"Good enough for what?"
"My class," I clarified.
"You don't have a class here. I've had lessons with all the instructors."
"Three lessons with each of them," I agreed. "LINE, Jiu Jitsu, Krav Maga, and boxing. For an observant woman, you somehow overlooked me."
Her perfectly arched brows drew low, obviously not the kind to let the pride of being proven wrong get in the way of learning the truth.
"What do you teach then?"
"Systema."
Her brows furrowed all the more. "Russian?" she asked, sounding confused. "You don't look - or sound - Russian."
"Romanian, love," I agreed. "But spent a good chunk of time withstanding the cold. Learned a lot. Momentum training." That didn't get much of a response. She had likely learned a bit of that in several of her studies. "Pressure point application," I tried.
There it was.
Interest.
It made her stand up straighter.
It made her eyes, guarded as they were, work.
"When is the soonest that I can set up an appointment?"
"Tomorrow," I offered, pulling it right out of my ass, but figuring that at least one of the rooms would be empty, and knowing it was probably best to make the most out of her interest as soon as possible. "Ten," I tried, figuring if she was free on a Monday at ten, she was likely free on a Tuesday at ten as well.
"The regular rate?"
I didn't know what that was, but rolled with it. "Yes."
"I'll be here," she agreed.
"Name, love?" I asked, watching as her eyes went almost confused, like something about me didn't make sense.
"Lenny," she offered, making me wonder what a name like that could have been short for.
"Edison," I gave her before releasing her bag and walking away, all the while wondering why the hell I was offering her a class when, so far, I had never been interested in offering them to anyone.
Was it simply attraction?
I wasn't usually a man governed by shit like that.
Curiosity?
What was she planning? Why was she planning it?
Why the fuck did I care?
Burning questions, all.
Maybe ones I would have answers to the next day.
THREE
Lenny
I had no idea how I had missed a class.
Or, for that matter, how I had missed an instructor such as him.
I might not have been interested in inviting a man into my life, but I was human. I was a woman who knew a fucking earth-shatteringly good-looking man when she saw one.
This man, yeah, he was too attractive not to notice.
He was tall. I was a sucker for tall, being about five-eight even in flat feet. He towered over me, six-three if he was an inch.
Then he had that dark and deadly vibe about him. Yes, deadly. That was, oddly, what came to mind first. It was right there in those improbably deep eyes. Was it possible for eyes to be black? If it was, his were. Deep. Endlessly so. If you dove in, you would never surface.
That was a bit flowery for me, but true nonetheless.
His long, dark hair was pulled up into a bun at the top of his head, allowing his perfectly European features to be the focal point. His somewhat pointed chin, great cheekbones, masculine brow ridge, and what seemed to be a strong jaw under his beard.
As for his body, he wasn't like one of those muscle-bound morons who spent half the day over by the weights. Not picking them up, mind you, making me wonder how many steroids one must take to be able to bulk up so much with so little effort.
Congrats on being fit, dudes, but there's nothing sexy about standing near weights like you are afraid to get your nice Under Armor shirts a little sweaty.
This guy was a lean kind of strong, with muscles perfectly toned for purpose. Giant muscles might look good (to some), but they were relatively useless. They made your range of motion smaller. Hell, I doubt the guys could wipe their own asses without one of those fucking pole things.
The Systema teacher - Edison, he called himself - had a body meant for fighting, strong but lithe enough to be able to move quickly.
I did not, did not maybe wonder what his abs looked like under his tee, if he had that perfectly cut deep V of an Adonis belt, inviting you to follow the happy trail and find the prize.
Christ.
If I was thinking of some stranger's cock as a prize, I needed to give some serious thought to getting laid.
Sexual frustration was not a distraction I needed.
And yet I was going to go ahead and have a private class with the man who caused the issue to begin with.
I wasn't a sucker for a hot guy.
They were a dime a dozen.
You couldn't swing a stick in Navesink Bank without hitting some random hot guy.
I don't know what it was.
Maybe it was the Romanian features, dark and sexy, the lilt it gave to his voice.
Oh, and that voice.
Really, I didn't even know what to say about it other than it was forged with the sole purpose of liquifying panties.
Gravel and glass.
So deep that he hardly spoke at all; he growled.
If you were, say, a straight man, I could see you having an issue understanding him because you're not completely hanging on every last word like any woman - and gay guy - would be.
And he called me 'love.'
I wasn't a pet-name kind of woman.
I had a name.
And I was cynical enough to think that the only reason you were calling me something other than that was because you simply couldn't remember it.
So it was a bit, ah, disorienting to realize that the one he used made my stomach do a completely uncharacteristic flip-flop.
I had to hope as I gathered my shit out of the locker room that he kept those words to himself when we were training the next day.
I would never let myself live it down if I embarrassed my damn self while trying to learn pressure point immobilization.
If I were smart, I would skip the lesson as a whole. Honestly, it was an expense I could scarcely afford.
