by Sunniva Dee
“Yep. I’m already indebted to him for getting me this fight, and I’ll be more indebted in two months when I go to Thailand on his bill.”
Markeston snorts, readying a reply, but he’s easily deviated when Maiko opens her door. He takes her hand and helps her out of the front passenger seat. She accepts politely and steps to the ground with the grace of a ballerina.
“Hilarious,” I mumble.
“What?” Victor has our backpacks on one shoulder and spreads his fingers to clasp my hand.
“Your mother. She so didn’t need Markeston’s help.”
Half a smirk runs up the side of Victor’s face. It’s sexy as hell, and I’m sad to think that I’m going to have to sleep in my own room tonight. It’s the only concession Victor has granted Dawson and his mother in terms of what he should and should not do before this fight.
We’re spending two nights here, he and I. It makes my throat thicken with sadness and joy at once. Victor is going to skip his ride home to see me off at the airport early on Sunday, and that last night, we’ll be together.
I know I have no reason to complain. Allyn, who’s also dated a fighter, tells me most of them don’t even see their girlfriends before a big fight. They can go weeks and months in fight camps far away and hardly even call them.
Yes, I’ve been lucky with Victor. But I have a nagging feeling he might not have slept at my house as much if it weren’t for Gunther Wilhelm Affenheimer the Fourth.
“Check into your rooms, and we’ll all have dinner on the sponsor’s bill,” Markeston bellows like he’s in charge. “Japanese steakhouse,” he adds, a quick glance at Mrs. Arquette to see if she’s impressed. She seems to be a woman of few to no expressions, but from Victor’s quick smile, that was a good call.
My room isn’t big, but it’s comfortable and has the nicest, thickest duvet known to mankind. I’ve got the TV turned on, it’s almost midnight, and I can’t stop thinking about Victor. It’s hard to be in the same hotel knowing our time together is running out while I do nothing about it. Is he asleep, or is he still in the hotel gym blasting his cardio?
The weigh-in was before dinner. I’ve seen quite a few emaciated fighters on weigh-ins, but Victor isn’t one of those. He says Maiko’s the one keeping him on the straight and narrow with his diet, making sure he’s always at his ideal weight, which is smack in the middle of the welter-weight class.
I don’t believe him though. It might have been his mother getting him on track both in diet and workout regimen, but it sure as hell isn’t she upholding it. Even at the Japanese steakhouse last night, he stuck to what he called “good proteins and healthy, starch-free carbs,” causing Jaden to chuckle about almost feeling guilty.
“Then again,” Jaden said, lifting a German-sized beer glass and taking an enormous swig instead of finishing his sentence. Victor just raised his non-fizzy water for the occasion, mint leaves and ice in place, and clinked glasses with him.
I don’t think I’ve seen him eat that much before though. As healthy as the meal was, I got to see what such a big man can put away when given the chance. It made his sponsor happy—he footed the bill merrily. Mrs. Arquette’s expression didn’t change at all during the meal, and she definitely didn’t engage in any conversation with me. I tried a time or two, but I understand that strategy-talk with Dawson was more important.
I can’t sleep. I should. I’m getting up early tomorrow, because I want to support Victor in the hours leading up to the fight. I’m not allowed to sit in on his training and mental focus exercises, but I’ll make sure to be close by. I think I saw windows in the gym room at the back of the venue. If I’m right, I’m going to sneak a few peeks of him in action.
There’s a triple, fast-paced rap on the door, how Victor always knocks at the apartment. My heart sets off in a gallop, but I’m still able to get to my feet and peer out the peephole. It’s him. Eyes burning right at me as if he knows I’m looking, he waits for me to open. Of course I do—immediately.
He’s sweaty, hair gleaming as if he took the eight flights of stairs straight from the gym room. I bet he did. I open my mouth to greet him but don’t have time before he engulfs me and presses his mouth to mine.
I pull in a gasp and accept deep strokes from his tongue. Needy, he pushes me inside, grabbing my face with one hand and crowding me against the bathroom door. “Shit. I’ve missed you.”
“Me too,” I whimper out. He’s so much right now. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this intense.
