Текст книги "Uncaged"

Автор книги: Emilia Kincade

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

Chapter Twenty Seven

Three days left. Just three days until the fight.

I’m eating brown rice, broccoli and chicken breasts, followed by an electrolyte and mineral cocktail I made up myself.

The worst thing that can happen to a fighter in the cage is to get a cramp. You’ve got to prepare your body for many days before the fight. You’ve got to get everything just perfect. Hydration is key, and good food is, too.

You’d never guess it, because, fuck, calories are calories, right? But there’s a world of difference in the way you feel consuming one-thousand calories of junk versus one-thousand calories of good food. I eat four one-thousand calorie meals per day. It’s actually really hard work.

When I was younger, I paid diet no mind. Now, with the big three-zero coming up faster than I’d like, I live by it.

There’s a knock on the door. I haven’t showered yet – I stink of sweat from working out – but it’s probably just one of Fallon’s goons come around the house again, maybe to give me the details for the fight location.

After I specifically told them not to. My blood boils. I walk angrily to the door, fling it open, ready to grab Baldilocks or whoever the fuck by the collar, hoist him up against the wall, and pummel him.

But it’s not him. It’s Penelope.

“Pen,” I say, unclenching my fist. Her eyes roam up and down my body. I’m wearing nothing but compression shorts. When I notice her eyes linger on the bulge in my crotch, I smirk at her. “I knew you’d be back.”

“Oh Christ,” she says, turning around.

“Wait, wait,” I tell her. I take her hand, turn her back toward me. “I’m sorry. It’s… I don’t know.”

“Just the way you are?”

“A lifetime of bad habits,” I concede. “Come in.”

I guide her into my apartment, roll a weighted medicine ball out of her way. “Anything to drink?”

“You got something alcoholic?” she asks. I peer at her, and she shrugs. “Hey, I didn’t want to come here.”

“Anything in mind?”

“Vodka orange?”

“Sure. I won’t be joining you. I can’t drink at the moment.”

“It’s fine,” she says, flopping into my sofa. I watch her while I make her drink. She looks stressed out. She also looks sexy as fuck. She’s just dressed casually, black jeans, flats, and a white blouse, and she looks fucking fantastic in it.

She fiddles with her hair, coils a lock around a finger. I hand her the drink.

“Pierce,” she says. “I talked with my dad this morning.”

“Oh?”

“He says that your mother and him are really serious about having the wedding down here.”

I nod. “Is that right?”

“He says it’s because both of us have no extended family to speak of. So you and I are their only family, and they want to get married with family.”

“Cool,” I say. “When?”

“It’s not cool.”

I sit down, and resume eating my dinner. “Just say what you want to say.”

She looks frustrated, fiddles with the edge of her blouse. “We need to decide what to… do.”

“About what?”

“About what happened between us.”

“You mean since we fucked?”

Penny lets out a long, drawn-out sigh. “Yes.”

I get up from the sofa I’m on, and walk toward the one she’s on. I wrap her up. She resists at first, but then quits.

“Pen, how about we just tell each other what we want, okay?”

“Okay. You go first.”

“I want you. I want to be with you, I want to fuck you, I want to smell you. I want to see you smile. What do you want?”

She hesitates. “I don’t know what I want.”

“Way to play fair, Pen.”

“It’s not as simple as all that.”

“Then let me ask you something? Have you stopped thinking about me ever since you stopped talking to me?”

She doesn’t reply, but she knows that her silence is an admission.

“And you think that our parents getting married means we can’t be together?”

“Of course that’s what it means.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s wrong.”

“How?”

“It’s just weird, okay.”

“So you have a hang-up.”

“I do.”

“Sounds like it’s your problem to get over, then.”

“Oh, fuck you, Pierce.”

“What?” I say. “I know what I want. You know what you want. I’m going to take what I want.”

“Not without my consent, you won’t.”

“Then you’re not taking what you want.”

“You know what else I want?” she asks, getting heated. “I want you to not do this fight for the mob.”

