Fierce Page 7

  Smart boy.

  "Are you okay?" he asked.

  "I was fine. I had that handled," I said.

  "Kiddo—"

  "Not right now, Jeff," I snapped. Jeff reached out, now standing at my side. I moved forward, away, and he didn't follow. Jeff knew me well enough to leave it alone. My hands rubbed my face as I paced to the wall and the edge of the mat.

  Breathing wasn't helping. I stepped back. I knew better than to punch the wall. Been there, done that. Risked my most valuable asset at the time.

  Now, it wasn't my most valuable asset.

  "I wouldn't do that if I were you," Max said. He appeared in my periphery, but I didn't look at him. Why was he still here?

  Why did his voice sound so gruff?

  "Well, good thing you're not me, then." I kept my gaze on the wall. I still didn't want to see Max's face.

  "You've got a nice cross. Don't ruin it."

  I flexed my fingers, extending my hand and then contracting it back into a fist.

  Even though I didn't care about what he said about my cross, a realization hit me. If I jacked up my hand, there went that little bit I had to protect myself.

  "I could have handled that," I repeated, my tone biting more than the chilled wind pounding the walls from the outside. It was wrong, and I knew it, but the words came and I didn't even try to regret them. I needed to get away from this place. Now.

  I spun around and bolted toward the locker rooms. Max's bare arms, black ink, and white shirt blurred as I kept my eyes away from him. Cold water on my face could do wonders. Half-way across the gym, my vision focused on the black cage, looming in the corner between the east and north side of the gym.

  The lights were still off overhead—I had yet to see them on—and most of the metal disappeared into the darkness. However, the key, a piece of metal that hooked the door to the cage, caught the lights from over the mats and sparked.

  My feet melded to the ground. I wanted to go to the locker rooms, but they were located on the east side; the entrance only a few feet from the cage.

  I could have handled it. I needed to have handled it.

  My breath caught; the rustic scent of blood underneath layers of chemical mat cleaners tangled in my nose. I could almost taste it—iron and salt mixing at the back of my throat.

  The only sounds were that buzz and dripping. Splatter, buzz, splatter, buzz.

  Forget washing my face. I backed up, my toes dragging. While I wanted to turn and run, I couldn't convince myself to turn on the cage. It was stupid, I know, since it was an inanimate object, but part of me feared the living would appear and suck me back in, and this time, that would be it. There would be no leaving. I had gotten out once and wouldn't again.

  I took another step backward.

  I didn't think I could survive that octagon again.

  Something hard, so very hard, hit my back. I wasn't going to get stuck again. My feet became fluid as I let out a startled shriek. I spun around, falling into position, as I sent out a left hook. My shoulders were already ready. I prepared to block or take a punch in return. My next hit—an elbow—had already been released by the time I realized whom I was hitting.

  My hook plowed into Max's torso. His face contorted in surprise with maybe a hint of ache as he grunted. He dodged the elbow, thank God.

  "Oh my God, Max, I'm so sorry," I said, voice muffled, my hand clamped over my mouth in shock.

  "Um…it's okay?" He came back to a normal standing position and rubbed his side, where my fist had connected with his skin. "Though, usually people walk forward."

  "Sorry. I'm really sorry. You just startled me."

  "Damn, girl, when you want to, you have a mean ass hook."

  My front arm still blocked my face. It felt stupid and awkward with Max standing so relaxed in front of me.

  I let my arm drop.

  "You weren't going to hit back," I said.

  He jerked back, only a small step, but it felt like the small distance between us gaped open. The pulse in his neck sped up as his eyes cut into me and he crossed his arms over his chest.

  "No. Of course not. I'm not sure why you would expect me to?" His defensive tone blurred with a trace of hesitancy, and for a moment, I wondered why he wouldn't want an actual answer to the question.

  It took me longer than it should have to explain myself. I studied Max, wondering why my realization bothered him so much.

