SWOLLEN: A Secret Baby Sports Romance

by Stephanie Brother

  I can’t believe that the only reason he didn’t call me after the first time was because he didn’t want to drag me into his world, well, right now, I feel like that’s exactly the thing I need to do to him to find out whether we have any kind of long-term life together, either as lovers or people who share a child.

  I know Liam has a right to know. There is little reason for me not to tell him other than the fact he’s going to freak out and that may affect what could be building between us. I am reluctant to lose him as a lover a second time, especially the way he blows my mind completely, but I know that if I don’t tell him now that I have the chance, he’s likely to hold it against me.

  There isn’t much choice. Risk never fucking Liam again if I tell him, or if I don’t tell him, risk losing someone much closer to me when he eventually finds out. I can’t keep Maggie a secret for too long, she takes up too much of my time. Plus, if I tell him, and he doesn’t have the freak out reaction I expect, Maggie will finally have the true family I’ve wanted to give her.

  Almost a week passes before I hear anything from him. Not a text message, dropped call or facebook friend invite in that whole time until suddenly, when I’ve just about convinced myself that lightning does strike twice, he calls.

  “Jasmine”, he says as casually as he seems to do everything else in his life, not a question either but a statement, and then goes on to invite me out for dinner the following night.

  As a single mother that works fifty hours a week, preparation is my byword. I have the whole month planned in advance, because if I don’t, I have no idea where I am.

  “Yes”, I tell him excitedly, having no fucking idea at all how I’m going to manage it.

  I can’t say no to him. It means it’s likely I’ll have to tell him about Maggie, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

  I plead for the night off work, agreeing to do a double shift the following weekend, even though the sitters fees will be more than my wages, and then call around two sitters and a bunch of friends until, finally, someone offers to help out, as long as I return the favor, when she needs it at short notice too.

  It’s been a week since the last time we saw each other, and even in that short time, our daughter has already changed. Every day I see more of him in her, and every day I allow myself to think about it, I hope that it really works between us. If Liam is as perfect a father as he is a lover and a fighter, and if he fights for Maggie’s protection as much as he did for mine that time, then we are going to be onto an absolute winner.

  I dress up. I don’t often get a chance to pull a sexy dress out of the closet and put makeup on, but if I’m paying for this, I’m going to make sure I enjoy it. I don’t even know when the last time I went out was, and compared to last week, when I was at the bare fist boxing event in joggers and hoodie, looking like some kind of Atlantic City white trash, tonight I look like a million bucks.

  I’m a good looking girl, I’m proud of my figure and I’m not afraid to show it off. I’m going to get laid tonight, I’m going to make absolutely sure of that. I want to make Liam want me as much as I want him, I’m going to make him need me as much as we need him to turn what we have into a family.

  I don’t give a fuck about what he does to make money right now, but there’s definitely going to be a sell by date on it. When Maggie’s old enough to walk and talk, I don’t want her to see her daddy coming home with his body covered in cuts and bruises.

  There is nothing official about what he does either. He’s talented enough to do what he does professionally, and if he wants to carry it on in any way with me by his side, that’s the route he might have to take.

  I’m an open minded girl, and it doesn’t make me think any less of him, actually, it turns me on to see him do it, but it doesn’t have a place between the three of us, and, anyway, by what Liam has already told me, he’s the first person that wants to leave that world behind.

  We meet at a bar in Williamsburg, where Liam has reserved a table on the terrace that faces a road choked with cars and people. Friday night in this part of the city has always been fun, and tonight looks like it’s going to be no exception.

  He’s dressed smartly, which offsets it a little, but I can still tell from the softened tissue under his eye and the bandage strapped across his wrist, that he’s been fighting again.

  He gathers me into him and we embrace, and then kiss, and then kiss again with tongues, while he presses himself against me.

  “Miss me?” I ask when I’m sat down.

  “It’s good to see you”, he says with a smile.

  He looks too young to be caught up in the world that he’s in, and I wonder how it’s happened. His apartment gave little away, but then again, I didn’t really expect it to. No photos of family members, nothing that personal at all really. It didn’t look all that lived in, but he might have only just moved there. It wasn’t the place we first fucked so maybe he likes to move around.

  “Busy week”, I ask, touching his wrist with my hand.

  “Would you believe me if I told you I got this tripping over in the park?”

  “No”, I say, shaking my head.

  Liam looks away and then back again as though he’s been caught. “Can’t get much past you.”

  “Did you win?”

  “I always win”, he says, almost slightly embarrassed to admit it.

  The waiter comes over to take orders. I ask for a red wine and Liam takes a beer. I have Maggie on my mind, nagging at the back of my brain, dancing on my lips, but now doesn’t seem to be the right time. Eat first, tell secrets later.

  “How have you been?” he asks.

  “Busy”, I say. The standard response in the modern American world, yet mine happens to be fucking true. Two jobs, a two-month-old daughter, several stories to write up. “I’ve been working on the underground fighting article.”

