kane would have known when he went past fifty, but he didn’t say anything, just kept going till Wayne called it.
It w
as mid-fall when Kane started saying things to me about fighting: unexpected things. Things like, ‘That guy I fought last night: we’ve been competing for years. That’s the third concussion I’ve given him.’
‘He shouldn’t fight you then.’
‘I shouldn’t fight him.’
‘It was a money fight.’
‘Ain’t no excuse.’
I came to realize just how much Kane worried over the hurt he caused other fighters in the ring. But when I said something to him about it he blew me off. Said the only thing he cared about was winning his fights.
Wayne might have been training Kane to be a fighter since kindergarten, but Kane hadn’t been born that way. He loved drawing, and he was incredible at math. He even liked English. If he’d gone to school full-time he probably would have been in the running for valedictorian. What I’m saying was there was a whole lot more talent in him than just his fighting skills. Which was good, given what happened next.
Kane injured someone in a fight.
I was at the fight. Because Wayne had made a new rule that I wasn’t allowed near Kane on fight nights, I asked Melissa to come with me. We sat up in the stands and got seriously hit on, but we were both pretty good at knocking guys back. I remember I got called a fine piece, and soon after a ‘cold bitch’, about the same time the guy’s friend said to Melissa, ‘You is nasty. Damn I like nasty.’
Melissa replied, ‘You is toothless; go get yourself some teeth before you be smiling at me like that.’
The thing about Melissa was she could always get away with saying things like that without causing offence. I guess because she said it with a smile. If I’d said it I would have been called more than a cold bitch. But Toothless just laughed with his friends, his smile not dampened one bit by his two missing front teeth.
‘You is alright, girl,’ he said, and winked at her.
There was a bit more banter after that, but as soon as the first fight started they left us alone.
Kane’s was the fourth fight. His opponent was Danesh Burrows, and Kane knew him. He’d told me the day before that he’d beat him. He did, in the first round. Didn’t even take three minutes for what was going to happen to happen.
Kane was just faster. He blocked punches and caught the other guy’s kicks before making contact every time with his own strikes and kicks. He had the psychological edge too. Even from where I was sitting I could feel the aggression and determination exuding from Kane.
Two minutes into the fight the sound of Kane’s gloves hitting Danesh’s skin came at speed. One of the hits was a liver shot. Danesh went down.
Cheers erupted around us.
‘Fuck me, Anderson’s giving that boy a beat-down,’ said Toothless behind me.
Danesh slowly got up off his knees and came at Kane with his gloves up. Danesh got one punch in and then Kane hooked him with his right. Danesh’s head snapped back. He staggered, but stayed standing. Kane finished him with a head kick.
Danesh was knocked out while he was still upright, and when he went down he went down hard.
Everyone got up on their feet and roared, the noise a mix of jubilation and disappointment, a sort of bloodthirsty baying. Melissa was on her feet beside me, but neither of us were clapping and cheering. She kept saying ‘oh no.’ I was watching Kane. He wasn’t looking out at the crowd; he was looking down at the other fighter, and the referee kneeling beside him.
‘That nigga is out,’ said one of Toothless’s friends with glee.
‘Move,’ was Toothless’s response, his urging directed at the inert form in the ring. ‘Come on brother, get up.’
Danesh didn’t move, and there was a rush of movement into the ring.
Wayne also entered, trying to get Kane back to his corner, but Kane, his chest heaving, and sweat pouring off him, stayed where he was, his gloves hanging limp at his sides.
The ringside doctor started working on the motionless fighter and everything got really quiet: no music playing or announcers calling the next fight, no cheers or yells, just people talking in lowered voices, if at all.
Wayne finally managed to get Kane back in his corner as two paramedics entered the ring with a stretcher. Danesh was carefully moved onto it, a brace around his neck and an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose.
Kane was announced the winner.
10
Kane quit fighting.
Wayne wouldn’t believe him. Kane didn’t tell him straightaway. He went and saw Danesh in hospital first. A whole lot of Danesh’s crew were at the hospital. Some of them Kane knew – he had dealt them car parts, even organized a few vehicle deliveries. None of them gave Kane a hard time. Just nodded at him, even shook his hand.
It had been a week since the fight. A week since Danesh had had surgery for the bleed on his brain.
Kane never told me what he and Danesh talked about. But later that afternoon back at his place, while we were sitting on the edge of his bed, and I was trying to think how I could make him feel better, he told me what some of Danesh’s friends had told him.
