Never Choose Flight (A Fighter Romance Novel) (4 page)

I sighed and headed into the office. Up the agonizingly long set of stairs to the fourth floor. My knees were still a little wobbly.

As I walked I figured out what I was going to say. I was jetlagged from the trip. People would believe that. I had really gone on a trip. If that wasn’t enough, I’d mention something about having vomited. That would be enough. I was well liked around the office. No one was going to be that mad at me or anything.

“Hey,” came the cheery voice that greeted me every morning. Samantha. Probably my best friend in the office. The receptionist.

“Hey,” I said, walking up to her desk.

“How was your trip?”

I hesitated. My mind had been so far away from my trip ever since I got back. “Good,” I finally said. “Well, not that good.”

“Family shit?” she asked.

“Like usual.”

“Ah well. It’s good to have you back,” she said. “Did your flight just get in this morning?”

“No,” I said. “Uh, it was pretty late last night. I was super jetlagged this morning though. Couldn’t drag myself out of bed.”

She stared at me through her curly hair. “You don’t look jetlagged,” she said. She could see right through my lies. She stood up and leaned towards me. Boobs perking out of her shirt. “Why are you actually late?” she said in a quiet voice.

“I am
actually
jetlagged,” I said with the most irritated voice I could manage on her.

“Sure,” she said, sitting back down. “Absolutely you are.” She gave me a wink. I have no idea how she could read me so well.

I walked away, towards my desk. Plopped myself down without saying a thing.

“Good morning,” came the other voice that greeted me every morning. It was also a sweet voice, much in a more sickening way. “How was your trip?”

I looked up at Derek. “Fine,” I said. I didn’t much like talking to Derek. He’s not a terrible guy, by any stretch, but there’s one thing that everyone in the office knows about him. He has a crush on me. Not a grown-up crush. Not a let’s-go-for-coffee-sometime crush. But, like, a highschool crush. With the stupid flirting, and the nervousness. And the staring at my boobs.

“You’re a bit late,” he said.

“Yep,” I said. It’s amazing how oblivious to hints he is. I’ve been trying to shut him up for months now. Never letting our conversations go anywhere. And yet he continues to try.

“Don’t worry though. I kept everything under control while you were gone. Even if it was for a few more hours than expected.

“Thanks,” I said.

I opened up my mail program and started to work my way through it. So many unread messages. So much of it spam. So much of it important. No way to tell which is which until I’ve read it.

I go through them one by one, like I do every morning, but today I’m slower. Every now and then I just read something that sends my mind off on a tangent. People looking for the
hard
paper stock. Wondering if we offer
overnight
shipping. Hoping for some
smooth
, glossy paper. It seems like every word even remotely connected to last night brings back the whole flood of amazing memories.

Eventually the emails just got
too
boring. I was distracted. My mind was somewhere else entirely. My desk is in a position where no one can see my screen. So I opened up my browser and searched “Malcolm the beast”. Nothing that came up had anything to do with what I was looking for. I tried “Malcolm the beast thomson”. There were a couple electronic message board posts that might have been about the Malcolm I had been fucked by the night before, but it was hard to tell. Apparently he isn’t the first man on the planet to refer to himself as a beast.

Then I tried “Malcolm the beast thomson los angeles fighter”. And that brought up the kind of thing I was looking for. All the website still looked like they were from the nineties. But the first one I clicked on had a huge picture of Malcolm on the left hand side. On the right were his stats. Six feet tall. Two hundred pounds. Never lost a fight.

That last part I found a bit unbelievable. Like, I’d seen what he could do. It was understandable that no one had ever been able to beat him. But you’d like he would have
told
me about that. Tried to impress me with it.

All the other sites I could find about him said the same though. A lot of the compared him to another fighter, from New York. He had an even more intimidating fighter-name. He was Terry ‘The God’ Fletcher. The God. He also had a perfect record, I found. And he was known for harassing his opponents before the fight. Making them go crazy so that they’d be easy targets.

I was glad that Terry was so far away. But I did find a ton of message board conversations about who would win, The Beast or The God. It was split pretty evenly. I didn’t find any evidence that the fight would ever actually happen though, so that was good.

The next thing I knew, an hour had flown by and it was lunch time. Samantha walked past me and tapped me on the shoulder. I stood and followed her. Into the break room, past the crowd up people, and into our own little corner. We always sat next to each other on the little loveseat and ate our lunches off of our laps.

“So,” she said in a voice quiet enough that no one else would hear her. “Spill. Tell me everything. Was he cute?”

I could tell that she was just fishing. Pretending that she knew things that she obviously didn’t. But I could also tell that she wasn’t going to give up. She’d find out what I’d been up to whether I wanted her to or not. “Yes,” I said. “But I’d probably go with hot, not cute.”

“Fuck yeah,” she said, a little too loud. She turned her volume back down for, “So details! How’d you meet?”

“On the plane ride home. But don’t get your hopes up. This was a one time thing. I don’t have a boyfriend now.”

“Sure,” she said.

“He’s a fighter. As his job, I think. And it’s dangerous. He said that he cares about me too much, doesn’t want me to get hurt. So we can’t be together.”

“Aw,” said Samantha, making the syllable last for as long as possible. “That’s kinda sweet. But do you think it’ll actually happen?”

“What?”

“You two staying apart. Like, for good.”

“I think so,” I said. “It’ll take me a while to get all the things he did to me out of my head, but it’ll happen.”

“Sure,” said Samantha. “Does he have your number?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He’ll call.”

“I don’t think so.”

“After a night with you? Any guy would be a total fool not to call.”

I smiled.

“So what’s the news?” asked Derek. He awkwardly sat himself down on the armrest.

“No news,” I said.

“Just catching up a bit,” said Samantha.

