Off Limits: A Stepbrother MMA Romance (15 page)

I’d had plenty of
dinners with our old housekeeper, Doris. She’d always clucked and
fussed over me and insisted I have seconds, taking personal pride in
how big I seemed to grow overnight. Every night. She’d claimed it
had been her roasted chicken, and she might have been right. I could
eat a whole one right now.

But instead, 6:30 on a
Friday night B-list has-been Candice Kidd flitted around our kitchen
in a frilly apron and fluffy high heels, the kind with angora tufts
coming off the front. I guessed she thought they were kitchy-cute,
like the 50s apron. She looked like she’d been miscast in the part
of a housewife when she should have gotten homewrecker. She’d
clearly had a lot of work done. Her breasts lifted up like
unnaturally round grapefruits and her lips puckered out, plump from
an injection. Her skin pulled taut; no surprise would cause a wrinkle
on her forehead.

Also in the kitchen,
Jewel stood in the corner with her shoulders slumped, mumbling
something in response to a question. She wore a long-sleeved, ankle
length tent dress. I couldn’t imagine a single shop in L.A. sold
shit like that. She must have gone online and found some fringe site
for people with sun allergies or extreme religious intolerance for
showing any skin.

She didn’t glance up
when I walked through the kitchen. She looked like a lamp with a
blown bulb. She’d closed up shop, no sign of all that heat and
desire that had been welling up inside of her, exploding last night.

The oven timer beeped.
I went upstairs to pull on a t-shirt and we all sat down together at
the completely unused dining table and played pretend. My father
filled Candice’s wine glass and gave her a smile as if he were
deeply, truly in love instead of already growing antsy. Candice
served me a heaping spoonful of some kind of nasty-looking casserole
as if she were running for mother of the year instead of dying to run
off to the spa.

It was the pretending I
hated the most. Maybe that was why I liked fighting so much. No
pretending in the cage.

Jewel sat at the end of
the table, pushing her food around and looking miserable. I sat next
to her, fists balled at my sides, coiled with tension and
frustration.

“Good to see you
two!” My father kicked off the conversation.

“How long are you
guys going to be here?” My question came out gruff. I wasn’t as
good at faking shit as he was.

“I’m going to take
that as sign of your reluctance for me to leave. Isn’t that right,
Tucker?”

“Sure.” I kept my
eyes level, my voice taut. It was his house and I was freeloading off
of it. He had every right to keep me in line. For six more weeks that
was, while I did nothing but train. Then, I’d cut all ties and head
out on my own, making money off my fighting. I just had to keep
focused, remember why I was doing all of this.

We ate a while in
silence, the sounds of our forks scraping on the plates not exactly
filling the gap.

“How’s the
internship at the bank, son?” my father finally asked. Son? Did he
think he was in a 1950s sitcom, too? Should I call him pops?

“Fine.”

Jewel looked up at me,
sharp. Shit. She knew I wasn’t doing an internship at a bank.

“Learning the ropes?”
my father asked. “Working hard? I was surprised to see you had time
for the gym today.”

“It was Friday.” I
shrugged, not exactly lying. Not that I cared about lying to him, I
just wanted to make it through this summer.

“I hear those guys
you work with are tough,” Jewel piped up from the side. “Real
fighters.”

I coughed my water,
down the wrong pipe.

“Investment banking
can be cutthroat,” my father agreed.

“It’s like they
send them down into a cage,” Jewel observed.

He nodded at her sage
words. I gave Jewel a look and she winked at me. Winked! I liked that
sass a hell of a lot more than the caving-in I’d seen around her
mother.

More silence. We were
good at that part, saying nothing.

“How about you?”
Candice decided to turn the spotlight on her daughter. “Are you
making any time to get out and live a little? Or is your nose always
buried in a book?”

Jewel sighed and took a
strategic bite of her macaroni casserole. She made a slight grimace
and swallowed it down with the help of some water. It was pretty
disgusting, goopy and crazy salty. Neither she nor my father had any
idea what they were doing with this playing house shit. It was kind
of funny when you thought about it.

“You only live once,
kiddo.” My father offered his sage advice.

