Chapter 1

No matter how many times I saw it, I was always stunned by the brutality of mixed martial arts. Not that I was complaining, mostly. The two men in the octagon in front of me were formidable specimens, and as tough as they came. They would have looked right at home on a battlefield a thousand years ago. These men...the joke was always that other men hated the fighters because they could show up at a bar, take your girl, then kick your ass if you protested.

They just had a different gear. Driven, obsessed, and maybe a little bit insane. Three things of which I was maybe, if not the exact opposite, at least very, very different.

Thud. After a particularly fierce blow landed by the impossibly hot Braden Dean, a fine sheet of sweat and blood was knocked off of one fighter’s face onto the people in the front row of the media section, including me, the intrepid spectator known as Alyssa Edwards. I closed her eyes and wiped my face with my forearm. What would it feel like to get hit so hard that this happened? What would it be like to get paid for it?

“Oh my God!” squealed my friend, Chantelle. Unlike me, Chantelle looked like there was nothing she would rather be doing. I think she was even jealous of the ring girls, professional hot chicks who pranced around the ring in between rounds, waving signs advertising the round number, which of course, no one ever noticed.

When the round ended Chantelle still hadn’t wiped the sweat off her face, like she was going to take it home as a stinky memento of a raucous evening. It was her first fight night and she was revving on all cylinders. “I can’t believe you got to grow up around this!”

Sometimes I couldn’t believe it either, but the fact that I was accustomed to the fighters and fighting didn’t make me less nervous. My father was a legendary MMA coach and his gym was highly sought after by pros and up and comers alike. I had always been the cute—or insufferable, depending on which fighter you asked—kid running errands, reading in the corner, emptying spit buckets and mopping (her first job in junior high). It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, or the best.

The legendary Mason Edwards kept his friends close, his enemies closer, and me closest of all.

“Can you tell what his tattoos are?” said Chantelle.

She was talking about Braden. The other guy was that MMA rarity: a fighter without a single visible tattoo. “No, not sure.” Braden had something on his right arm that came down into an ornate chest panel, and something on his right calf. But in the blur of the action there was no way to see the details.

I started biting my nails, a fact I was not aware of until Chantelle slapped my hand. I had told her to do this if she saw me chewing, but it still annoyed me. No one likes to get hit. Except the maniacs in front of us, of course.

“It’s going to fine,” said Chantelle. “You’re going to be great.”

Was it that obvious that I was nervous? Ugh. “I’ve just never interviewed any of these guys,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true. I ran a popular podcast about sports—over one hundred thousand downloads a month, thank you very much—High Impact. It wasn’t just about sports, though, which was part of the hook. I knew a lot more than I let on about athletics, but on the podcast I played a little dumber about it all. It took a “Naive girl enters the world of professional macho men angle.” I’d go in wide-eyed and innocent, make them feel good, and then jab them with the sort of open-ended questions they weren’t used to getting in interviews. It would put them so off guard in the moment that I’d often wind up with serious interview magic.

I would go anywhere for a story, as long as they would let me in. Sometimes even if they wouldn’t. Locker rooms, courtside, press conferences, and I had never been shy about ambushing players in public if I thought I could get a good sound bite out of it. A sprinter from a college in Vermont had yielded a particularly wonderful example. He had been accused of raping another student and had then been acquitted. The entirety of the female population on campus had risen against him, rallying under his bedroom window at night and staring up at it in silence. It had nearly driven him crazy.

As for my part in it all, I bribed his roommate to let me hide in the closet. When the sprinter came home and shut the door, I burst out with my microphone and said that if I could interview him openly and honestly, I would try to talk the mob outside into dispersing. It hadn’t worked out that way—the mob wasn’t about to be appeased, and I was proud of them for it—but I did get an amazing interview.

Barging in where you’re not supposed to be usually provokes people to great heights of quotableness.

“Oh, you’ve interviewed tons of them. You’re just telling yourself it’s different. All these guys are the same guy, way down deep. You’ve got to be a psycho to make it to the top of anything.”

Did that include me? “I just mean, none of the guys that my dad trained. Trains. It’s different.”

The referee signaled for the fighters to stand up as the next round began. Braden Dean, the impossibly hot guy who, yes, was being trained by my father, beat his chest and stomped the mat of the octagon like he had seen the biggest spider on earth. The other looked like he had broken mentally. He took his time getting off of his stool, which was never a good sign. Braden had certainly noticed his reluctance as well. Then they were back at it and I forgot that I was anxious about the interview and became nervous instead about the two men.

It was always a wonder to me when they were conscious after the first ten seconds. How in the world would they feel tomorrow? Even the winner was going to take upwards of a hundred shots to the head. And torso. And body. And and and...ouch. I pictured Braden waking up and mumbling, “Uh....did a train run over me?” Then he would reach over for me and gently stroke my hair, then...oh my God, focus, Alyssa.

“So your interview is right after the fight?” said Chantelle.

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my idyllic vision of fighter lust out of my brain. “I’m supposed to meet him in the locker room.”

Chantelle sighed. “I’d give anything to get into that locker room. Oh wow, can you imagine? But you don’t have to imagine! What the hell am I doing waiting tables? Is there any chance that—”

“Nope. Put it from your mind, my friend.” If I took Chantelle back there no one was going to pay attention to anything I said. I wasn’t any slouch in the looks department. In fact, I was almost volleyball player tall, with great legs and gorgeous black hair. But Chantelle had the kind of personality that made everyone else seem a little drab. Or at least, that’s how it had always felt. Men just didn’t gravitate towards me when there was a bigger personality in the room. Especially in a locker room, I’m guessing, I thought.

Braden threw his opponent into the fence in front of us and slammed a knee into the poor bastard’s midsection. He was a wrecking ball. I’d seen him fight a few times on TV, and had seen the occasional bit of sparring in the gym, but Braden was something to behold in person. It was nuts that something so violent could also be so elegant, but it was undeniable: he was a graceful killing and kicking and punching and stomping and elbowing machine. His business was fractures and bruises and making other people wish they’d never been born.

“Do they get those bodies just from all the cardio?” said Chantelle. “Maybe I should start fighting.”

“Pretty much,” I said. “I’ve seen a lot of their workouts. When you see how hard they have to push it, you start to understand why they can’t sustain an ounce of fat on their bodies.”

Braden smashed the guy into the fence again, like he was trying to push him through the links. I pictured him squishing through like Play-doh. Braden looked over the guy’s shoulder and me and grinned. In the middle of all that and he was grinning like there had never been a more wonderful moment in all recorded history. I had a new question about him every second I watched him, but every time I’d try to write one in my notebook for the interview, the crowd would go wild and I’d forgot what I was going to jot down.

Chantelle slapped my hand away from my mouth again. I’d been biting the nail so hard that if I’d slipped, I might have taken my entire fingertip off.

The crowd roared. When I looked up the other guy was facedown on the mat with his eyes still open, motionless. Braden had finished him by punching him in the stomach, shoving him off balance, and then nearly kicking his head into the rafters.

“I don’t get how his foot doesn’t break,” said Chantelle. “Will you ask him? If I tried to kick something like that I think my whole leg would shatter.” Her voice held the kind of wonder that a child might have while watching a magician perform, if the child was also ablaze with arousal.

Yuck. So far the night had yielded little besides bitten fingers and thoughts I didn’t want to be having. Now it was time to get to work.

The announcer stepped into the octagon and gave Braden the mic. He immediately called out Vlad Stanton, the current lightweight champion. “And when you get done hiding in the mountains out in Romania or wherever the hell you’re from, you come take your ass kicking and give me what’s mine! I’m coming for that belt! You can run, but you can’t hide. If you don’t show your face down here I’ll come take down the mountains and drive you out of whatever little hole you’re cowering in.” He thanked the fans, his coach, his friends, and then, with an exaggerated bow, he said, “And most of all, thanks to me!” He waved at the crowd and opened the gate to the octagon.

“Ugh,” I said.

“I think that was hot,” said Chantelle. “I want him to make a speech to me. He should let me write his speeches, actually. Oh my God, he is so hot.”

She wasn’t wrong. There was something to the unapologetic posturing. I wasn’t sure what the appeal was, but damn if it didn’t rev me up a little. Me and every other woman, from the look of it. It was such a cliché, but clichés don’t come from nowhere. Maybe he wasn’t the kind of guy you married, but for a little fun? Or a lot of fun? It made me purr, even as I tried to concentrate. As Braden walked by on his way to the locker room I expected a storm of thrown panties to drown him, but he escaped.

“All right,” I said. “Five minutes and I go. Wish me luck.”

“You’re not going to need luck. I know how hard you thought about that outfit.”

I started to protest, but Chantelle’s raised eyebrow told me I was getting nowhere. Oh well, she wasn’t wrong. I was in a green dress that showed off my pale skin and contrasted with my dark hair in a way that I’m sure Cosmo would have said made me a puma or tigress or whatever feline currently represented female allure.

But I hadn’t done it for him.

I had done it for a successful interview.

I gulped. Keep telling yourself that, Alyssa.

I went to the locker room three minutes later. One of the cut men let me in. I took a couple of what Oprah called deep, cleansing breaths, and walked into the fumes of sweat and liniment and testosterone.

Braden was sitting on a bench laughing with one of his sparring partners while another team member cut his wrist wraps off with a small pair of silver scissors.

“You go ahead,” said Braden when he saw me. “I’ll be in in just a minute.”

What was he talking about? “In where?” I said. I waved my microphone. “I’m here to—”

“In the shower. I won’t keep you waiting long.” He winked. “But I’ll take my time once we’re in there. We can give it as long as you need.” He bit his lower lip and leaned forward.

“—to interview you. For the podcast?” I hated the sound of my voice rising, turning what should have been a statement of fact into a question. What was wrong with him? Some of the fighters I knew postured for show, for their brand, for bigger checks and bigger fights, but this seemed real. Apparently, Braden wasn’t going to break character, because it wasn’t a character for him.

“But I’m in the middle of getting naked, as you can see,” he said, waggling his eyebrows. The remainders of the wrist wraps dropped away and I saw his bruised knuckles and massive forearms all at once. He rolled his head a little, trying to loosen up his neck. His traps bulged and flexed. It took a second for me to get my breath again. Why the hell did he have to be so hot? Could nothing ever be simple?

Then he raised his arms above his head and started making arm circles to loosen himself up after the rigidity of the fight. I felt like I was gawking at an exhibit in a museum. A sweaty, stinky museum that had so far exceeded any of Chantelle’s wildest speculations.

