Punching and Kissing

by Helena Newbury

  I swallowed, thinking desperately. “Okay, so...I have to knock you out? Or you have to knock me out?” The thought of doing it made me nauseous, but it was something we could survive.

  Aedan shook his head. He put his hands on my shoulders and leaned forward until his forehead touched mine.

  “Oh God,” I whispered. “Oh, Jesus, no….” I pushed back from him. “That was your plan? To train me to fight you and then just show up at the fight and expect me to kill you?!”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. I figured the later you knew, the better.”

  Before I knew what I was doing, I’d slapped him hard across the face. “Asshole! Stupid, selfish asshole! What’s the matter with you? I can’t do this! You know I can’t do this! I love you!”

  He stood there, a red mark rising on his cheek, and stared at me. His quiet calm was scarier than any amount of anger. “You have to,” he told me. “This is the only move we have left.”

  “You’re insane! What are you thinking?! We have to go to the cops!”

  “We’ve got no evidence. If we go to the cops, Rick’s lawyer will get him out within hours. And then we’re both dead and Alec too. We can’t run and leave Alec in the hospital. We don’t have a choice. Only one of us can come out of the pit.”

  “I can’t! Jesus, of course I can’t! Are you kidding me?!” I turned and ran, slipping under the ring’s ropes and racing out of the doors of the gym.

  He caught up with me half a block away, in an abandoned lot. Seizing my hand, he jerked me around to face him. “You have to.” He squatted down so that he was on my level and ran his fingers through my hair. “Sylvie...one of us has to go. And there’s no way I’m letting it be you.”

  I could feel tears pouring down my cheeks, but the deep, hot horror of it was so painful in my chest that they barely even registered. It was too cruel, too twisted. After everything we’d been through together. After finally finding the person I was meant to be with. “I can’t do it!” I screeched.

  He hugged me close. “You have to.”

  And, underneath the sadness in his eyes, I could see the calm. Jesus, he though—he thought this was a way to redeem himself! He thought that, if he sacrificed himself—

  I tore myself out of his arms and ran.

  This time, he didn’t chase me. I ran three or four blocks and only stopped when I reached the docks. It was another beautiful afternoon, with the cranes reflected in glass-calm water. This isn’t right. It felt like the wind should be howling and the rain lashing down.

  I knew Aedan wouldn’t kill me. I knew I couldn’t kill him. That meant both of us would die at Rick’s hands—he’d slaughter us for ruining his big fight. And he’d probably kill Alec in the hospital out of spite.

  Some tiny, traitorous part of my brain asked, isn’t one death better than three?

  No. No way. That was giving up everything I believed in. I couldn’t conceive of a world without Aedan. The world needed people like him. Any world was better than that—even one without me in it.

  The only solution was for me to die. But I knew I’d never persuade Aedan to do it.

  So I’d have to do it myself.

  Sylvie

  At the hospital, I sat at the end of Alec’s bed and just watched him breathing. The whole month that he’d been in the coma, he’d been gradually losing muscle tone, his body atrophying day by day, too slowly to notice. Now, though, I saw the difference. I think it’s because the same blonde doctor, Heather, was there, checking on him, and the whole scene could have been a month before. Except then, I’d been the frail one and he’d been the strong one.

  And now I needed to be strong one last time.

  “Tell me honestly,” I asked Heather. “Do you think he’ll wake up?”

  Her shoulders slumped. “It’s impossible to say,” she said. “I can’t make promises—”

  “Please. I’d give a lot for your gut feeling, right now.”

  She nodded and stared at Alec. “Then...yes.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered, studying my brother’s face. I swallowed. “I need your help.”

  ***

  By the time I’d finished with the doctor, it was evening. I went straight to Aedan’s apartment. We didn’t even speak, when we saw each other. We just wrapped each other up in a hug and rocked there in the doorway for long minutes.

