I’m subjected to the murderous torture of a chick flick marathon. Kyla insists on watching such ludicrous classics as The Holiday, Love Actually (at least I like what Hugh Grant did to “The World’s Shittiest Newspaper” in real life), Four Weddings and a Funeral (more Hugh, and I’m starting to wonder...), How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days (Matthew McConaughey was good in Two For the Money, big-ass muscles, I dig him, as well as in The Lincoln Lawyer and The Wolf of Wall Street), Notting Hill (OK, I’m starting to get jealous of Hughey), 10 Things I Hate About You (Fine, fine, I liked that one, I did), Silver Linings Playbook—
“That’s it. That’s fucking it. I’m dying here, dying!”
“Oh, come on, those were cute.”
They were, I admit it, but only to myself. Besides, I got a side-benefit from them. Who thought these yawns got a girl so horny? And whenever the guy and the gal reached their happily-ever-after, Kyla turned to me and kissed me on the cheek, and then her hand slid down to feel me, and to show me my own happily ever after. At the end of every movie.
Do you really think I would have subjected myself to this torture if I wasn’t receiving the perks?
Maybe Kyla knows this, maybe she planned the whole damn thing.
Jenny and Vera have become tight as thieves. And when Kyla spoke to her best friend it seems the blond is not only allowing us to be alone (which I appreciate very much) but she really is enjoying her time with the doctor. Which suits me just fine.
But Kyla’s a good friend, and when Vera’s not out doing I Don’t Know What with Jenny (my money’s on shopping, or ogling men) Kyla is with her, which gives me time to try and do something about this frigging college degree...which is not going so well. Not well at all.
Studying’s just not for me. I try, I do, but I’m just not one of those kinds of guys. And what I’ve studied so far in my ‘Business Management’ course doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with business and less to do with management. Is it really that complicated? Do you really need to go to all the trouble? My simple mind tells me all you have to do is find something people want and then deliver it. Or am I an idiot?
I put the laptop away and stare up at the ceiling.
My leg’s been getting better. Yeah, it still hurts like a bitch, but the cast will be off in a week. I’ll start physio then, and Kyla will be gone a week later. But that’s cool. I hate being an invalid around her. And the next time I see her I’m looking forward to being the man around her that I want to be.
When I’m alone, like now, when the studies go like shit and there’s nothing to do but think about the past and the future...I think of fighting.
It’s who I am. It’s all I know.
I’ll start the gym. I will. But I can’t give up the fight. If Kyla asked me to, if I was making the money I wanted to, maybe I would.
I might do it, but I don’t think I’d be happy.
The thought bothers me.
Kyla and I are officially serious. You learn a lot about someone when you spend almost every hour of every day with her for a month and you’re incapacitated enough that you actually spend a fair amount of time talking to her. I know everything about Kyla, everything. I know about her dad, her mother. I know about this guy Dave and Matt and the other guys she had. It was hard hearing that shit, hard, but I know it. I insisted, because I wanted to know her, I wanted to know everything about her.
And now that I do, I feel like her history is somehow mine as well, as if I experienced all the pain and the heartbreak with her in those years.
Kyla knows about me and Jenny. And that was rough on her. It was probably rough because I didn’t sugarcoat it. I told her the truth. I told her Jenny and I spent a night together and that it was romantic. Kyla asked me, “Do I have anything to worry about?”
And I assured her truthfully that she doesn’t. Kyla’s eyes told me she trusts me, and I will do good by that trust.
It helps that the doc and Vera hang out so much together. When the cast is off we’ll have a barbecue and I’ll bring Tyler over so he can spend some time with the girl who’s gotten me thinking about settling down. He saw her briefly when he flew over here two weeks ago to go over business, but he didn’t get to know her.
The only thing about Kyla’s past that concerned me is something closer to the present. It’s this guy, Vince. Kyla was cool in telling me about all the other stuff. She got a little teary at the recent scene with her father, but she was open, not holding back.
I felt something different when she told me about the bodybuilder. She held back, she was afraid, she didn’t want to get into details.
Which tells me Vince is a problem.
And I’m not all that comfortable with her going off to West Rock alone knowing this psycho is out there wanting to get a piece of her.
I asked her to stay, but it was a foolish request. She, unlike me, can study. And I’d be messing with her future by keeping her away from school. My recovery will take at least another month, maybe two. For her to miss that much school...
I’m thinking about Vince now, about what she told me, about how he slammed into the girls’ apartment and demanded Kyla take his calls. I’m thinking about how he grabbed her behind the college walls, pushed her up against one and pressed his hand down toward her crotch. He would have gotten where he needed to if she hadn’t taken those Krav Maga lessons suggested by Vera and then had him down on the ground long enough that she could make a run for it.
She went to the cops. Again.
There was little they could do. Vince always has an alibi.
I know guys like Vince.
Guys like Vince never learn.
“Promise me you’ll stick to well-lit areas,” I say to her.
“Logan, it’ll be fine. Vince has probably found someone else by now. He’s had all summer to get over me.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Look, I have friends, but none in Florida. I can get a few guys to be there but not all the time.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“I do.”
“I shouldn’t have told you, now you’re worried.”
“You should have told me. And, yes, I’m worried.”
“I’ll be fine.”
I cock an eyebrow at her. “Well-lit areas, stick to crowds, try not to party alone.”
“I’m always with Vera.”
“By alone I mean you and her. You’re females. Single, attractive females. What about this Rory guy?”
“He’s harmless.”