I lick my lips. “Well, now that is not that simple.”

“Why? Why can’t you just say no? Is it the money?”

“No, it’s not the money. They… didn’t give me a choice.”

“How?”

“They just didn’t.”

“Did they threaten you?”

I think about telling her the truth, that they threatened her. Her family, too… my family, too. But I don’t want to scare her. I know that it’s selfish, I know I’m only appeasing my own guilt, but I can’t help it.

“Yes.”

“See!” she belts out, slapping my arm. “I fucking told you not to get mixed up with them.”

“It was already too late when they rang my doorbell.”

“So you have to fight?”

“Yes.”

“Because two mob bosses have their favorite pit bulls and want to see who wins?”

“It’s a dick-measuring contest, yes.”

“And you’re going to do it.”

I nod. “Yes.”

“What happens after?”

“Well, I’ve made my terms clear to them,” I say. “Only this one time. After that, I might just retire.”

“From fighting?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” she asks accusingly. “I don’t believe you.”

“Don’t believe me, then.”

There’s a slight pause, and then, to my surprise, she asks me, “Can you remember your first fight?”

I laugh. “Oh yeah, perfectly like it was yesterday.”

“Tell me about it.”

I shrug, hold Penny a little tighter against me. I can smell the vodka orange on her breath, and all it makes me want to do is lean in and kiss her. She holds her lips apart just slightly, and I can see the tops of her teeth.

“Jesus Christ, pen, you’re turning me on.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“I can’t explain it.”

“Don’t dodge my question,” she says. “Tell me about your first fight.”

“Why?”

“It’s important to me.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Pierce, if I can’t understand you, then I can’t be with you. Would you just tell me?”

I sigh. “Fine. But I wasn’t as good as I am now.”

Penny laughs. “I really don’t care.”

Chapter Twenty Eight

It’s like a drug.

I know, cliché as fuck, right? But it’s the truth, and I’m not going to fuck around trying to find a better metaphor.

At first, it’s the adrenaline. My first fight, the crowd wasn’t wild when I stepped into that cage. My first fight, nobody knew who the fuck I was.

But my opponent, Crazy Carl, they knew him. They called him that for a reason…

Dude was built like a freight train, the kind that carries coal. His thighs were thicker than my waist. I knew then and there, even if I’d never seen him fight before, that he was a leg-lock man. He had a heavy base, low to the ground, and he was no doubt going to try and get me on the floor, try and lock me up, pull my shoulder from its socket, make me tap out.

Well, I knew then and there I wasn’t going to be the one tapping out. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous. That didn’t mean I didn’t feel that adrenaline surge, born of a little bit of fear and a lot of concern. Concern not just that I was likely going to sustain an injury during this fight, but for how the hell I was going to even beat this guy.

I knew I wasn’t going to lose, I just didn’t quite know how to win.

My thing’s always been a combination of power, speed, and endurance. I hit hard, but not the hardest. I’m fast, but not the fastest. I can go for long, but not the longest. I’m a bit of everything, and that makes me a nightmare matchup. No strategy works against me. If some dick thinks he can out-dance me, then I can out-hit him. If some brick of a man can out-hit me, I can out-quick him.

It’s just a big battle of rock-paper-scissors. Except I have all three.

And the adrenaline… that adrenaline just feels so fucking good. Time slows down. I react faster, want to draw blood. Fight or flight, and in the cage, nobody runs.

For some people, that adrenal buzz, that heightened plane of senses, it never comes back. Sure, the first few fights you get it, but then it becomes routine. You know what you’re going to do, what your opponent is going to do to you.

You know it’s going to hurt, and it doesn’t worry you anymore. But not me. I always felt that adrenaline. I trained myself to, learned to psyche myself up, learned to trick my brain into releasing the necessary neurotransmitters, firing the necessary synapses, so that my adrenal glands would kick into overdrive, and I’d get that edge.

