by Lynn, J. S.
But something else that his manager had talked about was stuck in his mind. His manager had suggested that maybe getting a girlfriend would help his image. Cameron knew that getting a girlfriend was harder than just deciding that some girl was going to be his girlfriend. Cameron didn’t know anything about the girl. He didn’t even know her name. But he saw her on a more regular basis than he saw any other girl.
Fantasies of suggesting that he was going to play video games with her and her instantly falling for him and all of his troubles disappearing flitted across Cameron’s brain. But he knew it didn’t work like that.
But, he supposed he could say that he had changed his mind about his interest in video games. At the very least, Heather might point him in the right direction.
He wished he was better at cooking. That would solve multiple problems.
Why did planting a tree and having people notice him have to be so difficult?
Heather stumbled and nearly fell flat on her face the next day when she walked into the gym. She swore internally and kicked the step she had tripped on for good measure. She knew that step was there. Sometimes she just misjudged it.
She went over to the mats to stretch and limber up before she started working out and training. A text from her father reminded her that she had a meet next weekend and she needed to be prepared. She was going to a practice fight the following night and the night after. And the night after that. There wasn’t much more she could do.
Her goal once she was there would be to try and find the good in people. Find the reasons to stay in this sport. Find what lay beyond all the fighting and competing. Heather wanted to find that reason. Just because Cam had been a failure, didn’t mean everyone else was.
Heather limbered up and went over to the punching bag to get her daily striking requirement in. She was thirty or forty punches in when none other than Cam approached her.
“Um, hello,” he said. He looked awkward. Heather didn’t hold it against him.
“Hello,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”
“Uh, yeah, actually,” Cam said. “Do you think you could maybe show me some video games? I guess I am sort of interested after I thought about it a little.”
Heather’s hands dropped to her sides as her surprise grew. That wasn’t what she had been expecting. She smiled to herself a little bit. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Or maybe he was trying. It was something.
“Sure,” Heather said. “I have some free time this afternoon. Do you want me to, like, go to the store with you or something? Do you want me to just give me titles of ones I like? There’s a number of ways we could go about doing this.”
Heather had to curb herself before she went much farther. She didn’t want to scare Cam away too early. If he was making an effort, she had to not stomp all over that before they got anywhere.
“Actually,” Cam said. “I was kind of hoping that maybe you would let me come over and try out some of the ones you already had? Or maybe you could bring them over to my place? I wish there was some public place that we could do this so you wouldn’t think I’m being a creeper. But even I know that they closed down the arcade in the mall.”
Heather nodded in agreement. She had been saddened when that arcade had closed down. She had tried to get ahold of a couple of the consoles, but was unsuccessful in her attempts.
“I suppose you could come over to my place this afternoon,” Heather said. Cam admitting that he didn’t want to be a creeper about the whole thing somehow made it a lot less creepy. Even still, Heather was confident she could take on Cam if something went wrong. Sure, he outweighed her, but she knew of ways to get out of such situations if something went bad. Worst case she could wriggle herself out of the situation and call the cops if it got that bad.
But the odds of it getting that bad were really slim.
“I could show you a few types of video games,” she continued. “If that’s what you want.”
Cam nodded. It was pretty enthusiastic nodding if Heather thought about it. She wondered what had changed about him and his disinterested attitude the day before. No matter. He was interested now, and that was what mattered.
Heather went up to the front desk of the gym and grabbed a piece of paper and a pen. She wrote down her address and gave the piece of paper to Cam.
“This is my address. Come over at any point after two, okay?”
Cam looked the address over, then he looked back up at Heather. “Sure. Also, can I get your name? You might have told me, but I’ve forgotten it. Sometimes my memory’s not that great.”
Heather found herself laughing. Not mean laughter, just nervous understanding laughter. “My name’s Heather.”
“Cameron.”
“I knew that,” Heather said.
He had introduced himself as ‘Cameron’ though, not ‘Cam.’ That was good to know. Heather would need to make that adjustment.
Cam—Cameron—nodded and left Heather to her workout. The workout went surprisingly smooth and her spirits were lifted through it.
Cameron triple-checked the address that Heather had written on the piece of scrap paper. Her handwriting was interesting. The numbers were all very neat and aligned. Her five looked like it could have been typed by a computer and her zero had the little line through it to distinguish it from a capital ‘O’. The letters, however, were less neat. They were flowy, one letter flowing into the next. Not quite cursive, but some mix between cursive and print. Her lowercase ‘S’s were actually cursive and Cameron suddenly understood why the cursive ‘S’ looked the way it did. She hadn’t bothered to write out the state, only the zip code after the city. Not that the city would have been necessary either, but that was beside the point.
