by Rye Hart
Time to keep my word. I’m about to show her something that I have never showed anyone.
“You can’t record any of this, okay?” I say when I get to the door.
“Of course, Hugh.” Hearing her say my name gives me a nice little shiver. I want to hear it again.
I take a key out of my pocket and unlock the door. Taking a deep breath, I open the door, step through, and turn on the light. Then I stand aside and let her in.
She walks through the door and takes a few moments to walk to the opposite wall where my middleweight belt is hanging. She turns back and looks at me. “I knew it was you,” she says. “Right away I knew that you were familiar, but I finally figured it out.”
“When?”
She looks down, then looks up at me with upturned eyes without raising her head. “Last night when I saw you out on the deck with the bag.”
I swallow hard. The hair on my neck stands up. I suddenly feel like I am nothing but the real estate between my legs. “You saw that, huh? What exactly did you see?”
“You. You were working pretty hard.” She turns back to the belt. “Do you ever wear it?”
“Ha! Yep, I put it on every time I’m out in the woods. When you and Jarom showed up it was an off day.”
“Hugh?”
“Yes?”
“You know what I’m going to ask you, don’t you?”
“Probably. Most people probably have the same questions for me.”
She nods. I can still taste the kiss on my lips. Her waist is so tiny I know I could get both of my hands around it. Her curves make me wish I knew how to paint. Knowing that she came from the city makes me want to renounce everything I’m doing out here and go back with her, but there’s just no way. There’s just too much darkness and rot inside of me to go back.
Unless this helps. Unless it’s finally time to really talk about it.
“Why did you leave New York? What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere with a giant beard and an ax?”
I run my hands through my beard, which is only an inch long. “This is definitely not a giant beard, but I grew it so I could keep my face warm out here. The other question is more complicated. Why don’t you look around a little more? I’m going to get us a bottle of wine.”
“Okay. Hurry back.”
“Believe me, I will. This isn’t easy for me, but I’m going to tell you what I can. The wine will certainly help.”
Upstairs I get a bottle of white off the rack and think of Andrew. I ask myself if he will care if I spill my guts to her. I think he would probably tell me to do it. I open the wine and pound a glass of it down quickly before taking our glasses downstairs.
When I get there, Sam is in front of a photo that my dad blew up until it was half the size of the wall. It shows me, Andrew, my coach Xavier, and two of my cornermen, minutes after I knocked out Gerard Seamus, a stone cold assassin from Brussels. It had been a brutal fight with a vicious finish. After he pounded on me for two rounds I managed to kick his head nearly into the rafters. He had been my toughest fight. I took his belt, his fame, and the spoils of war that came with it.
“I bet this was an exciting day,” she says.
“The excitement faded fast,” I say. “The next day I was in the gym with Andrew, helping him get ready for his own fight. His first.” I hand her a glass and fill it, then refill my own. I nod to a chair. “Have a seat. Let’s go before I change my mind.”
“I will. On one condition.”
“Anything.”
Sam sets down her glass and leans back against the wall. She toys with the hem of her nightgown for a moment before sliding it up a couple of inches, showing me a glimpse of her red panties. Then she slips a finger beneath the waistband and pulls them down a couple of inches, exposing her shaved self to me.
“Show me what you can do. You’ve got a minute and then I’m turning on my recorder and we’re getting down to business. So you better get down to this business while you can.”
Where has this little vixen come from? I knew as I moved towards her that this was going to be the shortest minute of my life. Better to make the most of it.
I get on my knees in front of her and pull the nightgown up at the same time I pull her panties down around her knees with my other hand. I see her blushing, and it makes me even harder.
Then I push her thighs apart with my wrists and spread her gently with my fingers. Running my tongue up and down the outer lips, I feel her growing wet on my tongue. The heat of her nearly drives me over the edge. I flick her clitoris lightly with the tip of my tongue and squeeze her ass with one hand, waiting for her to react. She shudders and grabs the back of my head with both hands, pushing me closer, holding me tight against her. When I put the tip of one finger inside her she moans. That’s when I pull back and get to my feet.
“I believe that we should honor our contracts,” I say. “And your minute is up.”
“You bastard.” Her chest is heaving. As if I’m a magnet, her hips are still reaching for me reflexively, looking for the delicious pressure I had brought to bear on her. “You have to finish what you started.”
“I didn’t start it, lady,” I say. “I believe this was your condition, and I met it. Passed with flying colors too, I’d say, from the look on your face and your panting. Shameless little thing, aren’t you?”
“Not usually,” she says, pulling her panties up and her nightgown down. “Today it’s looking that way though, isn’t it? Jesus, what did you do to me?”
“Trade secret. Unfortunately, as much as I like using my tongue on you, it’s time to use it to talk.”
She whines deep in her throat, a sexy feline noise. I want to go back to her, grab her, bend her over whatever I can find and satisfy us both. But this sweet torment is going to teach her a lesson.
“Do we have to?”
“Yes. You made the rules. I’m just keeping them. Now take out your recorder or notepad or whatever it is you’re going to do this with and let’s get going.”
