Just Let Go

by Alessandra Thomas

  Some incredible sex. But still, just sex. Get your head on straight, Natalia Ortiz. You are not back here in Philly to settle down. You’re not even here to have sex, as good as it may be. You’re here to take care of business, do right by your family, and get on with your life.

  “I’ve gotta get to work anyway,” Ethan mumbled. He rolled over and I fought against a whimper. His torso, dusted in dark hair, showed every beautiful muscle in the golden morning sunlight. The arm that had been protectively slung around my waist now laid on his abs, drawing attention to how very, very much I would like to suck love bites all over them. Then he sat up, and I was in even more trouble. His shoulders flexed, and his arms wrapped around his knees.

  * * *

  I really did love his hands.

  “Meet you at noon?”

  “Ethan, I – I mean, another date like four hours after the first one?”

  “Second and third,” he corrected. “Remember? Morimoto’s?”

  “Whatever,” I said. My mind raced. I did want to go on more dates with Ethan. Didn’t I? But this was soon. Too soon for me to talk sense back into myself, to steel myself against falling over the edge of this strange ground I suddenly found myself on. Wanting him. Not wanting to live the life he lived. The life he would ask of me, if I was his. “Maybe we should wait a few days to go on another date. Give me some time to get something good planned.”

  “Agreed,” he said. “I was talking about the meeting we have scheduled today with the contractor to look at the basement storage area. A foundation assessment is on the checklist, remember?”

  Instantly, heat flooded my face. “Oh. Right. Yes. Of course.”

  His soft smile wasn’t fooling me. I knew he was highly amused by my being flustered by him.

  He scooted to the edge of the bed, planted his feet on the floor, and stood before me. I thanked God, Jesus, and all the angels that he was wearing boxer shorts. If he’d been naked, I didn’t think I’d have been able to leave him.

  He held out his hands, and like magnets, mine gravitated to them. He folded them gently together. Big. Warm. Solid. That was Ethan. Something guaranteed. Something that knew what it was, what it would be twenty years from now, something that would always be there. He leaned down and dropped a soft, chaste kiss on my lips. I only got the faintest taste of him before he pulled away. “Go ahead and do your thing. I’ll see you later.”

  It took less than five minutes for him to pull his jeans back on, grab his keys and his wallet, and leave the apartment. I plopped down on my couch and let out a long, slow breath. With Ethan gone, this space had changed. Last night, it was a cocoon buzzing with soft, happy energy. I looked at my rumpled bed and the pizza box still on the floor from last night. The morning sunlight had grown harsh, highlighting the sterile, sharp lines of my table and chairs.

  I reminded myself that this had been what amounted to a hotel room up until a few weeks ago. I reminded myself that was why I’d liked it, back then.

  What did I like now?

  Maybe that was what I was here to figure out. Maybe Ethan was here to help me do it.

  Four hours later, I’d worked out (in the gym, just in case Ethan looked around for signs that there had actually been someone using it this morning,) showered, and blow dried my hair straight and sleek. I tugged on a pinstriped pencil skirt and a white button-down; I had exactly eight pieces of clothing to wear when I needed to be anywhere but at home, training, or in the gym. All black and white, all coordinating. It was a wardrobe I’d acquired since taking over The Knockout, simple and portable. It was also a damn good look on me.

  I probably could have met with Ethan and whichever contractor he’d decided to bring along today wearing my yoga pants and a sweatshirt, but something made me want to look damn good when I saw Ethan today. Even though I knew he already wanted me, wanted more of me. Even though I had a sinking fear that I’d eventually have to let him down.

  So here we were. Back to business. Which was probably for the best.

  The meeting was scheduled for noon sharp, and Ethan walked in at 11:59, with the basement inspector in tow. Ethan looked delicious in his suit, even though what really had my mouth watering was the memory of what every sinew and muscle looked like underneath it. How it had felt to press my skin up against his. Focus, Natalia.

