Boxer Beast

by Marci Fawn

  I’m not even halfway to the villa when the tears finally start to spill out.

  River

  Nothing ever fucking goes right in my life. I was about to tell Faith about what was going on… My hands go to the pockets on either side of my shorts, searching for something.

  The box.

  I take it out in my hand, watching the light of the bastard sun glimpse off of it. Not an engagement ring, yet, as I’d intended… My grandmother’s ring would look beautiful on Faith’s hand.

  A promise ring.

  It’s a promise ring. A promise to hold and to love her, forever and now. To be there for both her and Dawn, when they need me and especially when they think they don’t.

  I fucked up. I fuck up everything. I don’t know what I did to make Faith hate me so much, but I know that deep down she still loves me. I don’t know if I’m just deluding myself to think that or what…

  No. I’m not some insecure loser. Faith is my girl, and she always will be. But right now, something’s going on. I’m pissed.

  I take the ring out of the box, holding it in my hand and looking at it as I move further down the beach. Closer to the hot sand and girls in bikinis I’m supposed to lust after, and away from my love.

  Eventually, I break away from all the crowds. The sand is colder here, where the sun hasn’t battered down on it so much and where the water has rushed up higher than usual. It’s wet beneath my bare feet and I’m grateful that I didn’t pull on shoes. I was rushing to get out of that house. I might not have if I knew Faith was going to come and…

  Fuck!

  I shout up at the sky, cursing everything, swearing, not caring if some fucking stupid family on their vacation hears me. I swing my hand back and throw the ring as far into the water as I possibly can, but my throw is fucked in my anger and it bounces a pathetic distance into the sea before sinking.

  This is so wrong. I need to make it right. But I need to clear my head first, so I continue down into the peach towards a copse of some type of tree I admired earlier. I’m almost completely through the copse when I trip over something pink, and warm.

  Hot, suntanned flesh.

  Familiar flesh. Not in the sense that this is a girl I’d been with before, or ever intended to be with.

  “Sabrina?” My voice is more confused than I want it to be, and I feel drunk. The world is slurring. Everything about it is blurry at the edges and I just want to wake up in the morning and find out that someone else dealt with my problems – so long as that person wasn’t Faith, cleaning me up. Right now, much as I hate it, she is my problem.

  And her best friend is lying at my feet, entwined with…

  “Thomas, you motherfucker,” my voice turns to venom and I’m about to take out every scrap of anger I have on him.

  This is all his fault. I was fine until that bastard came in here with his greed and his blackmail and got between me and my family.

  “This is all your fault!” But I’m angry and disoriented, and clumsy. I move to attack him and I slip over the sand; the ground is uneven and unsteady, and there are rocks where previously there had been nothing. I move to get him again, and I slip.

  “You’re losing your touch, River,” Sabrina says, a hand over her eyes to guard her gaze from the sun as she looks up at me.

  She shoos away Thomas, and he scurries off, the both of them obviously worried that I’m going to fucking kill him.

  I might.

  I tell her as much.

  “Your one-night stand is teetering a little too close to death for my taste,” I say, my teeth gritted.

  But when she pats the ground next to her, I collapse down beside her on the sand, like I had with Faith. This is more comfortable, though. Sabrina might be able to help me, as much as we’ve never bonded or even remotely liked each other.

  “If I had a beer right now,” Sabrina raises a hand, imitating a toast a college kid might give at a frat party. “I wouldn’t share it with you.”

  I raise my eyes to her, wondering aloud. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “It means,” she says, pressing her pretend beer to her lips and taking a hearty swig. I laugh despite myself, but I still feel a black anger in my stomach.

  “You need to calm down and being on anything won’t help you. What’s up?” I don’t answer, and she raises an eyebrow at me.

  Well, one and a half eyebrows. She still can’t raise a brow like I can, but she’s gotten better – clearly through practice. “Faith?”