“I don’t like to get interrupted when I’m in the middle of getting naked,” he repeated. “Unless you’re in the mood to help. I might be able to find a job for you.”

“Yo man, that’s Edwards’s daughter,” said one of the corner men. “Treat her with some respect.”

Braden looked at me with eyebrows that he had somehow managed to raise even higher. Wondering, no doubt, how a soft little marshmallow like me was sired by the formidable Mason Edwards. I watched him take in the green dress, my hair, my skin, and I fought the urge to cross my arms and stammer. I put my shoulders back and raised my chin, like my dad had taught me. Always project confidence was his personal broken record speech.

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “But this interview does, and you agreed to it. Now you need to honor your contract.”

Braden cracked his knuckles and sighed. “My manager might have. I don’t remember agreeing to anything. Not saying you’re forgettable, not exactly.” He smiled and I wanted to slap him. Now there was a laugh. Me, trying to get tough and stand my ground with a man who wrecked people for a living. And, apparently, for fun.

“You should honor that contract,” I said again, getting annoyed for real now. “It’s got a signature on it and everything. If people don’t think they have to fulfill their side of a contract, society spirals into chaos.” So there I thought, rolling my eyes at myself internally. I sounded like a freshman political science major trying on a new identity.

“I don’t have time for this schoolgirl shit,” he said. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m on a bit of a tear. Can’t let myself get sidetracked by someone working the junior beat for...what TV show are you from?”

“It’s not—” I began.

“Right. No school girl shit. And no time for schoolgirls,” he said, getting to his feet and looking down at me. God, he was tall. And broad. And obnoxious. And a total dick. But these thoughts were all wiped away as if a tsunami had hit the locker room when he started undoing the drawstrings of his shorts. Just like that, he dropped them to his ankles, stepped out of them, and then pulled off his protective cup and underwear. Braden Dean, naked as a jaybird of war, daring me to say something, or react, or run from the room screaming. Or, as he was probably used to, to drop to my knees in gratitude and praise him.

Well, not this one. Not me. However much part of me might have wanted to. He was so well hung that he would have made a Greek God jealous.

Before I could get any more worked up in any fashion, Braden took the decision out of my hands. Whistling something tuneless, he strode from the room. I heard the blast of the shower coming on. “Room for one more!” he said. His laugh echoed off the tile walls. “But we’re going to have to squeeze in tight! You can quote me on that!”

The heat in my face told me I would have made a great stand in for a bright red tomato at that point. And honestly, I couldn’t tell which was making me flush more—the frustration of the interaction, or my raging desire to rush into the shower, slap his face, and then jump his bones.

I hurried out of the locker room into the hall. A wide-eyed Chantelle was waiting. “That didn’t take too long,” she said. “How did it go? What did you see? You’re so red! Wait...you didn’t!”

“It went like crap,” I said. “He’s a total dick. And I saw plenty, believe me.”

And not enough I thought as she took my arm and we made our way down the corridor and out to our cars.

Chapter 2

Mason was waiting for me when I got out of the shower, which pissed me off. A lot of fighters play into the coach-as-father-surrogate routine, but I had never been one of them. I needed a coach, not a dad. It usually took me days to unwind after a fight, but the shower had done its work and I was feeling better than ever. Even the bruises and the aches were like old friends, reminding me that I was good at what I did.

But I was good at it as I was largely because of Mason, and I owed my coach an ear, even though I knew what he was going to say: some variation about how I needed to treat people better, be more humble, give respect to earn it, etc.

It occurred to me that he might be there because he had heard that I had blown his daughter of and tried to talk her into a post-fight shower. Now there was a conversation I never wanted to have. Not that it had stopped me from flexing at her.

“You’re a hell of a fighter,” said Mason as I toweled off. Mason wasn’t into giving undue praise. Honestly, he wasn’t into saying much of anything, which was part of his mystique. When he talked, people listened. You never knew when he would open his mouth again, which was another reason why it always felt good to get a compliment from him.

Tell me something I don’t know.

“Now it’s time to get Vlad,” I said. It had sounded bombastic, but I had meant every word I said in that post-fight interview. I could not wait to get my hands on him and get that title belt. I was currently the interim champion of my division. Vlad had gotten injured and had been out of action for so long that they made up a fake belt—the interim belt—and given it to me to ensure that I would get the next crack at him. I wanted the real thing. Nobody took an interim belt seriously. It wasn’t Vlad’s fault that he was injured, either. I knew that. You can’t play at fighting, and training to fight means fighting in practice. But it gnawed at me, being on his body’s timetable. And it wasn’t just the injury. In Vlad’s country military service was compulsory. A year into his career the state had commanded him to enlist for two years, which he did without complaining. Honorable, sure, but it put the division on hold. Actually, you know what? Is it really honorable if your government says you have to do it? It’s not like he made a choice.

“But as a person? You leave a little to be desired, Braden.” Mason folded his arms across his chest and sighed. He looked me up and down, appraising and judging like I was on an auction block. Another honorable man, looking at me like I was an unwashed dish. “But there’s a big difference between having heart in the octagon and having a heart.” As always, I thought of his military service. Mason had been a legendary and highly decorated leader in Vietnam. He was not the man you wanted lecturing you about your integrity, because you always suspected that he was right about everything.

I had never told anyone this, but one of my biggest fears was that Mason would end up hating me, because that, in my view, would mean that I was worth hating. It bugged me that I took him so seriously, but there was no turning it off.

I had said it before and I would probably say it again: it’s a terrible thing to be strong and weak. I wasn’t weak, but I had some weakish tendencies I couldn’t seem to train out of myself.

“Not sure there’s a big distinction for me, boss.” I was all about the results. But maybe Mason should have asked the guy who I just about decapitated out there if I needed to soften up a little. Or the women who were lining the halls, praying to go home with me. No, I think I had it all figured out. If my personality was lacking to some people, it sure wasn’t stopping me from getting anything I wanted. Why change if I wasn’t getting in my own way?

“We had a rough year last year. I know you’ve got your sights on Vlad, but nobody’s forgotten about how you performed in the past twelve months.”

“I think most people have forgotten. Those people cheering out there weren’t thinking about that year. They were thinking about the guy I just destroyed, and about how I was going to do the same thing to Vlad.”

Biting my tongue has never come naturally to me, but I did it for Mason more often than anyone else. He wasn’t wrong, though. The year before I had been an aggressive mass of unrealized potential. A couple of years before that I’d jumped into the regional fighting circuit right out of my high school wrestling career. To say that it I took to MMA like a fish takes to water didn’t even do it justice. I was born for this shit. After a few fights, which I won on pure strength and fury, Mason found me and told me I needed some real coaching. I didn’t know who he was, that’s how green I had been.

He took me to his gym, gave me a tour, gave me a key, and for a while, the rest was history. Mason was as hardass as they came. Even though I fought for a living, Mason had been to war. Men who had literally had to fight for their lives were beyond intimidation. In some ways, Mason seemed like he was beyond fear, and that’s what I wanted, even more than his technical prowess. Oh, what do I know? You probably could have dug up a sports psychologist to say that what I really wanted was an authority figure who would wrangle me while letting me still feel like I was calling the shots, but he helped me get bigger. That was all that mattered.

I still fought it at first: the need to surrender to a coach’s will. I thought I was better than I was. It’s part of being young, but it’s even worse when you’re a young tough guy. You feel bulletproof and fearless, and who’s going to tell you otherwise? A good coach, that’s who.

As soon as I took a jump up into a bigger regional show, I nearly got murdered by a guy who’d go pro a month later. The big problem was that I was trying to do college at the same time. I dropped out immediately and didn’t regret it until I told Mason. Now, a couple of years later...

“If you’d just have stayed in college, I think things would have gone better, sooner,” he said. “It’s not just about books. It’s when you learn to learn. It’s how you improve the rate at which you can improve.”

At the time there had been no chance of me going back. Mason had wanted me to stop partying. He wanted me to stop womanizing and chasing after big sponsorships and more money. College wasn’t the place to help me focus, particularly when everyone learned that I was a fighter. Guess who got to be the king of every party? Yours truly. Break this board, show me a kick, take me home, drag me into your bed, and so on. Night after night forever.

But not forever. There is no sport where time is as unforgiving as in fighting. Father Time is still undefeated and always will be.

“College wasn’t for me, Mason. You know that.”

“You ever thought about setting down with a nice girl? They say that a good woman can calm a man’s soul.”

I laughed inside. When he said nice girl, he was thinking of someone like his daughter, I knew it. But if I told him I was with his precious little Alyssa, he would blow a gasket. Oh man, though, her body...I don’t think she had any idea how good she looked, and that was a rarity in the women who approached me. I don’t like hypocrisy, but I’m one of the few people brave enough to admit that I can be a hypocrite. In that way, I think I might have been ahead of Mason.

“Who says that? Who’s they?”

He touched his nose and smiled, a sensation that he didn’t look comfortable with, like he had read an article about smiling and decided to test it out. “You just trust me. You lost your touch before. Don’t think it can’t happen again. You and me want the same thing, don’t you forget that.” He stepped forward and poked me in the chest. “For you to be happy and get that belt.”

I believed him. He really wanted those things for us both. “You got the order wrong, boss. And I am happy.” Even as I said it, I wondered it if was true. What was happiness anyway? I had moments of contentment now and then, but I knew that I would never know what it actually felt like to be satisfied. Maybe that’s what happiness was. Deep, pressureless satisfaction, with no further expectations from anyone, including yourself.

“No I didn’t, and no, no you’re not. It’s time to focus. No more bullshit for now, you got it? Enjoy tonight. Tomorrow we’re back at it.” With that, Mason went outside. I knew he’d be waiting for me until I came out. The man was like a father to me, no matter what I said, wanted, thought, or thought I wanted.

I was lucky to have him. No matter what.

I finished cleaning up. I would focus, all right. Mason wasn’t wrong about me and that year, but I had never felt as untouchable as I did in that moment. Or infuriated. There was no reason for me to be angry at Mason about, but I was still mad. That’s what I didn’t like about myself. It worked wonders in the octagon, but damn there were times when I just wanted to be able to relax. There were periods of agitation that I couldn’t outpace, outwork, outthink, or outspend.

Losing my touch.

I’d show him. I’d show them all. I went into the hall where Mason was talking to the schoolgirl with the podcast. Alyssa with the green dress, the long legs, the incredible hair, and the annoying questions and expectations. Maybe my agent had actually scheduled the interview, but who schedules something like that around a fight? You’re always out of your mind after a fight, whether it goes your way or not. Good Lord, the drama never ended. Still, she was Mason’s daughter. Maybe I could do something nice for her. Give her a few answers. A few more listeners for her show. Or...maybe I could do something fun for myself. Yeah, that sounded way better.