That glorious, sparkling, blood-thirsty, win-at-all-costs edge.

I fight like my fucking life depends on it. I fight like the devil.

I’ve hurt my opponents in bad, bad ways. I’ve heard blood-curdling screams of pain erupt from my opponent’s mouths, and I still didn’t stop. I pushed, and pushed, and pushed… until I won.

I beat Crazy Carl. I beat him in twenty-two minutes, sixteen seconds. To this day it is the longest fight I’ve ever fought.

He got tired, I didn’t. He got me onto the mat a couple of times, but I wormed out. He almost tore the ligaments in my knee at one stage, but I slipped it out with just a bit of bruising, just a bit of swelling.

He was heavy, stomped like an elephant. It’s not like I could knock him off his base. I tried to kick him out from behind but he just swung me around and threw me at the cage. The pattern of the steel wire was printed in blood on my back.

But I danced, skipped, hit him when I could. He lunged for me, tried to take me down to the mat again. I feinted with a right hook, hit him with a left cross right in the jaw. I thought he was lights out the way his body went limp and fell.

But he got back up. If there was one thing about Crazy Carl, it was that he was persistent.

So we did the dance. I got him again, and again. He was huffing, gassed. I’m not saying it was fucking poetry or anything. I’m not saying it was a pretty fight.

But in the end I fucking won, so who gives a shit how it looks? All I care about is winning. I ain’t out to humiliate a guy. I know my strengths and my weaknesses.

I got him with a spinning back fist, hit him right in the temple. This time he went down hard, a sack of bricks, and I clambered on top of him. I was going to make sure he stayed down.

I had to stay on top of him. No way was I letting myself get under that hulk of a man. I was a buck-ninety and five-percent body fat, and he made me look tiny.

I got him into a rear choke hold, and he tried to roll me, so I used a little trick I learned watching the old underground guys back when I was a kid.

I kicked his kneecap with my heel over, and over again. Finally I felt it dislocate. It just popped out. His whole body jolted with pain.

I knew he’d never walk without pain again.

Fuck it. Whatever it takes to win the fight.

He couldn’t roll me anymore. He had no leverage. I choked him out. He didn’t tap out, the tough fucker… He passed out.

Like I said, fucking persistent. A real dog. When I think back to him, I can’t help but smile. I… I admire him. Knee ruined, and I’m there choking the motherfucking life out of him, and he kept going. He just kept going.

That stocky fucker taught me something that day.

I got to my feet, blood streaming down my face, missing a tooth, and a lump the size of a tennis ball on the back of my head.

My left ankle was sprained; I had a torn ligament that would take weeks to mend. I would ache and hurt all over my fucking body for equally as long, if not longer.

But I fucking won.

The ref came and held my hand up, and I winced. The bruise on my rib cage was already a deep purple.

But I fucking won.

The crowd loved it. I was the underdog, and I’d taken down Crazy Carl.

The doc came into the cage. He was a wiry man, white-maned, beak-nosed. He knelt down and examined Crazy Carl, gave him a smelling salt. Carl came to, saw that he had lost. The expression on his ruddy face…

He knew he had lost to me. Just some nobody. Just some newbie. Just some fucking out-of-town punk.

The doc walked over to me. He said, “What’s your name, son?”

I spat out my mouth guard, along with a long stream of sticky blood. “Pierce Fletcher.”

He said, “Well, shit, son, that might just be the best debut I’ve ever seen.”

I glared at the doc. “Don’t fucking call me ‘son’.”

Chapter Twenty Nine

“Do you like it? Fighting, I mean.”

He doesn’t reply immediately. Instead he eyes me like he thinks I’ve got some hidden motive for asking the question.

Mostly, I’m just curious. But then again, maybe I do. I don’t know where this is going to go, yet.

“Yes,” he eventually says. “I like the thrill.”

“Do you like beating people? Winning?”

“Yes.”

I nod, suck on my lower lip. “Have you ever sent anybody to hospital?”

