by Lane Hart
“I can tell she makes you happy. You have the smile of a man in love.”
“I am happy and in love,” I admit.
"Now I am, too," she replies before taking me to meet my brother and sister.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sadie
One week into my internship and I’m in love with Bald Head Island. You can only get to it by a thirty minute ferry boat ride, which is awesome and makes me feel like I’m stranded Ginger or Maryann style. There are no cars allowed on the island so everyone rides around on golf carts. Even though it’s a small piece of land, the number of sea turtle nests on it is incredible. There’s been more than a hundred laid this summer, so every night we patrol the beaches with red foil covered flashlights searching for hatchlings. After just a week I’ve seen eight nests boil, an absolutely amazing thing to watch.
Tonight we’re excavating a nest that hatched a few days ago to look for stragglers. There’s usually at least a handful of hatchlings, and sometimes as many as a few dozen. These are public events that everyone on the island is invited to watch, but only the interns get to touch the cute little guys. It’s a rather large crowd tonight since it’s Friday, the start of the busy tourist weekend. I look around the packed, roped off observer area and somehow spot him in the sea of people.
Jude.
I know it’s only been a week, but I’ve missed him like crazy. A small, insecure part of me couldn’t help but worry that the week before had been a dream or that he’d change his mind about wanting us to get back together, which meant he’d decide not to relocate. I jog through the sand and launch myself at him even though the waist high rope still separates us.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, tightening my grip around his neck as his arms wrap around my waist.
“I just wanted to see you before I go home to pack.”
I’d been freaking out after not hearing from him since yesterday when he was headed to Florida to finally see his mom.
“How was Florida?” I ask when I finally pull back to see the expression on his face.
“Better than I expected,” he says with a small smile. “But go, get back to work and maybe we can talk later?”
“Yeah, of course. I’ll be free until ten. Then you can patrol the beach with me if you want.”
“Hell yes,” he agrees with a big grin.
I go back to the nest site and help the other three interns with removing the mesh cage from the sand, and then we start digging. Finding that first hatchling is just as exciting as it is every single time. With latex gloves on we pick up and put each of the fifteen little guys or girls who we find into a plastic container to walk around and show the observers. The baby turtles are all covered in sand and scrambling on top of each other, desperately trying to find the ocean.
Once everyone’s had a quick look, we take the babies to the wet sand where the tide is coming in and line them up to watch them race home for the very first time. The waves wash a few back up on the shore, but they’re persistent and eventually all of them make it out of sight and into the great big ocean.
It’s sad to know that not many will survive, but the females that do will remember how to get back to this place and will return to this same beach to lay their own eggs in eighteen or so long years from now.
Jude sneaks up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist before kissing my neck. “That was pretty damn cool to watch,” he says.
“Yeah, and it never gets old,” I reply before turning around in his arms. “So tell me about how it went with your mother that left you buried in the sand.”
“She was…different than I expected. Pretty and actually sort of nice. She was apologetic, more so than I imagined she’d be. I have a younger brother and sister.”
“Really?” I ask.
“Yeah, the girl’s named Anna and she’s sixteen and the boy, Wyatt is eleven. They act like Jax and I hung the moon.” He laughs. “It’s sweet.”
“Have you told Jax about her?” I ask.
“Yeah and she called him while I was there. Hopefully it helps...but who knows.”
“How are you doing?” I know it had to be an emotionally draining trip for him to deal with this all alone. I wish I could’ve been there for him.
“I’m...really good. Even better now that I’m here with you,” he says with a dimpled smile. Reaching down, he grabs my hand and kisses my finger above the blue square topaz ring surrounded by diamonds. The promise ring he put on me before I left.
“Thanks for coming, and while I love it here, I can’t wait to get back to Durham with you.”
“Just one more week,” he says, brushing his lips over my cheek. “But I can already tell it’s going to be a great night. I’ve got lots of Reese’s, and there’s this little rainbow sea turtle I’ve missed and need to spend some serious quality time with.”
…
The summer’s coming to an end and while there’ve been some tough times, there’s been a lot of good ones too. It’s the Saturday before school starts and I’m at the Evolution gym, hopefully soon to be Havoc, getting ready to watch Jude fight a string of guys with a pretty big crowd of locals watching.
“A kiss for good luck?” Jude asks me after his hands are taped up and ready to go.
I press my lips to his before asking, “Do you really think you’ll need it?”
“Hell no. None of these fuckers will make it to the second round,” he says with a wink and cocky smile before he heads into the cage. Josh, the idiot, is up first. Why the boy wants to inflict this unnecessary pain on his scrawny ass is beyond me.
The bell rings and while the shrimp tries to dance around avoiding Jude, he finally gets cornered against the fence. Jude barely taps Josh's chin with a single jab before he goes down and doesn’t get back up.
