No Rep

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  Taos who, might I add, was well endowed.

  I could tell.

  I was also wondering if the man had any underpants on.

  Because by the way he looked right now? He didn’t.

  CHAPTER 7

  Sometimes I pretend to be normal. But being normal is boring, so I go back to being me.

  -Text from Fran to Mavis

  FRAN

  “Mavis, shut up, you whore!”

  Mavis, the whore, was practically falling off the couch in her hilarity at the situation.

  “So, you what? Cherished it? Worshiped at his throne of awesomeness?” she snickered.

  I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t do anything. After I almost touched his dick with my nose, I stood up, went beet red, and then tried to ignore the fact for the rest of lunch. It was incredibly awkward because that was all I could think about. And then, the damn man had to go and laugh it off like it wasn’t a big, life-changing deal when it was!”

  “Life changing?” she asked. “How was it life changing?”

  I held out my hands to indicate his size, and the smile wiped right off of her face.

  “You’re shitting me,” she said.

  I was already shaking my head before she could finish.

  “Nope,” I said. “Like for real, it was that big. And it was all I could think about. And… get this… I think he was the same cop that helped me that night.”

  Now that really wiped the smile completely off of her face.

  There were no lingering lines of laughter at all.

  “What?” she questioned.

  I swallowed. “During the warmup yesterday, they made us run outside. And when I looked into his eyes, I was so fuckin’ scared. I was right back there that morning in the middle of my own personal hell. And then he spoke to me, and his voice just did something to calm me. Then I opened my eyes and saw his eyes, and then I remembered. But he has no clue who I am.”

  Mavis shook her head, the movement causing the sleeping boy on the couch to bounce slightly with her movement.

  Vlad shifted so that his face was facing a different way.

  She watched him for a little while, silent, before saying, “You’re the reason that I had Vlad.”

  I scrunched up my nose in confusion. “What?”

  “The day that I got pregnant, I was at that bar because of you,” she explained. “You’d had a bad day. You’d had a panic attack in the grocery store, and you wouldn’t calm down, so I had to force-feed you your anxiety meds. And… I just wanted to escape for a while. Which was why I was at that bar that night. Why I slept with the guy in the band.”

  The guy in the band was actually named Bayne Green.

  She’d had a one-night stand with him when he was playing in the bar that night, never once looking back.

  Which worked for us, because after we tried to get into contact with him, and he’d told Mavis to ‘get rid of it,’ we’d decided that we would leave it alone and let it be.

  If that guy didn’t want to have any part of Vlad’s life, then who were we to force him?

  The only sad thing was, Vlad deserved everything in this world.

  And the man didn’t know what he was missing by denying him his presence.

  “You never told me that,” I admitted. “Mavis…”

  She grinned then. “It was the best thing to ever happen to me, you know. I don’t think I ever would’ve had the courage to go and put myself out there like I did without seeing you struggle. Seeing you work so hard to become normal again.”

  I poked my tongue out at her.

  She snickered and stood up from the couch carefully, taking care so that Vlad stayed where he was as she walked over to me and hugged me tight.

  “You’re my hero, little sister,” she whispered.

  I felt my face start to crumple, and like I always did when she showed her faith in me, I fell apart in her arms.

  By the time that we were finished with our crying jag, my phone was beeping to show me that it was time to go pick up a certain someone.

  “I can’t believe you finagled that.” She shook her head, wiping her tears with her t-shirt.

  I wiped my own and then sniffled as I tried to compose myself.

  Still, by the time I was rolling up to the gym twenty minutes later, I knew I was still a bit puffy and red.

  It was dark outside, and there wasn’t a single soul at the gym besides the one man that I could see doing something on the bar that I could likely never accomplish.

  I idled next to the curb for a bit, right under the security light that lit up the front entrance of the gym, but he was still moving along on what he was doing, and hadn’t noticed I was there.

  Gathering my courage, I turned my car off and got out, hand fisting around my keys as my heart started to jackhammer.

  Still, I made it to the door without incident, breathing out roughly when I opened the door and walked into the gym.

  The moment I did, I started to giggle.

  Because when I was outside, I could practically hear the music that Taos was working out to.

  At least, I thought I could.

  But inside, I realized that he wasn’t rocking out to AC/DC or Bruce Springsteen.

  Nope, he was listening to Disney songs.

  The particular one that was on at that instant was “Kiss the Girl” followed by “Hakuna Matata.”

  By the time that “Let It Go” came on, I was practically singing along while I watched him do move after move, until there was so much sweat pouring down over his face and arms that he ripped his t-shirt off in between reps and kept going.

  I found a comfortable spot next to the door, careful not to draw his attention because I didn’t want him to stop, and watched.

  I also might or might not have taken a video of the sexy moves.

  He went on like this for what felt like forever, but only ended up being two more songs.

  He went from whatever the bar thingy was that got his upper body up and over the bar completely, legs dangling underneath the bar, arms completely locked out, to something that resembled a pull-up but actually ended up being his chest and not his chin that got near the bar. He finally ended it with regular pull-ups.

