Saved (A Standalone Romance) (A Savery Brother Book)

by Naomi Niles

  “It is! I know we just met but would you like to go out for drinks tonight? Just to chat?”

  “I’d love to,” I replied, “but I actually have to meet up with a friend tonight. I haven’t gotten to see him in several days.”

  “Oh, do you have a boyfriend?”

  Normally I would have been taken aback by the question, but the word evoked a flood of warm sensations. I had never yet given him that label—we had only really been official since Sunday—but it fit. It was perfect.

  “I do,” I said, smiling. “We’ll take a raincheck, and maybe you can meet him the next time we go out.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Braxton

  I went out with Jaimie to World Market on Thursday night. We stopped at a bar on the way home, and both got a little tipsy. She wanted me to spend the night, but I resisted and assured her there would be plenty of night-spending when I got back from Vegas the following week.

  “This will give you something to look forward to, at least.” I twined a lock of her hair around my finger, suppressing a fierce urge to kiss her. “I’ll come over on Monday night and make stir-fry. We’ll play Old Crow’s new album and watch the second Before movie—which one is it?”

  “Before Sunset,” said Jaimie, her hands on the collar of my shirt. “It’s the one where they meet again after nine years apart.”

  “See, and we’ll watch that, and I’ll try not to fall asleep.”

  “Don’t pretend you weren’t fascinated by the first one,” she said with a smirk. “But yes, I would like that very much.”

  On Friday night, I flew down to Vegas with Coach, Carruthers, Bruce, and Nick. Once again, we stayed in the Bellagio. By now the place was so bound up in memories of Jaimie that I could hardly walk out of my room without being reminded of that first night. Once in the dining area, I was startled by the sight of long auburn-tinted hair on a pair of slender shoulders and thought for one wild moment that maybe she had come to surprise me: but a second later the person in question turned around, revealing himself to be a man, and the illusion was shattered.

  But I still carried a faint hope that she would show up for the fight. So when I heard a knock at the door on Saturday night just as I got out of the shower, I nearly ran to the door.

  But it wasn’t Jaimie. It was Nick, and he was wincing as though he had just eaten something sour.

  “Hey, what’s up?” I motioned for him to come into the room. He was still wearing his slacks and jacket. “Why aren’t you dressed yet?”

  “I’m not going to be in the fight,” said Nick, letting out a deep breath.

  I stared at him in surprise. “Wait, why? Did you withdraw your name?”

  He shook his head. “No, I got taken off the card. Coach found out that I had accepted Bruce’s offer.”

  “But the drug tests haven’t even come back yet.”

  “I know.” Nick lowered his head. “I couldn’t take the guilt. I had to tell him.”

  He strode over to the window, staring out over the balcony at the fading daylight. “I think I did the right thing in the end, but I should’ve done it a lot sooner. I can’t tell you how embarrassed I feel about it.”

  “Are you being taken off the team?”

  “No.” He chuckled to himself. “Turns out, the pills Bruce had been giving me weren’t actually growth hormones. They were placebos. Coach had asked him to go around making the pitch, seeing if he could find any takers. I stupidly fell for it, but because I didn’t take any actual drugs, I’m being let off with a penalty. He says I can play the next match.”

  “Well, I suppose it could be a lot worse.”

  “Yeah.” Nick blushed, still grinning idiotically. “They could have been real drugs. I could have lost my job.”

  He seemed pretty badly shaken by the experience. With trembling hands, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette, which he lit as he stood on the balcony, letting the smoke twine around him.

  “You know I was fired from one of my first jobs as a grocery stocker?” he asked me. “When I was seventeen and living in Jersey, I worked three nights a week stocking cans in the cold grocery store. It was a lonely job, and I had only the muzak to keep me company.

  “There was a girl I sometimes ran into on my walk home—cute girl in her mid-twenties, but with terrible hygiene and threadbare clothes. Her name was Margo. And I eventually realized that she didn’t have a place to live. She would hang out at McDonald's each night until it closed and then wander around town until sunrise. God, it broke my heart just to see that.

