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Alluring Passion: A MM Contemporary Bundle

Page 54

by Peter Styles


  I also realized that the YMCA was less than a block from my shop. I had always known we were in the “ghetto” neighborhood, but I’d had a ridiculous sense of overconfidence that nothing dangerous could actually happen on my block. Sure, someone had been murdered in cold blood in the parking lot of a bar across the street, but that didn’t mean that something could happen at Zelgman’s Comics, the apparent bastion of all that is good and right and fair in the world. I felt protected from everything going on around me. I wanted to believe that this was all coming from a sense of childhood naiveté, the same sort of feeling that allows you to sleep in the backseat because you believe that you’ll never get into a car accident when your dad is driving, but really, it was probably just my own stupidity and unwarranted faith that my store was just better than the rest of the city. I lived in a brothel and watched people do drug deals on the front steps of my shop more than once, and yet I believed that crime couldn’t touch me there. It felt like I’d already met my limit of victimization; one super shitty thing had already happened to me, and that meant that it would never happen again, somehow.

  I was naïve and proud, but my eyes had been opened. And they were never more open than when I looked at the YMCA where Christy took self-defense classes.

  Honestly, it looked like a place where you took self-defense classes just so you could get through the door. The weathered exterior was chipped and peeling everywhere. The building was a sickening yellow color, although I remembered it being a sort of healthy peach when I was a kid. It was like the entire building was a smoker’s lung that had shriveled and decayed in the time I’d been away. The graffiti plastered around the perimeter reminded me of tumors.

  Still, I pushed through and walked through the creaking front door. I needed something in my life to make me feel safe, and this was the only option I could really imagine.

  The echoing of my footsteps down the hallway was all I could hear. There was a woman sitting at a desk near the entrance, filing her nails and chewing gum like the caricature of a terrible employee. She didn’t look up when I stopped in front of her. “Excuse me,” I asked, “do you know where room 303 is? I have a jiu jitsu lesson there.”

  She didn’t speak, just gestured vaguely to the right with her nail file.

  I didn’t press the issue. Instead, I just rolled my eyes and muttered, “Thanks. You’re a peach.”

  She didn’t even seem to hear me, just snapped her gum and went back to filing.

  Fortunately, the signs pinned up at every hallway intersection were much more helpful, and I was only five minutes late when I finally found room 303. Inside, there was one man sitting on a field of mats, legs crossed and eyes closed.

  I stopped for a moment before I went in. He was handsome—really handsome. I didn’t really consider myself someone who had a “type” but, if I did, this guy was it.

  Even though I felt guilty for it, I couldn’t help but compare this guy to Gary, being barrel-chested and bearlike, like an old-timey strong man that had gone soft with a small layer of fat over the muscles. He was clean-shaven with thick auburn fur on his arms, legs and chest and a mop of deep auburn hair on his head. He was pale and covered with freckles. He looked charming and fun, both of which were true to his nature, and being with him always made me feel safe; he was the best person I’d ever found to cuddle with.

  This guy was hardly cuddly, but he made up for that with raw power and muscles that would have made me swoon if I was the swooning type. He had straight, jet-black hair, a broad, defined chin, and even more defined muscles. His shoulders looked like they were probably twice the length of my own, and everything about him looked like he’d be chiseled out of marble; even under his baggy black uniform, I could see smooth, pale skin pulled across taut, rippling muscles.

  He cracked open one eye that was so deep brown it almost looked black. His eyes fluttered open, and a part of me felt like he was surprised. I couldn’t understand why he would be but, almost as soon as I noticed it, the shock that tensed his body melted away into a smooth mask of indifference. “Harris Zelgman?” he asked. His voice was a deep bass rumble that I felt at the pit of my stomach.

  I blinked and took a deep breath. “Uh, yeah. I’m here for the private jiu jitsu class.” I glanced around. “Am I… in the right spot?”

  “You are,” he confirmed.

