by Helena Maeve
“Good. That’s… I’m happy. For you.”
“You are?” She couldn’t school the note of surprise out of her voice in time. It hung between them like a red flag.
Mercifully, Russ seemed to remember himself first and changed the subject. “You ready for tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Imogen said, feigning conviction. “We know who I’m going up against yet?” The pool of potential candidates was growing smaller and smaller by the day, but that didn’t make it any easier to predict her odds.
Russell shook his head. “Whoever wins tonight. I’d keep an eye on the TV if I were you.” There was a reprimand in that, but it was mild compared to Russ’ usual fare. “I’ll let you get back to work,” he added, shrugging his massive shoulders.
“Actually—” Imogen scrubbed her taped knuckles over her brow. Icy beads of condensation sluiced down her arm from the frozen berries, pleasantly cool on her overheated skin. “Actually I was thinking we could maybe watch it together?” That shouldn’t have been a question, but asserting herself was never as simple as picking a fight with Russell. He liked stirring her pot and he was good at it. Imogen shifted her weight. “We could get an early start on the battle plan. You always say I leave it to the last minute.”
“Won’t the boyfriend want to watch it with you?”
“He’s working late,” Imogen lied. It was preferable to telling Russ she hadn’t offered Jaime the same privilege.
To her relief, he didn’t ask. “Fight’s at nine.”
“I’ll bring the popcorn.”
Russell shot her a long, skeptical stare.
“Fine, I’ll bring the booze,” Imogen amended, pitching the blackberries back his way. “You know, most people keep peas in their freezer.”
“What can I say?” Russ deadpanned. “I’m an unconventional guy.”
She thought she spotted the vague curve of a smile on his lips as he retreated back into his glass-walled cage. It wasn’t a sign that she’d been forgiven last night’s quarrel, but it was close enough.
Imogen brought her elbow back and swung a punch, sending the sandbag swaying.
* * * *
The gym purportedly closed around ten p.m., but the scattered few fitness freaks that cared about lifting after work had already cleared by the time Imogen returned from dinner. When she’d told Jaime she couldn’t see him tonight, he’d deflated audibly. So Imogen had compromised—a quick dinner at the Greek place down the street, then back to the grind.
She had been counting on getting out of there before nine, but Jaime had a way of making her forget the time, and that was before he started playing footsie under the table. By the time they got the check, it was already ten past and Imogen felt her spanakopita rise up in her throat.
“I’ll take care of it,” Jaime assured her, already reaching into his wallet. “You’re in a hurry.” He had paid for breakfast as well and Imogen was beginning to feel like a kept woman, but she also didn’t have time to argue.
“Thanks. Next time’s on me.” She kissed Jaime before bolting.
It felt like forever before she reached the gym and let herself in with Russell’s keys. The heavy roller blinds were already down, the lights switched off. Moonlight spilled through the high windows, painting eerie shadows on the ground. Only Russell’s aquarium office was illuminated, the bluish glow of the TV screen flickering on and off as the images changed.
Imogen took the metal stairs two by two. “I know I’m late,” she panted. “I lost track of time—”
Russell met her gaze with a blank expression. “Don’t worry about it.” He didn’t sound mad. He didn’t even look it. In all the months Imogen had known him, he had never shown much of a poker face.
“I really am sorry.” She inched deeper into his office. “What did I miss?”
On screen, two women were grappling for supremacy as the ref tried to keep out of their way. One of them was Megan Luz’s spitting image, except younger and very, very blonde.
“No way,” Imogen breathed, sinking uneasily to an empty spot on the sunken couch. “Is that—?”
“Seems she’s gone into the family business. She’s been pummeling Helfer for a good couple of rounds. She’s—good.”
“I bet she’s good.” With a mother like Megan Luz, the daughter had some big shoes to fill. Imogen watched her elbow her opponent in the ribs just before the whistle. Luz the younger rose with a sneer, thrusting up her gloves as the audience went wild.
The sport loved a show-woman nearly as much as they loved a good fight. Angela Luz had both those things under her belt and an illustrious name to go with them.