  “So what did I do? I started sneaking food out in my coat when I left for the night. A jar of peanut butter, a bag of crackers, a baguette… And I wasn’t exactly discreet about it, and it didn’t take my manager very long to figure out what I was doing. She called me into her office one night and fired me on the spot.

  “So when Coach called me into his room just now, it was like reliving that moment all over again. I really thought I was about to lose my job. If that happened, I have no idea where I would go. MMA is my whole life. It’s the one thing I’m good at.”

  “Well, you got off easy,” I said in a reassuring tone. “You’ll get your chance in the octagon soon. And until then you can be my bitch water boy.”

  “Screw you,” said Nick, laughing in spite of himself.

  We hung out and talked for another ten minutes until it was time for me to get ready. Coach came to the door and ushered me out into the hallway, leading us downstairs and into the green room where we found a mini-fridge stocked with small bottles of fruit juice. I took one and drank it down in one gulp, tossing the bottle across the room and into a wicker wastebasket.

  “This event sold out in record time,” said Coach, poking his head through the door. “Everyone saw your performance on social media, and they’ve shown up hoping for a repeat.”

  “Well, let’s give it to ‘em,” I said with a grin.

  “Just remember,” said Nick, “Bones is a master of manipulation. He’ll taunt you, insult you, and say anything he can to get a rise out of you. I almost wish we were sending you out there with wax in your ears so you couldn’t hear him.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I assured him. “Just focus on bringing me my water.”

  Nick looked me over approvingly, wiping a stray strand of hair off my shoulders. “You ready for this?”

  I gazed at the door. It was open a crack, and white light was spilling into the room from the auditorium, illuminating Coach’s feet.

  I turned to Nick and smiled. “Fuck, yeah,” I replied. He took me by the hand, and together we walked out onstage.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Jaimie

  “Have you and Braxton been talking?” asked Ren.

  “What? Of course.” I was standing at the kitchen table cutting up a cucumber, not really paying attention to what I was doing. Sometimes I got so lost in my own head that I was only dimly conscious of time passing. “You make it sound like we broke up.”

  “Just asking.” She brought over a cutting board full of carrots and scraped them into the salad bowl with a carving knife. “This is the first time you’ve really been apart since you started going out.”

  “We’ve only been formally going out for about five days.”

  “Well, whatever you want to call it. You were pretty official before you ever made it official, if you know what I mean.”

  This was probably true, but I wasn’t going to let on how much his absence had been affecting me. Sometimes I wanted to apologize for thinking of him as a dumb bruiser; our conversation on the hay bale had definitively laid that illusion to rest.

  “I just wish I had the gift of hiding my real feelings,” I said aloud. “I get teary-eyed at work, and people won’t stop asking what’s wrong. Yesterday, Eleanor came over and offered me some medicine.”

  “You were crying because Braxton was leaving? That’s… sweet.”

  I laughed bitterly. “I think ‘obsessive’ is the w
ord you’re looking for. But no, I wasn’t just crying for that. I was crying for him, for the things he’s had to overcome, that we’ve both had to overcome, for the childhoods we might have had if humans weren’t so cruel and screwed up.”

  I told her the story he had shared with me about his friend Jim and how he had ended up in a wheelchair. Ren set down the knife and listened attentively until I had finished, looking increasingly distressed.

  “It makes sense that he would want to be as strong as possible, to make sure that never happened again,” she said. “He’s stronger than me, and I don’t just mean physically. If I witnessed something like that with my own eyes, I think it would break me.”

  “Same.” I shoved the cutting board aside and rubbed my tired eyes. “And I think I would hate the world and feel betrayed by the adults in my life who didn’t intervene sooner. But that could just be some of my own teenage angst bleeding into the situation.”

  “Maybe.” She opened the oven door just a crack, and a wave of hot air blew over her face. “Lasagna’s still not done. I always considered myself sort of privileged that you let me into your life.”

