by JJ Knight
“Jo,” he says, and then he’s working hard again. His hands move to my hips. I am flooded with emotion as he pushes in one last time, filling me, his eyes closed, his beautiful face relaxed in bliss.
He gathers me against him, his arms around my back. I cling to his chest. We breathe together, and our hearts clash against each other’s skin.
Then the light over the front door pops on with a buzz. Colt lifts his head and sighs. “We’re about to have company.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Oh my God, who?” I roll out from under him, scrambling for my T-shirt. God, if it’s his mother, and here I am, naked, with torn underwear. God!
Colt snatches up his boxers and slides them on. “You can stand behind me,” he says.
I pick up my bra and hide at his back. My arms snake inside my shirt to wiggle the bra on underneath it. Thankfully, the shirt is long enough to reach my thighs. I glance at the wrecked panties by the cage door. I am mortified.
But the face that peeks around the door is familiar. And unwelcome.
Brittany.
She sees Colt and strides in. She waves a finger at his boxers. “You’re fighting casual,” she says. Then she spots me. “Oh.”
“What are you doing here?” Colt asks. “We don’t train on Sundays.”
She holds up her duffel bag. “Just going to get in a quiet workout.”
“Bullshit,” Colt says. “You never come by yourself.”
I grow more irritated by the minute. I’m stuck half-dressed behind Colt. I couldn’t have even dreamed up this scenario.
Brittany sits on a bench, and I want to groan. Why can’t she just leave?
“We’re sort of busy here,” Colt says.
Brittany snorts. “I can see the trail.” She flutters a hand toward our scattered clothes. “I didn’t think you’d have company.”
“Well, you can see I do, so figure out some other place to work out.”
Brittany glares at him. “Actually, no. She should hear this.”
I peek around Colt’s arm. “Can’t we get dressed first?”
Brittany sighs like this is some great inconvenience. She walks over to our jeans and jerks them off the floor. “Here.” She tosses them through the cage door and turns around.
I snatch mine up and thrust my legs through. Colt takes his time pulling his on. Anger comes off him like sparks.
My panties lie conspicuously on the white platform, so I grab them and stuff them in a pocket. Colt heads down the stairs, and I follow.
“You’ve got ten seconds to explain why you’re here,” Colt says.
Brittany plops back down on the bench. I ignore her and head toward my shoes and hoodie. My face still burns with humiliation at her intrusion. But then, it could have been five minutes earlier, and that would have been much, much worse.
“I thought we got rid of her,” Brittany says. “We all decided it was for the best.” She puts a heavy emphasis on the “all.”
My stomach turns over. They talked about this? They want me gone that badly?
“Seems like there was an organized effort to keep us apart,” Colt says. His voice is like ice. “And I’m going to clean house when I find out who all was involved.”
Brittany shrugs. “So, they pulled a switcheroo on the phones and forwarded all the friends to a dead number.” She looks at me. “Nobody pushed her from that limo.”
Colt heads over to me and takes my hand. “Ten seconds are up.” He leads me to his shoes. “Don’t bother keeping your remote. It’ll be deprogrammed within the hour.”
Brittany jumps up. “Don’t push away the people who care about what happens to you.” She cuts in front of us. “We’ve been friends a long time.”
“Not anymore,” Colt says. “This whole thing is ridiculous.”
“No,” Brittany says. “Your behavior is ridiculous. Everyone’s spooked. They think you’re not fit for the title shot. You can’t manage your personal affairs. You get sidetracked by every underage groupie who lets you in her pants.”
“I’m twenty,” I spit out.
She ignores me. “We all agreed to keep you out of range of these girls until you got what you wanted. The title.”
Colt tries to push past, but Brittany blocks the door. “Colt, what do you think we’re doing here? Messing with you and Jo for the hell of it? There’s a lot at stake. Nobody cares who you’re screwing. But you’ve got payroll to meet, people who chose YOU to sink their careers into. And you can’t think for even a minute about anybody but your damn girlfriends.”
