Inhibitions

by Mattie Bowman

  A cold chill raked across my skin with the thought that this could be temporary for her. That this all could be some crazy illusion conjured by a top-hat clad Grant who threw glitter in the air and made Presley believe I was worth the risk of loving again. The guilt from this morning only fueled the cold clinging to my gut—which turned out to be better than a cold shower. Hard on completely fucking gone.

  Hitting the bag a little harder, I thought back to the week Presley walked in on David and his current girlfriend in her bed. The day before to be exact. I wasn’t one-hundred percent sure my reaction to catching him cheating on her had spurred his public attack on Presley, or if it was some horrible coincidence, but the heavy guilt had weighed on me since the day I brought her to my apartment. I tried to tell her more than once before I’d concluded that it was selfish to try and alleviate my own torture when the only result for her would be more pain.

  The fact that I knew she was better off made it easier to bear, but I still hated the way she’d found out. I would’ve told her if she hadn’t walked in on them.

  That was in the past, though. And maybe she’d take Grant’s advice and talk to David while he was here. They could hash out whatever demons still clung to her heart regarding him, and then she’d really be mine. Free and clear.

  My left pocket vibrated against my leg, and I quickly ripped my gloves off, wondering if Presley had awoken from her nap already. Digging my cell out, I was slightly disappointed at the screen.

  “Craig,” I answered. “What’s up?” I patted myself down with a towel and tossed it in the designated hamper as I headed toward the exit. Gloves were off now, no point in staying. Plus, that shower was calling my—and Presley’s—name.

  “Grady, what the fuck is up?” His tone was light and bordering on giddy.

  “I’m just leaving the gym. You don’t need to check up on me.” I weaved in and out of the various equipment spread out in the large room.

  “While I’m thrilled to hear you’re still working out on vacay, that’s not why I’m calling.”

  “What’s up?” I asked again, pushing through the gym doors and stopping in the hallway at his sudden shift to serious.

  “Cartwright was in a car accident,” he said, and I pressed the phone to my ear a little harder. “He’s all right.” I sighed thankful a fellow boxer—one I’d only known in passing—was alive. “But he shattered half the bones in his right hand.”

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It got pinned between the wheel and the crumpled dash. Paramedics on scene said he was lucky that’s all it was.”

  “True. Still, he didn’t want to hear that shit,” I said, knowing I’d feel that way. My hands were as important to my livelihood as a singer’s voice was to theirs.

  “Right.”

  “Thanks for telling me, man.” I started to walk again at a slow pace toward the lobby.

  “That’s not why I called either.”

  I stopped again. “Damn it, Craig. What’s going on?”

  “All right, sorry. The sponsor of the event wants you to take his place at the feature fight tomorrow night.”

  “What? Verizon wants me to fight?” I raked my fingers through my sweat-soaked hair, spinning around to manage the excitement that surged through me. “Fuck.”

  “I know, right?” He said. “Get your ass on a plane.”

  “I can’t.” My heart sank. As much as I knew this fight would advance my career and give me some crazy-good publicity, I couldn’t make Presley leave early. We still had almost a week left and one more fantasy to complete. If we left early, she wouldn’t get the full story she needed to land her dream job.

  “The fuck you can’t!” Craig laughed like I was joking.

  “I’m serious. There is no way I can make it.”

  “Why not? You’re in Colorado not fucking Israel.”

  I’d told Craig I was holing up in a cabin resort during my downtime between fights. He didn’t understand the importance of this trip, of what it meant to Presley.

  “This is the big dogs, dude. A chance of a lifetime. Tickets for this fight sold out in twenty minutes, and there are already a hundred thousand pre-orders on paper view.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “They paid to see Rollins fight Cartwright, not me.”

  “Who gives a shit?” He scoffed on the other end of the line, and I imagined him flipping me off. “You show up, knock his ass out, and gain notoriety. There is nothing but win here, man.”

  Picturing the fight, I started pacing, my mind trying to calculate if we could leave early. If Presley had enough notes to write a great story. I didn’t think it was fair to even broach the subject but how could I not tell her about this?

  “Owen, come on.” Craig used my first name which meant he had hit the deadly serious zone.

  “I know. I just can’t—”

  I turned to my right while pacing outside the promenade across from the gym and had to do a double-take. No, make that triple.

  It didn’t matter how many times I blinked, how many times I looked away and back again…I saw the same thing each time.

  Presley pressed against the glass. David, kissing her like he had when they were together. A loud crack popped in my ear, and I glanced down at my phone where the screen had split from my firm grip.

  “Owen? Are you hearing me?” Craig called, and I lifted the phone back to my ear. I tore my eyes away from the car crash, the one where I was what the semi collided with, and forced myself to move. And I kept moving, past the front desk, up the stairs, and into our room, because if I stopped…I’d turn around and kill him.

  “I’ll be there,” I finally said when the rock had dislodged from my throat. I instantly hung up the phone and beat the shit out of the mattress in our room because I was smarter than to take out my rage on the walls, but I needed the fucking contact.

