One Last Fight - Part Two (The One Last Fight Series Book 2)

by Ashley, Ava

  I draft a plan as the miles roll by. I’ll buy a newspaper at a corner shop, find an apartment in the classifieds, and try to move in immediately. If a same-day move-in doesn’t work, I’ll stay at the cheapest hostel out in Harlem or the Bronx until I can move in—hopefully within the week, because I have a feeling that even a hostel out in the projects isn’t going to come cheap. I don’t know, though. I’ve only been to New York City once when I was little, and I was there with my rich parents who were fine with expensive and covered everything, anyway, since I was a little kid. But big city prices are infamous and I’m just hoping the pay matches up.

  I’ll look around for a job at a tattoo parlor, but apply at diners and fast food joints, too, if I can’t get one. A waitressing gig at a ritzy place in Manhattan would, of course, be the best pay-wise, but I’m also incredibly unlikely to get it. Having had no jobs as a high school student, and thus no experience as a waitress or cashier, is making it a lot more difficult to find part-time gigs to hold me over. And since I didn’t even get a chance to resign from The Ink Joint, given how quickly I fled town, I’m screwed if they want a reference from my last employer.

  Whatever. That’s not my biggest problem, and I’ll figure it out and work my way up from the bottom again, if need be. It’s not like I have anything else to do.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Cooper

  I can’t sleep. Eventually, shortly after four in the morning, I decide to cut my losses and go on a run. I turn left where I normally turn right and find myself running through the city’s slums, headed for the trailer park where I grew up. I haven’t been back in years, not since shortly after I started training with Vlad and decided to put my past hangups about being the ‘white trash kid’ behind me.

  But here I am again, running through the same streets that I spent the days of my childhood playing on. I have come so far, despite all the hurdles that I have faced. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps to make it into the Navy SEALs and picked myself up again after I couldn’t be a SEAL anymore, and the girl who I thought was the love of my life betrayed me. I trained hard and fought my way to the top off the MMA.

  And now, for a girl who couldn’t even bother to leave a note or say goodbye, I lost rank and sponsorships for this year’s tournament. I was stupid and I went against my best judgment. Emotions are nothing but trouble and women are nothing but trouble if you try to do anything more than just fuck them and send them on their way.

  She’s just a girl. I should have known better by now. Didn’t I learn my lesson?

  I haven’t thought about it in a while, but this brings it right back to my mind. I remember every painful detail, even though the emotions for Sarah are all long dried up and gone.

  It was after I found out that I couldn’t be a SEAL anymore. I decided to go home and try to win Sarah back. I would show her that I was better and that PTSD wasn't so scary. I would make her come back to me. I was walking out of a flower store with an enormous bouquet of pink and red, mottled roses, her favorite, when I saw her walk out of her gynecologist's office across the street. A man in an expensive suit and shiny shoes had his arm slung low around her waist. She had her hand on her stomach and when she turned to kiss him, I saw that it was swollen with a small, basketball-shaped bump high on her abdomen.

  To be pregnant now, Sarah had to have been cheating on me while I was overseas. I didn't know where to turn. I didn't know what to do. Just like that, my whole world had fallen apart. I only survived because I had fighting to turn to and focus on. The MMA became my everything. I ate, slept, breathed, and lived fighting. With every fight I won, I was that much closer to recovery from both my PTSD and my heartbreak.

  So to have been so stupid now, after all these years, is unacceptable. I shake my head and turn around.

  I was stupid. But she’s gone now and I’m not making that mistake again.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Savannah

  I finally manage to doze off around four- or four-and-a-half hours into the ride and, shortly after I fall asleep, I am awakened by the driver announcing our arrival in New York City over the bus intercom.

  “We’re pulling into Penn Station here, folks,” the driver drawls, sounding even more tired than I feel. “Please check the area around you and make sure you take all your belongings, children, and trash out with you. This bus is heading back west in just thirty minutes and it’s a huge help to us here at The Blitz Bus. Thanks again for choosing The Blitz Bus for your travels today. We know you have a lot of options when you travel and we appreciate you choosing us. Have a nice stay in NYC and see you again soon!”

