CHAPTER 5 - MARC
Maybe I had been a little too sharp with Gemma at our first few sessions. Not that I cared what she thought of me—after all, she was just a means to an end. But shit, did she ever know how to bite back.
My first two sessions were a testament to that.
As we’d gotten started on the actual session, she had me start on some very specific stretches to “identify target areas that will need special attention in the next few weeks,” as she put it icily. I figured they would amount to more or less what I would have gotten out of an average warmup session in routine training.
I was way off.
She started instructing me to move my arm at its usual angles as far as I could stretch it, and right off the bat, it was obvious which muscles and tendons were giving me the most pain in an immediately tangible sense. I fought to keep from showing pain, but I could tell that Gemma wasn’t a stranger to reading subtle facial cues. I couldn’t hide my pain from her, and that pissed me off from the start.
After that, she instructed me to do more or less the same with some leg motions--other general stretches that would move the muscles around my hip and test out what was still in function and what wasn’t.
Identifying every weakness the injury had given me didn’t put me in a good mood. The thing was, though, that with every pressure point she identified, the more eager she seemed to get to explore the extent of my injury.
At first, I figured it must have been part of whatever cockamamey exercise routine she’d been taught in college. But as the session went on, she had me moving and stretching in ways I never would have thought to when I was still in full health.
“Tendons are multidimensional things, and only exploring how they work on a two-way street, as it were, won’t do us much good,” she had said, but with every jolt of pain I felt as I moved my body around, she almost seemed that much more eager to keep going.
That’s how the next few hours passed--with my being instructed to push my body to its newly confined limits, especially getting prodded onto the borders of those limits at the expense of more than a little pain.
The session after that wasn’t much different. I showed up to see a lot of resistance training gear laying around the room, but it was all the kind of stuff amateur bodybuilders get started on: rubber bands, hand grips, that kind of thing.
I was still sore from the first session when we started, so I was in a foul mood from the very beginning. On top of that, I could tell that Gemma hadn’t forgotten our first session. She started me first thing with some heavier resistance training than the equipment in the room seemed to indicate.
“It’s entirely possible you may be correct in assuming yourself fit enough to recover more quickly than most, Mr. Montoya,” she had said as I bit back intense pain from attempting to use one of the more tense rubber bands she provided for me to stretch with. “It would be helpful to use this time to gauge that assessment.”
I was determined to make a point, so I powered through the first half hour of grueling exercise.
“You almost seem disappointed,” I remarked after that point, and indeed, I was starting to get used to the punishment. “Am I not wincing enough today for you?”
“I don’t care about that, Mr. Montoya,” she said with sigh striding over to me, “but your posture isn’t quite right--here,” she said, pressing into my side from behind while I had the band stretched out taut, and the pain that shot through me was so intense I nearly let the thing fly across the room.
I could almost feel her smirk behind me as I let it go slack, breathing heavily.
“I had it just fine.”
“If your posture isn’t right, you’re just going to train your muscles to function every bit as improperly.”
We carried on like that for the rest of the session, and by the time I collapsed into bed that night, I was so frustrated I wanted to punch a wall. But the morning after, I was surprised to find myself about halfway out the door of my apartment before realizing I’d hardly winced once since getting out of bed.
I still felt stiff as a board, and I knew anything overly strenuous would put me out of commission again, but I’ll be damned, it really seemed to be working.
That put me into a relatively good mood when I reached the gym for our third session.
“You seem to be in a relatively good mood, Mr. Montoya,” Gemma said as I strode into the training room with a smile on my face.
“Just happy to see your face in the morning, Gemma,” I said, the hints of sarcasm laid on pretty heavy.
“Well then,” she said, pointedly ignoring my tone and motioning for me to follow her to another room down the hall, “we won’t waste any time getting to business. Today, you get a break from all that torture you think I’m putting you through. You’ve applied plenty of stress to the tendons we’ve identified, and I think they’re all fine and stable, but now, I’m going to help loosen things up a bit.”
I followed her a short walk down the hallway, and I gave a smile at her words as she pushed open the door to the next room over. “Loosen things up? What’s that supposed to mean, you don’t think things are casual enough between us? I never knew you felt that way.”
She shot a look back at me that could kill, and it only made my smile broaden as I lifted my eyes up from her ass. I was teasing her, but the look on her face told me it wasn’t exactly appreciated. Maybe this was my chance to get back at her for all that punishment over the past couple of days.
“I’m your physiotherapist, Mr. Montoya, and I maintain a professional relationship with all my clients,” she said as she directed me into the room. I rolled my eyes as I stepped in. I’d heard that from a lot of women before, it didn’t tend to mean much in the long run.
