Mine (Real Book 2)

They triggered him. His parents. They’ve ignored him his whole life, and the times they come see him, all they do is hurt him. It didn’t take but a couple of hours after their visit in Austin for Remy to go full-blown black.

I know it was thanks to them. Pete knows it. Riley knows it. Coach and Diane, they know it too.

The morning after their visit, he could barely get out of bed, and it’s been like this for days now. Remy is down and out. It hurts to see him like this so much, I feel as if I’m getting kicked in the stomach, daily.

“He up yet?” Pete asks me from the living room today. The team is scattered across the couches as they watch me close the door of the master bedroom behind me. I shake my head in despair. Remy has sunken down so far, he is completely closed off like I have never, ever seen him.

He barely looks directly at me. He barely eats. He barely talks. He is in a bad, bad mood, but he seems to be fighting not to take it out on anyone, and therefore, he says nothing, absolutely nothing at all. All I can see of his inner struggle is those fists of his, curling and uncurling, curling and uncurling, as he fixes his gaze on a spot and keeps it there, for minutes and minutes and minutes, as if whatever he sees is inside him.

“Shit. It’s a bad one,” Pete says, dragging a hand down his face. He keeps calling it a “bad” one.

The faces of Diane, Lupe, Pete, and Riley look the way I feel: wretched.

“Did he at least take the glutamine capsules?” Coach asks me, his forehead furrowed all the way up to his bald head. “Otherwise he’ll lose the muscle mass we’ve worked so hard to put on!”

“He took them.”

He just took them from my hand, shoved them down with a gulp of water, and plopped back down on the bed.

He didn’t even pull me to him like the times he’s manic.

It’s like he doesn’t like himself . . . and he doesn’t like me.

Quietly, and feeling as gray as if I have a thundercloud above me, I go and sit on a chair and stare down at my hands, and I feel everyone’s eyes on me for a long, awful minute. They bore into the top of my head, like I’m supposed to know how to deal with this shit. I don’t. I’ve spent two nights holding a big, heavy lion in my arms, crying quietly so he doesn’t hear me. The rest of the days, I have spent rubbing his muscles, trying to bring Remington Tate back to me.

Remington just doesn’t realize he is the one who holds us all together. Now we’re all scrambling to hoist him up. We are so codependent, we are somehow all depressed with him. I know for a fact, after seeing everyone’s faces for almost three days, none of us will smile until we see two dimples again.

“Does he say anything?” Pete breaks the silence. “Is he at least angry at those assholes? At something?”

I shake my head.

“That’s the problem with Rem. He just takes it. Like a punch. And he keeps standing but he takes it. Sometimes I wish he’d just say what he feels, damn it!” Pete stands and begins pacing.

Riley shakes his head. “I respect that, Pete. When you open your mouth to say something, it makes it real. Whatever’s running through his head, the fact that he doesn’t voice it means he’s fighting it. He’s not letting it matter enough to spill it out.”

I drop my hair as a curtain and blink back the moisture in my eyes, refusing to let them see how all this affects me. But it does. I was depressed once in my life. It’s a big, black, dark hole. This was not some light depression where you’re sad and have PMS. It’s the overwhelming feeling that you want to die. And wanting to die is completely against all our survival instincts. Our normal instinct is to kill to protect our loved ones, to kill to survive. Just imagining that Remy is feeling all the same mess I felt when my life blew up around me pulls me so deep into the darkness that I worry about being able to get him out, rather than falling right in with him.

Whatever it is he’s feeling, I need to remind myself he can’t control the thoughts his mind is throwing at him. His mind is not him, even though right now it controls his reactions. I want to support, to be steady, understanding. Not emotional, needy, and like I will fall apart at any minute. And god, at six months pregnant, I am definitely emotional, needy, and falling a little apart without him.

“At least he’s coming down to punch those bags. You don’t know how deeply I admire him for that,” Riley adds glumly.

“Do you think he’ll pull through before the fight, Brooke?” Coach asks me. “By god, watching my boy get humiliated last season out there . . . This was his year. This was his season.”

“I don’t think he’ll fight tonight,” I admit.

“So we can say good-bye to a first place ranking,” Pete swears.