  I didn’t take any of my belongings out of my backpack, so I just pick it up off of the seat next to me, which stayed mercifully empty throughout the trip, and pull the empty cracker wrappers and wadded up napkins with apple stems from the seat pocket in front of me. Unloading the bus takes a while, largely because of what seems to be a retiree travel group coming to see the big city, but I’m not in a rush.

  As soon as I step off the bus, though, I feel like I ought to be in a hurry, just because everyone else seems to be. I hold onto my backpack tighter as I’m jostled from all sides on the street corner, by people big and small, smelly and all dressed up. This isn’t the glittering New York City from television, nor is this the candyland New York City that I remember from my childhood trip, though I’ve since realized that I’m probably only remembering a trip we took to F.A.O. Schwartz. Instead, this is reality. It’s loud, it’s dirty, it smells bad, and it’s crowded. But it can also be what I make it. I push past a few people and over to the subway entrance on the street corner. It’s hotter underground, but I manage to buy a subway ticket for two dollars and seventy-five cents and swipe in. I locate a subway map by the telltale group of fanny-pack-sporting midwesterners huddled around it and find out that the Three train will take me right up to Harlem. Once I’m up there, I’ll be able to find a cheaper place to stay than here in midtown Manhattan.

  I get off the train about twenty-five minutes later and climb back upstairs to the street. I step out into the mid-morning sun and look around. I see few banged-up windows, paint peeling on the front doors, and a group of four women sitting and standing on the front steps of a brick apartment building, talking loudly and rapidly in Spanish. I don’t really have any idea where I’m going yet, so I just choose a direction and walk down the street. Soon enough, I come upon a dated gas station.

  The bell chimes as I walk through the door. “Hello?” I call.

  A little Indian man pops up from a back room, accessed from behind the cashier’s counter, and smiles at me. “Yeeas?”

  “Can you help me, please?” I ask. “I need today’s newspaper and the locations of the cheapest motels or hostels around here.”

  I buy a paper, a cup of instant ramen, and a bottle of Coke from him. I am directed to a motel where I get a flea-bitten room for fifty-nine ninety-nine a night, and so begins my New York life. I flip right past the news, entertainment, comics, lifestyle, and sports sections, going straight for the classifieds. I need a place to stay and I need a job at a tattoo parlor. At least the latter should be easier to find, now that I have a fairly decent portfolio.

  I pull it out to take a look at it again, hoping to make myself feel some excitement for this future, but seeing the snapshot of Cooper’s shoulder blade piece brings all the emotions crashing back down on me. For the first time since I saw Nate’s face on the poster last night—it isn’t even a full twenty-four hours ago, but it feels like a lifetime—I let the emotions wash over me. I let myself fall back on the hard, flat motel pillows and I let the tears run down my face, sobs shaking my body as I heave ragged breaths.

  I am never going to see Cooper again.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Savannah

  A few days pass and I settle into a daily routine. Things aren’t great, of course, but they’re working out pretty well. In fact, things are going much better than expected, given my usual
bad luck.

  I found a place almost immediately and was able to move out of the ratty motel after only three nights. I’m rooming with three women in a small apartment in Harlem, all the way up on West 137th Street. It’s a fifth floor walk-up with no air conditioning and a cockroach problem, but at least there aren’t any bedbugs. I hope. Not a single one of the roommates speaks English, beyond the basic ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘hello,’ ‘mine,’ ‘no share,’ and ‘rent now.’ Honestly, I see that as a huge benefit. If they can’t talk to me, we can’t become friends. I don’t want friends. If there’s one thing you learn early on the streets, it’s that loving people only gives other people material to a use against you and ways to hurt you.