“Mm, I shouldn’t be here,” he husks. My night shirt travels up, retreating to his hands. “God, your skin. I crave it, Helena. I don’t know what I’ll do once you leave.”
“Don’t even talk about it.” I pull his head against me. He licks me, pressing my boobs up so he can bury himself in them.
“I didn’t. I haven’t. It’s erased.” With a deep inhale, he straightens, and my cleavage feels so bare where his face just was. The one-foot distance between us is too much. What will thousands of miles be like?
“I just needed to see you. I’m not staying, okay? After the fight though, we’ll say goodbye to everyone and head back to the room.”
“No food first?” I don’t recognize my own voice. It’s the full force of his warrior energy that’s ignited every fuse in my body.
“I’ll consider it.” He steps back in, crowding me. Then he slides to the floor, hands dragging along my thighs until he’s on his knees. With gentle fingers, he pulls my thong to a side and lets out a small groan. Then he tastes me once with the tip of his tongue.
“Whoa,” I say, shuddering.
“Damn, you’re sweet.”
I’m warm all over.
“I need to go. Ah.” He forces himself back on his feet. Arms hanging, Victor looks ready for the guillotine. It makes me huff a small laugh. I’m hot, flushed, in desperate need of him, but his face right now?
“God, you’re cute,” I say.
“Again I’m cute?” He narrows his eyes, fire and playfulness growing in them. “I’ll give you ‘cute’ after the fight. The whole thing will be so ‘cute’ you won’t be able to sit on the plane.”
I bite my lip, bringing sexy back. Then I do a slow wink, letting my non-painted night-lashes cover an eye for a moment. “Bring it.”
“Devil woman.”
“Cutie-pie. I’ll show you my nipples.”
“No. Really: devil woman.” He walks backward through the entryway. Stare fixed on my boobs, he collides with the door, so I catwalk over and lean past him to unhook the chain. It takes me a second, because Victor nuzzles against my throat, not helping at all. By the time I succeed, he’s made goose bumps spring up all over my body.
“See you tomorrow, big bad fighter boy. Go get some sleep.”
“Yeah, that’ll be easy now.”
“You know whose fault that is?”
“Yep. Your boobs’ fault.”
“No!” I laugh as he keeps up his backward walk all the way to the elevator. I’m not decent in the corridor at all, but it’s empty—for now.
“Oh you’re right. It’s your tasty pussy’s fault.”
“Victor! Shaddap!” I bark. I look around, expecting people to poke their heads out from nearby hotel rooms.
The last I see of him is a sexy smirk as he puckers an air kiss my way. And I predict that Victor won’t be the only one with everlasting insomnia tonight.
VICTOR
I’m up at five a.m. Start the day off on the beach, running hard. Dawson and Maiko meet me at a parking lot a few miles down, and I replenish with a freshly made energy juice, courtesy of Maiko.
“Break,” she demands, nodding with her eyes closed. She grabs a blanket and spreads it out in the sand behind the car. “Now, meditate. Go to your secret place. Make it empty.”
I go on routine. It takes me only minutes to slide into my half-trance, and I listen to her instructions with one ear. She still wants me to relax. I do. Maiko knows all my tells, knows when each cell of me has d
isappeared into that place she showed me back when I was little. Once I’m there, she chants her wishes. Low, insistent, she asks me to visualize my opponent. Tells me to stare him down with all the power I own and all of the energy I haven’t yet absorbed from the cosmos. It’s there, she tells me, all I need is to seize it.
I feel it. I see him. She’s got me there, and I’m not on a blanket anymore, legs crossed and imagining things. No, I’m on the mat, in the ring, and I’m taller than The Russian, giving him what he fears most, the look of impossible defeat, of invincibility—exactly what I’ll give him in a few hours.
In her murmured way, she guides me through each move, every strike, punch, and kick. I’ve got him in a corner. I fly. I land on his chest, and he doesn’t get up.
It feels like hours when she takes me out of the fight again. Once I’m relaxed, brain empty of thoughts, she requests that I open my eyes. The sky is bright and the morning rawer when I come to. I stand, legs still weak with relaxation. And then she asks me to jog back.
