“Ah, damn it,” he exclaims after one particularly strong motion and stays still.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“My back. Did something to it just now.”
I help him roll over and lie next to him.
“Is it really that bad?”
“Nah, I am faking. Just wanted to take a little break.”
He tries to reach over to get a bottle of water from the nightstand and winces in pain. I hand him the bottle and he can barely sit up to drink, and then he lies back down and closes his eyes.
“Drago, I’m sorry I made you go dancing. I didn’t know your back was really hurting.”
“It’s all right. I’ll go see my doc tomorrow. He’ll give me a shot or something.”
Lying side by side, we are breathing deeply, wanting each other really badly. He is still very hard, and I reach with my hand and start touching him. He tries to pull me on top of him, and I get on top, but do not let him inside me yet. I lean in and kiss him hard on the mouth and bite his upper lip. He grabs the back of my head and kisses me for a long time. I pull away and look at him and then touch his shoulders, his chest, his stomach. I never knew it was possible to derive so much pleasure from just touching someone’s skin, inhaling its scent, kissing it. Every touch seems to reverberate inside me. Why this man? What is it about him that makes me feel as if a small fire, pleasurable and agonizing at the same time, started burning in me every time there is contact between us? It is as if I had taken some sort of a drug that makes all my sensors work at their highest mode when I am with him.
I take him in my mouth.
“If you keep doing this, I will come,” he says after a short while.
I show him a thumbs up.
“No,” he gently pushes my head away.
“Why?”
“Because I want this,” he says and sits me on top of him.
After some time he suddenly grabs me and lifts my hips off of him, so as not to come inside.
*****
Afterward we are both terribly hungry. I suggest I can bring stuff from the kitchen, but he says we’ll both go and eat at the table like civilized people. It takes him several minutes to swing his legs off the bed and pull on his jeans. He can’t stand up very straight and his gait is slow and uneven.
“Yup, look what you did,” he says and tries to smile.
“And taking painkillers won’t help at all? You have ibuprofen, don’t you?”
“Helps with inflammation. Does not do anything for pain, not for me. Told you, I am resistant to pain medication.”
As we turn the light on in the kitchen, a number of roaches run in different directions from the sink.
“Yeah,” Drago says. “They don’t like it when someone turns the light on unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Disrupts their pastime.”
“Yeah, I noticed the first time I was here. Thought it a very picturesque feature of the apartment.”
Drago rummages in the fridge and takes out bread, Brie cheese, radishes, blueberries, strawberries, and a mango. He also finds some dark chocolate. We put everything on the table and sit down—me in one of his Henley shirts, which is pretty big and hangs off one shoulder, he in his jeans—and eat. After a while he gets up because it hurts his back more when he is sitting down and continues to eat while standing up and leaning against the counter. I put my naked legs up on the empty chair and he stares at them. I study the tattoo on his arm, but I’m more interested in the discolored patches of skin and the story behind those. I try to ask again.
“When you were burned, was it in an explosion?”
“Nope.”
“What then?”
He shakes his finger at me. “Give it up.”
“Tell me.”
“All right. It was napalm mixed with gasoline, in a fire extinguisher. It shoots fifteen feet. Napalm burns through the flesh. Nothing can extinguish it.”
I put down a piece of mango I am eating at the moment. “Why did they do that to you?”
“Well, I guess they must have been angry with me.”
“Why?”
“Probably because I tried to arrest them, and they had different plans for their immediate future.”
“So basically, it was your fault?”
“Exactly. I brought it on myself,” he laughs.
“Did it happen in your country?”
“Nope.”
“Where?”
“In Austria.”
“What were you doing trying to arrest people in Austria?”
“Don’t remember.”
“Were you working for Europol or Interpol or something?”
“Ha! You know many interesting words, girl. Are you done eating?” He asks staring at my legs again.
“Why?” I get up and come up to him looking him in the eyes. He puts his arms around me, pulls me in close, and moves his hands down my back, my ass, my thighs, and then under the Henley shirt.
“Thought it wasn’t good for your back?”
“It’s not. Tomorrow, I won’t be able to move at all,” he says and then turns me around and leans me against the counter.
Chapter 12
I wake up and look at Drago. He is lying on his back, breathing heavily and breaking into short and torturous bursts of snore every few seconds. Before we fell asleep, he said that it was not cool how I had just left “in the middle of the night” the last time, and that I should definitely wake him up this time and, if his back was not too bad, he’d give a ride to the dojo. But we went to sleep so late, not before four in the morning, and he still turned around in bed for quite a while before he could find a more or less comfortable position for his back. And now, two hours later, I just can’t seem to bring myself to wake him up. No, I won’t do that. Let him sleep. Maybe his back will feel better after he’s gotten some rest.
The Rottweiler walks me to the door again, her kind and sad eyes watching me with great attention while I put on my coat and boots. The one-eyed cat makes an appearance as well, first sitting at a bit of a distance and then coming up and rubbing against my feet. They both look awfully drowsy, and I kind of envy them, knowing that as soon as I leave they will go back to sleep.
