He still doesn’t look at me. And the next punches that come in a fast series of jabs, Remy once again takes. Ooof, ooff, I hear, as his breath is knocked out of him.
Fight or flight rushes all over my body, and it mercilessly eats at my blood vessels, my nerve endings, my lungs. But it’s the first time in my life fear the adrenal response is overpowering that I want to take flight like never before. Run for him, grab him to me, and take him away, away from Scorpion, from himself, away from self-destruct button the man I love has pressed.
Scorpion pounds him several straight punches in the head, and then crack!
Remington falls face down on the floor.
A trail of blood that belongs to him is scattered all over his prone body. Raw, primitive grief overwhelms me, and a black snake of fear starts gnawing painfully into the thickest arteries of my heart. Remy’s face is swollen, and he’s panting for breath and shuddering with each breath as he plants one hand on the ground, and then the other. A chill black silence surrounds the room as the counting begins, and Remy tries pushing up.
His image becomes a big blur through the tears in my eyes, and I have to swallow back the plea building in my throat where I want to beg him to, for the love of god, stop with this bullshit and just stay down now!
I broke my knee by accident, but the thought of willingly breaking yourself again and again and getting up for more makes my eyes well up in horrified despair.
But Remy pushes up and spits more blood at the ground, using his arms to get back on his feet only to catch a powerful left hook right on his temple that swings his head around.
Riley and Coach yell loudly at him. “Your fucking guard! What the fuck is wrong with you?” they’re saying, over and over, their shouts loud and painfully distressed.
People yell across the room, every one of them unwilling to give up on him as long as Remy keeps standing.
“KILL HIM, RIPTIDE!!! KILL HIM!” they scream.
And as I watch him take another hit that splatters blood across the ring floor, I want to scream back at the public to please just shut the hell up! To please, for heaven’s sake, just let him fucking stay down and stop this fucking nightmare! I can’t control the spasmodic trembling within me. People shout their chant. “REM-MING-TON! RE-MING-TON!”
But I can see Remy’s hurting. One of his arms is dangling at his side, hanging limply. He’s hurting and he’s still giving it his all, like he gives every fight, like he goes all the way in every training session. He’s going to go on until he can’t get up. When that realization finally sinks into my stunned head, I’m shattered to a million pieces. A hot tear streams down my cheek as sounds rip through the room when another series of hits lands on Remington’s flesh, the awful impacts backing him up toward the ropes.
“Remy, Remy, Remy!” people continue yelling.
When the chant takes over with equal force across the room, Scorpion’s face scrunches in rage.
Remy spits right into the place where his tattoo should be, whispering something taunting that seems to anger the other man so much, he swings his arm back with a deafening roar and lands an uppercut that knocks Remy like lead on the floor. My heart stops.
Silence falls.
I blink in mute horror at Remy’s motionless form, fallen on his side, and I take in those perfect shoulders I know by memory, his beautiful bones probably broken, his beautifully trained and beautifully made body bruised purple and bleeding on that ring floor. His eyes are frightfully closed.
And I want to die.
There are gasps of outrage when the ring doctors appear up on the ring, and people start “booing” out loud as the announcer speaks.
“Our victor of the night, Benny the Black Scooooorpion! The new Underground champion, ladies and gentlemen! Scooorpioooon!”
The words somehow make it into my brain, but I don’t even register as I sit motionless in my seat, trying very hard to keep it together as I watch the medics—the medics!—surround Remy.
I never thought anything in my life would ever hurt me as much as breaking my ankle and wobbling off the field at the Olympic tryouts with my spirit broken.
But no. Now the worst day of my entire life has been this one. When I watched the man I love break his own body to unconsciousness, and every millimeter of every quadrant of my heart is broken.
Through burning eyes, I watch the medics haul his body to a stretcher, and the reality of the situation hits me like a cannon blast. I jump to my feet and am running like crazy through a throng of people as the doctors start carrying him away. I fling myself through a pair of them and reach for one bloodied hand and squeeze two bloodied fingers. “Remy!”
Strong arms wrench me away, and a familiar voice speaks close to me. “Let them look at him, B,” Riley pleads in a craggy voice, hauling me back as I struggle to be set free.
Spinning around to hit him so that he releases me, I notice his eyes are red as he tries to keep a hold of my struggling form, and suddenly, I break. Deep compulsive sobs wrack through my body as I grab his shirt, and instead of hitting him, I just cling. I need something to hang onto, and my big, strong tree is broken on a stretcher, beaten to a pulp.
“I’m sorry,” I cry, every inch of me jerking and shaking as the tears tear out of me just like they had once before, six years ago. “Oh, god, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”
He sniffles too, then pulls away and wipes his own cheeks. “I know, B, I don’t know what the fuck… It’s just… I don’t know what the hell went on down here. Jesus!”
Coach comes to us, his face grim, his eyes also brimming with tears and disappointment. “They suspect a concussion. His pupils don’t respond correctly.”
