Chapter Twenty-Two
Killian
She kept me waiting for fifteen minutes, but I didn’t complain. I was impressed she showered, dressed, dried her hair and was in the Jeep so quickly. She was wearing enormous sunglasses, short shorts, and a Ripcurl T-shirt that skimmed her waistband and hugged her body in all the right places. She looked like a Hollywood starlet. A dirty angel. A California surfer girl. A modern-day fairytale. Eden Madley was sexy, sweet, gorgeous, and mine. How in the hell had any of this happened?
While I drove, she pulled all her hair on top of her head, twisted it around and around, and tied it in a knot that secured it in place. Wispy strands of hair escaped the knot and blew in the breeze from the open windows. Her bare feet propped on the dash, she tapped out the beat of Bedouin Soundclash’s “When the Night Feels My Song” on the window frame. I had to agree with the lyrics—it was a beautiful day. An ordinary day, but a beautiful one. I didn’t feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. I felt happy in a way I hadn’t felt in so long. I wanted to hang onto it for as long as it lasted.
We picked up coffee from her favorite barista who put two and two together and came up with five. “So…you two, huh?” He put his hand over his heart and tapped it a few times. Then fluttered his eyelashes at both of us. “I knew there was something there from that first day. You two look so good together. Just for the record,” he said, putting his hand on my arm, “I knew you were straight. But it never hurts to look, right?”
Just give me the coffee and spare me the chat. Maybe I grunted in response. Who knows? Eden nudged my shoulder, prompting me to respond, so I mustered a smile and tried to be nice. “Right. Doesn’t hurt to look.”
“Have a good day,” Eden said, with a big smile and a wave.
“You too,” he said, giving us a wink like he’d been personally responsible for getting us together.
“Don’t mess with my head any more, okay?” Eden said when we were back in the Jeep and she was drinking her caffeine laced with milk and sugar. She was saving her cinnamon roll for later, having shot down my suggestion to try one of the salads or the Greek yogurt.
I glanced at her. “How do I mess with your head?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.
“You don’t know how you mess with my head?”
I pulled up in front of the bar and left the motor idling. She unfastened her seatbelt and turned in her seat to look at me.
“If we’re going to do this, we need to be open and honest with each other. I can’t handle it if you’re running hot and cold and I don’t know the reason behind it. Like, after the time I sketched your face, why were you so closed-off? You acted really cold.”
She was waiting for an answer, and I knew she wouldn’t let me go until she got one. I rubbed the back of my neck. This wasn’t going to be easy, but if I wanted to be with her, I couldn’t fall at the first hurdle. I did want to be with her. But I didn’t know how to answer her question.
“Is that why you were hanging out with Adam?” I asked. It was a dickhead move and I knew it. To her credit, she didn’t rise to it.
“Killian. Look at me.”
I looked at her. She pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and she looked at me, really looked at me the way only she could. Like she was an excavator digging out my secrets and lies and exposing them to the light.
“If you’re not ready for this, tell me now before we get into it. I don’t want you to jerk me around. I’m working on myself, and I don’t need someone to make me feel bad about myself. I care about you, and I think you care about me too. But we need to start communicating better.”
Like I said, she was strong and brave, and didn’t shy away from confrontation. And I cared about her, more than she probably knew. The last thing I wanted to do was make her feel bad about herself. I leaned back in my seat and searched my brain for the right answer. Sex was easy. Intimacy was hard for me. “If you look too closely, dig too deep, you won’t like what you find and that…scares the shit out of me.” I swallowed hard, not sure how all this honesty made me feel. I wanted her to leave, so I could go work it out at the gym. Punch a leather bag with my bare hands until my knuckles were raw and bleeding. That was how it made me feel.
She leaned over the gearbox and wrapped her hand around the back of my neck, pulling me towards her for a goodbye kiss. My eyes closed, and she pressed her lips gently against my closed eyelid. It felt odd, but in a good way. Sweet and gentle and caring. She sat back in her seat and looked over at me, a small smile tugging on her lips.
“What was that?” I asked.
“An angel kiss. From a dirty angel. And I like what I see, even when I look closely. Let me see you, Killian. Don’t shut me out.” She hopped out of the Jeep and waved goodbye over her shoulder.
Yep. She hadn’t Googled me. Fuck. What would she think about that? It didn’t matter that they ruled it an accident. Or that they claimed there were pre-existing medical conditions. My hands were officially lethal weapons, and I was a man seeking salvation and redemption, without a clue how to find it.
On my way to the gym, I thought about what she’d asked me in the coffee shop that day we talked for an hour. What would be my first choice of career? For years, all I’d known was fighting. All my life, I’d been fighting—for survival, against the bullies, against authority. When I discovered Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at fifteen, I was hooked. Not only did it give me the self-defense training I needed, it gave me a focus and a purpose in my life. MMA had been my passion, my art, my religion, my calling. For the first time in my life, I’d found a home, a place where I belonged. I loved the adrenaline rush. I loved the crowd. I loved the fans, especially the kids. When they asked for my autograph and told me they wanted to be just like me when they grew up, that I was their favorite fighter, their hero, I’d never felt more humbled or prouder of any achievement in my life.
