Faking It

by Nikki Bella

  “So?” he said, and I knew what was coming next.

  “Yes, father of mine? What wouldst that have of me?”

  He laughed. Twice in one night, miracle of miracles. “Tell me about Braden. The interview.” His voice wasn’t as warm as it had been. Who knew what he was thinking?

  I exhaled so hard that the windshield in front of me fogged a little. “Oh brother. That guy. Dad, I kind of hate him.” Hate warring with lust. The worst mix in the world. I certainly wasn’t the first woman who wanted to bang a guy nearly as much as I wanted to slap his dumb hot face off. But that was definitely not a conversation I was getting into with my dad.

  He nodded. “I know what you mean. I can’t come at it the same way as you, the relationship between a coach and a fighter is just too different, but I’ve seen how he is with women. I wanted to believe that he would do better by you, given that you’re my daughter. Now, you don’t need to give me any details. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. As long as you’re okay, I still have to do right by him as a fighter. I’ve been around Braden for so long that I still think of him sometimes as the kid that walked into my gym in the beginning, not who he has become. You wouldn’t have believed how gentle he was back then. Not in the ring, no, but that was perfect. Soft everywhere else, vicious once that gate closed.”

  He was forgetting that I had been there when Braden had walked in. I had wondered who he was and whether he had earned the swagger that he walked with. But I had never seen the side of Braden that dad was talking about. Mr. Softie.

  The mention of Braden being soft reminded me of just how soft his naked body had not been when he performed that impromptu striptease in front of me. Good Lord that package. But this was exactly the kind of thing I didn’t want to be thinking about in a car with my dad while said dad was laying down wisdom for the ages.

  He whistled. “Some fighters are just bad news, through and through from the beginning. Or they’re the potential for bad news. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone with as much upside—and downside—as Braden Dean. He was always going to be a masterpiece or a catastrophe. Even I was guessing about him. I just told myself it was an educated guess. So many of these kids are lucky they can find a way to get paid to fight, because otherwise they’d just fight their way into prison and do their brawling there, far away from the cameras and money, and with much higher stakes. Some fighters go sour once the fame and glory sets in. We all want to believe our own hype, but some people are particularly ill-suited to notoriety.”

  This was a veritable torrent of words from my usually taciturn dad. He must have really meant it. “Sure, dad. I can see that.” And I could still see Braden’s body. Couldn’t help but picture the soap and the water hitting his skin in that shower. Feeling maybe the tiniest bit of regret that I hadn’t followed him in there. Oh God, he would have loved that. Worst, he probably expected it!

  “Anything else you’d like me to do for you?” he said.

  See, this was part of the problem. I knew that he actually would try to do anything I asked him to. He treated the things I liked as if they were things I actually needed, which made it very hard to turn his offers down because…well, because I liked certain things. Like his help. “Well, maybe next time you could just set me up to interview one of the nice guys. But I guess you’ve already done that, unless this hand cyclist is some sort of holy terror.”

  “The sumo wrestler is very nice, by all accounts, as is the hand cycler. And when it comes to the next fighter...I’ll do my best, kiddo. That chip on the shoulder they all have serves them well in the fight. It doesn’t always do a lot for them in the rest of their lives.”

  “Well, what else could I ask for?” Besides a nice version of Braden and another shot at that shower.

  Dad took the last turn before entering the long driveway to his mansion. The house that fists built, he called it. Those fists had built a hell of a home. Every time I saw it I still thought I can’t believe I live there. It stretched for half of a block and looked like the home of some investment-banking guru. Not that I knew what that looked like, exactly, but the thought was there. “What do you want for dinner?” he said.

  “Surprise me, dad. I’m just going to run upstairs and clean up a little.” I knew he would take this as a challenge and I would be rewarded handsomely for it. Dad didn’t seem to know that he couldn’t turn down a properly issued dare, and I had just dared him to make me something so delicious that it would ruin all other food for me, forever.

  While dad bustled around in the kitchen, I went upstairs and got in the shower. I had gotten so sweaty in the crowd at the fight. People would get so worked up that there was a mist of booze and sweat that you could almost see in the air. The hot water felt like I had earned it. There are few things as pleasurable as a nice hot shower, especially when it feels like you deserve it.

  But there are some.

  Once I got soaped up it was impossible not to touch myself. Think about anyone but Braden. Think about anyone but Braden. Then I thought about no one except Braden. Braden Dean, hot jerk. He was probably arrogant enough to think I would go right home and dream about him. If so, he was right. Was it cockiness if you could back it up? At least there were a couple of new interviews coming up that didn’t promise to be titillating or enraging in any way. It was hard to imagine myself fantasizing about a giant in a diaper, no matter how nice he might be.

  By the time I got out of the shower I was clear-headed and calmer. Chantelle always said that if she could put an orgasm in a bottle she’d be a billionaire. And that if she was a doctor it was what she would prescribe for most ailments. It never made sense to me. Why on earth would you need something in a bottle when you could just think about...okay, it was officially time to stop thinking about Braden for the night.