“Like that was even a warm up,” Referee Linc scoffs after Josh is hauled out of the octagon by two guys.
Next up is Chris, a lightweight who is maybe twenty pounds heavier than Josh. He’s not as fast at running away as the featherweight was and ends up getting knocked out ten seconds sooner.
Nate is the first real challenge. He was Linc’s sparring partner before Linc's injury, another welterweight. Jude has definitely bulked up over the last few weeks and is the size of Jax, maybe a few pounds heavier.
The ginger doesn’t get knocked out by Jude’s fist. No, Jude gets Nate’s head in the guillotine hold while both are standing up. Seconds later the other fighter’s entire body goes limp when he passes out.
Last but not least is Senn, the light heavyweight fighter. Jude hasn’t even worked up a sweat, and has only fought for a total of three minutes after three fights.
Senn’s somewhat arrogant because of his size, but he’s not that much larger than Jude now. He’s definitely not as fast, and before the first round ends he’s taken one too many hits to his bleeding face so Linc steps in and stops the fight.
“Is that it?” Jude asks after he climbs up on the top of the cage and straddles it. There’s not a scratch on him. “That’s the best you’ve got? Then we’ve got some serious work to do. Welcome to team Havoc boys.”
Linc shakes his head and chuckles while Jude climbs down. I head inside the cage to congratulate him, not that I had any doubt.
“Congrats on your new gym,” I tell Jude with a hug. The owner and Jude had been in talks for the past few weeks, and Jude convinced him to sell it for nothing more than the tax value of the building. Jude was ecstatic, and now that the so-called fight for the facility is over, my dad will be coming down to help Jude get things turned over.
“So the coaches are wondering what’ll happen to their jobs,” Linc says to Jude, whose arms are still around me.
“We’ll try to keep them all, unless it’s obvious they don’t have much to offer.”
“Good,” Linc says. “I’ll let them know.”
“What about you? You’re gonna help me run this place, right? You know these guys and can help me keep them in line,” Jud
e tells him.
“Yeah, I can do that. At least until the doctor clears me to fight again,” Linc agrees with a grin and fist bump with Jude before giving me a one-armed hug. “Take care of our girl,” he says, heading off to check on his injured teammates.
“You ready to take me home, champ?” I ask.
“Home,” he repeats with his signature dimpled grin, picking me up by my ass so that my legs are around his waist, neither of us caring who sees. “I really like the sound of that.”
Epilogue
Fourth of July, One Year Later
Macklemore's Can't Hold Us blares over the speakers and Page and I jump to our feet to cheer with the thousands of fans in the arena. Jude's black Havoc sweatshirt is zipped up and the hood's pulled over his head when he steps out of the tunnel. My dad's with him, along with Linc who’s taking his brother's place tonight. The crowd's applause is deafening as he walks toward the cage. I'm waiting for him in his corner, the only corner I'll ever be in. Jude stops next to me and strips out of his hoodie, offering it to me before wrapping me up in his arms and dipping me with a spine-bowing kiss. After Jude gives Page a quick hug, she heads to the other side of the cage while he walks up for the judge's final inspection.
As soon as Jude enters the octagon his song comes to an ends and the second intro immediately starts up. Sick Puppies' You're Going Down is met with even greater reception.
Jax, the reigning Middleweight Champion of the World is defending his title for the ninth year in a row. Tonight Jude's gonna try and take it from him!
The fight has been hyped up for months after Jude moved up a weight class, trying to be the first man to ever officially beat his brother in the cage. The contract didn’t even allow them to fight in the same building for the past six months. A million dollars is on the line for the winner, and even the loser’s purse is enormous.
Jude's dad and Coach Snyder are with Jax as he walks toward the octagon. He gives Page a passionate kiss before receiving the ref's official clearance to get in the cage with Jude. Xavier’s with a babysitter tonight, still too young to watch his dad and uncle beat the shit out of each other.
In the middle of the front row I spot Jude’s mom, husband and two kids on their feet like the rest of the crowd. She smiles and waves at me when she notices my attention on her, which I return. No one other than her family knows who she is, but Jude and Jax do and that’s all that matters. Over the past year they’ve both managed to come a long way with letting her back into their lives. It hasn’t been easy, but they’re making the effort.
I’m trying to follow their example to do the same with my own sea turtle mother. She's actually here in the crowd tonight, although I'm pretty sure it's not really because of me or Jude. No, ever since they met a few months ago my mom's new obsession has been Jude's dad. Martin Malone seems to be just as smitten with her. Will it be weird if Jude ends up becoming my step-brother? Hell yes, but seeing the two of them happy and finally having my mom stick around is worth it.
