Mr. Real

by Carolyn Crane

  “Well, I thought it would be nice to serve, but then I tasted it, and I realized it’s not fit for human consumption.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Denali never goes bad. It’s absolutely refreshing. Always just the thing.”

  “No, it’s not always just the thing, Nick, and I don’t want you to drink it.”

  He pressed his lips into a plump bow, not quite a smile, and regarded her silently.

  Oh, this was wrong. Karen was going to kill her. She was supposed to let him complete his lifecycle, but she couldn’t.

  He tilted his head, as he liked to do. “But I so fancied a spot of Denali.” He drew two fingers along a puddle of the amber liqueur on the counter. “What a dreadful waste.”

  Would he lick his fingers? Even a drop could kill him!

  She grabbed his hand and sucked his two Denali-covered fingers into her mouth, then pulled them out. Like his fingers were a popsicle or something. “The lady said no Denali.“

  He straightened, looking stunned for once. Of course, she was being a total freak.

  “Look, I’m the hostess here,” she explained. “It’s important to me that you have the best possible time, okay? You know what I mean?”

  A new light appeared in his blue eyes. “I believe I do.” He regarded her warmly, as though he’d seen something new and good in her. She recognized the look then…it was amazement, gratitude. It nourished something deep inside her. “Thank you,” he said.

  She didn’t dare speak. Men usually only looked at her like that when she was about to have sex with them.

  He took his hand back and drew a finger along her cheek, watching her with intensity. “We should take care of this before your dog comes in.”

  “Definitely.” She moved toward the broom closet, but he stopped her.

  “Please.” He snaked his hands around her, hoisted her onto the counter. “It’s the least I can do.”

  “But you don’t know where—”

  “Tut—” He caged her with his hands. “I insist.”

  He found the broom closet on his first try, took out the sponge mop and dustpan, and got up all the glass, then swabbed up every drop of the sticky liquid, rinsing the mop in the sink periodically. He was so dashing, so full of easy masculinity, working away like he was cleaning a crime scene, being so kind and helpful. And grateful.

  Did he understand on some level what she’d done? Did it mean that he wanted to live? And if so, how could she let him just dissolve?

  When everything was put away, he came to her with a casual smile.

  “You know you’re welcome to stay here,” she declared. “Just don’t drink the Denali, okay?”

  Again that warm sparkle. “Thank you.”

  “I have more than enough space. You’ll even have your own room. Carte blanche on everything. Seriously, Sir Kendall. Nick. I’d enjoy it.”

  “Oh, I would see to that.”

  She smiled happily.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Paul took over the driving just before they hit Colorado, and Tonio relaxed in the passenger seat, feet clomped up onto the dash.

  Paul appreciated the younger man’s silence on the matter of Sir Kendall. He wished he could explain it to him, but it was all so twisted and dark. Truth be told, Paul felt ashamed. He knew intellectually that what happened to him as a kid wasn’t his fault, but he still felt ashamed, like he’d caused it, like the violence was just a natural response people had to something deeply wrong with him.

  Anyway, he was an adult now. People put all sorts of horrible things behind them—why couldn’t he? And then, to pull out the Sir Kendall character for a commercial, of all things?

  He’d never told anybody, of course, though he’d come close to confiding in Master Veecha a few times. He so wished he had. He could’ve used the old man’s perspective.

  After the elderly Master’s death, Paul left the martial arts school where he’d taught and lived for so many years and moved to Los Angeles. He’d worked his way up through smaller organizations until he finally made it into the Ultimate Fighting League—a.k.a. the UFL—landing a spot in the famed Eagle’s Cove, nest of champions.

  It had been a decent life for a long time; he’d worked as a bartender at night, trained with the other Cove fighters during the day, and started landing undercard spots and getting known. Girls lusted after him, and he had a few dates but nothing serious. Master Veecha lived a wild life, but he’d always demanded a monk-like focus from his fighters.

  “The young fighter must never give his heart away—not for booze, not for ego, not for love. The young fighter keeps his heart for training,” the master had always said. “Extraordinary skill requires extraordinary sacrifice!”

