by Maris Black
Kage walked Paul over to the large open area at the other side of the living room, and started coaching him. Paul was so thrilled his face was glowing.
I had to admit, I was proud of Kage. Not only was he taking time to dote on my little brother, but he was discouraging fighting except as a means of self-defense. It seemed he did something to surprise me every day.
Most of the time, the surprises were good.
22
THAT night after a supper of delivery pizza, which Kage and I respectfully declined, my father took us into the small room he called his office and pulled a bottle of Johnny Walker Red out of his desk drawer.
“You drink Scotch?” he asked Kage.
“Sure,” he said. “Although Jamie and I will be drinking on empty stomachs, so we probably shouldn’t have too much.”
“Yes.” My father gave me a pointed look. “Jamie looks like he could stand to eat a little pizza.”
“Dad, I’m fine,” I assured him. “I’m healthier than I’ve ever been. This is what I look like when I eat right. You’re just not used to seeing me with so little fat on my body.”
“I can see your bones.”
“Those are muscles, Dad. And I’m fine.”
My mother followed us in and set three glasses on the desk and walked right back out, then my father proceeded to pour us each what amounted to a triple shot.
“I just wanted to drink a toast to both of your professional futures. I realize they’re separate futures, but you both seem to be on your way up, and that’s great.”
“What do you mean, they’re separate futures?” Kage asked.
“Well, I just mean that Jamie will be going back to school soon, and you’ll be fighting in the UFC. Then Jamie will graduate and go on to work for new people who need his services, with you providing a good reference, as you said. That is the plan, isn’t it? He’s done what he set out to do for you, and now that job is pretty much done, am I right?”
“I don’t know,” Kage said, and I recognized the note of challenge in his voice. “That depends on Jamie. It’s pretty much up to him. He’s a big boy, so he can make up his own mind.” He set his empty glass down on the desk with a thump. “Could I have another?”
I felt my eyes go wide, and I downed my own drink. I figured I was going to need it.
After my dad and Kage both finished off another full drink, I interrupted what seemed an awful lot like a standoff, though for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. “Um, dad… Is Mom going to drive herself to the hospital? Because at the rate you’re going, you’ll be passed out when it’s time to go.”
“No, son. I’m going to bed now to try to get at least a few winks. Y’all had better go to bed soon, too. You’ll sleep in your room where you always sleep, and your mother has made up the guest room for your girlfriend. Kage can sleep on the sofa.”
“She’s my ex-girlfriend.” I set my half-full second drink on the desk. “We’ll go see if Mom needs any help in the kitchen. Goodnight, Dad.”
When Kage and I got back to the kitchen, Jennifer and Layla were tidying up the counters and stacking the empty pizza boxes near the garbage can. “We’ll take out the trash,” I said. “Just leave it.”
Mom sat on a barstool watching. “You know, I could get all of this. But I do appreciate you kids making the effort to make things easier on me. I’m fine, though. I’ve made peace with my decision, and now it’s just a matter of finishing it.”
“You’re not nervous at all?” Jennifer asked.
“A little nervous about the anesthesia,” she admitted with a laugh. “I’m afraid I might tell the doctor all of my secrets. They say that stuff gives you a loose tongue, and you’ll say all kinds of things.”
We all knew she was teasing and that she was probably terrified, but the woman could put on a hell of a front. As calm as she seemed, you’d have thought she was just going in for a checkup.
“Like you have any secrets,” Jennifer scoffed. Then she got that look I hated. The bully big sister look, and I knew something bad was coming. She turned toward me with a smile and said, “Jamie’s the one who’s got secrets.”
“Knock it off, Jen.” I tried to seem as unruffled as I could, but inside I was shaking. Being outed to my entire family and my ex-girlfriend on the eve of my mother’s surgery just seemed too horrific to contemplate.
“Jamie has secrets?” Layla didn’t disguise her jealous curiosity well. “I thought I knew everything there was to know about him.”
