by Katie Cross
Ava stirred in my arms when I managed to get her up on my shoulder. Her head lolled around, she smacked her lips, and settled back into sleep. The braid that I had spent almost thirty minutes on this morning had slipped back out, and I cursed it silently. I draped her fuzzy pink blanket around her shoulders and headed out the back door. The alarm beeped as I left it behind, my SUV only a few steps away.
While we drove through the quiet, dark street and into our very small neighborhood on the edge of Pineville, the end of work buzzed through my mind. Bert McMahon had dropped twenty pounds, which was a new record for the old guy. Good for him. Supporting locals in their weight loss goals wasn't where I saw my life going, but hey.
Whatever.
Mackenzie, my employee, reported that one of the treadmills wouldn't lower off its elevation. Needed to fix that in the morning. I mentally put that on my list for tomorrow. The day laid itself out slowly until I pulled into the garage and it whispered closed. One of these days, I needed to hire someone else for all this crap. The only thing I wanted to do was train the fighters coming in.
For just a moment, I closed my eyes and leaned my head back. The silent garage held no sound except a slight whistle when Ava let out a breath. Silence. Blessed, rare, golden, silence. I let myself enjoy it until I started to nod off, so I jerked myself awake and glanced back to Ava. Her head was pressed against the door, her mouth half-open. I stared at her and sighed.
Maybe this life wasn't any better than what she'd had with her Mom. Maybe I just told myself it was, but I was just as big of a mess. What other six-year-old had a blow-up mattress under her Dad's desk?
While I carried Ava to her room, I ignored the mess from breakfast. The forgotten milk on the counter and the pile of laundry in front of the washer. Ava struggled to wake up while I had her go potty and slipped her pajamas on, then tucked her into bed. A little hum came from her as I shut her door, a bright pink night light illuminating her messy room.
A hot shower cleared the sleepy cobwebs of my mind and finally allowed my body to relax. Business was good. Numbers looked great. Trainees doing well. Had some PR opportunities lined up that would get us further into the places I wanted. All that worked great.
My house? Shambles.
My personal life? Empty as the Sahara.
My body? In shape, but nothing on the horizon.
My relationship with Ava? Tense as a harp string.
My goal to give her a better life than her mother did? To be determined.
The checkboxes filled my mind with an ugly reality. Maybe having it all wasn't as much as I thought it was. My brother, Maverick, accused me of what he called the curse of all the gold.
“You have it all, brother,” he'd said to me yesterday when we'd grabbed lunch at the Diner. “Others would kill for your life. You have money. A beautiful, well-behaved daughter. Women literally fawn over you still. You could beat the hell out of anyone you wanted. Now you are your own boss. All the gold, Benny. You have all the gold.”
Then again, did I have it all?
The house was still empty. Dark. Unlived in. Ava felt more at home with Maverick's wife, Bethany, than she did with me. My daughter was sort of well-behaved because she tolerated me. She clearly didn't love living with Dad.
It has only been a year, I thought.
Still, I must be doing something wrong.
The bathroom steamed up when I stepped out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, and sat on the edge of my bed. Unexpectedly, Serafina rippled through my mind. A short laugh worked its way out of me while I thought about her wild hair and wrathful gaze. It sobered quickly when I recalled that fat lip and her condemning stare just waiting for me to make a comment.
Okay, defensiveness was one thing, but she had something else on her mind entirely.
I'd been in Pineville for eight months now. Once the gym was finalized, Ava and I bought a house on the outskirts of town. Hell, in a small place with only 300 people, everywhere was the outskirts. But I couldn't remember Serafina here in the winter. No, she must be recent. So who gave her the lip?
Not a boyfriend.
Father, maybe?
With a weary sigh, I slipped into my pajamas, dropped onto the covers, and promptly forgot everything else when sleep closed over me in a fast wink.
3
Serafina
The creak of a floorboard sounded like a bomb in the early morning stillness the next day.
With a wince, I paused. A little snort, then a gentle shuffle, came from the room to my right. I crept farther down the dark hall, a distant clock on the coffee machine illuminating enough of a path for me to slip over to my shoes and slide them on. The bright green letters on the clock announced 5:35 am.
Right on time.
Sunrise was a vague promise on the horizon as I slipped into a coat, then grabbed my backpack. My phone buzzed against my thigh with a text message and I sighed. Only one person would send a text at this time of the morning.
Mom: How was he last night?
Not wanting to talk to my parents yet, I sent a quick reply. If more than two minutes passed, Mom would just call. She knew I was awake and getting ready to go to work.
Serafina: He went to bed early. I haven't spoken with him in a day or two.
* * *
Mom: Has he apologized yet?
I sighed again. Yes. Profusely.
Serafina: Of course. He was horrified when I talked to him about it.
* * *
Mom: That's something.
* * *
Serafina: I set the boundary, Mom. If anything happens again, I'm gone.
* * *
Mom: Of course. That's fair. We're talking to a counselor now to see if we can get him some help. I'm concerned that this is more than just pain control issues now.
