Page 3 of Beneath Your Beautiful
She watched me through slitted eyes as I got dressed, the smoke from her cigarette billowing up and into the stale air. Joss once told me she had a huge trust fund. She didn’t work, and I had no idea what she did all day. Maybe she slept, or shopped, or got manicures. I’d never cared enough to ask.
“Did you meet someone special?” she asked. She took another drag of her cigarette and blew smoke out the side of her mouth.
“You should know me better than that.” She didn’t know me at all, but I made the rules clear from the beginning. No personal questions.
She shrugged one shoulder. “Things change.”
“Did they change for you?” I sat on the edge of her bed to tie the laces of my combat boots. I’d had them since high school and they were as worn and battered as I was. Much too young to feel this damn old. That line came from a country song I’d heard at Fat Earl’s once. I hated that bar. My old man used to frequent it before the hipsters invaded, back when Earl was still alive and turned a blind eye. But even now, with a new owner and a different crowd, the place probably hadn’t changed much. Country music probably still blared from the jukebox, and it probably still smelled like stale beer and fried food. My stomach still knotted with dread whenever I drove past it.
“I don’t need you to love me,” Joss said.Love? I bristled at the word. She never brought any of this up before, and I didn’t know what prompted her to do it now. This had never been our deal, and now I knew for sure it was time to bail. “But I’m not stupid. You kept your eyes closed.”
“Orgasmic bliss.” A lie. It had gotten the job done, but it wasn’t blissful. It felt like we were going through the motions, like two well-oiled machines. All mechanics, no emotions.
That’s what you wanted, asshole.
“Bullshit,” she said. “You were pretending I was someone else.”
Wrong. I was pretendingIwas someone else. I stood and turned to face her. “Time for you to move on.”
“Maybe I already have.” She let a curtain of brown hair fall into her face to mask her hurt expression. Jesus. Did she think she was in love with some guy who called her at two in the morning for sex? She didn’t even know my last name or what I did for a living.
“I never made any promises,” I said.
Joss laughed, but it sounded harsh in her quiet room. “I knew the deal. But I still hoped…it would be different.”
I rubbed the back of my neck and exhaled. What in the hell could I say? I couldn’t pretend to love her. I didn’t know what love felt like, but I knew this wasn’t it. I never thought about her after I left. Never asked about her family, never asked what she did in her free time, never asked anything about her life. We met at a club six months ago. I was drunk and beyond fucked-up. She was looking for a good time with no strings attached. She brought me home, and we fucked. We’d been doing it ever since, but I’d never once felt the urge to get to know her better.
“I can live without the three a.m. booty calls.” She jutted out her chin. “Besides, I deserve better. My shrink told me that, so it must be true.”
She had a shrink. And she did deserve better. Someone who stayed the night and gave a shit. “I won’t call again.”
My hand was on the doorknob, ready to leave when her words stopped me. “You thought I didn’t know you were Killian ‘The Kill’ Vincent, the champion of the Octagon?”
I stilled, my body tensing. I’d walked away from fighting right before I met her. The media had been all over it, so I shouldn’t have been surprised she knew who I was, but she’d never mentioned it. And that was a good thing. I hated to be reminded of what I used to be.
“Someone at the club pointed you out the night we met,” Joss said. “Do you really think I would have gone for you if you’d been a nobody?”
I was a nobody. What did she think would happen? I’d take her with me to my fights, let her bask in the limelight like those other nameless girls who attached themselves to me because of who they thought I was. None of them knew me. None of them wanted to know me. They just wanted to be seen with me—and fuck me. “I don’t fight anymore.”
“I know. And I’m disappointed. I wanted to be with a champion, but I ended up with a has-been loser who runs a stupid bar.” She faked a yawn. “Boring.”
All along, Joss had been fucking someone else. Okay, it was me. But sometimes, I felt like it was more of an alter ego. I’d been a showman who got the crowd loving me and rooting for me, chanting my name. An actor, playing a role, all swagger and bravado, but I’d backed it up with a grueling training schedule, and I’d delivered the goods. My brother Connor once asked me if I was fighting my opponent or my own demons. I didn’t bother answering him. If I had, I would have said:both.
She turned her back to me, and I let myself out. I was relieved it was over, but I felt shitty about it. My old man would tell me it was the price I paid for having a conscience. He was born without one, but mine was big enough to take on the guilt of the whole God damn world.
“The ref called a clean hit,” my dad said.
“I don’t give a shit what the ref called it. I killed a man.”
“Don’t be dramatic. He’s still alive.”
“He’s in a fucking coma.”
“Stop being a pussy.”
That was one of his pet names for me. Pussy. Idiot. Shithead. I believed some people in this world set out to destroy you just because they thought they could. My father was one of those people. But I learned a long time ago, if you didn’t let anyone get close enough, they couldn’t hurt you. Not in any way that mattered. It wasn’t fists that did the most damage. It was love that could bring a man to his knees. A woman brought down Seamus Vincent, and he turned to the bottle to ease his pain. He was a nasty drunk with a selective memory. Sometimes, I almost believed he had no idea what he did when he was drunk. Maybe he didn’t. What went on behind closed doors stayed behind closed doors. Who was I going to tell, anyway? The cops?
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