Page 2 of A Dark Duet

Running to my room, I leave the door slightly open so I can see if I need to help my mom. I was always afraid that one night he would hit her so hard he’d kill her. I continue to look through the crack of the door and I watch my father punch and slap my mother repeatedly, trying to wake her up. He grabs her, and she falls lifeless to the floor. He stomps on her face. Tears begin to pool in my eyes and slowly stream down my face. I look down, noticing that I just peed on my only good pair of pants. I knew I would get a beating from my father once he found out. I realize that my mother isn’t moving, her face is unrecognizable from all the times he hit her. I open the door and run out to stop him and he pushes me off him. I hit the wall with a thud. I get up, adrenaline coursing through my veins and try to get him to stop. I know something is terribly wrong. I scream, telling him to stop. He looks up with an evil look in his eyes.

“So maybe it was you who took the money. She probably spent it on you, you filthy mongrel, always eating and shitting. You are no good and you will be nothing but a scrawny piece of shit,” he spits.

“Something is wrong with her! She’s not moving!” I scream. He looks down as realization dawns. He looks up with his bloodshot eyes, high on meth.

“Call 9-1-1 and tell them that someone broke in. If you don’t lie, I will kill you. You know she was high on that shit, and probably took too much. You better do as I say, or you will pay. Do you understand me?”

“Y-yes, sir,” I stammer in fear, breathing rapidly, trying to get to theonly phone in the small house to dial 911 with shaking hands.

“9-1-1, what is your emergency?” the operator asks. I speak into the big phone and say the only thing that I was told to.

“Please, my mom is not moving, I-I-I think someone broke in and hurt her,” I say, as clear as the sobs racking my body would allow.

When the operator instructs that the police and ambulance are on their way, the phone falls from my fingers and I stare as my father acts like he’s trying to save my mother until help arrives. I look at him with fear and loathing, realizing that the one responsible for my mother’s death is my father, and I just helped him cover up the fact.

“Come on, Nate. Combo and then southpaw,” Jaden says while warming up on the bag. I hit it harder and harder. I have been at it for the past four hours. The team at the gym is watching in awe, and I don’t take a break. That’s what happens when I play out my mother’s death and how I covered it up in my mind in fear of my father. Over and over, I hit the bag, imagining it being my father’s body as my muscles strain and bunch up with the effort. Every time I’m in the cage, it’s exhilarating, a cleansing of my past that nothing—or no one—can quench. I continue the onslaught on the bag and I switch to roundhouse kicks. I don’t stop until I can’t feel my arms on my six-foot-two frame, exhausted. I’m drenched in sweat and can’t wait to hit the shower in the locker room.

My cage name, The Reaper, as in the Grim Reaper, is meant for show, but all fighters that have challenged me for my title have basically ended their career trying to take it, unable to defeat me. Like the Grim Reaper, deep down inside, I am no different. I do what I have to do and run with my team. I am no saint; more like the devil from the things I have done. I have to defend my title to some Brazilian fighter named Santos that thinks he can defeat me.

Yeah, we’ll see how long he can last in the cage from a takedown or a beating. There are times they have to remove me after they tap out and my fans roar as I scream like an animal.

After a win, I have sponsors, commercials, and let’s not forget—the women. They throw themselves at me and I can’t say I don’t have fun, but then they get clingy, thinking they have a chance. They complain, calling me coldhearted and shallow. I just send them off with a care package in the morning. The tabloids picked up on it and made a whole article about how the millionaire pro MMA fighter sends his one-night stands off with a care package in the morning. The fans eat that shit up.

Instead of scaring the girls off, it only increases their attention on me. I couldn’t care less, but after this fight, I already have another lined up, but I need a break in between, and preferably somewhere where there is no media. The paparazzi have been getting more aggressive since my last four wins and the fact that I broke my cardinal rule of sleeping with a girl more than once. Her name was Sabrina and she told them we were a couple and that we were going steady. When I found out, I fucking lost it with her. She was at my last fight, hoping I would tell her to come home with me, and when the media asked for a brief interview, she was waiting, and I made sure to let the whole world know that she was just a clingy bitch that wouldn’t leave me alone, and to get off my dick. She tried to slap me, and I grabbed her wrist in a tight grip, looking menacingly in her face. I suddenly smiled at the camera. “See, folks. I told you she is delusional and won’t leave me alone.”

