Knockout

by Tracey Ward

  “She didn’t want to see him. She’s been avoiding him.”

  “Lot of that going around,” I muttered.

  It had been three weeks since I last saw Kellen. It seemed like the silence of the last couple months was broken because I got phone calls now and then, the odd text still came through every few days, but I didn’t see him at all. And we still hadn’t talked about ‘it’ or ‘us’ or whatever it was that felt like a looming question mark between us. I wanted an absolution but I wasn’t sure I’d want the one I was going to get. Either way, I waited because I’m patient as anything and I promised him I would. And I never go back on my promises.

  Dad looked at me sideways. “You guys okay?”

  I laughed shortly, nervously. “No. Not really. But I don’t know what to do about it so I’m doing nothing. I guess I’m waiting.”

  “Are you waiting or are you avoiding?”

  “Both? But even if I am, so is he.”

  “Hmm. He’s a tough one.”

  “Have you been talking to him?”

  Dad nodded silently.

  “Did he take the fireman’s exam?”

  “He told you about that?”

  “Once forever ago. I haven’t heard anything since.”

  “He passed.”

  “He did?” I exclaimed excitedly.

  Dad smiled at me. “Yeah. He failed a couple times, most people do, but just last week he passed. He’s looking for a job now. He’s got a lot of stuff in the works.”

  “Like what?”

  He gave me a long, pensive look before pulling me into a hug again. “Keep waiting. Be patient. You’ll see.”

  ***

  Two weeks later I got a text message from Kellen. It was another address, only this one came with a date and time. I was to be at a random business complex in four days at 2pm. He wasn’t asking so I didn’t answer.

  I was nervous when I pulled up. I’d been nervous for four days. I hadn’t known what I was walking into so I was stressing about what I was wearing. I’d finally settled on casual; same jeans and tanks I wore to work every day. At least I wasn’t in vinyl underwear this time.

  As I got out, I scanned the small business complex, checking out the names on all of the marquees. Dentist, orthopedic surgeon, therapist, tax office, cash advance joint. I was at a loss. Were we here to brighten my smile? Talk taxes regarding the store? The idea of accounts and taxes and math and numbers made me suddenly sick inside. I worried I’d vomit in the parking lot.

  “Jenna,” Kellen called.

  I turned to my right, surprised. I had been looking for his motorcycle but it was nowhere to be found. Instead, he stepped out of a large black truck parked a couple spots away. I opened my mouth to comment on it, to tell him I liked his new ride, when he shut the door and my eyes landed on the side panel. There was a large decal. A compass rose covered in brilliant purple lettering.

  North Star Ink.

  “I…” I tried, but I failed to finish the thought. I don’t even know if I started it properly.

  “What do you think?” he asked, flipping his keys in his hands. He grinned as he strode toward me, his eyes bright.

  “About the truck or the free advertising?” I asked, laughing slightly.

  “Truck first, advertising second.”

  “Hot and thank you. That’s unbelievable. I can’t believe you allowed purple on your car.”

  “If your logo had been hot pink it’d be another story. That purple I can handle.”

  “What happened to the bike?”

  “It’s still around. I garaged it for now. This made more sense at the moment.”

  I clenched my hands nervously. “I heard you’re on the job hunt. Congrats on passing the exam.”

  His smile faded slightly. “Your dad told you?”

  “Yeah. Should he not have?”

  “It’s fine. I was going to tell you when I had a job lined up.”

  I smiled sadly. “Used to be you would have told me the hour it happened.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said quietly, looking down at his keys in his hands. “But I… I have things I’ve been lining up. Things that… things you need to know about. Things I want you to know, but I haven’t… I know I’ve been distant. It’s not what you think, though. I have to… Fuck.”

  “Kel, it’s okay.”

  He looked up at me, his eyes frustrated. “It’s not. Not yet. But it will be, I swear.”

  “I trust you,” I whispered.

  “Still?”

  “Always.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, his face unreadable, then he quickly pulled me to him. His arms wrapped around me gently, loosely hugging me the way he would have five years ago when all we knew was the bond we felt between us and the comfort of finding a place to call home. I hugged him back feeling like I’d walked a thousand miles to get to this moment. I was exhausted and relieved because whatever was left between us, it was still good. It was still strong and even if it wasn’t what we had planned, it was perfect because it was what we needed.

  “So,” I said lightly when he released me. “Why am I here? Am I learning about tax shelters for my millions? Can I get a Swiss bank account?”

  His brow pinched in confusion. I pointed to the logo over the office closest to us. It was for the tax office.

  “You can if you want, but that’s not why we’re here,” he said, leading me farther down.

  “Okay. Then why?”

  He stopped in front of a door, opening it for me. I could read the now backwards lettering through the glass panel in the door.

  Benjamin Phillips, PhD

  Family Therapy

  I glanced sideways at Kellen as we walked into the small lobby. There was a massive potted plant that looked too pretty to be real that I absolutely wanted to touch, but being in a therapists office I worried it was a test of some kind. Paranoid? Yeah, but I wasn’t about to touch that damn plant. There was a woman in her forties behind the counter who smiled when she saw Kellen, clearly recognizing him.