  A crack opened up in my chest—wider and more shattered than the screen on my phone. I thought she’d been taking a nap. What a fucking idiot. She’d done exactly what I’d asked—went and talked to him. Only I’d never dreamed it would end up with her in his arms, his mouth on hers.

  I punched the bed again, the springs creaking under the pressure. “Fuck!” I shouted, feeling as if a searing hot knife had been rammed into the center of my chest. The image of the two of them pulsed in my head as I shoved all my clothes into one bag, each set going in harder than the one before.

  “Stupid,” I said to myself.

  I thought she’d felt the same way. That we were on the same page, we always were. Turned out I was temporary. A pastime until—or if—he came crawling back. How could she forgive him? How could she…

  I clenched my eyes shut, unable to ignore the moisture slipping between the cracks.

  The lock popped on the door to the suite and my heart stopped and restarted. Terror shot through me at the thought of her bringing him back to the room—not from the sight, but from what I’d do to him. I gripped the strap on my back with both hands just in case, sucked in a deep breath, and walked out of the bedroom.

  Presley was alone—the fact flooded me with relief until the hole in my chest throbbed. She looked disheveled, her hair mussed, her eyes wide when she saw my bag.

  “Owen?”

  The shaken tone of her voice triggered all my protective instincts, but I resisted the overwhelming urge to go to her. Not now. Not after…I rubbed my chest, feeling as if I couldn’t catch a full breath despite standing still.

  17 Presley

  “Owen?” I blinked twice when I set eyes on him, thinking the shock had made me delusional as well because Owen stood there in his workout clothes but with an overstuffed bag over his shoulder and a strained look on his face like someone had died.

  I gasped, covering my mouth. “What happened?”

  His glare was sharp enough to cut me. “I’m leaving.”

  “Okay,” I said the word slowly—as slow as my brain was to catching up. “Let me grab some stuff.
I’ll go with you.” I hadn’t a clue what had happened to put that look on his face, but I was hell bent on being there for him whatever he was about to face.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” He blocked my path to the bedroom.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What were you going to do? Hide it from me? Keep up this act until we got home and then leave me?”

  “This act?”

  “Yeah,” he said, jerking the bag up higher on his shoulder. “This act. I hope you had fun using your best friend as a stand-in while you waited for him to come back to you.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I snapped and forced my fingers through my hair. “I’m so sick of not knowing what the hell is going on!”

  “I saw you two, okay?” His entire body trembled before me. “And I’m not sticking around so you can live out this fantasy with me and then go running back to him once reality hits. Craig called, I have a fight waiting for me tomorrow night. Just what I need after all this bullshit.”

  Tears flowed freely from my eyes despite being furious. “You saw us?” I shoved at his chest with all my might, but he didn’t budge. “For how long, Owen? Did you see me struggle? You see me knee him in the junk? Huh? See Anderson rush me away?”

  He dropped his bag. “What?”

  “Yeah!” I shoved him again, and when that didn’t work, I beat against his hard chest like the mad-woman I was. “You saw and you thought I would do that to you? You didn’t think he’d do something like that to me?” I sniffed hard in an attempt to stop my sobs.

  “Presley, I—”

  “Don’t,” I cut him off. “You assumed—again—without talking to me!”

  “I saw. I thought…”

  Everything hit me at once—what David had said, what he’d done, and then finding Owen like this—I lost it. “You were just going to leave me here? No explanation? Just bolt?”

  “What would you have done, Presley? If you’d seen me kissing my ex?”

  Acid raced up my throat, but I forced it down. “I would’ve forced you to tell me why!” I shoved him again, but he pinned my arms to my sides.

  “Oh really? Is that what you did with David?”

  I thrashed against his grasp but there as no breaking his hold. “There was nothing to misconstrue, Owen! I saw everything. Things you should never see…can’t un-see.”

  “I know, I know! I’m sorry, okay. I fucked up. I thought…damn it.” He pulled me to his chest, and I struggled against him for all of two seconds before I went limp against him, reeling in my sobs as he stroked my hair.

  “Did you see David the day before I caught him?” I blurted the question out the second I could manage a full sentence without my tears breaking my words. Owen went still as a statue beneath me, and I looked up at him with swollen, tear-stung eyes.

  He released me and took a step back. The acid returned to my throat, my stomach rolling.

  “Oh, God. Please tell me he was lying, Owen.”

  “What did he say?”

  I wiped at my face as if I could rub life back into it. “If you have to ask, it must be true.” I crumpled, unable to take one more second of the onslaught. He caught me before I hit the floor, moving me to couch as he hit his knees before me.

  “I’ve tried to tell you dozens of times.” He grabbed my hands, but I jerked them away.

  “Why? Why would you tell him we were sleeping together? We weren’t. He retaliated because of what you’d said.”

  “I’m so fucking sorry, Presley.” He shook his head. “I saw him with her that night at the bar, and I lost it. I ran my mouth off, said you were mine anyway, and had been for a long time. I wanted him to feel it…to know what it felt like to be hurt like that. I never thought…”

  I rubbed my forehead, absorbing the information like acid in a sponge. Two different stories from two starkly different men. One of which was the last man I’d trusted. After too many deep breaths to count, I finally lifted my eyes to his.

