I’m rooming with Diane in Atlanta, and I love that she keeps her toothbrush toothpaste, and all her girly necessities as neatly tucked away as I do. She’s a
great
roommate, sunny and positive every moment of the day, and I love that we get to talk about healthy cooking during the evenings, when we each hit our own queen-sized bed.
I’ve learned that she shops for the best local, freshest ingredients every morning, and she feeds Remington only top organic food, every single day, on schedule every three to four hours—which is why his workouts seem to be spaced in sections of either 3-2-3, or 4-4 with heavier meals in the case of the latter. The man eats for three fully grown, hungry lions. A lot of protein. A lot of vegetables. And in the half-hour window after his workouts, so many carbs that even
I
get carb-high just thinking about those delicious sweet potatoes and pastas he wolfs down.
Tomorrow Remington has his first fight out of two in Atlanta, and this afternoon I find myself hanging out at the sidelines of his privately rented gym, waiting to stretch him once he’s finished. It’s our third evening here, and I’ve already realized that Remington Tate trains like a madman.
A.
Mad.
Man.
Today in particular, he seems unstoppable.
“
Hey, Tate! Stop showing off in front of Brooke!” Coach yells, and we hear a laugh from across the gym, where Remington is killing—heartlessly
murdering
—a speed bag.
“
I can’t wear him out,” Lupe says as he turns back to us. He drags a hand down his bald head as he checks some sort of timer he has draped around his neck. His usual scowl deepens in intensity. “We’re going on nine hours today and he’s still got juice. But don’t even look at me, Pete. We
both
knew this was going to happen since he…”
“
Nine hours a day really is excessive, don’t you think? Even seven a day is crazy,” I tell Pete from the sidelines. Today we’ve gone way past his 4-4 training times, and I’m stunned that the man still keeps going.
Even when I trained for the Olympics, I didn’t hit it quite that hard, and frankly, Remington’s training schedule leaves me agog. Today he’s done hanging abs, where he hangs from his feet and swings his body up to his knees, as fast as he can, perfectly working those washboard abs like he’s doing nothing. He does pull-ups, push-ups, mountain climbers, planks. He jumps rope with only one foot, then switches to the other, then he crosses the rope, swings, twists, and turns, all while I barely even get to
see
the rope, he makes it fly so fast as it rhythmically slaps the ground. After that, he shadow boxes or hits the ring with a sparring partner, and if his sparring partner wears out before he does, like he did today, Remy goes back to the heavy bags or the speedball, and ends up
soaked
.
“
He likes wearing himself out,” Pete explains to me as we keep watching him. “If he can still give a punch late in the day, he bites Coach’s head off that he didn’t ride him hard enough.”
It takes one more hour for him to slow down, and by the time Coach whistles for me, I’m the one who’s dead tired from the visual stimulation of watching Remington Tate work out. Every move he makes is so aggressively primal it feels
sexual
to me.
Stifling a hot little shiver, I make my legs move and head over to the floor mats, where Remington is standing, waiting for me, already shirtless. Rivulets of sweat cling to his torso, and I know he’s perfectly warm and that his muscles have been trained to exhaustion. There’s no more muscle glycogen in storage, his glucose will be low, and he’ll be so hot he’ll be like a warmed pretzel when I maneuver him. The mere prospect of it makes me equally hot. It’s a dream of mine, to dedicate my life to this, but it’s such a tactile job that with this man, it’s a big challenge. Not only because his muscles are so strong compared to my own, but because I can barely make contact with his bronzed skin without feeling buzzed. Every pore in my body jumps to attention and hones in on whichever part of my body is touching his. I really hate this loss of control in me.
Now I watch his muscles bulge as he towels himself off and haphazardly drags the towel across his damp hair, leaving it even more sexy and spiky. I’m also wearing tennis shoes and a tight running gear outfit to make myself move easily over him, and those striking blue eyes sweep over me as I approach.
