Knockout (29 page)

But getting there, that was going to be a bitch.

“Four months ago,” I said quietly.

Her eyes looked up into the distance. She was doing the math.

“The night you two ended your engagement.”

Her eyes snapped to mine and she stared at me. Hard. Laney’s eyes were two shards of crystal burning fire that stared at me and tried to kill me with their hate and heat. But I bore it because I deserved it. Also because I knew it wasn’t over. It was about to get worse.

“So what?” she asked quietly. Too quietly. “You too hooked up minutes after he ended it with me? We were talking about it until two in the morning. Did he go running to you immediately after that? He couldn’t wait to move on to the next girl? To my own sister?”

“It was before,” Kellen said calmly, his knuckles going white. “I kissed her at your parent’s house before we split. It was right after we fought.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?!” Laney exploded. She leapt off the couch and backed away from me until she hit the wall like I was a plague carrier she was afraid to be near. I watched her silently. I didn’t try to calm her down. I didn’t try to explain. It was what it was and now that the bomb had dropped, Laney was going to do what she was going to do.

Flip the fuck out.

“You son of a bitch!”

She took two quick strides toward Kellen. He looked up at her where she towered over him, waiting.

She slapped him hard across the face.

I jumped at the crack of skin on skin, my adrenaline spiking hard in my heart. I fought every instinct to stand up and put her on her ass. I held my place on the couch, my own hands going clammy and clenched as I watched the left side of his face explode in red. He barely moved, though. His head had snapped slightly to the side with the blow but he brought it back and stared up at her impassively. His eyes were dead and gone. He was in the ring now. He was taking hits, absorbing blows and waiting for the storm to pass but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t connecting.

So she hit him again.

“Laney,” I said, unable to keep quiet.

“Nothing?” she asked him harshly, her voice going quiet again. “No reaction? You don’t want to hit me back? You don’t want to defend yourself? You don’t want to tell me ‘Stop, listen, we can explain?’”

“No,” he replied evenly.

“Of course not. Because that’s not who Kellen Coulter is, is it? Do you know who he is, Jenna? Do you know what you’re getting yourself into? I’m sure you think you do but you have no clue what being with him is like. Do you want to know? Because I’ll gladly warn you.”

“No,” I said, my voice similar to Kellen’s.

“Too bad. Being with him is like being alone. Look at his face right now. This is what you get when things get hard. You get nothing. Nothing!” she shouted, bending down to get in his face. He didn’t flinch. “See? He’ll bail on you every time. You think
you’re different because you’ve been his friend but it won’t matter. He doesn’t know how to love people. He’ll do to you exactly what he did to me and you won’t have my shoulder to cry on. Someday you’ll beg him for more than the nothing he’s giving you and he’ll give you the best sex of your life until you forget your own name, but a few days later you’ll be crying, remembering what you really wanted and you’ll realize you never got it. Not even close. He’s a hollowed out, cold, heartless bastard and if you think anything different then you don’t know him half as well as you think you do.” She reached down and jerked her purse up off the table. “But you’re welcome to find out, bitch.”

When the door slammed behind Laney, I closed my eyes. I breathed slowly and evenly as I listened to the familiar sounds of my apartment. The traffic outside. The click of my air conditioning turning on. The faint hum given off by my weird little lamp pointed at my easel.

I told myself not to cry. She’d forgive me someday. That’s what sisters did. They were honest with each other and they hurt each other but they always came back to one another because they were family. Blood. Bound to each other for their entire lives. I hurt her today but she’d hurt me before and we were still alive. We were all still here.

I opened my eyes to find Kellen still sitting there. He hadn’t moved since she left. His face was a painful shade of red on the side where she’d slapped him but he didn’t seem to notice. He stared straight ahead, his eyes black as midnight. Dark as death.

I rose from the couch slowly and went to the kitchen. In the freezer I grabbed a bag of frozen corn and a damp towel which I brought back to the living room, not surprised to find him still sitting exactly as he had been when I left. After wrapping the bag in the wet towel, I knelt in front of him. I avoided his eyes.

He winced slightly when I pressed the compress to his face but then he stilled and so did I.

I could hear my blood rushing in my veins.

We sat like that for a good five minutes. Me on my knees in front of him, the cold against his skin, him with his eyes on the far away, infinite horizon in his mind where he despised himself and the limitations he faced, ones placed on him by people long dead and gone. Or people who were never there to begin with. Laney may have known what he
lacked, but I knew very well what he was. I knew him through and through, so as he sat there inside himself where she thought he was hollow and heartless, I understood he was fuller than any man had any right to be.

He was full of hate. It didn’t leave a lot of room for anything else.

When my knees began to ache and my palm was frozen, I started to stand. His hand clamped down on my wrist. I looked up in surprise to find him staring down at me intently, his chest rising and falling rapidly.

He pulled me forward slowly until I knelt between his knees and his face hovered over mine. Then he kissed me slowly. His hands gripped my face as he pulled me toward him and he traced my lips with his tongue. Before I could react he was moving lower. His hands went to my shoulders, arching my body back until he was holding me up. His lips brushed across my cheek to my ear where he placed a series of kisses along the edge then back behind near my hair. I was struggling to breathe as his breath poured over my skin leaving me flushed and unsteady.

“Kel?” I whispered shakily.

“I have to know,” he murmured, his lips still moving along my skin. Skimming down the column of my neck to my collar bone.

“You have to know what?”

His tongue slid wet and hot along my collar until he reached the soft tissue of my shoulder. I inhaled sharply, nervously, as I felt his teeth graze my skin then sink in gently. His hands tightened on my arms.

