Real

I’m still smiling like a dope when the bell rings, and I don’t mean to hold my breath while I’m watching, but I do. Remington looks almost like a bored Rottweiler as his opponent, the “Grasshopper,” seems to jump all over the ring and around him like a baby kangaroo.

He knocks him out quickly, and because he keeps winning, he fights a line of new opponents, one after the other. From what Pete has told me, only the last eight finalists in each city will compete in the next designated city, and it will all come down to a big fight at the end of the tour, in New York, where only the top two men will engage in a long 16-round fight, rather than a handful of 3-round fights.

Now Remington takes on a man that looks more like a wrestler than a boxer. His abs are flabby and bulky, and he’s about double as wide as Remington. Something fierce and primitive grips my core, and I’m on my feet with a silent “no!” the instant the man they’d called “the Butcher” rams a hit into Remy’s ribcage. Remy’s slammed so hard, I can hear the breath tear out of him.

My insides seize in dread even when he recovers easily, and my heart doesn’t stop pounding in my chest. I bite my lip as I watch him land a set of perfect punches on Butcher’s core. He moves so fluidly, every part of his body flexible and strong, sometimes I forget he’s fighting against someone else merely because of the way he hypnotizes me with his moves.

I love watching those powerful legs, with thick muscles, and how they balance him and move with both strength and agility. I love each flex of his quads, his shoulders, his biceps, the way the vine tattoo that circles his arms only emphasizes how finely formed his shoulders and biceps are between them.

“Boo! Boo-hooo!” the crowd starts shouting, and it’s all after Remy sustained another hit in his upper torso. I wince when Butcher follows with a straight punch to Remy’s lips. His head swings, and I see drops of blood splatter at his feet, and hear myself say “no” again, softly. He straightens once more and regains his position, licking the blood up from a cut part of his lip. But I don’t understand why he’s letting down his guard.

It seems like he’s not covering, and even Coach and Riley are scowling in puzzlement from the corner of the ring as they watch the fight continue, Remington landing his punches always excellently, but strangely allowing Butcher too much access into his upper thoracic region. I’m confused and anxious for it to finish, and all I know is that every punch the awful man is landing on him I can actually feel inside me like a knife cut in the gut.

When Butcher slams his side once more and Remy drops to one knee, I want to die.

“No!” The scream is torn out of me.

And when the woman beside me hears me, she cups the sides of her mouth and shouts, “Get up, Remy! Get UP! Beat the crap out of him!”

A ragged breath of relief leaves me when he jumps back up and wipes blood from his lips, but his eyes flick in my direction, and he takes another punch that swings him back to bounce against the chord.

My nerves are tattered in such a way that I need to duck my head and stop watching for just a minute. There is, literally, a ball of fire in my throat, and I can’t even swallow my saliva. There’s just something about watching him take a pounding that makes me feel as helpless as I did when I cracked my knee, and could no longer do anything about it. This passivity is just not me. I’m being eaten with the sheer need either to go up there and hit that fucking fat man too, or just flee here. Fight-or-flight. But instead I just sit here, and it’s awful.

Suddenly, his usual chorus begins, “REMY … REMY … REMY.”

And something happens when I’m not looking, for chaos breaks loose in the Underground, and the people start screaming, “Yeah. REMY, REMY, REMY!”

The announcer’s voice bursts through the speaker. “Our victor, ladies and gentlemen! RIPTIDE! Ripppppptiiiiiide! Yes, you hungry ladies out there, scream your hearts out for the baddest bad boy this ring has ever seen! Rippppppptiiiiiide!”

I start, and my head shoots back up in surprise as my eyes fly back to the ring. Fat Man is being removed with aid from the ring medics, and it strikes me with the fact that Remington seems to have broken his ribs.

But my guy is no longer in the ring.

And he might have a broken rib too.

My god, what in the hell just happened?

As quickly as I can get through the crowd, I head backstage, my heart still bonkers and my body still aching for an outlet. I find Lupe heatedly arguing with Riley about how “the bastard is playing with fire,” and when they both notice me, Coach turns away from me and Riley jabs a finger and signals “upstairs,” then he flips out the key to Remy’s suite from his back jeans pocket to me. I take it and head to the hotel, which is thankfully just around the corner.

I find Remington sitting in the bench at the foot of his bed, his spiky dark hair as beautifully rumpled as always, his breath still slightly uneven, and a wave of relief washes through me when he raises his head and his lazy smile, the one that shows only one dimple, appears.

“Like the fight?” he asks, his voice rough with dehydration.

I can’t say no, but I can’t really say yes; I just don’t know why it’s such a complicated experience for me. So I say, “You broke the last one’s ribs.”

One sleek black eyebrow sweeps upward, then he drains the last of a Gatorade and sends it spinning empty across the floor. “Are you worried about him, or me?”

“Him, because he’s the one who won’t be able to stand tomorrow.” I meant that tongue-in-cheek, but although he grunts, he doesn’t smile.

