“Why?” She arched an eyebrow. “Is it bad island juju?”
I took a deep breath, refusing to rise to the bait, and raised my fist to knock.
“Come in,” a voice said before I could rap on the door. I pushed the flimsy door open.
Julio sat in the middle of the room in a thickly padded chair, his cane in his hand. Like mine, Julio’s cabin was tiny. He faced away from us, instead looking out the window that aimed toward the Pacific Ocean. This was his daily form of meditation.
“Would you like some tea, Connor? Or the girl?” he asked without turning around. “You’re gorgeous, by the way. Aren’t you. The mana isn’t very strong though.”
Crystal’s eyes went wide. “How do you know about my mana?” She breathed.
Julio stood up from his chair with concerted effort. I jumped forward to help the man walk, but he declined, raising a hand. “Please. I’ve been doing this for five years without you. I’ll be fine.” I glanced at the man’s eyes, and they were just as I’d left him five years ago, clouded. I’d begged, pleaded with him to get cataract surgery, but he’d declined, saying he did everything by feel anyhow. As a result, he had gone damn near blind. It broke my fucking heart, but it was what the old man wanted. And I knew Julio well enough to realize he wouldn’t be changing his ways any time soon.
He ambled over to a corner of his room, turned one of the nozzles of the gas stove to start the water boiling.
“Crystal, the mana is everywhere. If one only takes the time to truly sense the world around them, she would feel it. The force of nature intertwining with our very inner workings. Not only are the mind and the body one entity, but the world around us as well.”
She put a palm over her chest, and pulled free a delicate golden cross necklace, one I hadn’t noticed before since she kept it hidden. Interesting, was her religion why she refused to believe in the mana?
She absently fondled the cross pendant. “Okay stop it you two. How did you know my name? Did Connor work this out with you before?”
Julio reached into an overhead cabinet, took out a bag of loose green tea leaves, and put two scoops of the stuff into a gourd. To his left, he plucked a metal straw with a filter. I marveled that every movement he made was with an expert precision, maximizing efficiency. As blind as he was, he knew every single step he had to take. Even at his advanced age he practiced what he taught.
Not a single ounce of energy was lost. He lived his life the way I fought in the ring. No energy lost. No wasted movements. Where the opposition saw swagger, I saw technique: systematic intimidation of the enemy.
I had Julio to thank for that. Without him I wouldn’t have had my resurrection, or be the fighter I was today.
Crystal watched him, too. I wondered what was going on in that gorgeous head of hers. I stared at her, so out of place in that fancy cream-colored dress of hers which reminded me of melted vanilla ice cream, holding a Kate Spade portfolio bag. Talk about mana. She must have been born on voluptuous curves day. She was fucking perfect.
I snapped back to Julio, who was already ambling toward us with the teapot and the gourd with the metal straw poking out of it.
“Sit,” Julio spoke with a curt nod toward the two wooden chairs in front of us. I pulled up a third for him, and put the tea stool in the center. “Let’s drink mate’.”
He filled the gourd halfway, took a pull, then spit it out right on the brick floor, as was customary.
Crystal lurched back in her chair and angled her heels away from the mess. “What did you do that for?! Gross!”
“The first round of tea is too strong,” I explained. “It’s actually a form of politeness to spit it out like that.”
“First round? What do you mean?”
Julio poured another half cup and handed it to me. “Each person gets one round. We rotate. It’s an old ritual.”
“You mean I have to share germs with you?”
“Yes.” I sipped my portion and handed it back to Julio. He refilled it for Crystal’s turn.
“What does it taste like?” She asked, not waiting for my response before taking a sip. Her face turned red when she did.
“Oh, my God! It’s so hot, and bitter!”
I laughed. Hearing those words come out of her mouth reminded me how dirty my mind was. If I had her suck something else, would she squeal and spit, or swallow like a good girl?
“If you don’t like it, you don’t have to have it.”
“No, it’s fine. I don’t want to be rude.”
