you do?” I spin around so fast, I forget my knee is injured and almost fall forward, but Maximo catches me.
“I upped the stakes. Everyone wins some. Everyone loses some. Andrew came to see me for a favor about a year ago. He opened his own bookstore and he had issues paying me back, so I kept tabs.” Maximo’s finger slides under my chin. “I learned about his fascination with you. I told him he could fight tonight to help pay off his debt, and then you and Tongue showed up. It was like stars aligned.”
A tear drips from my eye as I wrench my face away from his touch. I turn toward the ring, and Andrew is staring right at me. He has bags under his eyes, and his face is pale. He looks terrible. “What happened to him?” I ask.
“You did,” Maximo says just as Andrew points the gun at me. “Oh, now there is a twist I didn’t see coming.”
“Andrew,” I choke out his name, staring at a man that I thought was my friend.
“I loved you,” he yells, “and then you started talking to him! This fucking psycho who followed you. Watched you. I knew, I fucking knew I’d lose you to him because good girls like you always fall for the assholes. I could have been good to you! Look at yourself, Daphne. He abuses you.”
“No,” I explain, inching my way toward the fence, but stopping at the edge of the stage. “He doesn’t do anything I don’t want him to do.”
“That isn’t good enough.”
“It’s going to have to be. It is always going to be him, Andrew. Always.”
The barrel of the gun gets bigger as I stare down it. “I won’t allow it.” His fingers flex, and I shut my eyes when I know he is about to pull the trigger, but it never comes. After waiting a few seconds, I open my eyes to see Andrew on his knees, the gun pointed to his head.
His hand is chopped off, and he is holding it to his chest, cradling it as he sobs. Tongue is standing there with his dead opponent’s sword in his hand, then places the tip against Andrew’s throat.
“No!” I scream. “I don’t want him to die, please, Tongue. Please. He’s my friend.”
“I don’t want to be anything to you,” Andrew replies, and the sharp bang of the bullet leaving the gun has me falling backward. I witness bits of brain, skull, and blood spew out the other side of Andrew’s head.
I can’t even hear myself screaming as heartbreak shatters me. I can’t breathe. I didn’t love him, but I cared for him. I looked forward to work every day because of him. This can’t be real. It all happened so fast. Maybe that wasn’t Andrew, and all of this is a sick joke.
He wouldn’t have gotten into bed with a man like Maximo, would he? Did I know him at all? He was going to shoot me, but Tongue stopped it by slicing off his hand. There is a lot I can handle, but I don’t know how to process this.
Andrew died because of me.
Because he wanted me, and I didn’t want him.
Does friendship mean nothing? Is friendship not good enough?
The thought has me narrowing my watery eyes at Andrew’s dead body, wishing his heart would pump for a few more minutes so I could spew my anger at him. If friendship wasn’t enough, then what the hell would have been?
Tongue starts to climb the fence to come to me, but Maximo holds up his hand, stopping him. “You have one more fight.”
“Fuck the fight,” Tongue sneers, staring at me through the chain fence. He wants to come to me.
“Then you don’t want to get married,” Maximo reminds us. “One more.”
“One more. One more. One more,” The crowd chants and stomps their feet in equal rhythm.
What is love if there can’t be different versions of it? Love is meant to be flexible, mendable, pliable to form what the heart yearns for in a certain person. There is a friendship love, a lover’s love, a mother’s love, a father’s love, and so on, but there is one emotion people forget.
Out of love, hate is born.
And there are different versions of hate.
Right now, my love for Andrew is turning dark and twisted. A part of me is glad he is dead because I would have learned eventually that my version of love would not have been what he wanted.
And all there is