The Fighter and the Baroness: A Modern-Day Fairy Tale

by Sunniva Dee

  “That won’t work,” I murmur, kissing the inside of her hand.

  “I’ve been at a fight with you before, remember? You won. So I’m good luck. And plus you should get used to me being at fights, because I work them.”

  “Not in Miami, you don’t.”

  “If I want to.” Helena tips the back of her head into the pillow, looking stubborn even in her horizontal position.

  My hand travels upward on its own, squeezing a breast and watching the nipple contract between my fingers. She’s not ticklish. Doesn’t cover herself demurely. All she does is blink slowly in a happy response to my touch.

  I keep allowing myself frivolities I shouldn’t. I mean, over and over and over with this woman. Against myself, I lean down. Suckle on her mouth and peek my tongue into it to tangle and play.

  “That jerk’s gonna start sending his round-card girls far away now?” I whisper in between kisses.

  “It’s not that far.”

  “Miami’s fucking far. I don’t want you to— Bah, anyway; it’s dangerous.”

  She’s bare underneath the flimsy sheet. I push it all the way down, find golden strands of hair covering a mound that promises paradise. “Why are you like that with me?” she gasps. “I’m not made of glass. I can take care of myself.” The last word tapers upward, because I’ve found a fleshy knob she loves that I massage.

  “You’re so pretty.” I sink down over her, licking it. At first, I’m gentle, but when her hips bounce, I work her harder. “Here you’re pretty.”

  “Oh God. Stop.”

  “Really, you want me to stop?”

  Breathless, she laughs and pulls me down over her. The sheet wrinkles between us, obstructing my access. “No, I just want you inside of me first. Do you have plastics?”

  She lost me on that one, but then I thrust against her, letting the head of my cock play along her cleft. “Plastics?” I pant, until it dawns on me. “If you mean rubbers, then yeah. We’ve got a couple left.”

  I press inside of her, and in that moment, the very moment when her eyes go wide and meet mine, when the world becomes pure sensation, is when I stop focusing on anything else.

  “So crazy,” I puff out. “So very crazy.”

  “Because you try so hard not to,” she breathes, undulating with my moves. “I wish you didn’t.”

  “Do you?” I reply on autopilot.

  “Yeah. I think we’d be easy together.”

  Miami isn’t as good as I want it to be. We’re in an old skyscraper of a hotel on the beach with an amazing view and peeling plaster on the walls. The games are in a center fifteen minutes inland. With Dawson’s quiet nods and my mother’s stone-faced approval, I don’t knock my guy out until the fifth round. I’ve got his blood soaking into my boxers.

  He and I, we hug, sliding in red sweat, slapping each other’s backs. He needs to get his lip looked at. I ripped it open with a top-speed Muay Thai upper cut.

  Jaden came with as my corner man but left after our low-key dinner at a local lobster house. Me, I go to rest in the double I share with Maiko. She shuffles in from the bathroom, leaves her silk slippers neatly at the side of her bed before she folds the blanket to a side and seats herself in a half upright position against the pillows.

  She’s getting there, my mother. Seventy and counting. I don’t want her to get there. Hair grey and head small against the headboard, she’s a reminder of the volatility of life. What if I reach our goal and she’s not with me?

  “You’re distracted, Victor-san,” she murmurs. She swallows a small pill that means the world to her health, washing it down with water. “What is it that has you distracted these days?”

  I shake my head slowly and shut my eyes. Human instincts have eased their claws into me, and I try to meditate, to overcome them, but it seems like my thoughts want to make me fail: these, about my mother; these others, about Helena.

  My body, my machine, what submits to my will and follows orders to a point of raising eyebrows in the larger fighting community. I’ve already been quoted for my strategies, with secrets my mother doesn’t want me to divulge. I wish this body wasn’t fighting me now, wanting Helena more than it wants its regimen.

  “It’s nothing, Maiko.”

  “No? Nothing?”

  I shrug my shoulders, exhausted by myself, by how I cave in to Helena’s warmth. “It’s a girl. Nothing serious.”