The address on the paper was the same as the address on the house in front of him. Heather lived in a quaint neighborhood. The house she owned was probably no bigger than a two-bedroom house. Cameron’s own place was an apartment-style flat. He didn’t need to take care of a yard or anything like that. He didn’t have the time, nor did he care about that sort of thing.
However, either Heather cared enough about her yard to keep the leaves raked and the grass mowed, or someone else did it for her.
He told himself that he had done enough staring and he got out of his car. He walked past Heather’s car, a Volkswagen Beetle in that pale blue color that the newer models came in. It looked really cute and well cared for, obviously different next to his mostly beat-up silver Honda Civic. Then again, Cameron liked driving around something that wasn’t ostentatious. It was unassuming, which made staying unrecognized on the street easier.
Cameron went up and rang the doorbell. It only ‘dinged’, it didn’t ‘dong’ afterwards.
Heather was quick to answer the door. Had she been expecting him to come at this time? Or had she just been close when he had rang the doorbell?
“Hey,” she said. “Come in.”
She led Cameron in and he found himself in what should have been a front room or a living room. Except it was full of exercise equipment.
“This is my gym,” Heather said. “Not all of the equipment could fit into any other room and I wasn’t going to split it between rooms.”
Cameron nodded in understanding.
The kitchen was right next to the gym. Heather didn’t point it out to him. Instead, they went to a room across from the kitchen, which was obviously the room she was using as a living room. There was a couch, a recliner, a simple coffee table, and a very large entertainment center. The room was obviously intended to be a bedroom. One of the closet doors wasn’t slid all the way shut and Cameron could see a bookcase with DVDs or maybe more video games on it.
Heather flopped down on the couch and gestured that Cameron sit in the recliner.
“Oh, do you want anything to drink?” she asked.
Cameron was a little hesitant to answer at first. He didn’t drink soda or alcohol or anything.
“I have water and a red sports drink left,” Heather said.
“Oh, water’s fine,” Cameron said. He was pretty sure he had already replenished his electrolytes.
Heather bounced back up from the couch and went over to a mini fridge in the corner that Cameron had initially overlooked. She grabbed two waters out of the fridge and handed one of them to Cameron. She opened the other one for herself and drank a third of it in one swig. Cameron sipped at his.
“So what would you like to see first?” Heather asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Cameron replied. “I’ve only ever played a few fighting games and I didn’t like any of them.”
“Okay, well do you want to play something with a story, with a whole ton of shooting, or perhaps a racing game? I think I’ve got some strictly puzzle games too.”
It amazed Cameron that there were so many types of games. It amazed him even more that Heather could forget if she even had specific games or not.
“I think a story game would be good,” Cameron said, trying to pick a type of game that Heather would appreciate him for. Or should he have said shooting? He had no idea.
“Okay, I’ll show you this one then,” Heather said. She pulled a case off of the entertainment center. The front of the game featured about five people. One of the people had a sword, another a staff, someone else had a musical instrument. The game sparked no recognition in Cameron’s mind. But it wasn’t like he watched commercials often. He also ran an ad blocker on his computer’s browser and ignored any ad that showed up on his phone.
Heather popped the game disc into one of several systems that Cameron could see. Two of them were black. One was white. Another was purple, and another one was green. He had no frame of reference. He vaguely remembered some of the fighting games he had played when he was younger being played on a grey colored system. Heather didn’t appear to have one of those.
The game loaded up.
“So, do you want to start the game fresh?” Heather asked, holding a controller in her hands. “Or do you want me to load up one of my games and run around for a bit so you can see what it’s like?”
“First you show me, then I’ll decide if I want to start it or not,” Cameron answered.
Heather shrugged. “Fair enough.”
Cameron was surprisingly not bad at video games. This was a bit of a relief to Heather. Rather, it was a relief that he seemed to be enjoying himself. The situation was so normal to Heather it was like there was a weird weight on her chest with all the normalcy.
Two twenty something year olds sitting and playing video games.
Cameron was also incredibly attractive, Heather found herself thinking. He also chose all of the very kind choices for dialogue options in the video game. They were not always the ones that did the best for the story, but Heather didn’t want to tell him anything and spoil his experience. But the choices he made were just all of the kind ones. That gave Heather hope for whatever was underneath his tough guy act.
After several hours of playing, Cameron put down the controller.
“Is there something that I could play that doesn’t involve me thinking too much? All of this talking and trying to figure things out is great and all, but I’m tired.” He laughed nervously.
“Yeah, I’ll grab a racing game,” Heather said. She took the controller from Cameron, but she didn’t even put a different disc in. She just went to her game system’s menu and loaded up one of the preloaded games. One where they would race hovercraft, where the controls were simple and intuitive.
She handed Cameron the second controller and pointed out which buttons did which action. Then they started to race.
While they raced, they talked. At first it was just about fighting and stuff. Since that was really all they had in common. They talked about fans at meets and different manager rules and diets. But then they started opening up about deeper issues.