HELENA
I wake up before the alarm goes off. This beautiful man is not hampered by sheets or comforters. Naked and on his back, he sleeps peacefully next to me. Half-erect, his member reaches a hip, lazy in the early morning.
I caress his cheek and trace a trail down his neck. A small indentation, indicating a content wrinkle, deepens at the corner of an eye. In moments like this, I think that he’s not cagey, not prepared to demolish. I get to touch him, to feel these muscles when they’re slack, not bulging with explosive energy.
My fingers fan out over his chest. Allow a dark nipple to tickle the crook between two fingers. Soft. Human. He did not seem human last night.
I’m not a specialist, but every move he made seemed in perfect sync with the former. He slammed that poor big Russian fighter into the mat so hard I think he passed out for a beat. He got up though, and managed half of a second round. Then he was pressed against the mesh, unable to break free.
I got to walk the rounds with my number cards for him. It made me feel good to be there, working the ring, on this last time with my man.
I bend down to kiss the corner of his mouth, and Victor sighs and swings his head enough to find my lips. We kiss like this, me half-sitting and trying to commit every feature, every response from him to memory so that I’ll never forget how we were.
What if I’m not allowed back in?
I need to stop thinking this. I could jinx it. I bet that’s what I’m doing right now. Or what if I have to choose between him and Kyria? I’m not prepared to do that. If Kyria Castle needs me so badly that I can’t pursue my master’s degree plans… what do I do?
I sink down beside him. Slide a thigh over his hip, covering his growing cock with it, my insides clenching with remembrance of last night. Oh lord, he was delicious. We couldn’t wait to get back here. The after-fight procedures, the dinner, the waving goodbye to his team, it all took forever. But finally, he shoved me in this door, against the same wall where he’d kissed me the night before and left me too hot to sleep. This time he didn’t leave me frustrated. No, he made me scream, rocked me through an orgasm that was bigger than any I’d felt before.
As he pulls me on top of him and widens my legs, he whispers, “Is it late?”
“No, the alarm doesn’t go off for another hour.”
Victor’s sigh is relieved and sad at once. He doesn’t have to say the words. I know what he’s thinking.
“Can I?” he murmurs.
“I’m ready,” I whisper back. He’s sluggish and hard, pressing me tight and breathing against my ear as he penetrates me. I let out a sob. It’s desire for him. Heat and grief for us. I feel so much with him inside me, with him around me. Strands of hair tickle my forehead, but I tilt my nose up to get all of him closer. I wonder, I wonder about all these sensations, the way nothing can be bigger than what I feel for him now. Maybe that is what love is.
“You should leave. This only makes it worse,” I whisper. Victor keeps drying mascara-tinged tears off my cheeks. We don’t have napkins, and he isn’t leaving me alone to find some at the coffee shop.
“I’ll be here until you’re through security. I’m taking these last minutes with you whether you want it or not,” he says.
My response is a broken chuckle, because I can’t talk and we’re better off with me not bawling. My sweet, violent, talented man. I’m about to leave him and not see him in so long. Maybe forever.
“Do you have any fights in Germany?” I whisper so I don’t get that voice that accompanies crying.
“I’ll look into it,” he says, tilting my face up so he can kiss me again. That means he doesn’t have any fights in Germany. Victor just doesn’t want to tell me no and see me sadder. “You’ll be back soon. Helena, my little baroness.”
I sniffle and meet his gaze, and he looks the way I feel. There’s so much tenderness in those eyes.
“I don’t want to complicate things any more than we already have by starting this, but— Shit. Never mind,” he says.
“What? Tell me.”
He sighs. Cradles my face with his hands and kisses me softly. “I think that I might have accidentally fallen in love with you.” He scrunches his eyes shut. “Ah. And that was ridiculous to say minutes before you board a plane.”
I laugh. It’s such a painful laugh, such a happy laugh. “I think I might’ve accidentally done the same thing, so”—I swallow the ever-growing lump in my throat—“right back atcha.”