  “He’s waiting for you now,” she said, gesturing to the solid unmarked door to our right.

  I glanced around at the rest of the waiting room, noting the empty brown chairs and scattering of magazines. It was pretty standard and it felt normal, which felt weird. I was beginning to think I didn’t totally understand therapy.

  Kellen surprised me when he took my hand to lead me through the door. He obviously knew where he was going as we strode down a short hallway and pushed through a cracked door on the right.

  We entered a small office that was surprisingly dark. I held Kellen’s hand a little tighter, causing him to give mine a reassuring squeeze in return.

  “Kellen, right on time. And I see you have Jenna with you. Excellent.”

  An older man with a mess of white hair and a warm smile approached me, hand outstretched. I released Kellen to shake his hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “You as well. I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m Dr. Phillips. You can call me Ben if you prefer.”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said awkwardly. How I addressed him kind of depended on what exactly was happening here.

  “What has Kellen told you about our process? About what he has planned for tonight’s session?”

  I glanced at Kellen helplessly. “I have no idea what’s happening. I’m getting that you’ve started therapy?”

  He nodded, watching me silently.

  “Okay. That’s good. Right?”

  “I hope so,” he said, his voice low.

  “It’s wonderful,” Dr. Phillips interjected. “It’s the first step down a long road but we’ve already been making progress.”

  “How long have you been coming here?” I asked Kellen.

  “Since the day after we told Laney about us.”

  I nodded in understanding. Since the day after we had sex. Three months ago.

  “And you’re a family therapist?” I asked Dr. Phillips.


  He shrugged noncommittally. “Normally, yes. I do deal with families and couples therapy. Marriage counseling. But Kellen and I have been doing some initial one on one and now he’d like to involve you in the process.”

  “We’re not married,” I blurted.

  Dr. Phillips grinned. “I know that. That’s alright. I understand you have a long history, though, and Kellen has told me you’d both like to move forward in the relationship but there are roadblocks.”

  “I’m fucked up,” Kellen simplified.

  I looked at him, exasperated. “You’re not.”

  “I am.”

  “He is a little,” Dr. Phillips agreed.

  “Are you allowed to say that?” I asked him, shocked.

  “Evidently, yes.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll do whatever I can to help. What do you need from me?”

  “I need you to sit silently in that corner for this entire session.”

  I followed his finger where it pointed to a very dark corner of the room.

  “Am I on time out?” I asked, unsure.

  “I can’t think about the fact that you’re here,” Kellen told me.

  “Then why am I?”

  “Because I need you to know some things. Things I can’t tell you. Do you remember the day on the sidewalk outside the gym when you covered my eyes and told me to pretend you weren’t there?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  It stung to think about that day. I hadn’t been to one of his bouts in so long. I hadn’t realized how much I missed watching him fight until that moment.

  “I need you to do that again. Someday maybe I’ll be able to tell you the things I need to tell you while looking you in the eye. I hope I can. But for now, I know I can’t. So I need you to sit where I can’t see you so I can forget you’re there and you can hear the things you need to know about me.”

  “Okay,” I agreed softly, feeling anxious. I knew a lot about Kellen. More than anyone. It almost scared me to think there were things even I didn’t know. I glanced at Dr. Phillips. “So, I’ll go do that now? I’ll sit down over there?”

  “And stay absolutely still and silent,” he reminded me.

  “Alright.”

  I went to go to my chair in the dark but Kellen took hold of my arm gently as I passed him.

  “Thank you,” he said earnestly.

  “No problem.”

  “I mean it, Jen. I know it’s a strange thing to ask.”

  “Kel,” I whispered, “I’d do anything for you.”

  He pulled me closer and pressed a kiss to my forehead.

  I sat down in the dark corner of the room watching the back of Kellen’s body as he leaned forward on the couch, his arms coming to rest on his thighs. His shoulders were high, tight. Already I knew he didn’t like what was happening, even if it was his idea. It was a posture I’d seen him take countless times when he was cornered by the world. When life had him against the ropes and he didn’t know how to fight his way out so he did what he did in the ring; he vanished. He ducked, he dove, he evaded. He ran. He would do anything to get his stance back. To feel like he was in control again, even if it meant losing a point or two.

  Despite all his skill, all his spit, his piss and vinegar, when things got hard, in life or in the ring, Kellen refused to fight.

  And I was about to find out why.

  “There are things I’m going to say,” Kellen started, his voice quiet I could hardly hear him, “that I’m only ever going to say once. That’s why you’re both here. Jenna,” he turned his head faintly, his profile exposed to me in the dark and he looked so much like the sketch I’d done of him that my heart wrenched in my chest. “I need you to know all of it. I can’t promise I’ll ever talk about any of it again, but I’m saying it to you now. It’s not everything you want, it’s definitely not as much as you deserve and I know that, but it’s also not easy for me and I hope it’s enough.”