Inside, I was surprised to see a few massage chairs, and I raised my eyebrows. “Huh, and here you were just starting to make me think physiotherapy was just going to be a lot of punishment.”
Now it was her turn to roll her eyes at me, and she looked over her chart as she made her way to the chair. “Knock it off. Now, I’ll need you to lay down here, face-up. I’m going to start by working on some of your upper arm muscles, and we’ll work down from there.”
“Sure,” I said, disinterested. For all I cared, this was just a chance to check out mentally for the next few minutes and enjoy myself. “Figure I can use a day off.”
“This isn’t a day off, Mr. Montoya,” she corrected me curtly as I sat down on the massage table and swung my legs over to lay back, looking up at the ceiling. “This is just as much of a vital part of the healing process as those exercises you seem to hate so much.”
“Sure, sure,” I said, yawning. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Stretch out your arm like so,” she said, demonstrating, and I mimicked her movements. To my surprise, she smiled at my response, and I arched an eyebrow.
“What’s so funny?”
“See how easy that was?” she said with a nod to my arm. “Two sessions ago, that would have had you wincing. You’re already starting to see some progress. I’m guessing getting up and going in the morning the past few days has been surprisingly easy.” I could see the words ‘you’re welcome’ in her eyes as she smiled at me, so I just scoffed in return to her remark.
“My body is a few notches above what you were probably used to at whatever university you graduated from,” I remarked lazily. “You were probably treating volunteers from what, the tennis team?” There was some playfulness in my tone, but she didn’t seem to take it that way, her smile dropping into a frown as she set her clipboard aside to move around to my arm.
“Well, having a highly fit body does count for something, but as they say, the bigger they are, the harder they tend to fall,” she commented, and I watched her hands go to my muscles, starting to feel around at some of the more tense areas. “You may have more muscles than a tennis player, but you can all have the same recalcitrant tendons.”
As she said that and her fingers s
tarted to manipulate my arm and shoulder, I felt a slight wince of pain as she touched a sensitive spot. It was a light touch, but it was a spot she knew damn well was a sore one for me, and I could tell it was a warning. But I wasn’t about to let her off so easily.
Despite her icy disposition, Gemma’s touch was surprisingly warm. The next few moments passed quietly as she explored my muscles. While her attention was on my arm, I had nothing else to look at, so my eyes almost unconsciously fell on her as she worked.
I had to admit, she was hot. Gorgeous, even. The past few sessions, I really hadn’t been in a mood to see past her clipboard and instructions, but up close like this, I noticed the smattering of freckles on her cheeks, accentuating her blue eyes. And her eyes were wide and luminous, at that, the room’s lights playing in their intensity as she kept her gaze focused on her work.
I turned my eyes back up at the ceiling, dispelling the thoughts in my head. But as her strawberry-blonde hair brushed against my skin as she leaned over to start really massaging my side, sending a rippling, relaxing sensation down my laterals, my eyes flitted her way again.
This time, they fell on her breasts. A slight stirring between my legs told me I liked what I saw.
For the pencil-necked university grad I was expecting, I’ve gotta say, I could have asked for worse people to have to look at for the next few weeks.
I smiled a little at the thought just in time for Gemma to glance up at me and raise an eyebrow. “See? Not so bad as you thought, is it?” I realized she was talking about the therapy, but I wasn’t going to let that line go to waste.
“I was wondering if you were thinking the same thing,” I shot back with a cocky grin, and her smile dropped. The next moment, I bit back a wince as she pressed her thumb into a spot on my underarm that tugged at a muscle that had been giving me some of the worst problems from the first day.
“I’m going to work on your hips now,” she went on, her professional defenses back up, and I chuckle.
“What’s the matter, Gemma? You work on bodies for a living, I figured you’d appreciate good ones when you get the chance to work on them.”
“I do appreciate good bodies, when I have the chance to work with them,” she shot back without missing a beat, and I felt a little put off by the remark, grunting as I looked back at the ceiling.
“Relax your leg, I’m going to be moving it around to get some of the fluids in your hip back into action, so to speak,” she instructed me as she picked up my leg a little, her back to me.
As if on instinct, my eyes drift to her ass as I feel her swivel my leg around, moving my leg around in my hip socket without any effort on my part. Her pants were tight-fitting, and before I realized it, something was stiffening between my legs as my mind drifted to imagining what she looked like without them on as her soft, gentle grip manipulated my leg.
As she backed up to draw my leg up just a little, I noticed her eyes flit to the remarkably large bulge between my legs. She might have ignored it, trying to stay professional, but I didn’t have such reservations.
“What, see another leg you’d like to work on after the left one?” I asked with a cocky smile, and as she moved, I reached my hand up and let her ass back straight into it.
What happened following the indignant gasp she let out made me regret even getting up that morning.