He's panting, unsmiling, then he drops on a bench while I go around and come up to him from behind.
He groans when I wrap my fingers around his shoulders and start digging deep. Sparks of excitement strike me low in my tummy when I make contact, but I try quelling all my reactions and focus on loosening his neck, his triceps, his biceps. I push into his pectorals, his core, trying not to respond like a woman to every clench of his muscles under my fingers, the amazing tautness of his skin beneath my touch.
We work on every joint, pulling everything loose, my moves occasionally making him make a low, purring sound. My sex muscles clench and I try to relax them, but every time he groans, they grip and clench tighter.
I hate it when they do that too.
Breathing slow and deep, I spend extra time as I rub his deltoids, the roundest, squarest part of the shoulder. I stretch and roll them, and then I follow to the supraspinatus, a small muscle of the rotator cuff, and also the most injured of the four muscles surrounding that cuff.
He’s still panting when I’m done, except now, so am I.
It takes me a moment to remember our conversation from the plane, and I smirk. “Not yet. But don’t worry. If you keep working out like this, we’ll get there before you know it.”
My adrenals are going to be shot if this keeps up.
“
Remy! Call out Remy already! REMINGTOOOOON!”
Even now, I remember my perfect crouching position at the starting blocks, the way all my senses seemed to hone in on the one sound of the starting shot, where everything—and I mean everything—zaps awake on that sound, and you go from standstill to running your heart out in a fraction of a second.
I rise from my seat like the entire roomful of people do, but that’s all I can do as I watch him take on the stage in the way only he knows how to do. The crowd gets instantly high on him, and I’m lightheaded too. There he is, a woman’s living, breathing fantasy, doing his slow, cocky turn, spiky black hair, darkly tanned chest, dimpled smile—
killer
smile—all in the package of Remington Tate. He’s perfection itself, and a new surge of hormones sweeps through me as I do what the rest of the crowd does and take in his visual, so blatantly on display in those low riding boxing shorts and so strikingly sexy, he becomes the center of my attention.
Ever since I stopped competing, I’ve gained body fat and am now at a healthy eighteen percent. I’m curvier than I ever used to be, with a little extra lift in my butt, and nice padding to my breasts. But I have never been more aware of my body and all its inner and outer parts than when I interact with this one man. I just don’t even know if I can ever get used to it. Can ever make him stop doing this to me. Can ever let myself “own” the fact that—yes, this man drives my body out of control.
I’m still smiling like a dope when the bell rings, and I don’t mean to hold my breath while I’m watching, but I do. Remington looks almost like a bored Rottweiler as his opponent, the “Grasshopper,” seems to jump all over the ring and around him like a baby kangaroo.
He knocks him out quickly, and because he keeps winning, he fights a line of new opponents, one after the other. From what Pete has told me, only the last eight finalists in each city will compete in the next designated city, and it will all come down to a big fight at the end of the tour, in New York, where only the top two men will engage in a long 16-round fight, rather than a handful of 3-round fights.
Now Remington takes on a man that looks more like a wrestler than a boxer. His abs are flabby and bulky, and he’s about double as wide as Remington. Something fierce and primitive grips my core, and I’m on my feet with a silent “no!” the instant the man they’d called “the Butcher” rams a hit into Remy’s ribcage. Remy’s slammed so hard, I can hear the breath tear out of him.
My insides seize in dread even when he recovers easily, and my heart doesn’t stop pounding in my chest. I bite my lip as I watch him land a set of perfect punches on Butcher’s core. He moves so fluidly, every part of his body flexible and strong, sometimes I forget he’s fighting against someone else merely because of the way he hypnotizes me with his moves.
I love watching those powerful legs, with thick muscles, and how they balance him and move with both strength and agility. I love each flex of his quads, his shoulders, his biceps, the way the vine tattoo that circles his arms only emphasizes how finely formed his shoulders and biceps are between them.