by Jessie Cooke
“Can you hear me? I’m Dr. Phelps. How’re you doing?”
“I-I’m ok,” I said. “Where is my brother?”
“Can you squeeze my fingers?”
I did, I think. “Where is my brother?”
“Follow my light with your eyes, okay?”
“Shit! Can you hear me? Where is my brother?”
“I can hear you. I’m sorry. I don’t know where your brother is. I have to worry about you right now. Let’s get you stabilized and then we can worry about tracking him down for you, okay?”
I tried to nod and my head felt like it was going to explode. “Fuck!”
“You have a headache?”
“Yeah, a little.” It felt like my head was being squeezed in a vice.
“Do you know your name?”
“Kane. Kane Diaz.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Hospital?”
“Yeah, good. You’re at Las Vegas General Hospital. Do you remember what happened to you?” The whole time he was talking, nurses were fluttering around, hooking me up to machines and drawing blood out and putting up new bags and hooking them to my IV.
“Accident.”
“Yes, you were in a car accident.”
I was starting to get sleepy. The stuff they gave me was pressing into my eyelids and dragging me down. I didn’t want to sleep until I knew where Cruz was. I pulled my eyes open as wide as I could but it still looked like I was staring through a slit. “I don’t remember. My brother was with me.” I closed my eyes again, and memories of the accident started to flood my mind in flashes, I think, or maybe it was my imagination. I could see Cruz. His head and face were all bloody. He was hanging upside down in his seatbelt. “Oh Jesus! Fuck! Where is my brother? Where is Cruz Diaz? Somebody please tell me where my brother is!”
I wasn’t sure if that had come out or if I was only screaming inside of my head until they all started rushing around me again, poking more needles into my IV and talking in hushed voices. The light above me was too bright. I couldn’t keep my eyes open, but I couldn’t close them either. I had to stay awake. I had to see my brother and know that he was okay before I went to sleep. I had to fight it. I felt tears streaming down my face and it was getting harder to breathe. My chest ached as I tried to suck in a breath despite the oxygen they were forcing through tubes and into my nose.
“Kane, calm down son. You must calm down and let us help you, okay? Give him another two milligrams of Ativan.”
“No please! I’ll calm down. No more medicine. I need to see my brother. Please…”
“Let us help you, Kane and I promise you I will find out about your brother.” Those were the last words I heard before the medications claimed me and sucked me down into a pit of darkness where flashes of squealing tires and shattering glass and bloody brothers haunted my psyche and pushed me to the brink of madness.
7
Alicia
TWO WEEKS EARLIER
I opened the door and there stood Cruz and Kane. They were both bleeding profusely from their noses. I rolled my eyes. “What the hell happened?”
“My little brother took issue with some things I said about his father,” Cruz told me as he stumbled past. I could smell the alcohol reeking as it oozed out of his pores. I let him stumble down the hall towards the bathroom and I turned back to Kane.
“Him, I understand. You used to be the good one.” Kane opened his mouth and then shut it again. “Come in here and let me get you an icepack.”
He looked like he was going to protest, but changed his mind and stepped inside. I closed the door behind him and he followed me into the kitchen. I took out a clean dish cloth and ran it underneath the warm water. I turned and handed it to him. When he took it from my hand our fingers brushed. I felt a surge that I shouldn’t have. I was with his brother now. Kane left me a long time ago. “Wipe off the blood,” I told him. I turned my back on him again and opened the freezer door. I pulled out an ice tray and then I took a Ziploc bag and filled it with ice. When I turned back, he was still standing there, holding the towel. “¿Está usted sólo va a estar allí?” I asked him if he was just going to stand there. He didn’t move or speak. I was beginning to wonder if he was in shock or something. “Kane, are you okay?”
As if just waking up, he put the towel to his face and flinched. “I’m okay,” he said, in a nasally voice. “Why are you with him, Alicia?”
I handed him the ice pack. “After you clean up your face, press that to your nose.”