With her hand on a point at my hip, she pulled my leg outward, and my whole left side felt like I was experiencing the most intense cramp of my life. I let out a sharp, loud cry as I felt almost as much pain as I did when I collapsed on the fighting ring floor a few days ago, and I jerked my hand back, clenching my teeth to get a grip on the intense pain surging through me.
“Shit, what the fuck!” I grunted through my teeth as Gemma stepped away from me, picking up her clipboard and writing something down. Her posture was stiffer than ever and her lips were tight, but I could see her face was red as a beet in embarrassment.
After she finished writing, she clicked her pen and looked at me with the most icy stare I’d seen from her yet. “I believe we are finished for today, Mr. Montoya.”
“Hang on—”
“Good day,” she cut me off, picking up her bag and making a beeline for the door. As she pushed it open and let it slam shut behind her, I let my head fall back onto the table with an exasperated sigh as the pain in my side subsided.
You really fucked up this time, Marc.
CHAPTER 6 - GEMMA
“Trina, can I talk to you about something?” I asked, peering around the corner into her open office space. She looked up from the files spread across her desk and smiled, taking off her purple reading glasses. It was around noon, the day after my third training session with Marc, and I hadn’t been able to get him off my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way he touched my arm, the bulge in the front of his pants, that mischievous, longing glint in his eyes.
I shuddered and bit my lip. Trina set down her fuzzy pen and got up.
“Something on your mind?” she pressed, true concern and interest in her voice. I was so grateful to have a genuine friend to confide in here at work. I mean, having Alice to talk to outside of The Fighting Chance was great, but this was not a subject I wanted to broach with my fifteen-year-old sister. Not exactly an appropriate topic of conversation.
“Uh, yeah,” I said meekly, twirling the end of my ponytail around one finger.
“Well,” Trina began, closing her laptop and walking around the desk to link arms with me, “it’s lunch time, anyway. Let’s go to that little cafe down the street and talk. I’m starving!”
I lit up at the mention of food. My stomach immediately growled its approval at this plan. This morning, I’d been feeling so off-kilter what with the situation yesterday that I might have pushed myself too hard during my workout. It was an old habit left over from my running years: whenever something was going wrong in my life, I hit the gym extra hard to distract myself. Physical pain and exertion had always been much easier to deal with than emotional or psychological issues. And sore muscles heal faster than broken hearts.
“Sounds awesome,” I replied, a grin appearing on my face despite the worry clouding my mind. Trina was always so upbeat and optimistic, it was hard not to be swept up in her contagious, perpetual good mood. I was lucky to have her and Alice around. Their self-confidence and easygoing nature balanced out my own borderline-neurotic worrying.
“Danny, we’re headin’ out for a bite to eat! Be back in an hour or so!” Trina called out over her shoulder as she flounced down the hallway, arm-in-arm with me.
“Bring me back a protein bar, will ya?” he answered. We both laughed. Everyone here ran on superfood shakes and protein bars, a diet I was still a little wary of.
When I was growing up, my father always did his very best to make up for the fact that our mom wasn’t around. She died from breast cancer only a year and a half after Alice was born, so my dad had to really step up and become a fully-functional single parent. He never wanted us to miss out on anything, so he taught himself how to cook, clean, and even do our hair in adorable styles. Dad used to watch cooking shows in the morning while getting us ready for school, and on the weekends he experimented with new recipes. Sometimes they turned out terribly and we ended up ordering pizza or getting Chinese take-out instead. But more often than not, he cooked us fantastic, over-the-top meals that looked like they could’ve been plucked straight out of a Martha Stewart cookbook.
Dad, Alice, and I used to spend hours in the kitchen together dreaming up new recipes and experimenting with healthy ingredients. We were always exceptionally well-nourished, with plenty of vegetables, fruits, and lean meats. He didn’t deny us anything, even when we craved ice cream or cake-- he just taught us the value of balance, in all things, including in the kitchen. It was just another way he helped us become the well-rounded, independent young women we were today.
So food had always been important to me. I couldn’t bear to reduce my diet to boring old fads, rest
ricting the foods that made me happy and added variety to my life. I still loved cooking with Alice whenever we actually had the time to do so, and I refused to jump on the fit shake and protein bar diet everyone at the gym raved about.
Luckily, Trina was in the same boat as me. We both loved to cook for those we cared about, and we both loved to eat!
“Yuck,” she blanched as we walked out of earshot. “I know it’s supposed to be good for you and everything, but I just don’t think my stomach would let me subsist entirely on granola bricks and spinach shakes!”
I shook my head, laughing. “Me, neither! Call me old-fashioned, but I’ll take a turkey sandwich and a salad over a flavorless nutrient stick any day.”
TKO (A Bad Boy MMA Romance) Page 4
