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)
Jamie came back out dressed in a pair of my gym shorts and a t-shirt, both of which hung off of his frame even worse than they had before.
“Alright, you two get busy eating,” I said to Jamie and Steve. “Jason and I need to hit the road. They’ll be sending out a search party for us if we don’t get back to camp soon.”
“Yeah, back for more torture,” Jason said. “I’m sure the guys won’t mind not getting beat up by you for a few hours.”
“How about you?” I asked him, picking up the box of condoms from the end table and heading toward the door.
“Hey, I’m in it to win it,” Jason said. “We’re buds. I’ll grit my teeth and take it, because I know you’ll do the same for me when the time comes.”
I laughed. “That’s what you think.”
I didn’t even look back at Jamie when I pulled the door closed on the sound of him and Steve chatting over breakfast, but I caught Jason peering in over my shoulder and biting his bottom lip.
“Your boy’s a screamer, huh? Jesus, you must have been nailing his ass to the wall.”
I got angry at Jason then. Probably a lot like I had when he was trying to get with my best friend in high school, only this time it was worse. But we were friends, and he was my training partner, so I tried to be as diplomatic as possible in my reaction. I smiled. “I don’t know what your deal is, Jason, but you’d better put your fucking eyes back in your head when it comes to Jamie. Are we clear on that, or do you need a hands-on demonstration.”
He held his hands up and laughed. “Hey, I’m just messing with you. You never could take a joke.” But I could tell I’d made him nervous. Jason wasn’t afraid to talk shit to me, but when it came right down to it, we both knew that in a real fight between him and me, he would lose every time.
I shifted the condom box to pull my keycard out of my pocket to get on the elevator, and that’s when it dawned on me that the box had been removed from the bag it had been in the night before. I looked down at it.
“Um, Jason… why is the seal broken on this box?”
He stepped onto the elevator, then turned around and gave me a little shrug and a smile. “You can’t be all screaming and fucking all over the house and not expect a guy to get horny.”
“But…” I followed him into the elevator and looked back toward my apartment, gesturing wildly with my hand. “Steve? I know he’s a little fem, but you did notice he’s a guy, right?”
Jason shrugged. “A dick and a hole, Kage. That’s all it takes. I’m not that picky.”
I grimaced at him, because damn. I’d known he was a hound dog, but I really had never grasped the level of his promiscuity. He had literally just told me he would fuck anything.
“Here.” I shoved the condom box into Jason’s arms. “Sounds like you’re gonna need these.”
I hit the button for the lobby, suddenly eager to get back to training. Because training was easy, and fighting was simple, and all of this personal drama was making my head hurt.
CHAPTER 10
(JAMIE)
It seemed like weeks instead of days before Kage sent for me. I got on a plane and flew to Chicago, where the fight would take place. A cab dropped me off at the fighter’s hotel on the morning of the weigh-in.
Kage met me in the lobby. I didn’t let on how excited I was to see him. Or at least I hoped I didn’t.
“All business,” he said close to my ear as we made our way through the hotel. “No fucking around or flirting, okay? You’re my publicist and my friend.”
“I’m not an idiot,” I told him. But the truth was, it kind of hurt to hear him say that, even though I knew it was the only way I could get to be with him. I would die if I inadvertently outed Kage just when his career was starting to take off. Because his career was way bigger than me. I knew that.
The hotel had done a surprising amount of reorganization in order to host the fighters that weekend. One conference room served as a signing room, where each fighter sat down in front of the stack of over a hundred event posters and added his or her autograph. With all of the fighters’ signatures on them, the posters would eventually be sold for upwards of two-hundred dollars apiece during the live event.
Kage looked ready to rip his own hair out by the time he had signed the last one, his cramped hand barely able to scrawl a convincing approximation of his name, but he never complained out loud. Not even to me.