Until the Bell Rings: An MMA Fighter Romance

by Roxy Wilson

  “Well, I think that if you wanted to do something again sometime…I’m busy, now; real busy, basically all the time…but we could probably give it a try.”

  “That would make me—”

  “Hey!” someone snapped.

  I took my eyes off of Riley’s and looked toward the source of the deep, gravelly voice, and wished I hadn’t. Of all the times Malcolm’s father picked to show his ugly face…

  Tyson Kroft was a rail thin, stone faced man, as dark skinned as Malcolm but more so; his genes were probably as aggressive as he was because other than the hint of gray in Malcolm’s eyes that he got from his mother, he could have been a younger version of his deadbeat father.

  Malcolm’s father was a criminal. The unrepentant, career variety that never quite managed to get put away for very long. Malcolm was his one redeeming virtue in the world and honestly, if he had any sense of what was right and wrong, he’d just leave it at that and be glad he actually put his hands to anything that managed to flourish and improve the world instead of turn to rust and coal in his hands.

  He did not like me one bit.

  I put my hands on my hips as he approached us, white hoodie and ghetto jeans hanging off his hips. It put me on guard, and I heard my father’s voice warning me that in that loose mass of clothing a man like Tyson might be hiding anything—a knife, a gun; hell, he could have a baseball bat in there and no one could tell.

  As he stormed toward me, I tried to remind myself that I had seen Tyson civil before—and he looked about the same. He only had one social setting.

  “Can we help you, friend?” Riley asked. There was an edge to his voice.

  Tyson sneered at him, and made a rude noise. “No,” he said, and then turned his attention on me, like Riley didn’t exist. “What’s this I hear about you telling Malcolm he needs to go to college?”

  I stared at Tyson. It was confusing coming from a parent that he would take issue with that. I adjusted my own social meter to its special ‘Tyson Kroft’ setting. “He does need to go to college, Mr. Kroft.” I never called Tyson by his first name, lest he get the wrong idea we were somehow on casual terms with one another. “You know how smart he is. Are you really angry about that?”

  “What I’m angry about, Zahra,” Tyson assumed he was on casual terms with everyone, regardless as to what they thought of him, “is that you told him he should go to college so he didn’t end up a scrub like his father. Like me. Why would you say that to my son? That’s my flesh and blood, Zahra; how you gonna turn him on me like that?”

  He seemed more hurt than angry, but those two things were closely linked in Tyson’s emotional world. I’d seen it more than once—which is why I really did encourage Malcolm not to cut ties with his father, but also to see him as he was; a deeply flawed, misguided individual that frequently ignored boundaries. Like right now.

  “You should take a step back, buddy,” Riley said.

  I turned on him. “I don’t need your help with this,” I said, maybe sharper than I intended.

  Tyson thumbed his nose at Riley.

  I pointed at him next. “And you behave yourself, too, Mr. Kroft. Now I told Malcolm he needs to think about his future; and yes, I told him he didn’t want to end up with your lot in life. Do you want that for him? What kind of productive life have you led, Mr. Kroft, that you’d want Malcolm to share it?”

  It was not the first time we’d had this conversation. From the beginning, Tyson had wanted full custody of Malcolm, but I was the one who recommended against it during the divorce and custody hearings. I understood Tyson’s anger at that, but his ignorance of what kind of life he lived for himself was beyond me.

  He shifted on his feet. His hands moved in the pocket of his hoodie. I didn’t panic; just paid attention. “Why do you think you’re so much better than me?” he asked. “Why do you think ‘Walter’”—he gave Malcolm’s step-father’s name a nasty tone—“is so much more than I am, just because he got an education and some piece of paper? You think I don’t know things?”

  “That’s just it, Mr. Kroft,” I said sadly. “You do, but you waste them.” No one would have believed that Tyson Kroft could break down a car and rebuild it without looking at a manual. In his own way he was brilliant—Malcolm had that same gift, too. But Tyson abused and wasted it.

  “I got cash in my pocket,” Tyson said. “I work free, for myself, not for anybody else. You want my son to go work for some corporate, soul-sucking empire? Want him to whiten up so he can work in the white man’s world?”