  By the time that “A Whole New World” ended, he dropped down completely from the bar, his face a full grimace as he breathed deeply.

  The cat, whom I hadn’t noticed until now, hissed at him from where he’d landed right next to his perch on top of a wooden box beside the rig. He blended in almost seamlessly. Once he felt his ire was known, he curled back up onto the box with his tail flicking angrily.

  Taos ignored him, standing with his chest heaving, face aimed toward the ground, arms around his hips, for what felt like forever before he groaned and dropped down to the ground.

  That’s when a sound akin to pain left him as he fell back onto his back and restlessly shifted his legs back and forth, likely to remove himself from the pain that had to be going on with his upper body.

  “Fuck,” Taos groaned, rolling over to his side.

  That was when he saw me.

  He stared, his face an expression of pain, then said, “Son of a bitch. I forgot about you.”

  I grinned. “It’s okay. I’ve been here for five songs, and I’ve been transported back to my childhood.”

  He grinned, and a bead of sweat dripped from his nose to his full lower lip.

  “I get so fuckin’ tired of hearing the same damn songs every day that I can’t help but play something different when everyone leaves,” he admitted. “When did you get here?”

  I gestured toward the bar. “Somewhere around the thingies that get your upper body all the way over the bar.”

  He grinned. “Muscle-ups.”

  “Those.” I winked.

  He snickered and got up from the ground, leaving a sweat angel in his wake.

  I admired the musculature of his sweat angel, then looked at the man.

  I’d seen him without his shirt off only once
before, and that was a few seconds before class started the previous day. But I gave my eyes time to roam over his body as he walked a few feet away to his very large water bottle that he had sitting beside the rig.

  He leaned over, and the waistband of his shorts tugged a bit low, giving me just the tiniest of glimpses of his ass crack.

  A bead of sweat disappeared down it while I was watching, and I almost wished that I could follow that sweat bead with the tip of my finger.

  Or would that be weird?

  Though, saying that, it would not only be weird because we were very new to each other, and not even dating, but because it was just plain weird in general to want to run your finger down the crack of someone’s ass.

  Wasn’t it?

  “You should try one,” he suggested, momentarily jolting me out of the contemplation of his butt cheeks.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Try one.” He gestured toward the bar with his bottle.

  I frowned. “I can’t even do a pull-up. Shouldn’t I focus on that first?”

  He snorted. “Probably. But I did all of my shit backward. Why can’t you?”

  “What did you do backward?” I asked curiously.

  He gestured to the wooden rings that were held by a large black strap from the ceiling. “I was able to get a ring muscle-up before I was able to get a bar muscle-up—which is easier. I was also able to do handstand walks before I could do a push-up.”

  My brows rose. “Really?”

  He shrugged. “I was in gymnastics when I was a kid. Something that I was able to keep up mostly. Though, just sayin’, it was ugly at first.”

  I gave the bar a speculative look. “How about you teach me how to do a pull-up, first?”

  He gestured to the shorter bar that was next to the one he was using. As I walked toward it, I noticed all the droplets of sweat that’d fallen down from him as I moved past his sweat angel.

  I stood underneath the bar and looked up, biting my lip as I did.

  “Jump up there and see what you can do,” he suggested.

  I did, hanging awkwardly from the bar as I tried in vain to pull myself up and failing miserably.

  I got about two inches up and couldn’t get any farther.

  He started to laugh, then his big hands went on my outer thighs and he pushed me up the rest of the way.

  “The way to get better at these are to do negatives,” he said. “When you get up there, try to force yourself to go slow on the way back down.”

  I did as he suggested, feeling the burn the entire way down.

  “Ow,” I whined as I fell off the bar and started to wring my hands.

  “Need some grips,” he suggested as he reached down for his that he’d taken off at some point in the lesson.

  He threaded the sweaty material around my wrists and then cinched them down with the Velcro.

  I wasn’t even the least bit grossed out about how wet they were from his perspiration.

  Why?

  Because the man was standing so close to me that I could smell his deliciousness. I didn’t know whether it was cologne or deodorant or what, but it was hot as hell, and I wanted to bottle it up so I could sniff it any time I wanted.

  “Try those,” he suggested. “Jump up there.”

  I did, and he steadied my rocking as I held on, finding that the grips did, indeed, change everything.

  “Now, what you’re going to do is hollow your body out like this,” he pushed my belly one way, and my feet the other. “And pretty much do the opposite of this the other way,” he showed me that until I was rocking back and forth on the bar.

  “Now drop down and watch me,” he urged.

  I did, and then watched as he perfectly executed the move that I wanted to master.

  The kipping pull-up.

  “What you want to do when you’re back here is kind of…” he continued speaking, showing me exactly what he wanted from me.

  Only, I was distracted.

  He had these muscles in his back that were downright debilitating.

  What would they feel like when I had my arms around his neck and was letting my hands roam…

  “You try,” he finished.

  I swallowed, trying to get my crazy mind back under control.

  “Okay.” I nodded thoughtfully, glancing up at the bar. “Let’s do it.”

  Only, after a ten-minute practice session, I could only get my chin to about three inches under the bar. And my kipping swing was allllll off.

