Kiva’s Fight Journal

[npom]

Great story Kiva!!!

Wish it could have been in one of my old Sports Review Wrestling magazines!

[Tiberius J.C.]

This story is brilliant! You've singlehandedly turned catfight fiction into an art form. It works on every level: as an intrigue, the earpiece is an ingenious twist on the Puppet Master theme. I must confess, it took me a while to realise where the sound was coming from. The little cheat! The pair of cheats! I'm glad Kiva beat her up. The fight itself is so vividly described and the action - unusually on this site - is perfectly credible, both in the way the advantage switches (most writers overdo this - fights don't see-saw endlessly, there may be one or at most two twists in the action but seldom, if ever, more) and in terms of the holds used and their effects. The fighters are both sexy and fully drawn as characters, which makes it so much more powerful. Interestingly you've decided not to make Craig a fight fan. He has no moral objections (he'd be a right pain in the butt if he had...) but it clearly isn't his thing, and that makes the story far more nuanced and convincing. Must stop - my rice is burning. In short, brilliant! One of the best, perhaps the best, catfight story ever - but it's a lot more than just a catfight story.

[Kiva]

Thank you all (or y'all)! Apartment House Wrestling in Sports Review Wrestling magazines were before my time. I hope those of you who were teenagers buying them on your corner drug store in the 70s and hiding them in your house from your parents enjoyed this re-imagining of the concept. AHW makes great source material for fiction stories. This is my second try at it and I think I'm done.

Writing this chapter has left me exhausted. I mentioned to some of you that I'm hoping to publish some mainstream short stories, so I tried to push the writing to another level with this one, focusing on mood and tone and dialogue.

My plan for KFJ is another chapter or two, then launch into one last story arc to close out the series. I'll be asking for your thoughts soon.

Be well,
Kiva

[🍷 𝗔𝘀𝗵𝘁𝗼𝗻 𝟳𝗖 🍷]

Thank you for you talents

[Rocko23]

Thank you a wonderful sweet chapter. Really glad Kiva won lol and nice reunion with Money Boy.

Take that Courtney lol!

[Tiberius J.C.]

This is lovely (after the grinding submission and the three seconds of 'afters'):

Courtney spills face-down into the shag, sucking air in long whooping pulls. And the anger, which should be finished now, isn't. It comes up off the floor with me. I swing a leg over and sit down on her back, take a handful of that loose dark hair, and press her face into the gold carpet -- not grinding, just holding, one long clinical beat, the way you hold a bell after ringing it.

Pressing her face into the carpet and holding it there. It's not violent. It's just utterly disrespectful, and the fact that she doesn't respond demonstrates to everyone (including the woman herself) that there's no fight left in her.

I'm not sure I understand the line that follows though:

This is who she brought here. Remember her.

I have various theories as to what that might mean. They may all be right, or perhaps none of them are. I'm still pondering, but 'Leave them with something to think about" is a good maxim, I think.

[Kiva]

I'm not sure I understand the line that follows though:

This is who she brought here. Remember her.

I have various theories as to what that might mean. They may all be right, or perhaps none of them are. I'm still pondering, but 'Leave them with something to think about" is a good maxim, I think.

Sometimes I throw in a line that's subject to interpretation. I'll make two suggestions and let readers decide:

This is who she brought here. Remember her.

1. "This" refers to the defeated woman whose face is pressed into the carpet - the "real" Courtney, the woman behind the facade of the shy girl who flips a switch at Bill's command and brutalizes and humiliates her opponents. "She" is the coached puppet version, Courtney's false version, who Kiva wants the defeated Courtney to remember. So as Kiva is humiliating Courtney and making her feel the defeat, she is saying, "this is where your fakery and cheating has gotten you. Don't forget it."

2. "She" can refer to Kiva. The theme of this story is Kiva integrating different versions of herself (nurse, mother, fighter, etc.) The line can mean, "I brought the fighter in me here tonight. Remember me" (as she presses Courtney's face into the carpet).

I hope these make sense. Or maybe I try to be too clever than I deserve.

[npom]

Thank you all (or y'all)! Apartment House Wrestling in Sports Review Wrestling magazines were before my time. I hope those of you who were teenagers buying them on your corner drug store in the 70s and hiding them in your house from your parents enjoyed this re-imagining of the concept. AHW makes great source material for fiction stories. This is my second try at it and I think I'm done.

Writing this chapter has left me exhausted. I mentioned to some of you that I'm hoping to publish some mainstream short stories, so I tried to push the writing to another level with this one, focusing on mood and tone and dialogue.

My plan for KFJ is another chapter or two, then launch into one last story arc to close out the series. I'll be asking for your thoughts soon.

Be well,
Kiva

My dad found my stash of Sports Review and Battling Girls. He was cool about it. Just said make your mom never sees these. 😂

[🍷 𝗔𝘀𝗵𝘁𝗼𝗻 𝟳𝗖 🍷]

"This is who she brought here. Remember her."