‘Doctors say he got brain damage. I mean, he don’t look how you think someone who is brain damaged would look, but he can’t remember things from like two days ago, and he got tired real quick.’
‘He probably just needs longer to heal.’
‘Natalie, he’s brain damaged. I did that to him. I fucked his life.’
‘You did not. If he’s talking and walking and not paralyzed then he’ll be okay. It was a fight. It could have happened to you. It’s how it is, Kane. He chose to fight.’
‘And I fucking chose to kick him in the head. He was probably gonna go down anyway. Why’d I do that?’
‘Because that’s how you win fights.’
‘Makes me a fucking animal.’
‘Kane, he’ll be okay.’
Kane shook his head, then buried his face in his hands. I put my arms around him, and pressed a kiss to his shoulder.
‘It’ll be okay,’ I whispered.
‘I fucking hate all this shit,’ replied Kane.
That night Wayne went at him about not doing any training that week. Kane was still pretty emotional from seeing Danesh, and Wayne could tell. Rather than give him some space though, Wayne started saying things like, he had to let it go, and he’d be stronger in his next fight because of it.
It was then Kane told him he was giving it up. Wayne lost it. Told him not to say that, to even think that. Kane stuck to it though, saying again that he was through.
Wayne called him so many names. Swore at him; said that he hadn’t got Kane that far to have Kane get weak just when they were at the start of his fighting career.
‘You ain’t backing out,’ yelled Wayne at him. ‘You fucking listen to me. This is it. No more working, and you don’t need no more school. We doing it. You train full-time from now on.’
‘It ain’t gonna happen, Wayne.’
‘This ain’t a discussion.’
‘Wayne, Danesh is brain damaged.’
‘Yeah, that’s how strong you are. You got this, Kane. Ain’t no one gonna stand up to you. The guys at the gym, everyone who sees you, they all say it. Every fucking day I see it too. You a fighter, and now everybody gonna know.’
‘I’m done.’
Wayne grabbed Kane by his sweatshirt and yelled right in his face, ‘You ain’t done. You ain’t ever done.’
‘It ain’t up to you.’
Something in Kane’s voice must have thrown Wayne, because he was silent a moment. Then he said, ‘You think you’re done? You know what being done is? Nigga, you got no idea. You don’t fight, you got nothing. You just a bitch. Get your sorry ass out my house. You don’t live here no more.’
Wayne released his hold on him, pushing Kane back against the wall with a hard shove. Kane said nothing, did nothing. Seemed like all of a sudden he couldn’t even meet Wayne’s eye.
I was furious, shaking with anger, as it registered that Wayne was kicking Kane out. And maybe Kane didn’t have
anything more to say, but I sure did.
I didn’t get very far. Barely opened my mouth before Wayne yelled at Kane over the top of me.
‘Take this crazy bitch and go. This ain’t your place. Men live here. You a man? You ain’t no fucking man.’
‘You can’t take Kane’s home from him.’ I said.
Wayne didn’t answer me, but continued to yell at Kane. ‘Move your bitch before I kill her. What you waiting for? You done? Fuck you, motherfucker, we’re done.’
Kane raised his gaze and looked at his uncle for a long time. Wayne didn’t say anything; just looked like he’d never hated anyone more than he hated Kane.
‘Nat, let’s go,’ said Kane in a quiet voice.
He took my hand, but I resisted following him.
‘Thought you were his uncle,’ I said to Wayne. ‘Supposed to be more like his dad – but you won’t be that, will you? Supposed to be looking after him all this time. Only a baby, and you had him fighting. You don’t decide who he is. Kane decides who he is.’
‘Nat, come on,’ said Kane, pulling me away. He opened the front door and didn’t look back. Wayne slammed the door behind us.
Kane said he’d rough it for the night, but there was no way I was letting him.
He wasn’t in much of a way to argue, but he really didn’t want to come back to mine. It was only when I said that I was staying out with him if he didn’t that he gave in.
Mom said he couldn’t stay. Luckily Kane had insisted on waiting outside while I asked, and didn’t hear her.
‘He doesn’t have anywhere else to stay tonight,’ I said. ‘You can’t make him sleep on the street. Can’t he just sleep on the couch?’
‘No.’
It was a stupid suggestion. Mom was sitting on the couch watching television, and probably would be for hours yet.
After Nothing Page 7