We’re alone.

And suddenly every pore in my body becomes aware of this.

My hands feel slightly unsteady and I seize some salve and kneel between his legs to put it on the cut part of his lips. It’s not bleeding anymore, but it cracked right on the fleshy middle of his lower lip. Time fades away as I press my finger in there, his eyes hooded as he watches me.

“You,” I whisper. “I worry about you.”

A sudden awareness of the exact rhythm of his breath overcomes me. I’m so close I think I just inhaled the same air he exhaled, and without warning his scent is inside me. He smells so good, salty and clean as an ocean, and I’m helpless to stop my reactions to him. My head is spinning inside my cranium. I imagine bending my head to his damp neck and running my tongue over each and every drop of sweat I see on his skin.

Scowling at my own thoughts, I cover up the salve tin, but remain on my knees, debating if I just start on his legs now that I’m here.

“I messed my right shoulder, Brooke.”

My roughly spoken name stirs the top of my head, and the way he says it affects me, but I cover up with a sigh of mock dreariness. “With a bulldozer like you, I knew it was too much to hope that you’d survive this night with just a cut lip.”

“Are you going to come fix it?”

“Of course. Someone has to.” On my feet, I head over to kneel on the end of his bed and grab his shoulders. I’m no longer surprised at the way every cell in my body hones in on the feeling of this man’s body connected, through my hands, with mine. I just close my eyes and allow myself to enjoy it for a moment as I try to loosen him up, but the tension in his body is more unrelenting than ever. I prod deeper into his right shoulder and whisper, “That ugly bastard landed a pretty hard one here. He landed a lot of hard ones. Does it hurt?”

“No.”

I think I heard a hint of amusement in his voice, but I’m not sure. My focus drifts to his muscle, complaining and pushing back into my fingers, and I know for a fact it hurts. It must. “I’ll rub you down with arnica, and we’ll do cold therapy.”

He sits perfectly still as he lets me work in some oil into his skin, and when I peek at his dark profile, I notice his eyes are tightly shut. “Does it hurt?” I murmur.

“No.”

“You always say no, but I can tell this time it does.”

“There are other parts of me that are hurting more.”

“What the hell?” The door of the suite slams shut, and Pete storms into the master bedroom, as angry as I’ve ever seen this gentle man look. His choirboy features seem sharper and not so angelic today, and even his curls look more pronounced. “What. The. Hell?” he repeats.

Remington’s body becomes a wall of brick under my touch.

“Coach’s in a snit,” Riley adds as he follows inside, and even easy-breezy Riley is scowling today. “What we all want to know is: why the fuck are you letting your ass get kicked?”

A strange tumultuous vibe grabs hold of the room, and my hands instantly stop moving on the back of his shoulders.

“Yes or no, you let him get in on purpose?” Riley shoots him a sinister glare.

Remington doesn’t answer. But his torso is fully erect now, and every muscle seems engaged.

“Do you need to get laid?” Pete demands, signaling at him. “Do you?”

My insides clench, and I know I don’t really want to stay here and listen to these guys make sexual arrangements for Remington, so I mumble, mainly to myself since nobody is paying any attention to me anyway, something about going to help Diane in the kitchen, then I head out of the room.

As I go down the hall, I hear Pete again. “Dude, you can’t let them do this to you just so you get her hands all over you. Look, we can arrange some girls. Whatever it is you’re doing, you can’t play these damned games like a normal person. You’re just torturing yourself, Rem, this is a dangerous thing you’re doing with her.”

I’ve slowed down almost to a halt, and I think my lungs just turned to rocks. Are these guys talking about me?

“You bet all your money on yourself this year, remember that episode?” Pete adds. “Now you need to defeat Scorpion at the final no matter what. And this includes her, dude.”

Remington’s timbre is lower than the others, but somehow, that soft growl is infinitely more threatening. “Scorpion’s a fucking dead man, so just back off.”

“You pay us to prevent this shit, Remy,” Pete counters, but that only makes Remington lower his voice even more.

“I’ve got it. Under. Control.”

The silence that follows the deadly whisper snaps me into movement, and I head to the kitchen to find Diane retrieving a small organic turkey from the oven. The scent of rosemary and lemons makes my mouth water, but it does nothing for my pounding heart.

“What are those guys yelling about?” Diane asks as she arranges her presentation, scowling sweetly at her baby turkey when it refuses to look pretty on the plate she chose.

“Remy got hit tonight,” I say. Because that’s what it had been about. Wasn’t it?

Diane shakes her head and clucks to herself.

“I swear that man has the reddest self-destruct button I’ve ever seen…”

She trails off when the door swings open behind me, and a large hand clamps around my elbow and spins me around. “Do you want to run with me?”

Remington’s icy blue eyes blaze fiercely into me, and I can feel his frustration all the way to where I’m standing. It circles around him like black whirlwind, and suddenly he seems on edge and more than a little threatening.