  “You need your focus if you’re to reach the eighteen victories you need for the title fight.”

  “Yes. Yes. I’ll stay away from her. I won’t betray us for fleeting pleasure.” I owe her my everything.

  “I know, son. You know what you have to do.”

  Sleep isn’t restful. It hasn’t been since the airport in Amsterdam. But tonight, my mind doesn’t linger on Helena’s skin and her quiet sighs. It returns to what I don’t allow myself to think about while I’m awake. Maiko’s mortality.

  I’m superstitious. You need to think good thoughts, send out good vibes. Maiko has the best doctor, the best meds. My mother is young—she could turn a hundred with the diet she follows. But I’m a thinker, too much of a thinker, so the minutes and hours I spend not worrying about her awake get to me at night.

  In sleep I’m back in Thailand. I’m Chanchai, three years old. Four years old. I am five. And tonight, tonight I’m submerged in my earliest reality.

  My mother’s frailty chips at me. The almost-loss in the ring tonight wore me down. And then there’s Helena, sweetness and sunny days and need for protection. She’s Madonna and vixen, what sets me off and rocks me, and she causes my future to rumble and quaver.

  Yes, even in my dream, I know why I dream.

  VICTOR

  My stomach is so full. But then it’s not full at all. I’m three, and I’ve known the difference between good-full and bad-full for a long time.

  Sometimes when I whimper, someone comes along and changes it. I whimper now, at the foot of a Muay Thai ring. I’m curled up next to a friendly dog, a stray that’s had puppies. I don’t know where they are, but I saw them before. She licks me.

  “What’s up, kid?” someone shouts from above me. He’s got yellow eyes gleaming with fight. Blood streams from his nose, but his sweat smells like victory. “You hungry?”

  I bob my head, because that is why I cry. The fullness in my stomach is air, not food. I’ve seen this boy before. He’s not a man. I’ve seen him fight in the ring. Maybe he was the one making people scream out glory a while ago. I like to watch, but not when my stomach cramps around air.

  “I want to celebrate my win,” he huffs as he hunches to my level. He grabs underneath my arms, which flail, limp until he’s got me standing. “We’re getting Som Tam,” he tells me, and my mouth waters even though my stomach still cramps.

  We don’t walk far. This strong boy who’s almost a man has my wrist in a grip while he walks us to the corner. I’ve smelled the food all day, but I know better than to get close to the street seller myself; there are too many hungry kids here for him to be friendly.

  I hide behind the fighter. Around his arm, there’s a monster that’s biting its tail. It is scary and beautiful.

  My nostrils flare with the scent of chili and cooked shrimp, ground peanut and rice, oh I am so close to a real meal.

  I don’t trust that it will be mine until the fighter leans down and settles a small paper cone in my hands. He gives me a fork to eat with. I took a kick from the seller when I hovered too close last week, so I shrink out of view, back toward the Muay Thai rings with my prize. The fighter nods to me, a grin on his face. “Eat it slowly, okay, or it will hurt. It’s a lot of food for such a little guy.”

  I nod back to him, a thank you and an acknowledgment that I’ve understood. Yes, I know this. I’ve learned that eating too fast makes it all come up again, and then I’m as hungry as I was before I ate.

  So I sit down in the shade behind the ring. I keep my back to the dogs and they let me be. Maybe it is my dog friend, the mother dog whose
puppies I saw before. Maybe she watches over me.

  It’s hard to eat slowly. My mouth was dry before the fighter gave me dinner. Now, it produces all this saliva, and it wants to open so wide it could empty the whole cone’s worth of warm food in seconds.

  It hurts. I need water, something to soothe the heat in my mouth. I feel my lip tremble, because I used to have someone with me. They’re not here as much anymore. They were little like me, but older by years. They’d curse at me for being a baby, but they’d find water when I needed it even if they didn’t have food. I spend time alone now. I have my dog momma.

  She licks my back, a comfort, but my stomach feels worse than it did before.

  “Here, boy,” the fighter says, suddenly there. He holds out white liquid—it’s milk. I haven’t had milk in a while. “Small sips,” he continues when I grab the bottle with both hands, too eager. “Slowly. You have to listen.”

