Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 79870 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79870 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
I knew all of these things, but I enjoyed hearing Marco’s voice chanting instructions in practice, because it trained me to listen for it during a fight.
After I’d tested the limits of my stamina defending a grab-bag of takedown maneuvers, I worked what energy I had left out drilling combos. I kicked, punched, and jabbed at the thick foam pads the guys held up in front of their bodies. I knocked everyone around with no mercy, following Marco’s barked commands with a level of focus that was scary even to me. Then, when I was nearly ready to drop, and my breaths were coming in heaving gasps, and my sparring partners had escaped to the cool refuge of the swimming pool, I finally gave in.
I crept off to my room, locked the door, and sat down on the bed with my phone in my hand. My heart was thudding in my chest, and I wiped sweat from my brow as I opened the text from Jamie. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I’d been hoping for something passionate. I wasn’t picky about the kind of passion. Tenderness would have been nice, to prove that he still cared. I could have even accepted anger, because maybe he was as destroyed by my leaving as I was. My heart could have taken solace in just about anything but the one cold sentence he’d written.
“You left your stuff.”
Really? That was the message I’d waited all day to read? Those were the words I’d pushed away for hours, worried they might make me abandon my training and go rushing back to Georgia?
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, squeezing my phone so hard it’s a wonder it didn’t break. Then, before I could say something stupid to give myself away, to humble myself even more in the eyes of the guy who had already leveled me to the ground, I typed out a text of my own.
“Keep the shit. I don’t need it.”
And I wasn’t just talking about the things in my suitcase. I was talking about it all: the sex, the friendship, the work he’d done, his heart, my heart… every fucking thing. Because I didn’t need it. All I needed was the fighting. It’s all I’d ever had, the only thing I could count on, and that was okay.
CHAPTER 5
(JAMIE)
Hospitals are a world all their own. When you enter those double front doors, you know you’re going to have to put your life completely on hold for a while. In the case of my mom’s surgery, the hold lasted four days.
I carried my laptop and got a lot of work done in the first two days. Kage may have told me he didn’t want the job of being my boyfriend anymore, but he hadn’t fired me from my job as his publicist, and neither had his uncle. So I worked. I copied the upcoming fight details to his website and his social media profiles, fielded messages, and uploaded photos from my hard drive.
It kept my mind occupied so that I didn’t go completely insane.
But inevitably, I turned to the tablet I had tucked away in my laptop case. Kage’s tablet, with its password-protected secrets. How would I ever unlock those secrets? And a better question, did I really want to?
I knew there were no spaces allowed, and that uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and numbers were all legal. If there were any special characters like exclamation points, I was screwed. Fortunately, there was a password hint: Favorite place to be.
With the Mission Impossible theme playing in my head, I made my first attempts at cracking the code.
LasVegas. Nope.
TheGrotto, or Grotto? Nope.
TheOctagon, or Octagon? Nope.
How about lowercase versions of the same? Nope, nope, and nope.
Fuck!
It was nice of Kage to give me a hint to work with. Unfortunately, it only underscored how little I knew about him. How could I not know his favorite place? That was a pretty standard thing to get to know about someone. I slid the tablet back into my laptop case and sulked. The harder it was to get into that damn thing, the more I wanted in, and I had a lot of time to kill.
During lunch on day three, Dad and I went down to the cafeteria, but I only sat and watched while he ate. He tried to force me to eat some country fried steak and mashed potatoes. I didn’t tell him it didn’t look like food to me— that nothing did these days.
“I’m not about to blow my diet on that fried stuff.”
“You haven’t eaten a thing since you got to town, son. This is ridiculous.” Meanwhile, he wolfed his meal down like he thought someone might come along and snatch it up.
“Not true,” I told him. “I ate a couple of boiled eggs this morning. And yesterday I had a salad and some sliced avocado.”