Ringside Read online

  When his mouth found mine again I attacked him. I lunged, wrapping my body around his in a move that surprised him and toppled us to the floor. I landed on top of him, laughing and bracing myself so I didn’t crush him, not that I could.

  “Nice tackle,” he chuckled, smoothing his hands over my thighs that straddled his hips.

  He still wore his jeans, his body still hidden from me, and I smiled as I slowly slithered down his body, dragging my naked skin against the rough fabric and mewling lightly in pure pleasure. Kellen watched me go lower and lower, his eyes hooded and full of that love and need that made me feel powerful. It made me feel safe. This was my moment. This was when he was his most raw and open and I wanted to bottle it forever. I wanted to live here with him on the floor wearing nothing but our hearts on our sleeves and our love on our lips. I wanted to draw it out and enjoy it, enjoy him, for as long as he’d allow.

  I unhooked his jeans slowly, pulling them down as he lifted his hips to help me. His underwear followed.

  I lightly traced my fingers along his legs. Up to his hips. Across his stomach. Down again the other side, drifting closer and closer with every movement. I made sure not to touch him there, though. It was his trigger. That was when I’d lose him, when he’d go under. I had to be careful and I was. I was patience personified as I leaned down and breathed hot and soft across his exposed skin. I heard him moan as his back bowed off the floor with the feeling, so I did it again. I moved over him without touching him. I was close but never close enough. I tortured him the way he always did to me until finally I couldn’t take it. Finally I let my tongue drag over his bare thigh and up higher. Higher. So close but never making contact.

  “Jenna,” he groaned.

  “Are you still with me?” I whispered.

  “Yeah,” he grunted. “Yeah. I’m here.”

  I slowly licked my way back up his body, careful to never really touch him. I tasted his taught, sun browned skin. Dragged my lips over the rolling hills of muscle on his stomach. I touched every golden inch of perfection that made up the man under my hands and he watched me as I did it with a small grin and a groan that I felt in my own chest. Down in my gut and lower.

  When I came up to kiss him he took my face in his hands and looked up at me seriously. It stopped my heart because I knew. I knew that this was where we parted ways.

  “I’m going to stay,” he whispered roughly.

  “I—you can—“

  “I’m going to try. I want to try. I have to.”

  “No, you don’t. Not if it hurts.”

  “Yes, I do because I love you. I need this with you.”

  “Kellen,”

  He pulled me down and kissed me deeply, his tongue invading my mouth. His scent was in my nose, his taste on my tongue and I almost cried when he lifted his hips and his hardness pushed against my soft center.

  I tried to pull back, to tell him no because I didn’t want this if it hurt him, but he held me firm. He put one hand at the back of my head to keep my lips on his, then his other hand touched my hip. It guided me gently down. Lower, lower, lower. Insistent and hesitant. Tiny movements that tensed his body underneath me with every inch until the grip he had on the back of my head was almost painful. His fingers clutched at me desperately and his lips stilled, going rigid against mine.

  I moved my head so we broke apart and our foreheads met. His breath came hard and shallow against my face, and when I brought my hand up to caress his cheek he shook under my palm.

  “Kel,” I whispered brokenly, tears in my eyes and my voice. “You don’t have to. It hurts you.”

  “I’m here,” he breathed, his voice strained in a way I’d never known. He pushed on my hip a little harder, guiding me down onto him. Pushing himself into me. “I’m here. I’m here, Jenna. Fuck. I’m here.”

  I rolled my forehead against his, back and forth in a soothing motion. “I love you.”

  He didn’t answer me. Instead he shoved against my hip until I was on top of him, straddling him and encompassing him there on the cold, hard floor of the kitchen. We were silent but for his breathing, labored and growing in intensity. I stayed quiet and calm as he adjusted. As he fought whatever demons were coming for him. I didn’t know what to do or what not to do so I did the only thing I could think – I held him. I put my hands on his face and caressed his stubbled cheeks with my thumbs, soft and slow.

