Hold Her Close

I shake my head. Hopefully doing this and doing it well will solve some of the issues that I’m having here at the station, but even so, I don’t feel good about it. Journalism should always be impartial. And so the fact that I am going to interview a man whose cock has been in my mouth and who fucked me with his tongue and everything else, it doesn’t sit well with me.

But it seems like I don’t have a choice. So I need to get to work.

Taking a deep breath, I swallow all my panic and my anxiety. I can do this. Profiles aren’t my specialty, but I’ve done them before. I know what his public relations people are looking for, and I can give it to them along with reporting that makes me stand out as a top-notch journalist. Start with his history and go from there. I’ll see where that leads me.

Start early. Jon Lawson.

I find a birth certificate from here in Nashville. It seems he truly is a local. And shortly after I find his birth certificate, I find death certificates for both of his parents in the vital records database. Fuck.

There’s an entire life painted in these documents, and I’ve done this before, but it feels entirely different doing it for someone I’ve met. This is exactly why I shouldn’t be doing this. I can’t look through this man’s life story with any sort of emotional detachment, no matter how brief our encounter was.

There are records from the foster care system, and juvenile detention records, too. The only file from juvenile detention that isn’t sealed is an incident involving a stolen car, though it doesn’t seem like he was the one who did the stealing.

Now he is a fighter. That makes perfect sense to me. I knew when I saw his body that it was toned to perfection, and MMA is a place that you can’t afford not to be on the absolute top of your game.

It is easy to find out why he was in Atlanta. A professional fight. It happened about a week after we met at the club. There are news stories praising his victory and his fighting style. Smooth and efficient, they call him. One story has a clip from the fight, and I press play.

Seeing him in action takes my breath away. He’s far, far more than smooth and efficient. No movement is wasted. Precise grace. He moves like water, and it looks like he can predict his opponent’s every move. But I know just enough about fighting to know that the MMA isn’t wrestling. These fights aren’t choreographed for show. Jon is winning in his own right, and undefeated since he started fighting in the league a year ago.

Pulling my eyes away from the mesmerizing way his body is moving and the completely distracting sight of him shirtless and shining with sweat and effort, I start to make notes. About his history and career, laying him out on a page so I can stand back and get a good angle.

How would Jon feel if he knew that I was analyzing him like this? I imagine a deep smirk and him asking if I liked what I saw.

That is the problem. I do like what I see. Far, far too much.

After I finish those notes, I double check what Alan said, and it is true. There is shockingly little coverage of him that is just him. No splashy profiles. No gossip items to be found in the tabloids. Most of what I find is second hand at best, and speculation at worst. The only pieces I find of him quoted are a couple of brief pre-fight press conferences, and his Instagram.

That could be interesting.

I click on it, but instead of the feed full of delicious shirtless workout photos that I was expecting, his account is actually kind of…boring. It’s regularly updated, and he has thousands of followers, but the main content of the photos is food and dogs.

A lot of dogs. Bandana wearing pitbulls that are practically smiling at the camera in every photo. That makes me laugh. I think I would have pegged him as a dog person, but I’m not sure I can even track how many dogs are in these photos. Are these all his dogs? Does he run a shelter? But it seems like his fans are also fans of the dogs, always calling them out by name in the comments and talking about how the photos lift their spirits.

They aren’t wrong—they do.

I click on his story to see his smiling face. It is a story from yesterday about to disappear. “Puppies are happy about running today,” he says, laughing. The camera moves and it looks like he’s being pulled forward. As the view shifts, I see what I count to be seven dogs on a combined leash, all running flat out. Jon is being pulled with them. “Slow down, you maniacs,” he calls. “I can’t keep up with you.”