  And there it was. Malcolm was a child in a new world, with intelligence, and promise, and opportunity. His slate was fresh. Tyson was old, and angry, his promise wasted a long time ago and, maybe, just maybe, it really wasn’t entirely his fault. His reaction was, though; and his unwillingness to let Malcolm flourish was his choice, too.

  “You are welcome to have this conversation with your son,” I told him. “I trust his judgment because he’s a smart young man who knows himself. But you need to let him grow up and be what he wants, Mr. Kroft. I doubt very much he wants to be you.”

  Tyson took a step toward me.

  Riley was between us before I even realized he’d moved. He loomed. Tyson was about as tall as Riley was, but Riley could have loomed even if he was six inches shorter. His body was tense with the warning of aggression.

  “What are you gonna do, big guy?” Tyson asked. “Stare me down. Like I’m a dog, or what?”

  “You bark an awful lot,” Riley said. “If it looks like a dog and acts like a dog…”

  “Mother fucker, I—”

  “Stop!” Both of them did, but neither looked at me. I wedged myself between them, and they made space. Damn right they did. “I haven’t got time to mediate a couple of testosterone crazed twelve year-olds,” I told them. “This is not the playground, boys. Both of you step back. Now.”

  Riley took one step back; so did Tyson.

  Tyson shook his head in disgust and jerked his chin at me. “You’re just like Jackie, you know that, Zahra? Can’t stand to be with your own kind. Gotta look on the other side of the fence.” Tyson’s other problem in life. He saw a fence in the first place and wanted Malcolm to see it, too. “Now you got a white man, you some kind of uppity house—”

  Riley was around me and on Tyson before he could finish, before I could even register being shocked. I hadn’t been a barrier at all, and all of a sudden Tyson’s nose exploded as he staggered back, groaning and reaching for his face, and Riley was already closing in again.

  I screamed his name, and pulled at his shoulder, and when he turned toward me I saw rage in his face. Real, monstrous rage. The kind that some part of your brain recognizes instinctively as dangerous and predatory and it start telling your body it’s time to fight or flee. My heart pounded in my chest and I let him go.

  Riley face only showed that beast inside him for a moment longer. Then it melted, and he glanced down at his fist like he didn’t even really understand what had happened. That was almost worst. This was the man I’d had such a good time with just half an hour ago? I’d had no idea there was a demon inside him and that it would be so terrifying when it came out.

  “You need to go,” I told Tyson.

  Tyson flipped Riley the bird, and did the same to me. I ignored him. He stumbled away, cussing and spitting and holding his nose.

  “Fucking asshole,” Riley muttered.

  “What,” I asked, keeping my own anger under control but just barely, “the absolute hell did you think you were doing?”

  Riley looked up from his bloodied knuckles and frowned at me. “I wasn’t going to let him speak to you like that.”

  “You thought his words were going to, what; cut me?” I asked. “You think I’m the kind of woman that needs you to fight my battles for me? Is this your version of showing off?”

  Riley’s face fell. “No, Zahra, I—”

  “Don’t,” I said. I stepped back from him. “Tyson is an actual criminal, Riley.
He could have had a knife, or a gun; he could press charges, do you get that? And it was an altercation with me that escalated. I could lose my job over that kind of thing. Do you have any idea what kind of damage you could have done?”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” Riley said, “I just lost my temper and—”

  “That’s the problem, Riley. You lost your temper. You lost control.” I shook my head, and waved him off. “You need to go, too. I can’t have anything to do with that kind of problem; I have my own to deal with.”

  “Come on, Zahra,” Riley said, half begging, half dismissing. “It won’t happen again, and he was asking for it.”

  “No one ever asks to get hit in the face,” I said, bewildered. “He didn’t attack me. Or you. He was just shooting his mouth off like he always does. You think that’s the worst thing he’s ever called me? Tyson Kroft is an insecure, small man who has to resort to calling names to make himself feel like he’s made a point. Frankly, that’s one step above smashing someone’s nose in to make a point.”

