The Comeback: An MMA Romance Novel (Book Two)

by Thunderbolt, Liberty

  She smiled real big. “You too, Daddy. You’re looking pretty tough right now.”

  “I am tough,” I said as I poked her in the belly.

  She laughed and slapped at my hand. “Stop it, Daddy.”

  Mace showed up at my side. He already had some focus mitts on his hands. “Come on Sam, get after it!”

  Sam kicked off her shoes and went right into hitting the mitts. “One two, one two,” Mace said in an encouraging tone.

  Leeza and I made small talk as I sipped on the concoction she brought me. It tasted pretty good.

  “So where’s Lorenzo?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him around as much.”

  “Why are you keeping tabs on Lorenzo?” She smiled like she was inviting me for a drink.

  “I’m not, but you’re being all nice to me. I’m sure he doesn’t like that too much.”

  “He’s fine. He’s over at Chuck’s Place drinking with his cousin. He doesn’t even know I’m here, but he wouldn’t care. Lorenzo isn’t dumb. He knows it’s all about ending up with that money.”

  She didn’t even realize it, but the snake coiled up inside of her was rearing its ugly head. I was kind of glad for it, because it kept me from letting my eyes stray down her great body to those amazing legs.

  “I’ve got to wrap up my training. Thanks for bringing me the shake,” I said.

  “Okay,” she had a hurt look in her eyes. “It’s not all about the money. I’ve hated seeing you become what you’ve been over the last couple years. I want to see the man I knew when we had her.”

  We both looked at Sam as she hit the mitts with Mace.

  “I appreciate that, Leeza.”

  Her hand was on my arm. “Well, I mean it.”

  “Thanks again for the shake.” I pulled away from her and walked over to Sam and Mace, “You’ve got to use your hips, sugar.”

  She started turning her hips more, and she was blasting the mitts. It made me smile.

  A few minutes later, Leeza and Sam were gone. Mace pulled off his mitts. “What the fuck is going on?” He looked disappointed.

  “Nothing man. She just showed up. She’s been trying to be real nice to me lately.”

  “She’s poison, Zane. You think getting her back will make it all good and you’ll have Sam, but it won’t work out that way. No way in hell. Don’t make a stupid decision.”

  He was right. I wondered if I would listen.

  Chapter 16

  My fight was now exactly one week away, and I felt good. My back was tight from when I re-tweaked it weeks earlier, but once I got going it was fine. It hurt badly at night. I wanted to take a couple Oxy to kick the pain, but I stayed away from it. It really wasn’t that terrible anyway, and I felt like I was six or seven years younger, maybe 27 instead of 34.

  I’d just finished another solid training session with Mace and Tyson. It was the last really hard work out before tapering a bit to get ready for Daniel Herman. We worked hard on takedown defense and getting off the canvas if he got me down.

  Leeza had been by the gym three more times since the first time she came last week. Each time she had a different flavored protein shake. I hoped she wasn’t drugging me. I was pretty sure it was just her being real nice to me to keep her options open and push her money train up the mountain. I think she saw that I had turned a corner as well, and just maybe she had real feelings for me.

  I packed my bag and told Mace and Tyson I’d see them early the next morning. We had an eight o’clock session planned. As I walked toward the door to leave, Leeza walked in. She was in tights and boots with a tight sleeveless top. I had to force my jaw shut so it didn’t drop. I glanced at my training partners, and Tyson wasn’t having much luck keeping his mouth from hanging open. Mace, on the other hand, wore a worried look.

  “I’ve got you a blueberry shake today. I tried it, and it’s real good.” Leeza held up the bottle.

  She was smiling and giving me those inviting eyes again. “Thanks,” I said, and took it from her.

  We talked about training for a minute, and she told me how excited she was for my fight with Daniel Herman. “You know, you really are acting like the Zane I knew years ago. It’s good to see. Maybe I’ve been mean to you, but you know for a long time you deserved it.”

  “I don’t deserve it now?”

  “Nope, that’s why I’m bringing you all these shakes and being nice.”