He chuckles. Pecks my mouth, once, then again. We get into a mouth-smacking rhythm, connecting and smacking, until he emits a small mmm. “No one really says that, you know,” he murmurs. “If you’re told someone’s in love with you, and especially if it’s the first time, you’ll stay clear of right back atcha, ditto, and the like.”
“But in Ghost Patrick Swayze said ‘Ditto.’”
“What?”
“It’s an old movie. We have a VHS of it at the castle. You haven’t seen it?”
He shakes his head, at me or at my question, I’ll never know, because that, right there, is the last call for Amsterdam.
HELENA
I don’t hear Mama’s chattering as we drive through the village. Green fields and undulating vineyards have led us here. It’s so small, so familiar. I’ve been gone for less than three months, and yet it’s like I’ve been away forever.
The old Rolls Royce Papa once bought at auction draws the villagers to shop windows and makes them stop on the sidewalks. Some wave. I roll the window down by hand and wave back, automatically using the graceful sideways move taught to me when I was a toddler.
My heart swells for this place. For old Herr Friedrich on the steps of his watch store, for Frau Schwartz and her haggle of babies. Did she have another since I was last home?
Ahead of me, Kyria rises above the modesty of the village. Centuries-old spires pierce the clouds above. Grey fortress walls zig-zag around it, undefeated by enemies since the seventeenth century, and a spring-green forest dances above us, shrouding the miniature pilgrim path scattered with Madonna altars up to the old church.
“He has been very helpful since he returned,” my mother says.
I know every nook of Kyria. It’s where my children should be born and grow up. I can’t imagine a life without this place. It’s anchored to my heart, so deeply rooted I’d hemorrhage if I tried to cut free. The Star Tower is where Gretchen and I enacted Rapunzel. I still remember how to remove the bars from that small window. No prince would be able to get through it though.
I squint, my mother’s last comment sinking in. “Who’s been helpful?”
“Why, your fiancé, of course. Sorry, your former fiancé.” She clicks her tongue, staring out the window as we drive up the ash-alder lane to Kyria.
“Why does he keep coming here? He’s not family.”
“He’s a sponsor. That’s how I see him since you decided you’d just lead him on and be done with him. Such a handsome man too. What a shame.”
> “Mama!” I’m astounded by her bluntness. Within our dying aristocracy, we’re always careful with what we say, even when we talk with family. My mother, she’s the master of smoothing things over, and yet here she is, displaying an all too overt sort of regret. “I can’t talk about this anymore. It happened months ago, and we’re over it. Gunther Wilhelm and I have an understanding.”
I hope.
My mother skips me a side-gaze, a hopeful smirk crooking her lips. “I don’t think it’s too late, honey. Gunther Wilhelm Affenheimer the Fourth is a wonderful man with honorable intentions. He has always had an eye for you—I remember him as a little boy, even, those big eyes of his always fixed on you while you were up to whatever nonsense.”
I suppress a groan at the thought of him having been the prince in our Rapunzel show. We invited our parents to watch too. Me, Rapunzel, because I had the long hair. He, the prince, because he was the only boy.
“What has he been sponsoring?”
“The mortar is rotting at the foundation of the Star Tower,” Mama says, flicking an anxious gaze at me while the main gates creak open to the inner sanctum of our front park.
“What? I’ve heard nothing of this! How long have you known?” I’m home now, right here, and reality is harsher when staring right into its face. My vacation from anxiety is over, and dollar signs mix with Euros in my head, causing nerves to prick at the nape of my neck.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. I’m sure Papa planned to tell you. Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth discovered it upon his arrival four days ago. He promptly took action though, and now we’ve got the best masonry experts from Berlin about to come in for an estimate.”
“And who’s paying for this!”
The car comes to a stuttering stop, my mother’s control over the pedals rocky with my unexpected anger.
“We are, I’m sure. You know Papa is in charge of the finances at Kyria. He always finds a way.”
I want to yell to her that our savings are gone, that our income from tourists is not what it should be since we fell out of the tourist magazines months ago. This castle is catching up with us, passing us, drowning us, and Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth seems to be the only one able to stop a disaster.
