Which was obviously why thoughts of Kayla were fucking with my mind even worse now. It probably had nothing to do with her specifically. It was just, now that I'd touched her, now that I'd tasted her, now that I'd felt the way her body would fit mine? It was literally all I’d be able to think about. Could have happened with any girl.
An ugly seed of doubt sprouted in response to that thought, and I shook my head like I could shake it away.
I had a job to do, and needed to practice what I'd preached to my brothers their whole lives.
Eye on the prize.
And this time, the prize was a pretty big one. Sticking in with Mickey Flynn for the next year of my life as his new golden boy fighter so that me and my family could get out from under his thumb. If I screwed it up? If Mick sensed for even a second that I wasn't giving him my all, he was going to go back on his promise to find Bash a lucrative fight to replace the one he’d had to withdraw from because of a broken hand.
Any excuse for Mick to lock on tighter. To sink his teeth into my jugular and hang on like a pit bull, he’d take it, and I wasn't about to give it to him.
"You've got a problem. I can see it on your face, so talk to Dr. Reid and let me see if I can help." He bent low and pulled two water bottles from the mini-fridge and tossed me one.
"Not likely," I said, catching the chilled plastic with one hand. Reid knew the deal I'd made with Mickey, but he was the only one. I still hadn’t worked up the nuts to tell Bash. He would've felt responsible for the situation if I told him, and after the couple months he'd had, that was the last thing I wanted. Olivia and he had never seemed happier, and she was even growing on me. She planned on moving in soon. They were on their way to a good future, and I wanted him to get a chance to enjoy it for a while.
I'd only told Reid because I wanted to make sure someone knew I'd gone to see Mickey to make the deal in the first place, just in case I didn't come back. It was one thing if the motherfucker killed me, but I sure as shit didn't want him getting away with it.
Mick was a businessman though, and at the end of the day, a dead me was a lot less valuable than a live one. To Reid's credit, he'd kept his mouth shut so far, but that was dicey too. Soon, I was going to have to cop to the truth, and it wasn't going to be fun, but for the time being, I got to see Bash totally, straight up happy for a while.
It was worth whatever came next.
"There's no point in talking about it. I’m stuck with her until Mickey says different.” I met Reid's perceptive gaze and marveled at how much he looked like a man now.
He was growing up right in front of me and it was eerie as shit. It seemed like yesterday that we were in the park and I was showing him how to throw a baseball. He was only a little less than three years younger than me, but he'd managed to keep his innocence for a lot longer than me or Bash had. Taking a part in preserving that might have been the only really good thing I'd done in my life.
I spent a lot of years listening to him talk endlessly about kickball games at school, or his favorite teacher, or why Godzilla would beat any Transformer in a fight. And when he brought home some stupid macaroni necklace, or a shitty little bud vase that looked more like a dildo, I was the one who made a big deal out of it, proudly displaying it on the plywood bookshelf in our shared bedroom.
It probably also helped that my mother had been a little easier on him. I was mostly convinced it wasn't because she'd mellowed or because he was a better kid than either me or Bash. She was just fucking tired. Beating the shit out of kids all day for years on end really took it out of a person.
I pushed back that sick feeling that always came with thoughts of her and folded my arms behind my head, refusing to get sucked down that ghetto-ass, pothole-filled Memory Lane again.
Reid was shaking his head, a bemused smile on his face. “If the way she bolted out of here with her face on fire and your expression when I walked in are indicators, I’m thinking Mickey will be able to see why this is a bad idea.”
And maybe he would. It really would be for the best.
But then my thoughts flipped back to the sparring we’d done. I hated to admit it, but she was right about one thing. I’d spent a lot of my time managing the gym and trying to stay on top of Bash and Reid’s developing careers. So much, that maybe I hadn’t been putting enough into my own. There was a hole in my defense, and a fighter like Claus Nicholson would exploit that every chance he got. I’d managed to stay undefeated so far because the guys I’d fought weren’t in his class. To assume the competition would stay this easy when I was trying to break into the elite was foolish. A manager who could see that and wanted to take measures to fix it was a manager I wanted in my corner.
Now if I could just get past wanting her in my bed, there was a slim chance in hell this could actually work…
Two hours later, I found myself sprawled on the couch in front of the TV not watching an infomercial about some protein supplement when my phone rang. I hadn’t been lying when I told Kayla I was going to jerk off in the shower, but it had been a sad, desperate affair that was totally unsatisfying and only succeeded in putting me in an even shittier mood. So when I saw her number, I almost ignored the call. I was in no shape for productive, rational conversation.
Then curiosity got the better of me. “Hello.”
A long silence before a brisk voice came on the line. “I got us a meet up with Carmine Rossini next Saturday at three. Can you make it?”
I leaned back into the cushion and flicked off the television, stunned into silence. Carmine was big shit in the Northeast, and that he wanted to meet with me this soon, before I’d really even landed any major fights, was huge.
“How did you manage that?”
“I called him an hour ago. I sent him some artfully edited video of you and he likes your style. He wants to talk about setting something up down the line. So are you in?”