  “That’s all, the only reason?”

  Leeza gave me her best coy look. “Why? Do you want it to be more?” She touched my arm.

  “Zane, you need to get some ice on your back as soon as you can,” Mace yelled from across the gym, “better get on it.”

  Obviously he really wanted me to get the fuck away from Leeza.

  “Looks like I’ve got to get home,” I told her.

  “That’s okay. I just figured I’d drop that by, but if you need help putting the ice on your back I can come over. I’ve got to get Sam. She’s at her friend’s house for dinner, but I’ve got an hour or so.” She gave me a quick glance up and down, and her hand found my shoulder. She held it there for a moment before letting it slide away.

  Fuck! I was actually considering this. She was vitriol, but really hot vitriol. And she’d been so nice lately. Besides, she was the mother of my daughter. I stood there dumbly, looking at her for a long moment, and then the door to the gym opened.

  Light flooded in, and another fucking gorgeous woman walked through it, Elizabeth. She was in a short black dress with a zipper on the side that unzipped all the way up. She wore high black boots, and her hair was curled slightly as it fell over her shoulders.

  She had an ice chest in her hand, and she strode over to Leeza and me. “Hi, Zane.” She looked at me and then Leeza.

  Leeza’s coy, sexy face soured in a hurry.

  “Hi, what are you doing here?”

  She set the ice chest down on the mat. “I know your back is hurting. I thought it would be good to bring you ice.” She reached into the ice chest and pulled out a large plastic bag filled with ice.

  “Are you seriously fucking him?” Leeza asked. “Aren’t you Sam’s teacher?”

  “Why are you here? Aren’t you his ex?” Elizabeth shot back.

  Leeza turned toward her. “Yes, and I’m also the mother of his kid.”

  “Believe me, I know.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “Nothing. It’s good to see you, Leeza. I haven’t seen you at school in a while.”

  It was a subtle dig that I wasn’t sure Leeza got.

  She glanced at me and offered a thin smile. “I hope you enjoy the protein shake, Zane. I’ll take a raincheck on what we talked about.” She turned to Elizabeth. “Good to see you, Ms. Vega,” and walked to the door.

  As the door closed, Elizabeth turned to me. “Raincheck?”

  “It’s nothing, just Leeza being Leeza to cause problems.”

  Elizabeth considered this for a moment, and then let it go.

  “I hope the ice helps.”

  “It will,” I assured her, and then gave her a kiss.

  Had Elizabeth just saved me from royally screwing up? I couldn’t believe she’d thought to bring me ice. Her motives were pure. I knew Leeza’s were not. But Leeza had this crazy pull that was hard to deny. So did Elizabeth though.

  After wrapping the ice on my back, Elizabeth and I talked a bit. Surprisingly, she didn’t even bring up the encounter with Leeza or asked me what it was all about again. I thought it best to leave it at that.

  Thirty minutes later, I climbed into my car and found my thoughts twisting between Elizabeth and Leeza. Elizabeth had to be too good to be real, but there wasn’t any indication that she was anything but genuine.

  No way was Leeza being completely genuine, but I felt like she was pulling me toward her. I had to remember the fight at her house when Sam got pushed. I had to remember her bitch face when she called the cops on me. I had to remember all the times she let
her demon out and clawed at my guts. And I had to remember that Elizabeth was now in my life.

  As I drove home I was so lost in thought that I didn’t see the truck slip in behind me as I turned onto my street.

  Chapter 17

  I pulled into my driveway, and the thoughts of Leeza and Elizabeth were mixed with thoughts of fighting Daniel Herman. In other words, I wasn’t paying attention to anything else. I parked my car on the slabs of concrete and heard the tall grass and weeds scrape along the undercarriage. I really needed to mow the yard.

  I climbed out and started to reach for my bag in the back seat. That’s when I noticed Lorenzo’s truck. It was parked on the street about ten feet behind my Camaro. I pulled my bag out of the car, pushed the door shut, and turned to face him.