Mason nodded at me and then left, guiding her down the hall. She didn’t see me. Daddy’s little girl.

I went back out into the arena where legions of fans were waiting for me to tell them where we were going to party that night. Bright lights, big city, me, me, me. The options were limitless. It felt like the world was mine. Was that really so bad? Was it really my fault? Should I have tried harder to resist? When people treat you like a God, can they really blame you when you start to believe it?

People swarmed around me. Women draped themselves all over any part of me that they could reach. And I knew that this crowd was also full of sponsors who would, this very night, offer me money to endorse whatever it was they were selling. What was I supposed to do? Tell them all no? Send them all away because I had to do the honorable thing and go sit in a room alone and ponder the mysteries of the universe instead of cashing in on a huge victory?

We’ll see who’s losing his touch.

Chapter 3

Dad walked me out to the car and held the door open for me. Always the gentleman, a stark contrast to my experience with Braden. Dad always had a hard time watching his guys fight. It was kind of cute. Sometimes he wouldn’t even make it into the arena. He would walk up to the door, fully intending to go in, then freeze up and sit in his car listening to it in an earpiece. He was like a relic in a museum. Behold the man who cares too much! His job was to prepare them, and the fighters understood when he said sometimes he loved them too much to go in and watch.

The thought of him spending so much time with Braden was interesting. I wondered what they talked about, or if they discussed anything besides fighting.

“How’d we do?” he said after he got in. I thought he was talking to me. Then I saw that one of the cut men had appeared on the driver’s side and dad had rolled down the window.

“Good Mason, real good. Kid’s a damn hothead, though.”

My dad nodded. “Let’s get you home, honey.” He reached over and patted my cheek, a gesture I had come to love. Dad was always affectionate with me in his words, but touch was not something he did well. I knew the effort it took for him and always appreciated the effort.

I leaned my seat back. Even though I hadn’t been in the octagon, I always crashed after the events. The adrenaline rush was something that couldn’t really be described, it just had to be experienced. I hadn’t been the only one on the edge of my seat, and the thought that a few thousand people were now recovering from a fight they hadn’t even been in made me smile. The things that we do to entertain ourselves.

“I’ve booked a couple more interviews for you next week,” he said. “Think you’ll like these ones, and they should come with less drama than others have.”

I put my seat up. “That’s great, who?”

Dad checked his rearview mirror and switched lanes. “Up and comer in the Paralympics. Hand cycler. She’s got a really wild story and will come off very well in the interview. I have to tell you, I wish my arms looked as good as hers do. Other one’s an American wrestler.” He stopped and smiled.

I liked to see dad smile more than just about anything. It was tough to get one out of him, and even tougher to make him laugh. “What are you smiling about? We’ve done wrestlers before.” This was going to be something odd, which sent a thrill up my spine. Occupational hazards and irritations aside, I really loved doing the show and I knew it had the potential to grow into something much bigger than it was. The ad revenue alone would be enough to pay a mortgage down the road, if I ever left home.

“Not like this,” said dad. “He’s an aspiring American sumo wrestler.” He laughed, and it was music to my ears. “I’m just picturing the two of you together. I think you’d fit in one of his legs. He made me feel tiny, and that doesn’t happen often.”

It certainly didn’t. Dad projected larger than his average size. The thought of him next to a sumo wrestler tickled me every bit as much as what he had been thinking about the same guy and me. “Whoa! Thanks dad! Is he going to be in one of those diapers?”

My knowledge of sumo wrestling was as desolate and patchy as you might have guessed. It didn’t extend beyond the diaper. Wait, surely it wasn’t called a diaper. I was going to have to do some research.

“You got it, baby. If you do these two well, you’re going to be set. And no, I doubt he’ll be dressed for competition. Now remember, I’ve been setting them up for you, but if you keep getting better, and you will, then every interview is going to lead to more requests for interviews, and then my work will be done. I’m just the foot in the door. You’re still closing them and making your way.”

I kissed my palm and pressed it against his cheek. “You’re the best. I won’t let you down.” I was often struck by how lucky I was to have such a father. Lots of people didn’t. And lots of people had fathers who weren’t there, weren’t as invested in their success. Chantell would occasionally suggest that maybe my dad could be less involved in my life, or I could be a little more independent, but I ignored her. She was just jealous.

“You never have,” he said. “I know you never will.”

Well, that made one of us. I was grateful, but I was also relieved. After Braden, I didn’t have any more interviews lined up that were worth crowing about. A few prospects, but nothing with any obvious potential to be huge hits. At my age—not that I was old, but even at twenty-three years old I knew that I could be more independent—a small part of me was wondering if I shouldn’t have more of a grip on my career, if I was too much of a daddy’s girl, but then dad would give me the next offer and my career would take an upswing that I couldn’t have found without him. And of course, Chantelle always said it sounded like a dream: a good father and a manager and agent combined. But that’s what she would say: Chantelle was as lazy as she was loyal, bless her heart.

What she didn’t add was that he was also my landlord. Twenty-three and still living at home, my dad paying for my home. I would leave someday. I would. Seriously, I would. It was the same old tedious thought loop that kept me awake many nights, and this wasn’t the time for it.

“So?” he said, and I knew what was coming next.

“Yes, father of mine? What wouldst that have of me?”

He laughed. Twice in one night, miracle of miracles. “Tell me about Braden. The interview.” His voice wasn’t as warm as it had been. Who knew what he was thinking?

I exhaled so hard that the windshield in front of me fogged a little. “Oh brother. That guy. Dad, I kind of hate him.” Hate warring with lust. The worst mix in the world. I certainly wasn’t the first woman who wanted to bang a guy nearly as much as I wanted to slap his dumb hot face off. But that was definitely not a conversation I was getting into with my dad.

He nodded. “I know what you mean. I can’t come at it the same way as you, the relationship between a coach and a fighter is just too different, but I’ve seen how he is with women. I wanted to believe that he would do better by you, given that you’re my daughter. Now, you don’t need to give me any details. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. As long as you’re okay, I still have to do right by him as a fighter. I’ve been around Braden for so long that I still think of him sometimes as the kid that walked into my gym in the beginning, not who he has become. You wouldn’t have believed how gentle he was back then. Not in the ring, no, but that was perfect. Soft everywhere else, vicious once that gate closed.”

He was forgetting that I had been there when Braden had walked in. I had wondered who he was and whether he had earned the swagger that he walked with. But I had never seen the side of Braden that dad was talking about. Mr. Softie.

The mention of Braden being soft reminded me of just how soft his naked body had not been when he performed that impromptu striptease in front of me. Good Lord that package. But this was exactly the kind of thing I didn’t want to be thinking about in a car with my dad while said dad was laying down wisdom for the ages.

He whistled. “Some fighters are just bad news, through and through from the beginning. Or they’re the potential for bad news. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone with as much upside—and downside—as Braden Dean. He was always going to be a masterpiece or a catastrophe. Even I was guessing about him. I just told myself it was an educated guess. So many of these kids are lucky they can find a way to get paid to fight, because otherwise they’d just fight their way into prison and do their brawling there, far away from the cameras and money, and with much higher stakes. Some fighters go sour once the fame and glory sets in. We all want to believe our own hype, but some people are particularly ill-suited to notoriety.”

This was a veritable torrent of words from my usually taciturn dad. He must have really meant it. “Sure, dad. I can see that.” And I could still see Braden’s body. Couldn’t help but picture the soap and the water hitting his skin in that shower. Feeling maybe the tiniest bit of regret that I hadn’t followed him in there. Oh God, he would have loved that. Worst, he probably expected it!

“Anything else you’d like me to do for you?” he said.

See, this was part of the problem. I knew that he actually would try to do anything I asked him to. He treated the things I liked as if they were things I actually needed, which made it very hard to turn his offers down because…well, because I liked certain things. Like his help. “Well, maybe next time you could just set me up to interview one of the nice guys. But I guess you’ve already done that, unless this hand cyclist is some sort of holy terror.”

“The sumo wrestler is very nice, by all accounts, as is the hand cycler. And when it comes to the next fighter...I’ll do my best, kiddo. That chip on the shoulder they all have serves them well in the fight. It doesn’t always do a lot for them in the rest of their lives.”

“Well, what else could I ask for?” Besides a nice version of Braden and another shot at that shower.

Dad took the last turn before entering the long driveway to his mansion. The house that fists built, he called it. Those fists had built a hell of a home. Every time I saw it I still thought I can’t believe I live there. It stretched for half of a block and looked like the home of some investment-banking guru. Not that I knew what that looked like, exactly, but the thought was there. “What do you want for dinner?” he said.

“Surprise me, dad. I’m just going to run upstairs and clean up a little.” I knew he would take this as a challenge and I would be rewarded handsomely for it. Dad didn’t seem to know that he couldn’t turn down a properly issued dare, and I had just dared him to make me something so delicious that it would ruin all other food for me, forever.

While dad bustled around in the kitchen, I went upstairs and got in the shower. I had gotten so sweaty in the crowd at the fight. People would get so worked up that there was a mist of booze and sweat that you could almost see in the air. The hot water felt like I had earned it. There are few things as pleasurable as a nice hot shower, especially when it feels like you deserve it.

But there are some.

Once I got soaped up it was impossible not to touch myself. Think about anyone but Braden. Think about anyone but Braden. Then I thought about no one except Braden. Braden Dean, hot jerk. He was probably arrogant enough to think I would go right home and dream about him. If so, he was right. Was it cockiness if you could back it up? At least there were a couple of new interviews coming up that didn’t promise to be titillating or enraging in any way. It was hard to imagine myself fantasizing about a giant in a diaper, no matter how nice he might be.

By the time I got out of the shower I was clear-headed and calmer. Chantelle always said that if she could put an orgasm in a bottle she’d be a billionaire. And that if she was a doctor it was what she would prescribe for most ailments. It never made sense to me. Why on earth would you need something in a bottle when you could just think about...okay, it was officially time to stop thinking about Braden for the night.

Dad’s web of contradictions manifested yet again in the kitchen. The trainer of vicious champions had prepared a gorgeous meal for us, as adept as any TV chef. Challenge accepted. I couldn’t believe that he had done it so quickly, and part of me wondered if he had planned it already and had it waiting on hand. He pulled out a chair for me and sat me down in front of a bowl of bouillabaisse, a beet and fennel salad, and bread for dipping. His own plate had very little on it. “I already ate a little,” he said. “Didn’t want to overdo it.”

