by Amity Cross
“Are you okay?” I asked, letting the woman go as she steadied herself.
She glanced down at me from atop her six inch heels. “Yeah, yeah. I’m okay. I wish I could say the same for my shoes. You know how much these things cost?”
I looked down at my scuffed boots and then to her heels and shrugged. I didn’t know a thing about shoes.
“Oh shit, where’s my manners? Thanks for helping me up. I’m Josephine, Josie for short.” She stuck out her hand.
I shook it with a smile. “No problems. I’m Renee, but everyone calls me Ren.”
“Hey, you wanna go for a coffee?” Josie asked, brushing off her knees.
I glanced down the street. “Coffee?”
“Yeah, it’s the least I can do. I mean, nobody stops these days.” She shrugged. “Everyone’s an asshole, you know.”
“Um. Sure?”
“C’mon.” She waved me forward. “I know a little place around the corner.”
We wandered around the corner to Sydney Road, the main drag through Brunswick and into a little coffee shop a few doors up. It sat next to a junk shop and a Turkish bakery that was already open and pumping out the sweet doughy smell of fresh baking bread.
A bell above the door jingles as we walked into the cafe and the bakery’s scent was replaced with fresh roasted coffee.
“Hey, Josie,” the guy behind the coffee machine called out.
“Hey Seth. Just the usual, thanks.” She glanced at me.
“Oh, cappuccino, thanks.”
The barista smiled behind his thick-rimmed hipster glasses. “I don’t think I’ve seen you in here before,” he said to me. “Are you new to the area?”
I shrugged. “You could say that.”
“Well, I’m Seth, the coffee guy. Pleased to meet you.”
Grateful for another friendly face, I smiled. “Ren.”
Seth beamed. He was cute in a lanky, clean-cut, indie, arty kinda way. Total polar opposite from the guys I was hanging out with at Beat. “Have a seat, ladies. I’ll bring ‘em over in a sec.”
Josie led me to a table by the window, the morning sun warming us through the glass.
Seth slid Josie a latte in a glass and set my coffee in front of me before disappearing behind the counter and firing the machine up again.
“Where do you work?” I asked as she dumped a sugar into her drink.
“I work in an office in the city,” she said. “Menial admin junk. My place is up there a bit.” She waved her hand in the air.
“You live on your own?”
“Yeah. Rent is killer.”
I smiled, taking a sip of my cappuccino. We’d lived in the outer suburbs where rent was bad enough that we had been scraping the bottom of the barrel. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know exactly how much it cost to live in the city.
“I saw you come out of Beat,” Josie said. “Do you work there?”
I sighed, not knowing how to describe my situation to a stranger, or if I should. “No, not really. My Dad owns it.”
She sat up straight, suddenly interested. “Really? Are there hot muscly guys?”
“Yeah,” I said with a laugh. “There’s a couple. There’s a lot of exposed nipple.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t seem very happy about it.”
Josie was so nice and genuinely interested I just spilled everything. I told her about my Mum and how it was her last wish for me to know my Dad. I told her about the last day and actually meeting him for the first time in seventeen years…and my rude awakening by my half-sister, Monica, that I never knew existed.
“Oh Ren,” she exclaimed. “It’s not your fault your Dad’s an ass that left you and your Mum. Shit, I would’ve smacked him one.”
“I can’t believe he put me in the storeroom. What kind of sick joke is that?”
“I’d sleep in his storeroom and eat all his food. Milk him for all you can get,” she declared. “There’s seventeen years of Christmases and birthdays to make up for.” She ticked them off her fingers. “Not to mention good school reports, tooth fairy coinage, pocket money…”
I stared at her, not believing a woman I just met would be so…kind to me.
“What are you looking at me like that for?”
“It’s just,” I stammered. “I just met you five minutes ago, I dump all my crap on you and you’re still sitting here?”
“What can I say? It’s not every day you fall over and someone actually stops to help you up. Besides,” she said, waving a hand at me, “isn’t that meant to be fate or something?”
I cocked my head to the side. “We’re fated to be BFF’s because I helped you up?”
“Ren, I see it this way. I don’t have many female friends. Not good friends anyway. I get along with guys more than anything, and believe me when I say, I’ve got a feeling about you.”
“A feeling?”
“A feeling.”
I gave her a look.
“Oh, shit. I like dick, Ren. Not that kind of feeling.”
I burst out laughing, covering my mouth with my hand.
“Hey, I gotta get going if I want to catch the train into the city. Work and all.” Her chair scraped back as she stood, collecting her handbag. “Wanna get coffee here again tomorrow? Same time?”
My heart began to swell at the thought of making a friend in such a hostile environment so soon.
“Yeah,” I said, beaming. “You got it.”
Life went on like that for a while. It’s what it did. Time went on and waited for nobody to catch up. Days rolled into weeks, classes came and went and I was still as welcome as I was the day I walked into the studio.
The one thing I had that was mine was fighting.
When the lights went off at Beat and everyone left for home, I crept out of my shell and trained. During the day I watched as Dad went through the motions with the Twins, listening to the more advanced techniques they used. Of a evening, I attended all the classes and soon I was advancing from the beginner to the intermediate MMA group. Needless to say I was the only woman, but I didn’t let that stop me.
