Fight for You

It was quiet, silent. Our steps, the campus, us—it was like the nighttime. We were like the nighttime, silent and bustling around with the crisp early autumn air guiding us up the sidewalk and through the quad. There was nothing to say, because the more open the space was around us, the less there was for words to fill it. Back in the dorm, my mind was swimming with things to ask him, expanding with off-topic small talk to distract us both from the tension stinging between us. In the hallway, I had a small laundry list of starter sentences that I could use to draw him out. In the stairwell, I had already thought of all the responses I could use as distraction until the tension washed away by the grace of moonlight. But, once we stepped outside and the silver moon was covered by night-colored clouds, all of my ammo turned to dust and blew away with the wind. Now, as we were walking in the wide open space, I could see all of the words I had prewritten in mind scattering and playing hide-and-seek. There was nothing to say now. I could feel the suffocation of that tension smothering me, his eyes—now black like the distance, emerald succumbing to the absence of light—flicking and retreating over me, like he was waiting for me to strike up a conversation. Words were foreign to me, so I ignored the desperation that I saw.

He drew a heavy breath out, silent for another hard collection of heartbeats, before doing it again with more exaggeration this time. Still, nothing came from me, so he murmured, “So, what’s your last name?”

I shot my eyes up to his face as my brows furrowed, “My last name?”

But he grinned as he caught my gaze. He’d won the game of silence, then. I drank in the lingering desperation of his eyes. He felt it, too, that singing rightfulness that I felt with him. The tension was real to him, too, and even more so because he held all the answers to my confusion. He wanted the same lighthearted small talk to steer our conversation, to preserve the sense we shared together. I gave in because I wanted the tension to evaporate. “Hart. It’s Hart.”

He drew in a deep breath and hummed, like he was saying my name through the throaty noise before he dropped his head back to skate his eyes across the sky. “Mine’s Knight.”

“Rixon Knight,” I tested it, tasted it, and laughed bitterly. “How fitting. You are both mysterious with dark inhibitions tracking you and valiant, noble, and rescuing poor damsels in distress. I’d say that about sums you up from what I’ve seen.”

He laughed lowly once, a noise to fill the absence of what to say back to my condescending tone. I didn’t blame him, but the wider the space was around us, the more ironic his name seemed, the more my nagging questions bit at me under my skin. But he didn’t want to answer them, either to maintain his mystery or his nobility. Who really knew?

“Yeah,” his tone clipped, “That about sums it up.”

I nodded slowly, my lips sewing shut so I wouldn’t insert my foot. But, I didn’t have to worry about that, because Rixon inserted his own. “And you, Ember Hart. You fill your name out pretty well, too. The embodiment of dazzling sweetness, winning people over, the central lifeline in a bodily system. Yet, the very same structure that, if poisoned or wounded, kills the whole establishment.”

I whipped around in front of him quickly, stopping him from continuing this pointless walk as we stopped in front of Brady Hall. The parking lot was empty, the security lights washing over us dimly; his eyes were still as black as the night outside the pale glow. He stood rigid with his shoulders rolled back, his hands in his pockets but you could tell they were balled tight. I looked up into his eyes with a brazen backbone keeping me strong as he regarded me coldly. “I’m the one killing the fucking establishment? Me? It’s on me? It’s not at all your fault?”

“Oh! So, it’s my fault then?” He laughed bitterly and pushed his hand through his hair, exasperated, “You know, what do you fucking want from me, Em?”

I blinked quickly, staring at him with dumbfounded anger as it contorted my face. “What do I want from you, Rixon? What do I want from you? Mr. Fucking Psychology Major can sit here and read me like an open book all he wants, but the second I try to understand—understand questions that are fucking owed to me, you frost your shoulder and make me feel like an idiot for trying to get it.”

“Have you ever thought, just maybe, that not everything in this fucked up world is supposed to make sense to you? I can’t give you the answers you want to hear, Em. But if you want to say something—really say something—then I suggest you get it out there.”

He was so cavalier with his deliverance and that felt like a slap across the face, a dose of reality that he was throwing at me with slumped shoulders and a shadowed face.

I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste the blood that popped from the flesh, coating my tongue with a metallic tang before I turned my head back up to face him. “Yeah, Rixon. There is something I want to say. We haven’t known each other long enough to say this, but there’s something here between us and I know you feel it, too. I’m just asking you to tell me what’s going on, because you involved me. You stood there, you kissed me, you protected me, and you said all of those weird things. You show me this sweet guy who wants to take care of his own and then you turn around and give me your shoulder, blocking me out when things start to get personal. I don’t know how to make something even begin to work if you’re just going to put me on ice because you’re afraid of personal boundaries.”