  “Faith,” I repeat, “does not love me anymore.”

  “You,” she pushes a finger to my chest, jabbing me in the chest with each word as she mocks my tone.

  “Are full of shit.” Her voice turns to normal as she says, “you and Faith are meant to be together. Always have been, always will be.”

  “You seem pretty smug for someone whose best friend just broke up with me.” I like talking to Sabrina, I realize.

  I can be a casual asshole without her accusing me of just doing it to protect myself because she does the same, and neither of us want to call the other out on it. I see how Faith would love the both of us, albeit in different ways.

  “Did she really?” She turns on her back. She’s been lying on her stomach this whole time, I realize. Then she takes her phone out from under her towel – was she making out with Thomas intentionally or just sunbathing and it kind of just happened? – and I’m confused. It’s not even on.

  “Ah, you see,” she says, noticing my frown. “This phone isn’t on. This phone doesn’t even get any fucking service out here. But this phone? If it were on, I bet Faith’s been texting me, begging for ways to get back with you.”

  “I didn’t break up with her, remember,” I smirk. But Sabrina is going something with this so I don’t fight against her.

  “I remember. But you forget,” she grins, turning her phone on, “that my friend is very angsty. I have a plan. Come here.”

  I move closer to her until she nods and pushes a hand against me, shoving me back a little as a playful reminder not to crowd her space. She’ll get Faith and me right again, like she always has. We’ll just need to work together.

  Sabrina tells Faith that we still have some time together and we need to keep the family together as best we can, for Dawn. And then they can figure out an explanation for the little girl. I feel bad about using my daughter as an excuse to get close to Faith, but…

  What can you do?

  Nothing, River. Calm down.

  We get in a classic car I didn’t know anyone up here had and drive down into town. There’s a market Sabrina wants to go to, so she can grab some stuff to make food.

  Then after she finds a store she’ll like, she’ll say they don’t have what she needs there and ditch both of us. That’s the plan.

  I nod at Sabrina from where she sits in the passenger’s seat, and she nods back. Faith and I are together in the back with Dawn in the middle.

  Thomas is driving, so I can’t kill him right now without risking a car accident hurting either of the three, much as I want to. But my anger is subsiding.

  I put an arm around Dawn and move it around Faith too, mainly aiming at holding her. She doesn’t fight it; the scowl she tacks on at the end looks like just that. An add-on.

  This is temporary. I know it is. She can’t mean any of it.

  We get to town and we all leave, our feet hitting the cobbled stones of an old road. I hold the door open for Faith, helping my girl out as Thomas goes off.

  He’s looking for somewhere safe he can park, unlike the space beneath the tree close by where we might be hit, he says. He works for a boxer but he’s not at all a lover of danger. I make a note in my head to give him shit about this later.

  The streets are filled with carts full of food, and Sabrina’s excuse is actually a good one. I grab an orange from a stall and pass some money to the man working there, then split it up into little pieces – littler for Dawn, but she’s learning to handle big kid food now, more
than ever – and pass them to the two most important women in my life.

  “You know,” I say, catching Faith’s attention with my smirking tone. “If Sabrina decides she doesn’t want to cook, I’m plenty capable of making dinner too.”

  Faith snorts, slamming herself against my shoulder playfully.

  “I don’t believe you,” she says, her tone betraying that she’s happier around me than she ever is alone. “You’d probably burn it.”

  “I’ll have you know I’d be a great housewife,” I wink at Dawn, and she giggles. I joke, but I’m a great cook – and hopefully Faith and Dawn will both know some day. We walk through the market, making plans of what to do today to bond and have some fun, and we all smile. But I’m just thinking of them and the future, and how I can stretch this out into other days –

  Just because you take it day by day doesn’t mean you only think of the one.

  Faith

  River isn’t with us. He’s standing right beside me but it’s like he’s not there – he doesn’t know I know, I think, and I’m not going to tell him. I wonder when he leaves. I can’t ask. But even as my heart constricts, I’m happy.