  “Huh. Okay.” I walked in, tentatively. The room was empty save for the mats. “Sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

  “I didn’t give it,” he said.

  I almost rolled my eyes. Fuck, he’s one of those guys. “May I have it?” I asked, a little more snark in my voice than was strictly necessary.

  He didn’t smile. “You may. My name is Jonah Jackson.” He frowned when I bit back a laugh. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. Jonah Jackson the jiu jitsu instructor. It was a name that even Stan Lee would describe as heavy on the alliteration.

  He gestured to a spot on the floor in front of him. “Come, sit down with me,” he ordered. “I was finishing my meditation, if you’d like to join.”

  “Meditation?” I asked. I sat down, curling my legs up Indian-style. “Isn’t jiu jitsu a Brazilian thing? I didn’t think meditation would be a big part of it.”

  “Perhaps it’s not,” he said, “but meditation is a me thing. It helps me focus, and I think it helps others too. You should try it.”

  “Nah,” I said dismissively, and I couldn’t help but take a little bit of pleasure in his look of irritation. “I’ve tried it before. I suck at it. I usually end up thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner, and then I end up too hungry to be relaxed.”

  I could see how badly he wanted to roll his eyes, but he held back. I was impressed by his discipline; that was the kind of instructor I needed. I needed someone a little bit less dumb than me, at least. “It can be hard to master at first, but once you do, it’s extremely beneficial. You just need to clear your mind.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  He ignored that comment and looked me up and down. It felt uncomfortable and strangely intimate; it felt like his eyes were peering into my soul. I averted my gaze while he did it and wondered briefly if he was going to list off my insecurities and reasons for being there, Sherlock Holmes-style, but instead he just said, “I thought my ad said that you should purchase a gi.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know where to get one. Plus, I don’t want to spend a bunch of money on something if I don’t know whether I’ll use it or not.”

  He pursed his lips. “Fair enough. But you can buy one online for less than a hundred dollars.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, can’t we do, like, street jiu jitsu? That’s a thing, right?”

  He sighed. “It’s not even kind of a thing.” He shook his head. “How about we try to meditate for five minutes? Just to find our equilibrium and allow our energies to mingle.”

  I snorted. “Energies? Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously,” he said, annoyed. “Why?”

  “What, are you going to tell me to paint with all the colors of the wind next?”

  His perfect posture slumped for just a second. It was so quick I almost didn’t see it. I couldn’t tell if he was more dejected or annoyed. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why are you here?”

  I shrugged. I knew perfectly well what I was doing there, but I really didn’t want to get into it with him. “I thought it might be good for me,” I said, simply.

  He raised his eyebrows. “There are plenty of different types of exercise. You didn’t need to choose jiu jitsu. You didn’t need to choose to study it one on one either. You made that decision for a reason. Why?”

  I sat in silence for a moment, my mind whirring along. I wasn’t sure exactly how much I should tell him. I didn’t want to get into all of the stuff I’d had happen in my
life with someone I didn’t know, and the robbery was still all too fresh in my mind. “I wanted to learn,” I said, simply. “I want to know how to defend myself, and this seemed like a good way to do it. One of my friends has been harping on at me about it for a while, and I figured it just might make me feel… I don’t know. I thought it might make me feel more secure or something.”

  He tilted his head to the side, examining me for a moment. My answer must have assuaged him, because he gave a curt nod. “I’ve always found it to be a comforting art form,” he told me. “It teaches you control over your body and your life. Most people go through life feeling like they’ll never find that, but it’s not as impossible as you might think. To control your body is to control your life and your surroundings.”

  I nodded. “Can’t get much more secure than that,” I said.

  He finally gave me a small smile. I’d never seen a pair of dimples I could describe as “manly”, but his were. “No,” he agreed, “you really can’t.”

