by Tracey Ward
I wasn’t about to find out if it was equally strong. I was done being amazed and distracted. He was ambidextrous. It was a pain but it wasn’t impossible to prepare for. I knew that better than most.
I dodged his hit and landed one of my own on his cheek. He startled, surprised because guess what, asshole – I could fight both left and right handed too. One of the only perks of going into a coma and waking up with a shattered fighting hand - you found a new way to win.
We slowly circled each other looking for a weakness, an opening, and I settled deeper inside myself. Deeper into the beast in my blood.
Going into the dark when I had sex - that was like blacking out. I was all primal, pure motor function and feeling. No heart. No head. Just a body with base instincts that begged to be met. The animal was different. He was cunning. He was powerful and pensive. I knew where I was, what I was doing, and how it should be done. While the dark was empty, the animal was full. Full of fight, full of hate, of anger, of strength. Of all the things I was afraid to feel when I was myself because if I did, if I let them out, I’d blow apart. I would have beat my foster father blind for the abuse he gave me. I would have hunted down Sophia and left her as carrion for the way she made me suffer.
I would have cried myself sick from the anguish in those years I was sure I’d lost Jenna forever.
And tonight as I was surrounded by a family that was taking me in as though I were already their own, laughing with me, accepting me, loving me without question, I felt something building inside that was almost too much to bear. A strange mix of sorrow, hope, and relief that threatened to pull me under, to send me running, so I fed it to the animal. I gave it to the fight.
I let the animal run, I let him feast, and he ate like a king.
Mason took advantage of a stutter in my step, one I put there to draw him in, and he lunged at me. I was ready and waiting, blocking the punch easily and taking the opening in his side. I hit him hard, knocking the air out of his lungs, but he bounced back quickly. He put distance between us as he recovered and then he was back in my space, coming at me with a left foot and a left hand that made no sense. It took me completely by surprise.
I nearly fell out of the ring. A cry of protest rose from the crowd, Jenna’s voice inside it like a bell sounding strong and clear through a storm. She was there in my peripheral – on her feet with her hands on her hips in a stance she picked up from my coach, Tim. It was impatient and intense. The one that said they knew I could do better so why hell wasn’t I?
I dodged around Mason, putting him off balance, and I got him in the back. Kidney shot. It snapped his head back and pulled an angry grunt from his gut.
“Come on, Mason!” Owen yelled. “Keep on your toes!”
“He’s roit handed but he hits from his left!” Mason shouted back.
“So do you!”
“I do, but it’s focking annoying to fight against.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” I told him grimly.
He turned to me, eying me shrewdly. “Did ya teach yourself that?”
“I had to.”
“Why?”
I smiled in response. I wasn’t about to tell him I had to do it because my right hand screamed like a devil on fire whenever I used it. That every bone had been fractured, shattered, and had to be painstakingly rebuilt. That it never healed right and it never would.
“Right then,” he growled in response to my silence.
Mason came at me and I didn’t bother reading his footing. It didn’t matter. There was nothing to read meaning I had nothing to go on. He’d mix it up and throw me off all night, just like I could do to him. So instead of reading him I wrote the story for him. I met him halfway, rushing him, and I hit him in the jaw with my left hand. Then again. He got me in the side, again on the cheek, and just as he was raising his hand to deflect another blow from my left hand, I threw my right.
It was white hot agony.
I didn’t pull the punch. I came at him full force like I’d never been hurt before because that was what the animal did – he lived every moment, every fight, like it was his first and his last. He wasn’t afraid of shit and when the pain came I howled on the inside and burned even deeper. I threw another punch and another. Another. All from my bad hand that had a cannon behind it, and as tears sprang to my eyes I saw Mason go down on one knee, his arms raising up.
I backed off immediately, reining it in just as Sorcha called the end of the match.
“Kellen wins,” she said quietly from beside Jenna.
My chest heaved as I filled my lungs with cold air. It burned the back of my throat like fire and I turned my eyes to the sky, trying to calm myself. Trying to stop the tears the way Jenna did.
I hadn’t gone off with my right hand like that since the accident. I’d used it but never like that. Never full force, never more than once or twice. My gut clenched against the sick that threatened to rise up my throat. My right arm shook with the pain and exertion, but I took a shuddering breath, pushed through the agony, and offered my left hand to Mason.
He looked up at me with sweat on his face, blood in the corner of his mouth, and he bumped my glove with his before standing up. “Why ya don’t lead with that hand is beyond me,” he grumbled roughly. “It’s focking evil.”
Jenna crossed the yard to me, gingerly taking my hand up in hers and pulling at the laces. “It’s broken.”
“What do you mean it’s broken?”
“He fractured it in a car accident last year. It’s never been the same. It hurts like a son of a bitch when he hits with it.”
“I know.”
She shook her head, her mouth a thin line. “No, not for you. For him.”
“Jesus, man,” Sean breathed. “Ya shoulda said somethin’. We wouldn’a asked ya to foit.”
“I like to fight,” I told them roughly, watching Jenna’s hands and trying to hide the tears that still threatened my eyes. “I need to fight.”