Her tone was clipped and all business, but there was an underlying sense of desperation there. Like she was waiting for me to steer the conversation elsewhere and the thought scared the shit out of her.
“I can do that. What did Mickey say about it?”
That was my pathetic attempt at finding out if she’d contacted her boss after our near-miss earlier. If he knew we’d been messing around, the status of our business relationship might be taken out of our hands. Everybody knew it was risky to dip your pen in the company ink.
“How many times do I have to tell you, Mickey gave me free rein? I’ll give him a schedule when we have one and that’s that,” she snapped.
I shifted the phone to my other ear. “Okay, take it easy.” Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was still a ball of frustration after our grappling. It was a herculean effort not to tell her that I could make it better if she wanted me to.
“So yes or no? I’ve got to call him back.”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll come by the gym on Thursday…during the day time,” she added in a breathless rush, “and we’ll talk about our approach with Carmine, go over strategy and you can show me your training regimen.”
She didn’t say goodbye but a second later, a dial tone sounded in my ear.
“Okey doke, sounds good. Nice talking to you, too,” I muttered into the receiver before tossing the phone onto the couch beside me.
I’d known Kayla James for four days now, and somehow she’d managed to work her presence into every one of them. Whether we were sparring verbally or sparring physically, trying to tear each other’s clothes off in real life or in a dream, she was taking over half my waking thoughts and all my sleeping ones.
And that shit? Had to stop.
Chapter Five
Kayla
"Matty, meet Carmine Rossini. Carmine, this is Matty McDaniels.”
I gestured between the two guys with a sweep of my hand and put on my most winning smile.
“He's the middleweight coming up through the Boston circuit that we talked about last week. We're hoping to match him aga
inst one of your guys. After some discussion, Matty and I decided Willie Martin would be ideal. We think it would be a great fight for both of them, and they'd both stand to gain lots of new fans."
Rossini looked Matty over with flinty gray eyes but, to my relief, nodded slowly in recognition. "I saw some tape of you. I like your style. You got brothers too, right?"
Matty's jaw flexed and without missing a beat, I stepped in to answer on his behalf. "Yes. Not MMA, though. One of them is a traditional boxer, the other a kick-boxer.”
I’d learned a lot about Matty in the past week and a half just through talking about strategy, discussing past fights and watching his interaction with his brothers on the couple of occasions I’d stopped by the gym. This only confirmed what I’d been feeling. For some reason, it didn't matter whether it was good or bad, the second someone mentioned Bash or Reid, he immediately went on the defensive. We were going to have to have a talk about that moving forward. For now, though, I had to hope he'd keep his trap shut and let me close this deal.
We sat around a long, gleaming conference room table and talked through all the details. We’d even patched Willie in via conference call and he sounded excited to do it. We talked sponsors, possible dates, media coverage, the whole nine. When, two hours later, everything had been hammered out besides the money, I was brimming with confidence and decided to broach the topic myself.
“Guess that’s it. Oh,” I waved my hand like it was a minute detail, but my heart was pounding so hard, I was afraid they’d hear it. “With regard to the purse, we're willing to split sixty-forty. Willie's good but he doesn't have the local support or following Matty does. If we’re fighting in Boston, we think that's more than fair."
Carmine rocked back on his chair and eyeballed me. “I never even considered that this would be less than fifty-fifty. They’re both new, relatively unknown. I’m not sure why we’d give up that extra ten percent.”
“Ticket sales,” I responded with a shrug. “Simple math. Matty is the hometown favorite. We’re going to sell more seats than you. If you don’t believe me, do an exit poll.”
He frowned and thumbed through some of his notes but didn’t respond.
“Don’t let all this hard work go to waste,” I said, leaning in to rest my elbows on the table between us. “We’ve gotten it all worked out down to the announcer. Let’s make a deal, Carmine.” I held out my hand and offered him an encouraging nod. “What do you say?”
My head was still spinning twenty minutes later when Matty and I stepped out into the early May sunshine.
“We did it,” I whispered, irrationally worried that someone might be following us and hear my almost childlike glee. “We frigging did it!”
Matty chuckled, and didn’t bother to use his inside voice as we crossed the parking lot toward my car. "I'm not going to lie, it never even crossed my mind that you'd be good at this part of it too."
I tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear and tried not to let the pride in his tone go to my head, even if it did lift my spirits.
"Thanks heaps. You're a real charmer."
Part of me was still in knots about the way we’d left things that night when we’d nearly had sex. It had been a long stretch of rocky road since the second we met and it seemed like that could easily have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but we’d muddled through. Now, aside from the tension that seemed ever-present and my own personal and humiliatingly graphic daydreams, he was becoming a part of my day that I really looked forward to. Which scared the shit out of me.
“I try. But for real, you handled the shit out of him back there. He didn't know whether he was coming or going. We definitely got the better end of things but Willie still seemed happy enough, and Carmine left the table smiling.”
This time, I couldn't stop the grin from spreading over my face as we climbed into the car.
Matty thought I did a good job. Something he already admitted he'd never given me a chance in hell of doing.
