by Amber Lynn
The way to the gym was very quiet. I didn't want to talk and Nate seemed afraid to open his mouth to allow room for skewering to commence. It was probably a legitimate fear on his part.
Being two o'clock on a Monday afternoon, the gym looked like a ghost town. He followed me to an empty room that had mats lying down on the floor just for our purpose.
"Chances are good we're going to get a little sweaty doing this. Do you want to change before we get started?" I asked, breaking our silence.
"I don't plan on staying here all day, so I think it's best to wear what you'd be wearing during an attack. Sweats, or workout clothes in general, are a different texture and feel. Something you can do in your jeans may not be as easy, or it could be easier, in sweats. Long story short, at least for now leave what you have on." He was rambling quite a bit.
"I asked if you wanted to change, not me. I'm wearing a t-shirt and jeans. I thought maybe you'd prefer to change out of your fancier clothes to keep the sweat stains down. If that's not the case, where do you want to start?"
"Let's start with what disciplines you're acquainted with."
I was bored already. The blue mats on the floor held more interest than talking about what disciplines I knew. I wanted to get right to the fighting.
"I've taken a lot of self-defense courses, basic and advanced, Aikido, Hapkido, Karate, Judo, Bojitso and I've spent some time in the ring boxing. As I've mentioned before, I'm also pretty handy with a knife." I refrained from counting everything out on my hand.
"That's a little bit more training than the normal computer tech tends to take," he unnecessarily replied.
"I've had time on my hands. Before recently, I went to work, then home, and that was all there was to my life. Training made me feel a bit more confident about myself too. Can you imagine how bad I used to be if this is me with more confidence?" I waved my hand up and down in front of my torso, in case he forgot who we were talking about.
"So, why did you want to do extra training today, if you already have all this knowledge?"
"Because I feel like it, okay? I don't want to sit in the office all day wondering what will happen next. I want to keep busy and training was the most likely reason Mr. Irving would accept for me to get out of the office. Are you going to actually help with that, or are we going to stand here talking all day?"
"Fine," he answered. "As I'm sure you've done many times in your self-defense classes, let's practice getting out of some holds."
He walked behind me and wrapped his arms around me in a death grip. Holds were not my idea of fighting, and the one he put me in was so basic I almost laughed.
"Now, get out of the hold," he instructed.
Categorizing the things I knew about my situation, I remained absolutely still, so he couldn't tell what was about to happen. Having noticed he wore pretty thin shoes, I swiftly raised up my foot and brought it down with all my might on his right foot. Even in just sandals, it still made an impact. He grunted and loosened his hold. At that point, I just slipped out from under his arms.
"Done," I announced. I was fairly certain a baby could've done it, so I didn't feel too amazed by my own accomplishment.
"Crap. I wasn't expecting that. I thought I'd be getting an elbow to the rib or something," he said while he massaged the top of his foot, idiotically through his shoe.
I thought about going and getting one of my usual trainers. I was certain Nate was going to go too easy on me and the frustrations I needed to get out were going to remain bottled inside.
"I can do the elbow if you'd like," I said with my biggest innocent smile plastered across my face. I even worked in a little eyelash flutter.
"No. I'm guessing your classes have instructed you on basically every hold I could try, right?"
"Well yeah," I started but was interrupted when he rushed at me and dragged me to the ground underneath him, cocooning me tightly.
"Let's see you get out of this." I could only assume he had a confident smirk on his face as he squeezed a little tighter.
With my hands tight to my side, I wiggled my fingers a little to get into my right jean front pocket. I put my hand through the hole I had cut in all my jeans to get to my flat five-inch throwing knife that I had sheathed around my thigh. I slowly moved my hand back out and placed the warm blade against his thigh closest to that hand and poked him slightly.
"Would you like me to leave some damage?" I coyly asked. "I spend a lot of my free time sharpening, so you can just imagine how sharp this baby is."
"Where did that come from you little vixen?" he asked, loosening his hold and getting up.
"Wouldn't you like to know? Oh wait, you've already asked repeatedly and you're no closer to finding out, because I won't be putting it back while you're watching. How about we hit the punching bag for a little while to let me work off some of this nervous energy," I suggested. "Your techniques just aren't doing it for me."
"I'm going to choose not to comment about my techniques, for now. The punching bag idea sounds good. We should probably change for that, though."
He led the way to the door where we split up at the locker rooms. Since neither of us was thinking of hitting the gym that day, we purchased some clothing and hurried to get changed. I ended up in a tank and a pair of Lycra shorts. Both were black with the gym's logo plastered on them.
The other time we'd been at the gym together, I'd only gotten to see Nate's arms from far away, so I didn't notice the tattoos he had snaking around his biceps and over his shoulders, disappearing under his shirt. From what I could see, they were mostly black symbols that flowed in ribbons. There were a couple of spots that had bright red or blue highlighting. The symbols weren't like anything I'd seen before, but they looked kind of like hieroglyphics.
Trying not to think of where they ended up, or what else he had tattooed on him, I said, "Those are some wicked tattoos. What do they mean?"
"Let's just say when you tell me where the knives are, I think you'll be ready to know what the tattoos mean. Until then, you'll just have to guess," he taunted.
Phooey. I didn't have my phone on me, so I could take pictures and hit the Internet to try to find their meanings later.