“If I can survive you,” he hoarsely whispered.

He moved fast as lightening, like a blur in the ring in the lights and the ropes. He lifted me off the ground as though I weighed nothing and threw me beneath him on the couch. He hovered over me, staring down at me with such a mix of heavy and hollow that I felt my stomach drop out with fear.

I didn’t know him like this. I don’t think he did either. It was something different, something strange. A mixing of his worlds of love and want and hate and loss. He was the man I knew, the one I loved, but he was also in the ring, in the zone and the empty. He was Jekyll and Hyde warring for the same space in the same moment in time and I was suddenly shaking scared of who would win and who would walk away forever.

I was also damn ready to find out.

I spread my legs and pulled down on his hips, settling him against me. He lowered himself gently, his eyes always on mine and I sighed when his incredible weight was crushing me from top to bottom. He pushed the air out of my lungs and I let everything else go with it. I stopped worrying and wondering. I stopped wanting and I started taking.

I moved my hands, fingers trembling, up his sides, taking his shirt with me. He watched me with a blank stare until my palms skimmed up under his arms then over his shoulder blades. He reached back with one hand, grabbed his shirt and yanked it quickly over his head. It disappeared somewhere in the room as his mouth found mine again and his hands began to roam. Wherever they went they found flesh, pulling and gripping, nearly tearing any clothing that dared to be in his way. He was fast, so fast, and when I lay naked and burning with chills beneath him, he went slow. So slow.

He kissed me once more, long and deep, then he buried his face in my neck. He took a shuddering breath. Then he surged forward. I gasped at the sudden fullness. At the incredible weight of him on top of me and inside of me. He was everywhere. He was everything. He was the only thing holding me down, keeping me from lifting from the world out into the stars and the frozen black above us. He was saving me, he was killing me. He was guiding me, grounding me and sending me so far out of myself I could see forever.

My fingertips dug into the muscles of his back as they rolled and flexed the way they did when he worked the bag. When he found his rhythm and the world went away. When all he knew was the air in his lungs, the beat of his heart and the feel of his skin.

I opened my eyes wide, staring at the ceiling and watching it blur around the edges. His breath broke in my ear, going staccato and strained as words spilled from his mouth in an unintelligible stream. I would never know what he said as French, English and all of the things both bright and dark that made him
him
poured from his lips and dripped in my ear like poison that would leave me shattered and broken from the inside out, irreparable for the rest of my life. It was his smile in the kitchen. His hands, his hair, his voice, his eyes, his laugh. His love, the only way he knew how.

I heard my name, felt his body stiffen against me, a hoarse groan,
and his hand in my hair so gentle it sent me over the edge until I was whimpering, quivering in my spine and vibrating with his energy. The world went wild, swimming over my eyes as the tide roared in then rushed out, leaving me stripped and bare, looking up into his eyes. His face was a blur through the sea salt pouring over me, down my cheeks and onto his hand still in my hair.

The wave had washed us clean, stolen everything, even our breath and I knew this moment was too big and bold to think about while I was still inside it. It would be like trying to understand the Grand Canyon while nestled deep inside a cave in one of its valleys. You’d never appreciate the scope of it, the horrifying, sheer magnitude of it until you had some distance. Until you stood at the edge on a clear day and looked down at that valley, remembering how safe you’d felt inside the grandiose labyrinth stretching for miles around you, hiding and devouring you. But once you knew, once you saw it for what it truly was, it would humble you. Astonish you. Set you free.

We recovered from the moment in a less awkward way than I expected. He stayed with me as I waited for the tears to dry up. He pressed his forehead to mine, the tips of our noses together as he whispered words I don’t remember. Ones that made me smile. Maybe they weren’t words at all. Maybe it was just his tone and the tickle of his breath on my skin. Either way, the tears dried up and the trembling in my limbs subsided.

He stayed the night. That was huge and I told him it wasn’t necessary but he said he wanted to, something I almost believed. What I fully believed was that he wanted to want to, though the two things were painfully different. We didn’t speak much, but he was there. He was right there with me in the aftermath and we climbed into my bed together after an evening of watching TV, ordering in pizza and drinking beer, things that now felt odd in how familiar they were, with a vague air of… okay. We weren’t great, we weren’t terrible. We were just okay. I hoped that would be enough.

In the morning I woke up alone. There was a note on the pillow that I didn’t care to read but I felt I owed him the benefit of the doubt, so I did.

Gone to the gym early.

Call you later.

-Kel

I crumpled it up in my fist until it poked with its edges like daggers in my soft palm, then I tossed it in a lazy arc across my room.

So this was it, I thought glumly. It wasn’t the end, I wasn’t that down on us, but it
was what the retreat looked like. I was on the other side of the looking glass watching Kellen walk away, getting smaller and smaller until he was nothing but a spot on the canvas and I couldn’t remember how his chin was shaped. All I could do now was hope he found his way back.

That afternoon, while my phone sat predictably silent on the coffee table, I sketched. It was of Kellen, of course it was, and he was walking away. It was him from the back with his head slightly turned, almost looking over his shoulder but never committing to it fully. It was an effort, a yearning, but it wasn’t real enough to bring him fully around. His hands were shoved in his pockets, his shoulders up and angry, but the side of his face was lost in shadow. I stared at it after I worked on it for an hour and I realized something. I’d sketched and painted Kellen countless times over the years, but one thing was always the same. I never fully showed his face.

Three days later, without a word from him or Laney, I sat in my apartment alone staring at that sketch. I should have put it away or torn it up, but I left it out on my easel so I could see it and feel like I understood. Maybe even a little like I was okay with it. I was okay with the waiting. I was good at it by now.