  The job situation worked out somewhat less well. While I was able to get a job at a low-range tattoo parlor pretty quickly just by showing my portfolio, without needing a previous employer’s recommendation, I could only get twenty hours a week. There’s no way that I can cover my costs, no matter how many places I try to cut corners and even subsisting on canned beans and rice alone, so I find a second job that I can schedule around my hours at the parlor. I’m working mainly night and early morning shifts at Greasers, a diner specializing in breakfast foods. The manager claimed the name was because the diner is Grease-themed, for the musical lovers, but I am not convinced. There’s not really anything in the decor or menu that suggests any connection with or inspiration from Grease, but the food is dripping in enough of the stuff that I would be entirely unsurprised if actual grease were the namesake.

  But a job is a job and I have about all that I can ask for.

  Since neither of my jobs are high-paying, though, I need some other source of money. I don’t have any valuables to sell, except my locket necklace from my mother, so I finally decide that I have to sell it. It nearly breaks my heart in two as I walk over to the pawnshop, but I have no other choice.

  “How much can I get for this?” I ask the pudgy bald man at the register.

  He reaches out a grubby hand and everything in me screams no as I drop the necklace into his hand. He turns it over a few times, rubbing it between his sausage-like fingers, eyes gleaming. Then something shifts in his face before he looks up. His expression is calculatedly bored.

  “A hundred bucks, tops,” he says nonchalantly.

  “Bullshit,” I say, equally calmly. “Look again and stop trying to rip me off, or I’ll take it and leave.”

  He looks a little surprised at how sure of myself I am, but I just stand there, back straight and chin set. Finally, he looks at the necklace again.

  “Three hundred?”

  “Eight hundred,” I say. “That’s solid gold.”

  “Eight hundred?” he cries. “What do you think this is, Tiffany’s?”

  “Fine,” I say, reaching out to take it back from him. “I’ll go somewhere else.”

  He pauses for a moment, like he’s trying to figure out if I’m bluffing, and I just wiggle my fingers impatiently, like I have places to be and things to do.

  “Fine,” he grumbles, “Seven hundred and that’s it.”

  “Seven hundred and fifty, or no deal,” I say.

  He makes a face like it’s physically paining him to agree, but he nods. “But we pay out on sale. You’ll get your money in anywhere from one to six months, depending on the market.”

  “But I need it now!” I take a breath to collect myself. I take another breath, then I switch tactics. “Please, sir, I need to pay my rent and I’m new to the city. I really can’t wait that long.”

  He gives me another look, then shakes his head and sighs. “Fine, I’ll tell you what—I’ll list it on the internet, too, and that should speed up the sale some. You’ll probably get it sooner this way, but no guarantees and I still can’t pay out until I’ve been paid.” He shrugs. “Money is tight everywhere. What can I say.”

  “Deal,” I say. I can tell he is offering all that he can. It still hurts when I walk out of the store, leaving the last thing tying me to anyone that I love behind. I don’t have my mom, or even the one remembrance of her that I had, and I don’t have Cooper. I don’t have my sister, my brother wouldn’t want me, and my father would disown me.

  And I don’t have Cooper.

  I’m in a city of millions, but I still feel all alone.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Cooper

  As a Navy SEAL, it was crucial to the success of my mission to be able to hyper-focus on the task at hand, completely disregarding everything else going on around me. I use that training to make it through the week. When I’m in the gym, in the ring, or pounding the streets on training runs, my mind is completely turned off to anything else. It’s just me and the street, or me and the bag, or me and the weights I’m smashing.

  Exhausting my body helps me fall asleep at night, but it doesn’t change the fact that every waking moment outside of training, I can’t stop thinking about her. She blew in and out of my life like an F-5 tornado, turning my life on its head and completely wrecking the no-emotions, no-attachments, no-problems system that I had going. And I had it going well, it was really working for me. I had girls to blow off steam with work, was crushing it in the gym, had more money than I needed saved away and was continuing to pull it in at rates that would have been unimaginable to the childhood trailer park kid version of me.