Heather started with how she was mostly still doing MMA because of her father, and for really no other reason outside of that. She told Cameron that she wanted to quit because she hated the fighting culture, but the only reason why she was sticking with it was to see if there was good in people.
Cameron laughed. “Is that why you started talking to me?” he asked.
“Actually, yes.” Heather admitted.
It was a little bit longer before Cameron opened up to her.
“See,” he said. “The reason I became a fighter was because I was bullied as a kid. So it started with a couple of self-defense classes. But then it turned into something more. It turned into a passion. I could become the big guy who beat all the bullies up.”
Heather raised an eyebrow. That seemed almost honorable.
“But I think I’ve screwed it up with that whole aggression comment that got published. Everyone now thinks that all fighters are just mean and angry bullies. And that’s exactly what I wanted to avoid.”
Heather frowned, thinking. “Maybe you just need to vary your life a little. Isn’t that what your manager was saying?”
Cameron nodded. “Yeah, it is. So that’s kind of why I started talking to you. Video games might not be great for my image, but at least I can say I do something that isn’t fighting. And this afternoon has been much more fun than my previous attempts at cooking.”
Heather snorted. “So let’s just ignore all of the people who say video games cause violence.”
“People say that?”
Heather was astounded. “Do you live under a rock or something? Of course people say that!”
Cameron looked taken aback. “I never knew.”
The race they were playing finished. Heather had placed first. Cameron had managed sixth. Which wasn’t bad for a first time racer.
“Do you want to go out sometime?” Cameron asked, almost nonchalantly. But Heather could hear the nervousness in his voice. As if he was afraid that she would say no.
Heather contemplated the proposition. After spending the afternoon with Cameron, she could see that there was something inside of him that he didn’t let out often. He could very well be a kind and caring person. She wanted to be kind and caring back.
“Yes,” she said. “That would be nice.”
***
In the end, Heather still ended up quitting MMA. She used her free time in the days leading up to her match to start applying for waitressing jobs in the area. She didn’t want to be a waitress forever, but she would be a waitress that put herself through school to be something else. She was considering psychology so that she could help people. It seemed pretty polar to MMA. And she wanted to do something completely different, regardless of what her dad said.
Cameron helped her apply for jobs when he had the time. He was still going to stick with MMA, but Heather didn’t hold that against him. She could separate him from the fighting culture and he needed to separate himself from it enough for his image anyway.
Their relationship was certainly not traditional. They spent most of their time playing video games or learning to cook. But they also found a good community service group to do things with. It really made Heather feel good about herself and Cameron seemed to enjoy it too, even if he only started doing it because his manager thought it would be a good idea.
Heather spent her last few trainings and the meet that followed still trying to find the good in the fighter culture. It was there, if she looked hard enough. But the knowledge that she was quitting gave her a wonderful level of peace that she was okay with. She would have to get a different gym membership, but that was something she could come to terms with. She was thinking of picking up running, anyway.
Connor eventually made it into the papers saying that there was good in everyone if someone bothered to look for it. He shared that he was a MMA fighter because he wanted to inspire young kids who got bullied to stand up for themselves. He stopped imagining every opponent as a bully, but as a competitor and nothing more.
Heather’s fight with her father was one of epic proportions. He threatened to cut her off, but the threat was short-lived because
Heather was already mostly self-sufficient. She took on the last couple of bills for herself and told her dad that he had no room to say anything. He told her she was throwing her life away, but Heather didn’t like the life she had been living, so she regretted nothing.
“Do you think you’ll ever make amends with your dad?” Cameron asked as he grabbed a shovel.
Heather shrugged and wiped hair off of her face with a dirt-covered finger. It was cute. But Cameron didn’t say that out loud. She didn’t like it when he called her cute. But he could think it all he wanted.
“I’m sure it’ll sort itself out,” she said with a shrug. “But there is a certain level of pride that I have now that I’m really earning my own wages and stuff.”
“Weren’t you doing that as a fighter?” Cameron asked.
“Yeah,” Heather said. “Help me with this tree.”
Cameron helped Heather carry the tree from the truck it was delivered on and then to the hole in the ground they had just dug for it. It was their latest community service project. He was finally planting a tree.
“But there’s a level of appreciation I have now that I’m working in the food industry,” Heather said.
Cameron nodded, only sort of understanding. He supposed he would not fully understand unless he did what Heather was doing. But Cameron had no desire to do that. He was glad Heather didn’t want to make him quit MMA with the amount of resentment she still held for it.
“Hey, did you submit your application to that college?” Cameron asked.
Heather nodded. “My new life begins now.”
They finished putting dirt around the tree and stepped back to take a look at it. It was still a small tree, but one day it would get a lot bigger. The thought was an inspiring one for Cameron.
THE END
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