  He eventually pushed me back and looked into my eyes. “You know it has to be me,” he whispered. “It’s the only way that makes sense. You’ve got a feck of a lot more to offer the world.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t say that.” But my voice was weak and despondent.

  He touched his forehead to mine. “Fight’s in three hours,” he said. “It’ll take an hour to drive out there.”

  “I don’t want to spend our last hours talking about this,” I told him.

  So we didn’t. He sprawled out length ways on the couch and pulled me so that I was sitting between his legs with my back against his chest. And he played with my hair while we talked about our childhoods and school and friends and everything that had made us who we were. I know so little about him! I thought, horrified.

  We sat there as the sun went down inside and the apartment grew dark, neither of us wanting to move, not wanting to waste a single second of precious life. Why didn’t we get up earlier? Why didn’t we train less and play more? Why did I work so many shifts at the hotel? I kept learning new things about him, things that made me love him even more. He hated raspberries, but loved raspberry-flavored candy. He and his brothers had rabbits, when they were kids, and Aedan’s used to hide inside his schoolbag and try to go to school with him. He once walked four miles in the rain to get to a gig by his favorite band, then stood there at the front and dripped a huge pile of water—but the speakers were so loud, they blew me dry, he insisted.

  “Aedan?” I asked at last. “What happened to your family? Why are your brothers spread all over the country? Why don’t you talk to each other?”

  His arms tightened around me. “Some bad shit. Some bad shit happened.”

  I waited, but he didn’t speak again. “You don’t want to tell me?”

  I felt him shake his head.

  “That’s okay.” I squeezed his arm. “You don’t have to.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just...it’s a family thing.”

  “Not for outsiders?”

  “Not my story to tell.”

  I nodded silently. As far as he knew, he was going to be the one who died. He was planning to take whatever happened to his family with him to the grave. What could be that awful? I gave a tiny, involuntary shudder.

  “I wish it had been different, now,” he said, almost as if he was speaking to himself. “I wish I’d looked some of them up. Got back in touch. I wish....” His arms tightened around me again and he put his chin on my head. “I wish a lot of things. Most of all, I wish I could just be with you. Forever.”

  This isn’t right. We shouldn’t lose this. We were too good together. To be split apart by an accident would be horrific, but to do it deliberately, to know forever that it was our hands that did it, however unwillingly….

  Aedan looked at his watch and then squeezed me. “Time to go,” he whispered.

  Sylvie

  Rick wasn’t going to risk holding the fight at The Pit, where regulars could show up. He wanted this to be a private event, with only those who he could trust not to blab. So he’d told us to come to a farm way outside the city. We had to drive there, so I borrowed a car from a friend at work. I didn’t tell her that it would be Aedan bringing it back, the next day.

  I kept quiet about my plan. When Aedan gently but firmly explained to me that it had to be him who died, I nodded silently. He had to believe I was going to do it, right up until the final seconds.

  When we arrived, our cheap, aging car looked ridiculous next to all the high-end SUVs with their chrome and blacked-out windows. There must have been close to a hundred of them, along with a varie
ty of sports cars. No limos, though—the guests had all driven themselves there. They were making themselves accessories by paying to see the fight, so they wouldn’t go to the cops, but a limo driver couldn’t be trusted not to rat out their employer.

  The venue was a large barn. The crowd was already in there, the buzz of excited chatter audible even outside. As we walked towards it, I could see white light streaming out of every crack in the corrugated iron walls.

  The big main doors were closed for privacy. Al, one of Rick’s bodyguards, nodded us towards a small side door. I took a deep breath, squeezed Aedan’s hand...and we went in.

  Inside, hay bales stacked two high formed a rough circle much smaller than The Pit’s—only about twenty feet across. Two openings had been left on opposite sides for us to enter through and a single hay bale had even been provided for us to slump down on between rounds. Someone had carefully strewn hay all over the concrete floor inside the ring to give it a rustic feel.