  Hard advice for a young man, but oddly convenient. His heart wasn’t exactly worth giving away for love. Paul had followed Veecha’s advice assiduously even after the man’s death; he’d followed it almost to the world championship.

  Then, one night, a talent agent came to the bar. The agent liked Paul’s big muscles and his dark-haired, blue-eyed, black Irish looks, and he encouraged Paul to try for commercial work—a commercial actor made lots more money than a bartender. He’d have more time to train.

  The agent was right. Paul got a few smallish parts, and he couldn’t believe how easy the work was for the pay. It was better for a fighter, too: long, late nights at the bar were not conducive to early morning workouts.

  And then the Denali man auditions came up.

  “You land this and you’ll be able to waltz in a couple times a year, shoot for a day or two, and then sit back and let the checks roll in,” his agent explained. And apparently the checks would be generous—he could quit being a bartender for good.

  Paul had always had a shot at the top, but he recognized this as an opportunity for the kind of financial freedom that would turbocharge his chances. He could train all the time, hire a lifting coach, an endurance coach, a dietician. Rest up after matches. This was it.

  Denali was an after-dinner liqueur, Paul learned, that was marketed to upscale women. They promised him that the commercials would never run in America—only in Australia and New Zealand and dubbed for Japan and Korea. Denali advertising in North America apparently took a different angle.

  Auditions were held on a Friday. Paul waited in the back room with several dozen actors, men ranging in ages from 25 to 40, all with numbers pinned to their shirts. They relaxed, talked, mumbled lines, stretched. Now and then, word came back from out front that the client was unhappy because nobody was “embodying the Denali man spirit.”

  Paul wasn’t surprised. What did these people expect? Denali was a stupid, fussy liqueur that tasted like peach schnapps. No man in his right mind would drink Denali.

  And then this awful realization descended over Paul. One man would drink Denali. One man would make the perfect spokesman for Denali.

  That man was Sir Kendall Nicholas the Third.

  The idea of deliberately playing Sir Kendall made Paul want to beat his head against a wall. He wouldn’t do it. No!

  But this was his make-or-break moment as a fighter; what if he could use Sir Kendall to get the gig? What if he could transform Sir Kendall from the instrument of torment from his youth into a source of freedom for the adult he’d become?

  Lord help him, Paul borrowed a silk scarf from the actor next to him and tied it around his neck.

  When his name was called, he followed a green-haired boy with a clipboard down a hallway and into a large sound studio strewn with lighting equipment and folding chairs. Over on the far side, an actor was in the process of auditioning in front of five people who sat behind a long table, their backs to Paul.

  Paul took a deep breath and worked on becoming dangerous, ladies-man, super-spy Sir Kendall, in body and mind. The green-haired boy whispered a few questions and wrote the answers next to Paul’s number, 38, though Sir Kendall would have vastly preferred 69 or possibly just 6.

  Furthermore, Sir Kendall would not like that t
here was only one exit in the room. And he would find the actor finishing up onstage to be a complete incompetent, and this entire affair to be tedious. Affair. Tedious. That’s how Sir Kendall would talk.

  And then it was time. The green-haired boy led Paul across to the ‘stage,’ where two pretty actresses struck bored-as-hell poses. He handed Paul’s headshot and resume to the people at the table, three women and two men. One of the men—angry expression, pointy little ponytail—motioned at him tersely. “Any day now,” he said. The director. The suit next to him was no doubt the client.

  The script called for Paul to walk into the restaurant, sit at the table, and order a Denali from a waitress while staring at a pretty girl.

  The script was wrong.

  In a kind of trance, Paul walked up to the door, which was represented by a large box and a light on a pole, but instead of going on in, he paused and leaned casually against the box, arms crossed, face held in the ultimate poof-tah Sir Kendall expression. The bewildered waitress finally walked over to him. “Yes?”

  “I need a quiet table, if you’d be so kind,” he said in the fake British accent his step brothers had always used for Sir Kendall. “And a Denali, neat.” And then Paul gazed across at the woman sitting at what was supposed to be the bar. “Make that two Denalis.”

