The Trainer (37 page)

Chris took two deep breaths, letting them
out slowly. He shook his head in mocking sympathy. “You can find
records of that particular situation in the same files, Mikey,” he
said, his eyes dancing with pleasure. “I advise you to read them,
they’ll be most educational. But for now, why don’t you just calm
yourself down; keep in mind that you can get over these doubts and
inadequacies with training and patience.”

He headed for the door, casually dismissing
him. Michael trembled with captive rage, and then the barrier
broke. It was like feeling waves crash through a wall of sandbags,
sweeping everything else out of the way. He snarled, “You fucking
asshole!” and took a swing.

His fist connected against the side of
Chris’s head, cracking the frame of his glasses and smacking into
the corner of his eye. Chris reeled back suddenly, his head
snapping away, and his glasses flew off, one lens popping out to
roll away. A blood spot turned into a trickle, and Michael moved in
closer to connect with his left fist. But his aim was off—in school
brawls he had never fought with an opponent a head shorter than he
was. Instead of hitting low and on the side, he smacked into
Chris’s upper arm. It was a righteous shot, though—he could feel
the impact shoot up his arm and into his shoulder. It should have
pushed Chris back, made him reach for the wounded part in
agony.

Chris grinned, his dark eyes clearer than
ever without the shielding of the glasses. Michael cursed that
taunting grin and swung again, right to the jaw.

But Chris wasn’t there any more. His fist
sailed through empty space, and he felt an awful explosion on his
left side that forced the air out of his lungs. The little bastard
had caught him with a lucky one to the ribs. But it didn’t have
that much strength behind it! Michael turned to follow his opponent
and threw out another punch, and lost his new breath when Chris
snapped a jab into his right side.

There was something wrong. Michael moved in,
crowding Chris with his taller frame. He elbowed to one side,
trying to duplicate that first shot, and then he felt what seemed
like a land mine imploding on his left upper arm. It was a
sickening pain, and as he desperately tried to pummel the shorter
man with his right arm, he realized that his left one wasn’t going
anywhere. He connected again, his closed and aching fist smashing
against Chris’s upper arm again, and was astounded to hear the
senior trainer laugh out loud. He reeled back, putting his arms up
in defense, and Chris shook his head, wiping the blood trail away
from his eye.

“You idiot,” he said genially, dropping his
hands.

“You asshole!” Michael screamed. He released
his right arm in a wild swing, and felt it neatly blocked, and once
again, Chris was not where he should have been. Crowding in, he
tried for a lower punch, a quick rabbit to the midsection, and the
forward motion of the punch almost threw him right by where Chris
had been standing. Chris was not only moving out of the way, he was
almost dancing, bouncing on the balls of his feet, and still that
damn smile was frozen on his face. Michael saw the blur of movement
away from his fist again, and for one second something was
triggered in his mind. But his anger was too hot, too overwhelming.
He gave up trying to punch the smaller man, who infuriatingly
wouldn’t hold still. Instead, he shifted back to give himself
aiming room, and then lunged, ready to drop Chris with the classic
schoolyard coup de grace, a knee to the groin. But he never made
it.

The fluorescent lights of the office seemed
like the blazing sun beating down on one of those ragged guys in a
cartoon, the ones always shown crawling around in the desert
looking for water. Michael heard the steady ringing of a clock he
distantly knew wasn‘t there. There was also someone talking to him,
but he couldn’t make out the words over the constant buzzing
sounds. He tried to smile, tell them everything would be fine, and
then he realized that he was going to be very sick.

Someone came closer to him as he gagged, and
lifted his shoulders. He turned his head politely away and lost the
contents of his stomach very carefully onto the carpet, and then
finished his smile. His head was pounding, in about four or five
places. He looked up and saw Lorens, looking very concerned.

“You’re cute,” Michael said.

“He is Opey,” Lorens seemed to be saying.
Michael nodded, and felt a new site of pain, and closed his
eyes.