“Lay off her, she’s
doing fine,” I grumbled. Where did he get off telling Jewel how to
live her life?

“I’m sure you’re
getting out.” He looked over at me, wry and acerbic. “Every
night.”

“You know me.” I
looked at him, blank. I wasn’t giving him anything.

“Well, don’t screw
things up with this internship. When you graduate from college you
won’t have the Princeton degree, the Princeton network.”

“I’m not sure how
I’ll manage,” I answered deadpan. “But somehow every day people
struggle through life without a degree from Princeton.”

“One day you’ll
understand what you turned down. You’ll see what a bad choice you
made.”

I could feel Jewel’s
keen eyes on me again, observing, understanding. She hadn’t known
I’d gotten accepted at Princeton and chosen to go to state school.
I bet she knew why, too, without my having to lay it out for her. The
only reason they’d let me in was the library wing with my
grandfather’s name on it. It housed special collections, the types
of books they called manuscripts and then kept enclosed in glass for
the sole purpose of getting old, gray donors to give more money to
the school. I’d had enough of that crap at the preppy boarding
schools my father had sent me to—one after the other after I kept
getting kicked out.

“I’m out of here.”
I stood, pushing my chair back. A woman in a white shirt and black
pants appeared and moved to start clearing my place. Of course, my
old man had hired in help for the duration of his stay. Casserole
aside, he and Candice weren’t going to lift a finger around the
house.

“I got it,” I said,
grabbing my own plate.

§

Fourth of July came and
went without any of the coming I wanted. I nursed a beer at a
backyard barbeque this guy Jax hosted, one of the fighters on my
team. He was a good guy, not much of a talker, but a kick-ass
fighter.

I went home early,
restless and unsatisfied. Not because the party had been tame, though
it definitely was nothing like what I’d done last year. Last Fourth
of July I’d raged hard with my old crew, tearing through parties
and women all night. We’d been out in the Hamptons or on the
Vineyard, I honestly didn’t remember which one. But it didn’t
matter that this year’s party paled in comparison, what mattered
was I didn’t have Jewel. She wasn’t writhing underneath me as I
pounded into her, begging me to come. Anything less than that and I
felt unsatisfied.

I’d barely seen her
since our parents had arrived back in L.A. She’d stopped doing yoga
outside in the mornings, ate out of the house. I didn’t know where
she went over the weekend, who she was hanging out with and I hated
it. It might be that guy Mike from her internship. She’d seemed to
like him. Motherfucker.

I thought about texting
her but didn’t do it. The girl was far back in her shell. And now
that I saw more of her mother, I got it. You didn’t have to be a
brain surgeon to figure out why Jewel might have issues with a mother
like that. She’d basically had two choices, follow in her footsteps
or run in the other direction. She could vamp it up and seduce
herself a man or a string of men like her mother before her, or lock
it down, hit the books and escape.

Now wasn’t the time
to try to talk her out of the choice she’d made.

But I wasn’t letting
her go. There was no chance I’d let Jewel get away from me for
good. But while our parents were around us acting like teenage
idiots, swatting each other’s behinds and making kissy faces, it
did put a damper on things. Some people had to sign up to be the
grown-ups in the family. Guessed that left me and Jewel.

I couldn’t stop
thinking about her, though, catching her in the doorway of my room
flushed, hand down her panties. It about drove me insane. I channeled
it all into my training. My father had no reason to suspect I wasn’t
working at a bank, I was out the door at the crack of dawn and then
didn’t get home until fourteen hours later, stone cold sober and
exhausted as hell. He even told me he was proud of me, working so
hard. If only he knew.

I had a fight on
Thursday night. It wasn’t as big as the one I’d done almost two
weeks ago. It wouldn’t be televised; there wouldn’t be as much
hype. That wouldn’t come until the end of July when I had another
exhibition fight. That would be my next big one, a night when I had
to bring it. After a fight like that, I hoped I could get signed.

Coach had scheduled
this Thursday’s fight once he’d seen I’d walked from the last
match with just a couple of bruises and cuts. Nothing broken, nothing
even hurt too bad, I’d been 100% in a handful of days. That opened
the opportunity for another fight, more experience, one more step on
the way to freedom. I couldn’t wait.

