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“I want you to know,” I said.
“All right,” Raine said after a moment. “If it’s what you want.”
I nodded and wrapped my arm a little tighter around her waist. Raine’s fingers kept repeating their motions from behind my ear, down my jaw, and back again, setting a slow, gentle pace while I talked.
“I had just won a tournament,” I said. “Well, okay, that’s pretty obvious. Anyway, it was a big one – one of those that had lasted a couple of days. We were somewhere in Central America, I think. I was trucked back from the place where I had killed the last guy, and they took me to this big ranch in the middle of a bunch of fields. I kind of assumed they were cocaine plants, but I don’t really know what those look like and wasn’t about to ask, but shit, we were in Central America with a bunch of mafia types, for fuck’s sake. It was probably cocaine.”
“When the truck stopped, I jumped out of the back and got surrounded by a bunch of people – some of the guys from the organization and a shit ton of chicks. I mean, probably about twenty of them, all trying to get their hands on me and shoving each other. I remember thinking I didn’t get it – I’d been in the jungle for the past two days, was covered in blood, had two broken fingers, and a decent sized gash down my side that needed stitches. It’s not like I looked good.”
I stopped a second and lifted my arm, showing Raine the four inch scar underneath. She reached around my back to trace it with her fingers a couple of times before she just left her hand on top of it. Her other hand kept playing with my hair.
“So, in the back of these women, I see this other chick – she’s really tall and blonde with big tits, and she’s walking quickly towards us. She stood out, no doubt about that. The way she looked and the way she moved, she was every guy’s type. I mean, straight women and gay guys would fall for her.”
I stopped talking again as images of her…of Jillian…when she first walked up to me flew through my head, both glorious and gloriously painful. Raine’s fingers ran over my head a couple of times, and I managed to take a deep breath and start again.
“She pushed through the rest of the people crowded around me, walked straight up to me, and stuck her tongue down my throat. When she stopped, she said the fight had been the most incredible thing she had ever seen and that I was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. I thought she was a little crazy at first, but I usually ended up with a couple different women after a fight, so I didn’t think much of it. After one of the doctors splinted my fingers and stitched me up, I went with her to this nightclub in the middle of the freaking coke fields. So we danced and she drank…”
“You didn’t?”
“I didn’t drink then,” I said. “I would have a beer or something, maybe a glass of scotch, but I didn’t ever get drunk. Jillian drank a lot.”
“I’m sorry,” Raine said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“It’s all right,” I replied. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes for a minute, and then kept going. “That shit doesn’t really matter, anyway. Basically, we hit it off. She came to the room they had set up for me, and we fucked all night. That wasn’t unusual, but what was different was that she stayed there until morning. I usually kicked the chicks out of the room after
wards. I didn’t like having them there when I was trying to sleep. What was even weirder was what happened when we got back to Seattle. She was at my apartment more often than not; she was at all of my games, betting shitloads of her daddy’s money on me, and we’d fuck like rabbits at least four times a day. We went on like that for about six weeks, and everything was perfect, as far as I was concerned.”
“Before Jillian, I was with a different girl most every night. After tournaments, it was more like two or three of them would come back to the hotel with me. You would have thought switching to a one-woman relationship would have been hard for me, but it wasn’t. I loved it. I loved being with her; I loved coming home and having her there with me in the apartment, and I loved turning other women down because I was with someone. It’s like that was how I was supposed to be. I guess I just didn’t know I was that kind of boy before then.”
“I felt like there was finally something good in my life – something that meant something. I started talking to her about maybe retiring. It’s not like I needed any more money at that point. I’d been in tournaments for over six years by then and had enough money to live off the interest forever. Jillian’s family was loaded, so there wasn’t any need for us to do anything other than whatever we wanted to do. I figured we’d be set, and she wouldn’t worry about me when I was…well, when I was working.”
“That changed a bit when I came back early from a trip. Some tournament that ended up being cancelled – not sure why. It happened occasionally. Either the local authorities started snooping around or whoever was supposed to be backing it up financially ended up in a river. Regardless, I came back early. We had an office building downtown, and I stopped off there before going back to the apartment. It should have been empty, but…well…it wasn’t. I walked into the office, and when I opened the door…”
I stopped and let the tension wash over me. My hands were clenched into fists, and my throat went dry. I couldn’t even say it.
“What the fuck?” He lifted his head up and looked towards the door. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember his name.
“Bastian! You aren’t supposed to be back yet!”
“Wha…what…?” I couldn’t even get any words out.
“She was with someone else, wasn’t she?”
“Um…” I had to clear my throat to continue. “Yeah.”
“Oh, Bastian.” Raine’s hand stroked from my temple to the back of my head. “I’m sorry. That must have been horrible.”
“It was,” I agreed. “I stormed off, and she followed me back to my place. She said it was a mistake. She missed me, and she was lonely and she swore it wouldn’t happen again, so I forgave her and we made up. The second time it happened…”
I heard Raine gasp, but I didn’t pause.
“…I told her I couldn’t live like that. I needed her to be with me only, and I didn’t know how to trust her anymore. She said she’d never do it again, and then she said she wanted to…um…make a gesture. She wanted to do something special to show me how she felt.”
I stopped talking.
“Fuck, I can’t do this.”
“It’s okay, Bastian,” Raine said, her hand on the side of my face again. “Just take some deep breaths, and talk when you’re ready.”
