“Anything in mind?”
“Vodka orange?”
“Sure. I won’t be joining you. I can’t drink at the moment.”
“It’s fine,” she says, flopping into my sofa. I watch her while I make her drink. She looks stressed out. She also looks sexy as fuck. She’s just dressed casually, black jeans, flats, and a white blouse, and she looks fucking fantastic in it.
She fiddles with her hair, coils a lock around a finger. I hand her the drink.
“Pierce,” she says. “I talked with my dad this morning.”
“Oh?”
“He says that your mother and him are really serious about having the wedding down here.”
I nod. “Is that right?”
“He says it’s because both of us have no extended family to speak of. So you and I are their only family, and they want to get married with family.”
“Cool,” I say. “When?”
“It’s not cool.”
I sit down, and resume eating my dinner. “Just say what you want to say.”
She looks frustrated, fiddles with the edge of her blouse. “We need to decide what to… do.”
“About what?”
“About what happened between us.”
“You mean since we fucked?”
Penny lets out a long, drawn-out sigh. “Yes.”
I get up from the sofa I’m on, and walk toward the one she’s on. I wrap her up. She resists at first, but then quits.
“Pen, how about we just tell each other what we want, okay?”
“Okay. You go first.”
“I want you. I want to be with you, I want to fuck you, I want to smell you. I want to see you smile. What do you want?”
She hesitates. “I don’t know what I want.”
“Way to play fair, Pen.”
“It’s not as simple as all that.”
“Then let me ask you something? Have you stopped thinking about me ever since you stopped talking to me?”
She doesn’t reply, but she knows that her silence is an admission.
“And you think that our parents getting married means we can’t be together?”
“Of course that’s what it means.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s wrong.”
“How?”
“It’s just weird, okay.”
“So you have a hang-up.”
“I do.”
“Sounds like it’s your problem to get over, then.”
“Oh, fuck you, Pierce.”
“What?” I say. “I know what I want. You know what you want. I’m going to take what I want.”
“Not without my consent, you won’t.”
“Then you’re not taking what you want.”
“You know what else I want?” she asks, getting heated. “I want you to not do this fight for the mob.”
I lick my lips. “Well, now that is not that simple.”
“Why? Why can’t you just say no? Is it the money?”
“No, it’s not the money. They… didn’t give me a choice.”
“How?”
“They just didn’t.”
“Did they threaten you?”
I think about telling her the truth, that they threatened her. Her family, too… my family, too. But I don’t want to scare her. I know that it’s selfish, I know I’m only appeasing my own guilt, but I can’t help it.
“Yes.”
“See!” she belts out, slapping my arm. “I fucking told you not to get mixed up with them.”
“It was already too late when they rang my doorbell.”
“So you have to fight?”
“Yes.”
“Because two mob bosses have their favorite pit bulls and want to see who wins?”
“It’s a dick-measuring contest, yes.”
“And you’re going to do it.”
I nod. “Yes.”
“What happens after?”
“Well, I’ve made my terms clear to them,” I say. “Only this one time. After that, I might just retire.”
“From fighting?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” she asks accusingly. “I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t believe me, then.”
There’s a slight pause, and then, to my surprise, she asks me, “Can you remember your first fight?”
I laugh. “Oh yeah, perfectly like it was yesterday.”
“Tell me about it.”
I shrug, hold Penny a little tighter against me. I can smell the vodka orange on her breath, and all it makes me want to do is lean in and kiss her. She holds her lips apart just slightly, and I can see the tops of her teeth.
“Jesus Christ, pen, you’re turning me on.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“I can’t explain it.”
“Don’t dodge my question,” she says. “Tell me about your first fight.”
“Why?”
“It’s important to me.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Pierce, if I can’t understand you, then I can’t be with you. Would you just tell me?”
I sigh. “Fine. But I wasn’t as good as I am now.”
Penny laughs. “I really don’t care.”
Chapter Twenty Eight
It’s like a drug.
I know, cliché as fuck, right? But it’s the truth, and I’m not going to fuck around trying to find a better metaphor.
At first, it’s the adrenaline. My first fight, the crowd wasn’t wild when I stepped into that cage. My first fight, nobody knew who the fuck I was.
But my opponent, Crazy Carl, they knew him. They called him that for a reason…
Dude was built like a freight train, the kind that carries coal. His thighs were thicker than my waist. I knew then and there, even if I’d never seen him fight before, that he was a leg-lock man. He had a heavy base, low to the ground, and he was no doubt going to try and get me on the floor, try and lock me up, pull my shoulder from its socket, make me tap out.
Well, I knew then and there I wasn’t going to be the one tapping out. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous. That didn’t mean I didn’t feel that adrenaline surge, born of a little bit of fear and a lot of concern. Concern not just that I was likely going to sustain an injury during this fight, but for how the hell I was going to even beat this guy.
I knew I wasn’t going to lose, I just didn’t quite know how to win.
My thing’s always been a combination of power, speed, and endurance. I hit hard, but not the hardest. I’m fast, but not the fastest. I can go for long, but not the longest. I’m a bit of everything, and that makes me a nightmare matchup. No strategy works against me. If some dick thinks he can out-dance me, then I can out-hit him. If some brick of a man can out-hit me, I can out-quick him.