  Dad’s web of contradictions manifested yet again in the kitchen. The trainer of vicious champions had prepared a gorgeous meal for us, as adept as any TV chef. Challenge accepted. I couldn’t believe that he had done it so quickly, and part of me wondered if he had planned it already and had it waiting on hand. He pulled out a chair for me and sat me down in front of a bowl of bouillabaisse, a beet and fennel salad, and bread for dipping. His own plate had very little on it. “I already ate a little,” he said. “Didn’t want to overdo it.”

  “You keep yourself in shape for an old man,” I said, digging in like I’d been held captive for a year, far from food.

  “Carb day was yesterday,” he said with a smile. “One day that body’s going to start betraying you. Mine sure as hell did. Taking care of yourself is the only way to stay sane when you start to fossilize.”

  He was far from a fossil. Dad was so lean that he looked like a piece of jerky. There were plenty of shlubby, unambitious young men out there who could learn a lot from him in the fitness department. One of my favorite things was to go out with him and see women in their fifties and sixties drooling over him.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. Dad frowned. I didn’t grow up with too many rules, which was fine, given that I was almost pathologically well behaved. But dad didn’t like rudeness, and he considered “diddling around” on your phone in the company of another person the height of bad manners. In his view, you did not have a conversation with someone who was not there while sitting next to someone who was there.

  When he said it like that, it made sense. But he hadn’t grown up knowing what it felt like to have a screen that you carried everywhere, to the point where it was almost like another limb, shrieking for your attention.

  “I’ll check it later,” I said, even though it was burning a hole in my pocket. Such was the modern age. Our conversation meandered everywhere and nowhere.

  Dad was a good listener. He told me once that one of the best decisions he had ever made was not to interrupt people. In my case, being an admitted chatterbox, this meant that he rarely had to say much at all, which is how I think he liked it. We talked about some strategies for increasing the audience of the podcast, and
more potential guests. He had a vision of a day when the podcast completely sustained me, when the traffic came no matter what I did.

  “I want you to have enough so that you can only do the work you want,” he said. “Lots of people punching clocks out there just because. I don’t care if you wind up working ninety hour weeks, as long as you love those ninety hours and you know where you’re head.”

  When we finally said goodnight, I cleaned the table and put our dishes in the washer while dad went into his study to read. He was always in the middle of some military history book with a thousand pages, a zillion footnotes, and tiny font.

  My phone buzzed again. I sneaked a peek at it before I went upstairs. I saw Braden’s name and immediately put it back in my pocket. I already knew everything I needed to about that swaggering oaf, thank you very much. It was probably going to be something like an emoji of lips. Or maybe a showerhead with steam coming off of it.

  Mmm. That had been a really good shower.

  In fact, maybe I wouldn’t look at it until tomorrow. That would teach him a lesson about expectations. That would show him that Alyssa Edwards was not, and never would be, at his beck and call.

  The best-laid plans and all that…I’d been in my room for less than one second before I had the phone out, ready to tell him off and rebut whatever cocky, drunken message he had sent to me.

  I am so sorry, read the text. That wasn’t me and I really apologize. I’ll do anything to make it up to you, just let me know.

  No emojis, either. The apology sounded sincere. Or, I guess, as sincere as anything can sound in a brief text, completely removed from context, and in the total absence of nuance.

  Well then...well, well, well.

  I had a hard time falling asleep that night, but I was determined not to text him back. My determination died quickly and I replied. When I did sleep, my dreams were incredible, haunted by a rather striking man in wrist wraps who was begging to serve me in all sorts of wicked ways.

  Chapter 4

  Oh my God, was there anything more predictable than a woman? If anyone had treated me the way I dismissed her in that locker room I would have slapped their head off. That would have just been getting started. The last thing I would have been doing two hours was responding to an apologetic text from someone who had wronged me. I couldn’t say that I’d ever felt like much of an adult, but one of the ways I could tell I was getting older was that there didn’t seem to be as many surprises left.

  No self-respect. I’ve always believed that people get themselves into the lives they think they deserve. They create their own disasters and then, when they’re unhappy, they can let themselves off the hook and say, “I’m not the kind of person who deserves to be happy?” Voila! Every dumb mistake is now distanced from them, it’s just fate.

  But that’s how women were. The harder you pushed them aside, the more they wanted you. It was one of the things he liked about fighting: for all the innumerable variables, there was a simplicity to it that the rest of life didn’t have. The referee announced me and the opponent, the door closed, and both of us knew the score. One winner, one loser…simple.

  This thing with Alyssa was predictable, yes, but still—it didn’t feel quite as simple as some of the other women I had known. Or maybe it was simple but not simplistic.

  I was playing with fire and I knew it. But hot is fun. Mason’s girl was off limits...for someone with limits. My dear old coach was going to fuss his old head off, but I would also be able to remind him, ever so sweetly, that he was the one who suggested I settle down with a nice girl.

  If it’s not obvious, I don’t like to be told what to do or not to do. The kind of person who thinks they can tell me what to do is the kind of person you would find shouting at an incoming tidal wave, then being confused later when they were washing seaweed out of their hair.