  The inspector took his sweet time walking the perimeter of our damp basement, and delivered the news at the end of the meeting – there were some cracks in the foundation, and even though the waterproofing we’d done fifteen years ago was more or less sound, the basement was still getting water in it. I tried to keep a professional, positive face, but once the contractor left, I buried my head in my arms.

  I heard Ethan take a deep breath on the other side of the desk. “I know it’s frustrating,” he said, “But I’m honestly pretty pleased with how that went.”

  “How is that even possible?” I groaned into the nest of my folded arms. “He said the foundation is cracking. We have a mortgage that isn’t paid off yet and a cracking foundation, Ethan! Not to mention old creaky windows, a HVAC system running up on twenty years, and old-school lockers and a skimpy schedule of classes that don’t even come close to competing with the other gyms in Philly.”

  “That’s right,” Ethan said. “But I did some preliminary work with my real estate contacts this morning. You might still owe a not-small amount on this property, but what I don’t think any of you realize is how the property in this area has skyrocketed in value.”

  “Ethan,” I said as I raised my head, completely aware that my voice had taken on a murderous tone. I didn’t care if I looked or sounded like I was going to kill him right now. He needed to understand this one thing. “I. Am. Not. Selling. The Knockout. My parents worked their entire lives to keep this gym up and running, and I’m not letting my mom’s freak accident and Papá’s cholesterol take it down.”

  “No, no, no,” Ethan rushed in. “I mean… okay. How much is this building worth, do you think?”

  I half-rolled my eyes. It wasn’t worth much – I’d gotten that impression loud and clear from my brothers and Papá. I couldn’t even bring myself to say it. Instead, I reached over to the post-it dispenser, adorably shaped like a ninja holding a board. I yanked a sticky note out of the top and scribbled the approximate figure, then smacked it down on the desk facing Ethan.

  He glanced at it, then pressed his lips together. Slowly, deliberately, he reached across the desk to gently lift the pen from my fingers. When his skin brushed mine, I wished for a brief moment we really had been able to freeze time in the golden moments of this morning, sleepy and warm and tangled up in a cocoon of our own making.

  He put the pen to the paper and scribbled out one thing, then wrote a couple more. Then he gently set the pen down, peeled up the note, and repositioned it in front of me. “That,” he said, his eyes kind and patient, “is what I’m talking about. Yes, you owe some money on it, but it’s worth a lot more than what you thought. Add together what the contractor from today quoted, what it’ll cost to redo the electrical, windows, and insulation, maybe build a couple of rooms for classes and buy some new equipment, and you’re still in a better position than you thought you were in a couple weeks ago.”

  “I don’t want to add to the mortgage,” I said, wringing my hands. I’d been there for every moment of the work my parents and, later, my brothers had put into the gym. “Taking out credit based on the value of this place is just like erasing all those mortgage payments they worked their butts off to make.”

  Ethan shook his head. “Not at all. You take out that credit, you make the improvements, you increase the resale value if you decide to sell it, and best of all, you make it much easier for me to give you a much lower insurance rate.”

  My eyes went wide at that mention. “Meaning I could still do my dangerous stuff that requires the more expensive personal insurance?”

  “Well, now I think we’ve talked ourselves in circles,” Ethan chuckled. “You wante
d lower costs, not cutting costs to make room for the price of your craziness.”

  “Nothing can contain my crazy,” I grumbled. But my heart warmed at the realization that he was still thinking about how to help me get what I wanted – a life doing stunt work – regardless of whether he was comfortable with it. “What would you do, if you were me?” I asked softly, raising my eyes to his.

  “I would… well, I’d definitely talk to the family. And, listen, this isn’t set in stone, even though I wouldn’t have mentioned a number I wasn’t reasonably sure about. Let me talk to my appraisers, get one in here, and pull in some of my banking contacts. Sit with your brothers and your sisters. And your dad, of course. Ask them how committed they are to this gym being sustainable for the long haul vs. the importance of building a liquid cash pool. Mention the numbers. See what they think.”