Maybe I was simplistic in my approach that it was just her and no one was bailing her out. She is on her own. You got the tools you brought, fix it or fail type thing.

[Kiva]

"This is who she brought here. Remember her."


Maybe I was simplistic in my approach that it was just her and no one was bailing her out. She is on her own. You got the tools you brought, fix it or fail type thing.

That's not too simplistic. It aligns with my first suggestion above. "You don't have Bill or anyone else to help you." Thanks for reading!

[Kiva]

Chapter 19: The Bitter Suite

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancin' way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I've looked at love that way

But now it's just another show
You leave 'em laughin' when you go
And if you care, don't let them know
Don't give yourself away

I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It's love's illusions, I recall
I really don't know love at all

-Joni Mitchell


The bride is twenty-six and radiant with the unguarded happiness of youth.  And I am happy for her in the way a divorced woman is happy at a wedding, which is to say, genuinely but with a small case of hiccups I developed during the ceremony.

It's a Texas hill country wedding, which means a lot of cedar and limestone and a massive tent for the reception. The venue is one of those cattle ranches that decided it could make a better profit in event planning.  It is two hundred acres of live oak and steep rocky bluffs just west of Fredericksburg. The barn has been "restored" which means it's perfect for photos. The large two-story farmhouse now serves as a hotel. The view of the valley is so pretty in the October twilight that bathes everything in honey-colored sunlight right before it fades to dark. The air smells like cedar and the caterer's smoked brisket, which is excellent. This is the part of the reception where we all hold our cocktails and mingle or look awkward or both.

I'm standing at the edge of the tent at cocktail hour with a glass of champagne I'm not really drinking . My dress is dark blue, knee-length. I had no idea what to wear to a hill country wedding, so the saleswoman at Dillard's recommended this one. It's fine. It's not memorable but I will not be the woman people remember at this wedding. That's the point.

I'm here because Gretchen, the bride, was my orientee three years ago. Green and terrified, fresh out of school, and with the cute Texas politeness that hides a spine of steel. She was a trooper. I taught her how to start an IV without blowing the vein, how to talk to a dying patient's family without falling apart, how to chart so the night shift doesn't hate you. She became an outstanding nurse. And now she's marrying a physical therapist named Kyle.  He's tall, with kind eyes and never stops smiling. He's the kind of man who laughs heartily with his whole chest and remembers your name. He looked at her during the ceremony like she was the answer to every prayer he ever whispered.

I watched his face during the vows, and I thought: I remember that face. I remember being Gretchen's face.

I hiccup again. Indigestion? Acid reflux maybe? Yes, that must be it.

I was twenty-six once, and I stood in front of people and said words I meant, and the man saying them back looked at me like that. And for a while, a long while actually,  it held. Marriage and a daughter and a life that looked, from the outside, like the advertisement brochure. And then it didn't hold, because of a video I didn't authorize and a trust I couldn't rebuild, and now I'm thirty-something and standing at the edge of a tent in a dress from Dillard's, watching someone else start the thing I started. The only difference between us is that she doesn't know yet how it can break.

Stop it, Kiva. Be happy for her. You are happy for her.

I am. The divorce doesn't cancel the memories of happiness. It just sits next to it, like a scar sits next to the skin that healed around it. You get used to it. Most days you don't notice.

A string quartet is playing something contemporary. The tent is draped in white cloth fabric and strung with Edison bulbs that cast everything in warm amber. The centerpieces are terra-cotta pots full of fall flowers: zinnias, cosmos, something rust-colored I can't name. The cake is three tiers and leaning slightly, which I find endearing. Guests mill and hold glasses and laugh in that cocktail hour banter that's not quite real laughter but close. I only know two of them. Kyle's and Gretchen's families seem like sweet people, the kind of people who say "y'all" and mean it like actual native Texans.

I should mingle. I should find Gretchen and hug her and tell her she looks beautiful, which she does in her bright and incandescent dress. I should make small talk with the groom's aunt from Lubbock who I heard is a retired OR nurse. I should be a normal woman at a normal wedding doing normal things.

Instead, I'm standing here holding champagne and noticing that I'm the only woman in this tent without a partner. There are couples everywhere. Couples holding hands. Some are sharing drinks. Another couple is doing that thing where one of them says something and the other laughs and touches the small of the other's back. It's such a small gesture but it means I'm here, I've got you, you're not alone. I haven't been touched like that in --

You're at a wedding, Kiva. You're not here to feel sorry for yourself.

I'm not. I'm here to celebrate Gretchen. I'm here because she asked me and I matter to her. Because three years ago I showed a scared twenty-three-year-old how to be a nurse and she never forgot it. That's the whole reason. That's what counts.

And yet.

The wrap around my shoulders keeps slipping. Under it, pinned to the dress where no one will see it unless they're looking, is my catpin.