He stared at me and parted his mouth open before wiring it closed with a snap of his teeth. The look that covered over those midnight emerald eyes was something close to murder, but as I looked longer, I saw self-administered disappointment. “You don’t know me, Ember. You don’t know shit about me.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You implied!” he seethed, taking huffs to breathe. “You implied. Don’t stir around in trouble you can’t handle, Em, and this is some shit I know you can’t handle.”

“You don’t know that!” I damn near cried out, stepping towards him aggressively.

“Yes, I do!” he shouted, throwing his fists down at his sides as he leaned toward me, his breath gusting over my face.

I bit my lower lip hard, reeling back into myself as I stared at him. I wasn’t weak. I was introverted, yes. I was a virgin to experiences, yes. I was terrified tonight, yes. But I wasn’t weak. I took a steadying breath as I felt my skin crawl, peeling back over my bones. I could handle whatever he wanted to throw at me. I knew it in the depths of my bones. He didn’t believe me, and I didn’t know how to prove it to him.

He turned sharply away from me and ripped his pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. As he bit into the filter and pulled out the lighter, he chuckled bitterly and sarcastically offered, “You don’t mind, do you?”

Agitation shot through me like a livewire current, shaking my head as I turned towards his back. “Well, it doesn’t exactly matter now, does it?”

He snorted out a laugh and nodded once as he flicked his ash, shrugging halfheartedly. “I guess you’re right.”

“That doesn’t make the conversation go away, Rixon.”

He dropped his head back and sighed. “You are one persistent chick, you know that?”

“You know what?” I threw my arms up and gripped his leather, throwing his arm to the side so he’d turn to look at me. “I’m not a straight-forward person. I’m not like this. I’m not, but you…you make me feel powerful. I don’t know if it’s because the feel you give off is powerful or if you just make me feel more than some meek little girl, but I feel it. So, this is me saying, it was nice to meet you, Rixon Knight. It was nice, but fuck this.”

He stared at me, eyes wide, jaw set. I wasn’t even sure if he was breathing, but his cigarette kept burning, ash falling into the night breeze until there was nothing left and the butt clattered to the ground and rolled away. I meant every word I said. I’d felt the ultimate power of him all night. It was evident in everything he did. It was the way he walked and the way he carried himself. It was the way he smiled and the way he watched me. It was in the way he fought. I knew him for an all of a few hours and he’d already started to affect my overall demeanor, he’d already begun to help me find my voice and speak out more than I had ever before, even though it was aimed at him.

As I stared into those powerful eyes, he said nothing. I couldn’t take his silence, though. I couldn’t stand there and have the intensity of his stare boring down on me because, yet again, it was impossible to gauge his reaction. I couldn’t take it as the seconds ticked and nothing was said, so I shook my head and turned to leave.

His hand shot to my wrist, his clutch closed tight around the bone, begging me silently to turn back to him, to look.

“Wait,” he breathed.

I turned to look at him and all that power, all that intensity had melted and fallen away to leave them scared, unsure, and desperate. My lips parted, the rest of my body turning back to him as his grip tightened on my wrist. It felt like desperation. It felt like raw, unadulterated, heartbreaking need as his fingers crushed my wrist. He stared at me, holding my gaze like he was willing a silent conversation to take place between us, for me to just get it. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t understand unless he spelled it out for me, which was something he refused to do.

“I…I can’t do this right now. I’m sorry,” he shook his head, turning his eyes down, “I’m sorry.”
I shuddered out a breath, “What?”

“I just can’t. I don’t know if I’m ready to let someone in again.”

“But, Rix,” I shook my head. I’d never felt rejection before, I’d never known the pain of it. But it felt like a giant blister over my heart, angry inflammation in my lungs, a fifty pound weight on my chest and nothing but storm clouds in my mind, evaporating all my thoughts to nothing but thunder.

He turned his head away from me; the weight of his desperation aimed at the moonlit sidewalk, and dropped his fingers from my wrist. “I have some things I need to figure out, Em. I just need you to understand. I can’t explain it to you right now.”

“I-I don’t, though.” I found that breathing was becoming hard, each breath held a weight, “I don’t understand.”

He pulled out another cigarette and lit it, his mouth twisting as he blew out the white curling smoke, “You’re not meant to.”

I watched him walk away from me and I didn’t try to stop him. His ashes flew back in the soft wind whenever he’d flick them. The only sound I could hear was his boots scuffing the sidewalk as he disappeared out of the security light of the parking lot. I stood there, staring at darkness, until the chill of the night bit at the skin of my collarbones. I forced myself to turn away from the way he headed and drag my feet back to McArthur, reminding myself to take breaths even though the mass of refusal settled cozily on my chest cavity.

