18
WHEN I woke up the next morning, Kage was gone. There was no note, no text message, nothing.
I drafted a text to him. “Morning, sexy. Where did you disappear to?”
I read it at least ten times. Was it too much calling him sexy? Should I play it cool and not text at all? I deleted the word sexy, typed it back in, then deleted the entire text.
I pulled on a pair of boxer briefs, then some shorts on over them. My reflection looked surprisingly sad after the glorious night we’d had. It was because I’d woken up without Kage beside me, and that was messed up. I’d never even spent the night with Layla, and we had dated for months.
Kage takes off the morning after, and I’m freaking out.
There was a knock at the door, and I almost came out of my skin. For a moment, I thought for sure it was Kage. But a glance through the peephole revealed the room service guy.
I pulled open the door and offered him a lukewarm smile. “Thanks.” I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the three dollar bills on the counter. Then I took my food and tipped him.
Beneath the silver dome lid of the tray was my feast. Egg whites. Proatmeal. Dry wheat toast. Black coffee. Fucking tomatoes. I pulled my water jug out of the fridge and started chugging it. Where the hell was Kage?
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed my phone and texted, “Where are you?” This time I actually hit send.
“My apartment,” he texted back. “Had to take care of something. Come up after breakfast?”
Relief washed over me. “Sure.”
I was so screwed.
But now that I’d solved the mystery of the missing fighter, I had an appetite. I ate every bite on the tray, even the tomatoes. Then I took a shower, so that I didn’t seem too eager. Plus, I thought it might be uncouth to show up wearing the remnants of his cum from the night before.
Kage answered the door to his apartment dressed only in boxers. He appeared freshly showered as well, his hair wet and slicked back, his skin scented with body wash.
Instead of inviting me in and engaging in conversation like he normally would have, Kage pulled my t-shirt over my head and had me in his arms before the door had even snapped closed behind me.
He clung to me, his face buried in the curve between my neck and shoulder, breathing heavily. He pawed ineffectually at my shorts until I pulled them down myself. But he didn’t attack me like he had the night before. We just stood there in front of the door, holding each other. When I tried to pull back to get a look at his face, he held tight and wouldn’t let me see him.
“Kage, are you okay? You’re scaring me. Is everything alright?”
“I’m fine. Let’s just watch TV or something.” He let go of me, went into the living room, and used the remote to turn on the classic movie channel. Some black and white thing was playing, but I wasn’t going to argue about his choice of movie.
We sat down on the sofa, looking straight ahead at the TV with only our thighs touching. This lasted for about sixty seconds, then Kage was up again. He went into the kitchen and refilled his jug with filtered water. He seemed severely agitated. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but my first thought was that he was on drugs— like cocaine or PCP or something. He was so damn jumpy.
Then he just stopped in the middle of the kitchen holding that jug of water.
“I can’t breathe,” he said. The words came out a soft gasp, his hand flattened over his chest. “I knew it. Fuuuck… not now. God, here it comes. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”
My whole body went white hot.
“Kage, what is it?” I was at his side in an instant.
He leaned against the counter and slammed his half-full jug of water down, mangling it and sending water gushing all over the granite. It trickled from the far end of the counter and puddled onto the floor, but cleaning it up was the least of my concerns.
Kage sucked in a deep breath through his nose and blew it out slowly through lips stretched into a tight line so that only a thin stream could escape. He repeated the process over and over, not speaking, while I stood impotently beside him. I was afraid to touch him.
“Are you okay?” I asked, already knowing the answer to the question. “Should I call 911? You say you can’t breathe, but you’re breathing, Kage. You are breathing.”
“Get my cell,” he groaned, dropping his head to the counter, heedless of the water puddled there. He was still dragging in those labored breaths and pushing out thin ribbons of carbon dioxide. I realized he was purposely hypoventilating— the equivalent to breathing into a paper bag— and that meant he felt like he was close to passing out.
I ran as fast as I could to the sofa and grabbed his cell phone from the cushion. I wished I could take time to turn the TV off. It was loud and distracting, but I had to get back to Kage before he lost consciousness and banged his head or something.
Absurdly, it occurred to me that I was worrying about a fighter who had been slammed and punched and kicked and choked relentlessly his entire life.