  I found myself suddenly feeling uncomfortable and squirming on the mat. I couldn’t tell if I was bothered by having his eyes on me or my own thoughts about how handsome he was, but I ended up saying, “You know what? Maybe we should try the whole meditation thing. Maybe it’ll work for me this time.”

  His smile grew, and my heart leapt. “Alright. Let’s do that. Close your eyes.”

  I did.

  “Now start to breathe,” he continued. “Do it slowly, deliberately. Count your breaths. Focus on nothing but the air entering and leaving your lungs. Focus on the feeling of your body taking in the environment around you, transforming it, and then feeding back into it. Feel yourself truly being a part of nature.”

  I stopped listening and cracked one eye open.

  Jonah’s eyes were closed. Even as he spoke, his breaths were measured and controlled. I watched his strong chest rise and fall beneath his gi, admiring the way the muscles moved. His pose was strong and composed, but so full of life; each and every breath he took filled him completely. After a while, he stopped talking and just breathed instead, and I enjoyed myself watching him.

  It felt like much longer than five minutes before he opened his eyes. I blinked rapidly, pretending that the light of the room hurt my eyes. “Do you feel like you found your center?” he asked me.

  “My center?”

  “Your calm place. The place inside you that makes you feel relaxed and at peace.”

  My eyes slid down to his chest again. “Yeah,” I said, “I think I did.”

  He nodded. “Good,” he said, although a part of me thought that he could tell I was full of shit. “Should we continue?”

  “Sure. Hit me, sensei.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Jiu jitsu is Brazilian,” he said, flatly. “There is no ‘sensei’. That’s racist. I’m just your instructor.”

  “So what do I call you?” I asked. “Teacher? Master? Sir? Jiu Jitsu Daddy?”

  “No.”

  “Brazilian Sensei? Knight Jackson? Jedi Jackson?”

  “No!”

  “Are you completely sure it’s not Jiu Jitsu Daddy? I feel like I really hit the nail on the head with that one.”

  “Just call me Jonah, for Christ’s sake,” he griped. “If you need to call me anything, call me coach.”

  “So, not Jiu Jitsu Daddy?” I pressed. I couldn’t stop grinning. “Or should I just shorten it to Daddy?”

  He sighed. “Are you always like this?” he asked. “Because if so, I’d like to know now.”

  “This is a pretty decent representation of my personality, yeah,” I admitted.

  “Great. Good to know.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Are you going to fire me as a student?”

  “No,” he said, immediately. He paused for a second. “Well, unless you call me daddy again.”

  “Will you have me banned from the dojo?”

  “It’s not a dojo.” He wrinkled his nose. “Seriously. Racist.”

  “Sorry. I watched a lot of anime in high school.”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised.”

  I laughed. I appreciated it when someone could rib me back. I was acutely aware of how irritating I was; sometimes, it was by design. It was one of the only ways I really knew to deal with people I liked.

  And, in spite of how weirdly uptight he seemed to be, I liked Jonah. Possibly a little bit more than I was entirely comfortable with.

  “What do you know about jiu jitsu?” he asked.

  “I know I’m supposed to buy a gi and that I’m not allowed to call my instructor daddy,” I replied.

  “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much. A friend recommended the class to me. She said she’d heard good things about it. She takes an aikido class here.” I smiled, fondly. “She’s a little bit obsessed with The Dresden Files.”

  “Okay,” Jonah said, frowning. “I have no idea what that is.”

  “Really? You’ve never heard of The Dresden Files? It’s super popular. It’s an urban fantasy book series. You should check it out.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that.” He didn’t sound at all sincere, but I decided to pretend that he was. “Even though you don’t know much about it, I think that jiu jitsu will be the perfect discipline for you. Some people actually describe it as a martial art for the little guy. Jiu jitsu isn’t about who’s the biggest or the toughest; it’s about who’s the smartest and the fastest. You don’t have to be a bodybuilder to master jiu jitsu and do well; size has very little to do with how well you’ll do.”

