by Maxi MacNair
Max won round two. Or so Jax said, which was shocking since the whole round was basically a technical grappling match, which was Jason’s game.
At round three, the match opened up and became the street brawl that favored Max. Kylie could tell that neither of them wanted to win by technicality. They wanted to knock each other out. They clashed like crazed pit bulls. Trading punches and kicks the whole round until midway through it, both of them exhausted and barely recognizable, Jason slipped in blood on the mat and his footing wobbled for a second. That was when Max had him. Max pounced on him landing punches with a speed and ferocity no one expected him still to have at that point. Jason didn’t have time to defend himself and it was over. The ref quickly ran in to the match, but Max kept hitting him again, and again…the referee tackled Max and had to use all his strength to pull him off. They couldn’t shake hands at the end of the match. Jason was unconscious and the whole room was silent with shock at how far this fight had gone. Soon the boos started coming from the crowd. Garbage was being thrown into the cage and Max had to duck his way to safety in the fighter's area. Eventually, the crowd was silenced as the announcer got on the mic to read the results of the fight. The winner, by knockout, was Max Waller. The boos grew even louder as the whole row of people from the Ultimate were stunned by what had happened.
Kylie couldn’t believe what she just saw. Jax, Ferran, and Trisha looked equally horrified. What was supposed to be a big day for their gym was now turned into something horrific. They now had possibly severely injured friend, and now one of the most detested goons in L.A.’s amature MMA scene, which nobody knew how to take as he also was seen as a friend. Kylie couldn’t stand to be there anymore and went home after getting confirmation that Jason was going to be alright and which hospital he was going to to get helped. She didn’t know if she could see him like he was.
Round 8*
A week past. Kylie sat on her couch, and thought about what to do. She still felt guilty for what had happened. She knew it wasn’t really her fault, but she couldn’t help but feel that way. Jason was beat up but okay, and back home the next morning after the fight from the hospital. He was tougher than Kylie ever imagined. She dialed Jason’s number.
“Hey you.” His voice sounded muffled through his split lip and battered nose.
“You want to come over?”
“You want to spar?”
She couldn’t tell if he were kidding or not, and what he meant by the word spar. She didn’t really like that.
“No. I wanted some company. See how you were doing after the fight. Dinner. Movie maybe?”
“Oh.” Was he disappointed? “Oh! I’m sorry. I’d love to. I feel like a dick now. When are you free?”
“Let’s say six?”
“I’ll be there. Can I bring anything?”
“I’m good.”
“And Kylie, I’m so sorry, that was a douchey thing to say. I’m really sorry.”
“No worries,” she said letting the previous comment go. She was excited to see him again even though she knew he could be a cold jerk sometimes and say stupid things.
Kylie heard the bike pull up outside, and Rosie started to bark. She held the door for him as he came upstairs carrying a bottle of sparkling cider. “I was in the wine aisle looking for something, realized you can’t have wine, and I kind of panicked. Will this do?” He handed off the bottle and immediately dropped onto one knee to greet Rosie. She spun around in happy circles, wagging her tail.
“It’s great. The jury’s still out on how much preggos can actually drink…”
“My mom drank a bunch when she was knocked up, look how I turned out!”
Kylie laughed. Dark bruises splotched his face. Max did a number on him, leaving the skin around his jaw red and puffy. A purple bruise colored his left cheekbone. White strips of sticky tape holding the cuts on his face together. The split lip he had was beyond help and was just going to need time to heal itself.
“It’s nothing my face hasn’t looked like before,” Jason said when he noticed Kylie staring at the marks on his face. “Remember when I said that I felt like my father when he found out about me when you told me you were pregnant.”
“Ya.”
“Well ya that’s probably the last time I’ll ever compare myself to him. I’ve got grade school pictures that look probably worse than my face does now.”
Kylie was a little struck by the openness Jason was showing, but she also realized she liked it. She liked knowing something about him he didn’t advertise to anyone. He had already shown he was fierce and strong. Kylie didn’t also expect him to seem vulnerable.
She’d made a pretty simple red sauce, cooked up some spaghetti, got some bread and a green salad. Nothing too fancy. They served themselves from the counter, then sat down at Kylie’s café style table with tall chairs.
“I feel like I’ve never really sat down and talked with you before,” Kylie said as Jason came to sit down with his plate. He had a hard time eating it, his cracked lip stinging from the tomato sauce and vinegar in the salad dressing.
“No, I know. We’ve hung out with the Ultimate group before. And…you know. Those times with Max.”
“Ya those times with Max.”
“Oh, I know. I gotta ask now though. It’s probably the medication speaking but...Do you do that a lot? The thing with two guys at once?”
“Never. I mean, I’d always wanted to. And I really liked it. But hadn’t done it before.”
“I’d always fantasized about two chicks. Never another guy.” Jason was quiet a moment. “It wasn’t so bad. And if you tell anyone I said so, I’ll never speak to you again.” He laughed to show he was kidding.
“I was surprised you guys went for it.”
“Amazing what tequila will do.”
“Yeah, the first time.”