  “I believe you.”

  The air went out of his lungs, and his head fell into my lap. I scraped at his scalp with my fingers. “You should have told me. You should have come to me before running away—”

  “I should’ve protected you.”

  The weight in my stomach amplified. “I didn’t see it coming. I was trying to leave…to go find you.”

  Silence engulfed the heavy air around us, sitting on my shoulders like an elephant. I didn’t know what to say or how to process the fresh betrayal coming at me from all angles.

  “Where do we go from here?” He asked, finally breaking the silence.

  I shifted out from underneath him and walked to where he’d dropped his bag on the floor. I pointed to it. “You need to go.”

  He knitted his eyebrows together. “Presley, please. You have to forgive me. I was wrong then and today and—”

  I held up my hand to stop him. “The fight Craig talked about?”

  “Fuck the fight.”

  “It’s big?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “How big?”

  “I said I don’t—”

  “How big, Owen?”

  “Rollins verses Cartwright,” he snapped. “Cartwright was in an accident and broke his hand. They want me to fill in. But I. Don’t. Care.”

  They’d been advertising that fight for months. It would be the biggest of the year. “You have to go,” I said again.

  “No.” He bounded across the room, yanking me to him and crushing his lips on mine. I sighed between strokes of his tongue, my body begging me to let him erase everything that had happened in the past three hours.

  I pushed him back. “You have to. It’s too big to pass up.”

  “I’m needed here.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  He stepped away from me, hurt coating his gorgeous dark eyes. “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know. That our fantasy just got all kinds of fucked up.”

  “We can fix it.”

  “A fallen stripper, altitude sickness, a forgotten lock, those are things we could fix. This?” I raised my arms as if to acknowledge the general fuckedupness of the situation. “Is beyond repair. At least for the quick fix we’d need to finish out our stay.” More tears threatened to come, but I forced them back. “Maybe all the times I’d messed things up was just leading to this outcome. Maybe we weren’t supposed to cross the line that we did.”

  “Please don’t say that. Don’t pretend like this was all a fluke.”

  I chuckled desperately to myself. “Second choice. Fluke. It’s become my lot in life.”

  “You’re not second choice.”

  “David left me for her. You were leaving me for a fight.”

  “That’s not why—”

  “Just go, Owen,” I said, the frustration completely draining out of me. “I’ll check us out in the morning. They’ve got David in a holding room until his flight tomorrow. I’ll be fine. Just…just go.”

  “Presley,” he sighed my name like it was a final plea to my sanity but I couldn’t be reached. I’d been broken one too many times today and was utterly shredded.

  One silent conversation that still came too easy to us despite the nature of our fight, and he’d scooped up the bag, and walked out the door, tears in his eyes.

  I’d thought I couldn’t be any more shredded than I already was. That was a false hope, because watching him leave was enough to splinter what was left of my heart.

  “You’re not scheduled to leave for another six days.” Anderson came around the front desk, taking in my swollen and puffy face. “You have your final fantasy to complete and you barely even scoped out the Wonderland rooms. Plus, Grant has to give the two of you his evaluation.”

  The determination in his pitch to get me to stay almost made me smile. Almost. “It’s not like I wouldn’t have loved to stay till the end, Anderson.” A rock lodged itself in my throat, and I had to talk around it. “We just…Owen and I…”

>   “Is this because of that asshole, yesterday?” He lowered his voice. “Because he was forced to leave the grounds.”

  In part, it was his fault, but I’d made the decision to force Owen to leave. He’d wanted to stay but after what had happened with David, Owen’s accusation, and then the realization that David hadn’t fully lied when he’d said Owen had said those things—I was all kinds of fucked up. And beside each of those facts, I honestly would never have been okay with Owen missing the fight of a lifetime for me. I had more than enough notes and first-hand experiences here at Inhibitions to spin a mouth-watering tale for Pamela. I just wished I could be there ringside to watch him do what he loves—but after everything I’d put him through while he posed as my fiancé, well, I highly doubted he wanted me now.

  “It’s complicated.” I dug my fists into my eyes for the millionth time that morning. A terrible side effect from crying all night was the dry, swollen, scratchy eyes the next day. I hated that the feeling was familiar and the source of both was a man. Could I be any more of a damsel? “Can you just check us out?”

  Anderson slowly returned behind the front desk, stopping behind an open computer. “I was looking forward to playing cards with you again,” he said while his fingers worked the keyboard.

  I gave him the most of a smile that I could. “If you’re ever in Cali, look me up.”

  “Don’t you mean us?” He asked.

  “I—” The phone ringing cut me off, thankfully.

  Anderson picked it up in one ring. “Yes. Of course. Give me one minute.” He hung up the phone, and I arched an eyebrow at the less-than-professional tone he’d used on the line. Glancing up at me, he waved me off. “You’re all taken care of.” He sighed. “There is one last thing you must complete before you leave, though.”

  “What’s that?” I pinched the bridge of my nose, the only task I was interested was getting on a plane and sleeping until I woke back up in my normal life. The one where Owen was still my best friend and my heart didn’t ache with each beat.