But that life was over, and I couldn’t go back to it. Now, if I could choose to do anything, I’d use my hands to do something good. To create something beautiful. To build something instead of knocking it down and destroying it. But it was pointless to think about what I would do when I’d already committed to the bar business. There were worse ways to earn a living, and I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t love it.
Later that afternoon, the enormity of what was happening hit me. Somehow, I’d talked my way into a relationship and I was happy about it. I leaned against the doorframe in the courtyard and watched her painting the wall while she talked to Zeke. I knew they were just friends, so I didn’t need to be an asshole about it. Eden said I needed to make more of an effort to be nice to Zeke. Jesus. This girl will be ruling my life soon, as if she didn’t already.
The mural unfolded before my eyes as she painted pink flowers. Poppies? Her talent awed me. When I saw the sketch she did of me, I felt like I was looking at myself the way she saw me, not the way I really was, but better. Like I was someone good.
Her art was different than Connor’s. His was more graphic, I guess. He was into manga and anime. In his early teens, he’d been working on a comic book, but I didn’t know what happened to it. I stared at my phone as if thinking about Connor hard enough would send him a telepathic message that he should call me.
My phone remained silent.
Unfortunately, Louis didn’t. We were standing across the street from the bar, watching the construction guys working on the roof. Not that watching them would speed up their progress or lower the cost—we were Monday morning quarterbacks, critiquing their work and grumbling about everything we could do better. I took a swig from my bottle of water and squinted at the crew of men in hardhats doing jack shit, as far as I could tell.
“He hasn’t gotten off his ass in twenty minutes,” Louis grumbled. “What the hell is he doing?”
“Catching some rays on our tar beach.” The guy in question was shirtless, with a beer gut and a red face he hadn’t gotten from over-exertion, judging by the way he was sitting around like a fucking potato.
“Good thing we agreed on a price for the job,” Louis said.
“We should have done it ourselves.”
“Because we have so much roofing experience,” Louis deadpanned. “With so much free time on our hands.”
We could have done it, but we had enough work, running the bar, and standing around, doing nothing, like we were doing now.
“Speaking of hands, how was your date?” Louis asked.
“I kept my hands to myself.” I smothered a laugh, thinking about Eden’s no-hands command this morning.
“I call bullshit.” He side-eyed me. My face gave him no clues to support his claim. Unlike Eden, I’ve perfected the art of keeping a poker face. A lifetime of secrets and lies taught me how to hide my emotions. “Did you tell her yet?” Louis asked, bursting my happy bubble.
I shook my head no.
“You should,” he said, telling me something I already knew.
She’d find out eventually. Every bartender at Trinity Bar, except for her, had eventually found out what I had done for a living. I asked them to keep their mouths shut about it but one of those days it would slip out.
“Nobody judges you as harshly as you judge yourself,” Louis said, trying to impart some words of wisdom.
Too bad it was bullshit. Anna Ramirez judges me, and one day when her son is old enough to understand, he’ll judge me, and he’ll hate me for what I stole from him. Sometimes, I tried to take consolation in the knowledge that Johnny loved MMA as much as I did. He ate, slept, and breathed the sport. He’d taken too many blows to the head, had suffered too many concussions, supposedly. If that had been the case, why did they let him fight me? Injuries were a risk we took every time we stepped into the cage. If you dwelled on what could happen, or let the fear get inside your head, you’ve already lost the fight before it started. To win, you needed to be mentally strong and you needed to be confident. There’s no room for self-doubt. Johnny was deemed physically fit and mentally sound. Even after that punch to his head during our fight, he’d passed the medical team’s tests and was sent back in for two more rounds.
“If by some terrible twist of fate, I couldn’t continue fighting, I wouldn’t be Johnny Ramirez anymore,” he’d told me once after a training session. “I’d be pissed off at the world, hating life, and impossible to be around.”
“More than you are now?” I’d joked, but I had understood what he was saying because I felt like that too.
“You ain’t no day at the beach, Vincent.”
“Is that why you’re always trying to cozy up to me?”
“We’ll leave our bromance outside the Octagon. When I’m forced to fight you, all bets are off.”
“I’m not fighting you.” Johnny was five years older than me—my teammate, my mentor, my friend, and a contender in the same weight class. His career started peaking while mine was still getting off the ground. We didn’t choose our opponents. The promoters did. But teammates fighting each other was contentious and not something I ever wanted to do. Ironically, Johnny had no problem with it.
“Your star is rising. Everyone’s buying into the Killian Vincent brand,” he’d said. “If you keep going like this, our day of reckoning will come.”
“We’ll refuse.”
“Like hell we will. We’re fighters. It’s not only what we do, it’s who we are. We’re in the UFC because we want to fight the best of the best. If the day comes, I’ll fight your sorry ass for the title. After I win, I’ll shake your fucking hand and buy you a whiskey, so you can drown your sorrows in it.”
By some terrible twist of fate, that wasn’t how it happened.
We fought to win. Not to kill. Not to finish someone off. We weren’t gladiators in the Colosseum, fighting for our lives. We believed that we were men of pride and honor. Competitors in the Octagon, friends outside of it.
Once upon a time, I was a champion. Who, or what, was I now?