  My stomach flipped. “I don’t want them to think I can’t make a decision on my own. This is, what? The second meeting I’ve called since they handed control over to me?” 25-year-old women were in a precarious spot, professionally. We couldn’t make stupid mistakes, but we also couldn’t ask for so much help that we appeared incapable. I knew from my business classes that women in business navigated this obstacle course every day. I remembered how exhausting it had been just thinking about it. Now I was living it.

  “And it’ll be the last one for a while, I think. After that we’re just giving you a base level of insurance and drawing up a plan contingent on the improved building and business plan. And, Natalia, I’m not going to lie – it’s going to take a while. Several weeks. A few months, maybe.”

  “So,” I said, drawing out the word as the realization of what he said dawned over me, “you’re saying that you and I are going to have to work together at least that long.”

  “Not, like, intensely. But yes, I’ll remain on the case for that long. We’ll need to check in regularly.” His eyebrow flicked up so quickly I might have imagined it if I hadn’t seen it a dozen times before. That was Ethan’s mischievous look, and it always preceded him doing something deliciously wicked.

  “So, more crazy dates?”

  “If I must. At least, crazy dates to match my calm ones, until you realize that you don’t have to be crazy to have fun with me.”

  I narrowed my eyes. He was insufferable about this, that was for sure. At least it was a cute kind of insufferable. “Still a deal?” he prompted.

  Slowly, I stretched my hand over the desk. He took it in his, not like a prince would, not like I was something delicate. Palm-to-palm, our fingers folded firm over each other’s, we gave the agreement a firm shake. “Still a deal,” I agreed. Finally, I smiled.

  * * *

  Ethan had asked if I minded if he worked for a bit in the gym lounge area, then squeezed in a workout with Rodrigo. Apparently, Rodrigo had challenged him to learn how to box. The fact that he’d accepted had made me smile once I’d headed back to my office. Maybe the idea of dangerous stuff with me really was changing Ethan, even if only a little.

  He’d showered and stuck his head in my office, and I hadn’t been able to resist chatting with him about his day. That had turned into me noticing a pretty good cut above his eyebrow, which had turned into me dragging him upstairs to my place to patch him up. Now we were making out against the wall, first aid kit forgotten.

  My phone buzzed against my hip, where I’d shoved it in the waistband of my pants. Not the most elegant solution, but I was not a purse sort of girl. I’d learned from my backpacking trips in South America that if you couldn’t carry something on your person, you didn’t really need it anyway – learning not to get bogged down had been the object of my four years away from home. I would have answered it, or at least looked at the screen to see who it was, but at that moment Ethan had started to do something to the inside of my forearm with his fingers, lightly tracing patterns there, moving toward my elbow slowly, that made my brain completely fuzzy. I looked up at him though heavy lids, and the soft look of adoration on his face made my heart stutter. Here was this guy, this man, who I’d found once, lost, and then found again. Who liked spending time with me, who wanted me, who adored me. Me.

  Whose hand had moved from stroking my arm to reaching for my hip. Ethan pulled me in to him, and my whole world condensed to the point where his thumb had worked its way under the hem of my shirt and was now drawing a slow, intense circle around my hip bone. We’d been together less than twenty-four hours ago, and here I already wanted him again. My thighs clenched together, and he tugged me closer, dipping his head to press his lips to my jaw in that way I loved so much.

  And then my phone buzzed again.

  “Do you want to get it?” Ethan said, voice low, at my neck. And then the reality of my life came flooding back. The Knockout. Dad. The House. So many factors that meant no, I couldn’t just ignore a call.

  “I don’t want to,” I sighed. “But I should.”

  “Probably a good idea,” he chuckled as I fished the phone out of my waistband. “I have a meeting downtown in an hour. Would have been cutting it close.”

  “Presumptuous of you,” I said with a grin. He just shot me a smile back, and I sucked in a recovering breath before touching the green button to answer the call.