“You keep yourself in shape for an old man,” I said, digging in like I’d been held captive for a year, far from food.

“Carb day was yesterday,” he said with a smile. “One day that body’s going to start betraying you. Mine sure as hell did. Taking care of yourself is the only way to stay sane when you start to fossilize.”

He was far from a fossil. Dad was so lean that he looked like a piece of jerky. There were plenty of shlubby, unambitious young men out there who could learn a lot from him in the fitness department. One of my favorite things was to go out with him and see women in their fifties and sixties drooling over him.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Dad frowned. I didn’t grow up with too many rules, which was fine, given that I was almost pathologically well behaved. But dad didn’t like rudeness, and he considered “diddling around” on your phone in the company of another person the height of bad manners. In his view, you did not have a conversation with someone who was not there while sitting next to someone who was there.

When he said it like that, it made sense. But he hadn’t grown up knowing what it felt like to have a screen that you carried everywhere, to the point where it was almost like another limb, shrieking for your attention.

“I’ll check it later,” I said, even though it was burning a hole in my pocket. Such was the modern age. Our conversation meandered everywhere and nowhere.

Dad was a good listener. He told me once that one of the best decisions he had ever made was not to interrupt people. In my case, being an admitted chatterbox, this meant that he rarely had to say much at all, which is how I think he liked it. We talked about some strategies for increasing the audience of the podcast, and more potential guests. He had a vision of a day when the podcast completely sustained me, when the traffic came no matter what I did.

“I want you to have enough so that you can only do the work you want,” he said. “Lots of people punching clocks out there just because. I don’t care if you wind up working ninety hour weeks, as long as you love those ninety hours and you know where you’re head.”

When we finally said goodnight, I cleaned the table and put our dishes in the washer while dad went into his study to read. He was always in the middle of some military history book with a thousand pages, a zillion footnotes, and tiny font.

My phone buzzed again. I sneaked a peek at it before I went upstairs. I saw Braden’s name and immediately put it back in my pocket. I already knew everything I needed to about that swaggering oaf, thank you very much. It was probably going to be something like an emoji of lips. Or maybe a showerhead with steam coming off of it.

Mmm. That had been a really good shower.

In fact, maybe I wouldn’t look at it until tomorrow. That would teach him a lesson about expectations. That would show him that Alyssa Edwards was not, and never would be, at his beck and call.

The best-laid plans and all that…I’d been in my room for less than one second before I had the phone out, ready to tell him off and rebut whatever cocky, drunken message he had sent to me.

I am so sorry, read the text. That wasn’t me and I really apologize. I’ll do anything to make it up to you, just let me know.

No emojis, either. The apology sounded sincere. Or, I guess, as sincere as anything can sound in a brief text, completely removed from context, and in the total absence of nuance.

Well then...well, well, well.

I had a hard time falling asleep that night, but I was determined not to text him back. My determination died quickly and I replied. When I did sleep, my dreams were incredible, haunted by a rather striking man in wrist wraps who was begging to serve me in all sorts of wicked ways.

Chapter 4

Oh my God, was there anything more predictable than a woman? If anyone had treated me the way I dismissed her in that locker room I would have slapped their head off. That would have just been getting started. The last thing I would have been doing two hours was responding to an apologetic text from someone who had wronged me. I couldn’t say that I’d ever felt like much of an adult, but one of the ways I could tell I was getting older was that there didn’t seem to be as many surprises left.

No self-respect. I’ve always believed that people get themselves into the lives they think they deserve. They create their own disasters and then, when they’re unhappy, they can let themselves off the hook and say, “I’m not the kind of person who deserves to be happy?” Voila! Every dumb mistake is now distanced from them, it’s just fate.

But that’s how women were. The harder you pushed them aside, the more they wanted you. It was one of the things he liked about fighting: for all the innumerable variables, there was a simplicity to it that the rest of life didn’t have. The referee announced me and the opponent, the door closed, and both of us knew the score. One winner, one loser…simple.

This thing with Alyssa was predictable, yes, but still—it didn’t feel quite as simple as some of the other women I had known. Or maybe it was simple but not simplistic.

I was playing with fire and I knew it. But hot is fun. Mason’s girl was off limits...for someone with limits. My dear old coach was going to fuss his old head off, but I would also be able to remind him, ever so sweetly, that he was the one who suggested I settle down with a nice girl.

If it’s not obvious, I don’t like to be told what to do or not to do. The kind of person who thinks they can tell me what to do is the kind of person you would find shouting at an incoming tidal wave, then being confused later when they were washing seaweed out of their hair.

A nice girl. Please. Something else that didn’t interest me much. It’s not like I hadn’t tried. All through high school, before I learned how to fight, to cow other men into submission, the nice girls ignored me. Sorry, nope. Then I turned myself into a machine and the girls became women, and those women flocked to me. No, I had been done with nice for some time. Nice was for betas, and non-fighters, and guys who thought that complimenting a woman’s profile picture on social media was the way into her pants. White knights and little lords who made great friends to talk to when you needed to confide in someone about a real man you wanted.

Women wanted a savage.

Which is why this savage got such a kick out of taking out my phone and texting her the mournful message I had been composing in my head.

“Really really sorry, again. Let’s get together and do a real interview so you can finish your assignment.” I pushed send and started counting in my head. It only took five seconds before the little gray bubble indicating that she was texting me back appeared under my message. “Sure! And you totally don’t need to apologize anymore, I know what it’s like to be in a mood!” We set up a time and date and I was feeling pretty damned pleased with myself.

She even sent an emoji of a microphone with a smile next to it.

Then my phone buzzed again. I looked down, already smiling, ready to see the latest installment in the Alyssa Edwards saga, but the message was from Janie.

That took the smile off my face. Janie was my little sister and the most important thing to me in the world. “Call me!” She was also a hassle I didn’t want to deal with right now. Janie’s mental handicap—sorry, handicapable, as the new buzzword went—made everyone protective of her, but it could also make her exhausting. Her cerebral palsy had also put her in a wheelchair, which made things tougher on my mom. I felt bad about even thinking that, but it was true. Janie didn’t read cues as well as some people, which was ironic, since she read more books than anyone I knew. Also, she wasn’t able to understand things as quickly as others, and even though this legitimized her need to be more dependent on other people than would have otherwise been the case, it could still get exhausting. Case in point: before I had even thought about responding, my phone was ringing. Janie wasn’t one for waiting around.

We definitely had that in common. Who was I kidding? There was no way I was going to put her off.

“Hey Janie,” I said.

“Hi Braden! How was your fight?”

I gave her the rundown and she tried as hard as could to listen. “Oh, that poor guy,” she said when I told about my fallen opponent. “I bet he’s going to have the worst headache tomorrow.” Then she asked about Vlad. I did my best to tell her about the potential plans for the fight, but she wound up interrupting me near the end of the story, like always, and of course she mentioned that Vlad was a war hero, and took over the conversation. I liked to think of Janie on the floor of the Senate, delivering endless filibusters that would allow her to pass any legislation she wanted just because she could outlast everyone.

“You’ve really got to come home. Mom is really sad. She misses you bad. I do too. When are you coming home? We could probably put your old room together, and we could stay up late and watch movies on nights when you didn’t have to train the next day. I think it would be a really good thing for her. So, when?”

“I’m not sure, Janie. There’s a lot going on.”

“Well, mom really misses you, and you shouldn’t let your mom miss you when you can change it.”

“I know she does, Janie. I know. But it’s not that simple. I have obligations here.”

“And it’s hard for her because everyone else is gone. She really misses you, and you’re the only one, beside me, who’s actually on this side of the ocean. Sean and Ryan haven’t been able to talk as much lately. That bugs her. It bugs me too. I want it to bug you. I think it should.”

I clenched my jaw. “I know that too,” I said, harsher than I intended. “Everyone” meant my brothers Sean and Ryan, who were both in the armed forces overseas. Marines. Semper Fi, Duty and honor, and all that jazz. Why should they be home taking care of my mom? They were too busy taking care of the world. I felt the familiar flush of anger, no, something that was closer to shame than anger, and I hung up on Janie with a rushed good-bye.

I’m telling you, strong and weak, it sucks. I could fight a man in a cage who wanted nothing more than to kill me, but I couldn’t end a conversation with my little sister in a civil fashion.

In truth—a truth I hated to admit—Sean and Ryan were doing exactly what I had wanted to do. Serving. Testing themselves. We had all been on the same career path. Our dad had died when we were young and he had been a military man. We all planned on doing the same. The only difference was that I had suddenly blossomed into a prodigy of a fighter and people started throwing money and promises at me. My brothers had been supportive. Maybe they had even been jealous. I was so amazing that sometimes I was jealous of myself! (Mostly kidding). But I had never been able to shake this feeling that they were also disappointed, like their sense of duty had turned out to be more finely tuned than mine. I was still testing myself, but it wasn’t like what they were doing. My mom told me she was proud of me, but there was no mistaking the difference in her tone when she talked about my brothers. They were heroes. I was just a tough kid who was making lots of money.

Guilt didn’t suit me. I had to do something to shake it off. So I did what I always do. I hit the gym and put in my mouthpiece, ready for some hard practice.

Someone was going to hurt so I didn’t have to.

Chapter 5

I was skeptical when his texts started coming in—this was probably just another game of his and I would wind up humiliated by the end of it—but I was still determined to get the interview. I didn’t want to let my dad down and Braden was a good story, if he could just break character long enough to give me a few decent quotes. He had proposed that I meet him at the gym where he practiced. Good enough for me. At least there would be an audience to keep him in check if he was feeling too sassy.

There was also the possibility that, if it turned out to be a trick, that I could make that the story. There was always a way to spin the narrative to suit you. I just hadn’t ever had to do it that way, but I think part of me had always known that it could happen. I didn’t want it to happen to one of my dad’s fighters, though.

But I would. He was too much. If it turned into an exposé on him, rather than some puff piece of flattery and fluff, so be it.

When I walked in the gym was full of guys. No surprise there. Women were making impressive inroads into MMA, but were still in the minority. A few of them stretched on the edges of the room, preparing for training sessions that could last anywhere from one to four hours. This was the second or even third session of the day for many of them. Some of the fighters were working heavy bags or hitting the pads with their trainers. Others were grappling, twisting each other into knots that looked like the height of discomfort. So maybe I would never know how to strangle someone, there were still good things about me, right?