  “Why?” I asked, surprised.

  “Because you shut everyone else out. It was especially bad when you were a teenager and I was your only friend. As you’ve gotten older, you’ve opened yourself up to the world a little more, but not really.”

  “Well, I think everyone has two faces.” I reached for the French onion dip. “You just have the extraordinary privilege of seeing me at my worst. Not everyone gets that.”

  “I consider myself very lucky,” said Ren.

  “You should. I can curse and complain in front of you in a way I can’t with really anybody else.”

  “Not even Braxton?”

  “We’re getting there. I’ve shared some pretty painful experiences with him that I’ve only ever told one other person.” I shrugged. “We’re still dating, so I have to assume he didn’t mind.”

  “Of course not. I’m sure he finds that kind of vulnerability thrilling.”

  “It is, in a way. It’s like a nakedness of the soul.”

  When the lasagna came out of the oven, I poured us both a glass of iced tea and followed Ren into the living room. The match was just starting: Bones and Braxton stood at opposite ends of the octagon glowering at each other, Bones in his gaudy spandex and Braxton in his blue shorts. The crowd yelled and stamped its feet. At the back of the screen, I spotted a blonde girl, no older than eighteen, holding up a hand-made sign that read “MARRY ME, BRAXTON.” A girl standing next to her, and looking not much older, held up a second sign that read “MARRY HER.”

  “Looks like you’ve got some competition,” said Ren.

  “I’m not worried,” I replied.

  But perhaps I should have been, because Bones came out swinging, apparently hoping to crush Braxton in the opening round with a devastating barrage of kicks and punches to the face. I’d seen several hundred fights, but had never before felt in my body the pain being inflicted onstage. I winced with every blow Braxton took to the jaw, watching the screen through closed fingers.

  Braxton lost the first round, badly. But he rallied in the second, surprising his opponent with a hail of quick punches and then pinning him to the floor before he could recover himself. The two men glared at each other with a hatred that was alarming and unfeigned.

  For the final round, Bones, having apparently given up on defeating him in the usual manner, decided to try a different tack. Instead of confronting him directly, he hovered in a corner hurling schoolyard taunts.

  “You are going to wish you had a time machine,” he said, “so you could go back and warn yourself not to fight this match tonight. The history books will call this ‘the humiliation of the century.’”

  “No they won’t, Bones,” said Braxton coolly.

  “Right up there on the timeline of embarrassing American defeats,” Bones went on with enthusiasm: “My Lai. The Sixty-Eight Tet Offensive. Fallujah. And Braxton Savery in Vegas!” Energized by the cheers of his audience, he added, “You are the most embarrassing thing to happen to this country since World War II!”

  “What happened in World War II?” asked Ren. “He knows that we won that, right?”

  I shrugged. Braxton’s face bore the faintest tinge of red behind the ears, and he seemed to be keeping himself in his own corner by some superhuman effort.

  “He’s an idiot!” Ren shouted. “Don’t listen to him, Braxton. He’s just trying to provoke you into breaking the rules!”

  “It’s a compliment, really!” I added. “He knows he can’t beat you any other way!”

  We went on shouting at the screen as though he could hear us. Braxton continued to stand quietly and the crowd, presumably annoyed by his passivity, started booing in earnest.

  “What the hell is wrong with those people?” said Ren. “I have never seen a more fickle bunch.”

  Despite working for years at FAF, it was only the second or third match I had ever felt invested in. As the minutes ticked past, and the two men stood in their respective corners, one glowering, and the other taunting, my sense of anticipation increased. They weren’t even really doing anything, and yet I couldn’t look away from the screen.

  “Are they even allowed to stand there like that?” I asked Ren.

  “I hope your mom is watching when I crack open your skull tonight and partake of its innards,” said Bones. “You know why? Because she’s going to thank me. And the nation will thank me when I topple your sorry ass. I am going to win the Congressional Medal of Freedom for ridding the world of your stench. They are going to make movies about this night for centuries, and no one will even remember your name!”