And then Kage was pissed. I could sense his short fuse burning beside me without even looking his way. In fact, Layla was damn lucky she was a girl, because it was probably the only thing saving her from getting laid out on my mom’s kitchen floor.
“Oh, I’m sure you do. I’ll bet you two have some secrets of your own that would make Mom blush.”
“Jennifer, you’d better watch yourself,” Mom said. “I may be going into surgery tomorrow, but don’t think I won’t take a strap to you.”
I had to take a time out from the drama to address my mother’s new saying. “Mom, where did you pick up this strapping people business? It’s creeping me out. You never even spanked us.”
“I swatted you on the legs a few times,” she said.
Jennifer rolled her eyes. “Let’s get back to the secrets. For instance, I’d like to know why you’re wearing your Claddagh the right way all of a sudden. You’ve always worn it upside-down. You do know what that means, right?”
“You’re still wearing that thing?” My mom asked. “I guess I just got so used to seeing it on you, I stopped noticing it. But you never believed in that superstition, did you?”
Layla stared hard and my necklace, and I brought my hand up self-consciously, toying with it to cover it up. She knew I took it seriously. I’d told her about it. Planned to turn it around one day for her, but obviously that never happened.
I laughed, an empty sound that I hoped would be enough to fool Layla and my mom. “Do I have it on the wrong way? Guess I just picked it up wrong this morning.” I reached around to the back of my neck and untied it, flipped it over, then tied it back. I couldn’t bring myself to look Kage in the eye.
“Come on, Kage. Let’s go out to the gazebo. I’ll show you where I used to sit with my friends and listen to music on summer nights. It feels great out there.”
We walked out the back door, and it occurred to me too late that my invitation was suspect in itself. There was a perfectly good female sitting in my kitchen— one that I’d been intimate with and who was obviously flirting with me. Yet I’d invited a guy to go on a romantic stroll out to the gazebo. Brilliant.
But there had been no other choice, really. Not only was it what I’d wanted to do, but the alternative might have ended in murder.
“Why did my mom have to invite her here?” I mumbled under my breath to Kage as we crossed the lawn to the gazebo.
“Because she wants you to be with a girl,” Kage said. “They all do. This is an intervention, if you haven’t noticed.”
“What? They don’t even know anything about us. Except for Jennifer. I’m pretty sure she knows.”
Kage squeezed the back of my neck hard enough to make me wince and guided me up the steps of the gazebo. “Dammit Jamie, how can you be a senior in college and still be so clueless?”
“What do you mean? They don’t know anything. How could they?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’re more perceptive than you are.”
“You don’t have to be an asshole about it.”
“Well, you don’t have to hide under a fucking rock, either. Or technically I guess it’s me you’re trying to hide. But guess what? I’m here. I’m right fucking here, standing beside you at your parents’ house, trying to support you.” He tried to run his hand through his hair and met resistance when his fingers hit the topknot. “Fuck,” he growled and ripped the elastic band out of his hair and threw it on the gazebo floor. “I don’t know what I have to do for you. I gave you
a job, flew you out to Vegas, gave you the best home I could, fed you, trained you, fucked you, fought for you… and still you won’t have me.”
His voice wavered on the last part, and it broke my heart to hear him sound so rejected. I’d done that to him.
Tears welled up in my eyes, spilled out onto my cheeks, and I wiped them away with the back of my forearm. His words had really struck home. I hadn’t been able to see things from his point of view, or maybe I hadn’t wanted to, but now he’d held a mirror up to my face, and what I saw there was ugly.
I thought back to every positive step he and I had taken toward declaring ourselves a legitimate couple: kissing in front of the lady hotel clerk on our road trip, confiding in Steve at the Alcazar, sharing a slice of wedding cake in front of Enzo, allowing his psychiatrist to see us together, and coming to visit my family together. It had all been Kage. Every bit of it. I was the one who had resisted, hidden, shied away, gotten embarrassed, and even lied to keep our relationship a secret.