After I close the door behind me I stand in the hallway for a few moments, picturing the apartment I have just left. Drago in the bedroom. The dog and the cat in the living room. Roaches in the sink in the kitchen. Damn it, I miss it all already, and I haven’t even gone five feet away.
Once again I take the Q train, but this time I get off after only one stop, at the 86th Street Station. I walk to 82nd and 1st to check up on Danilo. The last few days he hasn’t been answering my phone calls. I know there is very little chance he will be at the apartment now. He’s most likely spending the night anywhere else rather than at home. Still, I decide to take a look. If he is in and sleeping, I won’t wake him up, and will just leave quietly.
I go up to the fifth floor and open the door with my key.
Walking into the bedroom, I sort of gasp and stand still for a few moments, leaning against the wall.
Danilo is lying in bed, on top of the covers, awake. His neck is in a brace, right arm in a cast, he has an eye patch over one eye and nose inserts sticking out of his nostrils, his lower lip is cut badly and swollen to triple its normal size, and when he opens his mouth I can see two teeth are missing.
“Hello, Sash,” he pronounces with great difficulty. “My face is ruined.”
“Oh, Danny, what happened?” I sit at the side of the bed and blink rapidly so as not to start crying.
He does not answer and just looks at me with his one good eye, and his gaze is sadder than the Rottweiler’s.
“You did another Dark Fight?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh no! Why? Never mind. Just tell me, how bad is the neck injury?”
>
A cervical fracture is something all fighters probably fear the most. Danilo being in his bed and not at the hospital means he does not have a severe break, and I guess I should not be this scared. But seeing him like this, with the cervical collar on, I cannot help but feel terrified. Even a minor fracture would have my brother bedridden for weeks and might have serious complications and require a surgery later on.
“There is no fracture,” he pronounces slowly, some of the sounds coming out messed up or disappearing altogether.
I realize I have been holding my breath, and now breathe out with relief.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“And the eye?”
“Something called a hyphema.”
Oh, he must have been punched or elbowed really hard right on the eye.
“Can you see at all with that eye?”
“Not too well.”
“Will you need a surgery?”
“They said probably not.”
“Ok, well, then things are not so bad.” I try to smile to reassure him, but I don’t think my smile comes out very bright and cheerful at all. I sit silent for a while, looking at my brother and biting the inside of my mouth.
“My face is ruined,” he repeats. “Nose broken again . . . and these.” He points at his missing teeth.
“The nose will heal again, and we’ll get you to a good prosthodontist for the teeth.”
“Sergey says he’ll pay for the dental work and stuff,” Danilo sighs deeply several times.
I don’t reply anything out loud, but in my head I deliver a few choice words about Sergey.
“I found one of the teeth,” Danny then says, struggling to pronounce the words clearly and pausing to swallow the saliva. “I tried to put it back into the socket. You know if you put it back in within an hour, it will reattach itself.”
“It might.” I nod.
“But it fell right out again and I swallowed it.”
I can see a tear appearing in his good eye and hanging on his long lashes.
“It’s all right, Danny. It’s all right,” I say and stroke the arm that’s not in the cast. “We’ll get your face fixed. Don’t worry.”
We are silent for some time. I want to ask him so many questions, but somehow they just don’t seem important at the moment. What matters most is that none of my brother’s injuries are life-threatening. The mere notion that I might lose my brother gives me the same deep spasm in my stomach and the tightening and closing of the throat that I feel when I think about how our parents were taken from us.
“Danny, why did you fight?” I finally ask.
“Owed him money again,” he says and closes his good eye.
Ahhhhh! I feel so frustrated I just want to scream. I was so sure that my doing that one Dark Fight and paying off my brother’s full debt would be the end of it, that he would come to his senses and stop his gambling and would stay away from the 2 Gild Street lifestyle for good. Damn it. I was so stupid, naive and stupid, and too ready to believe what I wanted to believe.
I feel the anger boiling inside me, but it’s not directed at my brother. I know how it is. It is that bastard Sergey that would not let him out of his clutches. That fucking “honest businessman.” If he were in the room right now, I don’t think I would have been able to contain myself, and he would have been in acute danger of serious physical damage. With no outlet for my anger and frustration, I breathe in and out deeply until I feel a bit calmer.
“I am kind of hungry,” Danilo says. “There is stuff in the kitchen. I had it delivered from the store.”
I go to the kitchen and find several large jars of apple sauce and cartons of mango juice. I feed Danilo the apple sauce from the spoon. He can probably manage the spoon with his left hand, but it makes me feel better to be able to do something for him now. I then give him some juice to drink from a straw.
There is an almost full bottle of oxycodone on the nightstand. “Do you want your pain medicine now?” I ask. I wish he didn’t have to take that highly addictive stuff at all, but I don’t want him to just suffer through the awful amount of pain he must be in.