  "Because I was hitting you. I probably startled you. It's instinct," I finally said. It was a legitimate concern. I would have reacted that way. After all, Max was a trained fighter. He was trained to respond fast. And yet, staring at him, my logical thought felt illogical, as though some part of me should have known he wouldn't react that way.

  I hadn't thought he had been capable of something like that, either. I had all the trust in the world in that piece of shit.

  No one was not like that.

  The thoughts were already invading, the images trickling around me, long-gone noises and sounds slipping through the metal of the cage. Phantom fingers etched along my body, coaxing me back to that day.

  Suffocating. It was suffocating. The still air was too hot, too tight on my skin and in my lungs. I couldn't get enough air as it made my throat stick, made it threaten to close off forever.

  Arm against my neck. Pain. Stuck. Can't breathe.

  Buzz, splat, buzz, splat. Clank, clank, clank.

  A strong arm moved in my blurring vision. I flinched. I felt movement toward me. I fumbled backward.

  "Tori?" Max's voice broke through the noise. I closed my eyes.

  Stop, stop, stop. Dammit, just stop, I pleaded with my brain. My hands tingled and then disappeared. My heart lurched, hard and fast, and I couldn't get enough air.

  "Tori, are you all right?" Max's voice again. I focused on it. "Tori, breathe and count to ten."

  I tried to do what the voice said, but my lips had numbed. The heat continued to weigh on me, crushing me as the buzz and the splattering threatened to morph into more noise—noise that would keep me underwater.

  "Tori. Take a deep breath and hold it for ten seconds."

  Cool skin touched my arm. A little of the heat lifted. I took a breath. More cool skin, callused and rough, touched my other arm. I focused on the two wonderfully cold spots on each bicep, gripping against my burning flesh. The pressure lifted from my chest, the air less sticky and dry.

  "...five...six...seven..."

  I willed away all other noise, except for the numbers.

  "And release. And again."

  By the time he reached ten a second time, my lips had started to come back to life, as had my hands. I opened my eyes. Max's face rested mere inches from mine, his brows burrowed forward. His eyes, dark and framed with black lashes, studied me. After a few more seconds of assessment, he said, "You okay?"

  I nodded. I think. And stammered. I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry. I owed him a thank you, but I knew the words wouldn't come out. Embarrassment had replaced the hot pressure on my chest, and the way he looked at me made me angry with myself. Worry, concern. I didn't need his worry or concern. I definitely didn't need pity. Not that I saw pity in his eyes, but that usually was the next step.

  I didn't do pity. I didn't need it, nor did I want it. I had to stop this before it got there.

  "I—I need to go." I slipped my arms from his hands, brushed past him, and bolted toward the front desk.

  #

  The fall from invincibility is a hard one.

  You're tough. You're a teenager. You're a badass in the gym and the ring.

  Then it all changes. In a matter of minutes, you're no longer invincible. Everything I had believed about myself, the girl I thought I was—that badass ninja who would get whatever she wanted—wasn't real

  I could have handled anything. That was what I thought anyway.

  But I had been so wrong. The person I trusted the most showed me that. In a matter of minutes, I learned that I couldn't handle it. I couldn't ta
ke care of myself. All that work, everything I did, couldn't help me.

  I sat on my floor with my back pressed against my couch.

  I hadn't walked into that session with Tom like I had walked into my session with Will. This time, I had no false sense of invincibility, no sense of immortality. However, the fall had awakened in my mind. Tom's fist had yanked the Band-Aid away, the wound fresh as though it had happened yesterday.

  Seven years of hard work, of dedication, and of dreams made obsolete in minutes.

  I couldn't handle it then. What made me think I would be able to handle it now?

  Had I handled it?

  Tom was no Will.

  I still wasn't the girl I once was, either. Maybe I had never been her. Maybe it had all been in my head, an altered perception that shattered into thousands of shards.

  That thought clenched my stomach, ripples of pain running through it as though I were punched. In the three years since I had been out, since the day that decimated the seven years of work, I had tried to accept, and sometimes succeeded in doing so, that I hadn't been the person I perceived myself as.

