Worth the fight

smiles at me as he walks into the kitchen.  “Very good.”
    “I’m impressed.  You can cook?”  I never gave it any thought before, but in the years that I have been seeing William, he has never once cooked for me.  I’m not even sure if he even can cook.
    “Don’t look so surprised.  I’m pretty good at it, if I m ay say so myself.”  Nico walks to the oven and checks on dinner.
    “Do you cook often?”  I’m so curious about this man.
    “I have to, it’s part of the sport.  You can’t keep in shape and eat crap, so you learn to cook healthy pretty fast if you’re serious about fighting.”
    I nod , it makes sense.  It’s next to impossible to maintain a good diet when you live off restaurants and takeout.  I should know.  The only choice is salad, which is how I have been able to keep thin, but a man that looks like Nico needs an intake of way more calories than a salad could supply.  “Do you still fight?”  I don’t even think before the words come out of my mouth.  Maybe he doesn’t like to talk about fighting.  I remember the newspaper saying he had retired after what had happened, but he was definitely younger than whatever the normal age is for fighters to retire.
    Nico tells me dinner is ready and puts out an entire meal of salad, vegetables and the main dish.  I noticed that he didn’t answer my question, and I ’m not sure if it was intentional or just the timing.
    We sit at the table for a long time after we eat.  I tease him about how domestic he is and he teases me about how dependent I am on takeout.  He laughs when I tell him I’m on a first name basis with at least five deliverymen.  Our conversation flows naturally and time goes by fast.  Too fast.  Eventually we relocate to the couch and our conversation turns to how he got into MMA.  Nico tells me he’s the youngest of four boys and was raised by a single mother who worked two jobs.
    “I got my ass kicked a lot.  M y mom was at work at night and my brothers were into wrestling big time.”
    I laugh at the notion that Nico could get his ass kicked.  “You?  I hate to see what your brothers look like.” 
    Nico laughs, “I was always big for my age.  When I was eight or nine my mother would warn my brothers that some day I was going to be bigger and stronger and get even with them for the years of ganging up on me.  I don’t think they expected that day to come when I was only twelve.” 
    “How old were your brothers when you were twelve?”
    “We’re all two years apart so they were fourteen, sixteen and eighteen.”
    “You were bigger than the e ighteen-year-old at twelve?”
    “I don’t know if I was bigger than him back then.  But I could fight better.  I remember the day that it happened too.  Joe, the e ighteen-year-old, came home and I was drinking out of his cup.”
    “His cup?  He had his own cup?”
    Nico laughs.  “It sounds worse than it is.  But yeah, he had a cup and none of us were allowed to drink out of it.  I used to take it out when he wasn’t home and pour a big glass of milk and dunk my cookies into it.” 
    “On purpose?”  
    “Yeah, on purpose.  I liked to use it when he wasn’t home, it gave me a secret satisfaction.”  Nico smiles and shakes his head, realizing how sill y it sounds to have taken satisfaction from using someone else’s cup.  “But one day he came home early and caught me.  We went at it like we usually did.  We broke the coffee table and the end table wrestling around.   Mom used to get pissed when we broke the furniture.  But after we rolled around for a while, I pinned his ass to the floor.”
    I smile watching Nico tell his story with such fondness in his voice.  I’d never heard anyone speak of fighting with such reverence.  To me, fighting has always meant hatred and violence and ugly things.  But oddly enough, when Nico speaks of his brothers he makes it sounds like it comes from love and beauty.
    Nico stands , “How about a glass of wine?” 
    “Sure, I’d love that.”
    Nico brings me a glass of wine, but nothing for himself.  “Aren’t you having one?”
    “I don’t drink when I’m training.”  He sits next to me on the couch, much closer than he had been before.  My leg touches his inadvertently when I lean forward to set my drink down a nd when I look back at Nico he’s looking at our legs where they meet.  He notices me watching him and he brings his eyes back to mine.  I’m mesmerized