I don't know why I wore it here. I told myself it was habit, the way some women carry a pocketknife or a rosary, not because they expect to use it, but because the weight of it makes them feel more grounded. The pin lives inside my jacket most days, or hidden under scrubs or a hoodie, as a small silver secret that says this woman, the one who looks like everyone else, is also someone else. I've worn it to the grocery store, PTA meetings, Clarissa's piano recital. I wore it to a funeral once, which in retrospect, was a questionable choice.

But a wedding is different. A wedding is where people go to feel good things. To feel hope and longing and the optimism that it'll last. And there's something about that kind of emotional density that does things to me. It loosens something the way a beautiful sunrise is supposed to do things. What I know is this: weddings make me feel the missing parts of my life, and the missing parts make me restless. I wear the pin because I'm lonely and I don't know what to do about it. Loneliness and restlessness, in my experience, results in energy looking for a place to land.

Stupid. This is a wedding. People dance to "Shout" at weddings. They don't fight.

But what's the harm? I ask myself. There is zero chance I'd fight another woman here. Even if a woman owned a catpin, who else in their right mind would wear it at a wedding?

Then I see her.

She's across the tent near the ice sculpture, standing with a bouquet of ivory roses tucked in the crook of one arm, talking to a man in a navy suit and short haircut. Her dark hair is pinned up for the wedding. With her green silk dress, long neck, and excellent posture, she's poised and put together well without trying. She's the bride's sister, Gretchen's maid of honor.  I've seen her in the framed family photos on Gretchen's desk at work. Same face, same half-smile that never quite commits itself.

Her name is Margot. I know she's an attorney in Houston and she's married to the navy suit man, and she has a four-year-old and a corner office in a large firm.  Another life that looks, from the outside, like an ad for having your act together.

I probably would have looked away if the wrap hadn't slipped again.

Her eyes drop to my dress. To the pin.

Then, with the smallest delay, she touches the chain at her own throat. Half hidden, glinting just above the neckline of the green silk, is the silver cat.

Well.

Her eyes come back up to mine, and the smile changes. It's private but no longer warm. A minute later she's beside me.

"You're Kiva," she says. "The famous nurse and preceptor."

I turn toward her, close enough that I could smells her perfume. "That's an unverified rumor," I joke.

"Gretchen loves you," she says. "She still talks about the first time you made her start an IV on a real person."

"I stood over her like a prison guard until she did it."

Margot laughs softly. "I can imagine that."

I let my eyes flick once, very deliberately, to the silver cat at her throat. "You know, most women don't wear those to weddings."

She follows my look, then glances down at my own pin where the wrap has betrayed me again. "Interesting criticism from a woman also wearing one to a wedding."

Fair enough.

"Does Gretchen know?"

"She thinks I gave it up." She looks at the bride, at the string lights going on as the sky dims to violet. "I did, mostly. After the baby. Then a year ago I met a woman at a charity gala in Houston who had one, and it turns out I hadn't given it up. I'd just been on a break.

"Why do you have yours on?" I ask.

She doesn't answer the question. She turns slightly, enough that we are now closed off to the rest of the cocktail hour. Around us, the quartet plays something traditional and the guests keep doing the soft-focus dance of affluent white people at a wedding. Margot studies me for several seconds longer than a stranger should.

Then she says, "You wore it because weddings make lonely women restless."

I blink.

She continues, her voice calm. "You look like a woman who's good at being useful to other people, but not always so good at being happy. Divorced. One child. A husband - ex-husband - seeing someone you don't like, and more to the point, someone you don't want anywhere near your kid. You came here to celebrate your former orientee, and instead you've spent the first hour trying not to think about what being twenty-six and vibrantly in love felt like when you were doing it."

I just stare at her.

"Who told you all that?" I ask.

"No one."

She lifts one shoulder and continues. "You have the face."

"I have a face?"

"You have a divorced face." Another tiny shrug. "Also, a nurse face. Women like you think every feeling can be triaged if you categorize it correctly."

I let out one short laugh despite myself. "You're either psychic or a cruel genius."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

She takes a sip of champagne and looks out across the tent where Gretchen is laughing in a gathering of bridesmaids and string lights. For the first time, I see tiredness around the edges of her eyes. It's not drunkenness or the fatigue of a long day. It's something more chronic.

"So," I say carefully, "if we're doing readings now, why are you wearing one?"

Her gaze stays on the crowd. "I got my reasons."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting."

I recognize that tone. It's the tone patients use when they're willing to tell you they hurt but not disclose how they got that way.

Before I can decide whether to press her, she turns back to me.

"My husband has to make an appearance," she says, nodding toward the man in the navy suit. "He'll leave after the cake. Flight to Dallas. Apparently, civilization will collapse if he misses it. I'll be driving home alone tomorrow."

She says it matter-of-factly like it's just information. But she says "apparently" like she doesn't entirely believe it.

A toast goes up somewhere behind us. Gretchen laughs again. Margot watches her sister for a moment that seems almost tender.