I’d catch Dad watching every now and then, but he never approached or treated me any differently than he had since day one. Which was with mild interest and a whole lot of indifference. Monica made sure of that. I was only there because Mum wanted me to be, so I wasn’t fazed either way. Maybe that was a lie, or maybe it wasn’t, but after so long looking after someone else, it was refreshing to look after just me.
Every weekday morning, I’d meet Josie at the coffee shop around the corner and we’d talk about anything and everything. I’d never really had a best friend before and I guess she was the closest thing I’d ever had. Nothing was off limits and she was never short of a horror dating story. We’d laugh and chat and it made me forget my situation for an hour every day.
Monday night was the intermediate MMA class and as I shook out my tired muscles I relished how tough it had been. There were ten of us all up and I was the only woman. It was hard work, more because of the exercises and techniques than the distinctive weight and strength disadvantage. It was hard on the body as well as the mind.
We had an outside instructor, so I didn’t have to deal with Dad or the Twins. It was my own space to screw up or excel in and that made it even better.
Stretching out my quads, the guy across from me called out, “You almost had me in that last set, Ren.”
“Up yours Brett.” I brandished my middle finger at him and waved it around. “I could’ve beaten your ass to a bloody pulp. I was going soft on ya.”
Brett had become my training partner during class. At first the other guys gave him shit about it nonstop and he thought he had to give it to me easy because I was a woman, but that was until I put him flat on his back in five seconds flat. The shit stopped and the fear began. Okay, so no fear, but a begrudging respect for the tits and vagina brigade.
“Careful,” he exclaimed.
Laughing, I shoved him as hard as I could. H
e wasn’t as heavy or as built as the Twins, so he stumbled back a step.
“You’re getting tougher to beat,” he said with a grin.
I wiped the dribble of sweat that was trickling down my neck with my towel. “Thanks.”
“You back Thursday?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” That’s because I lived here, but I wasn’t letting on about that to a bunch of dudes I took class with.
Brett wandered off, collecting his stuff and followed the line of guys toward the showers. I didn’t fancy showering with nine other guys, even though there were doors with locks and all of that, so I hung around in the studio. I eyed the gym and began to think about the idea of walking it out.
“Hey Ren. How’s class going?”
I glanced up at Dad, who’d crept up on me while I was distracted. All our interactions over the past few weeks had been awkward at best, so I’d been avoiding him as much as possible. I still didn’t know what to say or do, so I didn’t do anything at all. Maybe that wasn’t the brightest idea on the list, but I was at a loss. Mum and I used to talk about everything and she was the only person I really knew how to relate to. Now that she was gone, it was like I'd forgotten how to be close to anyone.
She was the only one who wanted you and she still abandoned you in the end. I squashed down the traitorous thought with a hard swallow.
“It’s okay, I guess.” Total lie. I really liked learning to fight. I loved the burn.
“Monica never showed any interest,” he said. “She’s good with food and all of that, but we never clicked on other things.”
“So, I’m the son you never had?”
“Ren.”
“I’m having a hard time letting the past seventeen years go, Dad. I can’t just turn it off.”
“I am trying, you know.”
“I know, but it’s the fact that Mum had cancer and we were alone. That’s screwed up.” He stood there like a stunned mullet for ages, so I thought I’d better fill in the silence since he didn’t look like he was moving any time soon.
“Any new classes coming up?”
“A new self defense course starts next week.”
I nodded. I already knew about that one. Wednesdays at seven. Tuesday was beginner MMA, Thursday and Monday was intermediate MMA. Friday was for the hardcore fighter junkies. I hadn’t graduated that far yet.
“Are you going to take that, too?” he asked with a chuckle.
“Probably.”
The conversation dipped into a lull again. It didn’t have to be awkward, but it was like we didn’t know what was kosher to talk about. Safe topics, calm waters and all that.
“Why haven’t I met your wife yet?” I asked, knowing full well why I hadn’t.
Dad coughed nervously, which meant I wasn’t going to like his answer. “She doesn’t want to acknowledge that you exist.”
Snorting, I shoved off the wall and strode across the mat, picking up my towel on the way. If it was like that, then I didn’t want to meet her either.
“Ren.”
I didn't turn around. The more people I met, the more chance that I'd be left again. Besides, why would I want to meet the woman who Dad left Mum for? What kind of masochistic crap was that?
Storming into the showers where a bunch of half naked men tried to hastily cover their parts at my appearance, I shelved that one for the too hard basket.
6
Ash
I bet the universe a million bucks that everyone thought I was dead.
It'd been four years since I stood inside the boxing studio that had shaped the fighter I'd become. Four long, agonizing years.
And in all that time, no one had ever thought it might be a good idea to change the alarm code.
It wasn't meant to be like this. Not by a long shot. Problem was, I had a switch and the wrong kinds of people knew how to flip it. Once that happened it took a fucking freight train to stop me. Even I didn't know where off was.