“Cool,” said Derek, who then smiled and stared off into the distance.

I looked at Samantha and we sighed in unison. Our chat was over. But she winked at me again. She liked doing that. Leaving the interpretation of the winks up to me.

* * *

After work, I was back in my car, driving towards my place. But then I took an unexpected turn off of the freeway. I guess some part of my brain meant to do it, but I certainly wasn’t aware of the plan.

I drove past the warehouse. In the daylight, it looked exactly like the rest of them. There were no cars parked out front. No sign of anyone inside. No crowd. No booze. Just a regular warehouse. Really the only way I could tell it was the same place was the punching bag hanging from one side.

After that I carried on, trying to trace the path that Malcolm had driven the night before. It had been dark, and he had driven fast, so I think part of me was worried that I wouldn’t be able to find his place if I tried. But after fifteen minutes, I was parked outside of it. I knew where it was. I didn’t need to worry about that.

I had no way to tell if he was home. The place had big windows, but I couldn’t see any lights on inside. Not that he would have needed lights on, though, given the big windows. There wasn’t a car parked outside, other than my own, but that didn’t mean anything either.
Maybe
he had a car that he just hadn’t taken to the airport. But I had no way of knowing.

Part of me wanted to just go up and knock. But then I remembered what we’d agreed to. It was a one night stand. And I didn’t want to be in danger. So I drove home, taking a bit of a scenic route.

Once I was home, I made myself some dinner. Then I pulled out my phone. Zero missed calls. I know that the card I gave him had my cell number on it. That’s how devoted I was to selling paper. And yet he hadn’t called.

I left it on the coffee table as I flicked on the TV and put on some distraction. Normally I’d read a book, but my favorite genre has always been romance. And when emails about paper get me going because of recent memories, I can’t imagine what some of the stuff I read would do. I might just go insane.

So I sat there, watching TV. But really I was only pretending to watch TV. Really I was watching my phone. Watching how it wasn’t going off. No one was calling me. Malcolm wasn’t calling me like Samantha thought he would.

Maybe he’d actually done it. Maybe he’d torn up my business card without looking at the number. That’s how much he wanted us to stay apart. It was a weird sort of romantic idea - that he’d keep us apart
because
he cared about me.

But it sure didn’t
feel
romantic. It felt like I was being stood up, almost. Not quite though. Like a man said, “Hey, go see this movie that you really want to see with me. I won’t be there, but please wait outside the theatre for me to show up.”

By the time ten o’clock rolled around, I was dead tired. It wasn’t until I was lying down in nothing but a pair of panties that I noticed something.

I hadn’t had a cup of coffee all day. Not even a drip. I had always thought I was hopelessly addicted. That I’d fall asleep if I didn’t get my dose. But here I was. A full day of consciousness, no caffeine necessary. It was weird. It was like he had been a stimulant that I’d been wired on all day. And now it was time for the crash.

I checked my phone one last time before falling asleep. I hadn’t missed any calls. No text messages. He really wasn’t going to try and contact me.

I had a night of deep sleep, and woke up feeling strangely refreshed when my alarm went off. Once I was back in my own bathroom, standing under that warm water, I made up my mind. For good. I guess I’d never really had a choice, but I was finally being clear with myself. I even spoke it out loud.

“You are not going to end up with Malcolm Thomson,” I said. “It was a one night thing. You will never see him again. And that’s okay.”

Somehow, saying it outloud really helped. And it didn’t feel bad. The truth didn’t hurt. I’d had awesome sex. No need for me to be greedy and demand a relationship as well.

I ate breakfast and reminisced about the sex. Maybe I was a one night stand kind of girl after all.

I drank a huge cup of coffee once I was out of the shower, and got ready for my day. I ran my hair through the flat iron. Put on a nice and sensible outfit. Then sat at the breakfast table staring into my bowl of cereal, with my second cup of coffee steaming next to it.

I hadn’t missed any calls while I was asleep. He really hadn’t tried to call me. Or contact me in anyway. I imagined that he had driven past my house just like I’d driven past his, but then I remembered he had no idea where I lived.

If he had really done it - really torn up my card - then he didn’t have a way of getting ahold of me even if he wanted to. I guess that was the idea. Tearing up my card meant that no matter how badly he wanted me, there was no way for him to get a hold of me. No way for him to drag me back into his dangerous life.

And maybe that was a good thing. I finished up my breakfast, chucked back the coffee, and then drove to work, exhausted. Another day of emails and phonecalls on the amazing topic of paper.

I was distracted the moment I got there. Not by anything in particular. It was like every other day that I’d been here, I had no idea what I was missing. I didn’t really know that there was an exciting alternative. A life of brawling. But now I did. And that made my monotonous job feel all the more dull. And it’s hard to make a job selling paper even
more
dull.

But I made it through the day. One coffee after another. One email after another. Phone call after phone call after phone call. My sales were a bit lower, but I told people it was just from the trip. It would take a while for me to get back into the swing of things. And I hoped it was true. I was selling slow enough that I might not make quota.

But that felt unimportant. Quota felt like nothing. If I didn’t succeed, I would lose my job. That’s nothing compared to getting the shit beaten out of me. Nothing compared to what Malcolm faces every day. My whole life felt inconsequential.

I went home and watched TV again. No missed calls. No one trying to contact me.

That night while I fell asleep, I was in the drowsy phase where anything seems possible. And I imagined that maybe he was in the same position as me. He was just sitting there, wishing I’d try to get ahold of him somehow.

But I didn’t have his number. I had no idea how frequently he was actually in his house. I felt tiny while I fell asleep, surrounded by an infinite darkness. And at the other end of that darkness, he was. He had lost my number. I’d forgotten where he lived. And we both spent the rest of our lives trying to get to each other, but never making any progress.

I tossed and turned all night long.

* * *