Imogen felt her stomach churn as Luz Junior soaked up the applause. With her opponent still squirming on the mat, there was no possible challenge. She had won in three short rounds, putting herself up an echelon and becoming one of only three women who could end up fighting Imogen in the semis.
“I could take her, right?” Imogen asked over the gushing hum of the commentators’ usual drivel. “I mean she’s taller, but—”
“Still another fight to go,” Russell interjected with his heavy baritone.
He wasn’t wrong. Yet as the ring cleared and ESPN went to commercial break, Imogen couldn’t shake the uneasy thought of having to face up against the daughter before she took on the mother.
“Your arm’s still bothering you?”
“What? Oh…” Imogen glanced down to find that she’d started rubbing her elbow with absentminded strokes, worrying the swelling while she fixated on the screen. “No. Well, yes. But not as much as before.”
Russell scowled. “Let me have a look.”
Imogen weighed the benefits of stubbornness for a long moment before gamely proceeding to do as she was told. Russ had put his hands on her before—both to soothe and to rile her up—and there was nothing untoward in his pushing up her sleeve to reveal a pale swath of skin pockmarked with purplish wheals.
His touch was utterly impersonal, nothing inappropriate in the way he stroked his fingertips into the joint. Imogen still jumped as though burned.
“I thought you said it didn’t hurt?” Russ recalled, a frown creasing his brows.
Imogen forced herself to meet his stare. “It doesn’t.” She couldn’t not think about his hands on her hips, of his fingertips casting gently down her spine as they rutted together in her bed. The memory rose up, unbidden, but still very much present.
Mercifully, the commercial break ended before Imogen did anything stupid. On screen, the next match was slowly gearing up. The first fighter to enter the ring was also the undisputed European champion, Yelena Chernayevska. Imogen had watched her fight before and knew that the titles she’d won were thoroughly deserved.
Her opponent was a relative newcomer by comparison—a certain Gwendolyn Mendoza—much like Imogen herself.
“I know who I’m rooting for,” she drawled, trying to ignore the ticklish caress of fingertips manipulating her arm this way and that.
“Chernayevska?” Russell suggested distractedly.
Imogen huffed out a laugh. “Are you kidding? The new kid. I feel a touch of kinship there.”
“Then you’re the bigger fool.”
“Hey!”
“We know Chernayevska’s style. She’s been around the block. I can dig up enough footage to fill a library,” Russ countered. “Mendoza’s new blood. I don’t know her tricks.” And if he didn’t, then he couldn’t help Imogen devise a strategy to defeat her.
Imogen slumped against the backrest. “We know Chernayevska’s all about the points. I don’t fight like that.”
“You’ll learn.”
There was finality in Russ’ voice, but between his gentle massage and the sight of two fighters going at each other with fists, Imogen’s attention was torn in too many directions to muster a witty retort. She knew she should’ve focused exclusively on the fight—Chernayevska was quicker on her feet than Imogen remembered from online videos—but Russ wasn’t giving her a lot of leew
ay as he extended her elbow past the point of a mere troublesome twinge.
Imogen sucked in a breath as the throbbing morphed into a sharp ache, into the prickle of tears behind her eyes, but she didn’t ask for reprieve. She didn’t think she could take much more, when suddenly Russ gave a tug on her wrist and the throbbing vanished as though it had never been.
“Holy shit!” Imogen glanced away from the screen, flexing her arm.
“Better?”
“Fuck, yeah. How did you do that?”
“Magic,” Russell replied. “You should have come to me before you wrapped it.”
“I didn’t,” Imogen muttered, twisting her elbow this way and that and marveling at the absence of discomfort. The bandage had been Jaime’s doing.
Russ put the two together and huffed. “Nice of him.”
“He was just trying to—”
“Are you watching the fight or not?” Russ snapped, a hard edge in his voice. Imogen glanced up, startled, but his gaze was already trained on the screen. The hard lines of his profile betrayed nothing.