  A nice girl. Please. Something else that didn’t interest me much. It’s not like I hadn’t tried. All through high school, before I learned how to fight, to cow other men into submission, the nice girls ignored me. Sorry, nope. Then I turned myself into a machine and the girls became women, and those women flocked to me. No, I had been done with nice for some time. Nice was for betas, and non-fighters, and guys who thought that complimenting a woman’s profile picture on social media was the way into her pants. White knights and little lords who made great friends to talk to when you needed to confide in someone about a real man you wanted.

  Women wanted a savage.

  Which is why this savage got such a kick out of taking out my phone and texting her the mournful message I had been composing in my head.

  “Really really sorry, again. Let’s get together and do a real interview so you can finish your assignment.” I pushed send and started counting in my head. It only took five seconds before the little gray bubble indicating that she was texting me back appeared under my message. “Sure! And you totally don’t need to apologize anymore, I know what it’s like to be in a mood!” We set up a time and date and I was feeling pretty damned pleased with myself.

  She even sent an emoji of a microphone with a smile next to it.

  Then my phone buzzed again. I looked down, already smiling, ready to see the latest installment in the Alyssa Edwards saga, but the message was from Janie.

  That took the smile off my face. Janie was my little sister and the most important thing to me in the world. “Call me!” She was also a hassle I didn’t want to deal with right now. Janie’s mental handicap—sorry, handicapable, as the new buzzword went—made everyone protective of her, but it could also make her exhausting. Her cerebral palsy had also put her in a wheelchair, which made things tougher on my mom. I felt bad about even thinking that, but it was true. Janie didn’t read cues as well as some people, which was ironic, since she read more books than anyone I knew. Also, she wasn’t able to understand things as quickly as others, and even though this legitimized her need to be more dependent on other people than would have otherwise been the case, it could still get exhausting. Case in point: before I had even thought about responding, my phone was ringing. Janie wasn’t one for waiting around.

  We definitely had that in common. Who was I kidding? There was no way I was going to put her off.

  “Hey Janie,” I said.

  “Hi Braden! How was your fight?”

  I gave her the rundown and she tried as hard as could to listen. “Oh, that poor guy,” she said when I told about my fallen opponent. “I bet he’s going to have the worst headache tomorrow.” Then she asked about Vlad. I did my best to tell her about the potential plans for the fight, but she wound up interrupting me near the end of the story, like always, and of course she mentioned that Vlad was a war hero, and took over the conversation. I liked to think of Janie on the floor of the Senate, delivering endless filibusters that would allow her to pass any legislation she wanted just because she could outlast everyone.

  “You’ve really got to come home. Mom is really sad. She misses you bad. I do too. When are you coming home? We could probably put your old room together, and we could stay up late and watch movies on nights when you didn’t have to train the next day. I think it would be a really good thing for her. So, when?”

  “I’m not sure, Janie. There’s a lot going on.”

  “Well, mom really misses you, and you shouldn’t let your mom miss you when you can change it.”

  “I know she does, Janie. I know. But it’s not that simple. I have obligations here.”

  “And it’s hard for her because everyone else is gone. She really misses you, and you’re the only one, beside me, who’s actually on this side of the ocean. Sean and Ryan haven’t been able to talk as much lately. That bugs her. It bugs me too. I want it to bug you. I think it should.”

  I clenched my jaw. “I know that too,” I said, harsher than I intended. “Everyone” meant my brothers Sean and Ryan, who were both in the armed forces overseas. Marines. Semper Fi, Duty and honor, and all that jazz. Why should they be home taking care of m
y mom? They were too busy taking care of the world. I felt the familiar flush of anger, no, something that was closer to shame than anger, and I hung up on Janie with a rushed good-bye.

  I’m telling you, strong and weak, it sucks. I could fight a man in a cage who wanted nothing more than to kill me, but I couldn’t end a conversation with my little sister in a civil fashion.

  In truth—a truth I hated to admit—Sean and Ryan were doing exactly what I had wanted to do. Serving. Testing themselves. We had all been on the same career path. Our dad had died when we were young and he had been a military man. We all planned on doing the same. The only difference was that I had suddenly blossomed into a prodigy of a fighter and people started throwing money and promises at me. My brothers had been supportive. Maybe they had even been jealous. I was so amazing that sometimes I was jealous of myself! (Mostly kidding). But I had never been able to shake this feeling that they were also disappointed, like their sense of duty had turned out to be more finely tuned than mine. I was still testing myself, but it wasn’t like what they were doing. My mom told me she was proud of me, but there was no mistaking the difference in her tone when she talked about my brothers. They were heroes. I was just a tough kid who was making lots of money.

  Guilt didn’t suit me. I had to do something to shake it off. So I did what I always do. I hit the gym and put in my mouthpiece, ready for some hard practice.

  Someone was going to hurt so I didn’t have to.

  Chapter 5

  I was skeptical when his texts started coming in—this was probably just another game of his and I would wind up humiliated by the end of it—but I was still determined to get the interview. I didn’t want to let my dad down and Braden was a good story, if he could just break character long enough to give me a few decent quotes. He had proposed that I meet him at the gym where he practiced. Good enough for me. At least there would be an audience to keep him in check if he was feeling too sassy.