To her credit, she finished her round before handing the gourd back to Julio.
“Connor, it is good to have you here again,” Julio said while he poured his own portion of tea.
“Wait, so how do you two know each other?” Crystal asked.
“Five years ago, Connor appeared on my doorstep looking for meaning. It was the middle of the night. He’d been walking all over the island for three days looking for someone he didn’t know. He’d only heard my name spoken in the town. Imagine that!” Julio let out his patented three-chuckle laugh. He rarely used it, as if with his old age, he had a finite number of chuckles left to give the world. I smiled that my quest for meaning five years ago had been ridiculous enough he could laugh at it now. Julio kept pouring the tea as we spoke.
“You came here five years ago,” she said with a slow nod. I could see the wheels turning in her head. “And five years ago, you lost your match to Toro. Interesting.”
“The mana is strong, so strong I can feel it, Connor. Yet I’m also sensing a threat to it.”
I swallowed. “A threat?”
“Yes.” He closed his eyes as he took his turn to sip the tea again. “A two-headed bull. One head is an old challenge, and one a new. The only way to defeat it is to rush, head on, into uncertain territory.”
A whoosh of air went out of me. Julio was never wrong. I knew Easter Island wouldn’t be easy. Now I had to figure out what the hell Julio’s riddle meant this time. I’d cracked it five years ago, though it had almost cost me my life.
“And you,” he said, turning to Crystal and handing her the gourd. “My, oh my. What an energy, a uniqueness you have coming from you. It’s incredible. Unlike anything I’ve ever been in the presence of. Your warmth and your--mana. It is low, but great potential there. Oh, my.”
Crystal stared vigilantly at Julio while she sipped the warm liquid. Her lips wrapped around the metal straw left an imprint of red lipstick on the silver when she gave it back. Briefly my mind offered up the image of Crystal on her knees, leaving that same cherry-red stain around my cock. It was an ongoing fantasy of mine.
I thought about cracking another mana joke, but I knew this wasn’t the time. Maybe fate had brought us together for me as much as her. Sure, I knew Crystal was hot as fuck and had a mysterious aura about her, but the reality was I knew next to nothing about her past.
So, I shut up for once and drank my tea while Julio ran a hand through his beard, then pointed it at her. “For you, the answer you seek is in the stars.”
Crystal’s shoulders dropped. Her eyes bulged so much I was afraid they’d pop out of her head.
She stood up.
“Thank you for having us, sir. We need to go now.”
“But we’ve hardly even gotten--”
“I said, we need to go.” I maybe act daft sometimes, but there was no doubt that he’d touched a nerve deep inside Crystal. I wondered what secrets a beauty like her could be hiding.
A ran a hand through my hair and stood up. I handed the tea back to Julio. “Thank you. I’m here for sixty days. I’ll see you again soon.”
“See you soon,” he mimicked, and then let out his hearty three chuckle laugh.
Oh yeah. The man can’t see.
What a shame. Because Crystal was glorious to look at. Something told me I needed to delve beneath her surface.
8 - Crystal
Was Connor fucking with me? I couldn’t tell. He was so earnest with his belief on the ‘mana’
, but I didn’t think he was a true believer in “magic” until he sprung that visit with Julio on me.
It made me uncomfortable. Not because I didn’t believe it, but because I wasn’t sure what I believed.
I was already perched on the back of the Harley by the time Connor joined me. Julio stood in the door behind him, his blind eyes seeing far too much. He’d look straight through the artifice that I donned myself with, and made me feel like a little girl again stuck in nowhere Mississippi. The south was filled with superstition and tradition, and my little hometown of Beaumont was no different.
I looked away, hiding my reaction behind a pair of sunglasses, and ignored them both. If Connor would stop with stories about the Moai statues I might be able to enjoy Easter Island. Instead, every time I looked at the huge volcanic stone figures a shudder raced down my spine.
Connor swung his lean legs over the motorcycle and revved the engine. He turned halfway in his seat, and pierced me with his hazel eyes. “That was rude, Princess.”