  The unifying theme, however, was that they were all, men and women alike, sneaking peeks at what Braden was doing, even though he was just shadowboxing in a corner. The man had presence. It wasn’t just that he was so good-looking. It was more like...how can I explain it? Whenever I watched a movie that Christopher Walken was in, whenever he was on screen, even if he wasn’t the star, I just couldn’t see anyone else. I don’t think he’s ugly, but he’s certainly not that stereotypical leading man, Disney prince type of handsome. But it’s like he shoves everyone else off the screen. Presence.

Having Braden in the room seemed to collapse the world. He had a magnetism that pulled everyone’s eyes towards him. Everyone wanted to know who that guy was, how he did what he did, and how could they get some of it to rub off on them. It didn’t hurt that he was the closest of anyone in the gym to making a big leap up in the fighting world. He was already on top of his division. Or, as close as he could get while he waited on Vlad to head up. Everyone looked like they either wanted to learn from him or be near him, just to soak up some of the aura.

I didn’t want it to rub off on me. As I watched him bob and weave and duck and twist, in that moment I just wanted to rub him on me. Damn him, it was some dark magic. His hands were moving so fast that I couldn’t see them. His shirtless body was streaked with sweat as he danced back and forth in zigs and zags. Every punch and kick he threw sent ripples through his body, out into the room, and straight into me.

I don’t know if he sensed me, or saw me in a mirror, but suddenly he stopped moving, turned around, and trotted over to me with a big smile on his face. It was like nothing bad or obnoxious had ever happened between us. Like he had never dropped his towel and dared me to get in the shower with him.

  He bowed to me like he was my butler. “Hi, welcome!” he said, putting out a hand. I shook it and felt sweat ooze out of his wrist wraps. “Let’s go sit back here, Mason said I could use his office. I’m sure you know the way.”

I sure did. I used to go to the office on my breaks and read my dad’s books, or look at his old military pictures. My private father rarely opened up. His office was as close as most people would get to seeing what actually made him tick. The room was full of mementos, medals, framed letters and commendations from his commanders, and of course, pictures of all of the fighters he had trained. I had always loved that he had signed photos of them all, even the ones who had washed out, never won a fight, or who had blamed him for their own failures.

“I respect anyone with the courage to step into that cage,” he always said. “And I continue to respect them until they give me a reason to stop.” He was generous, but his patience was not endless.

Except with me.  

I followed Braden to the office and set up my microphone on the desk. We sat in two recliners facing each other. He hadn’t felt the need to put a shirt on and apparently I hadn’t felt the need to suggest it. I wondered what my dad would have made of this scene. The room seemed impossibly small. I ask myself vaguely why I wasn’t sitting on his lap, then checked myself. The interview. The interview. His lap would have been hideously sweaty, so there. Nope, I definitely wanted no part of it.

I wondered if someone might barge in while we talked, screwing up the recording. Then I got annoyed that someone might barge in while I was having alone time with Braden. Then I got annoyed with myself for thinking any of that.

Braden got up quickly and knelt by the small refrigerator. He took out a Gatorade and offered me one, which I politely declined.

He unscrewed the cap, took a sip, and sat back down. “So what do you need from me?” he said, leaning back in his chair, which displayed his abs in a fashion he was obviously aware of. What must it be like to know the effect you had on people at all time? It was a hell of a bargaining chip, depending on whom you were bargaining with. “I am at your service.”

“Honest answers,” I said, checking my equipment and running through a couple of sound tests. “The rest tends to take care of itself. It’s always great if things feel conversational. You know, more like a chat and less of an interrogation? Some of the best stories turn out not to be the stories I thought I was doing. Things can take surprising turns when people are honest. In other words, nothing that is actually revealing gets revealed when there is a script.”

“Makes sense. Anything else I should be aware of? By the way, I love your hair like that.” Braden stroked his chin and studied me. He sounded completely sincere and suddenly I felt like an item on an expensive menu, somewhere between the halibut and the filet mignon.

I felt myself flush, and then realized that I hadn’t done anything different with my hair. It wasn’t bad but it certainly wasn’t worth pointing out. But point it out he had. Ugh, was it really this easy with most women? I was geared up to resist him and still, it was working on me. Was he maneuvering, just trying to be nice, or buttering me up for his own purposes? Maybe it was all three. I wasn’t sure which ones I wanted to be most true.

“Let me guess, next you’re going to say I have nice eyes? Something else you learned from a Reddit Ask Women thread?”

His eyes moved up and down my body quickly but not in a way that felt creepy. He gave me a big toothy grin. “It’s just a fact. Not personal! Science basically says that you’re a gorgeous, brilliant woman. You think I need Reddit to tell me that? I am all about the results. Oh, and I only read Reddit to see all the nasty things people say about me.” Somehow, the smile got even bigger. Worse was the fact that it seemed genuine. I needed to focus and this was making it impossible.

“And what result are you after here?”

“I just want to make you feel good. That’s it. No motive. Most people like feeling good. You should try it.” It would have sounded cocky coming from him the other night, but now it felt like genuine flirting. Stay on track, Alyssa.

“You know what?” I said. “There is something you can do for me.”

“Say the word.”

Time for a test. I swallowed hard and bulled ahead. “The word is that I know you’re just turning on the charm to try and you can get in my pants. If you can’t do this professionally, I walk. And don’t tell me you like to watch me walk away, I want to be done with compliments for now, sincere or otherwise. I know you don’t need the interview like I do, but it can still help you. But please, let me do my job and don’t make this about my eyes, my hair, or all the things you’re thinking about doing to me.” My little speech made me blush, but I meant every word.

Braden actually looked surprised. “What makes you think I’m thinking about doing things to you?”

Oh God, had I actually said that? “I, uh—”

“You know, you don’t seem like all of the other fighter groupies,” he said. “No, no, don’t get mad, I’m kidding, mostly! I didn’t mean that you’re a groupie at all. But with your background, you’re obviously into the fight game. You’ve got to understand, everyone I talk to—and I mean almost everyone—wants something from me. The only interesting question is what they want, but I usually know. It’s not an easy thing, feeling like you’ve lost the ability to make small talk. I know I can be a little in your face and I’m not always a gentleman, but part of it really is about protecting myself.”

I turned on my recorder. “Fair enough. And you’re right, I certainly don’t have any point of reference for what you’re talking about, even though I’ve been around the sport for a while. I’m not sure I’d say I’m into the fight game, but I know a lot about it. Let’s get started, Braden, are you ready for the first question?”

“Hold on a second. I’m cooling off and getting cold.” He went to the corner and took an official gym sweatshirt out of the box, then pulled it over his head and covered up that banging body. All for the best, I supposed, as far as the interview went. “Go for it.”

“What would you say to someone who told you that there are far more important things than fighting? I saw a T-shirt the other day that said ‘Fighting solves everything.’ It was from a local MMA gym. I bet you know just who that guy is, even though you probably don’t actually know him. That guy obviously thinks fighting is the most important thing. How would you respond?”

What I imagined was that Braden would bristle, and pound his chest, and say that anyone who said such a stupid thing was a coward who fought from behind a keyboard as he posted on internet message boards, that pacifism was a position reeking of intellectual poverty and an acute lack of pragmatism, and maybe then he would turn over the desk and demand to see anyone who suggested that fighting was not the most important thing in life.

“Oh, I think that nearly everything is more important than fighting,” said Braden. “I like what I do, love it, in fact, but let’s not make more of it than it deserves. And of course, it depends on what you mean by fighting.”

I nearly fell out of my chair. His entire demeanor had changed. It had to be another ploy, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t disarming. “Really?” I said with a squeak, fully aware of how mousy and silly I sounded. “You know I turned on the recorder, right?”

Braden nodded and then laughed. “Oh yeah. It’s hard to get away from. This might surprise you. Hell, it will probably surprise anyone who has known me for long, but a lot of the time I feel like I fight to prove something. I know I’m good at it, but I really can’t see myself ever feeling like I’ve improved enough to make up for certain things. I fight with a huge chip on my shoulder. It’s heavy and I spend plenty of time wishing it wasn’t there. I’m not always sure I know where it came from, but I carry it every single minute. It’s great in a fight. It’s a burden everywhere else.”

It was like I was alone in the room, like he wasn’t even talking to me. Braden was staring at something I couldn’t see. Something in the distance, or the past. I wanted to wrap my arms around him, turn off the recorder, and say that he could tell me anything.

“It definitely surprises me,” I said. “Forgive me for saying so, but you seem like the kind of guy, a lot of the time, who gives people the idea that there’s a fighter stereotype.”

He looked up. “What do you mean?”

I plunged in. I had done a ton of interviews, but I couldn’t remember if I had ever had a subject who felt this vulnerable and open. If he had a game, I couldn’t see it. “You know. Overly aggressive. Macho to the max. An alpha even in a room full of alphas. Someone with...well, you said it. Someone with something to prove. What are you trying to prove?”

“That’s a great question. You listen to fighters talk for a while and the promoters are always trying to bait us into trash talking our opponents to sell fights. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes there’s legitimate animosity. But the clue to the guys who are doing it just because they have to is in the clichés.”

“Interesting. Sounds like you’ve put a lot of thought into this. Can you give me an example?”

“Yeah. You’ll hear a lot of guys say ‘I’ll let my fists do the talking.’ Well, okay, but what you’re actually hearing is that guy saying ‘I’m sick of saying the same old thing again in yet another interview. Can’t someone please ask me a new question?’ And that’s what you’re doing with me. You’re asking me questions no one else has asked. Maybe that’s because your mind is different than anyone else’s.” He folded his hands in his lap and nodded for me to continue.

Now this was more like it. Enough about my eyes, more about how my mind is different from anyone else’s. Wait. Unless he meant that I was weird, that I was a freak unlike anyone else. Focus. Compliments later, interview now. “Do you really think that you don’t know where the chip on your shoulder, as you put it, comes from? What do you think you might be trying to prove. Please speculate, if you’re willing.”

Braden sighed. “I’m willing. I think I want to believe, to show myself, that I’m worth as much as my brothers. I fight for money. Sean and Ryan…those are my brothers…they fight for something bigger. They’re soldiers. Marines, to be precise.”

“And why does that matter to you?”

“Because I wanted the same thing they did. Our dad was a lifetime military guy. I always wanted to be my dad. Lucky that way, but he died when I was really young. And I was going into the military when I got swept up in fighting. I wanted to devote myself to something that mattered. But I wound up devoting myself to myself. Whatever I am is whatever you see. There’s nothing more to me. But if you saw my brothers, you’d see versions of me with a little something extra. They’re the kind of men you’d be proud to be with. I’m just the guy you want at your party, if you’re that kind of person. Not that there’s anything wrong with a party, but you know.”