  He shook harder. His hand twined in my hair, pulling until my scalp ached.

  Still I didn’t move.

  Kellen’s hand on my hip hurt. His fingers dug into my flesh so hard I wanted to weep.

  I held perfectly still. Perfectly silent.

  That’s when he started to cry.

  I’d never seen it before – Kellen Coulter crying. Not in all the years I’d known him, and to see it now was the single most devastating thing I’d ever known. Tears poured from his eyes, his entire body was wracked with silent sobs that turned into hyperventilating and I suddenly realized what was happening.

  He was having a panic attack.

  I fought against the grip he had on my body and lifted myself off of him until he was free and untouched. His hand still held onto my hair, his other gripping my arm tightly like a vice holding my body near his.

  “Kellen, let me go,” I told him. “You need space to breathe.”

  He didn’t answer, he didn’t move, and when I looked into his eyes he was gone. He was empty in a way I couldn’t begin to fathom.

  “Kellen?”

  Nothing. Only a violently shaking, dead eyed man who was going to pass out if he didn’t slow down his breathing soon.

  But I had no idea how to pull him out of this spiral.

  My heart cracked, my blood spilling onto his body trying desperately to enter his chest and keep his heart alive. To beat for him, to breathe for him, to live without pain. I would have died for him then if it could have saved him from this thing that consumed him.

  I pressed my hand to the side of his face more firmly, afraid to touch him. Afraid he’d crumble under the lightest touch and blow away on the wind like dust. Like ash. He felt that fragile to me – his large, muscled body shivering underneath mine. Convulsing with a blind fear that washed over his eyes and left them dark like marbles.

  “Listen to me,” I whispered as steadily as I could. “Breathe slow and deep. In one, two, three… out one, two, three.”

  His breathing didn’t change. He didn’t hear me.

  I shoved his hand off my arm, swung my leg over his lower body, moving myself off of him and hovering my face close over his ear. “Come on, Kel. Come on. Listen to me!”

  No response.

  I watched helplessly as he lay there naked on the floor shaking and scared and so far from me that I couldn’t reach him. He was so far gone I was certain I’d finally lost him and the tears that poured from my eyes were hot as fire against my face. I let them fall, let them burn, and I cursed myself for letting things get this far. I never should have let him try. I never should have been so selfish.

  “I’m sorry,” I wept brokenly, crouched on the floor beside him. “Je suis desole. S'il vous plaît. S'il vous plaît. Come back, please.”

  The French poured out of me in stilted, desperate utterances of remorse accented by my tears. By my fear. It reminded me of the days in the hospital after the accident when he refused to wake up, when he started speaking to us through the fog in French about ice cream. When he nearly wept and whimpered and I spoke to him the best I could in the language that was ours. That had brought us together on the floor of my family’s living room for hours and hours as he tutored me and taught me. Teased me and gave me the confidence to speak it freely and fearlessly, no matter how poorly I did it. He wrote me letters in French, beauty burned on a page that I could feel under my fingers. That only I could understand in the language he had given me. That his mother had given to him before the world took its toll.

  “Kellen, listen to me” I said sternly. “Ecoute moi. Breathe. You
’re safe. Respire. Tu es en securite. Respire. Respire!”

  I nearly collapsed with relief when he took a deep, shuddering breath. His body continued to tremble and his hold on my head refused to lighten, but he was breathing. He was listening.

  “Bien,” I sighed. “Bien, Kellen. Again.”

  He breathed again, deeper this time. Thicker and stronger. His body began to relax.

  “I’m here,” I told him in French. “I’m here with you. I’m always with you. Come back to me. Follow my voice. Follow it out, Kellen. I’m here. I’m here and I miss you.”

  I talked to him for over ten minutes, but it felt like hours. With every word I spoke he shivered less. His tears dried up in his eyes as they loosened, his tension lessening until finally he saw me. Finally he breathed in deeply on his own, the hold he had on me fell away, and his beautiful blue-black eyes blinked up at me with wet, tear soaked lashes.