They sat quietly at her table for a moment, finishing the meal. “So what’s it like?” he asked.
“Getting boned by two guys at once?”
“NO, Being pregnant.”
“My boobs are getting bigger.”
“I noticed.” She smiled and dropped her gaze.
“Can I touch your stomach?”
“Sure.”
He got up and moved closer to her. “I hear all the time pregnant chicks talking about people just, like, reaching out and touching their stomachs, and totally not being okay with it. I want to ask.”
It could be yours, she thought. So weird. He touched her through the long-sleeved t-shirt she wore, his hands strong and warm through the thin material. Then he slid them to her hips. She leaned up and kissed him. Kylie felt close to Jason in that moment and the effects her pregnancy was having on her libido were still always on the verge of taking control of her it seemed. She wanted it to be both of them there kissing her again, but this kiss was also something she could get used to.
“I really like you,” he said when they broke apart.
“I’m pretty fond of you myself.”
“Do you feel like this is weird? Without Max, I mean?”
“No.”
“Do you do this with him?”
“I haven’t.”
She led him to her couch. Lost herself in his kisses, so different this time, when there wasn’t someone else there. Not less exciting, for sure. They took their time, exploring and discovering one another. She learned how sensitive his ears were, how kissing them made him suck in his breath. He was so gentle, and spent a lot of attention caressing her stomach and her swollen breasts, tasting them and pleasing them with his tongue. She arched her back and moaned. She saw dark bruises on his ribs when she pulled his shirt off. Max did a number on him.
This time he took care of her, catered to her, kissing her cleft and gently sliding a finger up inside her, working it and sending her into quivering orgasm. Only then did he climb on top of her, careful not to put too much weight on her stomach, and gently pump them both into climax. She couldn’t remember such soft lovemaking maybe ever, a
nd when she came on her back on her sofa it felt like a different kind of orgasm, one that rocked her from every edge of her being.
They lay there a while quietly. “So I know you like MMA,” he said. “What else are you into?”
“Sex,” she joked. She didn’t like talking about herself.
“Yeah, I know. But what makes Kylie McKee tick? Do you read? Watch TV? Music?”
She didn’t want to tell him her favorite thing, because it would mean letting him know her. It was also mean that she would need to tell him about her painting, which she was enjoying too much again to open herself up for judgement on.
“I mean, I love my bikes, I also really dig horror novels. Horror movies. I’m all about them. Blood, guts, I’m down.” Jason was saying this with an vulnerable eagerness. Like he was waiting for Kylie to open up and tell him something important about her. After all, he had opened himself up to her.
“I like horror movies. But what I really get into is painting,” she replied feeling like she had to give him this even though she didn’t want to.
“Oh yeah? Like what?” he cocked himself up on one arm so he could see her better.
“Portraits.”
“Of people?”
“Animals. Pet portraits. It’s kinda my thing.”
“Wow, that’s really cool. I bet people pay a lot for those.”
“There’s a pretty good market for it, yeah.”
Kylie didn’t expect to hear that from Jason. She mostly expected laughter.
“Can I see one?”
“No. I’m really shy about it.”
“Do you, like, have a website? Do you sell them online?”
“I’ll show you sometimes, I promise. Just not yet.” It made her nervous, and he could sense it too, she knew, because he pulled up his pants and handed her her shirt.
“Thanks for dinner,” he said.
“Thanks for coming. It’s really nice to get to know you a little better.”
He gave her a weird look, and headed out into the night.
Had she totally screwed everything up? She wanted to hang out, wanted to know the guy who had potentially fathered her baby, but she wasn’t ready to tell him everything. Wasn’t ready to have a relationship, or to settle down. She liked being on her own. Plus the idea of letting someone else in was scary. She regretted sleeping with him again…weird that it was the normal sex she felt like she had a problem with.
She ran her hands over her stomach, called out to Rosie, and took her downstairs to work on a portrait of a pug wearing a bumble bee costume.
This was the quirky side of Kylie she didn’t want exposed. It was something she had been doing on the side since moving to Venice Beach that nobody knew about. It was even a successful side business she had going for herself with an actual online website like Jason asked about that was starting to generate some actual money for her.
Kylie had a chilly thought though, “if Jason found her online for her pet portrait business, who knew what else he would find out about her.” He might even see she used to live in San Francisco, and find that online picture of her that was briefly posted around the internet because of who her ex-husband was, billionaire and software mogul Francis Donaughy, and what he did to her when they broke up. She didn’t want people knowing her past, and she didn’t like how vulnerable she was at that point in her life. How vulnerable she looked in that picture. He’d thrown her out with literally nothing to her name but her dog, locked the door of his mansion behind her. A paparazzi just happened to be there at the time and snapped the picture of her crying on the lawn in her white nightgown. The whole thing was a strange and ugly mess that she thought was left behind, but now she realized was still creeping around in the life of the new Kylie.
She wondered if she should give Jason a call, let him know it wasn’t him, it was her. In the grand process of her life there were things that needed to be worked out which had nothing to do with him or the baby he may or may not have put inside her.