  “You’ll get there,” he teased as he snatched his shirt off the floor and put it on.

  I had a feeling that with his tutelage, I would.

  My breath caught in my throat when he led me outside, fear starting to slither in despite the hunky man at my side.

  “Do your parents live here?” he asked.

  I swallowed hard past the fear, and felt a sigh of relief sweep over me when he pulled a flashlight from his key ring and started to use it to lock the door.

  It was only when we were safely in my car that I replied.

  “Actually, they don’t.” I paused. “They’re dead.”

  Taos winced. “Shit. Sorry.”

  I shrugged. “They died when Mavis was nineteen and I was seventeen. But to be honest, they really weren’t all that great of parents, either. I mean, sure, I didn’t want them to die. But they also weren’t the kind of parents that really cared about us. They didn’t care if we made doctor’s appointments, school or even ate. Mavis, sadly, had to grow up at a young age. Both of us did, really.” I paused. “I don’t think I even went to a dentist appointment until I was thirteen.”

  He blinked. “Really?”

  I nodded. “Really. And I never had my shots, not because my parents were anti-vaxxers, but because my parents were anti-parents. They didn’t care. So when they died in a car crash, it was pretty sucky there for a few months, but it wasn’t like we were dealing with anything we hadn’t dealt with before. The only difference was Mavis having to get guardianship of me for a half a year.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Wow.”

  I nodded. “Yep.”

  “My parents are gone, too,” he admitted. “They died when my brother and I were young. We both wound up in foster care. He got adopted out, I didn’t. That’s how I met Madden. In foster care right before he was ‘adopted.’ He found a permanent home with the family of the man responsible for saving his life. I found a foster home with a police officer. His wife a school teacher. They were great people, and didn’t mind teenagers in their home eating all their food.”

  My face softened at that. “I’m glad you have them.”

  I wished for something like that my entire life and never got it. It’d always been just Mavis and me against the world.

  “They both passed away a couple of years ago. My foster father of bone cancer, and my foster mother of an infection that went to her blood a few months later.” Taos sighed. “They were how we had the money to open the gym.”

  “Oh,” I breathed. “That’s really sad, Taos. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  He shrugged. “It’s the way of life, sadly. It sucks, yes, but it’s also something not to be sad over. They were both old. Eighties. So though it sucks that they’re not here anymore, I know that they went together. I know that neither one of them had to live very long without the other. And I know that one day I’ll see them again.”

  I wanted to reach over and grab his hand and squeeze.

  Instead, I asked about his brother. “And your brother? How is he?”

  That had Taos frowning. “I don’t know. I haven’t been able to find Greer since he was adopted. It was like he fell off the face of the planet.”

  That made my heart hurt. “I can’t say that I’m super-duper awesome at detective work, but I can stalk a person on Facebook and Instagram like a boss.”

  He grinned. “His full name is… was… Greer Allen Brady. But I’m sure that they changed it when he was adopted.”

  “Ma
ybe not.” I paused. “How old were you when this happened?”

  He grimaced. “Thirteen.”

  “Then possibly not since he’d been using that name for so long. If y’all had a good relationship with your parents, there’s an even better chance that he kept it.”

  He shrugged, and I chose to change the subject.

  “Now, how sore am I going to be tomorrow?”

  He burst out laughing. “Bad.”

  CHAPTER 8

  But did you die?

  -CrossFit

  TAOS

  I was rereading over a file when I heard the rumble-splutter of a car arriving in my driveway.

  I got up and looked out, ever the cop, and stared at the black nondescript sedan that was idling in my driveway.

  I watched quietly as Fran got out of her car and started walking the length of my walkway to get to the front door.

  I waited until she was right there, knocking on the door, before I opened it and grinned. “Come in. Gotta get the cat settled, then I can go.”

  She grinned and followed me in, just like she’d been doing for the last week and a half.

  Apparently, my car had parts that were required for it that had to come all the way from Buffalo, New York. That also meant that it’d taken a bit more time to get the parts than we’d originally anticipated, and since my car was a bit in pieces thanks to the specific parts that were needed, it meant that I was out of a vehicle for longer than I’d expected.

  Not that I was complaining.

  “I didn’t know you had a cat,” she admitted.

  I laughed. “Well, I have a cat when the cat wants me to be his owner. Sometimes, he likes the neighbor next door to be his owner.”

  She giggled. “You’re joking, right?”

  I shook my head and walked into my kitchen where Gumby, the boy tabby cat that literally was shared between my neighbor and I, sat on the corner of my kitchen island waiting for food.

  “I think that he was originally the neighbor’s, but he likes my food better,” I admitted as I walked to the kitchen cabinet that I kept his food in and opened it. “The neighbor originally bought the house that came with the cat. He was roughly about eight months old, and the old owner died, so he took him on. He got him fixed. Then allowed him to go outside when he pleased. Which ended up with me thinking we had a stray cat, and I made the mistake of feeding him a can of cat food that I got in one of those free kiosks at the bulk supply store when I scanned my membership card. Now, he comes to me when he wants to eat, hangs out, and then leaves when he’s ready to go home.”