  Kellen faced forward again, his head dropping as he looked down at his clenched hands. “I grew up in the foster system in L.A. because my mom died when I was a kid. She was my only family. It was just her and I in a tiny apartment on the wrong side of The Strip. We didn’t have much. Most of what we had was left over from my grandpa. He was a low talent boxer who drug her to Vegas from Ireland when she was only seven, right after her mom disappeared into thin air. My dad…” Kellen sighed violently, sitting back hard against the couch. “That son of a bitch was never around. I never met him. All I have of him are my eyes and a bank account full of dirty money. He opened the account in my mom’s name. Dropped large sums of money in it every month to help her with me, but my mom refused to touch it. Even when things got hard.”

  He paused. The room felt darker in his silence. “She started getting sick when I was eight, right when I started boxing. I wanted to be like my grandpa because I didn’t understand yet what a piece of shit he’d been. As she got sick she had to stop working as much. Money got tighter but we always managed to stay afloat. Even when she quit entirely and moved us out here to California. She started staying in the hospitals longer and longer. She started shrinking. She was pale and fragile. By nine years old I was bigger than her. I weighed more.” He quickly ran his hand over his mouth. “She was wasting away in front of me and I couldn’t stop it. Then one morning she didn’t wake up.

  “I was alone after that. I went straight into the foster care system. It wasn’t bad at first but I was a kid crying every night. People didn’t know what to do with me. I got picked on for being a baby and I started lashing out. I started fighting. I was good at it. Better than my grandpa ever was. I got in trouble for fighting. Families wouldn’t take me in because I was considered violent. I started being put with different types of families. People more prepared to handle my aggression.”

  “People who were aggressive themselves,” Dr. Phillips said quietly.

  Kellen nodded. “Yeah. Yeah.” He glanced over his shoulder slightly again, still not fully looking at me. “I took beatings in those homes. A lot of them. I learned to dish them out and I learned to take them but I hated it. I always hated it. It’s why I fell in love with boxing. It took all of that anger and violence and it structured it for me. It organized it until I could deal with it and I didn’t feel like I was drowning in it. Once I figured that out, I stopped fighting back. I took the beatings. Along with everything else.”

  Kellen stood suddenly as though he’d been shocked.

  “I can’t talk about this with her here,” he snapped at the doctor angrily. “I thought I could but I won’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s fucked up. It’s ugly and I won’t let it anywhere near her. You can put a pin in it and maybe someday you and I will talk about it, but I’m never discussing it in front of her.”

  “Kellen, are you afraid of her judging you? Of seeing you differently?”

  “I’m afraid of tainting her with it!” he roared. “She’s perfect and I’ve ruined that.”

  “You haven’t ruined her, Kellen.”

  “I’ve been inside her. I’ve held her. I’ve kissed her. Everything that was done to me, everything that I’ve done, has been done to her now.” He drug his fingers roughly through his hair as he cursed over and over again.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My heart hurt for him but my blood boiled as well. Imagining Kellen as a kid going through what people had put him through… someone touching him roughly…taking from him. I wanted to kill.

  “We need to talk about this,” Dr. Phillips said firmly. “This is why we’re all here, Kellen. This is the root of the way you approach sex. Why you use it to distance yourself from people. You’re using it to take control, make it your choice but you’re unable to feel anything in connection to it because you’re afraid of the emotions that go with it.” The man paused, watching Kellen as he towered before him, his eyes on the floor. “You’re afraid of sex, aren’t you? It stirs fear inside you. Hate. Anger. The violence you work so ha
rd to keep in check. Which is why you shut down. Why you choose to feel nothing.”

  Fuck her like you hate her.

  I remembered Kellen saying that about a girl he’d been with. At the time I’d thought it was an off color joke, a shocking statement that served me right for poking and prodding at him and his history. But now… now I wasn’t so sure it was a joke at all.

  Kellen shook his head back and forth slowly.

  “When you had sex with Jenna, what did you feel?”

  I blushed in the darkness. Neither of them could see me very well tucked in this dark corner, but even ghosts got embarrassed when their sex life was discussed with a stranger.

  “Pain,” Kellen told him reluctantly. “It hurt more than anything else.”

  “Because you were trying to connect with her. Kellen, the fact that you felt anything at all is a breakthrough. Even better that it wasn’t anger. What else did you feel?”

  “Grateful.”

  “Why grateful?”

  “Because I knew… I knew if I fucked it up, she’d still be there.”

  “You’ve been left a lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you’re not worried Jenna will leave you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she loves me.” He sat back down again slowly, the anger leaching out of him. “She loves me the way I love her.”

  “And how do you love her, Kellen?”

  His breathing was labored. Heavy.

  “Completely.”

  I pressed trembling fingers to my mouth, stifling the sounds of my crying. I cried for him the way I had when he’d shown up at our house in the middle of the night. When once again I’d stood in shadow, watching and listening. When I’d seen him and I’d known him and I’d ached for him. I’d cried silently then as I did now because the last thing on earth he ever wanted was pity.

  I wanted to die then. I wanted to never know the rest of our story because I didn’t know how it would turn out, how he could possibly recover from the things he’d been through. I wanted the knowledge that he loved me through and through to be the end of us because it was everything I’d longed for and I hoped it was at least one beautiful thing in his world. It was a silver lining to all the years we’d spent apart, all the hurt and the missed chances and poor timing. This was the victory to the fight we’d been in for half of our lives.