Punching and Kissing (28 page)

Sylvie

“I’m slow,” Aedan told me. “Use that! Come on!”

We’d been in the ring all morning. He was driving me hard and yet, at the same time, he was giving me lots more openings than usual. It was almost as if he wanted me to hit him.

I shook my head. “But how do you know
he’ll
be slow? The guy replacing Lowell?”

Aedan had returned, the night before, and told me that Lowell wouldn’t be fighting me. The blood on his knuckles told me why. But he’d also said he’d seen Rick, and that I’d be fighting someone else.

“I just know,” said Aedan. “He’ll be big, but slow.” I’d never heard his voice so strained. “You’ve got to go in fast and go for the head. Don’t let his size faze you. Don’t be intimidated. No matter what.”

“You don’t understand,” I told him. “It’s not a normal fight. Whoever Rick’s got to replace Lowell—he won’t just want to win. He’ll want to get me down on the floor and—”

“No,” said Aedan sharply. “He won’t. Not this guy.”

“How do you know? How can you be so sure?”

“I just do! Now hit me!”

I stared at him and saw the helpless fear in his eyes. I slowly lowered my fists as realization dawned.

“Come on!” he snapped at me. “Keep going!”

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “It’s you. Rick wants me to fight you!”

Aedan closed his eyes and lowered his hands. He nodded reluctantly.

“But that makes no sense! He knows we won’t fight each other!”

Aedan looked at me from under those heavy Irish brows. “He’s not going to give us a choice.” He sighed. “If we don’t fight, he kills us both; if we don’t show, he kills Alec.”

I swallowed, thinking desperately. “Okay, so...I have to knock you out? Or you have to knock
me
out?” The thought of doing it made me nauseous, but it was something we could survive.

Aedan shook his head. He put his hands on my shoulders and leaned forward until his forehead touched mine.

“Oh God,” I whispered. “Oh, Jesus, no….” I pushed back from him. “
That
was your plan? To train me to fight you and then just show up at the fight and expect me to kill you?!”

He sighed. “I don’t know. I figured the later you knew, the better.”

Before I knew what I was doing, I’d slapped him hard across the face. “
Asshole!
Stupid, selfish
asshole!
What’s the matter with you? I can’t do this! You know I can’t do this! I love you!”

He stood there, a red mark rising on his cheek, and stared at me. His quiet calm was scarier than any amount of anger. “You have to,” he told me. “This is the only move we have left.”

“You’re
insane!
What are you thinking?! We have to go to the cops!”

“We’ve got no evidence. If we go to the cops, Rick’s lawyer will get him out within hours. And then we’re both dead and Alec too. We can’t run and leave Alec in the hospital. We don’t have a choice. Only one of us can come out of the pit.”

“I
can’t!
Jesus, of course I can’t! Are you kidding me?!” I turned and ran, slipping under the ring’s ropes and racing out of the doors of the gym.

He caught up with me half a block away, in an abandoned lot. Seizing my hand, he jerked me around to face him. “You have to.” He squatted down so that he was on my level and ran his fingers through my hair. “Sylvie...one of us has to go. And there’s no way I’m letting it be you.”

I could feel tears pouring down my cheeks, but the deep, hot horror of it was so painful in my chest that they barely even registered. It was too cruel, too twisted. After everything we’d been through together. After finally finding the person I was meant to be with. “
I can’t do it!”
I screeched.

He hugged me close. “You have to.”

And, underneath the sadness in his eyes, I could see the calm. Jesus, he though—
he thought this was a way to redeem himself!
He thought that, if he sacrificed himself—

I tore myself out of his arms and ran.

This time, he didn’t chase me. I ran three or four blocks and only stopped when I reached the docks. It was another beautiful afternoon, with the cranes reflected in glass-calm water.
This isn’t right.
It felt like the wind should be howling and the rain lashing down.

I knew Aedan wouldn’t kill me. I knew I couldn’t kill him. That meant both of us would die at Rick’s hands—he’d slaughter us for ruining his big fight. And he’d probably kill Alec in the hospital out of spite.

Some tiny, traitorous part of my brain asked,
isn’t one death better than three?

No. No way. That was giving up everything I believed in. I couldn’t conceive of a world without Aedan. The world needed people like him. Any world was better than that—even one without me in it.

The only solution was for me to die. But I knew I’d never persuade Aedan to do it.

So I’d have to do it myself.

Sylvie

At the hospital, I sat at the end of Alec’s bed and just watched him breathing. The whole month that he’d been in the coma, he’d been gradually losing muscle tone, his body atrophying day by day, too slowly to notice. Now, though, I saw the difference. I think it’s because the same blonde doctor, Heather, was there, checking on him, and the whole scene could have been a month before. Except then, I’d been the frail one and he’d been the strong one.

And now I needed to be strong one last time.