“A rich kid is never harmless.”
“He’s harmless, Logan, just a little clingy. Would you stop worrying?”
I look down at my leg. I’m sitting on the bed. Sitting. The cast came off yesterday, and my leg looks like something from a scarecrow. A person can lose a lot of weight in seven weeks. But I’m determined to be up and walking on it without pain faster than the doc believes I can. They wanted to take it off in eight weeks ‘to be safe.’ But I insisted getting it off earlier. It’s incredible how fast the body heals when you set your mind to it. And I wanted Kyla’s last memory of me to be one of a whole man, not a broken one, before she and Vera head off back to college. And back to this guy called Vince. “I worry,” I say. “I worry because...”
I look over at her, sitting on a couch in my bedroom, her knees together, her eyes shining.
Technically speaking, we’ve been together two months now, counting from when we first spent the night together. Two months, and in that time I got knocked out in the ring for the first time in two years, I was concussed, passed out, then I totaled my car, broke a leg, some fingers, another concussion. I knew she’d be trouble when I first laid eyes on her.
But the last month. Christ, the last month... I knew I loved her the moment she walked in the door here. Well, I sensed it. But I only realized it in retrospect. The human mind requires evidence and proof and all that crap when what it should really be doing is just going on gut feel. Why demand evidence when you know something is true?
I should have told her I loved her a month ago already. And, now, in retrospect, I realize I probably should have told her I loved her the very first time I saw her sitting at my side in that hospital in Nashville. And if that was too soon, then the moment my mind probably knew, actually knew what was really happening between me and her was when I asked her at that same hospital, Don’t go.
And she stayed.
She freaking stayed.
How could a man not love such a woman?
I know the answer. And, in my now-humbled state, I can confess to it: I was trying to be just that, a ‘man.’ I was trying to be the hero who is not held down, adored by the millions. Typical macho crap which I see now is just that—crap.
My mind knew it loved her then.
Well, if the mind requires evidence and proof for shit, it has it now.
She’s been here for me. She’s been here despite the trip she and her friend had planned for themselves. The evidence is there. The proof is there. But even if it wasn’t, it’s not why I say this to her now. I say it, because I know it, and I’ve always known it. A premonition, an intuition. But I’ve known it from the start. “Kyla,” I say. “I...love...you.”
A terrible anguish and fear and terror clutches at my heart as I say this. I’ve never said it to a woman before. Never.
I’ve had women say it to me, yes, but none who ever meant it. I’ve had women say it to me at the top of their climaxes, women I had not known for more than an hour. But I always imagined that a girl would say it first. No matter. This is how I feel. And I won’t deny it. And if you don’t love me back, Kyla, I don’t care. Because you’re making me soft, and I’m starting to think about cliché quotes like ‘better to have loved and lost,’ and I’m actually starting to believe those quotes. Maybe it’s all those chick flicks you made me watch.
Kyla does not answer with words.
And the time which passes before I understand what her answer really is, is the loneliest, most confusing time I have ever experienced in my entire life.
She answers with a tremble of her lips. A shine in her eyes. And then an outpour of emotional tears that only makes me love her even more.
She jumps up off her seat, collides into my body, inadvertently squeezing my bad leg against the bed.
Her arms wrap around me in a rush, and her lips meet mine, moist with tears. “I love you, too, Logan. I love you too and I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to scare you...”
My hands slide around her waist, under her shirt and onto the hot skin underneath.
I pull her shirt off quickly. She pushes me back, drops her pants in one movement and straddles me.
We haven’t slept together again since she’s been back. We did a lot of other things, but not sex. And that I can be with a woman and have an equally good time with her whether we’re in the sack or not is another bit of proof my mind doesn’t really need anyway. But it has it now.
It’s fast. Not romantic. She grabs my cock and presses it against her clit.
We’ve had ‘the talk,’ and she knows I’m clean and I know she’s on the pill. So I don’t question it when she puts my naked shaft into her hot body.
The slickness of it has me reeling.
Kyla’s movements are violent, furious, rolling and pulling and hungry. She bites her lip and forgets that my leg is still bummed, but not bummed enough.
I’d love to get on top of her, but that would still hurt too much.
She bends down to kiss me, forcing her climax to occur as fast as it can, not taking it slow, just grinding down against me with a fiery love that is so hot it sends the groan into my chest and out my throat before I have time to catch it.
She clenches and squeezes and pulls and kisses me.
The burst comes with no warning, no preparation, no alarm bells or slow build-up and before I know it, my cock is firing its seed into her and Kyla’s screaming and we’re both screaming, growling, clutching and holding and grabbing each other.
She whimpers against my ear as my arms crush her body to mine.
It almost feels like I burst seven or eight times in this single climax.
We’re exhausted by the end of it. My leg is howling but I hide it. Kyla got lost in the moment (so did I), and I wanted to keep her lost.
“I’m gonna miss you,” she says. “I’m gonna miss you.”
“I’ll be there sooner than you know it.”
“I’ll do what you said, OK? I’ll do it. I’ll stick to well-lit areas and we won’t go out alone. And...if you have some...friends...I’ll take them. For you.” She pecks my lips. “For you. To set your mind at ease.”
My mind will never be at ease until my leg is strong and I’m by her side and I have a gym making money in West Rock. It’ll take weeks, weeks just to stand stably, never mind everything else.
I have few friends in the world, but the friends I have are loyal. The barbecue is later tonight. Tyler owes me. He knows he does.
And I’m going to collect.