Jhene #3
We’re some of the only people here this late at night. One of the few movie-goers I do see is some man in a rumpled trench coat shuffling out of room four with a guilty expression and a conspicuous stain on the crotch area of his pants.
I can’t help the snicker that escapes me.
Killian’s bought us a large bucket of popcorn and some sodas as we settle into seats near the back of the empty theater.
If it were anyone else, I’d be extremely nervous about sitting alone in a large dark room. But after the past couple weeks in the boneman’s company, my nervous system is calm.
It’s learned Killian is no threat; he would never hurt me.
The screen flickers to life to show us previews. It turns out they’re old trailers for movies that came out before I was born.
…which actually makes them even more enjoyable as I grab a handful of popcorn and watch a young Jack Nicholson hack away at a door with an axe.
“How often do you do this?” I ask around a mouthful of popcorn.
“Couple times a month. When I need to get out of my own head,” Killian answers.
He stretches his legs out in front of him, his massive frame barely fitting in the theater seat.
“Told you—bars and clubs aren’t an option.
Anywhere other than the Banshee, that is.
Too many people who want to fuck, fight, or take pictures for their damn social media.
But nobody comes to a place like this except insomniacs and weirdos. ”
“Which category do you fall into?”
“Both.”
The corner of my mouth twitches. “I think we have more in common than you realize.”
The movie starts with the title card and the year the film was made.
Al Pacino’s face fills the screen, young and intense and desperate, and within minutes I’m drawn into the story of a bank robbery gone horribly wrong.
But what I notice more than the movie is Killian.
He knows every line.
Every beat and pause. Every single moment of tension in the story.
I catch him mouthing the dialogue under his breath, lips moving silently in the darkness.
It’s startling as my gaze slides from the big screen to the big, burly boxer sitting next to me, and it dawns on me he really was serious.
He visits the Rialto late at night when he can’t sleep but wants to escape his studio. I can’t fault him for it. It’s actually endearing in a weird way that he’d choose this over some trendy bar or club around the city.
“How many times have you seen this movie?” I whisper.
“Probably about a dozen.”
“And you still watch it?”
He shrugs, his eyes stuck on the screen. “Good movies don’t get old. Many of them you can watch a hundred times and still get something new out of it.”
He’s got a point. Though it’s been so long since I’ve watched a movie start to finish, even the ones I’ve seen multiple times would be unfamiliar to me these days.
When the credits finally roll, Killian asks for my opinion.
“So, what’d you think?”
“I think Al Pacino needed a better exit strategy.”
He snorts. “He’d probably agree.”
“Do you always watch movies this old?”
“Only kind worth watching.” He stands, stretching his arms above his head until his shoulders pop. “Modern stuff is nothing but CGI and superheroes. All a fucking money grab. There’s no real grit or soul to them.”
“Can’t say if I agree. I’d need to watch a lot more movies than I have.”
“You said you weren’t allowed with the Bratva?”
“Fedorov wasn’t big on movie nights.”
Killian’s expression hardens, anger flickering in his dark eyes. He’s able to play it off with another roll of his shoulders.
“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
We leave the theater behind, venturing back into the warm summer night. It’s a quarter ’til four, not another living person anywhere on the side street we walk down.
Everybody’s either asleep in their homes or off in another part of town.
“It’s hard to enjoy stories,” I admit as we start walking. “I think my life feels too much like one. Something out of a movie. Right now I feel like I’m at the part where I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Killian grunts. “I know what you mean.”
“You do?”
“More than you’d think.”
We walk in silence for half a block, our footsteps falling into a casual rhythm with each other. For once I’m not rushing to keep up with him and he’s slowed down into more of a stroll for me.
“You got any other family?” he asks. “Besides Eva?”
It’s not every day I think about anyone besides her.
For so long, she’s been the center of my world. The only one I’ve cared about; really the only other person I had left…
“There’s my father,” I answer, shrugging. “He’s out there somewhere. I don’t know where but also don’t really care to find out either.”
“He an ass too?”
“More like a deadbeat. He left my mom when I was four. Eva was only weeks old. I guess he decided the family thing really wasn’t his vibe.”
