Sick Heart: A Dark MMA Fighter Romance

This won’t last. I have no idea how long we’ll be here, I just know it won’t be forever.

One day Udulf will come and pick me up. He will take me home, or whatever. Sell me, maybe. I don’t know what he’ll do with me.

Cort and I will not be together. I understand this. He will go his way, and I’ll go my way, and this pause in my life will just become another fairy tale story in my head. Something that never really happened.

But each morning when I wake up, I put the nightmare that is my life aside and only think about the reality of my new day. Which is training.

I jump rope for about thirty minutes. I do the drills I know, then learn a new one and practice that until I’m exhausted. And then Cort and I spar, or wrestle, or box. He has taught me how to kick, how to punch, how to use my elbows and knees, and how to block.

He still slaps my face every day. Well, he tries. The day after the roof sex he showed me four ways to block that slap. He made me practice relentlessly that first day and it’s still something I practice as one of my drills. So now, on day thirty, I don’t get slapped anymore. I have bruises all up and down my forearms from blocking, but it has been eight days since his fingertips even got close to my cheek.

Every afternoon we look at that tank on the roof and he decides if we can afford the water for a hosedown or a shower. And every few days, he decides we can. But on the other days we just jump into the ocean and swim around the reef, washing off the sweat but picking up salt from the sea.

We eat dinner with our bowls propped up on the beam and watch the birds, and the waves, and when it’s dark, the lights far, far off in the distance. I think it’s land. Like, real land. A coastline. And there’s a shipping lane too. We’re too far away to really make out the ships, but at night we track the running lights across the dark-blue horizon.

My skin burns, but then darkens to a golden brown as my hair becomes wild and tangled from the salty air and streaked nearly white from the sun.

Then, when the day is finally over and we’re lying on our mats, Cort will point to the moon and flash his fingers. We are counting up, not down. And who knows where that count ends. Could be tomorrow, could be next year.

And when I think about this, I find that I don’t care if we stay here forever. I know that’s not possible. We don’t have enough water to last much longer. But if we could stay, I would stay.

I like this pause.

We haven’t had sex again. We haven’t kissed, or held hands, or even sent each other longing, meaningful looks. When Cort looks at me, his look is hard and filled with expectations. He’s training me. I am a student to him right now. And at first, I felt a little hurt and maybe even a little used, but now I see that I am earning his respect. When he smiles at me now, it’s because I blocked a punch or a kick. It’s because he didn’t get the best of me.

And that’s new. Every man I’ve ever known has wanted the best of me. They want to take things from me. They want me to give myself to them.

But not Cort. He wants me to stop him. Everything we do is about me stopping him.

Sometimes, in the afternoon when it’s raining hard enough for the water to blow in onto the training mats, we’ll go inside and play a game. Or sometimes I will read a book and he’ll just lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. He never naps or even closes his eyes. He just stares up at that ceiling.

It rains a lot, at least once every day. In the mornings and then again later in the afternoon. Most of the nights are clear and we can see the stars as well as the moon. But there have been a few rainy nights and we’ve had to sleep on the mats on the training floor.

He doesn’t like sleeping down there and I’m starting to get the feeling that Cort prefers to be out in the open as much as possible because when I tried to sleep in the game room, he just shook his head and pointed to the roof.

I don’t know what that’s about because we don’t talk. We don’t even sign anymore. He hasn’t taught me any new ones since that moment he realized I was picking them up on my own.