Mason stood behind Jenna, pulling off his own gloves. “You’re good. Busted my lip on my tooth with that last one.”
“I’m sorry. We should have had mouth guards.”
He laughed. “What else? Armor as well? It was a foit, mate. How would I know I’d been in one if I wasn’t bleedin’ in the mornin’?”
“Are you okay?” Jenna asked, not looking up into my face. Giving me my privacy there in the darkened corner of the yard out of the reach of lights and eyes.
“I will be.”
“We’ll get this glove off and I’ll ice it. I’ll see if Sorcha has something for the swelling.”
“It’s not swollen.”
“No, but it will be.” She pulled off the glove slowly. I hissed tightly in the back of my throat, making her wince sympathetically. “You didn’t have to use it, Kel. It was a friendly fight.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
“It’s the animal,” I grunted.
She held my hand lightly in hers, her face a persistent questioning shadow filling my vision.
“When I’m in the ring,” I explained, “any ring, I’m all in it. I go to the animal, to the anger, and I put everything out there. You know it’s how I get right in my head when I’m all fucked up.”
“What did you need to work out today?”
I wanted to pull away. To avoid this conversation, this feeling in my heart, but I didn’t want to run from her either. I was torn, tormented and lost, pulled apart inside my own skin, so instead of running and instead of answering I put my left hand behind her head, pulled her in close, and I held onto her.
We stood there together like that for what felt like hours. In and out, slow and even. Jenna and I. Breathing.
Eventually she pulled back and lowered my hand slowly. “I’ll get you that ice,” she whispered.
“Thanks.”
She disappeared with Sorcha into the house, leaving me alone with the men. All of them were drinking again. Smiling.
“Sorry ‘bout ye
r hand, boy, but it was a good match. Good foit,” Owen told me heartily.
Sean saluted me with his cup, agreeing silently.
“I’ll get ya next time, ya bastard,” Mason told me with a wry grin and a slap on the shoulder.
I laughed shakily, still feeling raw from the pain in my hand and the warmth in my heart. “Yeah, you’re welcome to try.”
Mason laughed before he sauntered into the house, shouting something about needing a hot meal and a hot girl. Jenna and Sorcha laughed at him, the sound disappearing as the door shut behind him. Even then I could hear his responding chuckle, deep and full.
It made me ache inside in every empty corner I possessed.
“Ya alright, lad?” Sean asked me casually. He nodded to my hand. “Is it giving ya trouble?”
I looked down at it without interest. On the outside it was normal, the pain hidden down deep where only I knew about it, and the glaring metaphor that it was for my life was not lost on me. I understood it very well. It didn’t mean it made it easy to manage.
“It’s fine. I’m used to it,” I promised him.
“Does Jenna know how to mend it?”
“Jenna knows how to mend everything.”
A silence fell between us as the other men drank their whiskey and I carefully massaged my injured hand. It wasn’t awkward or strange. No one felt a need to fill it with anything but our breath on the air and the sound of laughter coming from the kitchen. It was peaceful. Comfortable.
It set me on edge.
“Well, I’m knackered,” Sean announced, tossing the dregs of his drink into the bushes behind him. “I’m off to find my wife and my bed. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Sean.”
“’Night,” Owen answered.
Sean walked toward me to go into the house, pausing as he passed.
“To look at ya there’s not much about us,” he said pensively, studying my face. “But in here,” he knocked his knuckles against my chest, over my heart, “yer a Coulter through and through.”
“Aye, yer one of us, lad,” Owen agreed with a grin, “whether ya like it or not.”
I smiled, stumbling on my feet as Owen pulled me into a crushing hug that felt like a balm on every tired, shaking muscle in my frigid body. I wasn’t ready for the embrace and I definitely wasn’t ready for the tears that stung my eyes when he let me go. I tried to hide them, tried to look down and surreptitiously wipe them from my face before they saw them, but Owen had his mom’s keen eyes. He caught them and my shoulders, holding me firm.
“Listen here, Kellen.” His tone was gentle but severe. “Ya don’t need to be ashamed with us. Not of nothin’, definitely not yer joy. We’re yer family. Yer clann. We’d foit for ya. Die for ya ‘cause that’s what a man does.” He shook me roughly, making me lift my watery eyes to his. “Ya live hard, ya love harder, and ya put your family first above everythin’ else. That’s what makes ya a man. And if yer not afraid to cry o’er the fullness of your heart, well, that’s what makes ya an Irishman.”
I looked at him for too long. Longer than I normally could have stood, but then I tossed my body against his and embraced him hard the way he’d hugged me and I let the tears fall from my eyes. I let my heart overflow onto my face, into the night, and I’d never felt more fulfilled in my life.
I’d never felt more whole.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jenna
“It’s an ocean,” Kellen commented drolly.
“I suspected it might be.”
“Do you know how I knew?”
“You’re a genius?”
“Not anymore.”
“Enough. You’re genius enough, trust me. I feel it every time we watch Jeopardy.”
“But the ocean,” he prodded.
“Oh, right, yes. The ocean. How did you know?”
“It’s made of water.”
“Yes.”
“And there are waves.”
