“It’s okay,” I murmured.
A long pause followed, but I still couldn’t manage to get my breath back. With forced determination, I counted my breaths instead, anything to keep myself from thinking, considering, or remembering.
“Come on,” Tria said quietly. Her fingers ran up the sides of my head. “Let’s get into bed.”
My head swam as I backed away to allow her to stand up. She grabbed my hand and steadied me as I stood beside her, yanked up my pants just enough to allow me to walk, and followed her into the bedroom.
“Sit,” she said, still using the same quiet voice. I sat on the edge of the bed as she removed my shoes, pulled my pants off, and started unbuttoning my shirt.
“I can do that.” I looked into her eyes but didn’t move to stop her or anything. Tria just smiled as she continued slipping buttons through their holes. She deposited the cufflinks on the nightstand and pushed the shirt off my shoulders.
I took a long look at the plywood and cinderblock nightstand and the small, round, platinum cufflinks sitting on top of it. I laughed once.
“What?” Tria asked. She rubbed her hands up my arms and rested them on my shoulders, close to my neck. She reached up with her thumbs and rubbed the edge of my jaw.
“Nothing,” I responded. “Just the ridiculousness of all of it.”
“Hmm.” She stared at me for a moment, her brow furrowed, before coaxing me to lie down. I complied as she quickly hung up my tux, then removed her dress and hung it up as well. I watched her move around the room, tidying things up before she climbed into bed with me. I moved close to her immediately, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her against my chest.
“I’m sorry I was such an ass to you tonight,” I said against her shoulder. I kissed her skin lightly. “I never should have let you go.”
“It wasn’t your decision,” she reminded me, “though if I hadn’t gone, it wouldn’t have happened.”
I laughed once.
“It would have just found another way of happening,” I said, contradicting her.
“It would be a lot easier to understand if you would tell me,” she said. I felt her arm finally wrap around the back of my neck and pull me closer.
I could only shake my head and sigh.
*****
Life throws shit at you, no doubt about it. It’s usually pretty unexpected, too. Sometimes it’s something awesome, like a gift that came straight out of heaven or whatever.
Other times, not so much.
About a month after the wedding, my family had finally given up trying to contact me by phone again. There had been at least sixteen unreturned calls, and I had taken to just ignoring the telephone any time it rang. Tria seemed to think I should actually answer, but I refused to discuss it, and she had eventually given up.
Tuesday night I headed to the bar in a rush because I was supposed to have been there twenty minutes earlier. It was challenge night, so anyone in the bar was welcome to get in the cage with me and see if they could manage to keep going for five minutes. I was supposed to be there early so they could check me out a little bit beforehand.
I groaned as I got halfway there, reached into my jacket pocket, and came up with nothing. There weren’t any smokes in my gym bag, either.
Ah well, I could always bum a few off of Wade.
I nursed a cheap beer Dordy handed me. I wasn’t really going to drink the shit, and he knew that. The idea was to make others think I might be a little tipsy, which would make them more likely to challenge me. I kept my shirt on, too, and spent most of the time sitting on a bar stool so people couldn’t tell how tall I was.
By the time Yolanda opened the cage, there were plenty of guys lined up for a fight. The first two went down without much trouble, but the third was a wiry thing. He kept dodging my blows. I finally took him out with a roundhouse kick to the face, then landed on his chest with both knees. He tapped out and then had to be half carried out of the cage.
Those in line to fight next promptly left, and there weren’t any more takers for a while.
“Ham it up a little, will ya?” Yolanda sighed. “Get the crowd going.”
I started growling and yelling at people through the cage and even climbed most of the way up the side to yell down at people—taunting, challenging, and verbally emasculating. While I was up there, a bouncing mahogany ponytail caught my attention.
Tria was up near the edge of the bar. She gave me a half smile and a little wave as I looked at her quizzically. She never came to watch me fight, so it was weird to see her there. My heart beat a little faster as I considered maybe she had changed her mind, and she was going to watch me work. Dordy approached her and reached across the bar to shake her hand. He glanced up at me, gave me a little wink, and then handed her some fruity daiquiri or something in a plastic cup.
I glanced around, wondering if I had time to take a little break and go talk to her for a few minutes. Dordy had gone to help some other customers, and I couldn’t catch his eye again. I looked around until I found Yolanda, but she was already hauling someone up to the cage for me to fight.
“We’ve got another challenger!” Yolanda yelled from the center of the bar.
I craned my neck to see her walking through the crowd with a guy behind her. She dragged him like a child being dragged through the grocery store by an impatient parent. With the crowd all over the place, I couldn’t get a good look at the guy until he discarded his shirt on a table outside the cage. Yolanda pulled him up the stone steps and opened the door to push him inside.
The man who walked up had black hair and thick, square shoulders. He was big—both tall and broad—but didn’t hold himself like a fighter. He was young—much younger than I was, and he glared at me, not with the excitement of a challenge, but with hatred.
Keith Harrison.
In the cage.
With me.
I was never one talk to God, but I felt like a prayer had been answered.
Chapter 14—Pay the Price
I wanted to dance and sing but settled for laughing my ass off instead.