So that’s how it’s going to be. Imogen smothered an unwanted flicker of guilt and turned her attention back to the match. There were plenty of violent feelings to deal with there, too, though at least Chernayevska could use her fists for an outlet. And she did.
Two rounds went by before she upped the stakes, experience helping her to control the pace of the fight as Mendoza exhausted herself trying to keep up. They went into a third round with the younger woman losing ground and spending more time in a corner of the ring with her elbows up to protect her face than throwing punches. Chernayevska pounded her with her fists, more like a boxer than a martial arts aficionado.
“Why doesn’t she just knock her out?” Imogen asked. “She’s got her pinned.” Mendoza was on the ropes, her flushed cheeks testifying to the effort she had to muster every time she broke free of Chernayevska’s ungodly pummeling.
“She’s playing to the judges.”
To Imogen, that kind of logic didn’t make any sense. “She could’ve finished this five times already.”
“Sure,” Russ echoed, “but where would be the fun in that?”
Imogen watched Chernayevska smirk as they broke apart at the shrill ringing of the claxon. She wasn’t just controlling the fight, she had brought Mendoza to the very edge of what her opponent could take.
“She’s trying to humiliate her…”
“Take a closer look,” said Russell. “She’s already done that. This is greed, a cat toying with a half-dead mouse.”
Five minutes later and the ref brought them to the center of the ring, clasping their wrists his hands. It didn’t take long for the judges to deliberate. There could be no doubt as to who had dominated the fight.
Chernayevska was pronounced the winner within seconds, to some unexpected heckling noises from the crowd. Mendoza had attracted a lot of support since she’d emerged as a potential contender to the great Megan Luz and seeing her dispatched without even the courtesy of a little bloodshed angered her fans.
The jeering didn’t seem to bother Chernayevska, who waved a hand and blew kisses as her detractors howled.
“Guess she’s not worried about losing sponsors,” Imogen drawled, feeling rather like she’d watched the slow unraveling of a woman’s career. Mendoza was young. She could bounce back from this with the right coach—assuming Chernayevska hadn’t sapped her of the will to show her face in the ring again.
Russell said nothing, only reached for the remote and turned up the volume. With the four contenders for the semi-final now known, the judges would proceed to deciding who would fight whom in the arena.
“Megan Luz must be very excited to see if she’ll meet her daughter in the ring sooner rather than later,” ventured one of the commentators.
His companion made an acquiescing sound. “That’s right, Trevor. The draw is performed in alphabetical order and Yelena Chernayevska, the Ukrainian powerhouse we just saw in action, is first to discover the name of her competitor. Will it be the world champion, Megan Luz, or her daughter, rising star Angela Luz?”
“And what am I?” Imogen grumbled. “Chopped liver?”
Russell shushed her with a sharp, “Quiet.”
She knew she should’ve resented his brevity, but somehow being told to shut up didn’t begin to ease the sting of the commentators’ indifference.
“This is why I don’t let you listen to the replays,” Russ said, slanting a glance her way. “It’s all bullshit.”
“Tell that to the sponsors.” Which she lacked partly because her presence in the media was practically non-existent.
“—Yelena Chernayevska fights Imogen Dao!” Trevor Newman interjected, his voice rising on a girlish note as he massacred Imogen’s surname. “Ladies and gentlemen, you know what this means. Do I even have to spell it out?”
Imogen knew. Megan Luz would be fighting her daughter come tomorrow evening. The final was still up for grabs.
* * * *
The shrill ringing of the phone dragged Imogen from a dead sleep. She thought of ignoring it but somehow wound up slapping her hand against the bedside table, knocking over reading glasses and Chapstick before she hit her iPhone. “What?” was the closest she could get to a polite greeting.
“Oh, shit. Did I wake you?” Jaime’s voice on the other end of the line seemed wide-awake. “Never mind, go back to sleep. I’ll talk to you in the morning—”
Imogen rolled over onto her side. “Time is it?”
“A little after one… Go back to sleep,” he urged, but it was already too late. Imogen felt very much awake.
