by Meg Maguire
And most important, why should she even frigging care?
She sighed as the microwave beeped, frustrated to the bone. With herself, for having gotten so hung up. With her living situation, and for what was surely going to prove the longest August in history. And from a phone call she’d gotten earlier—her mother calling to say Lindsey’s youngest sister, Maya, was threatening to not go back to high school in September for her senior year. Lindsey had promised to talk some sense into her this weekend. As always, the peacekeeper mitigating others’ drama.
Yet even with all that on her mind, her thoughts wandered back to Rich. His face and mouth, those fingers on her neck. Whatever she felt, it was no glimmer, no silly stirring. It was infatuation like she’d never suffered before, made all the worse by the way they’d parted. Some nights she was tempted to demand his number from Mercer, drink half a bottle of wine and text him, What the heck was in that message that made you stop kissing me?
But for all she knew, the reply she’d get would be, We kissed? When was that? Lindsey who?
She carried the popcorn and a roll of paper towels back through to the living room and settled between her ex-boyfriend and her boss.
“Nearly time,” Jenna said, sitting on the edge of the cushion with her knuckles pressed to her lips. “Oh, God, I hate this stupid sport.”
Brett took over the popcorn, which was just as well. As soon as the announcers began discussing Rich’s match, Lindsey felt sick.
“Should be a close one,” the first announcer said. “Estrada’s been on his game, but can that stack up against Moreau’s experience?”
“It’s going to come down to who’s hungrier for it,” a second announcer declared. “Though the odds in Vegas say Moreau’s belt won’t be going anywhere tonight.”
The screen flashed to backstage prep, to Nick Moreau jogging in place. He was good—a mean-looking thirtysomething from Quebec with a shaved head, a bit of a veteran. Then to Rich, and Lindsey’s heart stopped. A close-up of that handsome profile, his expression stern and set. He stretched his neck and licked his lips, then suddenly he was moving, the camera swiveling to follow as he was ushered through double doors into the dark arena.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” Jenna muttered.
Rich’s cocky, regal shtick hadn’t changed. He walked down the aisle to the same music, welcomed with a mix of cheers and boos as his stats were announced. He was extremely popular with Hispanic fans—and with any woman possessed of eyes and a pulse—but hated by his fair share of enthusiasts, too.
Moreau strode out to some hard-core rock song, minimalist in black warm-ups, his scalp gleaming under the lights.
Lindsey felt a pain in her palm and realized she was clenching her fist hard enough to leave nail marks.
The fighters had stripped to their shorts and gloves, both hopping and jogging in place, keeping warm. Rich shook out his arms and tossed punches in the air.
The announcer went through the rigmarole, rattling through the rules for the three-round match, and the men went back to their corners. A ring girl circled, and with a shout, the fight was on.
“Oh, God,” Jenna said again. If the throw pillow in her lap had been an animal, she’d already have crushed the life out of it.
Lindsey held her breath and bit her lip, hands squished between her clenched thighs.
Rich took the offensive early. Moreau was a more cautious, strategic fighter. Rich baited him with a few quick swipes, but Moreau waited for an opening.
“Oh!” Jenna cried when the first punch landed. It was a soft, harmless jab to Rich’s shoulder, but she buried her face in the pillow all the same. Lindsey teetered at the edge of the cushion.
The two fighters clinched for a few seconds, each landing a couple of good shots.
“Stay on your feet,” Lindsey murmured. “Stay on your feet.” Moreau was good on the mat—a far stronger grappler, even after Rich’s past months of world-class training. Or so she’d read in one of her incriminating magazines.
Rich knocked his opponent with a sharp hook then dodged aside, clearly content to keep this fight upright.
“Good. Good.” How had Mercer survived being in Rich’s and Delante’s corners? Lindsey felt a heart attack brewing just watching from the other side of the country. Yet she could practically feel everything, live and in three dimensions. Hear the crowd all around her as she had at the Boston fight, smell the sweat and feel the heat of the lights and bodies.