  “Kellen?” I asked shakily.

  He swallowed hard, licking his lips. “Oui,” he replied roughly. “Je suis la, Nonpareil.”

  I half-laughed, half-cried, and collapsed completely against his chest in relief.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kellen

  Take a deep breath. Hold it for as long as you can. Longer. Longer. Longer. Go to the edge of your consciousness where the world turns fuzzy and strange. Sound is louder but also muffled. Colors distort. Your vision dances around the edges, fading out and blasting full force in the center. Your heartbeat is in your ears. In your eyes, vibrating. Pulsing. It’s slowing. You’re dying.

  Part of you is already dead.

  That’s what it feels like to go into the deep. To slip into the nothing where the world can’t reach me. That’s where I feel safe – one foot in the grave and the other out the door of the world. It can be comforting in its numbness. You just have to get over the dying bit. You have to be okay with the waking dream.

  What I felt with Jenna was a living nightmare.

  Her body rested against mine there on the floor and I breathed slow and even, trying to calm my racing heart as she cried against my chest and clung to my arms. Her long, lean body shook against me as my muscles ached from my own convulsions. I wanted to shut it all out. To slam the doors in my mind and let the animal loose, but it’s what I’d always done and it got me nowhere. It got me nothing. I was in it now. I was shaking scared and fucked six ways from Sunday, but this was me. This was what Jenna didn’t know and if she was going to stay or if she was going to run she needed to see this. She had to understand.

  I had to let it all out. I had to relive it all over again.

  “I’m sorry,” Jenna whispered against my skin, her breath hot and wet, mingling with her tears. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  I closed my eyes, rubbed my hand hard over my face to clear it. “Jenna, I have to tell you something.”

  She sat up on her knees, looking down at me. I had forgotten she was naked but for the first time the sight stirred nothing in me. I was more intent on her eyes. I had to hold onto her eyes, gray and open. Waiting. Always waiting for me.

  “What?”

  “I was sexually abused,” I told her stonily. I didn’t give myself time to think about it or react to it. This was different from telling Ben. With him I’d let the animal out, the anger, but I held it back for Jenna. I gave her the raw truth and it flayed me alive. “Her name was Sophia. She ra—she touched me. I was ten. It went on for a year, maybe more. I honestly don’t remember. It felt like forever. I felt like I was dying. I wanted to die. I never told anyone. I asked her to stop. She didn’t. She said it would f-feel good if I let it. I didn’t. It hurt. It was horrible. I c-cried every night.”

  “Kellen, you’re shaking again.”

  “Every night on the floor, the cold, hard floor under my back aching and aching and… always. She smelled too sweet. It stung the back of my throat. My eyes. I cried. I m-mmm-missed my mom. I missed my mom. I missed my mom.” I ran out of air. I had forgotten to breathe. I took a thick, shaking breath and draped my arm over my eyes. I couldn’t look at her. I had to tell her, had to tell her, but I couldn’t look. Couldn’t look in her eyes as I opened the doors. As I released the demons and the animal lay dormant. As they swirled around me, touching me – “Caressing me. She said it’d feel good. It never, never did. Never. It hurt. I was scared. I wanted to run away. She called me baby. She called me a baby. When I couldn’t be a man for her she called me a baby. She slapped my face. She left me alone in the dark and I cried. I cried like a baby.”

  I was crying then. I could feel the tears escaping my eyes. Pouring down the sides of my face. Pooling in my ears and muffling the world. It felt like being underwater and I breathed a little easier. A little softer.

  “I cried. I was scared and I cried and I missed everything from before. I missed everything. Everyone. Ma maman me manque.”

  I felt Jenna’s hand on mine, warm and soft. I laced my fingers with hers and held onto her tightly.

  “I know, Kel,” she whispered softly. “I know you miss her.”

  That was all she said. That was all she did. And it broke me down.