The room echoes with her last word. I’m shaken. I don’t know what happens to Colt, why he can’t separate his life from his fights. I’m a beginner, but I already know you have to focus in there. For some reason, he can’t do it.
“You think I don’t know all this?” Colt says. “You think it doesn’t weigh on me every day?”
“I don’t see it,” Brittany says. “I see a fighter who skipped training yesterday to shop for dresses.”
I spin around to face Colt. “You were supposed to be here?”
He shrugs. “I wasn’t going to leave you until we got the phones straightened out.”
“We could have done that anytime!”
Brittany nods smugly. “See? Even the problem sees the problem.”
I want to jump her, I really do. I got a good lick in last time she and I hit the mat, and I’ve trained since.
But Brittany slings her bag over her shoulder and heads out the opposite way. “Don’t think you can just cut me out.” She waves her key fob in the air. “Right now your father likes me more than he likes you. He’s the one who called me here when you triggered the door lock after being photographed in LA last night. With her.” She opens the door and looks pointedly at me. “Jo, if you’re going to stick around, get his head on straight. When he gets his dick in a knot, he’s useless in the cage.”
And she’s gone.
Colt sits in a chair by the door, holding his head in his hands. I fetch his shoes and sweater and jacket, not sure what else to do.
He doesn’t look up, so I sit on the floor in front of him. He’s helped me a lot, and I wish I could think of something to do to help him.
“Let’s go back in time a bit, can we?” I ask. I don’t want to know all this stuff, but it seems like we have to talk about it.
Colt doesn’t move. His blonde hair sticks up through his fingers, all out of place.
I bite my lip. “Were you doing all right when you and that other girl were still happy together, before she left?”
He sighs and leans back in his chair. I try not to be distracted by the tautness of his belly, his smooth chest, and the tattoo circling his bicep. I hand him his sweater.
Colt jerks it over his head. “No. I was blowing it even then.” He picks up one of his boots and extracts the sock left inside. “I got by on brute force and the fact that the opponents early on weren’t ready for me.”
“Then she left.”
“Her name was Annie. She was training. I thought this was what she wanted. Things seemed fine. Then one day I came home, and all her stuff was gone. And a good chunk of mine.”
“She was living with you?” My face grows hot.
“Yeah. For about two months.” He doesn’t meet my eyes. “Maybe Pop paid her off. Maybe she just got sick of the scene. I couldn’t figure it out. Every time I got in the cage, I would see her. I didn’t know if I wanted to hold her or punch her.”
“And meanwhile, you got pummeled.” I’d seen the footage.
“I had to stop before my win-loss record got too bad.” He pulls on his second boot. “Everyone agreed at the time. When I didn’t get any better, they sent me to Buster’s. Away from any memories.”
I look around the room. I picture Colt in the cage with another girl, and I want to throw up. She used to be here.
Colt reaches over to stroke my head. “I can see what you’re thinking. You’re an open book, Jo. I didn’t bring you here to compare
you with her. I wanted to blow out any ghosts of her with you.”
I try to make my voice steady. “Did it work?”
He pulls me up to sit in his lap and lays his head on my chest. He’s like a little boy for a moment. My fingers thread through his hair. “It did,” he says. “I don’t even care about her anymore.”
My heart sings a little inside. But then I remember the two fights I saw. “You kept losing when I was there, Colt.”
He sits up. “I know. But when I got back here, after you cut me off, or I thought you did, I got my head on straight. I really did. My opponent became my opponent. My time in the cage got real clean, real focused.”
“What happens after your next fight?”
Colt looks up at me, his eyes reflecting the lights overhead. “What do you mean?”
“If you win, you go on, right? Back on the title-fight run.”
“Yeah.”
“But what if you don’t? What if you lose?”
He grips my waist. “I won’t lose.”
I refuse to let this go. “But what if you do?”