Kage had never once denied me to anyone. He had stepped up and claimed me even when doing so posed a threat to his future— the one goal he’d had since he was a child.
I remembered his words from the afternoon we got back from the road trip, when he’d asked me to go to my apartment and think things through.
I’m the one with something to lose here.
At the time, I had assumed he meant his career. But it wasn’t that simple.
I don’t give a fuck. I can touch his face if I want. Fuck the cameras. Fuck my uncle, fuck the public...
Self-revulsion roiled the too-still waters of my soul and opened my eyes to the truth. All along, Kage had been trying to come out of the closet, and I was the one pushing him back in. He’d taken a chance on me, trusted me, shown me his weakness, and I’d thrown it right back in his face.
“Kage…” I reached out for him, but he backed away.
“I’m not feeling it right now, Jamie.” He looked around us, at the twinkling lights of the gazebo, my parents’ house, the nighttime sky. “To be honest, I’m feeling pretty out of place here. This wasn’t a good idea. I should have just bought you a plane ticket and let you come alone.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. I want you here.” I put out my hand and stepped toward him, but he backed away again. I felt like I was trying to tame a wild mustang. He was one step ahead and just out of reach, and any sudden move might make him bolt.
He let out a harsh laugh. “You don’t want me anywhere except the bedroom.”
That one burned like hell going down.
“That’s not true.”
“You’re a fucking liar,” he railed. “I told you not to lie to me again.”
“Please, Kage. Let’s talk about this tomorrow. Let’s just go to bed and reset, and then we can work everything out tomorrow.”
“Yeah? You want to go to bed, Jamie? Is that what you want? Because I don’t have a fucking bed. I get to sleep on the fucking couch. Is that where you want me? On the fucking couch? That cunt gets a bed, and I get the fucking couch?”
“Kage—” I choked out his name on a sob, and that’s as far as I got. Because I looked into his eyes, and what I saw there dried the words right up in my throat. It was worse than the conversation over dinner when he told me he was bad, even worse than the fight, when I’d seen him knock that guy unconscious with no remorse.
“You’re scaring me,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm even though my adrenaline was spiking, and my fight or flight response was kicking in something fierce. “You’re not acting like yourself.”
“Yeah? Well, I’ve told you before. You don’t know me.” This time it was Kage who took a step toward me, and I was the one to retreat. “You don’t want to know me. You’d rather live in this little fantasy world of yours where everyone is a good person, and Michael Kage Santori just an entertaining summer fuck.”
He took another step toward me, and when I backed up, my knees hit the built-in bench that ran around the inside of the gazebo. He pressed in so close I had to lean back onto the side of the gazebo rail and catch myself with my hands. His body was so close now, I could smell him, and just like that I was instantly hard— trained to that scent like one of Pavlov’s dogs. I felt my nostrils flare and my eyelids flutter, and that uneasy quiver in my belly that told me I was a goner.
“Tell me,” he said. “Have you gotten your demons worked out?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your demons. You know. Have you gotten enough cock to satisfy your curiosity? Are you ready to go back to school? Go back to fucking girls?” He reached down between my legs and rubbed my hard dick through the fabric of my shorts. “Mmmm, looks like that part of you is still curious.”
I pushed against his hand and let out an involuntary sigh, getting harder by the second. I needed him to touch me more. More contact, more friction. I strained against him.
But instead of giving my cock more attention, he slipped his hand down under, cupping my balls and pushing his finger right up against my hole. The flesh was still aching, still ultra-sensitive from two nights before when Kage had so irrevocably owned my ass. I felt it every time I took a step, every time I sat down, and now the memories of those amazing sensations came flooding back full-force.
I groaned and shifted, trying to give him better access, trying to get more contact. I wanted him to penetrate me. Suddenly I needed more than anything for him to fuck me. If only he would fill me like I needed filling, hit that spot for me and make me come all over us. I drew in a deep, shuddering breath as he pressed up harder with his finger, transforming my entire body into one tangled mass of yearning.