“Oh, shit,” Michael said, stretching out
parts of his body. He was in his bed, and although he wished he had
been unconscious when they brought him here, he remembered every
step of the journey. No one had ever explained just how much it
hurt to be hit repeatedly on the head! I mean, he thought bitterly,
you watch boxing, and they take it all the time. In the movies, the
guys take turns swinging at each other’s jaws until one of them
trips over something or falls out a window.

They never get hit in the jaw in a viciously
planned knockout, fall backward and hit their heads against a table
and a chair on the way down. No, check that. Sometimes they do, but
then they get up and kick the other guy’s butt.

“That’s what you get for throwing a punch at
a boxer,” Anderson said, as she industriously bandaged his
forehead.

“A boxer?” Michael felt sick again, but
there was nothing left to bring up. “Oh, man.”

“Well, not a professional one, of course.
Too old; started training too late. But he’s not bad. On some days,
he’s a regular killer. There, that’ll do it. You wanna go to the
hospital now? You were dead set against it before. Do you
remember?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m—okay.”

“Then just stay awake for the next twelve
hours. We’ll keep an eye on you for the next two days; I’ve had
minor concussions myself a few times.” She beckoned to Joan, who
came forward with a glass of water and a straw.

“Concussions? I have a concussion?” Michael
repeated, panicking. His head pounded, and he pushed the drink
away.

“Well, of course, kiddo! What do you think
boxers do? They hit each other over the head until one of ’em gets
a concussion and passes out. Very civilized sport, huh?” She smiled
and patted his shoulder. “We’ll have the serious chat after I’m
sure you won’t take a left turn into coma-land. Sure you don’t want
those X-rays?”

“Maybe I’d better,” Michael said weakly.

“Good boy. Let’s get to work on Parker’s
guilt trip right away.” She stood up and left the room, and Michael
carefully sipped the water. And cursed his stupidity until he ran
out of creative words.

Michael looked into the mirror in horror.
There were bruises on his sides, right up against the curve of his
rib cage. There was a really ugly one on his left upper arm—now
turning a nauseating shade of greenish yellow. But his face! His
lips were split—a doctor put in a stitch below his lower lip, just
as a precaution. He had done a lot of damage because unlike a
professional boxer, Michael hadn’t been wearing a mouth guard. His
own teeth tore up the inside of his mouth, and one of them was
loosened.

There were also three stitches where his
head had bounced off the side of the table. There were two huge
lumps on the back of his head, and another smaller one below his
mouth. He looked exactly like someone had held him for someone else
to take shots at. He sighed and stretched. It would all heal, he
had been reassured. There was no permanent damage; most of it was
bruising. His concussion was very minor—his reactions were up to
speed within six hours of the incident. He could only smile at the
memory of the emergency room nurse who carefully asked him if his
lover had done this.

“He’s not even my friend,” he had mumbled.
“Besides, you should see him!”

She had given him a long suffering glance
and gone away. But indeed, she should have seen Parker. Not a damn
mark on him. Well, except for that little cut next to his eye,
which was probably caused by the edge of the broken metal frames.
He didn’t even have a black eye, for crying out loud!

Twice, twice Michael had felt the density of
those biceps on Chris, but never had he suspected that they were
anything, well, dangerous. There were a lot of musclemen in the gay
community, for example, but that didn’t mean shit when it came to
fighting. Chris probably could have taken shots to his arms all
night long before he started to feel inconvenienced.

He pulled a robe over his marked body and
sat down in the chair by his window. It had been two days; the
concussion watch was officially over. It was time to hear the
verdict, figure out what to pack, and where to go. When the knock
sounded, he forced himself to look relaxed before calling out,
“Come on in!”

It wasn’t Anderson.

Chris walked in and closed the door behind
him. Michael tried to set his jaw, but the effort made his mouth
hurt. He watched as the other man walked past the bed to stop about
six feet in front of Michael’s chair. He was dressed today in a
full suit, dark gray and single breasted. His tie was muted colors,
dark and touched with an appropriate burgundy color that reminded
Michael of old blood. The new glasses were shiny—the frames hadn’t
acquired the patina of the old ones yet. He wasn’t even wearing a
Band-Aid on his cut—apparently it had healed enough.