Colt fingers the pocket of my hoodie. “Sponsors will pull out. I’ll probably lose my position in the league.”
“You shouldn’t miss practice for me.” My heart is heavy.
“They shouldn’t have kept us apart,” he counters.
“What do we do now?”
Colt stands up, still holding me, then sets me on the floor. “First, we both get ready for our next fights.” He hesitates. “When’s yours?”
“Two weeks.”
He tosses his jacket over his shoulder and kills the lights. “Mine’s in five days. I’ll train here. You stay at Buster’s with your guy.” He stops. “Who’s training you?”
“Nate.”
“The cigar man?”
“That very one.”
“Well, he’ll do for now. Later we’ll get you someone a little more schooled in MMA.” Colt opens the back door. “And meanwhile, I’ll hire a new assistant who will look into my accounts. It’s time to sever my books from my father’s.”
I have to agree with that.
Chapter Seventeen
Lani doesn’t show up at Buster’s the next day, or the day after that. I send her a text from my old phone. She says she’s out of town. I don’t want to ask her about Parker and where she went after the fight by text, so I decide to wait.
I keep my new phone as close as I can during training. Both Colt and I check it at odd moments, never letting more than a few hours pass without communicating.
By midweek, Colt has fired two people on staff and cut Brittany’s access to his gym. Turns out the quiet teenage boy who assists Colt on fight days was a spy for his father, getting paid bonus checks every time he reported to The Cure.
Just after noon each day, while Colt’s trainer is fetching their lunch, I hide in the bathroom and we talk a few minutes on the phone.
“How do you feel?” I ask him.
“It’s going well,” he says. “I have to do a silly intimidation interview tomorrow with Mulligan McGee. They film us insulting each other. Part of the package.”
“Tell him his knees look like a Scottish bagpiper’s.”
Colt bursts out laughing. “He is a little light on the leg muscles.”
“It’s good, though, that they’re featuring you, right?” I pace the small room.
“Yeah, it’s a good sign. They’re building footage to air.”
Someone knocks on the bathroom door. “I gotta go,” I say.
“All right, Jo. Train hard.”
“You too.”
I kill the call and open the door. One of the girls I’m training gives me a quick hug. It makes me laugh sometimes, how friendly they are. I want to tell them, “Be fighters!” But I know not all girls are like me. I’d just as soon punch someone as hug them.
Buster steps out of his office as I go by. “Got you a new one, Jo,” he says.
A girl is looking around his office. She’s about the same age as me, with dark hair in a braid down her back. When Buster introduces us, she’s all timid. “I’m Annabelle,” she says. Her handshake is weak and uncertain. “My dad thinks I should try to get a little tougher.”
I flash a quick smile. “We’ll do that. I have several girls like you. We’re getting you all roughed up.”
“She’s all signed in,” Buster says. “Show her some kettlebell work, and then I want you to take off early today. Tomorrow’s going to be a long one.”
“Got it, boss.” I lead Annabelle into the main weight room.
She’s got a loose T-shirt on, so I can’t really tell how stringy she is to help me pick the first weight. I hand her a ten-pounder to be safe. “Let me show you some moves.”
When she takes the kettlebell, she almost drops it. “It’s heavy!” she says.
“We’ll get you stronger.” I show her how to hold it at her chest and lift straight up to work her shoulders. “This is where you get your punching power,” I tell her.
Her arm wobbles a little, so I reach to steady her. And that’s when I notice something.
Beneath that floppy sleeve of a shirt that is two sizes too big is rock-hard muscle.
I take a step back. This girl isn’t who she pretends to be.
Annabelle loses her grip and almost drops the weight. I want to call her out on her lie. She could handle three times that amount, easy.
Annabelle.
Annie.
I grow cold. This can’t be her. And if it is, why is she here, at my gym?