“Sorry piece of shit,” he says bluntly. “But sometimes I wish I could say the same—that mine walked out on us rather than stay and terrorize us, day in and day out.”
My brows rise in mild surprise. “Your dad live close?”
“Right here in Brooklyn. Still don’t give a fuck about him. Only time I swing by is to see my ma. Otherwise, I’ve got nothing to say to him that I haven’t already said with my fists.”
We cross a dead intersection and make it onto the other side of the street, only a few blocks left to go until Killian’s apartment building.
I’m hardly noticing, so invested in what he’s revealed.
“Your fists?” I repeat. “You’ve used them on your father?”
“He was a drunk,” he answers. “A mean one, the worst kind.
Came home every night looking for somebody to take his shit out on, and there we were—me, my ma, and my baby sister, Maeve.
Three people smaller and weaker than him, trapped in an apartment with a man who hated himself so much he had to make everybody else suffer for it.
“He beat my mother many times over the years. Every so often, he’d come for me and Maeve instead. I learned real quick how to take a punch. How to put myself between him and my sister. Couldn’t bear to see him hurt her, even when I wasn’t much bigger than she was. So I’d take double the beating.”
My chest aches with a familiar pain. I know what it’s like to be small and helpless and at the mercy of someone powerful and cruel.
“What made it stop?”
“A boy doesn’t stay a boy for long. I grew up.
Got bigger. Stronger. Faster than him. One night when I was fifteen, he came home drunker than usual and started in on my ma.
Beat her so bad she needed reconstructive surgery on her face.
I was gone for most of it, but when I walked in on the middle of it—I blacked out.
I did what I’d been dreaming about doing for years. ”
“You fought back…” I murmur.
He nods. “More than fought back. I beat him into a coma. Put him in a vegetative state. He’s been sitting in a recliner watching Jeopardy reruns ever since, and he’ll stay that way ’til the day he dies.”
It’s a dark and disturbing confession spoken in the late hours of night.
Some people would look at Killian and think he must’ve taken things too far if he put his own father in a comatose state. If he was able to beat him until he became a vegetable.
But I find it morbidly comforting.
Nobody’s ever fought so hard for me and Eva. Even our own mother left us in the end.
“Don’t worry,” he goes on when I remain silent. “I don’t go around beating people into comas often—outside of work. I prefer to use my fists only when on the job.”
“Actually,” I say, “it sounds like you did what you had to do. To protect your mom and baby sister. I’d do the same for mine if I could.”
“That’s what I tell myself. Not everybody agrees.”
“Like who? Your father?”
“He’s too brain dead to have a thought on it. I mean my ma.”
I stop walking, half turning to face him. “She doesn’t agree? But you were defending her!”
He’s stopped too, both of us illuminated only by the dim streetlamp a few feet away. The rest of the city street feels like background decoration, we’re so locked into our conversation.
“She’s never forgiven me,” he says. “For what I did to him. For the lasting effects it had on our family. She thinks I took things too far.”
“But he was hurting her. He could’ve killed her... and the rest of you.”
“Doesn’t matter. You want to see loyalty? Look to how devoted my ma is to him. She’ll stay by his side ’til the day she dies, shattered eye bone and all. In her eyes, she took vows and will abide by those the rest of her life.”
“Wow,” I murmur in disbelief. “Whatever she thinks, it doesn’t matter. I think you did the right thing, and a lot of people would too.”
We start walking again, still at a slow and leisurely pace.
The sky’s beginning to lighten at the edges, the first hints of dawn creeping over the Brooklyn rooftops. Soon the birds will wake up and start twittering.
“I should get you home,” Killian says. “Then I’ve got to head to the gym. Dez’ll have my ass if I miss another session.”
“You’re going to train? After being up all night? Again? You were just there last night.”
“Sleep’s overrated.”
I shake my head but choose not to argue.
We both know he’s running on fumes, burning himself out between the war with the Bratva and his upcoming fight. But pointing that out won’t change anything.
Killian’s as stubborn as I am.
Instead, I find myself saying, “It doesn’t hurt to blow off steam sometimes, you know. I mean more than going to a late-night movie when you can’t sleep.”