  Lorenzo piled out of the driver’s side, and the passenger window rolled down. I recognized his cousin, Lawrence, in the front seat. He was a monstrous 280 pounds and had a scar from his right ear to his lip thanks to a bar fight that involved a knife. The other guy was now dead, and Lawrence was a few months removed from a three-year stint in McAlester Prison.

  He nodded to me, and then just stared with his dark eyes.

  I also noticed the red embers of a cigarette in the backseat, but I couldn’t make out who was on the other end. Probably somebody with a similar past to Lawrence’s.

  My pulse was fast and my Adrenaline dumped into my veins as Lorenzo walked around the front of his truck. His eyes looked shifty, and they were bugged out like a frog’s. He had to be on something.

  As he got closer, I noticed something was in his hand. I couldn’t quite make it out in the darkness. Was he here with his boys to put a beating on me because of the way Leeza had been acting? That would screw him over for the money, but it looked like he didn’t give a shit about that at the moment.

  “What’s up, Lorenzo?”

  “What the fuck’s up?”

  “Just finished training,” I said.

  I sat my bag down beside me and gave him a quick once over. Now, he was just a few feet away. I noticed that it was a brown paper bag in his hand, but it didn’t hold any liquor.

  “You been training hard, right? Training real hard.” He wiped the side of his nose with his thumb and glanced back at his cousin. “That all you been doing, bro…training?”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “Chill out, Zane. Why you so fucking high strung?”

  He wiped the side of his nose again.

  I struggled to grasp the meaning of all this. It seemed if it was about Leeza he’d just come out and say something. Either that, or he would have already started trying to beat my ass.

  “I’m not high strung, just wondering what you’re doing here with your boys.”

  Lorenzo held up the bag in his left hand. “You been taking anything to help you? I got something.”

  I just stared at the bag. This wasn’t going as expected, but at least I wasn’t fighting for my life. Lorenzo glanced back at Lawrence, and I followed his gaze. Lawrence and his big-ass scar and dark eyes just sat there.

  “This is some shit that will help you, Zane,” he shook the bag slightly, and its contents jingled.

  “What is it?”

  “EPO, you know, the shit cyclists use.”

  “EPO, why would I want to take that?”

  “You won’t get tired. There are eight bottles in here and some needles. Load up on it over the next week. It will make it where you can train your ass off, and no way in hell you’ll get tired in a long fight. And it lasts for like three months!”

  He held the bag out for me. I didn’t take it.

  “Look man, I can’t take that. What if I get tested?”

  “They aren’t going to test you. And if so they aren’t going to test you for this. Besides, it’s already in your body. It just increases your red blood cells and shit.”

  I had no idea if what Lorenzo said was true, and he probably didn’t really know either.

  “I don’t know about all that, but it’s probably expensive as hell anyway.”

  “It ain’t cheap,” Lorenzo wiped his nose with his thumb once again then glanced back at his cousin. “But this is on the house. I need you to make that fucking money, and Lawrence here knew a guy who owed him something. You know how that goes, right?”

  He held the bag out to me again. I didn’t know for sure how it goes, but I could imagine. I didn’t plan on taking the EPO, but I also wanted Lorenzo, Lawrence, and whoever else was in the back of the truck to get the hell away from my house.

  I took the bag and glanced inside. Sure enough, there were eight small red-capped bottles and what looked like four needles in hospital packaging.

  “Pull it out and take a look,” he said. “Start taking that shit tonight, Zane. If you get a shot in the UCC soon it will help you, and there’s no way in hell they are going to test you. Think about it, the commission almost never comes. They almost never test at the Coliseum.”

  “I don’t need to look at it,” I said.

  “Just check it out. I want you to know it’s the real shit with me here right in front of you.”

  I pulled out one of the bottles and held it up between my thumb and forefinger. The small glass tube had EPO written on it from top to bottom on each side, like that made it officially the real deal. Lorenzo was probably the one who wrote it.

  “See, it’s legit, Zane. I want you to win. I want the money. Just take it. Nobody will ever know.”