“Alicia…”
“You don’t have a right to ask me that, Kane. What’s between your brother and me is just that. It’s our business.”
“Fine, then just listen to me, okay? He’s my brother and I love him, but he’s no good for you, Alicia.”
“Take care of your face. I’m going to go take care of my boyfriend. You can see yourself out.”
“Alicia damn it, listen to me!”
“Why?” I was suddenly angry. I was suddenly filled with the same rage that I felt six years earlier when he left me. “Why should I listen to you? You’re any better than he is? You walked away from me! At least Cruz always comes back to me no matter what.”
“No matter what? Are you telling me you know what he does behind your back? Alicia, you’re so much better than that.”
“I’m not telling you anything except that my relationship with your brother is none of your business. Don’t presume to know me well enough to know what I am or am not good enough for either. You knew me as a girl, not as a woman. I’ve changed, a lot. Now, I’ll ask you once more to leave. I think you’ve caused enough trouble for one night.”
He choked out a laugh and blood sprayed across my kitchen counter. “I’ve caused the trouble? You’ve got blinders on if you think he’s innocent and I’m the one leading him astray.”
“They’re my blinders to wear,” I told him. I zipped up the second ice pack I made and said, “Goodnight Kane.” I left him standing there and went down the hall. I was shaking. Kane still had an effect on me no matter how guilty I felt about it. If I ignored it, I could tell myself that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I found Cruz passed out on the bed. He’d smeared blood all over the comforter. With a heavy sigh I started undressing him.
I woke up feeling like something was crushing my chest. The pungent smell of blood and alcohol filled my nostrils and turned my stomach. I pulled my eyes open to find Cruz’s face inches away from mine.
“What are you doing?” I groaned.
“I need some loving, baby.” He wiggled his hips down into me. I could feel his erection.
“Cruz, get off me! You stink.”
“Come on baby girl, Daddy needs some of that sweet, sexy…”
“No! Not until you shower and sober up. I just went to sleep after I spent an hour cleaning you up and changing the linens on the bed that you bled all over.”
“I’m sorry baby. I didn’t mean to bleed on your bed. It will never happen again. Make love to me.”
“Take a shower.”
“Aye! Alicia!”
“Aye! Cruz! You want some of this, take a shower.”
“Take a shower with me,” he said suddenly pushing himself up with his arms. I loved the way his arms flexed when he moved. He had such a hot body.
“I might. Go start without me and get rid of that blood. It stinks.”
He laughed and tried to kiss me. I turned my head to the side. “I’ll see you in there,” he said. He stripped off his underwear and shook his naked ass at me. Jesus, he was too much. Once he was out of the room I let my mind go where it shouldn’t. I pictured Kane. I hadn’t had much time to think about it but in the six years since I’d seen him, he’d really bulked up. He went from a stringy kid with wiry muscles to a man with the kind of muscles sculptors strive to recreate on the statues of Gods. I shouldn’t have noticed all of that and I shouldn’t have been thinking about it, but I had eyes and I was a red-blooded female. There was no way I couldn�
��t notice. I closed my eyes and pictured the strong, angular lines of his face. His dark eyes were what I noticed first about him all of those years ago. They were framed by the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen. So sexy.
“Baby! I need you! I’m lonely.”
I reached down and ran my fingers lightly across the crotch of my panties. They were wet. I threw back the covers and told myself that it was because I knew Cruz was naked and waiting for me. Nobody needed to know any different.