  “Okay, I get it,” I said, “I’m short and this is a sport for short people. Hooray. Can we get on with it, please?”

  “Sure.” His smile turned slightly impish. “Let’s begin, shall we?”

  Chapter Eight

  I dragged myself through the front door of the boardinghouse to find Christy sitting at the table, doing her nails. “Oh, hey!” she said, brightly. “How did class go?”

  I glared.

  “Oh.” Her face fell. “So not great, huh?”

  “No. Not great at all. Fucking terrible, actually.” I collapsed into one of the chairs at the table with a deep sigh. “That teacher is the Marquis de Sade reborn. I don’t know what his fucking problem is, but I hope he gets over it sometime soon. Maybe his mom needs to say she loves him more often. I don’t know.”

  “What happened?”

  I massaged my shoulder. “He kicked my ass, that’s what happened,” I said grumpily.

  “Okay.” She bit at her lip before saying, “I know this is going to sound mean, but… did you deserve it?”

  My jaw dropped. “Christy! Come on! How dare you insinuate something like that? I would never—I mean—to think that I would…” When she kept her eyes on me and didn’t start apologizing, I realized I’d been found out. “Yeah,” I said, heavily, “okay. I guess I kind of did.”

  “I knew it.” Her face was still mostly sympathetic, but she was trying to hide her smirk. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing! I mean, not anything that bad, at least.”

  “Which means…?”

  I shifted in my seat. “I may have called him daddy a few times.”

  “What?!”

  “As a joke!” I clarified quickly. “It was just a joke!”

  “Did he tell you not to?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What does ‘sort of’ mean?”

  I grimaced. “It means he told me to stop multiple times. By the end, he was threatening to have me banned from the YMCA.”

  “What the fuck, Harris?” she asked, staring at me. She was so astonished that she hadn’t even finished applying her latest coat of nail polish. Her nail just sat, half-finished and drying into a blobby mess. “Why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know! I was nervous!”

  “You were nervous, so you called your jiu jitsu instructor—a man you just met— daddy?!”

  “Look, I don’t think you understand,” I explained, fervently. “First of all, the guy is
absolutely gorgeous. I mean, he’s an Adonis, seriously. He’s like if Bruce Lee and Channing Tatum had the world’s hottest baby. And you know how rarely I actually see super-hot guys. I work at a comic-book store, for fuck’s sake. You know how many hot guys I see there?”

  “That’s true,” she said, thoughtfully. “Other than that hot guy with the Iron Fist tattoo who took off his shirt in the store, I can’t think of any.”

  I frowned. “You can’t forget Gary.”

  “Gary’s your type, not mine,” she said simply. “And you have to admit that he’s not exactly a super, like, stereotypically hot guy.”

  “Fair enough. This guy, though…” I took a deep breath. “Holy shit, Christy. If I can get a picture for you, I will. It’s insane.”

  “Wait, you’re going back?” she asked. “You want to go back? He’s letting you come back?”

  “Well, yeah. Now that he completely bitched up my shoulder and established dominance.” I remembered the exact moment that his patience wore out: around the fifth or the sixth “daddy”, Jonah told me that either he could show me how serious jiu jitsu is as a sport or I could get out. I chose the former, and a big part of me regretted it. “I was just really, really nervous. I had no idea that jiu jitsu was so… you know…”

  “I don’t,” Christ said, frowning. “What is it?”

  I glanced around, making sure none of the other girls were hanging around the periphery. I didn’t exactly relish the idea of having this conversation spread through the entire house. “It’s so weirdly sexy,” I finally explained, quietly. “I mean, every single move starts with you basically pretending you’re about to fuck. It’s ridiculous.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “You mean like wrestling?”

  “I mean like wrestling, but about twenty times more extreme,” I explained. “He told me that if I was going to take it seriously, I should at least know what it is that I can do with jiu jitsu, so he decided to show me some moves. You know how those moves started?”

  “How?”

 

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