When I finally made it back to my room, I didn’t bother to turn on the light. I just moved my book from the bed and fell on the comforter, gripping my pillow into my chest. Nora still wasn’t home and I’m glad she wasn’t because I didn’t want to sit there and ask her about how her night went, because the truth of the matter was that I couldn’t care less. For once, I wanted to be selfish and drown under the tidal wave of emotions that I was feeling, all instilled because of some boy I met. I wasn’t the type to go out, to find myself drawn to someone like a magnetic force of nature. The second my eyes met his, something changed, something snapped alive and attentive to the warmth his stare held on me. This was foreign to me and I basked in it, but the last thing I really wanted to do was hear about Nora’s drunken night spent partying with a boy she didn’t initially care about.

I closed my eyes, let the emotions crash over me, and exhaled before my mind went blank and I fell asleep.

--

It was the sound of pain that woke me up with a start, my heart jumping into my mouth as I sprang into a sitting position. Even though the blinds were closed, the early afternoon was bright enough to make my eyes hurt as they focused on Nora gripping her foot, leaned into the wall for balance as she tried to nurse herself. I furrowed my brows together as I watched her.

“What are you doing?”

Gasping, she looked up, “I stubbed my toe on your bedframe. What are you doing sleeping so late? Were you up until the wee hours with Rixon?”

“No,” I shook my head at her mischievous grin, shutting down her promiscuous thoughts, “I wasn’t. I don’t know if I’m going to see him again, actually.”

“What? Why?” Nora pushed her hand through her hair and came to sit beside me. Even after a drunken night of sleep with mussed honey-colored hair and bags under her eyes, she still looked well-rested and ready for the day. She took a breath, “What happened?”

I shrugged feebly. “I don’t know, you’d have to ask him. One second, he was asking me to wait, like he wanted me to hear him out, and then the next, he was telling me that he couldn’t do this, that he wasn’t ready. And then, he was walking away from me. He didn’t even look back.”

“What a dick,” she choked out, sputtering almost, “Seriously! What a douche bag. He didn’t give you a reason?”

“Uh, no. I asked, and he said that he needed me to just understand, have patience, and when I told him I didn’t, he said—and I quote—‘you’re not supposed to’.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” She practically yelled, her coffee bean eyes growing wide with outrage.

I snorted humorlessly, “I wish I was. But, do you know what the best part was?”

“There’s a best part to this?” She raised her eyebrow incredulously.

“Oh, yeah,” I barked with a loud laugh, “The best part is that I was going to walk away with him looking stupid behind me, wondering what he missed out on. I was going to do it. But, nope. No way. Rixon Knight just walked away and disappeared into the night like some valiant fucking warrior.”

She shook her head, still trying to wrap her mind around the same things that I was. I wanted to tell her not to waste her energy because Rixon Knight was a mystery that couldn’t be explained. She got up to stand in the closet and change her clothes, scuffling around and stumbling against the walls for balance as she did. Though as something caught my eye, I jerked my head up to see Spencer slowly slipping into the room, flattening himself against the wall so that he could be quiet, as well.

“What are you doing?” I asked as I blinked and nodded to his secret agent posture, like he should have been dressed in a black morph suit, trying to steal the crown jewels.

“Oh,” he paused, letting out the breath he was holding before drawing out his response, “Hey, Ember.”

The way he’d said it all was awkward, and he looked even more displeased to be standing in the same space as me. It didn’t take a Psychology major—or minor or common knowledge, for that matter—to tell me that he was put off by my very presence. Rixon had told him what happened last night, either by phone or person, and now Spencer was recalling the conversation and letting that proof show very plainly. I sighed and stood up, watching him as he flicked his eyes elsewhere.

“Hi, Spencer,” I pinned him with my stare, purposefully letting the tension grow between us, watching him roll his shoulders back to try and lift it. “Talk to Rixon?”

“Uh, yeah,” he scratched the back of his head and cleared his throat. He knocked on the side of the wall by the closet pointedly as he turned his eyes to the door cracked ajar, “Nora, you just about ready?”

“Ready for what?” I asked as I turned to look at the door she was nonexistent behind with the exception of harsh exhales and the shuffling of fabrics, either being put on or thrown angrily away from her.

Nora pushed the door open dressed in a sweater and jeans. She ruffled her fingers through her hair as she dropped her mouth open, “Yeah, Em. We’re going to grab lunch. You want to come with us?”
I shook my head, giving her my best uninterested shrug as I stretched and stood up. “Nah, that’s fine. You two have fun.”

“Are you sure? You’re not third-wheeling it, you know,” she came over by me, grabbing a clip for her hair, and turning to look at me.

“I don’t want to go, Nora. It’s fine.”

I couldn’t help but flick my eyes past her to stare at Spencer who studiously dodged my gaze. The discomfort pooling off him was visible and it seemed to become denser the longer he felt my eyes on him. Nora waved noncommittally before heading out of the room and Spencer followed after her without so much as any type of goodbye, whether formal or friendly.