Then she says, very quietly, "The bridal suite upstairs will be empty after ten. They won't be using it. They're leaving straight for the airport. It's already paid for as part of the package. They said I could stay there overnight and head home tomorrow. I have the key."

I look at her.

She looks back.

No smile now. Or the half-smile either. Just the directness of a woman who seems done lying to herself.

"If that's suitable for you," she says.

I glance once toward the dance floor, where Gretchen is beginning the life she chose freely, and once toward the hill country as the sun is setting beyond the tent, where the cedar trees become silhouettes keeping their own private secrets.

Then I turn back to Margot.

"It's suitable," I say.

We don't say anything after that.

The quartet gives way to a playlist. The sun drops behind the hills. One final glow hangs over the limestone for ten minutes and then is gone, replaced by more strings of light bulbs.

The maid of honor speech is funny in the way big sister speeches are funny.  There are a few embarrassing stories, a mention of braces and glasses, a sudden turn into a poignancy enough to quiet the whole tent. Margot gives it beautifully. Champagne glass in one hand, note card in the other, voice steady and controlled. She never once glanced in my direction. If I didn't know about the catpin, the bridal suite, or wonder what else lives behind that half-smile, I would think she was the calmest woman in Texas.

Gretchen cries. Kyle cries. Half the tent cries because nothing is more contagious than two beautiful twenty-six-year-olds promising each other forever while string lights come on behind them.

I clap with everyone else. I even mean it.

The cake is cut. There's laughter when Kyle gets icing on Gretchen's nose. Then comes their first dance as a couple. The dance floor fills. The groom's mother takes my arm and says, "You're the nurse Gretchen loves," as if this explains everything about me worth knowing. Then Kyle appears, and asks if I would dance with him "because Gretchen says you exceed all of us."

So, I dance with the groom.

He's warm and earnest and an excellent dancer. "She adores you," he says over my shoulder.

"Gretchen was a good student," I reply. "She has an unfortunate tendency to make her teachers seem better than they are."

He laughs. "No, I mean it. First month you trained her, she'd say, 'Kiva says...' like she was quoting scripture."

"That's alarming. I mostly taught her how not to blow veins and how to avoid charting herself into legal jeopardy."

"That's scripture in your world."

I smile into his shoulder, and because he's newly married and too decent to do anything but tell the truth, he adds quietly, "She said you taught her how to stay kind without being soft."

That one gets in.

By the time the dance is over, my eyes are tearing up and I blame the cedar pollen.

The bride and groom leave just after nine-thirty for the airport. Everyone gathers outside the tent to send them off through a tunnel of sparklers. The photographer is in his glory. Gretchen hugs everyone. When she gets to me, she clings for a second.

"Thank you," she says into my hair.

"For what?"

"For everything."

I kiss her cheek. "Go be adventurous," I tell her. "It's the one night in life where it's mandatory."

Kyle hugs me next, grateful and slightly overwhelmed, like many grooms. They get into the vintage white getaway car under a hail of cheers and sparks and camera flashes and are chauffeured down the ranch road into the cedar dark.

I look around once the headlights disappear.

Margot is nowhere in sight.

The party doesn't end but it changes. The older relatives drift home. The younger ones move toward the bar with new determination. The playlist gets louder and faster. Somewhere behind me, two of Kyle's cousins are singing George Strait badly. A woman in metallic heels is crying in the ladies' room for reasons that are unknown.

I set my champagne glass on a linen-draped high-top table and leave the tent without telling anyone.

The farmhouse sits back from the main event space, all stone and timber and rustic. One upstairs window is lit. I know which room it is before I climb the stairs.

The hall is quiet and empty. The music from outside comes up through the floorboards as a muffled thump.

The bridal-suite door is unlocked.

When I open it, the first thing I notice is the size. It's not a bedroom. It's a suite designed for staging a lifetime memory. A king bed dominates the center of the room, dressed in white linen and cream silk pillows, with scattered rose petals across the coverlet. A bottle of complimentary champagne sits in a silver bucket beside two glasses no one has touched. There is a sitting area by the windows with upholstered chairs, a coffee table with a fruit plate and chocolate-covered strawberries. A marble bathroom glows beyond an open door, all mirrors and soft gold light and large his-and-hers sinks. A garment rack stands empty in the corner except for one white satin robe with Bride stitched across the back in gold script. The whole room smells faintly of garden roses.

And there, standing beside the bed is Margot.

The green dress is gone.

Margot stands beside the bed in a black bra and matching laced panties, her hair still pinned up but now with a few loose strands around her face. Barefoot on the cream carpet. The maid of honor, the Houston attorney, the woman who read me like a book across the ice sculpture distilled to this. She's leaner than the green silk suggested, with a faint softness at her belly. Good shoulders. Runner's legs. In her late thirties, she's maintained herself well.

She also has a slight edge in height and a weight over me.

She's folded her dress over the back of one of the upholstered chairs.

"You came," she says.

"I said I would."

"People say a lot of things at weddings."