Beat was the one place I could come to and forget every mother fuckin' shit thing that had ever happened to me. I could come here, pound a bag for a few hours, run the treadmill, kick the shit through a bag and get it all out before the switch was even flipped. Better than taking it out on the face of some poor dude in the ring. There was fighting and then there was fighting with anger as your driving force. That kind of shit killed guys on the receiving end and I didn't need that kind of trouble.
Fuck, I missed this place. When you're surrounded by people twenty four seven, you forget what it was like to have time on your own. Solitude. I was a better man solo.
It was the middle of the night and the studio was dark and empty, shadows cast by the streetlights outside were long and distorted by the mirrored wall. It was just the way I liked it. Quiet.
The place hadn't changed that much. It stunk of leather and sweat...stunk of testosterone and fighting. There were new mats, some updated bags hanging at the back and different posters hung on the notice board, but it was still the same Beat I remembered. It was reassuringly familiar.
Coach would flip his stack when he knew I was back. Everyone would.
Kicking loose my trainers and shucking my sweats off, I tested the first punching bag up on the hook. It was heavy enough, so I stretched out and yanked my T-shirt over my head. Just being here like this made anxiety twist in my gut. Time to sweat it out before it got the better of me.
The first few punches felt stiff, but for a guy like me, it was like getting back on a bike. I never really forgot how to fight, it was in my blood. I was born kicking and screaming and I'd go out the same way.
I lost myself to the movements, feeling my muscles come alive and as I punched the absolute shit outta that bag, I felt my heart starting to beat again. My gloved fists hit with a sting that splintered across my knuckles. I felt the impact shoot up my arm and absorb into my torso. Blood was flowing and thrumming in my ears. Yeah, I was fuckin' born to fight.
I caught a hint of movement out the corner of my eye and realized that I wasn’t alone after all. In the mirror I saw a shadowy figure sneaking up behind me. Sneaking never did anyone any fuckin' good.
Spinning on my heel, I came face to face with a cricket bat swinging straight for my head. Aw, shit. My reflexes kicked in and my hand shot up and grasped the end of the bat before it could smack me out.
My gaze collided with a set of brown eyes that were attached to a sexy, disheveled woman and my breath caught.
What the fuck?
7
Ren
Staring at the ceiling of my converted storage closet, I sighed.
Another hard night of training had me wired to the extreme. On one hand, I was getting stronger, my body was all toned and I felt good, but it kept me awake at the strangest hours. If I did all this training during the day, then I probably wouldn’t have this problem, but there was no way I was doing it in front of the Twins. That was an accident waiting to happen. Yeah, an accident with my fist to their faces.
Dad’s upgraded wife didn’t want to meet me. She was the bit on the side, why was it my fault? Why weren’t we all angry with Dad about it? It was a game where everyone was a victim, so who knew, right? Maybe I should just let it go and think about more constructive things.
A loud slapping sound brought me back to the present with a violent jerk and I sat up in bed, listening. Another loud slap echoed through the empty studio and my heart began to hammer. It sounded like someone was belting the shit out of something. Ghosts, intruders, robbers...
Crawling out of bed, I cracked open the door and peered down the dark hall. It was empty, but now that there was no barrier between me and whatever was going on down there, it sounded like someone was training. At this hour? It was after midnight. Not even I trained this late.
Edging down the hall, I peered down the stairs and onto the studio floor and almost had a heart attack.
This huge, hulking, monster of a man was going hell for leather with a heavy punching bag, the slap of his fists echoing throug
h the empty studio. He was totally Hulk-smashing some kind of demon out of his system.
Shit. I didn’t recognize him and he was half naked. No shirt, just a pair of shorts. Every time he took a swing, the muscles in his back rippled and I could instantly picture how firm his ass was. Fuck, I was ogling an intruder? He could be anyone.
Slinking back along the hall, I picked up the cricket bat that was leaning against the wall inside the office. The only thought I had was to incapacitate then ask questions. I mean, just one look at the guy told me I’d be no match.
Taking the stairs one at a time, I kept my gaze fixed on his back, but he was too engrossed in his fists to realize I was coming. He beat the bag like it was his worst enemy, like he was trying to kill it. I was right behind him and he was still going at it, so I swung the bat, aiming right for his head. It sailed through the air with surprising speed on my behalf and I almost thought I'd gotten him. He spun on his heel and at the last second, a big paw of a hand shot up and grabbed the end of the bat.
Green eyes stared at me in surprise and suddenly, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. I didn't just have an intruder on my hands, I had a sexy, muscled, tattooed, heartthrob standing over me. Blinking hard, I wrenched the bat out of his grasp.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked, his chest heaving.
“Me?” I scoffed. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I don't need to explain myself,” he said with a sneer.
“What are you doing in here?”
“What’s it look like, gorgeous?” He stepped forward, prowling like a tiger, all muscles and tattoos. Dean and Lincoln had nothing on this guy and there were two of them.
Realizing I was standing there in nothing but a singlet and shorts, my boobs on full show through the flimsy fabric, I leveled the bat ready to hit him again if he came any closer.
“You fucking tell me before I call the cops on your ass,” I hissed.