  Later, I’m relaxed in the shade by the ring. My body isn’t fighting me anymore. It has calmed around the food and the milk. I feel no hunger. I feel no pain. The fighter has left, but not until he gave me a T-shirt with black writing on it. He told me it’s mine now, that I should use it as a bed for my nap. My body likes his idea, so I lie down on it.

  Everyone has left the ring, probably to get their own lunch. But I’m here, and I have my momma dog. She lies down next to me too, liking the T-shirt as much as I do. And when I doze off, I’m smiling and fur tickles my half-dressed stomach. I know already that Muay Thai fighters are my heroes.

  “I dreamed of him again,” I tell Maiko when we’re packing up the hotel room in the morning. “The fighter who gave me my first warm meal when I was little.”

  Maiko nods solemnly. “He did you many favors. It was good.”

  My mother isn’t a woman of easy words, but each statement holds more than the sounds she enunciates. Her words are always clean and tidy. She can sum things up in ways no one else does, making order out of everyday chaos.

  “He did me so many favors,” I agree, folding a shirt and adding it to the shorts in my backpack. “That fighter kept me alive.”

  “Yes. He raised your vision from the ground to the mesh wire. At three, you wouldn’t have been by the rings because of your interest in martial arts.”

  “That’s true. I went there for the shade and the quiet corners. No one chased us away from the rings, so we kids would find each other there when we were lost.”

  “But you started believing in Muay Thai during that first meal,” Maiko says, not meeting my eyes. We’ve spoken about this before, many times. She knows the amber-eyed fighter’s influence on me.

  “He fed me again and again. He carried me up to see his fights. He couldn’t have been older than thirteen when he let me watch from atop the stairs, almost in his corner.” I smile to myself. “Even when other fighters grumbled about me being in the way, he spoke up and let me stay.”

  “He was a good fighter and a good person.”

  “He was. I wish I knew his name.” Then I realize what she just said and glance up from the side pocket where I’m trying to locate my ear buds. “You saw him fight?”

  She bobs her head once. “The day I discovered you. From your description, yellow-eyed, wiry, and with a monster tattoo. It must have been him fighting while you copied his moves from below.”

  “His overhand punch was always precise and effective,” I tell her, my knowledge of today put into the framework of old memories.

  “I witnessed one of those,” Maiko says. She fits her small feet into her sandals, readying herself to leave. “His kicks were good too. I recognize some of them in you. Your straight kick and your head kick especially.” She turns to me fully, waiting at the door while I maneuver her rolling bag past the bathroom. “But he had nothing on your speed.”

  “He was younger than I am now and had less training,” I defend. “He kept me alive.”

  “I’m aware.”

  In the elevator, I ask her again why she picked me. I do it less frequently than when I was younger, when I sat at her feet in the sunroom, watching her face, my savior, still remembering the rumbling of bloated air in my empty stomach. But I still ask it in moments when the past closes in and I need happy words. “Why didn’t you pick him? He was really young too.”

  Again, her gaze lifts and finds me feet above her. She never reminds me that I already know, and I love her even more for that. “Because you were special. The nimble strength in your body. Your burning eyes. You wanted it so much. On the fifth day we came by and you were still there with your dog, that is when I said to your father, ‘He’s the one.’”

  He’s the one.

  I close my eyes, feeling a smile plump my cheeks. My mother’s hand pats my arm with moth-wing weightlessness. Dry and small, it says with action what she doesn’t often express in words. “I love you.”

  HELENA

  “It’s the roof on the south wing, over the library. Your father can’t afford it, you know.” Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth sighs like he’s sad for Papa, but I’m not sure that he is.

  I’m being weird. Does being away from familiar surroundings make a person suspicious?

  “But don’t worry about it. You should take your little vacation in Florida—nothing wrong with that—and I’ll take care of this, all right? I’m calling the roofers. The thing is, wood is the original roofing material, but it’s time we stop patching it up. We should go more permanent. Shingles, which your ancestors would have opted for if they had the funds. Then all future roofing issues will be avoided. No rotting, no nothing.” He snickers, enjoying his own play with words.