I close the door behind me. The lock is one of those heavy brass bolts that turns with a solid clicking final sound. I turn it.  The muffled sound of the party outside becomes the only reminder of why we came here.

I set my clutch purse on the dresser, next to the untouched champagne icing in its bucket. Then I kick off my high heels and reach back for the zipper of the Dillard's dress.

It's a strange thing, undressing in front of a woman you're about to fight. You feel even more vulnerable than if you were stripping in front of a man. Margot watches me the way I watched her. Her eyes sweep, sizing up reach and weight and whatever tells the body gives away without realizing it. I step out of the dress and fold it over the same chair as hers, dark blue over green silk, a forty-nine-dollar dress lying across an eight-hundred dollar one like they belong to the same story now.

I'm in the navy bra and underwear I bought at Target because I genuinely did not expect anyone to see them tonight. Not lace or sexiness. Practical. My body is approaching forty and my belly is a little soft. I don't suck in. I just stand there and let her look, the way I let her read me downstairs.

"Rules?" I ask.

"Do we need them?"

"You have your clients to see and I have my patients."

She considers that. "All right. Submission or knockout. Nothing to the face?"

"Open-hand slaps to the face are fine. No closed fists above the neck. Body punches are legal. Hair pulling's legal. No eyes, no biting." I roll my shoulders. "And either of us can stop it. If you or I tap or say stop, it's over."

"That's very responsible of you."

"I'm a nurse. Responsible is the whole job."

"Is that why you do this?" She tilts her head with real curiosity. "Because you spend all day being responsible for everyone else's body, and this is the one time you get to be irresponsible with your own?"

I don't answer that right away, because it's closer to true than I'd like a stranger to get twice in one night.

"You keep doing that," I say. "Reading me."

"I read everyone. I'm an attorney." She glances at the bed between us, at the rose petals scattered across white linen and the whole stage for a marriage's first night. "You want to know my reasons. You've been wanting to since the tent."

"Well?"

She doesn't give it to me. She just steps around the foot of the bed, and I step to meet her. There's maybe eight feet of cream carpet between us and the rose petals off to the side on top of the bed like an audience that walked into the wrong theater and decided to stay for the spectacle.

Outside, the playlist changes to something slow. Couples are slow-dancing on the ranch below us, swaying under string lights, still believing in romance, or at least trying.

Up here, it's just the two of us and the bridal suite and the smell of roses that were never meant for this.

Strangely, the wedding hasn't left us. I can feel it. The sweetness of Gretchen's face, the sparklers, the groom's hand warm on my back, the whole tender moment of two people starting the thing I started once. It's all still stirring in my chest, and I think it's stirring in Margot's too. The maid of honor who watched her little sister marry into a happiness she may not have at home, who gave the beautiful speech and never once looked at me, who came up here and folded her dress and now stands facing another woman for combat in her underwear.

That's what neither of us will say out loud. The wedding cracked something open in both of us, and we can't put it back, and there's only one thing in this room we know how to do with it.

"Look, Kiva," Margot says, "I know how much you mean to Gretchen. I don't want to put you in a situation where you feel uncomfortable fighting her sister. She doesn't need to know.  If that's not enough for you, I understand, and we can put our dresses back on and go downstairs and dance, and I'll buy you a drink and we'll never talk about it. The catpin board won't find out  about it."

"I know."

"But you don't want to back out."

"No," I say. "And neither do you."

She nods slowly, and I watch as Margot's face transforms from the maid of honor to something else.  Gone is the woman with composure, the champagne toast poise, and the note-card steadiness. What's underneath is rawer and more honest, and it's now looking straight at me.

"Then let's get it done," she says. "Ready? Let's fight."

We start to circle.

Margot's hands come up first. Her chin is tucked behind her lead shoulder, elbows in, weight on the balls of her feet. A boxer's stance. She flicks a jab to test the distance and it catches me high on the cheek, a stinging pop that makes my eye water. It's not a completely closed fist, but it's not a pure slap either. Before I've blinked it away, she's doubled it.  Pop-pop. the second one snapping my head half around.

I ordinarily don't mind boxing. I've had some training and I'm a good striker.

But Margot seems well trained and experienced. She circles right out of my range, using her reach advantage. I throw a right hook that comes nowhere close to her body. She counters with another jab. I get a forearm up in time and it thuds off my wrist. She steps in behind it and cracks a left hook into my ribs that I feel in my teeth. The breath leaves me in a grunt.

She's fast and she's mean and she has been taught, and I am getting picked apart. If I stand here trading with her, she'll have me on the carpet inside a minute seeing double.

So, I stop trading.

I take one on the mouth that might have split my lip. Then I'm inside, past her hands where she can't jab, and I wrap her up. Both arms around her, chest to chest, my head buried against her collarbone so she can't get an uppercut going.  I drive off my legs the way Austin drilled into me. Strength comes up from the floor.

Margot grunts and tries to push off me. She tries to create the space her game needs, but I don't give it to her. I walk her backward, three hard stomping steps. The back of her thighs hit the mattress and I drive... and we go down onto the bride's bed together in a heap of thrashing limbs.