My attention goes back to the cage when the door is locked by the ref and the announcer starts going over both Malones' stats and records before the ref allows them a chance to touch gloves. With matching wide grins they meet and bump the fronts, tops, and then bottoms of their blue and red gloves before hugging each other in the center of the octagon and returning to their corners. The bell rings and then history is made. This is the first time a brother has ever challenged his sibling's title.
Jax has the heaviest hands in mixed martial arts, and his punches fly faster than the eye can follow. Jude lives up to his nickname, The Matrix, dodging Jax's powerful swings while executing some painful kicks. It’s obvious Jude plans to test his older brother’s cardio, as he slaps away furious punches and weaves away from him constantly. That goes on for three rounds, and everyone in the arena can see that Jax is wearing himself out. This is the very first time in Jax's long career that he's had to keep fighting past the first round.
Knowing that he doesn’t have much left in the tank, Jax begins getting sloppy in the fourth round, swinging for the fences with every punch and leaving huge openings in his guard. Jude ducks under a wild haymaker, and using Jax’s momentum, trips him and throws him down to the canvas. Pouncing on top of Jax, Jude wraps his arms around Jax’s neck, putting him in an anaconda choke hold within seconds. Jax tries to squirms his way out of Jude's grip but doesn't get anywhere. He finally taps out before he passes out, making the crowd roar.
He did it! Jude won! I jump to my feet and cup my hands around my mouth, cheering for Jude.
In the cage Jude offers his brother a hand up which he accepts. The two hug again before the ref raises Jude's arm as the new Middleweight Champion of the World. The shiny gold belt is fastened around his waist and he’s named the second ever, King of the Cage.
Jude still holds the welterweight belt too but I know that now that he’s bumped up a weight class, he won’t stand in Linc’s way of reclaiming his title.
The announcer puts the mic in front of Jax's face first. "What a fight! That was hands down one of the best match-ups the IFC’s ever seen! But how does it feel to be defeated for the first time in your career?"
"Wow," Jax says with a shake of his head, his chest still heaving from his struggle for breath. "If someone had to beat me I can't think of anyone I'd rather lose to. Jude kicked my ass and he earned this win and this title fair and square. I can’t deny that he’s the better fighter."
"Will there be a rematch?" the man asks Jax.
"No, I don't think so. I had already decided that I'm officially retiring today, so that was my last fight. No regrets going out. I’ll leave it up to my baby brother to keep the title in our family."
A shocking gasp fills the arena at Jax's career ending declaration. Even I didn’t know that he was planning to give up fighting.
"Jude, how does it feel to make history tonight?" the announcer shoves the mic in his face and asks.
"It feels amazing, and I'm still in shock,” he responds, smiling broadly and shaking his head. “My brother's the best damn fighter in the world and I never dreamed I could even try to give him a run for his money. It's incredible to think that I've actually come this far, but without Jax's support and confidence in me, I never would've made it here tonight. Jax has always been my best friend and role model, and not even kicking his ass will ever change that."
"You've been training in a new Havoc facility in North Carolina for the past year, correct?" the man asks.
"I have, since last year's win, so that I could be close to my girlfriend, Sadie, while she's in school. When I asked, her father was kind enough to agree to let me open the facility for him down in the south. But now I have another important question for him. A favor he owes me," Jude says. Looking around for my dad, he motions for him to step up beside him. "Coach, you know I love your daughter more than anything, and I plan to spend the rest of my life with her. So do I have your blessing to ask Sadie to marry me?"
Jude's gaze lands on me in the crowd while all I can do is stand frozen with my hand over my surprised, gaping mouth.
"As I’ve told you before, Jude, I couldn’t have picked a better man for her, so I'd be proud to have you as a son-in-law," my dad says, making even more tears fall from my eyes.
Jude turns around and holds out his palm. His dad who’s in the cage with them places what looks like a small box in the center of his hand and says loud enough for the microphone to catch it, "You’ve found her, now go and get her."
An instant later, Jude climbs over the side of the cage and goes down to his knee in front of me, bloody and sweaty, half beaten to death, but smiling up at me while holding out a diamond ring.
"Sadie Briggs, my heart and soul knew I was yours from the very beginning, and now I’m asking you to be mine forever. If you’ll be my wife I promise to always love you more today than yesterday, but not as much as tomorrow. So sweetheart, will you please marry me?"
"Yes," I say with a tearful smile, wra
pping my arms around his neck. With a laugh, Jude picks me up in a bear hug that's greeted with deafening hoots and hollers before his lips crash down on mine.
Melting in his arms, I feel like I’m living a fairytale romance as all around us thousands of voices start singing in unison "Nah nah nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah, hey Jude!” for the most incredible man in the world. And in this perfect moment I realize that although we might be at the end of the story of how we fell in love, it’s just the beginning of my happily ever after with Jude Malone.
The End
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lane Hart was born and raised in North Carolina. She continues to live in the south with her husband, two daughters, and several pets named after Star Wars characters.