“Whoa,” I breathed in amazement. I put my hands on the sides of my head, mimicking a burst from my skull. “Boom. Mind blown, buddy.”
He grinned. “I thought you’d like that.”
“I love learning.”
“Not French.”
“No.”
“And not Gaelic.”
“For fu—“ I snapped, exasperated. “We’ve been here three days. How have you learned so much of it in three days?”
“I thought you said I was a genius,” he laughed.
“You passed genius a long time ago. You’re a friggin’ witch at this point.”
“Warlock,” he corrected.
I shoved him hard in the shoulder, toppling him onto his side in the grass. He was quick to grab me, pulling me down with him until I lay there next to him on the cold earth with the ocean at my back, his body at my front, and the low afternoon sky hovering in swirling clouds above us.
We were alone on the cliff overlooking the sea. We’d borrowed Owen’s car and taken a drive together to find it. To see it for his mother the way we planned six months ago when we sat overlooking another ocean on another day that felt like a million miles and minutes from where we were now.
Yesterday we’d spent the day with Mason on a tour of Dublin, checking out the Guinness factory, having lunch by the River Liffey, wandering the campus of Trinity College. We’d ended the day at a pub with some of his ‘mates’, two of whom were intensely British. It shed a lot of light on the bastardization of his accent.
Today I wanted to make sure we saw this, the ocean, because I knew Kellen wanted it but he’d never ask for it. It was too much to talk about. We hadn’t mentioned his mom as we sat there – now laying there – but she was in the air. She was on his mind and I knew it by the way he got quiet. Not cagey the way he did over the abuse, but melancholy. Almost sullen.
Kind of like he was right now with his brows pinched together and his dark eyes brewing something sinister behind them.
“What is it?” I whispered.
His face instantly cleared. “What’s what?”
“What were you thinking about?”
He didn’t answer. He looked out at the sea again and he avoided my eyes, but I shook him gently, unwilling to let it go.
“She would have loved to see you with your family like this,” I told him.
The scowl returned. “You don’t know that.”
“I can imagine, though. She’d want you to be happy.”
“Then she should have sent me here to them before she died.”
“She didn’t know them, Kellen.”
“She didn’t know the people in the foster system either,” was his barbed reply.
I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t know how to defend a woman I’d never met so I stopped trying. I lay there next to him, my body hugged loosely to his by his arm, and his eyes on the horizon.
I was cold. I’d made a mistake with what I wore, not anticipating the shift in the weather from chilly to downright cold as balls. I wore three layers – tank top, long tunic, and jacket – over thin black leggings that were letting the cold from the ground seep into my hip. Into my legs. I had regrets, but coming here with Kellen was not one of them.
I knew he was angry at his mom. I’d known for a while, even though he never talked about it. This right now, this frustration, was the closest I’d ever seen and to be honest it scared me. Madeline was the one person in the world he’d ever trusted with his whole heart and ever since he found out that she’d kept him from his birth father even as she knew she was dying, he had a thorn in his paw. One that was festering. Infected and angry. Aching.
“I wish—“ He paused, taking a breath. The scowl deepened. “I wish I could ask her why. Why did she work so damn hard to keep me away from my dad? And if she knew she was dying and she knew we had family in Ireland why didn’t she send me to them? Why didn’t she at least contact them and tell them what was happening?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but Kellen wasn’t done.
“She ha
d to have a reason. She had to. She loved me. She wouldn’t have just quit on me. I was only a— Fuck.”
“You were only a kid,” I supplied quietly.
He nodded. “Yeah. I was a kid. I was alone. She took me out of Vegas like she was trying to make sure I didn’t end up with my dad, but why? How bad could he have been that she wanted me alone instead of with him?”
“Ask him.”
His eyes flickered to mine, then darted away. “No.”
“He’s the only one who knows,” I reminded him slowly. “He’s the only one who was there. Just him and your mom and she can’t answer these questions, but maybe he can.”
“If I go see him I’ll just end up in jail again.”
“You won’t.”
“I’d hit him, Jenna,” he insisted.
“Why?”
He chuckled darkly, then fell silent. I wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t have an answer or if he didn’t want to voice it. With Kellen it could go either way.
I decided to try a different tack. I decided to answer for him. “You’re angry at him because your mom was angry at him. You don’t know why. You’re following the leader. Your mom was your world and who she loved, you loved. Who she hated…”
I could see the wheels turning, picking up speed. His breathing became harsher, more labored. Angry.
“You need answers,” I reminded him, unwilling to let up. “You always want to know why and how. You read books on subjects you don’t give two shits about, but you still want to know just for the sake of knowledge, and of all things you have to know this, Kellen. Finding out the why on her hate toward him might answer the why on her isolating you, and you need that. You want that for her as much as for yourself. Probably more.”
He looked at me hard. He didn’t hide behind a mask the way he usually did. He let me see his anger, his displeasure. His frustration and annoyance, and some of it was for me, but it was because I was right. That I could live with.
“I don’t want to like him,” he told me coldly.
“You don’t have to like him to talk to him.”
“I’m still going to punch him in the face.”
“If he’s been a gambler in Vegas all these years I doubt it’ll be the first time.”