Sick Heart: A Dark MMA Fighter Romance

He grins back. And it’s a wide grin. I have known him for decades and if you add up all the time we’ve spent in silence it would equal years. So I can read the meaning behind his expression. And I am not confused about this one.

He is up to something.

I reach up, hook my fingertips over the lip of the container, then pull myself up and turn to reach for Anya. Maart is reaching for her too.

I eye him, then Anya, to see if she will reject his offer of help. But this girl is nearly unshakable. She doesn’t even hesitate. She takes both our hands and Maart actually chuckles as we pull her up in one smooth motion.

And then there she is. There we are. The three of us. Way too close. But I don’t want to back up and leave the group. It would send the wrong signal.

What the fuck is Maart up to? I’m not quite sure yet, but he’s staring intently into Anya’s eyes. Then he points a finger at her face and in a low voice he says, “I have one rule tonight. And you do not get to say no.”

She swats his hand away.

“No sign language,” he growls. “I earned your words. So I want to hear you talk. Do you understand me?”

It’s weird watching them because it’s very clear that Anya and Maart have a relationship going.

Not the same kind of one I have with her.

Not lovers. There is no chance Maart would fuck this girl during training.

It’s something else.

Something even more intimate.

It’s mutual respect.

And of course, that’s mandatory when you have a student-teacher relationship and spend hours together training one-on-one each night. But even so, I haven’t been imagining them in a relationship.

Anya presses her palms together, like she’s praying. She touches her thumbs to her eyebrows and lowers her chin. Her formal wai is the ultimate reverence typically reserved for monks. And ajarn.

Maart reaches out with the tip of his finger and lifts her chin back up. She drops her hands and waits.

“Well? Yes or no?” Maart asks.

“Fine.” Her voice is small and soft. “I agree.”

Maart smiles as his head slowly turns to me. Then he holds up the bottle. “Then let’s celebrate.”

I take the bottle and he turns his back to us, walking over to the other side of the container where he has a little plate of those little cornstarch cookies that are so popular in the rural towns of Brazil, some dried pineapple, banana, and guava, and some chocolate pieces in a stainless-steel bowl that’s sitting on a chunk of quickly melting ice.

This is our thing. Every last day of Rock camp Maart, Rainer, and I come up here to the roof of a container and we get drunk on whiskey under the incredible blanket of stars that can only appear on the darkest of new-moon nights.

Maart has placed a blanket down on the rusty metal roof of the container, a thick quilt that feels very good on my bare feet when I step onto it. And it suddenly occurs to me that Maart has put a lot more thought into this night than I did. Because this isn’t how it typically goes. We bring the bottle, we bring ourselves, and every once in a while, Rainer will produce cigars.

“What’s all this?” I ask, panning my hand to the spread before us.

Maart grins at me, apparently in a very good mood. “It’s our last night on the Rock. And we might come back here again one day, or we might not. I didn’t plan on Anya being here. I thought it would just be us. But fuck it.” He stares at her for a prolonged moment. “She’s not bad to look at, though. Right? So I’m not complaining.”

Anya walks over to him and raises her middle finger in front of his face.

He swats her hand away. “I said no sign language. If you want to tell me to fuck off, you will use words, nak muay.”

Anya scoffs. “That’s nak su to you.”

Maart laughs. And so do I. Nak muay means fighter. Nak su means warrior.

Anya has proclaimed herself a warrior. And Maart must agree, or he would correct her. He’s been so stressed this time around, it feels good to see him happy.

“So,” I say, walking over to stand next to Anya. “You speak Thai too?”

We haven’t spoken any Thai out here. So she didn’t pick this language up from us.

She sits down and picks up a piece of dried pineapple, nibbling on it coyly. “I’ve been speaking Thai since I was seven.”

I look at Maart to see if he knew this, but the expression on his face is some kind of combination between admiration and confusion.

“I understand seventeen languages,” Anya explains, the tip of her pink tongue poking out to lick a sugar crystal off the pineapple. “I’m Lazar’s spy.”