  “That would make it hard to make a movie, then, wouldn’t it?” said Braxton, speaking up for the first time in a while. The audience laughed, and Braxton, seemingly buoyed by the response, managed a smile.

  “I like how this became open mic night at the stand-up comedy club,” said Ren.

  “Your mom saw that movie The Babadook,” said Bones, “and she was surprised, because she didn’t know you had gone into acting. If you and Kim Jong-Un were trapped in a room, I would tell Kim, ‘I’m sorry.’ The difference between you and Bin Laden is that one is a shit-faced traitor despised by all men of good will and the other died in 2011. If you were my dad—”

  But we never got to find out what would have happened if Braxton was his dad because at that moment Braxton strode forward and clocked him in the face. It happened so fast that Bones had no time to prepare; in the split second before Braxton’s fist collided with his jaw, he made a belated effort to raise his arms, in vain. Looking badly stunned, he staggered back against the metal cage.

  Ren and I leaped to our feet.

  “Get him while he’s down!” shouted Ren. “Don’t let him recover his wits!”

  “Eviscerate him!” I yelled. “Send him to the ER!”

  “Send him to the morgue!”

  Braxton, as if taking our advice, leaped forward with all the ferocity of a house cat tackling a lizard. Bones managed to get in a few swift kicks but Braxton was simply too powerful, and the hurricane of fists proved overwhelming.

  “Don’t bite him!” I shouted, my hands over my mouth. “Let it be a clean fight!”

  “Ignore her!” said Ren. “Do what you have to do!”

  But I needn’t have worried. Within a few minutes, Bones was too stunned to move. His face bloodied, his arms pinned to the mat, he raised his head to spit in Braxton’s face but missed. The referee called time, and the room rose to its feet in applause, cheering loud enough to shake the house.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Braxton

  I landed in Boulder on Monday morning after a weekend of riotous celebration. After the fight, Nick had led me downstairs to the bar where we drank until he passed out. I carried him back up to his room and tucked him into bed. He let out a belch and rolled over, murmuring that he was cold and asking me to turn the
moon off.

  I was on my way to the restroom when I heard a knock at the door. Thinking it must be Coach come to congratulate us, I opened it.

  There in front of me stood a girl in her early twenties. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a paisley-patterned button-down, unbuttoned to reveal a white tank top. She had long dirty blonde hair tied back in a floral-patterned scrunchie, and she smiled, shyly but eagerly, when she saw me.

  “Hi,” she said. “Braxton?”

  “Yeah. What’s up?”

  She laughed nervously. “My name is Leanne. I drove all the way down from Salt Lake City to watch tonight’s match. How long have you been training?”

  “Since I was in grade school.” I glared suspiciously at her. “Did you need something?”

  “No, that was all.” She brushed her hair back, peering through the door to where Nick lay on the bed. “You mind if I come in for a minute?”

  I was reminded irresistibly of the first night Jaimie and I had spent together, how she had come to my door as I was getting ready for bed and invited herself inside. Something of the same desperation and fervor shone in Leanne’s face. It would have been intoxicating if I hadn’t already been taken—who could deny himself the spoils of victory after a hard fight? But as it was, I felt frightened.

  “No,” I said after a long moment’s pause. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  Disappointment shone on her face as I closed the door and returned to tending Nick.

  It was raining when I left Vegas on Monday morning, but bright and cloudless in Boulder. The moment I landed, I reached for my phone to call Jaimie and let her know I was in town. But no one answered, and a second later, I glanced up to see her standing in front of me at baggage claim, waving and beaming warmly.

  “Hey, you!” She ran forward and gave me a hug and a kiss. She was wearing a purple tank top with the top button unbuttoned and a pair of khaki shorts that rode low on her hips. We stood there for a moment gazing into each other’s eyes, heedless of spectators. “It feels like you’ve been gone for a year.”