She licks her lips and looks me up and down. I can tell we’ll get back to it soon enough. I can wait.
There’s also the fact that I really do want to get a few things off my chest before I pull her onto it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: SAM WASHINGTON
When Hugh was licking me I thought I might be having an aneurysm. Was it only a minute? It felt like a goddamned out of body experience that had lasted both an eternity and a mere flicker of a second. I could have lived there forever with him pressing against me. I’m still so wet that I’m self-conscious even walking back to my chair.
I take out my recorder and turn it on. “Mind giving me your name, for the record and for a sound test?”
“Hugh Maddox.”
I hold the recorder to my ear, fiddle with a couple of things, play it back, and nod. “Good to go.” I realize that I’m fanning myself with one hand like a delicate lady from a Jane Austen novel. God help me, I’m swooning. Now I know the meaning of the word.
Hugh could tell me to do anything in this moment and I would trip over myself trying to do it fast enough to please him. And I sense that he would do the same for me.
The rain picked up again, harder than before. I thanked my lucky stars. Anything that could keep me under this roof a little longer was good.
“So Hugh,” I say. “You’re a fighter. A professional.”
“I was. My last official fight was in Manhattan a couple of years ago.”
“And you’re no longer fighting?”
“No, not professionally.”
“Any plans to return to it? I know you’ve got a lot of fans out there who would love a positive answer on this.”
“Afraid not. And to those fans, I’m really sorry. There’s more to the story that you know. And by the end of it I hope you’ll understand and not judge me too harshly for it.” The brashness is slipping from his voice. I can tell that we’re headed for serious territory. It makes me want to turn off the recorder, cradle his hea
d in my lap, and listen, which is what he obviously needs.
“Fair enough. So, what do you want to tell them? Where do you think this story starts?”
Hugh leans back and crosses his arms. He looks at the picture of himself with the new belt. No, he’s looking at Andrew. He bites his lip and I can’t tell if he’s angry or trying not to cry. There’s suddenly an emotional tension in the room that adds an almost palpable weight to everything.
“I didn’t plan on leaving,” he says. “Fighting was my life. I made it through the ranks so quickly that it made my head spin. Not just mine. I think there are some guys out there who are probably still seeing stars from the hits I dropped on them. I was a natural. I can’t even take credit for that, but if you saw me fight you know that I’m right. But where the real magic happened was that I was also willing to work harder than anyone else. When you find someone with natural ability who is also going to work everyone else into the ground, you have a terrifying specimen.”
There’s nothing boastful in his voice. I can tell that Hugh is a man without a huge macho ego. Maybe this is what happens when you know you’re the toughest. You earn the right to be sensitive and know that, no matter what anyone says, or how they might mock you, you’d still be the sensitive guy who could rip heads off, and everyone knows it.
“So you win the title, you’re at the pinnacle of it all, and then…?”
“Yeah. Sponsorships were throwing more money at me than I would ever know what to do with. That money pays for me to live here out in the middle of nowhere. I’ll never have to work again if I don’t want to.”
“Just so your listeners know, you look like a lumberjack, right down to the flannel and beard. The first time I saw Hugh, listeners, he was carrying an ax and had a pile of logs behind him.”
Hugh laughs. “Guilty as charged. I’ve learned that lumberjacking isn’t really something you do on your own. It kind of takes a whole camp to do it on any appreciable level. I guess you could call me a reclusive wood-cutting enthusiast these days.”
“Maybe that’s what you can call your memoir one day. Reclusive wood-cutting enthusiast.”
“Maybe you’ll need to ghostwrite it,” he says.
I flush and almost turn off the recorder before realizing that there’s no video and no one will be able to see my raging desire for him when this hits the air. Hopefully.
“But a better title would be something like…” Hugh pauses, again looking at something I can’t see, his eyes unfocused. “...the man who ran away from a damn tragedy he couldn’t face and was too big of a coward to tell anyone about.”
“I would read that,” I say. “I bet your fans would too. What would it be about?”
“I don’t know if you were following it,” he says, “but it took forever for mixed martial arts to get sanctioned in New York. The athletic commissions just wouldn’t allow it. McCain called it ‘Human cock fighting,’ and that was all most people thought they needed to know about it. I didn’t sweat it that much. I fought everywhere. If you were good enough to get into the professional league there were always going to be money fights for you.”
“But not everyone was good enough?”
“No, of course not. It’s one thing to be tough. Fighters...pro fighters...we’re different. We have an extra gear or cog that makes us able to do what we do. Trust me, you can’t understand it if you haven’t been in there.”
“I believe you.”
“Andrew wasn’t quite good enough for the pros yet,” he says. “But I agreed to train him with my coach, and to train with him, until he was ready. But he just wouldn’t wait. Every other weekend he was jumping into some underground fight--all in New York, so, illegal--for a few hundred bucks, thinking that this would prove something to us all. All he really needed was patience. If he just could have given it a couple more years he would have been thrashing every killer in the division, including me.”
I had never heard Andrew’s name in any of the press I had read about Hugh. Where is this going? I saw the look on Hugh’s face becoming more serious. I was starting to feel a chill and the urge to wrap my arms around him returned, stronger than ever.