Rose petals await under us, crushed flat by our weight. I feel them mash wet against my sweat-slick skin, I feel them cling and smear. Margot's nails find my shoulder and rake down like hot lines of fire. When I glance down there's red streaking my arm and I honestly can't tell in the low gold light what's blood and what's crushed petal. Both, probably. Red on red on white linen.

She's not done. She hooks a heel behind my knee, bridges her hips hard, and rolls us, and suddenly it's her weight on top of me.  Her undone hair falls loose around both our faces like a curtain. She postures up and drives a short punch down into my body, then another, her fist sinking into my stomach.

I cover, tuck, and grab onto the front clasp of her bra resting against her sternum. I yank on it to pull her closer and slap her hard. The flat crack of my open hand rings off the marble in the adjacent bathroom. Her head whips. When it comes back around her lipstick is dragged sideways across her cheek in a red smear.  A strand of hair is stuck to her wet mouth and her left cup of her bra has been pulled down, exposing her bare breast.

"Fuck you, Dana," she snarls.

Dana?  Did she forget my name already?

Margot grabs a fistful of my hair at the crown and wrenches my head back over the edge of the bed, exposing my throat. She leans down into my face; her voice comes out low and shaking.

"You think I can't see it?" she growls. A slap rocks my head to the side. "Every late flight. Every deposition." Another slap, backhand this time. "You come to my sister's wedding--"

She's not fighting somebody else, Kiva. Get out from under it.

I plant my feet flat on the mattress, bridge up hard, throwing her weight forward onto her hands  and wriggle my hips out the way I've done a thousand reps in Austin's gym, wedging my forearm into the gap, bridge again, wriggle again, and on the third one, I rip my head free of her grip as a fistful of my own hair is left behind in her fingers. I scramble, and now it's me climbing over her, reversing the position. The name that comes out of my mouth isn't hers either.

"You don't get to be in her life," I hear myself say, and the voice is uglier than mine and it's been coiled up in my chest for months. "Jeanne."

I pin her wrist to the linen and slap her with a full hip turn like a golf club swing, the way you hit something you hate. And for one terrible second, it's Jeanne's face under me and not Margot's at all.

"You don't get to sit in my chair at my daughter's recitals." SLAP! "You don't get to be the fun one." SLAP! "You just...you just walked in like the spot was empty..."

Margot bucks and we both go off the side of the bed.

We hit the floor and grab on to each other's hair, our hands grabbing, slapping, and scratching any skin or pulling on any part of underwear available. We catball on the floor, with both of us holding hair in one fist and punching with the other.  We crash into the coffee table causing it to  flip over, and everything on it goes flying. The fruit bowl falls as grapes go bouncing, apple slices skid across the carpet. The plate of chocolate-dipped strawberries upends on us in a tumble of dark and red. We roll straight through it. I feel a cold and wet strawberry burst under my hip. Margot's hand closes on one and mashes it into the side of my face, chocolate and pulp grinding into my cheek and my hair. It's so obscene, so completely stripped of any dignity either of us walked in with, that a wild laugh tears out of me even as I twist my hand back into her hair.

"He said he loved me," she chokes, and her voice breaks and the tears come, running down through the ruined mascara, creating black rivers on her flushed cheeks. She's still clawing at me, still fighting, but she's sobbing while she does it.

"In a room like this...he stood there..."

"I know," I gasp, and I mean it all the way, because I do, because a man stood in front of me once too and meant it and then didn't. "I know, I know..."

We grind across the wrecked floor locked together, through fruit and petals and smeared chocolate, two grown women in ruined underwear painting each other with wedding wreckage. Her nails leave a burning track across my ribs. My knee comes down in the spilled fruit and skids. I get an underhook on her and lose it. She gets my back for a moment and I turn belly-down before she can lock her legs. We stack up on the overturned table, both of us heaving, slick with sweat and stickier things, hair matted, faces streaked, absolute disasters of women.

But I can feel her going.

The boxing was always a standing game, and there's no standing left in this. It's all floor now. It comes down to grind and leverage, and her lungs are losing, because you cannot cry and fight for air at the same time and win. A divided opponent is a beaten opponent. She just doesn't know it yet.

We grapple halfway on the overturned table, both heaving. Margot's black bra has twisted in the scramble, one strap dragged off her shoulder, the cup pulled askew. Her distorted right nipple pokes out but she is past caring as the only thing that you care about in a fight like this is oxygen. My top isn't much better. A bra hook has given way somewhere in the last two minutes and the navy Target thing is riding wrong. Our boobs are spilling out and neither of us has a hand to spare for modesty.

I end up on top again. She tries one more time to buck me off, and I ride it out and let it spend the energy. and when she sags, I make my move. I shove her flat against the overturned coffee table and wait. She raises up her head and that's my cue. I swing my leg over, and get my thighs around her head.  Her neck is caught in the crease where my knee bends, my other leg crosses over my own ankle to lock it. Head scissors. I sit back, arch my hips, and squeeze.