  I frown. First off, it would be too expensive to lay a stone roof on Kyria with all its nooks and towers. Second, I like the thought of keeping it original even if it’s a pain to keep up. If I had the funds, I’d exchange the handmade, wooden shingles one wing at a time. Lastly, a big one: Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth is neither my husband nor a family member.

  My father seems to be accepting his financial assistance to get my home restored though. I’d really rather he didn’t.

  “What’s Papa saying to this?” I ask coldly.

  “Oh he’s brushing it off. He agrees to me paying for the patch-up but ‘needs to think about’ the stone roof. I’d say we do it right away.”

  “Listen,” I say. “Now is not the time. I’m not even there to assess the damage—”

  “That’s what you have me for, honey. I’m here while you play beach girl down in Florida.”

  I manage to be polite all the way through our thirty-minute conversation. When we hang up, his nasal whininess and the weak but dogged insistence on taking charge have me sick.

  I flop back on the couch and click the TV on.

  “Wassup, amore?” Angelo says on his way past with two tumblers of something drinkable. When I don’t reply at once, he steps backward into the doorway and waits, quizzical. “Something up?”

  I groan. “Just family. Or no, not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “Ex. You know, as in people wanting to marry you when you don’t.”

  “Yeah, I’m not familiar with that one,” he says. “Sucks. He wants you to come home again with the wedding dress and the crown and all that, do the deed? Go all the way?”

  “Probably, but right now he’s manipulating my family with his money.”

  “Whoa, complicated. Good luck with that,” Angelo says and shuffles down to his room. “I’m back, amore. I found exactly what the doctor ordered,” he purrs to someone. “A White Russian for you, Cuba Libre for me.” I shake my head. It’s not even noon yet. He went partying last night, and not with the landlady. Briefly, I wonder if this one is Angelo’s age.

  I’m mad at myself for picking up whenever Gunther Wilhelm calls. I need the news he so willingly shares, though. The problems my father spares me from. I can’t come clean when I call Papa. I can’t tell him I know what’s going on at Kyria, how he’s barely holding on by a thread financially. In my min
d, I see my home fall, a time lapse of roof and stone crumbling, my grandmother in the window above the pond, eyes glassy with despair and urgency.

  I look at my watch, finding the date of my departure from the U.S. closing in. I’m letting my father do his thing with the student visa. I’ll be signing off and doing all the in-person appointments and signatures as soon as I come home. I feel guilty about not straying from my plan, but I know I’m no good to Kyria if I don’t have skills and knowledge to help it survive.

  Papa, Papa. If at least you could be honest with me.

  Suddenly, I realize I don’t share details with him either. What if I told him more about my life here in Tampa? I could describe a day at the restaurant for him. I could tell him about my new friends, about the fighters, about my duties as a ring girl. Maybe even a PG version of Victor and me.

  I get up. Take my crown out of the dresser and hold it against the light. It looks like something you could buy at a novelty store, something to use for your bachelorette party. No one would guess the authenticity of it. The only one who knows hasn’t mentioned it since an airport ages ago.

  I pull the phone out of my pocket and text my father. Hi Papa. Are you around to talk on Skype?

  He is. My computer rings him with the buzzing of the old-fashioned grey phone that used to hang in Kyria’s grand foyer.

  “Hi, Mein Schatz. Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, Papa. I just wanted to chat.”

  And so we do.

  Tonight is busy at Hooters. The place is full of fighters, girlfriends, wives, and fighter groupies hoping to become girlfriends. The guys are hyped up. Most I’ve seen before in my almost six weeks in this job, but a few come from other camps than Alliance Cage Warriors. They’re here to support their teammates on the big televised event from Vegas.

  As far as I understand, there are six fights on the bill, which is a lot. The last one is a title fight. Jaden, Marty, Zeke, and Keyon have already claimed a booth in a section that isn’t mine. Zeke sends me a flirtatious wink over Allyn’s head. She’s busy taking Jaden’s order and ignores the Mediterranean-blue stare he x-rays her chest with.