  The woman playing the waitress stared at him, unsure, it seemed, whether to perform her line, Coming right up, there at the door. Or perhaps she thought him insane.

  “Certainly,” she said.

  “One more thing…” Only now did he rouse himself from his casual pose. Like a man possessed, he pulled a card from his pocket—his agent’s, but no matter—and handed it to her. “Tell them Sir Kendall Nicholas the Third has arrived from Budapesh.”

  Budapesh. He’d heard somebody in an old movie pronounce it that way. Could he be any more ridiculous?

  The girl playing the love interest gazed at him in much the same way that the waitress had gazed at him. Paul could feel stunned silence coming off the people at the table.

  What in the hell was he thinking? He was mad. He had officially gone mad.

  And then the suit stood. “That’s it!” he said.

  And then the director stood. And clapped. “There it is,” he barked. “There it is. Thank fucking god.”

  Then all the rest of the people at the table stood and clapped.

  They offered Paul a three-year contract and an enormous signing bonus that day. In a daze, he scribbled his name on the line.

  His agent wanted to take him out to dinner. The waitress wanted to fuck him. All he wanted to do was take a shower. He couldn’t believe that he’d played Sir Kendall Nicholas the Third.

  Paul kept the gig a secret from the guys at the Eagle’s Cove—all they knew was that he did commercial work.

  The money made it bearable at first; he could coast for months on what he earned from one shoot, which enabled him to throw himself into weight training, take-downs, and performing reps of moves that weren’t yet his. Master Veecha had always said that to make a move yours, you needed to do a million reps.

  He maintained Master Veecha’s formless focus in the ring for longer and longer, and soon he was getting undercard fights on big fight nights. An energy drink paid him to wear their T-shirt and cap, and the Puma Reinhardt mythology grew—he dominated his opponents with utter calm and serenity, utter control.

  It was only when Paul was in the ring, fighting at the level of formless focus, that he became fully free of Sir Kendall.

  Inevitably, though, the call would come again. Another Sir Kendall spot to be shot. He was compelled by his contract to return, like a man condemned, to play super-spy Sir Kendall, the lover of Denali. God, if anybody had any idea how twisted it all was.

  As the shoots piled up, he began to have Sir Kendall nightmares, something he thought he’d gotten over years ago. He longed for the contract to be up and even went so far as to have a lawyer take a look at it and see how to get out. The lawyer assured him that the most painless way of getting out of the last twenty months of his Denali man contract would be to stab himself repeatedly in the face.

  It was one thing to brace himself before a shoot and expect to be addressed as Sir Kendall in the studio. But now and then he’d be recognized out on the street by female tourists from Australia or Japan.

  Look! It’s Sir Kendall! And of course Paul would freeze. After all those years, the fight or flight response was ingrained in him—it wasn’t as if he could simply switch it off.

  Being called Sir Kendall out of the blue would throw him into a tailspin. He’d shove his nails into his palms, remind himself that he was in L.A. Gene and Gary aren’t here, he’d tell himself. They’re in prison for the criminally insane. Forever. They can never get out. They can’t get you now.

  Thank goodness the spots only played in Australia and Japan and that his fans were women. Paul couldn’t imagine what it would be like if a man called him Sir Kendall in any kind of threatening way.

  And then he found out.

  Pico “Pulverizer” Jaffy used it first. In Atlantic City. Brilliantly—Paul had to give him that. Fighters always touched gloves before a fight, and it was right at the glove touch that Pico pulled it out: “You ready to die, Sir Kendall?”

  Terror gripped Paul’s chest, and everything got hazy—the ref, the octagon, the lights, the shouts, the bell. Paul’s famous focus evaporated into a cloud of rage, pain, and fear. Fight or flight. He fought, but his focus was shot. Pico came in with a jab and a cross and shot down for a double leg takedown, slamming down onto Paul, getting him into a neat arm bar. Just like that, the fight was over. Thirty seconds into the first round.