“I can talk,” she mumbled, fumbling for the light switch. “I can so talk. What’s up?”
“Nothing important. I just went online and I saw the draw—wanted to see how you were coping with the news.”
For a second, Imogen couldn’t get her thoughts in order, much less follow what she was being told. What news, she wondered vaguely. Then the penny dropped. Chernayevska, the fight—the way Gwendolyn Mendoza had been dispatched from the competition. She sighed. “I’m not the one who got destroyed for five straight rounds.” She could only imagine that Mendoza was spending the evening drowning her sorrows at the bottom of a gin bottle.
“Are you worried for tomorrow?” Jaime asked. “Because you shouldn’t be. Chernayevska’s all pageantry. You’ll kick her ass.”
His efforts to talk the talk were touching, if a little awkward. Imogen smiled into the pillows. “You know that for a fact, huh?”
“I consulted with my Magic 8 ball and everything. Seriously,” Jaime pressed, “how are you doing?”
Better, my arm doesn’t hurt and also I think Russ is coming around to the idea that I have a love life, Imogen mused, but what she actually said was a largely noncommittal, “Oh, you know. As well as you’d expect. My bed feels a little empty, though.” If she couldn’t be honest, then she could at least make the call worth Jaime’s while with a little harmless flirtation.
He laughed. “Oh, yeah? Maybe I should come over.”
It was an attractive proposition. Des was once again spending the night at her girlfriend’s and Imogen had taken the opportunity to sleep naked. “Maybe you should,” she drawled, toying with the notion more or less seriously. “How did your meetings go? Did you get any work done without me to distract you?”
“I like it when you distract me,” Jaime protested. There was a shuffling sound on the other end of the line and Imogen imagined him settling more comfortably against the pillows.
“Are you in bed yet?” she asked, biting her lip.
“Yeah, how did you know?”
Imogen smiled, though she knew he couldn’t see her. “I’ve got a sixth sense for these things, didn’t I tell you? I can also predict what you’re wearing.”
“Oh?” Jaime breathed into the phone and the soft, expectant sound sent a shiver skidding down Imogen’s spine.
“You were wearing your pajamas,” she mused,
“but you decided against it just now. More decadent that way.”
“And I’m decadent?”
“Yes,” Imogen said, knowing that as she spoke she was planting the idea into Jaime’s thoughts. She propped her pillows up a little higher against the headboard, sitting up. The covers slipped down to her belly, revealing her bare chest to the crisp air of the room. She shivered. “Am I right so far?”
On the other end of the line, Jaime sounded a little out of breath as he huffed, “Right on the money. You’re practically clairvoyant.”
“It’s one of my many talents. Another one’s mind control.” It was a ridiculous sort of ploy, but the clock on her bedside table read one-thirty and she had no desire to spend another minute talking about Chernayevska or the fight. Russ had already filled her head with advice she wasn’t sure she’d be able to follow. Defeat had never seemed more probable.
Jaime chuckled. “You’re full of surprises…but I think you’re forgetting who’s in charge here.”
“I am?” Imogen breathed, but all she could think was yes, please.
Somewhere along the line being given orders and being offered the possibility to follow rather than lead had become an eye-opener. Imogen sank back into the sheets, splaying her thighs in anticipation.
“If you were here, I’d smack your pretty ass red for that.” There was nothing sweet about someone flat-out saying they wanted to hurt you, but the way Jaime offered up the warning made it sound more like a compliment, a sort promise that he’d take her in hand if she wanted him to. And she very, very much did.
Imogen bit the inside of her cheek to conceal a laugh. “And then?”
“After I bent you over my knee?” Jaime’s voice took on a sharper edge. “I’d make you earn my pardon.”
“On my knees?” Imogen could picture it, the hardwood floorboards digging into her shins, Jaime stroking his hand lazily through her hair as he worked his cock into her mouth. Back in her lonely bedroom, she walked her fingers down the valley between her breasts, pinching lazily at a nipple.
She was sure her gasp traveled down the line to Jaime, though he gave no sign of having heard it.