“You can’t let him fight like this, Pete! He could get hurt. He could hurt himself,” I burst out; then I drag in a breath and try to calm down.

“It would have been better if he didn’t remember,” Pete says, with an infinite amount of bitterness in his voice.

“What do you mean?”

“It would be better if he didn’t remember anything his parents ever did to him.”

My protective instincts surge with a vengeance. “What did they do to him?”

There’s something alarming about the way Pete hesitates, about the way his eyes slide across the group, and then settle back on me. My pulse flutters faster than normal by the time he finally speaks. “They committed him because he went black for the first time when he was ten, Brooke. But first, they thought he was possessed. They got all fanatic about it and had an exorcism performed on him.”

When those last words filter into my troubled brain, I am so heartbroken and torn, my heart withers in my chest. I make a sound and cover my mouth.

Diane covers her face.

Curses fall from Riley’s lips as he turns his head to the carpet.

Coach stares down at his hands.

The silence that stretches . . . it is taut with sorrow, with disbelief, and this agonizing frustration . . . of an ill little boy who was so misunderstood . . .

I think of “Iris”—the song he has played to me. The song where he wanted to be seen and understood, by me. When not even his own parents understood him.

Oh god.

“He was put in an exorcism circle in his own home,” Pete says, driving the dagger deeper inside me. “His room was stripped of everything so he wouldn’t hurt anyone, and he was roped to his bed. They went at it for days—we don’t know exactly how many, but over a week—until a little neighbor who used to play with Rem came in looking for him, and those parents intervened. The ‘holy man’ was dismissed, and Remy was just committed instead.”

There’s not a sound in the room.

I’ve stopped breathing. I feel like I’ve stopped living.

“Unfortunately,” Pete continues, “he remembers that manic episode, because at the institution, they did some experimental hypnosis to draw his memories out. See if some therapy would work. Not that it did. Worse is, his own body would have protected him from that hurtful memory if we hadn’t fucked up with that damn hypnosis.”

There’s still not a sound.

But I can hear my heart beating inside me, so hard. Hard and ready, like those times when I could sprint like the wind. I can even hear the blood gushing through my veins, fast and furious. I am ready . . . and angry . . . and desperate to fight something. To fight for him. I remember him telling me he had a memory of his parents. How his mother crossed him at night. An indescribable pain cracks tiny little places inside me. Oh, Remy.

“So he remembers all of that?” I ask, while the middle of my body burns with impotent rage.

“I know he knows they’re wrong . . . when he’s blue. But when that black side comes, I know he thinks about it.” Pete’s frustration and despair is carved into every line of his face. “It’s only natural to wonder why you weren’t wanted.”

“But he is wanted!” I cry.

“We know, B, calm down.” Riley rises to his feet and comes over.

He hugs me to him, and I realize my hands are on my stomach, and the image of my Remington as a boy enduring such a thing because of something that was not his fault rocks in my head. Oh, how I wish I had his fucking evil parents in front of me now, and at the same time, I’m glad they aren’t here, because I don’t know what I would do or say to them. But I want to hurt them for hurting him! I want to hit and scream at them and run after them with a pitchfork. I clench my hands and ease away from Riley. He and Pete are like my brothers now, but Remy doesn’t like them to touch me, and I don’t like to do things that hurt him—even if he can’t see. I want comfort, but the only comfort I want is from the man in the bed in the master bedroom.

Quietly, I head to the master. “I’ll see you guys later—thanks for checking up on him.”

“One of us will be around,” Pete calls.

I don’t want to make noise, so I wave from the door and shut it closed behind me, and my heart does all the crazy stuff it does when I see Remy. His big muscular form is on the bed, sprawled facedown, like a lion at rest. My playful boy, my protective man, my jealous boyfriend, my cocky fighter. My misunderstood little boy.

My eyes run down the length of him, his spiky hair dark against the pillow, his jaw beautiful and square. He’s quiet and resting. Resting like he’s wounded in some place my hands can’t reach and my eyes can’t see.

Reaching behind me, I turn the lock, then ease away and start stripping off my clothes. It’s not for sexual reasons I want to be naked, but because I need to feel his skin on mine. He has never, ever slept a night with me with anything between us.