  I nodded my head. “Thanks,” I said, and looked at Lawrence. He had a smirk of satisfaction on his rounded face.

  They drove away. I walked toward my house with my training bag in one hand and a bag of performance-enhancing drugs in the other. Lorenzo didn’t try to kick my ass because of Leeza’s newfound niceness toward me, but I was afraid his supposed nice gesture might result in a whole set of different problems.

  I opened the broken screen door and wondered if the contents in the bag would soon be coursing through my veins.

  Chapter 18

  Everything seemed to be going so good, but as I sat on my couch I realized how one little damn thing could twist my thinking, and in turn, my apparent good fortune. My brain squirmed as I looked from my open computer to the contents of the brown bag. The little bottles of liquid and needles were lined up in a neat row on my coffee table.

  Mauro’s MMA Show was on the TV, but I had the sound turned low and wasn’t paying much attention to it. My thoughts were sunk into the world of EPO. I needed to find out if I could safely take it, and needed to grapple with the very serious question of whether I should. I wanted to just flush that shit down the toilet, but if it really would help me and I really wouldn’t get caught, this seemed like the perfect time to take it. The stakes were as high as they could possibly be. The stakes were Samantha.

  Over ten years earlier, not long before I had my first pro fight, I did a twelve-week cycle of a Deca-D-bol stack and went from a scrawny 145 pounds to a solid 188, and my squat max went from 245 pounds to 365. It jumpstarted my career, but after that I’d been strictly legal other than the prescription pills. But who in the MMA industry didn’t take those?

  I scratched my arm and scanned the web page that was all about EPO. The information was muddy. I couldn’t really tell if I would pop positive if I took it, and it looked like it had the potential to thicken my blood. It did offer great results for endurance athletes, but MMA isn’t exactly an endurance sport. You need cardio, as they call it, but you have to be explosive as well.

  “Screw it,” I said to myself, and started to open one of the bags that held a needle. In a minute I could have this stuff running through my body and making me stronger and more capable of winning fights.

  I pulled the needle out of the package and looked at it. Then an image of Samantha flashed into my head. What if I got caught? It would all be over then. And then I thought of Elizabeth. Maybe I should call her. How disappointed would she be in me if I got popped for taking th
is? I sat the needle back down.

  I did some more reading, did some more soul searching. I stood, and walked around the living room, noticing that my back was tight as hell. It had been hurting, but now it was making me walk with a limp. It could be more painful because of this new stressor, or maybe it was more fucked up than I had realized.

  I walked back to the couch and stared at the bottles. Mauro’s show was just wrapping up. They were talking about how a couple fighters from the Netherlands swear by the power of eating horse meat. I’d never heard anybody talk about EPO for fighters. And besides, how could I even be sure that the stuff Lorenzo gave me was real?

  I bent over and scooped up the bottles and dropped them back into the paper bag. Then I tossed the needles in on top of them. I carried the wrinkled bag to my room and slid it into the corner of the top shelf of my closet. It came to a stop against my gun. As I walked away I felt better, but my back still hurt.

  The next thing I knew I was in the kitchen, and the bag with the leftover pills was in front of me. I plucked out two of the six remaining Vicodin and tossed them into my mouth. I threw open the fridge and found a bottle of Bud Light on its side up against the Mayonnaise. I twisted it open and chugged. The pills and alcohol slid down my throat with ease, and I took a deep breath.

  It had been five weeks since I’d taken a pill or even had a drink. It felt like seeing an old friend for the first time in years, but remembering the time we stole beer from the convenience store or egged houses. It was good to see him even though he was trouble.

  I headed back to the couch and consoled myself with the idea that this was a good tradeoff. I chose the lesser of the two evils, and I’d make sure that this was the only damn time I’d choose either.

  I sat down and finished the beer in two long gulps. I wanted another one.

  An hour earlier my only thoughts were on beating Daniel Herman. Then they shifted to Leeza and Elizabeth and Herman. And now my jacked up brain was being stretched by Vicodin. It felt good and bad at the same time.