In my mind’s eye I could hear the birds chirping and that cool breeze blowing my hair across my face, getting chocolate ice cream in it from the smear on my nose. It made for a pretty impressive knot later on in the day.
“I asked her why she was taking a picture and sh-she said… she said…” I held the back of my hand to my mouth for a few seconds and blinked away the tears that threatened. “She looked at me like it was the most obvious thing in the world and said ‘Because, Sky-Pie, one day we might want to look back and remember that time we just sat in the sunshine and had some ice cream together.’”
The blinking didn’t suffice and a tear rolled down my cheek, which I wiped away. Austin was quietly looking back and forth between the picture and me.
“She was right. I remember the sound of my dad’s yelling, I remember the sound of the belt against my skin… but I remember that day with my mom too, the timer whirring down, I remember how her arm felt around my shoulder and how safe and loved I was. I remember. There’ve been so many times when I had to close my eyes and reach back to that feeling, otherwise I would have broken down completely.”
“Where did she stand on the belt then?” Austin asked.
“Dad wasn’t always like that. She d-died when I was twelve, when I was going through puberty, starting to show… um… signs of growing up.” I waved my hands over my body. “He was… strict, before she died. He was awful after.”
“Sorry. She sounds like she was a good mom.”
“The best. It wasn’t fair that she got sick and died, but it’s even less fair that you never had anybody like that in your life. She was my soft place to fall, she showed me what love was. When nothing else in the world made sense, I could rely on the fact that she loved me and everything else would sort itself out. I miss her so much.”
Seven years since she died. Seven years since I spoke these three words that were circling around in my brain and my heart. It felt like forever, and like a fleeting second all at the same time.
I wondered if Austin had ever heard them. If my mom was around I could have talked to her about it and I bet she would have told me to say it weeks ago. I reached out and touched his cheek again, turning his head in my direction a little.
“Austin? I love you. You changed my life and… I just love you.” I swallowed hard and pulled my hand back to my lap, looking down at it as another lump formed in my throat. “You don’t have to say it back to me… y-you don’t have to feel it. I just w-wanted you to know you’ve got something, and somebody, you can rely on. I wanted you to know.”
For a moment, Austin’s face went stiff like granite, and then it began to contort. He unlaced his fingers from his forehead and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
I could see him grit his teeth, could feel the strain like a hum through the mattress, but despite his best efforts, tears still leaked out from under his hands. Lacking any better ideas, I rubbed my hands over his chest again like I had when he was talking about his childhood home.
Austin pulled himself together after a minute or two and dropped his hands from his face, one of which landed in my lap. I held his big hand with both of mine and he looked at me with undisguised wonder.
“I love you too, Sky. I do.” He paused and his eyes rolled around the room a little before returning to me with an apologetic, even awkward, shrug of his broad shoulders. “So, now what?”
I sighed with happiness, feeling like sunshine had burst through some cloud cover inside of me. It was too much to contain and I smiled, seeing Austin’s face light up in response.
“Well… you’re a free man. It’s a sunny day. You wanna, maybe, get some ice cream… with me? We could take a picture.”
Chapter 19
Skylar
The next few months were heaven on Earth for me. With all that drama behind us, Austin was able to concentrate on training for his upcoming title fight, and I could go about my studies with a clear head. Clear, that is, except for the intrusion of the occasional dirty thought about Austin thrusting into me from behind, or one of a million other soppy daydreams about him.
Every day or two, between my classes and his training sessions, we’d fit in an hour for him to teach me a hybrid of self-defense moves and a variety of ground-fighting styles. For him, it was just enough to keep him warmed up for the next grueling set of drills that Ross had in store. For me it was a workout and a half.
Whenever I needed a couple minutes to recover, I’d lock him up in my signature move, a deep kiss. It was the only thing I could do in the middle of the MMA gym that distracted him from his relentless training ethic.