Knockout (33 page)

“How long have you been coming here?” I asked Kellen.

“Since the day after we told Laney about us.”

I nodded in understanding. Since the day after we had sex. Three months ago.

“And you’re a family therapist?” I asked Dr. Phillips.

He shrugged noncommittally. “Normally, yes. I do deal with families and couples therapy. Marriage counseling. But Kellen and I have been doing some initial one on one and now he’d like to involve you in the process.”

“We’re not married,” I blurted.

Dr. Phillips grinned. “I know that. That’s alright. I understand you have a long history, though, and Kellen has told me you’d both like to move forward in the relationship but there are roadblocks.”

“I’m fucked up,” Kellen simplified.

I looked at him, exasperated. “You’re not.”

“I am.”

“He is a little,” Dr. Phillips agreed.

“Are you allowed to say that?” I asked him, shocked.

“Evidently, yes.”

“Okay, well, I’ll do whatever I can to help. What do you need from me?”

“I need you to sit silently in that corner for this entire session.”

I followed his finger where it pointed to a very dark corner of the room.

“Am I on time out?” I asked, unsure.

“I can’t think about the fact that you’re here,” Kellen told me.

“Then why am I?”

“Because I need you to know some things. Things I can’t tell you. Do you remember the day on the sidewalk outside the gym when you covered my eyes and told me to pretend you weren’t there?”

“Yeah, of course.”

It stung to think about that day. I hadn’t been to one of his bouts in so long
. I hadn’t realized how much I missed watching him fight until that moment.

“I need you to do that again. Someday maybe I’ll be able to tell you the things I need to tell you while looking you in the eye. I hope I can. But for now, I know I can’t. So I need you to sit where I can’t see you so I can forget you’re there and you can hear the things you need to know about me.”

“Okay,” I agreed softly, feeling anxious. I knew a lot about Kellen. More than anyone. It almost scared me to think there were things even I didn’t know. I glanced at Dr. Phillips. “So, I’ll go do that now? I’ll sit down over there?”

“And stay absolutely still and silent,” he reminded me.

“Alright.”

I went to go to my chair in the dark but Kellen took hold of my arm gently as I passed him.

“Thank you,” he said earnestly.

“No problem.”

“I mean it, Jen. I know it’s a strange thing to ask.”

“Kel,” I whispered, “I’d do anything for you.”

He pulled me closer and pressed a kiss to my forehead.

I sat down in the dark corner of the room watching the back of Kellen’s body as he leaned forward on the couch, his arms coming to rest on his thighs. His shoulders were high, tight. Already I knew he didn’t like what was
happening, even if it was his idea. It was a posture I’d seen him take countless times when he was cornered by the world. When life had him against the ropes and he didn’t know how to fight his way out so he did what he did in the ring; he vanished. He ducked, he dove, he evaded. He ran. He would do anything to get his stance back. To feel like he was in control again, even if it meant losing a point or two.

Despite all his skill, all his spit, his piss and vinegar, when things got hard, in life or in the ring, Kellen refused to fight.

And I was about to find out why.

“There are things I’m going to say,” Kellen started, his voice quiet I could hardly hear him, “that I’m only ever going to say once. That’s why you’re both here. Jenna,” he turned his head faintly, his profile exposed to me in the dark and he looked so much like the sketch I’d done of him that my heart wrenched in my chest. “I need you to know all of it. I can’t promise I’ll ever talk about any of it again, but I’m saying it to you now. It’s not everything you want, it’s definitely not as much as you deserve and I know that, but it’s also not easy for me and I hope it’s enough.”

Kellen faced forward again, his head dropping as he looked down at his clenched hands. “I grew up in the foster system in L.A. because my mom died when I was a kid. She was my only family. It was just her and I in a tiny apartment on the wrong side of The Strip. We didn’t have much. Most of what we had was left over from my grandpa. He was a low talent boxer who drug her to Vegas from Ireland when she was only seven, right after her mom disappeared into thin air. My dad…” Kellen sighed violently, sitting back hard against the couch. “That son of a bitch was never around. I never met him. All I have of him are my eyes and a bank account full of dirty money. He opened the account in my mom’s name. Dropped large sums of money in it every month to help her with me, but my mom refused to touch it. Even when things got hard.”

He paused. The room felt darker in his silence. “She started getting sick when I
was eight, right when I started boxing. I wanted to be like my grandpa because I didn’t understand yet what a piece of shit he’d been. As she got sick she had to stop working as much. Money got tighter but we always managed to stay afloat. Even when she quit entirely and moved us out here to California. She started staying in the hospitals longer and longer. She started shrinking. She was pale and fragile. By nine years old I was bigger than her. I weighed more.” He quickly ran his hand over his mouth. “She was wasting away in front of me and I couldn’t stop it. Then one morning she didn’t wake up.

“I was alone after that. I went straight into the foster care system. It wasn’t bad at first but I was a kid crying every night. People didn’t know what to do with me. I got picked on for being a baby and I started lashing out. I started fighting. I was good at it. Better than my grandpa ever was. I got in trouble for fighting. Families wouldn’t take me in because I was considered violent. I started being put with different types of families. People more prepared to handle my aggression.”

“People who were aggressive themselves,” Dr. Phillips said quietly.

Kellen nodded. “Yeah. Yeah.” He glanced over his shoulder slightly again, still not fully looking at me. “I took beatings in those homes. A lot of them. I learned to dish them out and I learned to take them but I hated it. I always hated it. It’s why I fell in love with boxing. It took all of that anger and violence and it structured it for me. It organized it until I could deal with it and I didn’t feel like I was drowning in it. Once I figured that out, I stopped fighting back. I took the beatings. Along with everything else.”