“Estrada’s come out strong,” the first announcer observed. “But Moreau’s known for his pacing.” True.
“Be cool,” she muttered. “Save something for the other two rounds.”
“I have no idea who’s winning,” Brett said.
“No one yet.”
By the time the horn blared to end the round, the two men had had a good dance, but neither was the clear favorite. Lindsey shoved popcorn in her face, just to have something to do.
Jenna peeked from behind her pillow. “What happened?”
“They’re both holding steady,” Lindsey said.
Jenna went back into hiding the second the ring girl was done prancing.
Lindsey didn’t know what Moreau’s trainer had said to him during the break, but he came out with a fire under his ass, going right for Rich’s legs. Get him on his back. That’s what he’d been told.
Rich dodged Moreau’s efforts to kick his feet out from under him, and with a solid roundhouse to the ribs he sent the other man stumbling into the chain-link.
“Yes,” Lindsey groaned, hugging the bowl. Her heart punched her ribs with every beat, easily a million times a minute.
Rich sneaked in a flurry of jabs, then took a mean hit to the ear. He gave twice as good as he got, banging Moreau in the ribs with his knee. Thirty seconds before the horn, Moreau hooked him behind the legs and got them onto the ground, but they ended the round in a mutual tangle, neither in danger of submitting. Lindsey gulped a breath when the air horn sounded, the first she’d taken since the fighters had hit the mat.
“Anything?” Jenna asked from behind her pillow.
“Nothing deciding.” But Moreau was probably winning now, if this fight came down to points.
“If Moreau can manage that again, early in the third,” noted the announcer, “we might just have a match on our hands.”
“He better not!”
“Linds.” Brett zapped her a look, the kind you’d send your kid when they lost track of their indoor voice. She shot one back, feeling no need to be ladylike, given the occasion. Especially considering how noisy Brett got whenever the Pats played the Giants.
The third round started. Moreau had gotten a taste for dominating and wanted more. He was going for Rich’s legs, looking to get them back to the mat. Before he could, Rich seized an opening, landing a half dozen serious head shots and taking only a single nasty hook to the cheek. There was blood beside Moreau’s mouth, more of the same slicking Rich’s curled fingers.
“Jesus,” Brett muttered, clearly missing the civility of football.
Then, disaster.
Moreau bent low and caught Rich behind his knee. Rich retaliated with an elbow between Moreau’s shoulder blades and wormed his way out of the clinch. They traded jabs, then Rich nearly snagged an opening, missing Moreau’s ribs with a roundhouse kick but still banging his arm, and hard. Something had happened—the crowd’s collective voice flared in a passionate ruckus, but Lindsey didn’t know why. Had that kick been illegal?
“That’s not good,” the announcer said.
She straightened. “What’s not good? For who?”
Then something strange happened. After a moment of staggered circling and punching, Moreau lunged, looking to take Rich down. And Rich seemed to let him.
She shot to her feet, popcorn jumping from the bowl. “No!”
/> The men tumbled to the ground, scrambling for position before they even hit the mat. Moreau came out on top and landed three brutal punches to Rich’s face, and panic rose in Lindsey like bile. “No, no, no!”
“Linds, chill.”
She shushed Brett.
The advantage was gone as quickly as it had come. Rich clamped his legs to Moreau’s waist and turned them onto their sides, getting his arm locked around Moreau’s neck. Moreau’s limbs were wild, lashing and kicking, fighting for purchase. They rolled and thrashed, arms and legs a gleaming blur.
“A reckless strategy. Can’t see this ending well for Estrada,” commented the first announcer.
“What? What?”
“Don’t be too sure,” the other announcer said. “He’s not letting up.”
The grappling raged on, and Lindsey couldn’t tell who was in control. Rich, she thought. He had a leg clamped over Moreau’s and an arm pinned, but Moreau had the other flailing, knocking Rich with an odd, awkward thump to the jaw.
