Th listener (freewrite)

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I don't know what it was about him, really, 'cause he wasn't her type at all. She was never one to go for the rough outlook, the blood and all the gore that came with his kinda life. But see, to look at him, you would've never thought he was a boxer. He was so quiet and well-kept. Tall and dignified, like he'd just stepped out of a classroom, rather than the ring. He even wore glasses, when he wasn't fighting, said they helped him with his reading. I think that's what drew her in, the reading, the fact that when she met him, he was sat on a park bench, even though it was cold, making his way through a battered Oscar Wilde.
Now, that girl, she always had a soft spot for Wilde. She started talking to him more out of a dare with herself, because she knew she was capable of walking him by and somehow she felt this wasn't someone she wanted to walk by. She sat on the bench opposite for the longest time, waiting for him to look up, so she could catch his eye and work her magic. But he didn't. Not once did his unlikely boxer's face come out of those pages.
And so she got up and picked at her brain for something to say on the walk over.
'You know, he dies at the end' she said, pointing at the book and immediately cursing herself for saying such a stupid thing.
'I know,' he said, finally looking at her. He hiked his glasses up on his nose just a little and gave a short, easy smile. 'Everybody dies at the end.'
'Have you read it before?' she asked, surprised and for some reason, sitting down beside him.
'Many times,' he nodded, though he didn't seem to mind her presence. 'There's always something I find I missed.'
'Doesn't it get boring after a while, though?'
He shook his head and put his book down. 'Not if you know how to come at it. It's all a game, really, just a matter of...steps.'
'Steps?'
'Life.'
'Oh...yes.'

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Though she didn't know what he meant and in a way, she never really got it. He told her how the book had belonged to his first wife, how she hadn't had space in her suitcase and just left it behind, crying as she went and how he kept it, despite it all.
'I did not spend the next week crouched on the floor, crying for her. I'm not a good man,' he confided to this girl who stared at him in growing wonder. 'I did not read it out of despair, missing her. Truth is, I never did. Miss her, I mean. I liked her, sure, I liked them all. All the women, the girls.'
And she loved the way he smiled when he said the word girls, nostalgic like saying hello to an old friend.
'But I read it and I keep coming back to it, I guess. Ironic, I suppose.'
'Why?'
'It's the only one I came back to. And she was the first one who left. There would be many, though, many who wept for me more than I was worth. Many who were disappointed, I think, after a while, felt they'd gotten themselves a bad deal and I can't say I blame them. Anyway, I don't know why I'm telling you all this, suppose it's not what you want to listen to, is it? What would a pretty girl like you want or care with things that happened so long ago?'
But the boxer lied, for in his own way, he'd suffered and those things hadn't happened quite so long ago as he liked to imagine. And she didn't tell him that she'd sat beside him for another reason completely. She'd fallen in love with his serious look as he read through The Picture of Dorian Gray, but she stayed for the way his eyes glimmered as he spoke of the past, told tales of the women he'd loved and the fights he'd been through.
She found him in the park every day and each time, he'd put his book down – whether it was Wilde or Kafka or even sometimes Shakespeare – and tell it all again, and she'd watch as the events played themselves before his eyes over and over.

'They were all an escape, the women, the fighting, they all made me feel like I was out of this world, you know?' he said, licking his dry lips and glancing at the girl who nodded, because she liked to think she understood.
'But escapes don't last and you need to always be on the run, to keep chasing them, because the thrill fades and so you need someone new to love or to fight. Or both, as it often turned out,' he smiled and the girl glimpsed the young man he'd been once. Understood what all those women must've seen in him. There was something wrong in his smile, something delightful and worrying at the same time.
As time wore on, the fights became more glorious and the women grew crazier, wilder and she found herself wondering, sometimes, how much of it was real and how much was just a story borrowed out of a book. Or no, not a whole story, just bits here and there, some flesh to the old bones. The stories grew so grandiose that she wondered if he'd ever been a boxer at all, until at one point, during a chilly winter morning, one of the last they'd spend in the park that year, she finally worked up the nerve to ask him.
'We're all boxers in our own minds,' the old man told her, with a soft shrug.

Today's prompt was 'boxer'. Check out @mariannewest's blog, she's the one behind all this freewriting thing.

Thank you for reading,