  I’m with him. If not for forever, for now.

  I stand beside him but from a distance, watching him move from where he is in the kitchen. He starts at one side of the room and ends at a cabinet, opening it and grabbing a box of cereal he must’ve chose when we went to that market.

  “I can’t believe you chose familiar food when we could experience Greece,” I say. But as soon as I say it, it’s a reminder to the both of us that he can’t experience it anymore because he’s leaving. I’m leaving too… Tomorrow. But I could stay longer, if I wanted.

  He can’t.

  “And I can’t believe you insisted on not letting me cook,” he says, moving closer to me with a sad grin on his face. He raises his hands up in the air like he’s under arrest, feigning helplessness. “So here we are.”

  “The food she made was lovely.” I think about it. It was simple, some type of pasta dish with veggies. She was trying out a recipe she’d gotten from a man at market, someone Thomas knew. They’re going to end up together, I just know it.

  “Does that bother you? Sabrina and Thomas, I mean.”

  He pours his cereal into a bowl and stares at me in confusion for a second as he eats.

  “Why would it?” Another spoonful goes in his mouth. I don’t know why I can’t quit watching. I should already be over him – we’re over now. This game of pretending as if we aren’t over tomorrow.

  “I don’t know. I know you hate him,” I say. I need to back out of this conversation. If I’m not careful, he’s going to know I eavesdropped and he’s going to know exactly what’s going on.

  I guess I’m a lucky girl because he just shrugs at me. He finishes his food quickly – how can he eat that much and still stay so muscular?

  He sticks the bowl in the sink, giving it a quick rinse off before leaving it there. He turns his head to me, smiling, and he moves past me out the door through the kitchen.

  “Final stop in Santorini, better hurry up so we’re not late!”

  His words aren’t happy, and his forced tone betrays them. I nod after him, realizing he can’t see me a few seconds too late. I watch him go out the door, scavenging through the cabinets myself and grabbing a granola bar or two to bring along for Dawn and I.

  It’s our last day.

  It’s going to be a long one.

  “What do you want to do, sunrise?” River picks Dawn up in his arms, calling her by that new nickname she loves so much. It’s perfect for her and I love and hate that he calls her it. He loves her so much, and she loves him… It’s going to break everyone’s heart when he goes.

  I bite back the thought, bile rising in my throat. I hear Dawn reply that she wants to go look at the little villages she saw past town, and I smile. My daughter is so simple, in the kindest way. She doesn’t know adult pain, or greed, any of the things that are causing us issues right now. And she’s so unaware of all of it.

  I make my way from the porch where I’ve been standing over to both of them, and they wave as I walk. Sabrina’s decided to stay home to get some of the stuff packed up before our flight tomorrow, but I know exactly why she chose to stay – her leg has gotten so much better than it was at the start of the trip, and she has a man around.

  She’s a dominant woman – the type of fun she likes to have involves riding.

  I look down at my feet away from my daughter and… River. I don’t know what to call him. I’m just thinking about what it would be like to have him above me again, and I cringe inside, not knowing why I still feel this way even through the pain.

  River looks at me and he’s about to open his mouth to say something, but I’m a lot better at interrupting him and speaking faster than I was when I was seventeen.

  “Let’s go see the little houses,” I say, and I smile down at Dawn as I take her hand. I can’t pick her up without hurting myself anymore – my back was sore the other day from it, and it makes me sad.

  I look up to the feeling of River’s eyes on me, a feeling that always leaves my skin covered with goose bumps – in a good way – and tingling. I smile up at him, too, then, and he takes my hand. Less hesitantly than I was expecting.

  “Oh,” I say. I’m not sure where the word decided to come out of my lips. I’ve lost a lot of control of what comes in and out of my mouth these days.