  Liam sips on his beer. He could be a model in a different life, a film star. I look into his eyes and want to know what’s behind them. That’s part of the reason I’m interested in this fighting world in the first place. Humans are so multilayered and hypocritical, that sometimes we do things in contradiction to what we actually believe is right. Liam seems way too intelligent to have lost himself to that world, far too good to stay there for too long.

  “So, what’s your verdict?” Liam asks.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, and I grew up with three brothers”, I say, not all that keen to talk about it if it makes him feel uncomfortable.

  “I hate it”, he says.

  The natural question would be, why do you do it? and I think he wants me to ask, but I don’t. “I can see why you would”, I say instead. “It’s pretty brutal.”

  “It’s probably the strangest job I’ve ever had”, he says. “The best paid as well.”

  “I’m sure it pays more than waitressing”, I say.

  “Everything pays better than waitressing”, he jokes.

  I touch his wrist again, just because I want to feel close to him, and Liam reaches in, pulls me towards him and steals another kiss.

  “You said you had a secret”, he says again, when he’s pulled away from me.

  “I’m a complicated person”, I say. “I’m a woman for a start.”

  “I like complicated”, he says. “Especially complicated woman.”

  I give him a look that tells him I’m not convinced and try and divert the conversation somewhere else.

  “What would you be doing if you weren’t beating the shit out of people in abandoned buildings all over Brooklyn?” I ask.

  “All over the States”, he corrects me.

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, believe it or not, in another life completely, I had a chance to be a professional football player. I was offered a scholarship at LSU, all of my fees paid for four years and then right out of the gate I fucked up my knee.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Things kind of went a little downhill after that. My kne
e is better now, but it took too long for it to get fixed and I had to pass up that chance. I never had enough money to go back, and, anyway, I kind of messed up the opportunity. It wasn’t a good time in my life.”

  “That sucks, Liam”, I say. “That’s super bad luck.”

  He shrugs. “I guess so, but then again, maybe it was never meant to be. My minor would have been philosophy, so if the football didn’t work out you might have been sat here talking to a philosophy lecturer.”

  “A philosophy lecturer that kicks the living shit out of people, now that would be a conundrum”, I say.

  “We probably wouldn’t have even met”, he says. “I definitely wouldn’t have been able to save you from those three guys that night.”

  “You might have been able to talk them down”, I say.

  “Or confuse them with a discourse about the ethics of what they were about to do.”

  “You would have made one hell of a sexy lecturer”, I say. “I can see it now, tank top, corduroy jeans, glasses.”

  “Is that the look you go for?” he asks. “If I’d known I’d have worn something else.”

  “I’d have fucked you if you were my lecturer”, I say, “and I’d fuck you whatever clothes you put on.”

  Liam smiles. “You know, I don’t think I’ve met many girls as direct as you”, he says.

  “Do you like it?”

  “You know I do. Last weekend was incredible. Even better than last year.”

  “Even though I had to leave early?” I ask, Maggie on my mind again and refusing to go away.

  “You’re a complicated woman”, he says.

  “Thank you for being understanding”, I say.

  “By the way, you look incredible tonight.”

  “You’re only saying that because of what you saw me in last week.”

  “No, seriously”, he says. “I think you are beautiful. I’d even go out on a limb and say we had a connection.”

  He is right in more ways than he can imagine.

  “I’d like to get to know you more, Jasmine”, he says, his hand on my leg. “I think there could be something special between us.”

  It’s only our first real date (even though we’ve fucked several times and have a baby between us he doesn’t even know about) but I agree with him. There could be something special between us. Something people spend their whole lives searching for and only very few are lucky to find.

  “Where did you go for a year?” I ask him. It comes out a little more challengingly than I mean it to, but I think it’s an important question in the grand scheme of things.

  Liam lets his eyes drop to the table before they come back up to me.

  “I’m going to go full confession here”, he says. “It’s only fair.”

  “Go on.”

  “I got myself in debt a while ago, with some people you don’t want to be in debt with. After that shit with my knee I got depressed, and then-”, he looks around for a moment as if to see who might be listening and then leans in close to me before he continues, “-it’s really fucking embarrassing, but I got addicted to the pain meds they put me on.”

  I sip my wine and wait for him to continue.

  “I’m clean now, I have been for almost six years, but at the time, I needed money to afford them. One thing led to another, I fell in with some bad people, I went to jail, and then I got in debt, with the only people I could find to lend me the money. Since then I’ve been paying it off.”

  “Fuck”, I say, because I don’t know what other word is appropriate right now.

  “That’s why I didn’t want to drag you into my world. That’s the full story. I fight where I can and when I can. This year I’ve been all over America and I’ve fought in some of the craziest fucking places you could imagine. As a writer, you’d love that. More importantly, I’m nearly debt free. The end of this year I’ll be out of this world forever.”

  “To start your tenure as a philosophy teacher”, I say, trying to lighten a mood that has suddenly got serious.

