Long Shot: An MMA Stepbrother Romance (6 page)

 
She got the damn Civic right when she turned seventeen—she was determined to be like everyone else, even though we were poor as shit and picked on all the fucking time. She scrimped and saved her babysitting money, the tips from waitressing at Darryl’s Fish House, and she bought the damn thing. Nearly a decade later and it’s still running. It ain’t perfect on the bridge. It wobbles and protests, and the wipers ain’t worth a good goddamn. I’m trying to ignore the waves crashing against the side of the bridge. I crane my neck to look over at her, and it sends a pain through my shoulder, and shit does it ever hurt. But the way she looks in the spotty streetlights, filtering in through the rain, it’s a sight for sore eyes after so many years away.
 

Her silken blond hair tumbles over her shoulders, and I close my eyes, remembering for an instant just how it felt to touch her hair, bring her face close to mine. But it all went to hell that night. And it should have. I’d be a weight, dragging her down. It was easier to stick to my role. Keep fighting, keep fucking disreputable women, keep my head down and my fists up.
 

Natalie pulls off the bridge and breathes a deep sigh of relief. “I’ll get you fixed up at the clinic, but you can’t tell no one at the club that I did it. Else, I’ll have three or four boys a night knocking on my door. You got it?” She turns to me, her amber eyes serious. I try to keep a straight face, but her accent has gone deep country.
Cain’t tell no wonnn
. Her accent always comes out when she’s tired.

I crack a grin as she turns onto Beach Road and drives to the little urgent care clinic where she used to work. “You sound like a fisherman’s wife, Nat. You’ve gone island on me.”
 

She rolls her eyes. “It’s because you showed up after the longest damn shift I’ve ever pulled. This whole doctor thing ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“You’re good at it, Nat. You’ve got a knack for making people feel better just by being in the room with them.”

“If that’s the way it worked, I wouldn’t have bill collectors up my ass. Nor would I be pulling sixteen-hour shifts.” She groans. “And you need to stop sweet-talking me, Josh McRae. I thought I was done with you when you barreled out of my daddy’s house right after his funeral. You certainly showed up out of nowhere tonight, and if you weren’t fucked up as shit, I’d be kicking you out on your ass in the morning.” She pulls into a parking space at the urgent care center and turns off the car. Her face has always betrayed her feelings, and now I see hurt and anger reflected in her gaze. She frowns. “As it is, you’ve got two days to recover, and then I’m driving you back to your shitty apartment in Nags Head. You still live there, don’t you?”

“Yeah, close to the gym. But I swear, I’m getting out of that.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it, Josh. I have plenty of reason to doubt you.” I open my mouth to speak but think better of it. This woman is planning to stitch me up and stick me with needles in a minute or two, and it’s best not to argue with your doctor about ancient history. There’s a lull in the rain, the drops lighter now. “We best get on inside, Josh. I’ll tend you, and we’ll both get home so we can sleep.”
 

She gets out and hauls my heavy, broken body out of the passenger’s side door, sighing as she takes my weight on her much smaller body. I put my one mobile arm around her, and she walks up to the door and waves her key card, as easy as pie. I don’t ask how she still has the key, but I’d bet it was some old Shaw family trick. You can take the slick redneck out of town and fancy her all up with a medical degree, but she still knew how to steal her supper at the end of the day. Else, neither of us would have survived childhood.
 

“If we get caught, it’s the end of my career as a doctor, Josh. We need to be in and out.” She looks from side to side when she says it, and I’m pretty sure she’s laying it on thick for my benefit. I move to turn on a light switch, but she catches my hand. “Not a peep, no lights except in the exam room.” I nod. She walks me to one of the rooms and sits me down on the exam table. She slips on a pair of latex gloves and closes the blinds before switching on the lights. Before she exits the room, she looks back at me, and I see the vulnerability and pain in her expression. She walks away, and I listen as she gathers supplies. I’m an extra-special, sharp and sticky thorn in her side tonight, but it had to shake out this way.
 