Chapter Eighteen
After work, Zero and I head to his apartment to hang out. I need to talk to somebody about Annie, and I know it can’t be Colt. Besides, I haven’t had a chance to ask him about Angel at the drag show. The only time I’ve seen him since then was at the cafe.
We settle on an evening of brown-rice sushi and a DVR episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
Zero comes into the living room with chopsticks. His head is huge, topped with his biggest wig in honor of RuPaul. “There’s a Kardashian in the HOUSE!” he says.
“You don’t look like any of them,” I point out.
Zero stabs the air near me with the chopsticks. “Khloe is on ‘RuPaul’ as a guest judge!”
I manage to snatch the sticks from his hands. “The things I watch for you.”
He wiggles into his red velvet papasan chair. The discord between his work khakis, button-down shirt, and the crazy huge blonde beehive is startling. But he makes me laugh. The conversation about Annie can wait. Zero needs some fun.
“You love my crazy drag shows, kitten.” He’s already dropping into RuPaul speak. I’m sure he’ll start telling me to “Sashay away” any minute.
I can’t focus on the show, although the outrageousness is a relief from my stressful day. When Zero finally cuts the television off, my worries settle back over me like a cloud.
“Girl, you are so gloom-and-doom tonight.”
“I’m okay.” I set the plate on the Japanese sake crate that serves as his coffee table. I’m about to bring up Annie when I notice that Zero is also acting off, like he too is trying to avoid thinking about something troubling.
“What’s on your mind, Zero?”
Zero buys some time by pulling off the wig and holding it in his lap as he smooths out the lumps in the puffy bouffant crown. “Angel Wild was at the show.”
“I saw. What was that little number you two did in the entryway?”
“Apparently the beginning of the end.”
I move down closer to him. “I didn’t hear a peep from you after the show, even when Colt’s engagement breakup hit the gossip sites, which I know you read!”
Zero focuses hard on the red bow buried in the wig. It’s perfect, but he picks at it anyway. “We might have had a little moment.” He pauses. “Or a night’s worth.”
Holy cow. “So, you two are together now?”
He stands up suddenly. “Oh, no. Not with that diva. Just a one-nighter
. Nothing that’ll stick. We’re like oil and water. He’s slippery, and I flow with the river of life.”
Zero’s had way too much RuPaul for this conversation. “Well, I like him fine,” I say.
He sets the wig on the coffee table, where it sits stiffly like a taxidermied poodle. “No need to like him. He’s not staying.”
I tug on the end of one of my braids. Zero is not usually like this.
He decides to change the subject. “Sounds like you’re all cozy with Golden Boy.”
The sushi rice sits like a rock in my belly. “He fired the people who kept us apart.”
Zero brushes his head free of stray wig hairs. “I still think he should have come for you.”
I don’t answer that. I agree. We were just so new. I wonder if he would have chased after Annie, if he had known where she’d gone.
“I think something crazy might be happening.”
“Crazier than a father going off the rails and you jumping out of a limo?”
Actually, compared to that, Annie’s appearance might not be such a big deal. “I think his ex-girlfriend just signed up to train with me.”
Zero’s eyes go wide. “Did she say? Oh, girl, dish!”
I shake my head. “No, she’s been lying about her fighter experience, acting all weak and pathetic when it’s clear she’s been training.”
“Have you told Colt?”
“I don’t plan to. He’s got enough with the fight coming up.”
“Well, you watch that diva. She’s bound to be trouble,” Zero says. “Is Colt doing that interview tonight?”
“They’re filming right now.” Colt said he would call after it was over.
“Pretty big fight on Friday.” Zero twists an onyx ring in circles on his finger. He’s nervous.
“What’s got you?” I ask.
“Just worried about Jo Jo. Last time you went off to one of his fights, you ended up bruised and bleeding.”
“I can handle myself.”
“So, what happens if he loses?”
I’m about to say, “He won’t lose,” but I know it’s possible. I can still picture that first match I went to, where Throwdown sat on Colt and bashed his face. “I don’t know.”