  Around the ring, the crowd was three deep. Almost everyone was in suits and many of them were chattering as if they knew each other. A few were even talking stocks and shares. They’re doing deals. They’re doing business while they wait to see one of us kill the other one.

  Every single guest was a man. I wondered if the men who’d been so eager to see me get raped had come along to watch one of us die. Was that a different sort of man? I wasn’t sure.

  Both of us wore what we normally wore to the gym—tank tops and sweatpants. We could have been about to train, if it wasn’t for the lack of gloves.

  We moved slowly through the crowd, but it was no good trying to be inconspicuous. As soon as one person saw us, a cry went up, radiating through the people like a wave. Some cheered. Some leered at me. Some started discussing—loudly—which of us would win.

  I noticed that no money was changing hands. Everyone knew this wasn’t going to be a traditional fight, where the best fighter won. They weren’t interested in betting. They just wanted to see us agonize and sob and brutalize one another.

  Several men leaned in front of us and tried to grope me. Whichever way I dodged, there was another hand there to brush a thigh or grab for a breast. Aedan tried to keep me away from the worst of it, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. When one of the men grabbed my ass, he lost it and swung at the guy. The man staggered back, clutching a bloody nose.

  “You’re still protecting her?” said Rick’s voice. “That’s kind of ironic, given the circumstances.”

  He’d pushed his way through the crowd from the other direction and now stood in the middle of the ring, waiting for us. I heard Aedan give a low growl and made sure I had a firm grip on his hand, ready to hold him back if need be. Carl, Rick’s other bodyguard, was standing just behind him, gun drawn—there was no need to conceal them, in here. If Aedan attacked, it would all be over in an instant. And I knew the same gun would be used to slay us if we refused to fight or tried to run.

  “Have the two of you worked it out between you?” asked Rick. “Who’s going to make the sacrifice? I’m genuinely curious to know.”

  I’ve never wanted to kill anyone so much in my entire life. Both of us just stood and stared at him, holding hands for strength.

  Rick stepped closer to me. “And just think—all this could have been avoided.” He reached out and brushed my cheek with his thumb, which made my skin crawl. “All you had to do was not tell your boyfriend what happened with Lowell. Then tonight would have been a few minutes of unpleasantness on your back—or maybe on your face—and you both could have gone on with your lives. Although…”—he glanced at Aedan—”he probably wouldn’t have wanted you, afterward.”

  I gripped Aedan’s hand even harder, but it was to hold myself back as much as him. I knew Rick was trying to provoke me, to show off to the crowd, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

  Rick rolled his eyes and turned his back on us, quite unafraid. Carl and his gun gave him all the bravery he needed. “TONIGHT!” he bellowed, holding his cane aloft for silence, “Two star-crossed lovers face the ultimate decision. How much will they sacrifice for each other?”

  The crowd roared. I saw Al close the side door, sealing us all in the barn. He strolled over to Rick, his gun drawn, and took up a position beside him, ready to shoot if we disobeyed.

  Aedan pulled me close. Both of us were breathing hard, now, trying not to panic. “You know what you have to do,” he told me. “It’s the only way. You have to do it.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t!” I knew it was going to be me who lost the fight, but I had to convince him I was going along with his plan.

  He knitted his fingers with mine, raising his voice over the crowd. “You can. You can do this. This is the only way we win.” And, before I could argue, he leaned in and kissed me, one last time. His lips came down on mine and it was as if he was trying to inject every ounce of his soul into mine, so that he could live on in me.

  Aedan

  I was ready to die.

  I’d made my peace with it, during the walk back to my apartment after seeing Rick, and during the day training Sylvie. I was surprised by how easily I accepted it. In some ways, I guess I’d accepted I might die the very first time I went to fight at The Pit. And God knows the world wouldn’t be losing much. I was a pretty good fighter and a pretty average dock worker. The universe would do just fine without me.