I knew I was putting her in a bad position tonight, but Frank needs to see me as his golden boy, the most valuable fighter in his stable. And getting detained by police sniffing around at the hospital isn’t going to match up with that. I wasn’t ready to set eyes on Natalie yet. But the plan has to stand, and I guess it’s okay if it works out this way. I shift on the table, trying not to put pressure on my left side. My shoulder is burning like there are fire ants crawling inside my joint, and the bruise on my ribs is pulsing in time with the crawling fucking ants. I grit my teeth. I can take this. I can. It’s all for one goal—well, two goals—but I’m pretty sure that the second goal isn’t attainable. I fucked that up a long damn time ago.
 

Natalie wheels in an IV drip with a fat bag of saline in it. “All right, man. I’m the only doctor at the hospital who can get a needle in without a bruise. All thanks to doing nursing school first.”
 

She takes my hand and puts it on my leg. I close my eyes for a minute and listen to her breathing as she wipes an alcohol pad over my vein. She leans in close to me, and I breathe in, taking in the scent of her. She partly smells like the hospital, partly like her home. But underneath it all, there’s the essence of her. On my mama’s good days, she said to me that the top of the head was the piece of a person that always smelled just like them, that you could get addicted to someone by getting to know that scent. And the way Natalie smelled, well it was just like coming home.
 

Natalie slides the needle into my hand, and I wince. I’ve done plenty of drugs to get through fights—and to recover from them afterwards—but I’ve never shot anything up. The needle makes me queasy, but this is no time for me to show weakness. I open my eyes and look at her. Her eyes have gone distant, and her hands are moving quick, like she’s in the zone, assessing what to do next. She squeezes the IV bag and gets the saline flowing in my veins. She takes a syringe and empties whatever it is into the IV port. Almost instantly, the fire ants’ crawling begins to fade, and the pulse in my side stops hammering. There’s a rush of sweet, clouded happiness that sings through my veins, and I grin, sinking down into the feeling.
 

“You like that, huh?” She puts her hands on her hips in a deliciously sexy, sassy stance. I stare at her, look over the luscious curves of her body, unabashed. The fluorescent light seems to glow around her blond hair in a halo of perfect light. “They all love the morphine.”
 

I laugh. When the sound comes out of my mouth, it’s goofy and far away. She smiles too, or is that a sneer I see on her face?
 
I can’t properly tell. I feel like reaching out and taking her in my arms right now. The warmth of that perfect body, her legs wrapped around me—I’d had that feeling once, and I’d let it go.
 

You’re so pretty, Nat
. I want to say it, but the words are stuck in my throat. She’s risen so high above everyone else, it’s like she wasn’t even human anymore.
 

“Quit lookin’ at me like that.” She sneers at me as she secures my IV in place, but I almost detect a faint blush creeping over her chest, over the apples of her cheeks. I might be hallucinating it.
 

“Like what?” I watch as she prepares another syringe, her movements expert, precise.
 

“Like you’re
hungry
.” I laugh, and she steps closer to me, puts the needle up to my head. “Like I’m a burger. That ship has
sailed.
” The sneer stays in her voice, but she can’t help that sarcasm from slipping out here and there.

“Hey, what are you doing? I’ve already been stuck with one needle, Nat.”

“Lidocaine. For the stitches. Hold still there, big guy.” I feel a few small pinches around the gash in my head. I was so worked up about my shoulder and ribs that I’d barely noticed the pain there, but I knew it was fucking nasty. I was thrown hard tonight. It’s a wonder I’ve lasted as long as I’ve had. But I’m getting out, moving forward, going on. Natalie cleans me with a hot washcloth and then another alcohol wipe. I barely feel the needle as it goes in—she’s an expert at this kind of shit. She fastens a bandage over the stitches and helps me out of my makeshift sling. I’m just watching her, the whole time, enjoying the view of the girl I’ve missed for three years.
 

Not a girl. A real woman, now. Smarter and more gutsy than you or anyone you know.
 

Before I know it, she’s shooting me up again at the wound on my side and setting my aching left arm over her back so she can stitch me up where the other fighter caught me with a razor blade on my ribs.
 

“Fuck Natalie, no more needles.” I try to wrench out of her grip. Even under the haze of morphine, the lidocaine stings as it goes in this time. She ignores me and holds me steady.