Life wasn't exactly expensive down in drugville, but my salary had been stagnant since I got the job, and the gym was bleeding every red cent out of my pocket.
Fifty dollars a week just to get in the door.
Then another fifty per private session.
If things went like they usually did, that would mean I would have three with this hot-as-sin Edison guy, costing me another hundred-fifty that meant I would likely be having my cell shut off until the first of the next month and be living on ramen.
But, well, no one called me. And I had a few minutes left on my pre-paid cell that I had for just this reason. I might not be able to pay the ninety to reconnect my cell, but I could buy a ten-dollar card for the pre-paid just in case the one place that might call me needed to.
And ramen wasn't that terrible if you shopped at this little bodega down by the shore where the college was. They stocked all the fancy flavors for the kids on a budget that prioritized booze over food.
Hell, they even ran two-for-one deals if you watched closely. That was when I usually stocked up. Twenty packets of ramen for less than twenty-five bucks.
Between that and the end-of-the-world sized portion of peanut butter I had snagged at Costco on Meryl's card as a fee for sending me on an errand to pick up fucking napkins on my day off, I would keep my stomach full even if my wallet was full of cobwebs.
I would get by.
I always did.
And I would walk away with a strong knowledge of various pressure points. That could prove invaluable if I somehow found myself losing in my fight.
I wasn't delusional.
There would be a fight.
There was no way this particular man was going to let me walk up and kill him.
For one, he had training.
For two, he would know the second he laid eyes on me that I wasn't t
here for a social call, to sit over weak coffee and pound cake to discuss the weather and the current divisive political climate.
If he saw my shadow darkening his door, he would know I was there to make him hurt.
And he would fight back.
And he was bigger.
If he caught me off-guard, if he overpowered me, knowing how to incapacitate him with as little effort as possible would come really in handy.
So I was going to keep it in my damn pants, and learn what I could from the Edison guy.
I was not going to fuck him.
Nope.
No matter how much my body was trying to convince me that it would be a fantastic idea.
Ugh.
I hauled it out of my car, shivering a little thanks to the sweat-dampened gym clothes and the cool autumn air, always needing to hike it half a block from my parking spot to the front of my apartment building.
As almost always, there were four of the guys from Third Street hanging there, smoking, and watching the prostitutes down the corner in their skimpy outfits that must have been hell to wear in this weather.
"Oh, look who it is," one of them said, looking me up and down. "The bitch in apartment eighteen."
"Yep. That's me," I agreed, squeezing smaller so I didn't brush any of them as I moved past.
"I got a cure for that bitchiness, babe," he offered, hand going down to grab his crotch. You know, because that was totally sexy to women.
"I have an appointment with my vibrator. He doesn't talk so fucking much," I countered, grabbing the door, and moving inside to the chorus of laughs and ribbing of the guy's friends.
And, well, it wasn't even a lie.
I stripped out of my gross gym clothes, took a hot shower to warm the chill out of my bones, then grabbed my vibrator to try to take the edge off, fully knowing that was all it would do - take the edge off.
There came a point when you were in a long enough dry spell when no amount of finger fucking or vibrator-using would do more than just make you be able to function. It didn't take the clawing need away because it wasn't just an orgasm your body was craving. It was the hormones, the pheromones, the feel of hands on your skin, in your hair, the intoxicating sensation of lips and tongue on your nipples, inner thighs, pussy. It was the weight of a man on you, the hiss of his breath as he slid inside you, the way the orgasm was a journey, not just a quick release so you could think clearly again.
I had fallen squarely into the 'this isn't cutting it' phase a good seven months before. But life had taken a turn that I never could have seen coming, making the very idea of trying to go out and get laid a completely laughable concept that I didn't even entertain in quiet, needy moments when the world slipped away and I was just myself again, just a person with wants and needs instead of some woman on a mission.
There would be time for that again someday.
If I didn't go to jail, of course.
But even if I did, it would be worth it.
My alarm went off at eight, making me climb out of bed to shut it off, having realized many years before that the only way for me not to sleep through it was to put it clear across the apartment so I couldn't just reach over and turn it off when I was still too asleep to realize it was a terrible idea.
I had been at work until four, Monday night/Tuesday morning being the one day of the week that we got a delivery of new booze and smokes and meant I not only had to meet the delivery guy and deal with his eye-fucking that made my skin crawl, but also stock the storage room before I could finally count out my register and go home for the night.
I went to the sink to get a glass of water, giving my coffee pot a longing look, but knowing that that was a bad idea if I was going to have someone doing pressure points on me that could cause any kind of pain level. Pain made you throw up way too easily. I didn't need anything sloshing around in my stomach to come back up.
So I took a sip of my water, got into black yoga pants and a black wifebeater, threw on my shoes, and made my way out toward my car, letting the cold morning air wake me up fully by the time I reached it, turning it in the direction of the gym, the cash stashed in a weird zipper compartment on the belly band of my yoga pants.