“There’s a number on there. It says Julie. Call it, tell her to meet me.”
I fumbled with the phone and got the number dialed.
“Put it on speaker,” he said at the last second. I did.
“Kage, what is it?” a female voice asked, sounding alarmed.
“I can’t breathe,” he told her simply.
“I’m on my way,” she said. “Headed out the door right now. Are you at your place?”
“Yeah.” He slowed his breathing even more. “Jamie’s with me.”
“Can he hear me?” Her voice seemed to carry a note of caution.
He nodded, then gasped. “Yes. You’re on speaker.”
“Jamie,” she said firmly, surprising me. “Get Michael to the bed. Make him lie down, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, hating the panic in my voice. I needed to pull it together, be strong for Kage.
“He’s going to be fine,” she told me. Even thinned out over a cell phone line, her voice was convincing. Commanding. “He’s having a panic attack, that’s all. It feels very scary to him, but he’s not in any real physical danger. Just get him to the bed and comfort him the best you can. I’m already in the car, and I’ll be there in less than fifteen minutes.”
“Alright,” I said, my voice warbling with my own wave of panic.
“Jamie,” she called, and I had to pull the phone back to my ear. “Don’t let him out of your sight.”
After I hung up the phone, I took Kage by the arm and led him slowly to the bed. He seemed weak, like the energy to move had been stripped from him. I got the feeling that if I let go of him, he’d sink down and not try to get back up— which is exactly what he did when we reached the bed.
I left him there lying sideways on the bed long enough to run to the front door and unlock it. Then I was at his side again.
I picked his legs up and got them onto the bed while he continued to hypoventilate and stare at the ceiling. His breathing was chillingly similar to my grandfather’s on his final emergency room visit. A longtime emphysema sufferer, he’d lived with us for the final years of his life. During that time, we made frequent trips to the ER. On that last night, I’d held his frail, grasping hand as he fought for breath. The tube blowing oxygen into his nose did little to comfort him.
His words had been desperate, punctuated by labored breaths.
“Don’t want.” breath. “To do it.” breath. “Anymore.” breath.
He was tired. So tired. His chest heaved with exertion.
The nurse had explained what he was going through. How the work of breathing had become too much for him, how he was physically and emotionally exhausted, how he would give up if only his body would let him. But the instinct to survive is strong— much stronger than the will.
My grandfather had given up, but his body would not. Could not.
We’d stood watch over him for hours, me on one side, my mom on the other, and the rest of the family at the foot of the bed. I cried and swiped at my tears with the back of my left hand, because my right hand was wound in his gnarled and discolored fingers. I held on because it was all I could do. In my mind I felt shame, because I prayed for him to get relief. I prayed for him to die.
That night they put my grandfather on a ventilator, and he never came off of it. Not until they put the sheet over his head.
I blinked away the memory and looked at Kage lying there on his bed— fit and fine and in the prime of his life— gasping for air and looking so damn tired.
How could this be happening to him?
“I’m sorry, Jamie,” he whispered. As if he had any reason to apologize to me when he was the one suffering.
I climbed into bed beside him and took his hand in mine, cuddling close, careful not to put any pressure on his chest or impede his breathing in any way. I laid a kiss on his shoulder and waited, mildly concerned that some strange woman was going to find us like that— cuddled in his bed in nothing but our boxers. Would it be obvious that we were lovers? When Kage had told her I was with him, it seemed as though she already knew who I was. They had talked about me before. Maybe she already knew about us.
Kage obviously trusted her. It seemed I had to trust her, too.
When the door clicked open and I heard her approaching the bedroom, I closed my eyes and braced myself for the worst. But she came in and introduced herself in a businesslike manner.
“Hi, Jamie. I’m Dr. Julie Tanner.” Her dark hair was smoothed back into a conservative bun at the nape of her slender neck, revealing a beautiful face that was fresh and free of makeup. There was concern in her brown eyes.
A doctor. Now things were starting to make sense. She reached a hand out to shake mine.