  I stood and went into my bedroom. I hesitated, my hand on the closet doorknob. A deep breath later, I opened the door and walked into the small closet. Cold air surged around me, but I wasn't sure if that caused chills that ran up my arms and rampantly spread across my back and up my neck. On the shelf, in the back, gleamed my bag. I grabbed it and slunk to the ground, ignoring the pile of shirts I sat on, and opened it. I shoved the wrist wraps to the side. My fingers grazed the smooth black leather of the back of a glove.

  The ache overwhelmed my breathing, making my chest tighten and my stomach knot.

  The gloves had always made me feel like me. I would put my hands into them, and I was Tori. But the last time I had put them on, I wasn't anything special. In fact, I sucked.

  I had never been scared to spar. Even the first time I touched gloves with Will. I had been working with him doing mitts and circuit training before then. I had no reason to be worried.

  I put my face in front of his huge fists a couple times a week for over two years. I knew he was trying to hit me; that was what we did in sparring, after all. But there was control. The full-on impact was saved for the ring, and no joints were blown. We tapped out. Sure, I walked away from sparring with a black eye or even a concussion a time or two, but never from Will.

  As we progressed more and more, each of us in STRIKERS, something changed. I got out of that awkward, pimple phase. He started checking me out. After the checking-out started, it seemed like I fell out of the boy category, but he also seemed more hesitant to spar with me. One day, he even told me he didn't want to hit a girl. Then I got the sponsorship he had wanted. I had liked to think I got the sponsorship because I was a good fighter, but maybe he had been right. Maybe I had gotten it because I was a girl, and that's why I unintentionally took it from him.

  I zipped up the bag before I did something stupid like take the gloves out.

  I would stay at the desk until I found another job. I would do my job, and avoid the rest of the gym, the smells, the sounds, the boxers.

  As soon as I could find another job, I would leave this all behind again. I couldn't take bits or pieces of it with me, and that was what Max was. Bits and pieces of my old life and old dream, and something that I had to cut out entirely. There was no middle ground.

  I kept telling myself this was where I wanted to be in life. No. This was where I needed to be in life. However, I wasn't so sure anymore.

  You'll just fall again.

  Once, I tried to explain how it felt to a counselor. She told me it was part of development, that it was my teenage brain that made me think I was invincible and that I still really was the girl I had thought I had been—only mortal.

  Her words had faded into nothing long before the bruises did.

  Chapter Nine

  As much as I didn't want to admit it, feeling absolutely trashed was like a welcome home. A sort of pleasantness ran underneath the ache. Every sore muscle reminded me how much I missed feeling this way.

  I found some leftover rice from the previous night, heated it up, and went to my couch. The apartment was too small for a dining room, leaving my cheap coffee table as my only option.

  Pulling my legs up underneath myself, I studied my planner. My paper's deadline loomed ahead. After shoveling my rice in my mouth, I read over my outline and mulled over the one source I still missed.

  Volume one of that theory book had been helpful, but the remaining section of my paper needed the next piece, which I could assume would be in volume two. That meant going to the library. I stood and stretched—it felt so freaking good—and smelled myself. That was not so good. Pretty rank, actually. Definitely still needed that shower.

  Just as I started toward my bathroom, the pipes shuttered and cringed, loud enough to go through the walls and to send a vibration through it, if one were to have their hand there.

  I waited until the pipes moaned again, this time as the neighbor shut off the water, and another ten minutes. Someday, I would be out of this apartment and be able to shower whenever I damn well pleased.

  After taking a much longer shower than I should have, until the warm water turned lukewarm and then cold, I pulled on some clothes. The steam from the shower, tucked into such a small room, continued to swirl in the air and fogged over the mirror. I didn't bother wiping it away. I just pulled my wet hair into a bun and decided, by feel, it would work.

  I reached the library around dinnertime, though college kids never seemed to eat at the standard meal times. Noise poured from the coffee shop, but once I passed it and the hall full of giant tables, it turned quiet.