  What ate at me was the effect it would have on Sylvie. Would she ever forgive herself? I had to make it as quick as possible—in the first round, if possible. I couldn’t show pain. If she saw she was hurting me, she’d stop. I had to act like I was fine until I went down and then—

  And then what? Would she really keep beating on me, until I was dead? On her own, no. But when she stopped, I knew Rick would be there to scream at her, to tell her she had no choice. He’d threaten Alec. I had to pray that that would be enough for her to finish the job.

  Rick had swapped the air horn they used at The Pit for an old brass bell. It sounded to start the fight, the peals echoing off the metal walls, but I didn’t want to stop kissing Sylvie. Her lips felt so good against mine. I knew it was the last time I’d ever feel them.

  I broke the kiss, took a long, shuddering breath and stepped back, opening my eyes. I lifted my hands and we tapped our fists together for luck. I could see the tears welling up in her eyes and felt the heat of all the anger and pain building up behind my own.

  And the fight began.

  Sylvie

  We stood there staring at each other, fists raised but neither of us moving to hit the other one. Aedan nodded at me. He wants me to hit him. He wants me to hit him while he just stands there!

  “Fight me!” I yelled over the crowd. “I can’t do it if you don’t fight me!”

  He just stood there, solid as a rock, only his eyes betraying his emotions. I could see every muscle in his arms standing out, every vein.

  “Hit me!” I screamed.

  Rick re-entered the ring, a gun in his hand, and tapped his cane meaningfully on the floor. If one of us didn’t make a move, he was going to kill us both.

  Letting out a low moan, I stepped forward and swung at the man I loved.

  Standing perfectly still while someone hits you is one of the hardest things in the world. Aedan didn’t even flinch. My fist glanced off his jaw, a clumsy hit but enough to snap his head to the side. My guts knotted up. Jesus, what am I doing?

  Aedan nodded at me to do it again.

  I couldn’t hear anything and I realized the crowd were roaring, the shouts and cheers and leering comments about my body all blending into one noise. Rick was still standing beside us, gun raised.

  “I love you,” mouthed Aedan. “Hit me.”

  I hit him, this time putting my full force behind it. I just wanted to get Rick to back off. Normally, my fist wouldn’t have even got close to him or, if it did, it would have been like hitting a brick wall. But Aedan hadn’t tensed up. He’d left that ripped stomach relaxed and my
punch seemed to go right to the very center of him, doubling him over. The crowd roared so loud that my ears hurt.

  Aedan struggled for breath. I’d been winded a few times in training, though never that severely, so I knew the bursting, aching pain and the desperate fight for air. It tore my heart apart to see him like that and my mind screamed at me to do something, to stop the monster who was hurting my man.

  But I couldn’t. The monster was me.

  And now I saw Rick turn towards Aedan. His message was clear: he wanted this to be a real fight.

  He wanted Aedan to hit me.

  Aedan

  I straightened up, groaning at the pain in my stomach. And saw Sylvie begin to circle me, dodging and weaving. At first, I was relieved. She’d started to fight. Hopefully now she could get some good hits in and—

  I realized she wasn’t punching. She was just dancing around me, making it look good.

  Giving me a target.

  She wasn’t doing it for her own benefit; she was doing it for mine. I saw Rick looming nearby, gun drawn, and got the message: I had to hit her, and she was trying to lure me into it.

  I lifted my fists...but I couldn’t. Sparring had been hard enough but actually hitting her, bare knuckle? I’d never raised my hands to a woman in my life.

  “You have to,” mouthed Sylvie over the crowd. I could see tears in her eyes.

  Behind her, Rick raised the gun. I knew he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot both of us, if we didn’t give him what he wanted.

  I drew back one fist—and saw Sylvie flinch and brace herself. Oh, Jesus, no! I couldn’t do it if she did that! Christ, she was terrified. What am I doing? Even death would be better than this.

  My death. But not if Rick killed Sylvie too.

  To save her, I had to hurt her.