“Uh… nice to meet you,” I said quietly, glancing down at my thin boxer briefs and then at Kage’s boxers, always in danger of gaping open. I suddenly felt very under-dressed, more so than I thought I would now that she was actually here, her keen eyes roving over Kage’s body. A blush crept onto my cheeks. “I need to throw some clothes on. I just didn’t want to leave him until you got here.”
I crawled down the bed and got a t-shirt and shorts out of Kage’s dresser and put them on. They hung loosely from my smaller frame, but I didn’t care. I wanted to wear his clothes, because it made me feel like I belonged to him.
When I returned to the doctor’s side, she was injecting something into Kage’s upper arm.
“What’s that?” I asked, unable to help myself.
“Librium.” She capped the syringe and pressed a wadded up gauze square to the injection site, then secured it with a bandage. “It’s to calm him down and help with the anxiety. He’ll be out of it for a while. Why don’t you go on back to your room and let me take care of him?”
“You sure? I don’t mind staying.”
She smiled, but it wasn’t an altogether friendly look. More like a mask for barely-reined-in irritation. “I’m sure you wouldn’t. But I’ve been treating Michael for a long time. We have a system we’ve developed over the years for dealing with these things.”
“He can stay,” Kage said, and his voice was so bland it scared me. For once, he truly did sound like a machine.
“I understand you want to keep your friend close by.” Dr. Tanner rested her hand on his abdomen and spoke softly, her words barely reaching my ears. “But you know it’s not for the best. Do you really want him to see you this way?”
I opened my mouth to protest. She was making it sound horrible, and her hand on his belly was really bothering me. I wanted to climb into bed with him, wrap myself around him, and tell that lady to back off. Who the hell did she think she was?
But I knew the answer to that. She was his doctor. His long-time doctor. I had known him for less than two months and had been intimate with him for three days. So the real question was probably who the hell did I think I was?
I took a deep breath and made up my mind. “She’s right, Kage. I’m going to go for a run and work for a bit. See if I can get you some more appearances. I’ll drop by later when you’re feeling better.”
He didn’t answer, and the doctor acted like I hadn’t spoken. It was as if I’d already gone. So I let myself out of his apartment, sparing a glance backward and cringing at the sight of that woman sitting on his bed.
OVER the next few days, I saw little of Kage. When I’d stopped back by his apartment to see how he was doing the night of the anxiety attack, no one had answered the door. I called and left a text message, but both had gone unanswered.
He was conspicuously absent from his training sessions, but Marco graciously, and surprisingly, offered to work me out. So I worked out, pouring everything I had into wearing myself out so badly that I didn’t have the energy to think about Kage and wonder where he was.
Marco said he didn’t know anything, but I suspected he wasn’t being completely truthful with me.
In his absence, I changed his ringtone to a loop of Mama Said Knock You Out. It was cheesy, but I needed something to recognize him by when he called. On Wednesday afternoon, I heard it for the first time and nearly broke my neck trying to get to the phone.
“Hello?” I tried to sound nonchalant.
“You working hard for me?” That voice. I hadn’t even realized how much I had needed to hear it.
“Yes.”
“Good. I like to get my money’s worth.”
My mouth went dry.
“Trust me. You’re getting a bargain.”
He laughed, and even through the phone it gave me chills. “I know I am.” He paused for a few seconds, and dead air stretched conspicuously between us. “You want to see me fight?”
“Yes!” No hesitation on my part. This is what I’d been waiting for.
“It will be this Friday night. I won’t see you before then, so… Well, I’ll see you then.” He clicked off, leaving me to wonder what he’d been about to say. And where I needed to go to see him fight. There were too many questions, and too much excitement.
I was going to see Kage fight. The thought of it had butterflies already dancing in my stomach. No way I could concentrate for the next two days.
His ringtone blared from my phone again, and I answered it.
“I forgot to ask,” he said. “How do you want me to finish this guy?”
I chuckled, amused by his bravado. “Something fancy. How about a flying knee?”
“When?”
“What do you mean, when?”
“I mean when in the fight? Should I take him out immediately or toy with him a bit?”
I laughed. “Jesus, your ego knows no bounds. Okay, hotshot. I think you should wait until the second round. It’s the first time I’ve seen you fight, so you need to put on a show for me.”
“Done. And Jamie… If I finish him with a flying knee in Round Two, I get your ass as the prize.”