"Now that this is solid, we've got to get you ready. Is Felix available to start training seriously? The sooner the better. We’ve only got three months.”
He leaned forward and flipped on the radio, selecting a rock station before he answered. "Yeah, about that."
I could already tell I wasn't going to like whatever he was about to say.
“Felix had some family issues and had to go to Guatemala for a month. He'll be home in a few weeks now, but until then, I'm on my own. Don’t sweat it though, I’ll be fine."
I thought back to his weekly wing-fest at 1984 and shook my head. "No you won't."
"I can start prepping without a trainer, Kayla. I did it my whole life, until two years ago. There was no money for trainers, but guess what? I still won fights."
"You won't be one hundred percent."
"I can take Willie at seventy five percent. You're not going to get me to agree to let yet another stranger into my boxing family out of the blue. I'm putting my foot down here and now."
"What if I do it?" The words were out before I thought them through, but I couldn’t very well take them back, even if being with Matty more often was a heartbreak waiting to happen.
"What if you do what?"
I had to put the job first here. Surely, I could manage to keep it professional for a few piddling weeks. "What if I pull double duty? Things will be quiet on the management end aside from some calls and just me vetting other fighters for after the Martin fight. The rest of the time, we can spend in the gym. Three weeks, just getting you conditioned and making sure you're accountable. I'm not saying I can take Felix's place. I'm just saying I know enough to help get you ready for when he comes back so you're not behind the curve. What do you think?"
At least I wasn't a stranger.
He threw his head back and seemed to be muttering at the ceiling when I risked a glance in his direction.
"Don't be stubborn and short-sighted, Matty. You have me here, I'm willing to help, so you might as well use me."
***
Matty
It was that exact thought that had me in knots. She made a lot of sense, and I was already getting comfortable around her. Not in the groin region, that was still decidedly uncomfortable in her presence, but as far as feeling like she was invested in my success and had the knowhow to try to find me some decent match-ups, things were progressing better than I ever hoped.
This would seriously test my ability to be around her long-term without trying to jump her bones again. Like some twisted form of exposure therapy.
I was getting by all right for the last week or so when she’d stopped off at the gym to run over some things with me, but to her credit, she’d always come mid-day when there were at least a few guys there jumping rope or knocking the heavy bag around, and she’d only stayed an hour or so. This would be a lot more than that.
"Are we talking every day?"
"No." She seemed to hesitate, probably because she knew that neither of us could do it every day without cracking. Smart cookie, this one. "Every other. And every Saturday off. Come on, Matty. I've seen you fight and you know you have some issues to work out. You've got to get some more speed if you want to be faster than Willie. I've got lots of tapes we can watch, and I learned some great new flexibility exercises that will make those kicks really fly. What do you say? It could be fun."
For the first time since we met, I actually got the feeling she believed that. She'd been determined before, and always ambitious, but only now that we were talking about more hands-on work was she lit up from the inside.
"You love it, don't you?"
She pursed her lips and made a show of leaning forward to scrape something off the windshield as she drove. "Love what?"
"MMA. You love fighting."
"Yeah, I like it a lot."
"No. You love it. So why don't you do it more? You have a real knack for it, you’re quick as hell and you've got all the technical knowhow.”
"Ah, but I'm missing one key comp
onent," she said, sitting back with a wry but sad smile.
"And what's that?"
"A dick."
I let out a short laugh but then frowned at her when I realized she was serious. "They have a bunch of MMA tournaments for women, and there are a handful of girls who make a living in the cage. Why can’t you be one of them?"
Granted, she wasn't at the level of Ronda Rousey or anything, but she had a passion and feel for it that I knew in my gut could be something more if she let it.
"Mickey prefers if I stick to the back end of the business."
Who the fuck is Mickey? I was about to snap, but then I stopped myself. It had occurred to me more than once that they might have been more than boss and employee at some point — Mickey didn’t seem like the type to take people under his wing for nothing— but I couldn’t bring myself to push because I didn’t want to hear the answer.
“We don’t need him. I’ll help you."
"Help me what?"
"We take this three weeks and train together. Every other day, both getting into condition. Then, you let me find a fight for you. Something in New York, or out of town, Mickey doesn't even have to know."
The MMA ladies circuit was small and didn't have a large following. Unless he was specifically looking for it, Mickey would never find out about it, and what he didn't know...
I couldn't deny that was part of the lure for me. Defying that motherfucker when he thought he had me up and down, dead to rights. What was strange was how small a part that played in my decision.
So what was the rest of it? Because suddenly I wanted this more than I'd wanted anything in a very long time.
"I just don’t know…"
I swallowed my disappointment, but nodded anyway. Odds were, in a battle for supremacy over Kayla's priorities, Mickey was going to win. From what I had gathered, she’d worked for him long enough that she felt like she owed him her unwavering loyalty. And maybe she did.
“He would look at this as a betrayal. I know it sounds old fashioned, but that’s the kind of guy he is.” She flicked a glance my way. “And I owe him. He helped me out of a jam when I was younger.”
Trust Me: Matty and Kayla, Book 1 of 3 (The McDaniels Brothers) Page 4