He hesitates.
“Nah,” he mutters then, and a grimace runs across his already distorted features. “That shit started giving me terrible itches all over my body. Pour some white rum in my juice instead.”
I bring a bottle and add a small splash of rum into the glass.
“A bit more, please. Come on, pour a good amount in.”
“Danny,” I say after he finishes his drink. “Listen to me. Focus, please. You must promise me that you will not do any more Dark Fights ever again. Not ever again. Do you hear me? And that you will stop the gambling. Once and for all. Promise me that. And this time you must really mean it.”
He is silent.
“Danny?”
“Ok, Sash, I promise.”
*****
Having climbed up the hanging ladder, I am back in my room just in time to get changed and start on my morning chores before we open the dojo. Passing hurriedly through the living room on the way to the stairs I almost bump into Liam. I mutter an automatic “morning” and want to get around him, but he catches me by the elbow and starts sniffing at me.
“You smell like a man’s cologne and cigarette smoke again,” he declares and looks at me out of his sleepy eyes that gradually gain a stern, angry expression.
I shouldn’t respond. I should just walk away quietly, but because I am in such a bad mood, such an agitated mood, I cannot contain myself.
“Yeah? So what? You gonna throw me down the stairs again?”
A momentary shudder runs across Liam’s face. He releases my arm, steps back, and lets me pass, just watching me, his mouth tightened into a narrow line, his eyebrows furrowed.
This time he does not know for sure I spent the night outside the dojo. He is full of suspicions but has no definite proof and won’t find any. Unless . . . hmm. What if Martine did see me last night? Would she snitch? If she does, I’m screwed. Ah, damn it, right now I really can’t focus on any of that. All of my thoughts are about Danilo.
Intense training helps me relieve some of the turmoil I feel inside after having seen my brother in his horrible condition. I have my anger somewhat under control now and no longer feel the urgent need to choke Sergey to death. Still, I don’t feel quite like myself and, immersed in my gloomy thoughts, I don’t want to talk to anyone. After the class, I am sitting on the bench in the empty locker room, staring at nothing in particular, folding and unfolding my black belt. What worries me the most is whether Danilo can keep his word. Damn it, I really hope this time he can.
Martine comes in and sits by me.
“What are you so gloomy about?” she asks.
“I’m not. I’m OK.”
“Come on. I can see something is wrong. Was it your boyfriend that upset you?”
“My boyfriend?”
“The man I saw you with last night at El Hogar.”
Damn. So she did see me. I look her in the eyes for a moment and then turn away.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you sneaked out of the dojo. I understand how it is,” she says and pats me on the knee.
It is strange hearing her refer to Drago as my boyfriend. Is he my boyfriend? I never really thought about that. I do not particularly like the term “boyfriend,” either. People say it left and right and it’s become such an overused word that I am not sure I know what it means exactly.
“Don’t be sad.” Martine puts her arm around me and kisses me on a cheek. “Oh, I know how to cheer you up. Wait here! Don’t move,” she exclaims and runs out.
She returns some ten minutes later. I am still sitting down on the bench in the exact same position as before and playing with my black belt. She takes the belt from me and places a warm ham-and-chee
se croissant in my hands.
“Your favorite thing for breakfast, right? I got it at the coffee shop across the street, not at the food cart. And the coffee, too, just as you like it, with almond milk, no sugar.”
“Oh, thank you, Martine,” I say and almost start crying.
Such acts of kindness from people who do not want anything in return have always had a rather powerful effect on me, but not to the point of tears. Now my friend bringing me a croissant and a coffee makes me choke up. I wonder what is going on with me. Have I gotten so used to being the strong one and feeling responsible for and trying to take care of and protect my brother, that receiving feels utterly unexpected and throws me off? Could be that, or maybe it’s just my hormones acting up. I’ve read somewhere that if a woman abstains from sex for a while and then suddenly starts having sex, her hormonal balance gets completely messed up.
“I hope Liam did not see me running out on the street in my gi.” Martine laughs.
Wearing gi outside the dojo is against martial arts etiquette.
“Thank you, Martine,” I say again.
“Listen. Don’t worry about your boyfriend. Whatever he did is not worth your being so upset. Maybe you should not even be with him anyway. He is too old for you.”
“Huh?”
“Well, how old is he?”
“I don’t know. Midthirties.”
“Hmm. I doubt that. He looks older.”
Well, his body certainly does not. I do not say this out loud. “I’m not upset because of him, Martine.”
She looks at me waiting to hear more, but I do not elaborate further on the topic.
“Hey, remember how we used to go dancing together before you became an uchi-deshi? I miss that,” she says. “I’m a bit jealous you go now with that guy and not with me. It used to be our thing. Maybe one of these days you can sneak out and we can go to El Hogar together.” She puts her arm around me again and kisses me on the side of my head and then on my neck.
*****
The Dark Fights Page 14