  Riley was frozen, and I was just fine with that. He should have been; he should have felt awful for what he did. But, I knew he didn’t. What he felt was ashamed that I’d seen him; not that he did anything wrong.

  “Go, Riley,” I said. “Thank you for lunch. But we are done here.”

  He seemed like he might have said something else, but I turned and tugged open the office door and left him there on the sidewalk.

  I had my own demons. I did not need anyone else’s in my life, thank you very much.

  Chapter Six

  Riley

  I smoldered all the way to the gym. The adrenaline drop had my blood hot and it never really cooled all the way down. I was furious; Tyson was lucky a bloody nose was all he got. I’d held back. I could have smashed his face in entirely.

  The thing was, I normally didn’t lose my temper. I stayed in control; you had to, to be a good fighter. If I lost control in the ring, or even in a cage, I could kill someone. There was a difference between fighting and violence, when you got right down to it. Fighting was a contest. Violence was about hurting people.

  And I had wanted to hurt Tyson.

  Mixed in with the simmering leftovers of fury was my own guilt and shame at having shown myself up like that in front of Zahra. It had gone so well. Fuck, what the hell had I been thinking?

  Well, I hadn’t. For starters. And now I had to ask myself: was it a onetime thing? With Zahra, with losing my temper? Was it just because I was with her, or was there something else symptomatic going on?

  Frankly, with the kind of pressure I was under it was worth thinking about. Fortunately, I was due for four hours of hard training with Tully, and things were usually a lot clearer after that. Something about getting focused on one single thing had the effect of clearing away all the confusion. I probably did all my best thinking after a training session.

  Tully didn’t have a gym of his own, because he only trained me. He was a friend of my father’s from way back, and had known me and my brother, Logan, since we were kids. Dad didn’t fight, but Tully did at the time and I’d always looked up to him.

  He was a heavyset guy, white haired, bushy eyebrows, face smashed into a permanent scowl from being hit in it so many times, I imagined. Not all of those times in the ring—Tully Sinclair was a lifetime bachelor and in his day he’d probably had a fair number of bouts outside the ring with angry boyfriends and husbands. And maybe a few women, too; who knew?

  His signature glower caught me when I came in the door of the boxing gym we trained at. “You’re late. Gear up.”

  Two words at a time. Tully wasted nothing—not time, words, beer, food, or money. TKO was a whole in the wall gym with only the most basic equipment, that smelled perpetually of sweat, leather, and cheap-ass floral plug-ins meant to mitigate the other two smells. Instead, they just gave the place pockets of unsettling fragrance that was twisted together with the rest of it all into something vaguely like piss. Floral piss.

  “I gotcha, Tully,” I said on my way to the locker room. I changed, ignoring the looks and the handful of congratulations about my last fight. All I could think about was Zahra’s face and her telling me we were done. Just one date; that’s all I’d gotten before I screwed it up. Maybe I could salvage it. It would take a lot; but so did everything else in my life. What was one more challenge?

  Tully didn’t even ask why I was late. He didn’t care. He cared about keeping me on schedule, and working me hard. And when I was late, it only meant that we had to pack the same amount of work into a smaller amount of time. As soon as I hit the floor he glanced at a stop watch that was already running, and had been since we were supposed to have started half an hour earlier.

  I ran laps to warm up, leapt and fell and lifted and marched in place like a nazi on speed, legs scissoring in mid-air half the time. All that well before I hit the heavy back, with Tully behind it and watching my form and technique but saying nothing.

  “I was late because I had a date,” I told him between sets. Four minutes of grueling exercise, one minute of rest. “Girl named Zahra.”

  “Don’t care,” Tully said.

  “She’s great,” I told him anyway. “But I think I might have screwed it up.”

  “Good,” Tully grunted. “Back up.”

  Another round of drills, kick-kick, jab-jab-cross…

  Heaving hard for minutes later I swigged water and let my hips and core cool down. “Lost my temper,” I said. “Hit a guy in front of her.”

  “Good job.” He sighed. “Dumbass.”

  “I guess it freaked her out.”

  “Probably. Up.”