“Just drive.”
The motorcycle lurched and I slid into him, once more holding onto him tightly. Our drive out to the far reaches of the island had almost been idyllic. The drive back to our hut was terse. My tension fed his and then reflected into me until a knot formed between my shoulders.
Finally, with the late afternoon sun bright on the horizon, we arrived at the fishing village that Connor had chosen for his home away from home. Knowing that he’d been on the island five years ago, it made a bit more sense to me that he would knew the ins and out, and maybe why he had chosen this God forsaken place as the place to regain his crown.
The engine purred beneath me as I slid off the back of the bike. He gave me a quick nod, and then he pulled off, leaving a puff of dirt behind him.
I sighed. This was going to make sharing living space with him difficult. But, maybe this was for the best, right? If he was angry at me, and I was angry at him, this attraction I felt towards him would die.
Lord, I hoped so.
I gazed towards the crest of the volcano that the island was mostly made up of. Clutching my necklace again, I shoved all thoughts of mana and stupid magic beliefs out of my head, and stomped towards the hut.
After organizing my things for an hour or so in the place, I stepped back outside to get some fresh air. I’d been wondering why Connor took so long to come back inside, and when I went out I had my answer.
He was standing in what looked to me like a yoga pose. His eyes were closed, and he was facing the direction of the sunset. He stood on one foot only, his arms together like a tree. He had on only his short fighting shorts, and they left extremely little to the imagination. I took a moment to admire the way he was made. He was unique, that was for certain. Then again, you didn’t get to be one of the best MMA fighters of all time by following the status quo.
And you certainly didn’t get abs like that by following the status quo, either. “Connor? What are you doing.”
He calmly opened his eyes and let his foot down. “The limalama.”
“What did you just say? Lima beans? What does that even mean?”
In a series of many quick dodges, ducks, and jumps, he danced his way toward me. My pulse soared as he quickly jumped his way toward me, pausing only inches before touching me. He stood in front of me, bearing his sweaty, ripped chest.
“The Limalama is the ancient art of self-defense taught on this island. It’s part dance, part attack.”
You left out part sexy man. “Well, it’s an...interesting technique.”
“It is. Now if you don’t mind, I can’t be staring at you while I’m in the middle of my training. You’re quite gorgeous, and it’s incredibly distracting.”
If he wasn’t hot as hell with a pretty Irish accent, I might have been taken aback that he’d just blatantly called me sexy. “Oh? Well I’m sorry for breathing and distracting you.”
“Look, Crystal, now I like you, don’t get me wrong. But this is the fight of my fucking life coming up in sixty days. And if I don’t stick to my training regimen, I’m not going to be in peak shape. Now please, leave me alone so I can be in peace with the mana.”
“The Mana? Seriously? It’s not a thing.”
“Tell that to my millions of fans who say I fight like magic.”
I rolled my eyes and headed back to the hut. I’d had enough of Connor’s shit for one day.
That week, I settled into a routine to complement Connor’s. I’d shower in the morning, put on one of my nice dresses, and Connor would drive the motorcycle to the hotel where the MMA TV had made a base of an office for the skeleton crew they’d brought out to the island. There I could have lunch and use the internet to get marketing done and touch base with Zoreto, Connor’s agent, and my friends and family back home. It was a nice daily escape to pretend I wasn’t living in a town that was eighty percent dirt roads, in a cabin, alone, with a damn celebrity who kept strutting his washboard abs around me constantly.
Any girl would be physically attracted to him, and I wasn’t about to lie to myself and say that I wasn’t. He had the type of genetic build that put out the message to the female species, ‘your babies with me will be amazing,’ sure. Yet something deeper about Connor drew me to him aside from his gritty, raw hotness.