I almost turned off the microphone and put my arms around him. I couldn’t have been more shocked by this turn of events if he had pulled out a tutu and told me that his real dream was to be the prima ballerina in New York. I couldn’t shake the idea that this was all just some strategy of his, but if he was trying to turn me on, it was working. It didn’t feel that way, though. Again, it was like I was barely there. I almost felt like we were in a confessional booth and I was his priest. At any moment he’d snap back into reality and demand that I erase the recording.

It looked we had both been pushed into our careers and never thought we would be good enough. My father had steered me towards my job, but I’d never be good enough because I wasn’t the son he had wanted. A good enough girl still wasn’t a boy. And Braden would never measure up to his own expectations because he wasn’t pursuing his own dreams. All of the posturing—well, at least some of it—was a smokescreen. It was rare to find a guy who could admit he was compensating, but a fighter who admitted it? Now that was an odd bird indeed.

Take it easy, I told myself. It could still be a trick. But I couldn’t quite believe it. It was almost like he’d gone into some sort of trance. Maybe he’d snap out of it at any moment and realize what he’d been saying.

But that didn’t happen. And even if it had, it would have been worth it just to see the

walls come down for a few minutes.

Chapter 6

I woke up feeling hungover even though I hadn’t touched a drop of anything. Sensitivity to light, dry mouth, a general sense of bafflement over what had happened the night before.

  Alyssa. Alyssa.

Her name was going through my head like someone had injected it into my skull. No, that makes it sound like it was something bad, which wasn’t exactly true. But I could not stop thinking about her. And me. As in, what the hell had gotten into me last night? My pulse was racing at a pace somewhere north of feeling anxious.

It had been so long since I had had something to anticipate outside of my next fight. My next one night stand. The next compliment someone would give me to or the next check they would write to me.

In the fight game, image isn’t everything—I mean, you could do whatever you wanted to outside the cage. As long as you won inside of it, no one could say anything about it. The result was obvious. But image wasn’t nothing, either. Perception mattered, and even though I had something of a bad-boy reputation, and even though I had had a year (just one!) that failed to live up to my potential, I had done a pretty good job managing my image as an iron hard warrior, ruffled by nothing. There had never been any reason for me to broadcast my insecurities to the world. It was nobody’s business but mine and even I couldn’t acknowledge them as often as I probably should have. I had always found a way to bury them under training, work, one extra mile, one more round.

But now it was apparently Alyssa’s business too. Like she was a skeleton key that had opened me up, letting everything I tried to keep private ooze out onto the desk between us. I hadn’t been able to shut up!

After I spilled my guts, she had asked me a few more questions and then turned off the recorder. “Do you want me to delete any of that?” she had asked. That was sweet. I could tell she was moved and surprised, but only to the extent that I was aware of anything. I felt like I had come back into my body after going into a trance. I heard someone say that you’re only as sick as your secrets. Did this mean I was cured?

“Do you want me to delete anything?” she repeated.

An earlier version of me wouldn’t even have gotten to the point where she would have needed to ask. I wouldn’t have started blabbing in the first place. But I was surprised to hear myself say no. She could keep it all and use it however she wanted. And I meant it! For the moment at least, I really didn’t care what anyone thought about it, or who might hear it. What had she done to me?

I had to do something. She had put me in motion and now I couldn’t stop circling her, like a shark that won’t be able to breathe if it takes a break and stops swimming.

After my morning session at the gym I waited to catch my breath and then I called her, a million questions running through my mind. I had a horrible moment where I imagined her laughing about how much I had opened up, how I had become less of a man in her eyes...but it was better to just do something than to stay afraid of it. I called her before I could second-guess myself anymore.

“Hey Alyssa, it’s Braden.”

“Hey! What’s up?”

“I want to take you out tonight. I don’t want to beat around the bush, let me take you out.” I felt like a sweaty kid in high school, worried that she would say no. Or like I was trying to pin a corsage to her dress without sticking a needle into her while her dad watched.

She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Braden.”

But I could tell she wanted to say yes. Her voice said that it was a fine idea indeed. And whenever there’s an opening, I can find it. In another life, I might have made a great detective. “It’s a great idea.” I tried to put a laugh in my voice. “Look, last night might have just been another job to you, but it really meant something to me. I’m not sure how well I can explain it. I don’t get like that. I don’t feel like that very often. If I didn’t know you better I might think you had cast some weird spell on me and tricked me into admitting all of my issues. So, I think it’s only fair, witchy woman that you are, that you let me take you out.”

“Not sure my dad would see it that way, hot stuff.”

That’s what I was talking about. She could not help but be playful, and that’s when I knew that her experience had been as good as mine. There was no way she would have called me hot stuff the night I dropped that towel in the locker room, unless she was doing it condescendingly, which wasn’t her style. No, no one can fake the sort of intrigue that was creeping into her voice. I figured she was probably playing with her hair and feeling as good about all this as I was. I liked the thought of that, I really did. As long as she was flirty, this was as good as sealed. But even as we talked, I realized that I wasn’t thinking about getting her home and dragging her into bed. I just wanted to be with her, and I’d never felt anything like that. Nearly everything I was saying to her felt like it would be a cheesy line in some other guy’s mouth, but I was being as authentic as I ever had. What was wrong with me?

“He doesn’t have to know, Alyssa. And if it makes it easier, it can just be for the interview. Maybe I can give you some better stuff, or, I don’t know, like bonus material or something? And that way, even if he did find out we spent some time together, he would be able to support it since it would be for your show.”

I can almost hear her thinking. Say yes say yes say yes.

“I just want to know you better,” I said. “If that means I have to let you learn more about me, so be it.”

“That might work,” she said. “You’d be willing to answer more questions?”

“Not only that, I’m happy to talk to you exclusively. I mean, I’d have to clear it with my agent, but yeah. I’d be willing to tell you anything you want to know,” I said. I checked myself for signs of insincerity. Nope, it was all real.  I’ll say this: when you are the toughest, people stop asking if you’re okay. They just assume that you can handle whatever you’re dealing with, and that’s not always the case. Guys like me don’t get to feel defenseless very often. Maybe that’s what part of her appeal was. She made me want to let her in. She reminded me that vulnerability was a real thing.

Once you know how to hurt a body, you have a better chance of knowing how to heal it. Guys like Bruce Lee would have made great doctors if they had different inclinations. Alyssa had been around fighting her whole life and she seemed to have an innate intuition about what people—meaning, me—needed.

“Fantastic,” I said. “I’m going to get in one more quick session, clean up, then come and get you. I’ll take you to dinner and then we’ll keep going on the interview.”  

“Where should we meet?”

“I’m going to come pick you up. And unless you’re a picky eater, let me choose, okay? I know just where to take you.”

She agreed and I went back out into the gym. It looked brighter, somehow. Cleaner. Like a place with purpose, not a place to use as a distraction. I worked with a focus unknown even to me. I’d always prided myself on my obsessive training, even with that tough year I had, but this was different. Every time I hit the bag, or the pads, it was like I was pounding on some part of me that I didn’t like. I could hit harder. I was more accurate. I could tie every movement to something bigger. To a future, instead of simply trying to outrun my anger moment to moment.

You know what? I think Alyssa was making me want to be a better person. That sounded like a line from a movie. Maybe it was. Still true, though.

When I finished up, I thanked my sparring partners and Mason and hit the shower, which reminded me again of how I’d dropped my towel in front of Alyssa. How I had laughed, knowing that she was probably thinking about me in the shower. Well now I was thinking about her, in exactly the way I promised myself I never would. Getting too attached to people took away your freedom. My freedom was what had allowed me to do what I do: fight without limits.

I wondered if her dad had any idea that I had just made a date with his daughter. Or something close to it. I knew she’d be in for it if he caught us. I could handle myself, but she was obviously such a daddy’s girl that I didn’t know exactly how she would respond to his disapproval. I didn’t plan on finding out.

I changed into a jacket and my nicest slacks. I kept a few changes of sharp clothes at the gym. Sometimes photographers would drop by and want something more polished than a bunch of sweaty hogs hitting each other. It never hurt to be able to look slick on short notice. On my way out, everyone whistled and jeered at me. It must have looked like a Halloween costume to them. I encouraged them all to enjoy their fun, knowing that I was probably on the way to the greatest night of my life. Even that sort of hyperbole made me laugh, because I recognized that I was being dramatic and knew that it might actually be true.

  I got in my Mercedes, a gift from the company. The car had been part of my first big endorsement deal. When I had sent a picture of the car to mom she had tried to be encouraging, but had quickly changed the subject to Janie and my brothers and how overwhelmed she was by everything.

No. I had better things to think about.

I texted Alyssa and she sent me her address. It wasn’t familiar to me and I realized that I had never been to Mason’s house. I wondered if this was going to be it, or if she was meeting me somewhere on the sly. If it was his house, he must not be there or she wouldn’t have suggested we meet here.

I still wasn’t sure when I pulled into the driveway, which was so long that it could have held a single file fleet of yachts. A whistle escaped me. I couldn’t believe the size of her dad’s house. I knew Mason was a legitimate legend who had done very well for himself, but I had no idea he lived like this. This was something I would have expected from, I don’t know, someone like a sultan. Suddenly my car seemed like a toy. I felt like a boy. Oh well, I could always find a way to use things for inspiration. I’d let this fire me up just like everything else. Intimidation wasn’t on the list of things I felt.

Not ever.

Even more unbelievable was the sight of Alyssa coming down the walkway to meet me. She had put on a dark blue dress and had her hair pulled back tight. Classy and effortless. Better yet, she didn’t seem to have any idea how hot she looked, even though I’m sure she spent some time thinking about what to wear.

I got out and opened the door for her, wondering absently if her dad was watching from an upstairs window. But no, he wouldn’t be. I doubt he would have wanted her anywhere near me and she surely knew as well. The fact that she wasn’t slinking around like a cat burglar must have meant that he was somewhere else.   

“Where do you want to eat?” I said after getting behind the wheel.

“What were you thinking? You told me you were going to pick. I’m easy when it comes to food. My dad cooks like a pro, though, so I’m definitely a little spoiled.”

So, not only was Mason a decorated veteran and highly sought-after MMA coach, he was also an elite chef. Fine, fine. I put “learn to cook like Mason” in my mental to-do list. And I had to keep in mind that Mason was older. He had a huge head start on me in life, but I could be just as focused. As it happened, though, I was no slouch as a cook.

“I know just the place. If you didn’t have anything in mind, just leave it to me.” On the way to the restaurant, I think we were both a little nervous. I definitely was, but she was showing it a lot more than I was. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a sense of how the night would go. It felt easy with her. The nerves were pleasant. There was an anticipation in the air between us. Anticipation of what, exactly, remained to be seen.