Margot's eyes go wide. Her hands fly to my thighs, prying and clawing. The same nails that shredded my shoulder are now scrabbling for any give in the lock, but finding none. My legs are the strongest thing I own. Twelve-hour shifts on my feet, three years of training, and every one of them is in this hold now, closing on her like a vise.

She thrashes. Her heels drum the ruined carpet, scattering grapes. She kicks a pear across the floor. A muffled sound comes out of her. Something about Dana. I feel her whole body shutting down in a way her pride won't admit yet. Breathing compromised, blood flow compromised. She's got seconds of real fight left and she's spending them badly.

"Tap or talk, Margot," I say, and I'm not squeezing Jeanne anymore. The anger's gone out of it. I'm just a woman ending a thing that needs ending. "One or the other."

She holds out three more seconds, long enough to keep some scrap of the lawyer's dignity. And then her hand comes up off the carpet and slaps my thigh frantically. Once. Twice.

I ease the scissors open just enough, not all the way, keeping her caught but letting the air and the blood come back.

"Say it," I murmur.

"I give," she rasps, chest hauling. "I give...I submit...let go, please--"

I let go.

She rolls out of my legs and onto her back among the petals and the chocolate and the wreckage. She throws one arm over her eyes. She ignores her twisted bra as her body heaves for air. I sprawl on my back beside her, and for a long while neither of us is anything but two nearly destroyed women on a bridal suite carpet, gasping.

The AC hums. Outside through the window, the party plays on. An inebriated chorus is singing "Don't Stop Believin'."

There's a smear of chocolate on the ceiling. I will never know how.

"Dana's his paralegal," Margot says at last, facing the ceiling, her voice raspy yet calm. She reaches up without looking, fixes her bra and tugs the strap back onto her shoulder, a small dignity returning now that the fight has left. "Twenty-nine. He thinks I don't know." She breathes, "I've known since April."

"Jeanne's my ex-husband's girlfriend," I tell the same ceiling, working my own strap back into place. "She's going to help raise my daughter every other weekend. And Clarissa seems to like her. That's the part that kills me. I have to pretend to be nice."

Margot lets out a wet laugh. "That's worse."

"It's so much worse."

We lie there in the ruins of a room intended for somebody else's perfect night, sticky and bleeding and finally relieved at having beaten the hell out of two women who were never in the room at all.

We lie there a long time, side by side, staring at the chocolate on the ceiling. The party outside is thinning out. You can hear it in the music, the way the DJ has shifted from fast crowd pleasers to the slow, sentimental stuff when the dance floor is down to the diehards and the drunks.

"We should clean up," Margot says eventually, not moving.

"Mmm."

"How will I explain this to Gretchen when she gets the bill for the damage?"

"You and I will split the cost," I say.

Neither of us moves for another full minute. Then she pushes up onto her elbows, winces, and gestures at the bathroom with her chin.

"You first. Winner's privilege."

"That's very sporting of you."

"I'm a gracious loser exactly once a decade. Enjoy it."

I peel myself off the floor.  Everything protests as I limp into the marble bathroom, and the mirror stops me cold.

I look like something dragged out of a wreck. My lip is split and swelling. The left side of my face has that flushed, puffy heat that slaps leave. I'll be explaining it away with a story about a cabinet door for the next three days. My mascara has run into raccoon smears; my lipstick is somewhere up near my ear. There's chocolate dried in my hairline and a fleck of strawberry pulp on my collarbone. When I turn, I find the scratches: four clean lines down my shoulder, and a burning track across my ribs. Rose petals are stuck to me in places I'll be finding for an hour.

I look at this woman in the mirror, thirty-something, wrecked. But I don't feel horror. I feel something closer to recognition. There you are.

I strip out of the ruined underwear, peel the last of the petals off my skin one by one, drop them in the wastebasket like evidence, and step into the shower. The water goes pink at my feet for a second, then clear. It stings the lip, the ribs, the shoulder. I stand under it until I stop shaking.

When I come out wrapped in a towel, Margot's already laid out my only options on the bed. My blue dress and heels -- impossible. I am not stuffing this body back into that dress tonight. Or the white satin robe from the garment rack, the one with Bride embroidered across the back in gold script.

"It's that or the dress," Margot says, "and you're not driving two hours in the dress. Or at all, frankly. Look at yourself." She's blunt about it, but kind underneath. "It's midnight, you've got a split lip and a face of slaps, and you've got a long dark drive through the hills full of deer that like to die on your hood. Don't."

I put on the robe. Bride. The only wedding I'll attend this year, and I wrecked the bride's suite, took her robe, and beat up the maid of honor.

Margot takes her turn in the bathroom, and when she stands, she's just as ruined as I was with swollen cheek, black-streaked eyes, a red welt blooming where I caught her with the last slap. She emerges from the bathroom changed into a soft gray T-shirt and cotton shorts she pulls from an overnight bag. The ordinary clothes make her look more human.