The screen shifted to a different angle, mat-level, and Lindsey winced at the agony contorting Rich’s face—agony and unmistakable desperation. For ages it felt as though nothing was happening, the two men locked in a slick knot of jerking muscle. Then at long last, Moreau reached his hand out and smacked the mat. The horn blast was swallowed in the crowd’s roar and the announcer shouting, “And there you have it! Rich Estrada is the winner by submission.”
“If that doesn’t get Fight of the Night, I don’t know what will,” claimed his colleague.
Jenna dropped her pillow in time to scream with Lindsey.
“Quite the match,” quipped the first announcer. “Though you can bet Estrada was hoping for a knockout.”
“A bittersweet victory,” said the other announcer.
“What?” Lindsey froze, not seeing any bitter side to this. “Why?”
Unlike his bested opponent, Rich hadn’t stood. His trainer and some other staff member rushed into the ring and crouched over him.
“What’s going on?” Jenna asked.
“I don’t know. Something happened just before they went down, but...” She fell silent and sat. With help, Rich had gotten to his feet. His foot, rather. He held the other one a couple inches above the mat.
“We’re waiting for confirmation,” the announcer revealed, “but it’s looking like...yes—”
“Looks like what?” Lindsey demanded, throwing popcorn at the screen. A medical official knelt by Rich, messing with his foot.
“Yes, looks like Estrada’s right foot is probably broken.”
“Oh, no,” Jenna said, while Lindsey opted for a fouler expression.
They showed a close-up replay of the moment Rich’s kick slammed the top of his foot square into Moreau’s elbow, the impact looking a hundred times worse in slow motion. She swore again, earning a glare from Brett.
“Calm down, Linds. He won.”
“Do you have any idea how long it takes a foot to heal? It could take a guy out of commission for months—”
“This time last year you didn’t even know what MMA was—now you’re a groupie. Give it a rest.”
A guy with a mike made his way to Rich. “Your second consecutive win since you signed, and your first title. How do you feel?”
“I feel like I just broke my frigging foot.”
“Unusual to see you dominate on the mat.”
“Desperate times,” Rich said, annoyance seeming to give way to exhaustion. One thing was certain—he was not happy. Someone presented him with a flashy gold belt, but he did little more than clutch it to his ribs.
“Anything else before we let you get that foot taken care of?”
Rich said what he did at the end of every match. “Thank you, Mamá. Thank you, Diana.” Then he added something he never had before. “See you soon.”
Lindsey shivered.
The guy with the mike moved on to Moreau as Rich hopped down from the cage with the help of his corner, belt slung over his shoulder.
Jenna shook off her alarm. “Rich is healthy. He’ll be back in no time, I bet.” She stood and replaced the throw pillow.
“You heading out? The main event’s next.” Don’t leave me with Brett.
“I think I’ve hit my threshold for stress. Plus I’ve got a client first thing, and who knows how late Mercer will keep me up rehashing this.”
There was more to Jenna’s hurried exit, though, and Lindsey couldn’t blame her. She and Brett weren’t exactly bringing out the best in each other lately. She went to fetch Jenna’s purse.
“Well,” Jenna said when they met at the door. “At least there’s one rather selfish upside to this.”
“What?”
“We’ll probably get to see a lot more of Rich around the office again.”
“You think?” Lindsey glanced back at the screen, a queasy sensation tumbling around in her stomach. The camera followed Rich as he was led hopping from the arena, supported by his trainer and a medic. His face was pained, glistening with sweat. He didn’t look like a man who’d just won his first title fight. He looked...uncertain.
“I’m sure he’ll come home during his rehab,” Jenna said. “Mercer said he’s really close to his family.”
“Right. Yes.” The coverage had shifted to the next match, leaving Lindsey dangling, feeling too many conflicting things: dread and relief, fear and triumph. Pride. Worry. More emotions than she’d felt in the past month combined. The result of Rich’s injury? Partly. And the thought of him coming home.
“Well,” she managed to say, “that’s something.”
Something that had guilt rising in her middle for all the times before the breakup when Brett had been making the effort to be sweet, rubbing her feet, maybe, and boom! Rich’s hands. No, Brett’s hands—Brett, not Rich. But he’d flashed across her mind, unbidden.