“I would like to offer my apology to you,
Michael,” he said. It sounded a little stiff, but at the same time,
sincere. “It was wrong of me to take advantage of you like that.
You had no way of knowing I was trained to fight, and I could have
defused the situation instead of inflaming it. I am prepared to
make amends in any way appropriate, and I assure you that this will
never happen again.”

Michael nodded, amazed at how completely
sane it all sounded. How—right—it sounded. He blushed and lowered
his head. “Yeah, it’s okay. Um—I accept. You know, I was going to
hit you the first night I came here,” he remembered. “Jesus, we
could have gotten this done way back then!”

“I don’t think so,” Chris said. “I never
would have hit you that night. However, I would have certainly held
a grudge had you managed to hit me.”

“Oh man, I should have been paying
attention. You blocked me that night so easily—if I’d just thought
about it, I would have known you were a fighter!” Michael shook his
head. “I think sometimes that everything started to go wrong that
night and it’s just never let up.”

“Perhaps. Thank you for accepting my
apology—I will be at your service should you think of some way I
can atone for my bad judgment.” He executed that neat little bow
that Michael almost had nailed (or so it looked in the mirror), and
turned to leave.

“Wait—there is something,” Michael said.

Chris wheeled back. “Yes?”

“Teach me.” Michael blushed again, and felt
a renewed pounding in his head. “Really teach me. Make me
understand this stuff—I’m not getting something, and I don’t know
what I’m doing wrong!” He was close to tears, and ground his teeth,
substituting physical pain for the much more threatening emotional
one. “I can’t screw this up any more! But you know what’s wrong—you
can make me understand, I know it!”

Chris folded his arms and nodded. “Of
course,” he said, “this depends upon what Anderson chooses to do.
If she releases you and sends you away, I will have to wait until I
finish my project here in order to find you and do this. It might
be a time-consuming occupation. Are you sure this is what you want?
I assure you—it will not make you like me any better.”

“I don’t care,” Michael said stubbornly.
“Maybe not liking you was a part of it. Always having you here
meant that I couldn’t get everything I wanted. Hell, it was like
having an older brother on the football team, you know? You got all
the attention, and I was just a fu—screw-up. I don’t know. But if I
leave this, I have nothing. I’ll be a bum, hanging out at my
uncle’s—if he’ll still have me—and hoping that I win the
lottery.”

“You always had more options than that,”
Anderson said, pushing the door open. Michael rose even before she
crossed the threshold. She waved one hand, and he collapsed back.
“You could have applied to any auction house, any other school, any
large slave holding family—you could have gone to Europe, or to
Asia, or any corner of the world. You could have stayed with New
Age Negel, and become the Swami of Slavery in about ten or twenty
years, or even started your own breakaway training program. But
you’re impatient, Mike. You want everything now, or at least within
the year. You want the best, but you have no idea what it costs to
acquire it. And you feel personally slighted when you don’t get
it.”

Michael nodded bitterly.

“And now—what? You want to stay, don’t
you?”

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

Anderson looked at Chris who shrugged. She
looked back at Michael and pursed her lips. “This is officially
your last chance, buckaroo. You listen up, because if you ‘fuck-up’
this one, I’m skipping your butt across every body of water between
here and the Pacific, with three bounces on the Mississippi.”

Michael cringed a little at the obscenity,
but nodded again. “I understand, Trainer.”

“Well, I sure hope you do.” She turned on
Parker and jabbed a finger at his chest. “He’s all yours, Muhammed
Ali. Start him the way I start my classics, and ride him hard. I
want to see how you work, and I want daily reports. I’ll finish
with Lorens in another two weeks, and Joan will be here for another
two or three months. Before Joan is ready to leave, I want Mike to
be where he should have been when he first got here. Got that?”

Two voices answered, “Yes, Trainer.”

When she left, Chris turned to Michael and
shrugged. “That settles it, then. I will see you at five o’clock
Friday morning in suitable jogging clothes. You’ll also start
dressing more formally—you sometimes make the attempt, but often
miss.”