“You think you’re going to prove something?” I asked him as he walked through the entrance and stood on the opposite side of the cage.
“Just going to give Tria a little lesson,” the idiot replied. He reached up high like he was stretching out his arms or something. As if that was going to help.
I laughed again.
“In what?” I asked. “How to watch the ex get his ass kicked? You’re going to be demonstrating that for everyone here!”
I waved my arm around in a big, dramatic arc.
“Oh, you never know what kind of surprises I might have,” Keith said with a smirk. “You’re just an overgrown meathead with no regard for what’s important. I’m going to show her that. Later on tonight, when all this is over, she’s going to walk out of here with me.”
“You aren’t walking out of here.” I snickered before I slid my mouth guard into place.
Yolanda walked up and did the usual overplayed performance of checking us both over. I was in my fighting trunks and he was in a pair of jeans. Less maneuverability, more bulk, and generally a bad idea. Fucking amateur.
Actually, not even that. Amateurs know something about what they’re doing. This douche was clueless. Yolanda handed him his own mouth guard, which he initially tried to refuse, but she made him take it. She collected his shoes and socks and placed them with his shirt outside the cage.
Showtime.
Usually with challenge nights, I dove right in and took people out pretty quickly. I’d give just enough show to make other people think maybe they had a chance but not much more. Challengers were considered winners if they went more than five minutes in the cage without tapping out.
I fully intended to “lose” as far as time went. I was going to drag this fight out as long as I could, and I was going to enjoy every last minute of it. By the time this was over, his own family wasn’t going to be able to pick him out of
a Summer’s Eve lineup.
I started slowly walking around the cage, watching him watch me.
He came at me first with heat and pride, but I stepped to the side and watched him fly past. I grinned behind the mouth guard, crossed my fists in front of my chest, and waited. I danced back and forth on the balls of my feet as he attacked again.
This time when I stepped to the side at the last second, I raised a foot and kicked him in the back. He stumbled but didn’t quite fall. If looks could have killed, I would have been in a lot more trouble. As it was, the main threat to me came from laughing too hard.
I let him come at me a couple more time before I turned and jumped at him. He literally had no idea what hit him as I slammed my fists into his gut and chest and then flipped him around and nailed him in the lower back. He twisted and turned to get away from me, and I let him run to the edge of the cage, panting.
The crowd was screaming so loud, I could hear nothing but the pandemonium. Somewhere in the back of my head, I knew Tria’s voice was among them, but I didn’t let myself think about it. Thinking about her would be distracting, and I didn’t want to lose my focus on beating the shit out of this douchebag.
I raised my hand and curled my fingers back toward myself, beckoning him.
He ran for me, stopped quickly, and tried to fake to one side. I grabbed his elbow and wrenched it backwards. With his arm twisted behind him, I kicked the back of his knee and dropped to the floor with him under me. I punched twice with my free hand—once in his back and once in the side of his face. He went limp, but I knew he wasn’t out yet when he shook his head a little. I leaned back, flipped his stunned ass over, and knocked his head against the ground. I spit my mouth guard out to the side.
“You fucking pup,” I snarled in his ear. I slammed the back of his head against the floor of the cage again. “You have no idea how to play with the men—just like you had no idea how to play with a woman!”
His eyes widened and then narrowed as his struggles increased without any effect.
I laughed again, flipped him over onto his face, and kidney punched him a couple of times. I held him down to the ground, but he still wouldn’t tap out, which worked just fine for me. I leaned over close to his ear again.
“You couldn’t even figure out how to get it in her, could you?” I laughed. “Poor little pup doesn’t know what to do with it, but I do. I’m up in her three times a day, you know. Can’t get enough of that pussy! It feels so good!”
He bucked against me, trying to shoulder me off, and kicked his legs out ineffectively as I kept laughing and snarling into his ear.
“I love filling her with cum. And she loves taking all I give her!”
I smashed his face down once more before getting off of him and watching him crawl toward the edge of the cage. One of his buddies was over there, past the area where spectators were supposed to be to watch the fights, but I didn’t think anything of it. I couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but it was one of the guys in the truck with us back in Beals. Conner or Devin or something. The guy dropped down to the bottom of the cage as if he were encouraging Keith, but to keep going or tap out, I didn’t know.
I danced around on the other side of the cage while Keith pulled himself back up. Right before he was about to turn around, I kicked him in the back of the knee, sending him down again with a sharp snapping sound. The crowd roared—some groaning as if they knew what that felt like—but most just kept cheering.
Keith hit the mat and then pulled himself up using the edge of the cage next to his buddy. He could barely stand at this point, and I raised my hands up and did a quick spin in a circle.
I turned back to Keith, who had managed to gain his footing again. He took a step toward me, but he was off balance. One of his eyes was pretty much swollen shut, and he couldn’t have had any depth perception anymore. I moved to one side and reached out to grab his shoulder and take him down to the ground. As my hands gripped his upper arm, his other hand moved in quickly.
At first, I barely felt it. It was just a little touch to my side that didn’t feel like a punch. It was smoother and colder than knuckles.
It also went deeper.