  Sure, I didn’t spend much of it. Heck, I’m in this mess because I lived so frugally that I decided to go for a roommate in my simple apartment, just so the second bedroom wouldn’t stay empty. And sure, I didn’t get anything but a quick, cheap release from the desperate groupies who fought each other to get to be the one in my bed for the night. But I was making it to the top and I was fine with my life. I was showing them. I was showing everyone who thought I was white trash because my mom got herself knocked up before she could get her GED and never managed to make it out of Hooters-type jobs.

  Now, post-Savannah, I’m still killing it professionally. I lost some major sponsorships and my seed in the tournament, having to fight from the bottom up, but I’m doing well in trainings, hyper-focusing like the ex-Navy SEAL that I am, and will be back up before Vlad has time to stop grumbling about ‘those fucking flaky girls.’

  Still, I’m not content the way I was before. Getting random sex from girls I pick up at a bar doesn’t appeal to me after what I had with Savannah. Emotionless, meaningless sex with yet another bubble-brained girlfriend-wannabe who doesn’t understand that having a loose vagina and pants so easy to get into that they might as well fasten with Velcro isn’t going to make her mean something to me.

  I’m killing it on Friday, slamming into the bag like it fucked my mother, when Vlad stops me.

  “Look, man,” Vlad stops, sighing and shaking his head. “I don’t know what you want me to do, but something has to be done. You’re just not right.”

  “I’ve been training just fine,” I snarl, grabbing the bag from him.

  “You’ve been training just fine,” he admits, stepping aside as I start swinging at the bag again. “But man, you’re not you. For weeks, you were walking around like every day was some kind of gift and nothing could go wrong, but now you’re moping and sulking and it’s impossible to get you to smile or even just wipe that grimace off of your mug. Man, this isn’t like you.”

  “There’s nothing for you to do,” I say, without looking at him. I just keep swinging.

  “Then what can YOU do.” Vlad says it as a statement, not a question. He stops the bag and I stop swinging. I may have adrenaline flowing through my blood by the bucketful, but I’m not about to swing at the one guy who I can always depend on, the one guy who always has my back.

  “Get out of here, get your mind right, and I’ll see you tomorrow.” Vlad claps me on the back and gives me an easygoing smile, but there’s worry in his eyes. He’s worried I’m going to do something stupid, I can tell.

  And with the state that I’m in right now, maybe I will.

  “I’ll handle it,” I say. “I’ll
see you later, man.”

  After a quick shower, I go to the place where I always went when I needed to reset my mind and blow off my steam. It’s been weeks since I’ve been to the bar, since I had Savannah and she was all the woman I needed or could even want, so I don’t know whether my usual Friday girl will be there. If she has any self-respect at all, she won’t be. But I’m not concerned, if she’s not Savannah, then a girl is just a girl and it doesn’t matter which one it is. I’ve never had trouble finding a willing lay and I know I can have whoever I want in the bar.

  As I walk through the door, though, I immediately see my Friday girl. She’s sitting by herself in the middle of the bar, all dolled up like usual. God, she looks as cheap as a dirty penny after Savannah. Her hair is a brassy, fake blond, her makeup is caked on way too thick, her clothes leave nothing to the imagination. She’s boring to look at. You can see all that you’re getting and you can get all you’re looking at without any effort.

  I half feel like turning around right then and just getting a pie from Bennie’s and heading home, but I need to do this. If I can just fuck a chick and get back into my schedule, maybe I’ll be that much closer to being over Savannah.

  “Hi,” I say, sitting down on the barstool next to her.

  She looks up from her bright green cosmo and looks beyond pleased when she sees me standing there.

  “Well, hello, there,” she purrs, leaning forward so that she’s pretty much spilling out of her dress. “I’ve missed you.”

  Her breasts look harder than Savannah’s—they aren’t as welcoming and don’t make you want to just dive into them and bury your face in their soft, supple warmth. Her smile is small and calculating, not uninhibited like Savannah. There’s no joyful freedom there, there’s no depth and friendliness. You can almost see the wheels turning behind her hard eyes—how she’s going to land a fighter, how she’s going to have a nice easy life where her only concerns are dressing up for the tabloids. She finger-walks her hand up the inside of my thigh, but I feel nothing but disgust.