He likes feeling me, and I ache to feel him.

Climbing into bed, I spoon him from behind. “Look at you,” I say, imitating what he says to me sometimes as I buzz my lips across the shell of his ear and slide my hand around his shoulder and to his chest, spreading my hand where his heart beats. He groans as I kiss the back of his ear.

“Look at you,” I say lovingly in his ear. I lick the back of his ear softly, like he does to me, running my hands down the length of him, petting him like he pets me. “I love, adore, cherish, need, and want you like I never thought possible to love and adore and cherish and need and want another human being or anything in this world,” I whisper. He growls softly as if in gratitude, and my eyes well up, because it’s so unfair he has to deal with it. Why does anyone have to deal with something like this? Why does a beautiful person who doesn’t want to harm anyone feel chemical impulses to hurt himself? To feel life is worthless? That he is worthless? To think he might rather die?

He doesn’t need to tell me. I’ve been there. But I’ve been there only once. He is there so often, and no matter how many times he pulls himself back up, he will always know with certainty that in the future he will be dragged back down. He’s such a fighter. Lovingly, I trace my tongue over the grooves of his abs, his muscled arms, his throat, at the seam of his lips.

He turns away. “What am I doing, Brooke?” he asks.

I stiffen at his blank tone of voice.

“Do I think I can be a father? That I could even be a husband to you?” He turns with a strange, pained noise and buries that sound in the pillow, his muscles bulging as he slides his arms under the pillow to hold it to his face.

“Remy,” I say, forcing my voice to stop trembling and the pain inside me to shut. The fuck. Up. “I don’t care what your mind is telling you, how it’s making your body feel—you know. Remy. You know. You are good and noble and you deserve this. You want this.” I slide my arm around his waist and press closer.

“I deserve to be put down. Like a dog.”

The tears that had formed only moments ago slide out of my eyelids. “No, you don’t, no, you don’t.”

He shifts away from me but I don’t let him. I twine my arms around his shoulders and stop him from rolling farther away, and I run my fingers through his hair and caress his scalp. “I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you like a crazy fucking lunatic. If you’re a mess, I want to be a mess with you. Just let me touch you—don’t pull away,” I whisper, sniffing. He groans and turns his face into the pillow again, and as I touch him, he almost winces. But I touch up his arm, trace the B on his bicep, the Celtic tattoos. The noises he makes, like a true lion, like a wounded lion, make me feel as desperate and fierce as a lioness trying to lure back the interest of her mate.

I’ve thought it difficult, sometimes, when he’s manic, because he’s such a ball of energy, and so difficult to control. But nothing is as hard as right now, when my fighter is down in the dark, when he doesn’t want to do anything. When he feels he’s not worth it.

Brushing my fingers up his jaw, I scratch my nails into his scalp in a way I know he likes, and he lets me, but he doesn’t open his eyes, only makes those low, dark growling noises.

“Do you want to listen to music?” I ask him, and he doesn’t say no, so I reach for his iPod and place an earbud in his ear and one in mine, and I play “I Choose You” by Sara Bareilles.

He listens to the song as I pet him, exactly like he has petted me, and I want him to feel exactly how his petting and licking make me feel. I want him to feel cherished, protected, understood, wanted, loved, and nurtured. So I try my best . . . and I know my hands are not as big as his . . . and I know my tongue is smaller on his nape . . . but I know he likes my touch and he likes my tongue on him. . . .

So “I Choose You” plays about me choosing him . . . and how he is becoming mine and I am becoming his. . . .

And I whisper in his ear, “I will always choose you, Remy. From the first day I saw you, I loved what I saw and every day I love it more. And I love what I touch, the man I hold right here, right now.” I press the mound of my stomach into the small of his back. I’m unquestionably pregnant now, and it’s a tough maneuver to get the fit just right, but I really want to hold him as close as I can.

He suddenly rolls over. His arms wind around me like vises and then he rests his forehead between my breasts, holding on to me. He doesn’t look at me, but I feel his need. I graze the top of his head with my lips and relax in his grip, so he knows I like being here.

Suddenly, he groans into my skin and his muscles ripple as he eases off me with visible effort and plops back down on the bed. “Go out, baby. Go somewhere else. I’m no good like this.”