Every time I felt like I was solving the mystery of the man, I’d find out some other fact that would blow my mind. Like how he claimed he had wandered for three straight days over Easter Island five years ago, thirsty, emaciated, and hopeless, until he stumbled randomly into Julio’s house. There Julio nurtured Connor back to life with maté tea and taught him the art of the mana. How he’d loaned money to Erma years ago so she could start a small business where she harvested fresh vegetables and drove them into town to sell herself. That one broke my mold of a man who I considered to be as narcissistic and full of himself as they come. The facts and the anecdotes I had collected from the locals seemed to point to the fact that Connor was telling the truth about most things, which made me wonder about the damn mana he kept talking about.
Whenever I tried to ask him if the mana was real, or if he was just trying to describe some sort of positive thinking, he’d brush me off. I had been living with the man for a week, and I still couldn’t tell if he was just using his thick Irish sense of humor to mess with me, making up all these stories for his own amusement.
The mana is very real, he’d say with a smirk.
I didn’t believe in the mana, or any sort of magic. I hadn’t been to church in years, since the day in my childhood when my world came crashing down. And there was no damn way I was going to tell Connor why I didn’t believe in any sort of superstitions, and had trouble being spiritual. The world was a place of logic and rules, and if you didn’t follow those, you got hurt. My father had taught me that years ago.
On day thirteen of the fights, Connor and I stayed out late to watch them. Tonight, wearing a dark blue suit with his hair slicked back, he’d grabbed the mic and personally welcomed the two fighters to Easter Island.
On the motorcycle ride home, it began to drizzle a little. Connor hit the gas, and suddenly we were going so fast, my hair stood on end and I felt a little panicky. We flew over bumps, and I had to cling hard onto him to not get tossed from the motorcycle.
“Hey! Slow down Connor! What the hell!”
He sped up even more, and with it, my heart began to thump with rage.
“I said slow down!”
“Can’t slow down. Tropical storm coming. We gotta make it home or else we’re going to get caught in it. Trust me baby, you don’t want that.”
I had donned one of my nicest dresses for the night in case the camera panned to me, and dirt was flinging up onto the fabric as Connor flew over the bumps. My grip on him tightened. I dug my fingers into his abs, half in anger, and half afraid that I’d get tossed from this thing. My dress collected just enough rain from the drizzle to make it a magnet for the dirt. I clenched my jaw and rested it on his shoulder. I took deep
breaths, trying to calm myself, but it was a lost cause. A tear rolled down my cheek. I saw my whole life flash before my eyes as we flew over another bump. I hated not being in control. I wanted to stop this vehicle, I wanted Connor to turn around and go back to the hotel where I could stay in sheets with high thread counts, and have internet.
“Connor, please,” I murmured, one last weak attempt to get him to stop.
“Almost there. Almost home. Trust me.”
The rain came down harder as we pulled up to our cabana. I jumped off as soon as I could.
I ran toward the cabin, but stopped before I made it inside. “You’re such an asshole, you know that? I’m sick of this.” I was done. Maybe his head games had gotten to me. The loss of control over the little decisions. But him not listening to me, not slowing down when I’d asked him was the final straw. Some might have seen it as a small detail, but I was done here. He could fend for himself. I’d go back to the five-star hotel in town and have internet when I woke up and stop being the chewtoy of a deranged jokester.
He got off the motorcycle slowly, his hazel eyes focused on me. His suit had the same coat of rain and dirt on it as my white dress, but he didn’t seem to care.
“Right you are. I am quite a bloody asshole.”
I was about to launch into a tirade and tell him exactly what I thought of him. But right as I was about to speak lightning flashed across the sky, followed by the biggest crack of thunder I’d ever heard. My mouth moved, but my voice drowned in the noise.
I literally jumped it was so loud.
Connor rushed to me. “I wasn’t trying to ignore you. Have you ever been in a tropical storm in the pacific? It’s about to get feckin’ ugly. I’ll buy you a new dress, but that’s the least of our worries. We need to be inside. And we definitely can’t be on the road during a storm.”
I reached out and interlocked my arms with Connor’s. Had I overreacted? Was I the one experiencing emotional overload now that I’d been away from home for so long.
Fantasy Island Page 7