Plan B though was to call Max instead. Even though she was disgusted thinking about the fight last week and how he mercilessly beat Jason she also knew she didn’t want any more loose ends in her life. And given the thought that Max could be the father Max could be a huge loose end to haunt her down the road. On the phone she tried to make a date with him for the following night. Same plan, she’d offer to cook dinner, just the two of them.
“Will Jason be there?” he asked.
“No, I think we should get the chance to just talk between the two of us.”
Max paused a bit. “I’m kinda busy tomorrow.”
“Oh, no problem. Is there a better time for you?”
“I’ll let you know.”
The night she made that call to Max, Kylie was restless. She’d screwed things up with Jason, and didn’t like the way Max seemed to be pushing her away.
She went downstairs and focused on the cute pug in its costume. That odd part of her life was really the only thing she was sure of then as she worked to blend her yellows to make them pop against a sky blue background. She didn’t need either of the men. She had her baby and her dog, and nothing else mattered.
Round 9*
After another month of casual contact with Jason, not Max, Jason ran into her at the gym. She had been casually going back, but less frequently as her pregnancy didn’t let her do much physical activity anymore. She trained by herself mostly, working on some kata Jax taught her. Smooth, focused. She loved the way it cleared everything else from her brain as all her energy went to making sure she placed her feet right, held her arms properly, and kept her core tight. She worked on her breathing, pushing out the rest of the world. She felt like a whale, knew she was getting close, but the kata really kept her in line.
She didn’t even see Jason until she gave her final bow and finished.
“You’re getting really good. Tight control. Great form.”
“Thanks.” She wiped the sweat from her brow, and sat down on the nearby bench. She certainly got tired a lot easier these days.
Jason dropped down beside her. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
He took a deep breath. “Okay. I guess what I’m trying to say here is I’m kind of not fine.”
She blinked at him.
“I thought we were getting somewhere the night at your place, I thought we were having some kind of connection, then I felt like you stonewalled me. I want to be in your life, but you have to let me in.”
She didn’t know what to say. “I need time” seemed like the right thing to say to not let Jason any closer to her and her past, but not push him all the way out of her life.
“And that’s totally fine. I respect that. But you really freaked me. I tried to play it cool, tried to keep it casual. But I don’t want that. Not with you.”
“I freaked you out?”
“Yeah. Felt like a door slamming in my face.”
She studied him, perhaps more so than she had before. Brown eyes, over-gelled hair up in a pompadour which would have been silly on a lot of guys, but Jason managed to rock it. He wore his usual blank white tank top that he always did when not in his workout clothes. His body more tight and compact and hard than most of the other guys at the gym, and now also possessing a heart, which she hadn’t really ever taken into consideration. It scared her.
Sitting next to her, he expected her to say something. She didn’t know what he wanted. What she felt. She couldn’t say what she was thinking and that every man in her life has abandoned her when they got to know the real Kylie, and she wasn’t sure he wouldn’t do the same thing.
Suddenly, Max came in then, and saw them together. He carried tension in his shoulders as he walked straight over to them. Almost like he was back in the cage and coming after his opponent.
“Hey,” he said.
Jason nodded. Kylie returned the hey.
“How are you feeling?”
“Good. Great. My forms are really kicking ass.” It wasn’
t what he meant and she knew it, but they sat in the middle of the studio and she didn’t really want to get into too much here.
“I want you to get the paternity tested,” Max said. “I’m sure Jason agrees with me.”
Jason opened his mouth and closed it again before he spoke. “I’m curious, but it’s up to you, Kylie.”
“I told you I don’t want anything from either of you.”
“I’ve got to know,” said Max, “It’s my life too, and I can’t go through this not knowing if I’m a father or not.”
“I’ll look into it,” Kylie said.
“You’ll do more than look into it. You have to do this. You can’t leave me not knowing.”
She bristled. She could do whatever she wanted. His job was done. He’d fucked her. Now she didn’t need him, and with the way he was and had been acting, she didn’t particularly want him near her or her baby.
“So you’re into making demands of me, but not interested in coming by to talk to me,” now feeling angry enough to poke the bear in front of her.
She quickly wondered about moving again. Then she saw Jax and Trisha, waving from across the studio, thought about her nice little part time job, her apartment, and yes, Jason, who sat next to her.
“Ease off, bro,” he said. “It’s a crazy time, give her some space.”
“I could be a father,” Max raised his voice.
Jax and Trisha heard. Oh, no. Color rose in Kylie’s cheeks. Now they’d understand why the two men fought so hard the previous month, why they circled around each other now in the gym like aggressive dogs.
Jason stood up now. She didn’t need any of this. Kylie stood too, very aware of the heavy weight of her pregnant belly.
“Back off, dude.” She’d never heard Jason sound like that, low and menacing.
“Or what? You could be the father, too. Don’t you want to know? Isn’t it killing you?”
“Take a walk, Max.”
Now Jax and Trisha crossed the room to them.
Kylie didn’t want drama. She had had enough of that in her life and spoke up hoping to diffuse the situation and avoid a tell all moment in front of Jax and Trisha. “All of you. I can handle this. Max, can we go somewhere and talk? Just you and I?”