  “I wouldn’t go that far”, he says with a smile. “So, there you go, I’m the fucked up bad boy parents don’t want their daughters to meet. I’ve been addicted to pain meds, I’ve been in jail for robbery, I’ve swapped a potential career in football for illegal fighting rings, and at one point I was up to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt to a crime organization that not only has a fondness for killing people, they like to do it by chopping their victims up into tiny pieces and throwing them out of a private plane so it takes years to collect them all.”

  “Wow”, I say.

  “So you see why I was reluctant to bring you into it.”

  “Tiny pieces?” I ask. “Out of an airplane?”

  “That’s what happened to the last guy that didn’t pay his debts. You probably saw some of it on the news. A leg found in Maryland, a hand in Ohio.”

  “What about your parents?”, I ask.

  “Yeah, no”, he says, shaking his head.

  After a moment's silence, he leans in towards me to take my hand. “I’ll completely understand if you want to leave”, he says. “It’s fucked up and has nothing at all to do with you. I’m not exactly a great prospective partner.”

  Try father of my child. Fuck. I don’t know how I feel. I knew about the fighting, obviously, but had no idea about the rest. What if he doesn’t pay off the debt? What if he does and they make him continue to fight anyway? What if I lose him?”

  “When you pay off what you owe, what then?” I ask, a little scared at what this means.

  “It means I’ve paid my debt and I’m free.”

  “And the fighting? Fuck, Liam, isn’t all this shit controlled by criminal organizations anyway?”

  “Not at the level I fight, no.”

  I’m not entirely convinced and I think Liam sees it.

  “This is a criminal organization, but they are honest people”, he says.

  “You just told me they cut people into tiny pieces and throw them out of airplanes.”

  “If you don’t pay your debt to them”, he insists. “If you do, you are free to do whatever you want. They don’t get involved with the fights, it’s not worth the hassle for them.”

  “Fuck , Liam”, I say.

  “I know, adventure time right.”

  “This shit doesn’t scare you?” I ask.

  “There is nothing I want more than to get out of this world and start leading a normal life, believe me. I am tired of pushing people away. I nearly couldn’t with you before, and now I definitely can’t. Like I say, the ball’s in your park. If you want to leave this here, I totally understand. I’m almost out, though, I will say that, and when I am, there is nothing else I want to dedicate myself to but seeing if we work. I’ve never felt like I have with you, never even thought it was possible.”

  “Me too”, I say, reaching for his hand.

  Fuck. This is typical me. Alarm bells ringing all over the place and me making a decision with my heart. And now that he’s opened up, that means that there is nothing else but for me to do the same. He needs to know about Maggie. He needs to know about the daughter that now forms part of his world and is something else massively at stake should he somehow fuck up his exit from it.

  I open my mouth but the words refuse to come out. They are there, already formed, a year old, but something in the connection between my mouth and my brain is stopping them from being vocalized.

  Instead, I say, “I’m going to the bathroom”, and the look Liam gives me makes me think he thinks I’m not coming back.

  Liam

  I’m a fuck up. I could have kept this whole thing a secret until the end of next year when the debt will be completely paid off and I’ll be a free man, but no, moral integrity decides I have to be absolutely honest.

  She’s not coming back. She’ll be in the bathroom resting her head against the mirror wondering what the fuck she ever did wrong in her life to deserve me. If mercilessly smashing strangers skulls in wasn’t eno
ugh to put her off, being in debt to a crime family with a penchant for killing certainly will be.

  She’s probably halfway through the window and ready to run away up the street. Fuck. The first time in what feels like forever I get a real chance to be with someone, someone I clearly have a connection with, and I have the compulsion to confess everything there is to know about myself as if doing anything else would be entirely ungentlemanly.

  That, coming from a man that puts people into hospital on a regular basis. If I ever get to see her again, maybe I should tell her how I stole sweets from my local shop when I was six, or about when I put dog shit in my dad’s shoes, just in case she hasn’t made up her mind about me yet.

  I’ve looked so often at the doors to the restaurant that the waiter keeps thinking I’m calling him over. Five minutes pass and nothing. I’ve finished my beer and don’t want to order another and sit here alone drinking it.

  A lipstick mark around Jasmine’s wine glass is the only thing that remains of her, as though she’s been swept up suddenly by a tornado and ripped dramatically away from me.

  That wouldn’t be too far from the truth. A tornado of information turning me from one thing into another.

  A bare fist boxer is one thing, a bare fist ex-drug addict, in debt to the mafia is a different prospect entirely.

  I’m about to give up and call the waiter over for real, when the doors to the restaurant open and Jasmine comes confidently striding back out. I almost can’t believe it, as she takes her seat again, kisses me and then pushes her hair casually away from her face as though nothing has changed between us at all.

  “Jasmine, are you okay?” I ask, worried the opposite may be true. Worried she’s come back to tell me it’s over.

  “Sorry”, she says, and my heart sinks for a moment. “That was a lot to take in, I had to take a moment. I still don’t know.”