Something squeezes in me. I don’t want him to feel coddled or pitied, so I plump my pillow like all is well and say, “I don’t want to go anywhere. I’d rather be here with you.”

He spares a look at me, and my heart moves just to feel those eyes on me. It beats even faster when he reaches out. He slides his fingers into my hair, his gaze never leaving me. His eyes have never been so bleak; he looks haunted, but in the black of his irises, I still see him. That fire that is him. That drive, that intensity, lurking in the background like a tiger. His hands coast down my spine, then drag around to my front and pass over my hard, sensitized nipples, then he rests his head on me and spreads his hand open on my stomach.

“You really want to be with me,” he says gruffly. The hunter in him is still there. The lion. The raw instinct that is him. He pins me down with a questioning look that almost feels like a command. Yes, his eyes are dark and bleak, but those irises are still alive and hungry. Hungry for my affection, I realize. For me.

“Yes, Remy,” I say, without a hint of doubt, either in my voice or in me. “I do want to be with you. And don’t call me a masochist, because you’re my everything. My adventure and my real, rolled into one sexy, jealous, beautiful package, and you make me ridiculously happy. Nora might have turned into a junkie, and now I realize I’m no different. I’m addicted to you. You’re my crack, and you also happen to be the only dealer.”

He closes his eyes and exhales.

“You might not want to be with you now, but I want to be with you,” I tell him. “I left my entire life just to come be with you. Just you. And you know it wasn’t a bad life.” I stroke his hair. “I made my rent; I had good, caring parents, kick-ass friends, and could get a job in my new career. I left all that. I’ve left my dreams behind so I can come chase after yours—and after you. Like some stupid groupie.” An amused little laugh leaves me.

He lugs his big, solid body up to a sitting position on the bed, tips my head back, and cuts off my laugh with his mouth. “You’re no stupid groupie,” he whispers into me, sucking up my reply before he adds, “You’re my female, and you’re too fucking good for me.”

I shudder when he pulls me down and under him, and I moan and touch every bit of his skin that I can. “And you’re my male and are too good and precious for anyone, but you’re still my. Male. Mine.”

He growls and rolls over onto me so his erection is between my legs, his tormented gaze clinging to mine for hope as he jerks one of my legs around his hips. Then he grabs me by the knee and does the same with the other.

“I love you,” I say breathlessly. I thought I said it all the time, but I guess he needs me to say it right now, for the way his features go raw when he hears it makes my insides bubble with the need to say it again. Lifting my head, I repeat it with each kiss I place on his face. I decide to say it until he tires of it, and it takes a long, long time for him to finally take my mouth to quiet me.

At least sixty-four kisses.

He enters me on kiss thirteen. He moves in me, pushing deep each time I say “I love you,” taking it with a thrust, like the only way he thinks I will love him is for him to take it forcibly from me. “I love you,” I moan out on the next thrust, and he closes his eyes, and I feel him desperately sucking up my tenderness. I try holding my orgasm at bay as I hold on to his shoulders, saying “I love you, I love you,” but he’s hot, he’s beautiful, he needs me, and I need him. He takes me to the peak even as I fight it, and I orgasm at “I love you” number sixty-two.

His eyes look even more ravenous by then, like all my “I love yous” only kindled more of his hunger. And when he starts coming in me, he watches me as if he’s not sure he believes me yet, because he can’t believe himself to be lovable. So when he can’t help himself and crushes my mouth with his and shoves his tongue in, rough and hard, I grab him and kiss him back even harder.

He shudders in me, his muscles clenching. He grabs my hips to still me, but I rock them, coaxing him to come all the way in me. He moans softly and suckles my tongue, and I curl my legs tighter and lock them at the small of his back, my arms tight around him as he lets go, and when his muscles stop flexing and rippling, I still remain holding him, so he won’t get rid of me. He spares me his weight when he sags, and I come with him, entangled, burying my face in his neck as he rolls to his side. He’s still in me, and I don’t want him to come out.

“Don’t come out,” I moan.

He comes out as he turns me around, then maneuvers himself back in and starts licking me, one hand splayed on my breast, the other over my stomach. I moan and think I want to cry with happiness, because my lion is back. At least he cares enough about something. About us.