Kellen stood suddenly as though he’d been shocked.

“I can’t talk about this with her here,” he snapped at the doctor angrily. “I thought I could but I won’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s fucked up. It’s ugly and I won’t let it anywhere near her. You can put a pin in it and maybe someday you and I will talk about it, but I’m never discussing it in front of her.”

“Kellen, are you afraid of her judging you? Of seeing you differently?”

“I’m afraid of tainting her with it!” he roared. “She’s perfect and I’ve ruined that.”

“You haven’t ruined her, Kellen.”

“I’ve been inside her. I’ve held her. I’ve kissed her. Everything that was done to
me, everything that I’ve done, has been done to her now.” He drug his fingers roughly through his hair as he cursed over and over again.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My heart hurt for him but my blood boiled as well. Imagining Kellen as a kid going through what people had put him through… someone touching him roughly…taking from him. I wanted to kill.

“We need to talk about this,” Dr. Phillips said firmly. “This is why we’re all here, Kellen. This is the root of the way you approach sex. Why you use it to distance yourself from people. You’re using it to take control, make it your choice but you’re unable to feel anything in connection to it because you’re afraid of the emotions that go with it.” The man paused, watching Kellen as he towered before him, his eyes on the floor. “You’re afraid of sex, aren’t you? It stirs fear inside you. Hate. Anger. The violence you work so hard to keep in check. Which is why you shut down. Why you choose to feel nothing.”

Fuck her like you hate her.

I remembered Kellen saying that about a girl he’d been with. At the time I’d thought it was an off color joke, a shocking statement that served me right for poking and prodding at him and his history. But now… now I wasn’t so sure it was a joke at all.

Kellen shook his head back and forth slowly.

“When you had sex with Jenna, what did you feel?”

I blushed in the darkness. Neither of them could see me very well tucked in this dark corner, but even ghosts got embarrassed when their sex life was discussed with a stranger.

“Pain,” Kellen told him reluctantly. “It hurt more than anything else.”

“Because you were trying to connect with her. Kellen, the fact that you felt anything at all is a breakthrough. Even better that it wasn’t anger. What else did you feel?”

“Grateful.”

“Why grateful?”

“Because I knew… I knew if I fucked it up, she’d still be there.”

“You’ve been left a lot.”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re not worried Jenna will leave you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because she loves me.” He sat back down again slowly, the anger leaching out of him. “She loves me the way I love her.”

“And how do you love her, Kellen?”

His breathing was labored. Heavy.

“Completely.”

I pressed trembling fingers to my mouth, stifling the sounds of my crying. I cried for him the way I had when he’d shown up at our house in the middle of the night. When once again I’d stood in shadow, watching and listening. When I’d seen him and I’d known him and I’d ached for him. I’d cried silently then as I did now because the last thing on earth he ever wanted was pity.

I wanted to die then. I wanted to never know the rest of our story because I didn’t know how it would turn out
, how he could possibly recover from the things he’d been through. I wanted the knowledge that he loved me through and through to be the end of us because it was everything I’d longed for and I hoped it was at least one beautiful thing in his world. It was a silver lining to all the years we’d spent apart, all the hurt and the missed chances and poor timing. This was the victory to the fight we’d been in for half of our lives.

But there were others.
Battles he was fighting alone and I would help him if I could. If he’d let me. So I stayed silent and I stayed alive because you have to keep moving, keep fighting, because as a wise man with bloodied knuckles and a brilliant smile once told me, it’s not always about winning. It’s about not giving up. You have to see things through to the end to find out who you really are, what you’re truly made of. Maybe you’ll win, maybe you’ll lose, but when you know you’ve given it everything you’ve got, at least you have no regrets.

“Can I ask a question about what you said tonight?” I asked, digging into my ice cream and staring out at the ocean.

The sun was close to setting, its wan yellow rays glistening off the water and winking like diamonds. I was happy. I was content and it was partly because I had my favorite ice cream, partly because my toes were sunk deep into the cool beneath the top layer of sun-warmed sand, but mostly it was because of Kellen. Because he was eating his own ice cream which he had correctly ordered and was loving it. He was happy and he was there beside me and life was lovely.

“You can ask,” he allowed.

I smirked at him. “But it doesn’t mean you’ll answer. I know. It’s an easy one. I think.”

I wasn’t stupid enough to ask about the real things he said in therapy. About the things he’d warned me he would never speak of again. I knew better. I knew those things were buried deep just as they’d always been and maybe he’d let them go someday or maybe they’d always be there, but for now he was lighter than I’d ever seen him. He was buoyant. Free. It was beautiful.

“Hit me.”

“My dad didn’t give me the money for my tattoo parlor, did he?”

Kellen froze, his spoon halfway to his mouth. He pinched his lips together for a second then opened them to slide the spoon inside. He shook his head faintly.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” I pressed. “You did it with the money your dad gave your mom.”

“We never touched it,” he said reluctantly. “It sat in a bank account for my entire life building every time he gave us more, which was every month. He was some high roller that came through the casino she worked at. He didn’t have a family and he didn’t want one but he told her he’d always take care of her. The year I was born she added my name to the account and never looked at it again. I didn’t know about it until I was eighteen. Your dad helped me manage it. I’ve invested some and it’s been building. I give to charities a lot. I paid for college with it. I offered to pay for school for you and Laney but your dad wouldn’t let me.”