I handed it over to the surly woman at the front desk, Cary, whose personality I appreciated because no one wanted chipper at fucking ten AM after being up until around five.
"Should I just wait here?" I asked, looking around at the not-weight-training-guys and the duo of women grappling in the corner.
"He's already in the room," Cary said, dismissing me by walking away.
There was no reason whatsoever for it, but my belly did this weird as hell fluttering thing as my feet shuffled across the floor toward the private lesson room, a place I had been in well over a dozen times before, but it somehow felt nerve-racking and new as I closed in on the door.
Inside, I found what I expected.
There was one whole wall of mirrors so you could watch your form. The other three walls were lined with thick black padding in case you got thrown against them. Which I had. Many times. So many in fact that it no longer hurt when it happened. The floor was padded as well, but not nearly as thickly, wanting you to really feel the impact of hitting it, of how disorienting that pain could be in real life, teaching you to be able to focus past it in case you needed to do so in a real life type of situation.
But then there was one thing in the room that I was not used to seeing there, a tall, fit, dark-haired, black-eyed, sexy as all hell Romanian man in a pair of black basketball pants and a black tee, looking silently intimidating just leaning against the wall.
Even with my silent footsteps, he seemed to sense my arrival, his head lifting, his gaze going right to where I was standing in the doorway, feeling the unusual urge to shuffle my feet under his penetrative gaze.
"Lenny," he greeted in that growl of his that seemed to shiver through my insides and rest as a heavy weight on my lower stomach that any woman would be able to call for what it was - desire.
Great.
Just what I needed.
To be all hot and bothered by a man whose hands were about to be all over me in a way that was definitely not meant to turn me on.
I shook off the thought, raising my chin a little. "I want to focus mostly on the pressure point application," I told him, figuring that it was my money, I should be allowed to dictate what I learned. "I have learned a bit of using the momentum against an attacker from my classes with Lo."
Lo was a woman I could see myself being friends with. You know, if I did things like nurture friendships, that is.
She was a bit older than me, but badassery seemed to seep out of her very pores. I had overheard someone say something about her running Hailstorm which I knew as some weird paramilitary camp up on the hill that looked a lot like some end of the world prepper's wet dream, but I had no idea what it meant to run it, what it was that Lo did outside of owning and teaching at the gym.
Whatever it was, I was sure she did it with her seeming practiced ease.
I had had classes with three male instructors, but not one of them pushed me anywhere near as hard as Lo did.
She had confided in me once that she thought my desperation to learn everything I could in such a short amount of time made it seem like I genuinely needed the knowledge, wasn't just dicking around and wanting to learn to be some badass just for the cred. She said that she had once been the same way. And she knew it was much more important for her to push me until I puked and bled than to have the person I was clearly trying to protect myself from do it to me.
I respected that.
No kid gloves.
Because not a single bad guy in the world would slip them on to deal with me.
Lo was a woman who knew the ugly of the world.
What she didn't know exactly was that I was part of that ugly, that I didn't need the skills to be able to defend myself against some big bad.
I was the big bad.
"We can do that, th
ough I do want to make sure you have the momentum parts down as well."
Then, completely without any warning at all, he charged me.
One second, he was a still figure against the wall, the next he was somehow right in front of me.
I would say it was so fast that he blurred, but to be perfectly honest, he moved so fast that my eyes didn't comprehend the movement at all.
So when his open palm slammed into my shoulder unexpectedly, I couldn't think fast enough to move, letting the impact shove me back a foot before I could even plant my feet.
All my training.
All these months.
And someone could still get the better of me that easily.
You're not ready.
That was the voice inside my head, whispering its ugly, toxic thoughts, the kind of thoughts that would make it impossible to use my cool, calm, and collected mindset to keep me grounded, to let me win.
And that, well, that was fucking unacceptable.
Losing was not an option.
Getting pinned and killed myself was not in my plans.
I was not going to let one strike make me reevaluate my skills.
My feet planted, and I went ahead and gave the middle finger to being on the defense.
And I attacked.
Somehow, he seemed to anticipate this, deflecting my strikes with his same languid, loose ease, every muscle in his frame seemingly relaxed while mine coiled.
I landed a whack to the spot just under his clavicle, the thump a much-needed boost of confidence, even if his much larger frame didn't budge.
I cocked an arm back to swing, only to find my wrist encircled by one of his huge hands. My whole body was swung around, my back suddenly up against the wall of his front, one of his arms a vice around my waist.
The movement came from pure instinct, having been pounded in to me by Lo and one of her mountains of men from Hailstorm who she used as an attacker for me because, apparently, the move was better when your opponent was much larger than you.
I sank down as close to a crouch as possible given his hold, then shot up from the soles of my feet, Lo's teachings making it clear that the momentum on the way down could break the hold of someone much stronger than me.
Edison (The Henchmen MC Book 10) Page 3