  “That’s right,” he responds, and this time the smile he gives me isn’t so tight, and I feel a bit of the suffocation in my chest starting to loosen. Dawn completes the moment, her little hand grabbing onto River’s and dragging us towards the road on our way to other roads made of cobblestone. We’re not taking the car today.

  We’re going to look at the little houses.

  Dawn finds a beautiful white rose she decides to keep for herself. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I’m pretty sure roses like that don’t grow in Santorini – at least not naturally – so I let her believe that it came from the sidewalk where she found it.

  River catches my attention with some waving – no shouting, I notice, which is what catches my attention the most. I look at him, and turn Dawn’s back to him as I realize he’s asking me to. There’s a flower cart ahead of us, spilling flowers out everywhere. He’s helping the man pick them up, and I’m pretty sure Dawn finding this particular white rose wasn’t intentional…

  Although I know River, so maybe he did actually knock over a cart just to see smiles on our faces. Either way, it’s working.

  I keep walking away from him down to a little café we saw earlier and had intended to get dinner at.

  It’s late now, and they’re starting to close, but they have that late night menu where you can only order specific things for a small price. I’ve always wanted to go to a place like this, but I wonder if Dawn should be out this late.

  She assures me that she’s not that tired, and we order food. I pick something I want out for River, intending on us splitting both of our meals. Dawn gets something that I think might be a twist on macaroni, and it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.

  What does surprise me are the small flowers River hides behind my ear when he comes up to the table. He sits beside me, and we eat, laughing, smiling, and just being happy. This is what happiness looks and feels like – a little girl and a strong man, who I need more than I’ve ever needed anything.

  It’s easier tonight. He is so easy to love and it’s easy to bond with him, to have fun, even if it’s our last day together.

  The walk back to the villa is tougher.

  But once we’re inside, it’s the hardest I’ve ever been. We’re up on top of the stairs before I collapse in his arms, my tears spilling out onto his chest. This isn’t the first time I’ve cried on him, but it’s the first time it’s been about him.

  And he knows it.

  He doesn’t apologize. He just holds me, whispering in my hair.

  “I
have something to show you.”

  And he takes my hand and we walk the short distance back to our bedroom – somewhere I thought I’d lie alone for the rest of these nights. I was so, so fortunately wrong.

  He tells me to stay and I do, wondering if I should put my hands over my eyes and cover my sight. But I don’t.

  He kneels down under the bed, pulling out his luggage. I notice that most of his clothing has been hung up in my closet, too, so I wonder what’s in there.

  Until he pulls it out.

  “These are for you two,” he says, his voice steadier than either of us could possibly feel.

  “Dawn deserves a father, Faith… Even if it’s not me.”

  His voice breaks and it kills me inside. I know what this is. The envelopes, the SD cards. There’s videos on them, he explains.

  He’s recorded all of them the past few days, and it explains all those times he’d seemed distant and I thought he was mad at me. He was just busy, making sure that she was okay, that we were okay – “even when I’m not there.”

  I break out in tears again. He sets it down on the bed and goes to me, and we’re moving towards each other, and falling in each other’s arms.

  His mouth is on my mouth and my hands are on his skin. We touch, our hands roaming each other’s bodies like we’ll never be able to touch each other again.

  “River,” I kiss his throat, his shoulders. I tug at his shirt and pull it away from him as he tries to touch me, kissing his chest. His hands take away my clothes and his hands go to my hips, looking for a way into my panties as he touches me. I burn a slow fire I’ve felt before, and I need to take advantage of everything I can before this is extinguished.

  I fall to my knees, opening the fly of his pants. He’s hard for me, and I look up at him before looking down again, and I kiss the tip of his cock. My hands go to his hips and I pull his pants the rest of the way down; he’s always touched me, always done what I’ve wanted him to do, but tonight I want to show him I love him.

  I kiss his cock again, looking up at him as I take the head in my mouth. I suck it lightly, taking in more and more of him, sucking deeply –