  “Natalia, sweetie,” a rehearsed, syrupy voice came through the speaker before I had a chance to say a single word. “Thank God you answered, I thought my day was about to be positively ruined.”

  “C-Carol?” I asked, my brain finally catching up enough to identify the voice.

  I’d signed with Carol about four months after arriving in LA.

  “You’re not thin, but you’re not a body builder,” she’d said. I remembered thinking that I had thought I was thin, up until that moment. That was LA for you. “And that hair,” she’d gushed. “The movement is just to die for.”

  I’d been lucky enough to snag some roles as a stunt extra in one of those Godzilla films. A few dozen of us all jumped off a rising platform and landed on foam mats below. The platform would later be green-screened as the top of a building against the backdrop of a night sky, and we’d all be jumping to our deaths. At the time, it was an easy way to snag a few hundred bucks for a couple days’ work. Most of my fellow extras had walked in with the same attitude. I’d walked away with an absolute love for stunt work. It was a rush, knowing I was helping to make something spectacular in my own small way. I’d loved the fast-paced, quickly changing nature of the job. It was good money that was also pretty safe.

  The “safe” part changed pretty quickly, though, as I started feeling my way through the levels of stunt performing. I moved from jumping off stuff and running away from invisible monsters to working with simple combat skills on battle fields. The stunt directors picked up pretty quickly that I had a boxing and martial arts background, and within a couple months my name had started to float around as someone who could pick up fight choreography quickly and look good doing it.

  The stunt actor community in LA was, by and large, supportive, and there was a small network of us that would exchange lessons on specific skills. I taught boxing to someone in exchange for him doing bo staff work with me. Another girl taught me basic fencing in exchange for what I could teacher her about hand-to-hand combat basics.

  It was fun, sure, and for a few months, I was enjoying life, I had enough money to eat, and even enough to put some away.

  Carol had helped me take all that disjointed, rudimentary work, and start to flesh out a career for myself. Together, we’d mapped out the things I’d need to do to reach the different levels of certification in the Joint Industry Stunt Committee’s register, which would allow me to work for years to come as a much better-paid professional.

  She’d booked me on a couple steady jobs and set me up on three times as many auditions when I’d gotten the call about Mamá. Everything had come to a halt then, obviously.

  But now, she was calling me again. What had been a pipe dream, something theoretical, when I’d made this dating
bet with Ethan, was now flooding back to my memory and reminding me of all the things I’d wanted for myself, of the person I’d been, before The Knockout took over my life. Just hearing Carol’s voice had me pining or the LA stunt life again.

  Hearing her description of the job in question only made me agonize that much harder. Before I’d left LA, I’d only started to train for motorcycle and other moving stunts – basically, putting all the skills I’d already learned in use while in motion. It was the height of exhilaration – the wind whipping around you, cameras right there in your face to capture every twitch of your shoulder, every beat of your heart apparent in the pulse at your jugular. In those moments, I may have been a stand-in for some famous movie actress, but that was just fine – I knew that when the movie hit the big screen, it would be my breaths, my heartbeats, my drops of sweat running over skin, that would make the audience go nuts. It was like this huge secret I got to keep from the rest of the world, and it was delicious.

  “I’ve got an amazing opportunity for you, honey. Four and a half weeks from now. So it would be a series of stunts, this first one is really just motion, but then a couple months down the road we’re working on moving on to automobile work, and I know this is branching out a bit for you, honey, but it would be with the door closed. I told them you didn’t have the exact training for that, but I did show them your head shot and your stunt reel, honey, I hope you don’t mind… and they said it would be a waste to send one of my LA girls out to the East Coast when none of them would be as perfect as you anyway, so it’s kind of a miracle that you’re back home in Philly now, if you think about it, and because you’re such a dead ringer match for Natalia – can you believe that’s the actual actresses’ name too, sweetheart, I mean it’s just too perfect –”