“What got you here, Joshie?” I open my mouth to tell her as she finishes stitching up the wound, but I think I’d better keep this one to myself. It’s a good story. I beat down yet another fighter from out of town. My MMA name is “Long Shot,” and I’ve lived up to it by messing up some of the best fighters along the coast. The purse at Frank’s club is always fat, and Frank lets us all fight without any kind of rules. So we’ve usually got out-of-towners coming through, hoping to beat the club’s favorite fighter. But I prove them wrong. This one got me with a razor blade. But he looks a hell of a lot worse than me.
 

“Dunno. Probably hit up against the side of the cage.”
 

“The cut is awfully clean.” She makes a small sound, like she knows what I was really up to. She probably does. The audience wants blood, so we make sure there’s blood. Frank does, anyway. Natalie grabs a roll of gauze and tapes up my ribs the best she can. “They’re just bruised, I think. I’m not going to risk an x-ray here. If they’re broken, you’ll just have to deal.”

Whatever dose of morphine she’s given me is starting to wear off, and those fire ants feel like they’re back inside my shoulder. The throbbing in my side starts again, centering on the stitched-up wound. I put my fingers to the stitches—clean, professional, perfectly tiny. “Nice job, Nat.”
 

She swivels around, her wavy blond hair falling in a cascade over her shoulders. Her dress dips just a little, so all I see right now is that golden Rapunzel hair and an eyeful of her round, full, perfect tits popping out of the deep v-neck of her dress.

“Stop touching those stitches, Josh.” She slaps my hand away like she used to do when we were kids and I was messing with her schoolbooks. The touch of her hand is familiar and intimate in a way she doesn’t realize. To me, it feels good, feels like things are back to normal. It feels like this chasm of time has somehow closed, and we’re right back where we used to be before I stormed out after her daddy’s wake. “You’ll get it infected.”

“Will not,” I say. My eyes are drawn back to her cleavage. Time has been very, very good to her. She probably thinks the few pounds she’s gained make her look frumpy, but that little bit of weight has filled out her curves and turned her into the woman she was meant to be—the kind who has regular meals and doesn’t skip dessert.
 

“Will so.” She slaps a bandage over the stitches, and I groan.
 

“That fucking hurts, Nat.” She fastens tape over it.
 

“Serves you right for coming back in the middle of the night and staring at my tits the whole time I’m tending to your sorry ass. Good-for-nothing, womanizing, inappropriately flirty...”

“You forgot ‘extremely handsome’ and ‘athletic.’ Oh and, ‘brilliant.’” I can tell she’s suppressing a smile. She rolls her eyes for the umpteenth time since I arrived at her house.

“I should have kicked you out of the damn house, cocky asshole.” I grip Natalie’s arm for support and slide off the table while she unhooks the saline bag and carries it in one hand. With both hands occupied, her dress falls a bit more. I laugh and try to look away, but my eyes are drawn back again and again. Those breasts are the subjects of my eighteen year old fantasies, and it’s been years since I laid eyes on them. I might be imagining things, but it seems like I notice her eyes connecting with my body, meeting mine for a second and then looking away briefly.

“I’m only cocky because I’m the best fighter the Outer Banks has ever seen. And because I can get any lady, tourist or townie—”

“Enough, Josh. You ever listen to yourself?”

“Not enough to learn anything, I’m sure,” I say. I know it’s what she believes, what she wants me to say. We’re falling into our old routines. She shuffles around, trying to figure out the best way to get me out of the room and take the saline bag at the same time, then she sighs and shoves the saline bag into my hand. She looks at me again, her eyes sweeping over my body. That spark sings through me, the spark I’ve always felt with her.

“You take this, Josh. It’s best we keep the saline going since I imagine you’re ridiculously dehydrated as per usual after your fights, and I’m going to bet we need another dose of morphine before the night’s over.”

I nod and lean into her body, gripping the saline bag tight. She throws her bag over her shoulder and pushes me out into the hall. The heat comes off of her body in waves, and I feel her breast brush up against my bare torso. Even with the sedating effect of the morphine, blood rushes down to my cock, and I feel it stir. I close my eyes as we limp along and try to think about fighting, about Frank, about my GED test, about my sponsor, about anything but Nat. But I can’t focus, and the images of our last night together keep rushing through my mind.