"Stay," she says. It isn't a question. "There are two of everything in this room and one bride, and she's on a plane. Stay."

For the first time, I see Margot's full smile.

So, I stay.

We work the cork out of the complimentary champagne. It takes both of us, laughing and grimacing until it pops and foams over Margot's hand. We climb onto the ravaged bed, push the remaining  crushed petals to the floor, and prop ourselves against the cream silk pillows with the bottle between us because we're too exhausted to get the glass flutes. Margot finds a movie on the room's enormous television.  It's a black and white romance film. It's old and forgettable and perfect.

Outside below, the party ends. The music stops. Car doors close. Gravel crunches under tires. Voices call goodnight, until there's nothing left but the hill country quiet and crickets.

We don't talk about Dana. We don't talk about Jeanne. We don't talk about the fight or any of it. We pass the bottle back and forth and make fun of the movie. Finally, at some point, Margot's head tips onto my shoulder and I let it stay there. I think about Gretchen somewhere over the Gulf right now, full of joy, starting the thing she believes in, having no idea that in the bridal suite she declined to use, her big sister brought down a burden she'd been carrying since April, on a floor full of chocolate strawberries, with a stranger in bra and panties.

Yes, Joni Mitchell, I've looked at love from both sides now. From the dizzy dancing way you feel, as every fairy tale comes real, to don't give yourself away. And I've reached the same conclusion.  I really don't know love at all.

But I do know one thing. Love is not an illusion that ends badly. Perhaps love lives between the two sides, between the giddy fairy tale and the inevitable messy complexity of being human.

I also know the weight of a head on your shoulder at midnight when you thought you'd be driving home alone through the deer and the dark. I know that some kinds of tenderness only arrive after you've beaten the wanting out of each other. I know that tomorrow I'll drive home in a borrowed robe with my dress folded in the passenger seat, and I'll ice my lip, and I'll go back to my life and my daughter and my shifts and my ex-husband and the nice woman I'm not allowed to hate.

But that's tomorrow.

Tonight, the champagne is warming and the movie is bad and there's a smear of chocolate on the ceiling that neither of us will ever explain, and for the first time in a long time, I am not lonely... And my hiccups are gone.

The credits are rolling by the time Margot falls asleep on my shoulder. I let her stay there.  I watch the light flicker on the wrecked and beautiful room, and somewhere outside in the dark, the last car finds the highway and is gone.

[MikeHales67]

So Kiva adjusts to the new normal.

I like the idea of the catpin as psychotherapy. Sort of like an anger room. Maybe they weren't really fighting each other.

The contrast between the violence of what they do with the mundaneness is wonderful. At least it wasn't vomit on the ceiling.

Also many kudos for using the lyrics of Joni Mitchell. Totally love her. Always wanted to quote 'Amelia'. One day.

Do wonder if Jeanne has a catpin, but I'm sure you have an answer to that.

[CuriousCombat]

Wow,  just wow. You have outdone yourself Kiva. The buildup in this chapter was fantastic. The wedding as the setup was exceptional and that part where they called each other by their personal rival's name was delicious. Absolutely wonderful. One of the best chapters I have read in this series. Very well done and it made my Sunday! So, thank you.

[Kiva]

Thank you Mike and C.C. for your wonderfully kind comments. It means a lot to me to know people enjoy these stories. And yes, Joni Mitchell is one of my favorites and one of the all-time great songwriters.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Texas Hill Country, it's a lovely region in central Texas, north of San Antonio and west of Austin. With its picturesque landscapes of cedar, limestone, wineries and rustic barns, it's a popular wedding venue for people in these areas. I tried to describe it accurately for this story, but for those who'd like a visual aide, this might help.

https://austin.wedsociety.com/article/8-beautiful-texas-hill-country-wedding-venues/

[Tiberius J.C.]

Fantastic! Really imaginative and penetrating. Sexy, too, no point in denying it. Two strong, intelligent, attractive women in their late thirties, ... the huge bridal suite ... the locked door ... the music playing downstairs.. no one to hear... no one to break it up.. Then the one you want to win slowly getting the upper hand and finally trapping the other woman's neck between her thighs ... and then the submission ... delicious !
 *
Moving on, there's the prospect of a lasting friendship there, because there's mutual respect and a wealth of empathy. I thought she was maybe jealous of her little sister's idolatry -- that she felt you'd usurped her role -- but by our mid thirties none of us are still heroes in the eyes of our younger siblings.
There's the promise too (or is it only a tease?) of a life-changing ---or perhaps merely cathartic -- knockdown drag-out with Jeanne. Not sure how realistic that is though.
Margot vs Dana is more likely to go down -- if only in my head. But what we have already is fantastic. Thanks. The wedding scene was poignant  -- in a number of ways , some life-affirming, others more, shall we say,'nuanced'?
Loved it !

[Tiberius J.C.]