Like the baby and I care about him too.

Later, he plays a song for me called “Hold Me Now” by Red, and I realize he’s just asking me to hold him. I do, turning to him once he’s stopped grooming me, urging him to set his face down on my chest until his big body seems curled like he’s trying to fit himself to me, and even then, his hand is spread possessively over our baby.

♥  ♥  ♥

A WEEK PASSES.

Aside from the few hours Remington forces himself to go train, he stays in our room, and he doesn’t seem to want me out of his sight. He doesn’t talk to me much, but he keeps an arm around me like a vise, and he wants me to feed him and fuck him all the time. I try keeping him interested in life, so I tell him about little things I’m able to glimpse when I go out of the room to bring us food. I tell him that I caught Diane and Coach kissing the other day. I tell him that Melanie is hard at work finding patterns for our baby’s room, and that Pete seems sad about Nora. He likes listening—I know he does.

The final approaches, and Remington hasn’t yet made it to the fighting ring on any of the recent nights. He’s dropped to second place after Scorpion. He could’ve fallen even more, but Scorpion lost a couple; he’s fighting while on drugs, according to Pete, and he hasn’t been as sharp as usual. To think that Nora is with that asshole worries me sick. She could be equally drugged and helpless, but the thought corrodes me in such a way I really can’t think about that now. All I want is for Remington to successfully finish this season—this is his dream. Then . . . then we have to find a way to once again get Nora home safe, even though I know, in my gut, the men have been planning something, but it doesn’t help my unease.

But now we’re three days away from the big fight, and Remington is still completely dark. Today he went to train and didn’t even look anyone in the eye. I know he feels things, bad things. I know he doesn’t voice them because it would be losing, and he won’t ever lose. Except for when he lost for you, a sad little voice tells me.

Everyone has grown extremely worried, and I feel especially concerned when Remy asks me to call Pete and Riley. They knock at the door of the master, and I cover Remy’s naked body with the white bedsheet so that only his muscled back and arms are exposed, and lead them inside.

“They’re here,” I say.

Riley approaches first and kneels at the side of the bed. “Hey, Rem, how you doing?”

“Bad,” he warns.

“What’s up?” Pete says.

Silence.

“I want you to take me . . . to the damn hospital . . . and schedule me.”

Riley’s eyes flare wide, as do Pete’s. The boys look at me for a moment, and Remington repeats exactly what he has just said. “I want you to take me . . . to the damn hospital . . . and schedule me to get that procedure,” he adds.

Something in his words—in the way the men hesitate before answering—send a new rush of alarm skittering through me. “You want to do that again,” Riley says.

He nods against his pillow. “Now,” he firmly stresses.

Riley turns helplessly to Pete, who after a moment grabs his phone. “First we need to see when it can be done. Let me call the hospital,” he says and starts dialing, stalking out of the room.

“It’ll perk you right up,” Riley says as he shoots up to his feet and pats Remington’s back with a solid thunk.

Remington grabs him by the tie and pulls him closer as he sits up. “Don’t fucking patronize me. Just take me there and don’t you dare let her see,” he grits.

My eyebrows flick upward when I realize Remington thinks I left the room, and Riley’s eyes shift momentarily my way, a signal to not to let on that I heard. But I’m not lying to Remington ever again, so I step forward.

“I want to be with you. If they medicate you or do anything else to you. I want to be there and I’m going to be there.”

He straightens at the sound of my voice, but he first looks at Riley. “Riley . . .” he warns. Riley loosens his tie as Remy swings his head to look at me. “You stay here and I’ll be back.” He speaks gruffly but with obvious caring, using a complete different tone with me than the one he’d been using with the men.

“I don’t think so,” I stubbornly counter, because, seriously, I’m not budging on this. The three are acting as if I’m an incompetent, weak little rosebud!

Remy narrows his eyes and clamps his jaw at my stubbornness, and I lift both my eyebrows and cross my arms.

“I go where you go. Understand? Whatever it is, it’s no big deal,” I say.

He stays locked on my stare, a muscle working in the back of his jaw.

“It’s no. Big. Deal!” I assure, bluffing with everything I’ve got.

But I’m not letting him out of my sight.