When I pulled into my own driveway, she gave me a look like I had tricked her like some unscrupulous guy running a carnival game. “This doesn’t look like a restaurant. This looks like a house. Yours, I’m guessing?”

“Good guess! You should be working for a carnival.”  

“Who says I don’t?”

“What’s your specialty? You’re obviously not the bearded lady. Are you the one who tricks people into paying to see the littlest horse in the world, but then it turns out the whole effect is done with mirrors?”

“I can tell whenever someone’s running game on me.”

I snorted. Couldn’t help it. “What is your special carnival sense telling you right now?”

“Ask me later. But nice house. Really nice.”

Most relationships I’d been in didn’t have a lot of give and take. They were mostly just me taking. I could admit it. I suppose that’s not a real relationship, is it? But I couldn’t have admitted it before meeting Alyssa. And if everyone lets you take without asking anything in return, how much are you actually obligated to give?

“Yeah, it’s humble but it’s mine. Come on. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

I haven’t been entirely honest here. The one thing I could do besides fight was cook. Maybe that’s selling myself a little short, but I was a hell of a cook. It threw me when I heard about Mason, because knowing him it wouldn’t have surprised me if he turned out to be the best cook in the entire world. But that feeling passed. I was no slouch in the kitchen. “My family is really into food,” I said when I ushered her into the dining room, where I had set the table.

“My mom always said it was the easiest way to make people happy.”

“Nothing about this looks easy, Braden,” she said, taking it in. “In fact, it looks like you put a ton of effort into it. Who taught you?”

“My mom, mostly. But she taught us all to love it. Then we’d experiment. After a while, it turned into a competition. Big surprise, right?” And now I’m competing with your dad. We’d all cook and try to outdo each other. My brothers and I. Then we’d let Janie be the judge. That was always her favorite part of the week. Taste test day.”

“Janie’s your sister?”

“Yeah. You’ll get to meet her soon. She will bully you into a list of reading recommendations that you have never heard of. But I don’t want to say more than that right now. Might spoil your sixth sense. I want to see how in tune you are with the universe.” I pulled out her chair and sat her down. “Be right back. First course coming up.”

I brought out the appetizer, a batch of medium-sized oysters. “I shucked these myself.”

“Were you wearing that suit when you did it?”

“Unfortunately, no. I’m many things, including messy. I like this suit but I doubt it’s oyster proof.”

“Probably not.”

“You know, even if you were a picky eater, these oysters are good enough that I think I could have swayed you towards them either way.” I had also heard that oysters were an aphrodisiac. Not that I needed any help getting revved up for her, and she seemed like she was into me.

When she tried one her face lit up and the effort was immediately worth it. Knowing that I got that reaction out of her—with a little help from the highest quality oysters in town—was pure joy. Within minutes we had polished off the plate. The pleasure I felt at someone else’s pleasure was exquisite. No, not just anyone. Hers.

For the entree, I had prepared a duck with orange sauce. Dessert was a tiramisu that had taken forever. Most people think that Olive Garden is the height of tiramisu, but those people still have not had a real tiramisu. No king has ever dined in an Olive Garden. I had been prepared to answer questions throughout the dinner, but for a while, the only thing she wanted to talk about was the food, how I had made it, what the ingredients were, and to tell me what a bad cook she was.

“We always had a cook,” she said. “My dad always wanted us to eat healthy and he said hiring someone to prepare for to our specs—his specs, of course—was the best way to make sure it always happened. That was the one thing about him—no matter how good his food was, it was all fattening and fun. When dad cooked it was usually for special occasions when we all wanted to hog out. It still took a professional cook to keep us healthy.”

“I can’t say he’s wrong about that,” I said. “What with that figure you’re rocking.” I laughed, worried that I’d overstepped, but she smiled and looked at her plate, then looked back up at me with her head lowered. It was one of the sexiest things I’d ever seen. The weirdest thing was that it was also something I had seen before in other women. They just hadn’t had the same effect on me.

“You know,” she said, “That’s one of the first things you’ve said to me that didn’t annoy me. You were absolutely impossible that first night.”

“Well, I annoy most people way quicker,” I said. “You’re right, though. I was an idiot. A big, naked idiot.” There was a quiet moment and she opened her mouth. But before she could say anything, my phone buzzed. It was a text from my mom, saying she was ready for a skype call. “I think this might give you a better idea of what I’m like,” I said, nodding to the living room. “Come on out here and meet the family. This might work better to answer your questions that I could do on my own. Let’s see what happens. These people know me better than anyone. They’ll keep me honest.”

I could tell it surprised her, but she was into it. She got out her recorder and checked her equipment. I wasn’t sure if she would need it, but she was welcome to record anything she saw.

What she saw as the screen flickered into life was my mom and Janie, smiling like they had just won the lottery. If that didn’t melt Alyssa’s heart, nothing would.

Not that I was planning on melting her heart. Or running game on her. None of that. I was determined, for the first time, to show a woman the real me, for better or worse.

Chapter 7

There was nothing quite like having all of your expectations of a person blown away. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde didn’t even begin to cover the discrepancies between Braden’s former and current selves. Who was this man who cooked duck, calamari, shucked oysters, and talked about me meeting his family? Who gave me the kind of sincere compliments that I would have loved hearing from anyone, but that made me shiver when they came from him? I hoped that I had hidden it well, but I spent that dinner in full-on fever mode. I wanted to knock everything off the table, throw him onto it, and show him just how wild he had made me. Effortless charm. That’s what he had. Most men I had been with tried so hard to flatter me that, by the time I gave in, even if I had wanted to, it was nearly always more effort than it was worth. And when it happens that way, it’s not even real charm. When it’s calculated, it’s something else. It occurred to me that I had never actually been seduced. I had told myself that I had, but I had been fooling myself.

Braden, though...even if he was being real and was doing it subconsciously, he was absolutely leading me and my body somewhere.

  It was almost a relief when his phone interrupted us.

Almost.

I followed him into the living room and we sat in front of his laptop. He connected to Skype, there were a couple of beeps and boops, and then his mom and his sister appeared on the screen.

They were absolutely adorable and I was touched to see the love in their eyes as they looked at Braden, big brother, and son. He looked just like a masculine version of his mother. The same high cheekbones. The same piercing eyes. As they greeted each other, it was obvious that he had picked up many of his mannerisms from her.

“Hey mom, Janie, this is Alyssa. She’s a reporter who’s doing a story on you two. I told her that you were the most glamorous creatures on earth and she couldn’t get her microphone out fast enough. Oh wait, it’s not really a microphone, is it?’

“No, it is. It’s just digital.”

“Well, I will do my best to be glamorous,” said his mom. “Call me Amy, please.”

“I will, thank you. And what about you, Janie? Do you go by Janie, or do I need to call you Miss Glamorous like your brother is insisting?”

Janie was in a wheelchair. Her neck was twisted at an angle that looked painful. I wasn’t an expert, but I would have guessed that she had cerebral palsy. “Janie is just fine,” she said. “Hey big brother,” she said, her voice high and clear. Her eyes lit up with joy at seeing Braden, and I was thrilled to see that he had the same expression on his face. Nothing was as attractive to me as seeing a man truly exuberant about a passion, and Braden’s family was obviously one of his passions. But I couldn’t help but think about what he said about his insecurities. I wondered if it was all in his head. Surely this wasn’t the mother who pressured him into thinking he wasn’t as good as his brothers.

“Are you his girlfriend?” said Janie. “Have you read the Narnia books? If you didn’t like those, you should take a look at The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I’m really interested in genetics.”

“Uh,” I said. “I’m just a—”

“Would you like that Janie?” said Braden. “I think that’s exactly what should happen. Help me wear her down.”

Amy laughed. “What do you think, Janie?” she said. “Isn’t it about time your wild big brother settled in? Maybe it would knock some sense into his head, instead of letting these other maniacs knock it out.”  

“Leave it to me,” said Janie. “By the time I’m done with her, she’ll be on your arm, Braden. But when’s your next fight? Is that chicken still hiding from you?”

“We’re still waiting to hear,” he said. “Vlad is deciding whether he thinks there’s enough money in it. I’m ready. He’s not. But it’s up to him. He says he’s got an injury, but maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s just a chicken.”

Janie fanned her elbows out and flapped her arms like chicken wings. Braden did the same.  

This was news to me. I hadn’t known that the title fight was actually under discussion. This would be a huge jump for Braden. He was as tough as they came, but Vlad was viciousness from another dimension. And country. And continent. Part of me wanted him to heal up so Braden could thrash him. Another part—the part that, I guess, wanted to be his girlfriend—wanted Vlad to convalesce until the end of the time and stay far away from any octagon where Braden was fighting.

The conversation went on for another half hour. For most of it, I was happy to sit back, listen, and watch. Janie and Amy asked me a few questions, mostly about more books, but it was obvious that they were desperate to connect (or reconnect?) with him. Braden seemed so at ease, which was so odd to see. For all his swaggering, cockiness, confidence, whatever you wanted to call it, Braden didn’t seem like he had a lot of peace in his life. But this was him at his most peaceful.

They were all just so normal. I’m not sure what I expected. Maybe a bunch of people dropping towels and strutting around, daring cub reporters to step into the shower. But this was very much like a conversation any loving family would have had.

When he finally said goodbye, Braden closed the laptop and leaned back into the couch. He closed his eyes and smiled. “Janie really wants me to come home,” he said.

“I can tell. Do you visit often? With the way you all interact, it sounds like you really miss them.”

He opened his eyes. “Not as often as I used to. Not as often as I should. And yeah, I do miss them. Constantly. For a while, I avoided visiting because I told myself it would take away from training. That part’s actually true. Then I told myself that if I went home I’d feel judged, even if no one was actually judging me. That part’s just in my head.”

“What part? Are you talking about your brothers again? You know, you really shouldn’t—”

His brow furrowed but his eyes smiled. “Hey, you know what would help?”

“What? Should I turn the microphone back on?”

He leaned forward and kissed me, just like that. I felt like I had just stepped off of a merry go round that had been going a little too fast. Heat shot through my body from my toes to the top of my head. Braden pushed more insistently and I relented, kissing him back, slightly opening my mouth. He pressed me back into the couch, putting his thighs on either side of mine. I put my hands on his lips and gasped. His muscles were so hard it barely even felt like a body.

The last time a man had touched me I had had to do all the work. We had both been unsure. Me because I hadn’t been that into it but was lonely, him because he was insecure and inexperienced and had no idea how to handle me.

This was the opposite and then some.