This time his expression changes. The corners of his lips curl down. “Yes. Of course. It’s part of fighting.”

“Did you like that?”

“I didn’t force him to get into the cage.”

“You ever nearly kill someone?”

Now his face darkens. I can tell I’m wading into sensitive territory, but for some reason, I just want to keep going. Keep pushing. Like he does to me.

“Yes.”

“Who was he?”

“Just some guy.”

“What happened to him?”

“I crushed his windpipe. I wasn’t trying to hit him in the neck, but his dodge was too slow. I got him right on his Adam’s apple. He couldn’t breathe. The doc had to perform a tracheotomy right there. Cut his throat right open and shoved a fucking straw down it.”

“But he lived?”

“Yes.”

“Does he still fight?”

“Yes. He’s in Brisbane now.”

“Did that make you feel good?”

Pierce now flashes angry eyes at me. “What do you think?”

“Did you ever wonder about what if it happens to you? Something similar? Some fluke, some accident?”

“Even in pro regulated fighting people have died before,” he says. “I don’t think about it.”

“Never?”

“You think race car drivers think about crashing?”

I nod my head. “I would bet all my money that they think about it all the time.”

“Pen, you’re not going to make me second-guess myself.”

“I’m not trying to,” I tell him truthfully. “I’m just trying to understand you.”

“What’s so hard to understand? I’m good at fighting. I like fighting. I like underground fighting. I do what I like. It’s simple.”

“You like risking your life?”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“Fine, but what about permanent injury? Brain damage?”

“Like I said,” he says, looking away. “I don’t think about it. I’ve got a fight to prepare for. If you came here to bullshit me, you can leave.”

I’m stung by it… and even though I try not to show it, I’m certain he can tell.

“Have you ever thought,” I ask, raising my voice. “About the people you beat up? What if they have families? What about their parents?”

He doesn’t reply.

“Or what about some kid who thinks he can fight to make a bit of money, and doesn’t know what it takes? You ever fight someone like that? Someone inexperienced?”

“Of course I have.”

“And let me guess: You messed him up bad, right?”

“He shouldn’t have gotten in the cage.”

“So, what, you beat up some eighteen year old kid, where do you think he goes? He goes back to his mother, that’s where.”

“I don’t give a fuck about them once they leave the cage.”

“Is that all it is to you, Pierce? What goes on in the cage? You think the consequences of what you do don’t extend outside of it? What about me? Do they extend to me?”

“Like I said, Pen, if you came here to bullshit me, you can fucking leave.”

“You really never think about the people you beat up? What happens to them after you snap their arm or pull their shoulder out? It never occurs to—”

“Hey!” he barks, jabbing a finger into the air. “I step into that fucking cage, and I fight. And I win. I get the fucking win, I get my fucking money, and then I leave. It’s what I do.”

“Yeah, you get your money and then you fuck some girl and leave before she wakes up, right? Yeah, Pierce, playboy badass. You’re just a big fucking man, aren’t you?”

A stony silence settles between us. I sigh.

“Pierce,” I say, and I make sure my voice is gentle. “I really don’t think you should do this fight for the mob. You and I both know that if you win, they’ll want you back for another fight because you’ll become an investment. If you lose, they’ll want you to pay them back for their losses. It’s not like the movies, Pierce. These guys don’t honor agreements… not if they can make money from it.”

He grits his teeth together. I can hear the enamel grinding through his jaw.

“Fine,” I say. “I can tell you’re getting mad.”

“I have to fight this fight, Pen,” he says. “No matter what you say, I have to fight it. You’re only going to make things worse if you’re here to shake my confidence.”

“Shake your confidence?” I scoff. “Well, you’ve definitely got enough of that to go around for two or ten.”

“You think so?” he asks. His eyes are wolf-like, savage.

“Yeah. As if I could shake your confidence. Get real.”

But he doesn’t reply. He just gets up, picks up the bright blue medicine ball, and begins bouncing it against the wall near the front door. He catches and throws, catches and throws, rapidly, while dropped down into a half-squat. It’s some kind of total body exercise.