A new burning wetness pop up in my eyes, and the knot in my throat tightens as Riley starts after Coach. Nora. Oh, fuck meeeee, I still need to wait for Nora! I grab Riley back, more tears threatening to unleash when I realize I won’t be able to go with him.
“Riley, my sister! I told her to meet me here.”
He nods in understanding. “I’ll text you the name of the hospital.”
Nodding miserably, I watch him leave, wiping away more tears and not even knowing what to do with the whirlwind of emotions inside me. I desperately want to go with Remington, but I can’t ask Riley to trade places with me. Nora doesn’t know him, might change her mind if she sees him instead of me. I swear it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, to watch him be taken away, all bloodied, without running after him.
I lean on the door of the women’s restroom, and wait, and wait, restless with worry and haunted by what I just saw.
My mind keeps spinning and I feel I will wake up soon and realize this was just a bad dream, and Remy did not just commit the most painful almost-suicide up on that ring.
But he did.
He had.
My Remy.
The man who played me “Iris.”
The man who laughs with me, runs with me, and says I’m a little firecracker.
The strongest man I’ve ever known, and the one who’s been most gentle to me.
The one who’s a little bit bad, a little bit crazy, a little bit too hard to handle for me.
When three hours pass, I’ve run out of tears, and my hope is gone too. Nora isn’t coming. Remington just let himself be knocked into a concussion, and I’ve been told where they’ve checked him in.
And as I go get a taxi, I’m the one who feels like whatever just got broken inside me will never, ever, heal.
At the hospital, he’s in a private room.
I sit in a chair for the first week and stare at his beautiful face with the tube that helps him breathe, and I cry from anger and frustration and helplessness. Sometimes I put his headphones on his beautiful head and play him every single song of the ones we played to each other, waiting to see if his eyes twitch or there’s some indication of thought in there. Other times, I walk out in the hall just to wake up my legs and arms that have fallen asleep. I haven’t seen Pete, and nobody will tell me where he is. Today Riley peers into the waiting room, where I’m staring down lifelessly at my bag of peanuts. I just didn’t know what to get that would be moderately healthy, and I already finished all the granolas. I think I’ve lost some weight, for my jeans are hanging loose from my hips, but my stomach is about as closed as a fist and the few times it seems to relax enough to let me eat something, my throat is to blame for not letting it past.
“He’s awake,” Riley says.
Blinking, I’m suddenly, immediately, on my feet. I toss the uneaten bag of peanuts into the empty chair next to mine, and then run down the hall only to stop and stare at the door to his room. Afraid to see him. Afraid of what I’m going to say.
I’ve been thinking a lot these few days. That’s all I’ve done, actually. But out of all my thoughts, my mind goes blank as I step inside. A deep, dark anguish overwhelms me as I head for the bed. I thought I was getting numb already, but I realize I’m not. I step slowly forward and fix my eyes on the very spot where my world seems to revolve around. And I see him. His eyes are open. I don’t care what color they are. He’s still Remington Tate, the man I love.
He’s going to be okay and I am not. I don’t think I ever will be.
The tears burst out, and all of a sudden, all my thoughts come rushing back. I have so many things to say I just stand in the middle of the room and tear my guts open. My words are angry, but they’re barely understandable through my sobs. “How d-dare you make m-me watch t-that … how could you stand there and make me watch h-him destroy you! Your bones! Your face! Y-you … were … mine! Mine … to … to … hold… How d-dare you break you! How dare you break me!”
His eyes go red too, and I know I should stop because he can’t even respond to me, but this dam has opened and I can’t stop it, I just can’t. He made me watch and now I have to make him listen to me, to what his stupid fucked up shit has done to me!
“A-all I wanted was to help my sister and not g-g-get you in trouble. I also wanted to protect you, to take care of you, to be with you. I wanted to ss-stay with you until you were sick of me and didn’t need me. I wanted you to love me because I… I… Oh, god, but you… I … can’t. I can’t anymore. It’s hard to watch you fight, but to watch you suicide yourself is… I won't do it, Remington!”
He makes a pained sound in the bed and tries shifting even with one arm in a cast, and his eyes are burning red and tearing me open.
I can’t stand the way he’s looking at me. The way his eyes claw into me. Destroy me.
Hot tears continue trickling down my cheeks as I yield to the reckless impulse and go to him. I touch his free hand and bend my head to his chest as I lift his fingers and kiss his knuckles feverishly, aware that I’m getting them wet with my tears, but I can’t stop because it’s the last time I’m going to kiss this hand and it hurts.
He groans as he awkwardly places the hand of his casted arm on the back of my head and heavily strokes my hair. His throat is tubed, but when I wipe my tears and look up at him, his eyes are screaming things at me that I can’t bear to listen to. I stand, acting as cowardly as Mel says, and he grabs my hand and won’t let go. I don’t want him to, but I need him to. I pull my hand free with force and grab his forehead and set a kiss at the very center, a kiss that I hope he will feel all the way down to his soul, because that’s from where it’s coming from inside me. He makes a rough sound and starts pulling at the tube on his throat, and the machine makes a beeping noise when he starts succeeding in yanking off all the strings attached to him.