  Not everybody heard the taunt, but they all saw how Paul’s game fell apart. Lots of people lost money; the odds had been on Paul to destroy Pico and go on to fight Nuevarra.

  Friends, fans, and Cove coaches mobbed Paul as he stumbled back to the warm-up room. What happened? Was he okay? Paul just hung his head. He’d vowed never to be made helpless again, and what had happened? He’d been made helpless. By a name.

  It was the way Pico had growled it—Ready to die, Sir Kendall? In a flash he was that small, helpless, asthmatic boy again.

  Guys used the name twice in the week after that during internal fights for rank within the Eagle’s Cove. Two up-and-comers. Within seconds, Paul was tapping out. By then, the entire Ultimate Fighting League knew that the effect could be reproduced: if you called Paul by the name of Sir Kendall, you would win.

  Paul couldn’t blame his fellow fighters for using it. Hell, if he could utter a name at the beginning of a fight that would make his opponent lose his shit, he’d do it. It was a fighter’s job to stay cool through everything, and he’d blown it. Like Master Veecha used to say, “Inner calm, outer force!”

  Coach Walton made Paul visit the therapist who worked with guys on the team; the therapist had watched the fight with Pico, of course, and suspected some form of post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD. He suggested regular bi-weekly sessions where they’d work on the issue and get to the bottom of it.

  But Paul didn’t need to wallow in memories of Sir Kendall, and he sure as hell didn’t need to get to the bottom of anything—he was already there. What Paul needed was to pull himself back up.

  You can come back to the Cove if you beat Bearbaum,Walton said. The Bearbaum fight. Vegas. Three months away. Yeah, he could beat Bearbaum. If he could get free of Sir Kendall.

  The very next day Paul informed his agent he was breaking the contract. He would rather stab himself repeatedly in the face than play Sir Kendall again.

  He dumped his apartment, his furniture, his everything, as though Sir Kendall was a skin he could shed. It was Tonio, the young fighter he’d mentored and looked after, who came up with the idea to take a road trip just to get out of L.A.

  Paul went for it. He needed to be free of every vestige of Sir Kendall.

  The traffic was thick for late on a Friday night. Did the people of Colorad
o not sleep?

  “I have this idea, for when we get to West Virginia,” Tonio said, grabbing another licorice. “There are these boulders in the valley, and we, like, strap ourselves to them and pull them up the hill. A totally wicked core workout.”

  Paul took a licorice. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “There’re these old cars in this junkyard nearby, and we could tear out the seatbelts for the harnesses to pull the boulders,” he continued excitedly. “Totally build explosive power.”

  Paul smiled. Tonio was such a maniac for training.

  The plan was to train together away from the stress of L.A. and the camp circuit. Really, they were the perfect training partners, he and Tonio. Tonio had a great stand-up game, and Paul had the ground game. He’d also passed along a lot of Master Veecha’s wisdom to Tonio, but there was so much more to teach him about formless focus.

  “Not that you require more explosive power,” Tonio added when Paul didn’t answer right away.

  “Hey, I’ll take more explosive power any day of the week.”

  Tonio watched him admiringly. The kid believed in him; he didn’t understand that even the explosive power of a two-ton gorilla wasn’t enough to defeat Sir Kendall.

  Master Veecha said you must first imagine a thing in order to attain it. Paul gazed at the red lights ahead of him, trying to imagine life without Sir Kendall.

  And he found he couldn’t.

  Emotion welled up in him, like a fist pushing up through the inside of his throat. The red rear lights blurred on.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Alix woke up to find Sir Kendall sleeping next to her and was immediately filled with excitement and awe and a little bit of terror.

  One of his thick, dark brows was brushed downward from rubbing against the pillow. She fought the temptation to smooth it back up.

  Shit, what was she doing? Karen thought he could be dangerous, and the man did have a gun.

  And yet…letting him drink the Denali and complete his lifecycle seemed like a good idea back when they were first talking about it, but she couldn’t his expression out of her mind—his gratitude and amazement when he’d sensed she’d saved him. And now she was supposed to let him dissolve? When he’d been nothing but kind to her?