How to tell your Mom that her son was addicted to prescription drugs and his sketchy girlfriend could be feeding him something else?
Certainly not over text.
Halfway out the side door, I paused. Speak of the devil. A beater car was parked on the road at the end of my brother’s scraggly lawn. The lawn had once been lush and well-cared for. He lived in a quiet neighborhood on the periphery of Pineville, where the edge of the reservoir gave way to fields and grazing land. Ranches dotted the hillsides and mountains in the distance. His little house had been an ideal place to stay when he worked at a nearby ranch, but now . . . well, it might be a bit isolated for his needs these days.
That beater car, however, meant trouble.
Serafina: Good luck with that, Mom. He got defensive last time I brought it up. By the way, Amber is back. Apparently, she spent the night.
* * *
Mom: Great.
I could picture Mom's annoyed eyebrow lift. Yeah, I wanted to say. Feel you there.
Amber, his new girlfriend, was nothing but trouble. I'd asked Talmage where he found her, but he'd been vague. She ghosted in and out at odd times. She'd been territorial, at best, when we'd first met. A snarl here and there if I showed too much sway with my brother. As if a sister posed any threat to her.
Serafina: Riding to work now. I'll keep you updated, but no news on my end.
* * *
Mom: Can we please buy you a car? You shouldn't be riding around the mountains on a bike.
* * *
Serafina: I love my bike, and, I'll have you know, work is only a few miles away. Besides, I'm almost there on the down payment savings, but thanks, Mom! Love you!
I tossed the phone into my backpack, grateful that I hadn't stopped to pack lunch and dinner. Amber slept like a sick baby, which meant hardly at all. The last thing I needed was a confrontation with her before a long day at work.
Chilly spring wind brushed against my cheeks as I stepped outside, wiping away the last signs of sleep as I headed into the burgeoning mountain light. With summer on the way, I wouldn't need a car for months before the snow came again. I'd probably hold off on buying one for a while. A rent-free summer in the mounta
ins, helping my older brother while working around delightful people and tourists, was exactly what I wanted.
And then?
Who knew. Something spectacular would come along.
Because spectacular things always did.
The day passed with surprising speed. Too much of it slipped by in a nervous spiral of concern about my upcoming time with Benjamin that night, which set me off balance. I'd accidentally dumped hot coffee on a diner, mixed up three orders, and fielded eight different calls and fifteen text messages from my brother asking if I'd picked up his prescription.
Talmage: Need it, sis. Today.
* * *
Talmage: Do I need to send Amber after it?
* * *
Talmage: The pain is getting worse and you already know I used my last one.
I sent him the mental bird halfway through my shift, responded once, then turned my phone on silent. Bert let me go half an hour early. When I left at 2:30, my friend Dagny waved me off to take care of only three customers, and I headed to the pharmacy.
Talmage was agitated when I got home after work but he quieted when I passed his pain pills over. By the time I finished baking a chicken, gravy, and biscuit dish that tasted like home, he lay docile on the couch. I blasted music and cleaned to my heart's content. Talmage had always sucked as a cleaner, and since his shoulder injury, it had gotten worse.
Let's just say that fridge probably hadn't been cleaned since my preschool graduation. The grimy work kept my nerves at bay for the rest of the afternoon, but when I approached the side door to the MMA Center that night, I had to quell a rush of butterflies.
Go away, I silently muttered to them.
The last thing I needed to deal with today, of all days, was the brutal attraction. If I wanted to defend against Amber, or Talmage again, I needed to focus.
Just outside the door I stopped, drew in a deep breath, and let it out. When I finally found my courage, I stepped inside the gym to find the lights over the main desk turned off. Only the mat was still illuminated, and the radio off. The clock ticked toward 9:10. After I set the tinfoil-covered dish on the counter, Benjamin appeared out of a back room.
“Hey,” he said.
He walked over in bare feet and loose workout pants that sent twin shivers down my spine. That t-shirt fit his shoulders a little bit too well. Since I hadn't verbally attacked him yet, like last night, he seemed more at ease.
“Hey,” I said. “Thanks again for doing this. I brought my favorite dish from home. It's a chicken biscuit kind of thing with veggies.”
He glanced at it. “Great, thank you.” Then he nodded toward the mat. “Let's get started.”
Riiiiight, I thought, letting my backpack slide to the ground. No casual friendliness here. Unsure of what to expect, I'd dressed in a pair of black workout pants and an old t-shirt with YMCA written on it. If I ever did workout aside from riding the bike around town—which was so close to never it paralleled the likelihood of someone living on the sun—I would have worn this.
Seemed fitting.
He'd already headed for a bright blue mat with a red circle around it, so I followed him, but I had enough sense to take my shoes off and leave them with my backpack. Once he stood in the middle of the mat, he turned to face me. Those stupid butterflies resurrected themselves.
“You ready?” he asked.
I took two steps onto the mat and paused. “You're not going to, like, come at me are you?”
To my greatest shock, he cracked a smile. Weary. Exhausted. But there. I accepted it as his first sign of humanity and tried not to notice the way it illuminated his face.
“No. Not that. You ready to get started?”
