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“It’s good to see you”, he says with a smile.
He looks too young to be caught up in the world that he’s in, and I wonder how it’s happened. His apartment gave little away, but then again, I didn’t really expect it to. No photos of family members, nothing that personal at all really. It didn’t look all that lived in, but he might have only just moved there. It wasn’t the place we first fucked so maybe he likes to move around.
“Busy week”, I ask, touching his wrist with my hand.
“Would you believe me if I told you I got this tripping over in the park?”
“No”, I say, shaking my head.
Liam looks away and then back again as though he’s been caught. “Can’t get much past you.”
“Did you win?”
“I always win”, he says, almost slightly embarrassed to admit it.
The waiter comes over to take orders. I ask for a red wine and Liam takes a beer. I have Maggie on my mind, nagging at the back of my brain, dancing on my lips, but now doesn’t seem to be the right time. Eat first, tell secrets later.
“How have you been?” he asks.
“Busy”, I say. The standard response in the modern American world, yet mine happens to be fucking true. Two jobs, a two-month-old daughter, several stories to write up. “I’ve been working on the underground fighting article.”
Liam sips on his beer. He could be a model in a different life, a film star. I look into his eyes and want to know what’s behind them. That’s part of the reason I’m interested in this fighting world in the first place. Humans are so multilayered and hypocritical, that sometimes we do things in contradiction to what we actually believe is right. Liam seems way too intelligent to have lost himself to that world, far too good to stay there for too long.
“So, what’s your verdict?” Liam asks.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, and I grew up with three brothers”, I say, not all that keen to talk about it if it makes him feel uncomfortable.
“I hate it”, he says.
The natural question would be, why do you do it? and I think he wants me to ask, but I don’t. “I can see why you would”, I say instead. “It’s pretty brutal.”
“It’s probably the strangest job I’ve ever had”, he says. “The best paid as well.”
“I’m sure it pays more than waitressing”, I say.
“Everything pays better than waitressing”, he jokes.
I touch his wrist again, just because I want to feel close to him, and Liam reaches in, pulls me towards him and steals another kiss.
“You said you had a secret”, he says again, when he’s pulled away from me.
“I’m a complicated person”, I say. “I’m a woman for a start.”
“I like complicated”, he says. “Especially complicated woman.”
I give him a look that tells him I’m not convinced and try and divert the conversation somewhere else.
“What would you be doing if you weren’t beating the shit out of people in abandoned buildings all over Brooklyn?” I ask.
“All over the States”, he corrects me.
“Exactly.”
“Well, believe it or not, in another life completely, I had a chance to be a professional football player. I was offered a scholarship at LSU, all of my fees paid for four years and then right out of the gate I fucked up my knee.”
“Fuck.”
“Things kind of went a little downhill after that. My knee is better now, but it took too long for it to get fixed and I had to pass up that chance. I never had enough money to go back, and, anyway, I kind of messed up the opportunity. It wasn’t a good time in my life.”
“That sucks, Liam”, I say. “That’s super bad luck.”
He shrugs. “I guess so, but then again, maybe it was never meant to be. My minor would have been philosophy, so if the football didn’t work out you might have been sat here talking to a philosophy lecturer.”
“A philosophy lecturer that kicks the living shit out of people, now that would be a conundrum”, I say.
“We probably wouldn’t have even met”, he says. “I definitely wouldn’t have been able to save you from those three guys that night.”
“You might have been able to talk them down”, I say.
“Or confuse them with a discourse about the ethics of what they were about to do.”
“You would have made one hell of a sexy lecturer”, I say. “I can see it now, tank top, corduroy jeans, glasses.”
“Is that the look you go for?” he asks. “If I’d known I’d have worn something else.”
“I’d have fucked you if you were my lecturer”, I say, “and I’d fuck you whatever clothes you put on.”
Liam smiles. “You know, I don’t think I’ve met many girls as direct as you”, he says.
“Do you like it?”
“You know I do. Last weekend was incredible. Even better than last year.”
“Even though I had to leave early?” I ask, Maggie on my mind again and refusing to go away.
“You’re a complicated woman”, he says.
“Thank you for being understanding”, I say.
“By the way, you look incredible tonight.”
“You’re only saying that because of what you saw me in last week.”
“No, seriously”, he says. “I think you are beautiful. I’d even go out on a limb and say we had a connection.”
He is right in more ways than he can imagine.
“I’d like to get to know you more, Jasmine”, he says, his hand on my leg. “I think there could be something special between us.”
It’s only our first real date (even though we’ve fucked several times and have a baby between us he doesn’t even know about) but I agree with him. There could be something special between us. Something people spend their whole lives searching for and only very few are lucky to find.
“Where did you go for a year?” I ask him. It comes out a little more challengingly than I mean it to, but I think it’s an important question in the grand scheme of things.
Liam lets his eyes drop to the table before they come back up to me.
“I’m going to go full confession here”, he says. “It’s only fair.”
“Go on.”
“I got myself in debt a while ago, with some people you don’t want to be in debt with. After that shit with my knee I got depressed, and then-”, he looks around for a moment as if to see who might be listening and then leans in close to me before he continues, “-it’s really fucking embarrassing, but I got addicted to the pain meds they put me on.”
I sip my wine and wait for him to continue.
“I’m clean now, I have been for almost six years, but at the time, I needed money to afford them. One thing led to another, I fell in with some bad people, I went to jail, and then I got in debt, with the only people I could find to lend me the money. Since then I’ve been paying it off.”
“Fuck”, I say, because I don’t know what other word is appropriate right now.
“That
’s why I didn’t want to drag you into my world. That’s the full story. I fight where I can and when I can. This year I’ve been all over America and I’ve fought in some of the craziest fucking places you could imagine. As a writer, you’d love that. More importantly, I’m nearly debt free. The end of this year I’ll be out of this world forever.”
“To start your tenure as a philosophy teacher”, I say, trying to lighten a mood that has suddenly got serious.
“I wouldn’t go that far”, he says with a smile. “So, there you go, I’m the fucked up bad boy parents don’t want their daughters to meet. I’ve been addicted to pain meds, I’ve been in jail for robbery, I’ve swapped a potential career in football for illegal fighting rings, and at one point I was up to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt to a crime organization that not only has a fondness for killing people, they like to do it by chopping their victims up into tiny pieces and throwing them out of a private plane so it takes years to collect them all.”
“Wow”, I say.
“So you see why I was reluctant to bring you into it.”
“Tiny pieces?” I ask. “Out of an airplane?”
“That’s what happened to the last guy that didn’t pay his debts. You probably saw some of it on the news. A leg found in Maryland, a hand in Ohio.”
“What about your parents?”, I ask.
“Yeah, no”, he says, shaking his head.
After a moment's silence, he leans in towards me to take my hand. “I’ll completely understand if you want to leave”, he says. “It’s fucked up and has nothing at all to do with you. I’m not exactly a great prospective partner.”
Try father of my child. Fuck. I don’t know how I feel. I knew about the fighting, obviously, but had no idea about the rest. What if he doesn’t pay off the debt? What if he does and they make him continue to fight anyway? What if I lose him?”
“When you pay off what you owe, what then?” I ask, a little scared at what this means.
“It means I’ve paid my debt and I’m free.”