I can hear myself from the big-screen TV re-airing my last fight. I stand as I watch myself smile, showing my straight, white teeth.

“Well, there you have it, folks. Nate ‘The Reaper’ is, in fact, single and available,” I hear the reporter say.

Great, I mutter to myself.Now they really won’t leave me alone. I can’t wait ’til the fight so I can take a week off to go someplace Jaden has suggested in South Dakota.

Just him and I alone, none of the team are going. Jaden has been with me since I started fighting at theY, learning all the martial arts there is to know. When I made it to foster care at age thirteen, I started street fighting for cash. My fights went viral and landed in the hands of a promoter, and that’s how I made it to MMA. I had to train hard and clean my skill up. Most of my moves were illegal in MMA at the time, but I’ve learned. Now I’m here on top of the world as one of the most successful pro MMA fighters. I started my gym with Jaden teaching young inner-city kids to defend themselves and keep them off the street. Some of them are from broken homes with drug-addicted parents, like mine. I want to make a difference, I know what it feels like to not have a stable home, or the love of a parent.

My father died after he owed money to some drug dealers. They came to collect while I was at school in the sixth grade. Child services came and put me in foster care. I have no family and no siblings. The only person I have who resembles a brother is Jaden; he comes from a similar background. His parents were just drug addicts, they didn’t beat him like my father beat me.My mother didn’t hit me though. She was too high on heroin to beat me.

I basically only ate because of the public school system. I was a scrawny kid until they placed me in foster care. They made fun of me in middle school until I started street fighting, then I got respect. No one messed with me, unless they wanted a beatdown at an old warehouse that set up fights from the drug dealers in town.

Yeah, I knew everyone selling drugs. They never messed with me, though. They knew my mother supposedly overdosed and was beaten up by some drug dealers coming to collect. No one knew the whole truth about how my mother died, and to be honest, no one gave a shit about a heroin addict. My father continued to beat me after my mother died. It got worse as I got older. There was a time when I thought I could take him, I think I was eleven and was getting taller, but when someone is on meth, it’s like they have this super strength, and they don’t stop until you’re either unconscious or dead.

That didn’t end well until he knocked me out. He would torture me by waking me up, burning cigarette butts on my inner thighs so no one at school could see the angry burn marks. I tried to wake up earlier, but he would beat me to it.

Sometimes at night, I wake up thinking a cigarette is burning me. I tell no one that shit and that’s why I don’t let women sleep over. I sometimes wake up ready to swing and punch whoever, but there is no one there, just the dead silence of my empty home decorated by an interior designer.

For show, it’s all for show. If anyone really knew how I lived when I was a kid, with no sheets on a mattress that was just thrown on the floor in a roach-infested room, they would probably feel sorry for me and then think I was lucky.

My house now is a palace compared to where I really grew up, with a shitty childhood filled with hate and violence. It’s all I know, I was never loved by a mother or taught by a father. I was the mistake my mother told me I was. Telling me it was because of me that my father was so angry at her. She never hit me, though and told me to stay quiet and out of the way. I at least respected her for that. She was fucked up, just like I am, but in a different way. She chose drugs, and I chose fighting.

I walk outside the gym, waving at Charles.

“Have a great evening, champ!” he says.

“Thanks, Charles. Don’t forget to lock up.”

“No problem, boss. I’ll lock up.”

I walk up to my bike; I like taking my bike on most days to avoid attention in my Lamborghini. Everyone looks at it with the modifications I made to it, adding body kits and mods. I wanted it to be unique, something no one else had. I used to dream of having a car like that when I was a kid. When I made my first million, it was one of the first things I bought.

I straddle my bike and grab my helmet with the tinted visor. I turn the matte-black superbike on, revving the engine, the smell of gas rising from the modified exhaust. God, I love the smell of my bike. It gives me the adrenaline rush I need to feel to let off steam. I like to get home exhausted, so the darkness can take me to a blissful sleep. When I’m that tired, the nightmares don’t usually come. I rev the engine again, going faster, speeding through the lanes with my headphones on, listening to “Sweet Dreams”by Marilyn Manson on my way home.

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