“What do you want from me?” he whispered against my ear, his beard stubble scraping deliciously along my cheek and jaw.
“Fuck my ass,” I said, feeling no shame.
“That’s what I thought.” He removed his hand from between my legs and slipped his fingers under my necklace, snatching it so hard it broke both the cord and the skin on the back of my neck. I cried out in pain as Kage turned and threw the necklace as hard as he could into the woods next to the gazebo. “You think I’m good enough to fuck, but not worthy of being your boyfriend? Well, guess what? I don’t want the job anymore. Good luck finding another man for the position. It’ll take two to fill the vacancy I left.”
He turned and walked away, moving quickly and with resolve down the gazebo steps and onto the lawn. My mind was reeling, my face was hot, I was mortified… and I was angry. Because how dare he treat me that way? To taunt me like that, specifically for the purpose of humiliating me, was inexcusable. And then to destroy my necklace and throw it away.
I ran down the steps of the gazebo and after Kage with only one thought. Revenge.
I wanted to shred him like he’d just shredded my pride. I closed the distance between us in a couple of seconds and tackled him, hoping to take him down and make him suffer. But attacking a brutal fighter trained in multiple disciplines is probably never a good idea, especially if you don’t know anything about fighting except the little bit that fighter has taught you.
When I flew at him from behind, I have no doubt he heard me coming like a herd of buffalo and anticipated exactly what I was going to do. To his credit, even in anger, he didn’t hit me. He flipped me easily off of his back, deposited me on the ground, and kept walking, stinging my ego even more.
“Are you running from me?” I yelled. I stopped in the middle of the yard, so overcome with anger that it didn’t occur to me at first that the people in my house might hear. I glanced at the darkened house. The TV flickered in the living room. Probably Layla and Jennifer watching TV and plotting on me. Kage pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and kept walking toward the house. “Who are you calling? Your uncle?”
“A cab.” He was emotionless. Efficient.
Leaving.
“Why don’t you come back here and fight like a man, you fucking pussy?” I screamed out of desperation.
He
spun around in mid-stride and stalked back to where I was standing. “What is wrong with you? You want me to fight you? I would fucking kill you.”
“You don’t scare me,” I lied. “What have you had, one fight now? It wasn’t even that impressive, asshole. You’re nothing. They’re gonna destroy you in the UFC.” I didn’t even know what I was saying anymore. Anything to get a rise out of the dark-eyed beast standing in front of me. I knew he could kill me. I knew. And yet I pushed as hard as I could.
When words didn’t work, I did the dumbest thing I’d ever done in my entire life. I threw a punch. He let it land. I say let because there’s no way he didn’t see it coming. I telegraphed it from a mile away. I could see where my knuckles had caught his lip, and it was getting pink and swelling up. A bead of blood welled up, and he reached up and touched it.
Then he just looked at me with that cold, terrifying look, then down at the blood on his hand, then up at me again. All I could think to do was run. I ran across the lawn, past the gazebo, and down the small hill in back, out toward the wooded area just beyond our yard. But I didn’t make it to the tree line before he caught me.
He grabbed my wrist and spun me easily. Smooth as butter and so fast I didn’t know what hit me, he had me face down on the grass with my arm cranked painfully up against the middle of my back. I felt his weight pinning me down, his thighs straddling my thighs, and God help me it was turning me on.
“Kage—” I lifted my hips off the ground as much as I could and pushed my ass back toward him. But I wasn’t trying to escape.
“You want it that bad?” he asked, his voice sounding gravelly and just as needy as I felt. He torqued my already screaming arm just enough to make me squeal like a wounded animal, then leaned over me and bit down on the soft spot between my neck and shoulder. He rocked his hips against my ass, dry humping me into the ground for several slow, excruciating seconds, and I could feel how hard he was. Then he sat back on my thighs again. “Jamie, look at me.”
He eased up on my arm enough that I could turn my head and look back over my shoulder at him. My cheek was pressed against the damp grass, the scent of earth overpowering in my nostrils.