“I just couldn’t get him to listen,” says Hugh. “So I had to figure out how to try and protect him. I failed. I failed him in the worst possible way.”
I’ve never heard someone sound so miserable.
He looks up. “You know what the worst part about being tough is? About being strong?”
“What is it?”
“People stop asking if you’re okay. They assume that you’re fine, no matter what’s going on. They forget that you’re human.”
CHAPTER TWELVE: HUGH MADDOX
Well, here I am, telling her everything. I’m glad this moment is finally here, even if it means I lose my anonymity, my hiding place, and her. I feel like I’m in a confessional booth, which makes me think that maybe I should have taken church more seriously. Or therapy.
You’re only as sick as your secrets. Who said that? I always liked it and believed it, even though it never got me to share any of them until now.
Sam’s concern is genuine. I can tell that she wants to say more than she is and I love her for it. But I have too much left to say before we can go...wherever we’re going to go.
“Andrew kept showing up at the gym beat all to hell,” I say. “I knew what he was doing and I couldn’t make him stop. So I did the only thing I knew how. I offered to go with him to watch his back. He was so happy. He knew that if I just saw him fight in one of these illicit gigs I’d see that I was wrong about him. I’d see that he was ready.”
I can still see the kid in my head. I can still hear his loud laugh, and see the awkward way he moved when he first started fighting.
“His first fight--the first one I saw him in--was in a warehouse on the outskirts of Brooklyn. Shabby, shitty business. The kind of place where people wind up brawling for YouTube hits. I tried to get him out of there as soon as we got there, but he was determined. I couldn’t drag him out of there in front of everyone; it would have wrecked his self-image and whatever reputation he had gathered among these guys.”
“So he fought?” says Sam.
I nod. “Right before it started I saw the other guy tuck a roll of quarters into one of his fists. There was a lot of betting action going on. I tried to tell Andrew what I had seen but it was too late. I could have broken it up. I should have. I trusted that he’d be able to dodge, or grab the guy, get his hands open if they went to the ground, and then everyone would see that he was trying to cheat. You can really fuck someone up with even a little extra weight in your hand.”
“I’m sure.”
“The irony is that, as soon as the fight started, it happened just like I hoped it would. Andrew wasn’t the best striker yet, but he was a devil if he could drag you down. Grappling with Andrew on the mat was like being in the water with a shark, even if you were good. There was no margin for error. Just like I had hoped, he got wrist control, popped the guy’s hands open, and out rolled that pack of quarters.”
“Was that the end of the fight?”
“Ha! You didn’t know Andrew. That was just the beginning. Andrew jumped up, grabbed the quarters, handed them back to the guy, called him a little bitch, and told him to feel free to use them because he was going to need all the help he could get.”
“Sounds like I would have liked him.”
“Everyone liked Andrew. Except the guy he had just humiliated. And it didn’t stop there. They fought for another six rounds with only fifteen second breaks in between. It was brutal. The other guy was getting the worst of it. Totally outmatched. Andrew was punishing him for trying to cheat. That’s one thing most people don’t know about fighters. At least, people who think we’re all just dumb thugs. They think there’s no honor, no code. But most of us got into martial arts for the ethos. There’s something pure in it when you start, even if you forget it.”
“That makes sense. I used to love Bruce Lee.”
“Who doesn’t love Bruce Lee? But Andrew was punishing the guy. I could tell that he could have finished the fight at any time. Put the guy out of his misery. But he wanted him to suffer, so he dragged it out to teach him a lesson. Unfortunately, he created an opponent who had nothing to lose. Then he got him so blind with rage that...it went bad. Oh God.”
I rub my face. It’s like no time has passed at all and I’m right back there in that warehouse, waiting for what I can’t stop.
“Do you want to pick this up again later?” says Sam.
“No. If I stop now I might never start again…Andrew finally took the guy down for the last time and got him in a rear naked choke. There was no way out but the guy was tough. He wouldn’t tap and soon he was asleep. Andrew got up and collected his money while the guy’s homies picked him up and tried to revive him. As soon as he was mobile, he came up behind Andrew and kicked him in the side of the head.”
“Oh my God!”
“It was a hard shot, but nothing that we hadn’t seen before. But it knocked him sideways. Just one of those freak things. Andrew fell and hit his head on the side of the table that people were using for their drinks. One of the corners hit his temple and that was it. He died minutes later of a massive brain hemorrhage.”
There it is. Out in the open. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more Andrew.
Sam wipes a tear from her eye. “So that’s why you quit?”
“Not entirely. First of all I wanted revenge. Of course. But that kind of thinking isn’t sustainable. The guy who killed Andrew was plugged into a couple of gangs. That was a fight I eventually would have got the worst of. I wasn’t going to start carrying a gun and getting in shootouts every day. But the other part of that was that cops raided the warehouse right then. They rounded us all up. Medics saw what happened to Andrew. One of them, a fan, recognized me and took me over to talk to a couple of detectives.”
“Did they help you get the guy?”
