After Nothing by Rachel Mackie

pulled his phone out of his pocket and turned on the flashlight.
    ‘I wrote that,’ he said, shining the light on his own perfect script.
    ‘I got it inked.’ I smiled over my shoulder at him. ‘I left out the “I belong to” bit. It was supposed to be a birthday present, but I think it’s more a present for me.’
    ‘That’s gonna be there forever.’
    ‘I can always get it covered,’ I teased.
    The light from his phone disappeared, and his lips pressed gently against my neck.
    ‘You like it?’ I asked, tilting my neck to give him more room.
    ‘Yeah, I like it.’
     
    That was how we were when something bad happened to Kane.
    I thought at the time it was too hard on him. That it wasn’t fair – his life was hard enough. But then, it took fighting from him, and maybe that was good.
    If he’d stayed fighting, who knows how far he would have gone. I know Wayne was convinced he’d be a professional fighter. And in the ring even I could tell he had an edge over his opponents. Every hit he landed, every kick he made: they almost always had maximum impact, with minimal cost to him. He always won.
    I heard one of the guys at the gym say when he was watching Kane spar with another fighter, ‘That nigga strikes harder, moves faster and fights smarter than anyone I know.’
    Fighting was Kane’s strongest connection to Wayne. Kane never said anything much to me about Wayne, but I know he really cared what Wayne thought of him. Wayne never showed him much love: nothing physical like a hug, or even a handshake. Probably the only time they touched was when Wayne was training him. And when it actually came to Kane’s training, Kane carried Wayne. Like, Wayne would tell him to do something, or give him advice, and Kane would have to ‘redirect’ his idea. Or Wayne would lose his place counting Kane’s reps. One time when Kane was supposed to do a quick fifty push-ups, I counted him do seventy-two. Kane would have known when he went past fifty, but he didn’t say anything, just kept going till Wayne called it.
     
    It was mid-fall when Kane started saying things to me about fighting: unexpected things. Things like, ‘That guy I fought last night: we’ve been competing for years. That’s the third concussion I’ve given him.’
    ‘He shouldn’t fight you then.’
    ‘I shouldn’t fight him.’
    ‘It was a money fight.’
    ‘Ain’t no excuse.’
    I came to realize just how much Kane worried over the hurt he caused other fighters in the ring. But when I said something to him about it he blew me off. Said the only thing he cared about was winning his fights.
    Wayne might have been training Kane to be a fighter since kindergarten, but Kane hadn’t been born that way. He loved drawing, and he was incredible at math. He even liked English. If he’d gone to school full-time he probably would have been in the running for valedictorian. What I’m saying was there was a whole lot more talent in him than just his fighting skills. Which was good, given what happened next.
    Kane injured someone in a fight.
    I was at the fight. Because Wayne had made a new rule that I wasn’t allowed near Kane on fight nights, I asked Melissa to come with me. We sat up in the stands and got seriously hit on, but we were both pretty good at knocking guys back. I remember I got called a fine piece, and soon after a ‘cold bitch’, about the same time the guy’s friend said to Melissa, ‘You is nasty. Damn I like nasty.’
    Melissa replied, ‘You is toothless; go get yourself some teeth before you be smiling at me like that.’
    The thing about Melissa was she could always get away with saying things like that without causing offence. I guess because she said it with a smile. If I’d said it I would have been called more than a cold bitch. But Toothless just laughed with his friends, his smile not dampened one bit by his two missing front teeth.
    ‘You is alright, girl,’ he said, and winked at her.
    There was a bit more banter