“Teach away, coach.”
“The first thing to work on is confidence. For the most part, I think you have that down.”
I reared back. “Say what?”
“Confidence.” He readjusted his stance, planted his feet, and kept his shoulders broad. “Being aware and confident in any given situation will automatically deter some people. If you’re paying attention, they may pass you by. Most attackers want an easy victim. Don't make it easy for those idiots, all right?”
But what if that attacker is your rage-filled brother and you never know when he's Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde? I thought but nodded instead. A solid wind could knock Amber over. Likely, if I growled at her, she'd back off.
“Confidence. Makes sense.”
He held out a hand, stopped, and said, “Can I touch your shoulder?”
I nodded again, this time with a gulp. He reached over, grabbed my shoulders, and pulled them back. It automatically made my chin tip up a little. He lifted an eyebrow.
“Feel the difference?”
“Actually, yes.”
There was a sort of power there in the rearranging. Seeming pleased, he nodded and stepped back again. At least he didn't take a quick glance at my chest, which stuck out farther than ever. Not that I had so much to brag about there. If my hips could share a little of the love, I'd be far more even. The smell of his cologne distracted me, and I wanted to follow the trail back to him.
“Next, remember that you're powerful. Use that power. Make them afraid of you, okay?”
“Sure.”
“We're going to practice a few things, and I want to feel it from you. The confidence and the power. A self-defense situation is not the time to hold back. Snarl like an animal if you have to, just use what you've got.”
The realization that this may have been my worst idea occurred to me then, particularly when the words, “I'm going to teach you how to fight off an attacker when they have a hold of you,” came out of his mouth.
Dear heavens, I thought. He's going to have his arms around me.
Ten minutes later, after reviewing things that jumbled in my brain like groin kick and hammer punch and use your car keys, that is exactly what happened. He came up behind me, wrapped his arms around me, and said close to my ear, “This is a bear hug. Someone could come up behind you and stop you like this. How do you get out?”
If you are my attacker, I thought, I may not want to stop it.
His arms had clamped around me like a steel vise, my spine pressed into his chest. Those butterflies flapped around helplessly, drunk from the overwhelming smell of aftershave that followed him.
“Think,” he chided, no doubt misreading my silence. His arms tightened. “What are you going to do?”
Instead of flipping in his arms and laying a kiss on his lips, I stomped my foot with a grunt, thankfully missing his toes. Then I whirled to the side with my elbow high, the way he'd told me. I tried to shove it into his neck on one side, then the next. It gave me room to spin, and I mimicked a knee to the groin with my knee.
“Good.” He stepped back. “You're quick.”
Breathless too, but I managed to smile. Praise from a guy like him felt a lot like basking in holy light. Rare, warm, and stupefying. The obnoxious ring of a cell phone crashed through the room, breaking the moment.
He rolled his eyes. “Just a second.”
Grateful for the chance to recover my wits, I ran a hand through my hair and peered out the far window on the other side of the desk. A reflection of a rectangular light, like a tablet, and a slight shuffle of pink, caught me by surprise. It looked like it was under the desk if I understood the backward reflection correctly.
Was that . . . was there someone under the desk?
Benjamin spoke into the phone in monosyllables, his back to me. I almost walked over there to see who hid, but a little shock caught me by surprise when I heard a quiet voice say, “Who was it?”
Benjamin replied in a quiet murmur as he shut the phone off, then frowned as he looked at the screen again.
Instead of gasping, I yanked my hair out of my high ponytail. It spilled down my shoulders and relieved a sudden banging in my head. Or maybe that was just the clanging of alarms.
Did he have a kid?
In all my months of pretending not to watch hi
s every move, I'd never seen a little girl. Had I?
A little pang hit my chest. I missed little kids. Mom had run a daycare out of our house for the entire eighteen years that I lived at home. There had always been chaos and children and messes and grubby hands and sticky goods. Without it, everything seemed a bit empty. I wanted to walk over there and talk to her, but I had a feeling Benjamin would lock up the very tight, minuscule sliver of friendliness this had opened up between us. The questions ran rampant through my mind anyway.
Why keep her hidden back there?
How old was she?
Where was her mom?
Was she even his?
He complicated my questions by returning, so I hastily yanked my hair out of the way again. He stopped several feet away with an apologetic expression.
“Sorry.”
“No problem.” My arms dropped back to my side. I tilted my head back that way. “Do you need to go?”
“No, we can finish.” He ran a hand through his hair, and I caught a glimpse of a tattoo on his left bicep. “Where were we?”
You were hugging me and whispering in my ear and I think we should start there again, I thought.
“You had mentioned a side headlock?”
“Oh, right.”
With a shake of his head that seemed intended to get his mind back into the game, he proceeded with instruction. Seeing him a bit distracted by the call made him seem even less godlike, and I relaxed. Instead of focusing on the fact that Benjamin Mercedy was touching me, I tried to picture Talmage coming at me in the darkness again. The unhinged desperation. The wild strength I didn't know he had in him, shoulder injury or not. It brought a ferocity out of me that I hadn't been aware of before.