"You've just added to the aggression I need to take out on the bag. I hope you know it's your fault if there's nothing left but a pile of sand afterwards."
When we hit the twenty-five minute mark, it was determined we both worked up enough sweat, so we took a break to do a little stretching and cool down. Once we got our heart rates back to normal, we hit the showers.
I remained a little longer than I normally did under the water, trying to rinse away the tension I could still feel in my shoulders. Actually finding relief had been a long shot, but at least I'd gotten out of the office. Sitting around and stewing would've been worse.
We met back out in the lobby and decided that a protein shake would hit the spot. I took a strawberry banana one and he went with chocolate caramel. Nate paid for both of them, even after receiving a scowl.
As we sipped on the shakes he said, "Really, Avery, I'm still having trouble figuring out why you aren't a field agent. You don't have to be undercover to work in the field. I mean just from what you've said, you have more training than some of the other agents I've worked with. I think your talents are wasted behind that computer screen all day. You need to join the world of the living and get out of that basement."
"I don't want to talk about that. Nothing I can say will change your mind and nothing you can say will change mine. I like computers and always have. You're only hope is that spending time with you will get the action bug to bite me. I wouldn't count your chickens on that happening. I'm pretty set in my ways."
"If you're worried about who they'll partner you up with, I can work it out so we team together. That way you can take care of all my computer needs and at the same time be allowed to come out with me and fight the bad guys hand-to-hand," he suggested.
I had a feeling he was used to getting his way. He wasn't goin
g to with me, and I hoped he'd figure that out sooner rather than later.
"Something to think about at a later date." After I was dead seemed like the right time for me to ponder it. Working that closely with Nate sounded more like a nightmare to me than anything else. I refrained from flat out turning him down, though, I figured that would only make him try harder.
We finished our drinks and headed back out to the car. Just as I sat down in the passenger seat, my phone went off, indicating I had a new text message. I figured it'd be Frannie planning a night out. It wasn't Frannie.
You know you're pretty hot when you're beating up your boyfriend. I don't think you're taking my warning seriously enough. Please reconsider.
"What's wrong with this guy?" I yelled a little too loud for the confines of the car.
"What's wrong?" Nate asked, but I was already tilting my phone so he could see the latest message.
"He knows where I live, my email address and my phone number. That's a little creepy. How could he have found out all that information? For some reason he thinks you're my boyfriend. That will be the day. He must not have heard any of our interactions to know we're just coworkers who actually hate each other. It'd be nice if he'd come out from whatever rock he's hiding under so I could tell him that to his face."
"Liz is your phone person, right? Let's drop the phone off and let her go to work on tracing it back to the sender. With the police working on the written note, Carl working on the email and Liz on the text, hopefully we'll get something back to help figure out this guy's identity."
The ride back to the Pit went a lot faster than the one away from it, but the talking remained the same. We both stewed without sharing what we were thinking about. Judging by the way Nate's knuckles turned white around the steering wheel, I was pretty sure he was back to thinking about strangling someone.
When we arrived, Carl was gone, which is a little surprising, but Liz was still there. She perked up when she noticed Nate walking behind me.
"Where's Carl? It's not like him to leave in the middle of a project," I said, walking straight to Liz's desk.
"He was hungry and didn't find anything interesting in the vending machine, so he went out to grab us both something to eat."
"That was nice of him. We're actually looking for you anyway. Your expertise is needed on the case." I handed over my phone to her.
"What do you have?" she asked, looking at the text that was still up on my screen.
"We'd like to find out where that text came from. It seems to be the same person who has been leaving me notes all day. Evidently, he or she has been following me around too." Just the thought of some creep watching me made me shudder.
I could handle an attacker right in my face, but to think about them lurking out there somewhere was disconcerting. It made me wonder just how close I was being followed and how long they'd been following. It was getting harder to determine whether the case was really involved or if I'd just been the lucky recipient of a crazy stalker.
?"Sure, I'll move this up to the front of the queue. Maybe if we get this all sorted out, you won't need your protector," she said nodding her head towards Nate.
I hoped that once we figured out who was behind the messages, Liz didn't develop her own need to have Nate follow her around. I was fairly certain he wouldn't volunteer, but I didn't want to see how far she'd take things.
"Thanks. I'm looking for anyway to get rid of my shadow and finding this person seems like my best bet," I said as I started to head back toward the door. "I guess if you get anything you'll have to call Nathaniel since I'm temporarily phoneless."
I figured that would be her first move anyway. I had a home phone she could reach, but I thought the incentive to call Nate could hurry things along.
Back outside, I jumped in the car and readied for our next journey. "Let's get some groceries. That protein shake wasn't enough to keep me going for long. Anxiety makes me hungry and I'm going to start chewing on my ankle soon."
"We can't have that; I happen to like your ankles. I'm not hip on what your favorite store is, so you're going to have to give me directions." He didn't wait for me to tell him which way to go as he started the car.
"Turn left out of the parking lot and I'll get you there."
We'd spent enough time in the car that I thought it was beginning to smell like the both of us. That didn't bode well for my apartment, because it wasn't much bigger and Nate was planning on spending hours there. I already had the issue with the dreams, his smell lingering around wasn't going to help.
CHAPTER 14
Meet me in the freezer section