“Tell me honestly,” I asked Heather. “Do you think he’ll wake up?”

Her shoulders slumped. “It’s impossible to say,” she said. “I can’t make promises—”

“
Please.
I’d give a lot for your gut feeling, right now.”

She nodded and stared at Alec. “Then...
yes.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, studying my brother’s face. I swallowed. “I need your help.”

***

By the time I’d finished with the doctor, it was evening. I went straight to Aedan’s apartment. We didn’t even speak, when we saw each other. We just wrapped each other up in a hug and rocked there in the doorway for long minutes.

He eventually pushed me back and looked into my eyes. “You know it has to be me,” he whispered. “It’s the only way that makes sense. You’ve got a feck of a lot more to offer the world.”

I shook my head. “Don’t say that.” But my voice was weak and despondent.

He touched his forehead to mine. “Fight’s in three hours,” he said. “It’ll take an hour to drive out there.”

“I don’t want to spend our last hours talking about this,” I told him.

So we didn’t. He sprawled out length ways on the couch and pulled me so that I was sitting between his legs with my back against his chest. And he played with my hair while we talked about our childhoods and school and friends and everything that had made us who we were.
I know so little about him!
I thought, horrified.

We sat there as the sun went down inside and the apartment grew dark, neither of us wanting to move, not wanting to waste a single second of precious life.
Why didn’t we get up earlier? Why didn’t we train less and play more? Why did I work so many shifts at the hotel?
I kept learning new things about him, things that made me love him even more. He hated raspberries, but loved raspberry-flavored candy. He and his brothers had rabbits, when they were kids, and Aedan’s used to hide inside his schoolbag and try to go to school with him. He once walked four miles in the rain to get to a gig by his favorite band, then stood there at the front and dripped a huge pile of water—
but the speakers were so loud, they blew me dry,
he insisted.

“Aedan?” I asked at last. “What happened to your family? Why are your brothers spread all over the country? Why don’t you talk to each other?”

His arms tightened around me. “Some bad shit. Some bad shit happened.”

I waited, but he didn’t speak again. “You don’t want to tell me?”

I felt him shake his head.

“That’s okay.” I squeezed his arm. “You don’t have to.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just...it’s a family thing.”

“Not for outsiders?”

“Not my story to tell.”

I nodded silently. As far as he knew, he was going to be the one who died. He was planning to take whatever happened to his family with him to the grave. What could be that awful? I gave a tiny, involuntary shudder.

“I wish it had been different, now,” he said, almost as if he was speaking to himself. “I wish I’d looked some of them up. Got back in touch. I wish....” His arms tightened around me again and he put his chin on my head. “I wish a lot of things. Most of all, I wish I could just be with you. Forever.”

This isn’t right. We shouldn’t lose this.
We were too good together. To be split apart by an accident would be horrific, but to do it deliberately, to know forever that it was our hands that did it, however unwillingly….

Aedan looked at his watch and then squeezed me. “Time to go,” he whispered.

Sylvie

Rick wasn’t going to risk holding the fight at The Pit, where regulars could show up. He wanted this to be a private event, with only those who he could trust not to blab. So he’d told us to come to a farm way outside the city. We had to drive there, so I borrowed a car from a friend at work. I didn’t tell her that it would be Aedan bringing it back, the next day.

I kept quiet about my plan. When Aedan gently but firmly explained to me that it had to be him who died, I nodded silently. He had to believe I was going to do it, right up until the final seconds.

When we arrived, our cheap, aging car looked ridiculous next to all the high-end SUVs with their chrome and blacked-out windows. There must have been close to a hundred of them, along with a variety of sports cars. No limos, though—the guests had all driven themselves there. They were making themselves accessories by paying to see the fight, so they wouldn’t go to the cops, but a limo driver couldn’t be trusted not to rat out their employer.

The venue was a large barn. The crowd was already in there, the buzz of excited chatter audible even outside. As we walked towards it, I could see white light streaming out of every crack in the corrugated iron walls.

The big main doors were closed for privacy. Al, one of Rick’s bodyguards, nodded us towards a small side door. I took a deep breath, squeezed Aedan’s hand...and we went in.

Inside, hay bales stacked two high formed a rough circle much smaller than The Pit’s—only about twenty feet across. Two openings had been left on opposite sides for us to enter through and a single hay bale had even been provided for us to slump down on between rounds. Someone had carefully strewn hay all over the concrete floor inside the ring to give it a rustic feel.

Around the ring, the crowd was three deep. Almost everyone was in suits and many of them were chattering as if they knew each other. A few were even talking stocks and shares.
They’re doing deals. They’re doing business while they wait to see one of us kill the other one.

Every single guest was a man. I wondered if the men who’d been so eager to see me get raped had come along to watch one of us die. Was that a different sort of man? I wasn’t sure.