  Max's back was to me, on the other side of the librarian desk, and I hesitated. His soft voice reached me. He pressed a cell phone to his ear. "Si. Adios, Madre."

  Even though I knew it was him, by the hair and the tattoo that peeked out on his shoulder, above the collar of his fitting long sleeve shirt, the Spanish threw me off. It sounded different than the Spanish I heard around the city.

  He pulled the phone away from his ear and bent down, behind the desk.

  "Hey," I said.

  Bam. A book flopped on its side as the desk shook with what I could only assume was Max's head. His voice muffled, and I couldn't tell what he said.

  "Hola," he said. "Erm, I mean hey. Sorry. Sometimes, I forget what language I'm speaking." He stood, appearing from behind the desk, rubbing his head. The relaxed lines of his lips shifted tight and his jaw muscle ticked. "Oh shit."

  "What?" I asked. Even though he stared at me, I looked over my shoulder, wondering if I had missed something.

  "I was afraid that was going to happen." Max's hands gripped the edge of the wood desk. His fingers flexed at his knuckles, pale and tight, almost matching the flexing of his jaw muscle.

  There was nothing and no one behind me. What had ticked him off all of a sudden? Surely a desk hadn't hurt him more than a person ever had.

  "What are you talking about?" I asked again, doing one more check of my surroundings. What was I missing? I turned back to him, and his eyes locked on mine.

  "You haven't looked at yourself? Since...the gym?"

  "No," I said, still not following. Why was that important, and why did he sound so surprised that I hadn't?

  I lifted my hand and grazed my face. Did I still have drool on my cheek from sleeping? Or toothpaste on my lip or something? No, my lips felt fine. Dry, but fine. I moved my hand up my face. Oh. The tenderness of my skin around my left eye indicated a bruise. That ass had actually made that hard of contact with my face? And I hadn't even realized it?

  "Do I seriously have a black eye?"

  I leaned forward, over the counter, and asked again, "Do I have a black eye?"

  I was so focused on his face, waiting for his response, that his sudden made me flinch. It was only after I had taken a quick step backward that I realized Max had only wanted to touch my face, thou
gh I had no idea why.

  "Sorry," he said. I guess he had picked up on whatever the hell had just happened. "That was...not appropriate of me."

  I wanted to tell him that it was okay, that it wasn't him per say, that I didn't mind, that I was just messed up, but I couldn't get any words out. I hoped he would let it go.

  "I just am wondering if the skin here—" This time he touched his face, right over his cheekbone. "—is painful?"

  I lifted my fingers to my cheekbone. I shook my head.

  "Then it probably isn't bruised there. The bruise may darken, but you probably won't end up with it getting any bigger."

  I was starting to feel like a bitch for the way I had snapped at Max after Tom's fit.

  "Look, Max, I'm sorry that I snapped at you earlier. That was totally uncalled for."

  "It's okay. That should have never happened," he started. His fingers were still flexed, his grip tight on the desk again. The words were starting to form on his lips.

  "Don't say you're sorry. It's not your fault. Shit happens. I'm fine. I wouldn't be there if I couldn't handle it." He still appeared to be fuming. "Seriously, Max. It's a bruise. It'll fade."

  It was a lie, after all, because I wasn't sure what I could handle. Did I really deserve to be back at the gym? Did I even deserve the chance to be able to handle whatever came my way?

  If only the past would fade like the black eye would.

  "I know." He forced a smile. Too bad I could see right through it, to the gritted teeth and clenched jaw. "I just don't like seeing—"

  "Girls with bruises?" I finished for him. My voice sounded bitter, the words sour and the question leaving behind a cold residue in my chest.

  I wanted Max to agree. I didn't want him to be one of those guys.

  But I also wanted him to disagree.

  No one is ever going to be able to win with you, Tori.

  Conflicting emotions swelled inside of me. I was my own Prince Charming and that couldn't change. I didn't need anyone. I especially didn't need anyone who had strong feelings regarding females and gender roles and male insecurity problems.