I stripped on the way to the shower and once I was naked I pulled the shower curtain open. At the sight of him, all thoughts of Kane were gone, sort of. He grinned at me and his dimples creased. His blue eyes had the mischievous twinkle they got when he was in the mood for something hot and rough. Speaking of rough, the blood was washed off his face but his nose was swollen and his eyes were beginning to bruise. Men are so stupid. I stepped into the shower and pressed my breasts up against him. He wrapped a strong arm around me and pulled me into him, kissing me passionately. As he kissed me, I let my fingernails dig into his chest. He brought his hand up my wet back and fisted my hair up in it, pulling my head back roughly. “My baby’s in the mood to play tonight, huh?” I didn’t answer him; I just started sliding down to my knees towards his big hard cock. The hand in my hair was pulling tighter. It hurt like hell, but turned me on. Only Cruz would understand that. When my knees hit the tile floor I wrapped my hand around the thick shaft of his cock and lifted it up and kissed the underside. He pulled my head back and pressed himself up against my lips. I opened my mouth. He slid his throbbing cock in between them and into my hot, wet mouth. I began to suck and swish the tip of it in my mouth. I brought my hand up and squeezed his balls and began to work them with my fingers. He pushed his hips forward and said a lot of dirty words in Spanish as I sucked him back into my throat. His swollen head pressed into the back of my throat and I rocked back and forth on my knees and began sucking harder and faster. I let my free hand slide down between my legs and my fingers found my engorged clit. It was so swollen it ached. I rubbed it while sucking him and continuing to massage his balls firmly. He liked it when I got rough. I was in the mood to bring him to that fine line between pleasure and pain.
The harder I sucked him and rubbed my clit, the louder we both moaned. His hips were thrusting forward and back, matching the rhythm of my bobbing head. The first sign that I was bringing him to orgasm was the tightening of his balls in my hand. He brought his hand back down to run his fingers through my hair. He was groaning loudly and his already huge cock was swelling in my mouth against my tongue. He pushed forward suddenly, forcing me back. I was balancing on my heels and the only thing holding me up was his grip on my hair. I was looking up at him and he smiled and started pulling up on my hair harder and forcing himself in and out of my mouth at a rapid pace. I felt like I was going to choke but I never stopped sucking. He was really getting into it and the look of ecstasy on his face was getting me even more excited than I was. I took my fingers off my clit and slid two of them up inside of my pussy and began to fuck myself as hard as I could while he fucked my mouth. He was at least pulling it out so that I could take a breath and then shoving it back in so deep that my nose slammed into his stomach each time. I felt his cock quiver and throb and he gripped my hair even tighter and pulled my face in as closely as he could as he began to come in my mouth. I shuddered and gagged as my own orgasm tore through my body.
He held me there until he was finished and then he let go of my hair and let me rock back on my heels. I had to put my hands out and catch myself. “Damn it, Cruz!”
He had his eyes closed and his hand on his cock, still in the throes of his orgasm. He opened them and looked down at me with a slow, sexy smile. He held his hand out to me. I took it and thought he was going to pull me to my feet. I was surprised when instead; he slid down to the tile with me. He pulled me up into his lap and shoved his tongue into my mouth. After he finished sucking my tongue nearly down his throat he lifted my legs and pulled them up over his shoulders. He grasped my ass tightly with both of his hands and pulled me up so that my pussy was in his face. I was in fucking midair. The man was crazy. He used his tongue to spread open my lips and then he attacked my pussy with his whole mouth. While he did that, he grabbed one of my breasts and began to squeeze it hard. Then he pinched the nipple between his fingers and twisted it. I was leaning the top half of my body back into the tile wall and pressing my pussy into his face as hard as I could. He bit down on my clit and made me scream. It wasn’t pain. It was fucking delicious ecstasy. After he bit on it, he started sucking so hard I thought he was going to suck it off. I tightened my legs around his head and held on with my thighs for dear life.
He suddenly took his fingers off my nipple and moved them down to my ass. I cried out as he slid one into my ass slowly, working it in deeper and harder as he sucked my pussy. He worked it back and forth and my moans and screams got louder and more urgent. Suddenly I was coming like I’d never come before. He kept sucking me throughout and my body was shaking violently all over like I was in the middle of a grand mal seizure. When I began to calm down I felt him pull his finger out and lay me down onto the shower floor. As I lay there looking up at him through glazed eyes, he grabbed his cock which was hard as a rock again and stroked it, maybe three times before he exploded all over my chest with his second orgasm. Now we both needed a shower.