Worst of all, Brett’s kisses had paled for her. She’d kissed Rich for all of three minutes—and a champagne-clouded three minutes at that—full of abandon and bad-idea excitement. Surely she was blowing the experience out of proportion. And yet...Brett had stirred nothing in her by the end, as much as she’d willed her body to respond, and indeed to keep a certain troublesome man out of her mind during intimate moments.
She bade Jenna good-night and shut the door, staring blankly at the pattern in the wood.
Rich is coming home.
And I am so royally screwed.
* * *
HE FUMBLED WITH his crutches and keys and managed to get the heavy glass door open. It was just past five-thirty. The sky was still dark, the city not yet awake.
This wasn’t how Rich had envisioned returning to his home turf, post title-fight victory—limping in at dawn before the gym even opened, dropped off by his little sister on her way to an early shift at the teaching hospital. But the alternative sucked.
The alternative was to take the frigging bus. Show up during regular hours and get heralded as the hometown hero, clapped on the back like some prodigal son. Bad enough the board in front of his mother’s church asked parishioners to pray for his swift recovery.
He was a champion now—and he wasn’t supposed to be. He should have been Nick Moreau’s warm-up bout, a sure-bet title-retention match to keep Moreau’s streak going until the big event in Rio, just after Thanksgiving, where rumor had it a past champ wanted a comeback against him. Now Rich was the light heavyweight champ, such a shock that the promotions outfits were falling all over themselves to get busy making the merchandise no one had expected they’d need. The day after his win they’d taken him to a studio and stripped him to his gloves and belt, propped a crown on his head and photographed him for the cover of his organization’s monthly magazine. There’d be a big thing on the website, too. Prince of Thieves, the headline would read. They’d in
terviewed him for a couple hours, all about how he’d stolen Moreau’s title from under him.
Overnight he’d gone from sidebar mentions to the front cover. One desperate headlock and he was a somebody. A champion, no matter how green.
Yet Rich didn’t feel like anyone worth cheering. Undefeated record aside, he felt like a failure. What good was a pit bull once its teeth got knocked out?
Back aching, armpits tender, shoulder joints raw, he swung his way down the hall and hopped one laborious step at a time to the basement, unlocking the gym’s double doors.
Smelled just as it always had, he thought, flipping on one set of lights. Same as when he’d first stomped down these stairs at age twelve. You could keep your grandma’s muffins—nothing said nostalgia to Rich like the smell of sweat and leather.
Home.
The thought had guilt squirming in his gut.
He hadn’t been back since March, and a few more improvements had been made. Fresh mats, a few pieces of new equipment in the weights and cardio corner. Maybe he’d helped buy those, earning Wilinski’s a much-needed boost in dues. It should have cheered him, but nothing could, not in this mood.
“The members are out of their minds,” Mercer had told him. “You’d think Anderson Silva was coming to train them.”
“Yeah, right. Tell them they’re off by about six billion wins and nearly as many dollars.”
“You’ll see. Everybody’s going frigging bat-shit.”
Sure. Great.
Bully for them, getting shouted at by a bona fide MMA rising star. But Rich knew the truth. He’d been neutered, the best momentum of his life wrecked by a misstep, a moment quicker than an eyeblink, quick as Moreau’s elbow colliding with Rich’s first metatarsal. Now he was stuck limping around on crutches for the four to six weeks he’d been ordered to stay off his foot, when the last thing he wanted to feel was idle. The last thing he wanted was time, time to heal and to think while his muscles turned soft from disuse.
Time to worry that this funk he couldn’t seem to shake might be depression. His father’s bleak, hateful legacy finally come calling.
He was a trainer again. His job for the past decade, but never his passion. He’d done it for the paycheck and the free membership, for a set of keys that let him seek refuge in this underground sweat-hole in the middle of the night, those times when anger or sadness kept sleep at bay. Now he’d be one of those lazy-ass trainers, shouting orders from the sidelines. And once his bone was healed? Another couple months struggling to get back into the best shape of his life.