The muscles on his back bulge each time he catches the ball. Beads of sweat glisten on his skin. He continues the same exercise, but now balancing only on his right foot. He throws and catches ten times, then switches to his left.

I watch him repeat the whole process six times, and still he hasn’t turned around, hasn’t talked to me. I can hear him breathing hard from the exertion, and now those beads of sweat are dripping, leaving shiny tracks down his back.

“Screw it,” I say, getting my stuff and walking to the door.

But as I’m about to open it he rings my wrist with his fingers, yanks me around. The medicine ball drops to the floor with a thud, and then he’s on me, lips against mine, his hand guiding my fingers down to his crotch.

I feel his hot hardness through his compression shorts. His cock is like a curled bar of steel. Frantically, I pull him out, can smell his musk, and then he’s undoing my jeans. It’s all so quick, a heady rush. I step out of the puddled denim, and he lifts me up, turns me around and presses me against the wall. I curl my legs around him, at his waist.

I grip onto his cock hard, pump him in between us, but he holds me up with just one arm, and with his spare hand he wrenches my underwear to the side.

In one powerful movement he thrusts himself all the way inside me, and I wince and groan, overtaken by sensation and a fleeting hint of pain. I feel so full with him inside me.

He starts to fuck me hard. His thrusts are aggressive. He bangs me into the wall. I bite onto his shoulder to keep from screaming as he fucks me with abandon, wildly bucking into me.

I hold onto his neck, grab at the sweat-slick hair on the back of his head, relish the feel of his hot breath streaming down in between us.

His eyes are hard, full of determined lust, and he licks a swathe of skin from my ear to my collar bone, like he’s some kind of savage animal ready to eat me.

“Fuck you, Pierce,” I moan breathlessly. “I hate you.”

“You like this, don’t you?” he asks, and again he holds me with just one hand so he can pull my head away from his shoulder, so he can look into my eyes. “You wanted this, didn’t you? That’s why you came here, isn’t it, Pen?”

“No,” I hiss, my eyes falling shut as he fucks me somehow harder.

He pulls my head to him, mashes his lips against mine, and then he’s holding my ass with two hands again, lifting me outward in time so that each of his thrusts buries so deep inside me.

I’m totally overwhelmed. I can’t do anything but hold onto him and let him have his way with me.

He carries me to the sofa, throws me down onto it, grabs me by the hips and spins me around so that my back is to him.

“Wait,” I say, but he closes my thighs together and then pushes himself inside me. I’m blinded by pleasure, scrunch up my face and clench my teeth and make sounds I’ve never made before.

He fucks me harder, faster. His arm snakes around my hip and he starts to play with my clit. He drives himself into me over and over again, fingers my bud so well he’s got me right at the edge in an instant.

“Fuck,” I groan loudly, lifting my hips slightly to meet each of his thrusts.

“You want to come, don’t you?” he growls.

I hate to say it, but I do: “Yes!”

His thrusts rock my body. My face grinds into the cushion on the sofa. He twirls my hair in his other hand, pulls my head back, turns me to look at him.

And he looks at me while he fucks me, while he fingers me. It takes just seconds, but that pressure inside me explodes, and I crest hard, moan harder, clench tighter.

Pleasure cascades over me, wracks my body, and still he keeps going, keeps bottoming out inside me. Then I hear him grunt, feel his cock swell, and he comes inside me again and again, emptying himself right into me.

And then it’s over. We’re panting, sweating, heaving. He falls down on top of me, stays hard inside me, and kisses me on the back of my neck, on the back of my shoulder.

We don’t even say anything. We just lie together on the sofa for so long… I don’t even know how long.

“I hate you,” I eventually say.

“No you don’t,” he tells me.

I wriggle out from under him, rush to the bathroom to clean up.

And then I leave without saying goodbye, leave him naked on the sofa, somehow feeling even worse than before.