I also wanted Jewel to
come.

Finally, Thursday, I texted her:

Fight
tonight, 7 p.m. Ticket for you at the door.

I sent her the address
of the gym. No response.

I figured she wouldn’t
come. She’d barely looked my way over the past week. She had to be
embarrassed as hell at what I’d seen her doing. I planned on seeing
her do much, much more than that in the weeks to come. That noise
she’d made, the high-pitched cry of release? I was dead set on
hearing it over and over again.

That night, getting
ready, I still had her on my mind. How she’d looked at my last
fight, seeing her out there in the crowd cheering for me, standing in
that white dress. How I’d heard her voice in the cage during the
fight. Tonight, I wanted to beat down my opponent and show her, pound
my chest and roar. If I couldn’t touch her, I at least wanted her
to see me dominate.

No stage show this time
around, no ring girls, I jogged to the cage without fanfare. No
Jewel, either. The seat I’d set aside for her was empty.

Fuck. I stepped into
the cage, took my pep talk from coach, and dove in. You didn’t
always get what you wanted in life, but you couldn’t let that stop
you. You had to keep going, relentless, after what you wanted at all
costs.

It was a tough match
up. He was a judo guy, a black belt, and all he wanted to do was try
to immobilize me and force me to tap out by locking my joints or
getting me in a strangle hold. It was the kind of fight promoters
hated, with long stretches of time looking like nothing was
happening, just me and him locked in a struggle on the mat, each one
trying to gain advantage.

With my wrestling and
jujitsu background, I knew how to hold my ground, but it wasn’t my
favorite kind of fight, either. I liked staying up on my feet, timing
my jabs and uppercuts, seizing the right moments for a solid kick.
One of the reasons I’d chosen this L.A. training camp was the mixed
methodology. If you were strong at one part of the fight, Coach
forced you to focus on your weaker skills. The more I studied
kickboxing and boxing, the more I loved it and realized the game
changer for me would be building up my standing aggression technique.

That didn’t happen
tonight. We grappled on the floor for one round, two, then three. The
judges called it a draw.

No resolution, no
release. Just like my life.

Back in the locker
room, I showered and dressed. Some guys came over to tell me it was a
good fight. But mostly they left me alone. I knew it had been a good
fight. The guy had a reputation for his take-downs and he’d brought
his A-game on me. It hadn’t been enough to win. But I hadn’t
sealed the deal, either. I’d let the win slip out of my hands.

With a loud, still
unsatisfying bang, I slammed the palm of my hand against a metal
locker.

“Tuck?”

I heard her soft voice
behind me and wondered if I’d made it up.

“Can I come in?”
she asked, tentative. “The guys said it would be OK, but…”

I turned around, my
hand still up pressing an ice pack to my forehead. Jewel stood there,
her eyes filled with concern as she walked toward me.

“Are you OK?” she
asked. “You definitely won that fight. I don’t know what the
judges were thinking.”

I cracked a smile. She
made me do it. I liked the sound of her blindly in my corner.

“He fought hard,” I
said.

“You fought harder,”
she insisted. “A draw is bullshit.” Fire in her eyes, hands on
her hips, she stood radiant and fierce. I loved it.

“You came.” I knew
I was stating the obvious. She was right there in front of me. But
I’d thought she hadn’t come and my brain was taking a while to
catch up.

“I stood in the back.
I’m sorry. I have a hard time watching all of it.”

“You don’t like
watching two grown men pummel each other?”

“I don’t like
watching you get hurt.” She looked, concerned, up at where I’d
been cut. Again, I’d managed to not get too banged up. A grappling
match tended to leave less marks than punches and kicks. But I still
felt sore as fuck.

“It’s not bad.” I
removed the ice pack. She winced anyway when she saw my cut. She must
not know what a bad beating looked like. It made this look like a
playground scrape.

She stepped closer and
took the ice pack from my hand. Reaching up, she brought it to the
abrasion on my forehead. “You need to keep icing this.”

“Are you a bossy
nurse, Jewel?” We stood close and I could smell her hair, lightly
fragrant like lavender.