I could hear a lot of screaming coming from all around the cage, but my focus was on the self-satisfied look on Keith Harrison’s battered face as he yanked the mouth guard from around his teeth.
“Fuck you.” He sneered at me, obviously pleased with himself, but I didn’t understand why—not at first.
My gaze followed his arm down to his hand, which was clenched into a fist around an object shoved up against my side. He shifted, and his hand moved up slightly. The pain that ripped through my torso was excruciating as blood poured out of the opening in my skin. He stepped back, pulling a slender silver blade from my side.
Despite the spinning in my head and the sudden taste of blood in the back of my throat, I stayed upright. Keith Harrison was still in front of me with a half-crazed look in his single open eye and a bloodied knife in his hand. Everything around me seemed to slow down, including the gasping and screaming from the crowd. The sound was deep and long—like I was hearing it from across a lake or from the other side of a hill.
I realized the fucker had just stabbed me.
I should have been shocked and horrified for a dozen reasons. One, how the fuck did he get the thing into the cage? Yolanda searches everyone who comes in, even me. Two, how fucking stupid could he be, stabbing me in front of a hundred witnesses?
I wasn’t shocked though. I was just pissed.
“Motherfucker!” I yelled out as I reached forward, grabbed him by the head, and slammed his face down on my knee. His nose exploded in a shower of blood and screams, but I didn’t stop.
I threw him backwards, and he bounced off the chain links and right back to me. With one hand, I did something I had always refused to do in the past, but now I no longer cared—I grabbed him by the hair, yanked him down until his back was across my bent knee, and just started pounding on his face.
A strange tearing sound came from my side, and another sharp pain reverberated through my skin. I stumbled for a moment, and Keith dropped to his back in front of me. I kicked him solidly right in the middle of his face, and he flew against the edge of the cage. I slipped in blood then, stumbled a bit before regaining my balance, and then started toward him again.
I was going to kill the douchebag just like I wanted to the first day I laid eyes on him.
“Stop, Liam!” Yolanda’s voice commanded. I felt her hands wrap around my bicep and yank me backwards. That’s when her hands were joined by Wade and Gary’s, and the three of them hauled me away from the mess on the floor of the cage.
“Motherfucker stabbed me!” I told her as I stumbled back. I shoved at their hands to get them off of me. Keith was crawling uselessly on the ground in a circle.
“No shit,” she responded. “Liam—you’re bleeding all over the place.”
“I am?”
My knees gave out, and I fell heavily on the cement ramp.
“Holy shit!” Gary gasped as he grabbed hold of me just before my head hit the ground.
“I can’t deal with this,” Yolanda said. Her voice was perfectly calm in a no-nonsense, professional way that scared me a bit. “Gary—lay him down gently. Tell Dordy to call 911, and bring me all the clean towels in the kitchen. Wade—hold him down.”
I tried to tell them I didn’t need help, but when I opened my mouth, I coughed up blood. My vision blurred, the lights of the bar brightened, and lots and lots of voices filled my ears. The clamor created a strange sound—like having two conch shells held against my ears. Only one voice managed to cut through the rest of the noise and make any sense at all.
“Liam! Liam! Oh my God!” Tria's voice echoed around the ceiling of the bar. I turned my head to try to see her, but that just made me nauseous.
“Stay still!” Yolanda huffed as she placed her hand on my chest. “There's an ambulance on the way.”
I wa
nted to ask her why she wasn't just driving me herself, but words were a little hard to form. My lips were all sticky and not moving right. My tongue felt weird, and my skin felt as if little bugs were crawling all over it. Gary handed Yolanda a bunch of towels, and she pressed them against my side.
Gasping, I flinched and then sat up partway as I tried to shove Yolanda off of me. Everything went blurry and swimmy again as I felt heavy arms push me back against the floor and soft hands cradle my face.
“Tria.”
“I'm right here,” she said. I turned toward her voice and finally found her dark eyes hovering above me. I wondered what she had been doing at Feet First and if she could have picked a worse night to show up. If she hadn’t already hated the fighting, tonight would pretty much make it a certainty.
Her eyes disappeared, and I heard another voice.
“Don't you see?”
I heard Keith as someone dragged him out of the cage and past where I was on the ground.
“This kind of thing happens all the time! You want a life like this?”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” she yelled at him. “What did you do?”
“I’m showing you what he’s like!” Keith screamed back. “He could die on you at any time! He might die tonight! Is that how you want to live your life? Just waiting for someone to hit him hard enough to kill off the rest of his brain cells?”
He tried to reach out for her, but she flinched.
“Get away from me!”
“Motherfucking douche!” I tried to yell and sit up, but Wade and Gary were still holding me down.
“I'll get him if you stay still,” Wade informed me. I nodded, and the pressure of his hands left my skin. I couldn't see what was happening anymore as my vision blurred, and I blacked out.
When I could focus again, Tria was back in my view. Her face was covered in bright red and blue flashing lights, and she was talking to some guy in a uniform. The air around me was cool, and I wasn’t on the ground any more.
“Fucker stabbed me,” I mumbled as I looked around to try to get my bearings.