  I burst into sobs. Sobs that caught in my throat, in my gut. That ripped through me and curled me into a ball there on the floor with my face on the cold tile and her hand warm inside mine. I pulled it to my chest, I clung to her in the dark, and I cried. I cried so hard it hurt. I cried so hard my throat closed in on itself and I worried I’d suffocate. I felt like the floor had opened up and the dark was all around me, threatening me. That a door would open any moment and bathe me in yellow light. That a figure red and ready would stand in front of me. I worried I never got out. That I was still that boy on the floor crying and crying alone and scared.

  I clung to Jenna. I begged her to be real.

  And I cried. And I died.

  ***

  Three hours she sat on that floor with me. I fell asleep or I passed out, I’m not sure. I cried for too long for my body to handle. I hurt everywhere from laying on the floor, from the shakes, from the tears that tore through me and left me battered. I doubted Jenna felt much better.

  When I came to she was propped up against the refrigerator with my head in her lap. A blanket was thrown over both of our bodies. She’d turned off the oven and the stove. Everything was ruined but it didn’t matter. We were lucky the place hadn’t burned down around us.

  I got up slowly, afraid to look at her, but she didn’t ask me to. Instead she took my hand and led me through the apartment. She took me to the bathroom where she wordlessly wetted a towel, brought it to my tear streaked face, and gently washed it clean. I stared into her eyes but she didn’t look back. She let me watch as she worked but she didn’t react.

  When she was done she turned off the light, took up my hand, and pulled me to the bedroom.

  I followed her blindly.

  I obediently laid in bed when she pushed me down onto it. She laid down next to me without a word.

  She didn’t turn off the lights.

  I didn’t let go of her hand.

  ***

  In the morning she was still there. I don’t know what I expected this awful day to look like, but I never imagined it could look like Jenna. Like long dark hair, full pink lips, sleepy gray eyes. Like something so fucking beautiful it couldn’t be real.

  “Good morning,” I croaked. My throat was raw and desert dry, full of sand and grit. Full of the ashes of every secret I’d ever kept, burned away by the brightness of her eyes.

  She blinked several times, first quick like a bird’s wings, then slow like sleep. Like love.

  She smiled. “Morning.”

  “You stayed.”

  “Of course I stayed.”

  “You didn’t have to.” I cleared my throat, felt it tighten painfully. “You don’t have to.”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll stay.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “But
I’d like to.”

  “You really don’t hav—have to… shit.” I growled in my chest and scrubbed roughly at my face.

  “Kellen, slow down.”

  “I’m fucking it up again.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I don’t know how to do any of this. I—what do I do now? Why am I trying to make you go?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered gently. Patiently. “But I’m not going to do it so leave it alone.”

  “You can’t want to stay with me,” I told the ceiling, unable to look at her face. “Not after last night. Not after every-everything you saw.”

  “Ne te pas presse.”

  My brow pinched. “What?”

  “I’m telling you to slow down. You seem to take commands better in French.”

  “Ne te presse pas,” I corrected. “Your French is terrible.”

  “Well, I had a shitty teacher.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. The feel of it was so strange that it startled me. It pulled me out of myself. Out of the spiral that threatened to take me down again. It gave me the strength to look her in the eyes.

  “I couldn’t do it,” I confessed quietly. “I tried to stay out of the void and I couldn’t. I mean I did, I stayed out of it, but where I went instead— it was worse.”

  She nodded solemnly. “I saw.”

  “And heard.”

  “Yes. I heard you.”

  “And you want to stay?”

  “Leaving never crossed my mind.”

  “Maybe it should.”

  She glared at me. “Stop trying to make me go.”

  “Stop acting like you don’t see me differently,” I snapped.

  “I see you more clearly.”

  “Then you should—“

  “Do I tell you what you should and should not do?”

  I paused, gritting my teeth in annoyance. “No.”

  “Then do me a favor and stop telling me what to do. Give me a little credit. Do me the courtesy of assuming I know my own mind and leave me the hell alone about this. I’m not leaving. Back off.”