8
Kane
Slinging sweat from my eyes, I rubbed the back of my sparring gloves across my forehead. I was shifting my weight from foot to foot as I waited for Aaron’s next strike. He was beating me and he shouldn’t have been. He’d only been fighting for two years. Jacob wouldn’t even let him fight in the expos, but he was kicking my ass. I could see every time I looked over at Jacob’s face that he wasn’t happy. Of course, he already wasn’t happy that morning when he looked at mine and my brother’s faces. I didn’t know if he’d already heard something, or he just assumed we’d gone after each other, but it wasn’t hard to tell that we were both on his shit list.
He barely spoke to either of us before putting us each in a cage with one of the guys to spar. I counted myself lucky that I got Aaron and not Lance, but it was turning out that it was my day to get beat no matter who I went up against. I was trying hard to focus, but my mind kept wandering back to previous night. I ran back over the fight with Cruz in my head. It was stupid and it never should have ended with us coming to blows. The truth was, that no matter how many excuses I tried to make, or how I tried to deny it, the fight was about Alicia.
As I stood in that kitchen watching her put together an ice pack, I couldn’t help but notice how nicely she’d matured since I saw her last. I couldn’t help but wonder if I should have told her that my brother cheated on her whenever he got the chance. I looked over at him in the next cage. His nose was more swollen than mine and only one of his eyes were black. He still had the cocky ass attitude that he’d had for as long as I could remember, and it really made me want to blacken his other eye.
Jacob let Aaron beat on me for quite a while before he finally stormed into the cage.
“What the hell are you doing?” He was standing over us and I hoped Aaron had done something stupid too and he was yelling at him. He had his eyes trained on my face and it was unnerving. “Sparring,” I said, finally pushing Aaron back far enough so I could get back on my feet.
“You look like shit in here. At this rate I’d be better off sending Aaron in to fight for the championship.” I just looked at him. He was right, but I didn’t know what to say. I saw my brother in the other cage, still ducking and dodging away from Lance’s giant paws. “You don’t have anything to say?” Jacob asked me.
I spit out my mouth guard. “No, you’re right.”
“Maybe I should put you in a cage with your brother and let you two finish whatever the hell you started last night.” Everyone stopped what they were doing and listened to what Jacob was saying. “I got a call from Lucas Minelli last nigh
t. Do you two boneheads know who that is?” I shook my head. Cruz and Lance stopped sparring and Cruz shrugged. “He owns that God damned strip club you two were brawling out in front of last night. He recognized you,” he said to me. “He called me before the police showed up and you two took off. Do you have any fucking clue how lucky you both are that you didn’t get your stupid asses arrested?” Again, I nodded and Cruz shrugged. “You two are associated with me now. This is my reputation. You are my fighters. You won’t do anything in this city that I won’t know about within ten minutes of it happening. If you had been arrested last night, and the press had shown up, how do you think that reflects on my club?” I took a chance and said,
“Poorly.” In my peripheral vision, Cruz smirked. Judging from the look on Jacob’s face, mine was the better answer.
“That’s right, fucking poorly. I can make or break you as a fighter. If you don’t want to be here and you’re not serious about wanting to win then you are welcome to leave now. But, if you choose to stay, you will also choose to control your fucking rages when you’re out in public.” He turned back to me and said, “You have another press conference in two days. When they ask what happened to your face, what the fuck are you going to tell them?”
“I didn’t think about it Jake, I’m sorry.” He continued to glare at me and then he turned and glared at Cruz too. Cruz still looked smug. Jacob looked around the gym at the rest of the fighters and suddenly everyone was lifting weights, punching a bag, running on a treadmill or disappearing into the locker room. He stormed back out of the cage and Aaron and I squared off again. It turned out to be a long, fucking day.
“What the hell are you whistling about?” Cruz and I had been in the showers and I had been ignoring him for at least ten minutes. He tried talking to me at first, but when I wouldn’t listen to him he started fucking whistling. He was like a big, bloody Mexican canary.