  After the next round, I shook my head. “Can’t stop thinking about her.”

  “That’s obvious,” Tully complained, rolling his eyes.

  “Any advice?” I asked.

  Tully shrugged. “Work hard. Up.”

  Wisdom of the ancients, Tully Sinclair style.

  “Who’d you hit?” he asked when I took another minute break.

  I shrugged. “A guy. Low-life. Tyson something. Kroft. Don’t think he’ll press charges; doesn’t seem like his style.”

  Tully looked down for a moment, one fist on his hip, rubbing his chin. “Tyson Kroft…hm...sounds familiar.”

  I perked up. “Seriously?”

  Tully ran in a lot of circles. Back in his day, he’d fought both legit and cage matches himself. Only in his case it was by choice, and in my case it was for my brother. Tully knew people who knew people who knew people, in just about everything. I didn’t ask too much about it, but he’d squirreled away a decent retirement fund well before he quit fighting and doing whatever else he did. His past wasn’t something he spent much time talking about.

  Like just about everything else.

  He held a finger up. “Tyko,” he said, nodding slowly. “Oh yeah. Know him. Of him, anyway. You hit him?” He frowned, bushy eyebrows merging in the center of his brow.

  “Just once,” I said. “Why? He’s bad news?”

  “Not really,” Tully said. “But he’s into some bad stuff. Bad people. Cars, mostly. Part of a chop shop. How’d you run into him?”

  We were almost a minute over my break, but I didn’t mind. Especially not when Tully was clearly in a talking mood; it was sure to go away soon. “The girl I went out with,” I said, “Zahra; she knows him. She’s a social worker; works with his son. Or used to. Guess she’s trying to steer him away from becoming his dad.”

  “Probably a good idea.” Tully grunted. “Tyko’s been in and out of prison a few times. Keeps getting smarter, though. I’ll give him that.” Tully tapped his foot a few times, and then frowned at me. “This isn’t time for you to be distracted. You know that, right?”

  I did, and didn’t need to say so. I just nodded.

  I wanted to make things right with Zahra. And I decided that I would, whatever that took. But there was every chance that even if she did give me a second chance she wouldn’t give me a third when s
he found out what else I was up to.

  “Logan’s counting on you,” Tully said. “Keep your head in the game.”

  “I know, Tully,” I told him, harder than I meant. Not that he noticed or cared. “I’m just tired. Not too tired to fight, but…”

  “I know that,” Tully said. He took a step toward me, put a heavy, gnarled hand on my shoulder, knotted and swollen from decades of abuse. “You got to take care of your brother first.”

  “And if he’s never finished being taken care of?”

  Tully shrugged. “He may not be. That’s family. It’s what your dad would have wanted.”

  I wished there was a way to know that for sure.

  Fact was, all of Logan’s troubles were brought on him by his own actions. He was in debt. A lot of it, and to people that took interest out in a currency of blood and broken bones. I’d been legit when I first started fighting, and worked my way up to two title belts with a clean streak. Until Logan had told me he owed fifty large ones to a loan shark and was out of ways to pay him back.

  I didn’t have that kind of money. Fighting paid, but it didn’t pay like that. “All you gotta do,” he’d suggested, “is fight in the right venue. Just a few fights; you’ll be new. I can put my bets down, we’ll clean up, and then you can get out. You gotta do this for me, man.”

  And I did have to do it. He was my brother. I couldn’t let him drown. They say that loan sharks know better than to kill the people that owe them money but that wasn’t quite true. The truth about them was that they had a limit to how long they’d wait. Sure, they’d break bones at first, rough a ‘client’ up if they were late to scare them into action. But if it became clear that no real action was forthcoming, they’d cull the herd, as it were. Make room for someone else in the world.

  Except, it wasn’t just a few fights. After my first two, the odds changed. The bookies caught on that I was the real deal. I was the favored contender in most matches. Logan’s bets made him less and less, so I had to keep fighting, and the odds got better and better in my favor and that was how it worked; how they kept you fighting. If it was just for the money—just for the income, that is—then I’d have gotten out of it after the first couple of fights. It wasn’t fun.