Braden wrapped his fingers around my wrists and squeezed lightly. I bit his lower lip and raised my hips to meet him. He put his hands under my ass and ground himself against me. His strength was incredible. He could move me around anyway he wanted. And it turned out that was exactly what I wanted.

So much of my life had been defined by a lack of control, but when it came to the men I had dated, it had been the opposite. I had always had to be the leader in bed. Now I was realizing that giving up control, being desired like this, was all I had ever wanted.

Braden’s breath deepened with my own. Before I could react he had picked me up, turned me around, and pressed himself again me as I leaned over the back of the couch. His hands moved up and down my back, exploring, the suddenly they were under my shirt on my bare skin. His fingertips traced patterns across my shoulder blades, then dipped under the straps of my bra. One hand grabbed the waist of my jeans, gripping my belt and pulling me back against him.

He was hard. I had never wanted anything so badly, and from the feel of him, he wanted me just as much. But he was obviously intending to take his time. He gripped the back of my neck lightly in one hand and pulled the back of my shirt up. He kissed up and down my spine, letting go with his hands long enough to undo my bra. Then he bent over me again, his arms on both sides of mine. Then he gripped my wrists and kissed the back of my neck.

I heard a high, soft moaning and realized that it was me.

His breath was in my ear. “I’m going to take you upstairs in a few minutes,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Ask me what’s going to happen then,” he said, slipping one hand between my legs from the back and rubbing me through my jeans.

“Tell me,” I said. “I’m not sure I can form a whole sentence right now.” I was instantly wet. My mind was already spinning, wondering what he had in store for me upstairs.

“Whatever I want,” he said. “I’m going to make you feel good and I’m going to show you what you need.” Before I could answer he applied more pressure between my legs and kissed the back of my neck again. He pushed his cock against my ass and rubbed back in forth slowly. I thought I was going to explode.

“Now,” I said.

“What?”

“Take me up there now, I can’t wait.”

I felt like a toy as Braden lifted me up, tossed me over his shoulder, and took the stairs two at a time as if I weighed no more than a bag of yarn.

The long hallway passed in a blur. From my perch, I couldn’t help but notice how this man had the greatest ass I had ever seen. The thought that I was actually going to see it within moments—and not in that awkward way that I had in the locker room—made my vision blur. Finally, he pushed a door open with his foot and took me into his bedroom. I had a vague impression of a king-size bed with dark covers before he dropped me on it and pounced on me.

Braden pushed one of his knees between my legs and opened me while his hands pulled my shirt up and got rid of the loose bra. One hand played with my nipples while the other unbuckled my belt.

I squirmed as if I wanted to get away from him—part of me actually did seem to want to escape when the pleasure was too intense—but he held me in place, not letting me stray too far as he pulled my pants off and threw them off the side of the bed. I scarcely had time to breath before he began licking a light trail from my breasts to my stomach, and then his fingers were opening me softly and his tongue found me.

I heard the sound again, the high whimpering moan. Braden buried himself in me, teasing me with his tongue, and I was dimly aware again that the sound was coming from me. I turned my head to the side and saw that there was a floor to ceiling mirror on the wall. As soon as I saw what he was doing to me, I came instantly. By the time I finished he had lifted me and sat me against his headboard. He stepped back and unbuckled his belt, then pulled down his briefs.

The brief glimpse in the shower hadn’t done his cock justice. I had never wanted anything as bad as I saw him crawling across the bed towards me, but I worried, in the best way, that it might be too much for me.

When he reached me he reared up on his knees. Instinct took over and I had in my mouth before he had to tell me what to do. I couldn’t help myself. I took him in in short strokes, then longer, stopping to appreciate his moans and to taste every inch of him, running my tongue from the base to the tip every few seconds, in total disbelief that this is where our disastrous first interview attempt had led us.

His hands were in my hair. He gently pulled me back when he couldn’t wait another second. He reached down and pulled me forward so I was no longer sitting up, then spread my legs with his hands. He was inside me two seconds later, deeper than I had ever felt.

As our bodies rocked together, the sensations were so intense that the barely even registered as feelings. To be touched, handled, was something that nearly every woman had felt, but this was being consumed. Braden had invaded every one of my cells, and I had done the same to him. It felt like we were the last people on earth, racing together towards an oblivion that we could only get from the other.

As he thrust into me, over and over, I climaxed once, then again. He leaned back so he could reach my clitoris and kept going while touching me lightly, driving me over the edge again.

I felt him building towards his own orgasm inside me. His abdomen tightened. His breath grew ever quicker. The veins on his neck stood out in sharp relief over his torso that was now slick with our sweat. When Braden came I put my hands on his thighs and marveled. Caught in his passion, he looked like he was sculpted from marble. He trembled again and again, then finally collapsed on top of me.

I felt like I had simultaneously been emptied of everything thought, been brought back to life, had enjoyed the greatest meal of my life, and won the lottery. But had it been good for him?

“Oh my God,” he said into my ear. I traced the muscles of his back as his breathing began to slow.

“What?” I said.

He leaned up on his elbows and smiled down at me. After kissing me once, he said, “That’s the kind of sex people pay to see. I’m telling you, there is nobody on the entire planet who had it better than we did tonight. You are a masterpiece. You just brought my body to life, little Alyssa Edwards. Or, from the way I’m feeling now, you just may have brought on a coma. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to move again.”

I laughed, which made me snort a little, which made us both collapse into giggles like we were kids at a slumber party. “I feel the same way.”

As it turned out, once we had a few minutes to recharge, our bodies took over and we found that yes, we could still move.

Chapter 8

When I’m trying to promote a fight—or myself, for that matter, which usually amounts to the same thing—I’ve never been a stranger to hyperbole. But when I say that first night with Alyssa was the best night of my life, that isn’t me overselling it. If anything, it’s an insulting understatement to what happened. I thought about the Transformers I played with as a kid. You could take an ordinary pickup truck and reassemble it with a few clicks and twists into a robot.

It was like Alyssa had grabbed me—in fairness, I grabbed her first—and turned me inside out, upside down, cranked my limbs and my personality, and turned me into...what?

Something better. It felt like she made me into something better.

I’ve always had a strange relationship with sex. Well, strange might not be the word. I wanted it constantly, but what young guy doesn’t? The difference with me was that, after high school, where I was often ignored by girls, I could have it constantly. I found that I liked the chase, but no one was making me chase them anymore.

My night with Alyssa hadn’t been the result of a calculation or a pursuit. And it hadn’t been the sort of spontaneous one-night stand I was used to. It had been a singular event that made me think I needed to divide my whole life into Before Alyssa and After Alyssa.

Why not? BC and AD had a good run, as far as notating significant events in human history. Maybe it was time for BA and AA.

There is a reason that there are entire religions based around sex. Some of them say that when you’re really into it, that’s when you see God, literally. Alyssa, all of her, body and soul, made that finally click for me. I wasn’t religious, but I was feeling pretty damned worshipful. Maybe I needed to start a church and install her as some sort of alluring high priestess.

I wasn’t sure what might happen next. We hadn’t talked about expectations or plans. We spent that night absolutely drunk on each other, and parted wondering when we would see each other again.

I thought it might fade. Lots of things happen late at night when people start breathing hard. Things that have a very different sheen in the harsh light of day.

Not this, though. If anything, my attraction to her got more intense.

The next month was pretty wild, to say the least. I meant it when I had told her that we were having the kind of sex people usually watch alone on their laptops. It was all like something out of a novel. It had only been an hour after she left when I called her. I couldn’t stand it. We made plans to go out again that night. I wanted to see her all the time, and she felt the same way.

I kept waiting for the euphoria to fade. It kept not fading. In fact, it kept not fading even more every time I saw her. It was the opposite of not fading.

There was a very real problem, however: her dad. Getting away with it once had been lucky. We had had the shield of the interview, if we turned out to need it. But that excuse wouldn’t last forever. No, we had to stay off Mason’s line of sight. I wasn’t sure how he would react on her end, but the fighter in me imagined him finding out about us, kicking me out of his gym, calling the heads of the organization...then soon I would be fighting for sandwiches on Youtube. Unlikely, yes, but you can’t always control the places your mind goes.

In some ways, this made it all way hotter. It would have been smarter to lie low, but we couldn’t control ourselves. I had never been wanted like this, I only thought I had. And I had never wanted like this. Not anything, let alone another person.

I liked to be disciplined in my fighting, always hoping that it would trickle out into the rest of my life. Sometimes it had. But there was no way I could have been disciplined when it came to her.

Alyssa had to sneak out to see me, or we would meet somewhere in public and fool around in one of our cars. One of our hottest trysts happened when she was driving me somewhere and then suddenly pulled into a car wash. Once we were in the bay and the windows were soaped up, she unzipped me and gave me the best blowjob I had ever had. Then I insisted on driving, drove to another car wash, and returned the favor. We felt like high school kids. An hour after that we drove to a cheap hotel and rolled around in bed for two hours before I had to get back to the gym.

Alyssa would come watch me practice and then we would hit the locker room for another “interview.” Once I got so wild for her that we did it in Mason’s office, which didn’t even have a lock on the door.

There were other benefits as well. I had never noticed how much focus went into all the different women I was trying to string along. It seemed like since they were always coming to me that I wasn’t putting any effort into it at all. But going through the motions with new people all of the time was a time suck. Everything was just a prelude to sex, sex had honestly just meant having an orgasm with another person, and it had cost me. I realized that now my headspace was devoted to two things: Alyssa and training. Focusing on her made it easier to focus in general. Apparently, I wasn’t one for multitasking. It was like the rate at which I could improve was, itself, improving.

And opportunities were appearing out of nowhere. Sparring guys like to gossip. Clips of me training were making their way onto the Internet. If results were anything to go by—spoiler, they always are—then I was killing it. I had sponsors sniffing around wanting me to endorse everything from pain relievers to wrist wraps to pre-workout drinks. And I wasn’t going out and chasing them. I was spending less time thinking about my image than I ever had and I owed it all to her.

Interviewers were showing up at all hours, wanting to know how it was going, how I was feeling about Vlad, and so on. I didn’t have time for most of them, which was a great feeling. I really didn’t have time for them. There was only preparing for the fight and dreaming about the next time I saw Alyssa. There was a thrill in the stripped-down, monkish austerity of the whole thing.

The facts were indisputable: Less womanizing equaled a better Braden. I didn’t party. I didn’t drink. I was more or less on Alyssa’s schedule when we could see each other, and there was only one vice we both loved.

We had a couple of close calls, which heightened both the tension and our desire. I’m sure the other fighters noticed the attention. Alyssa was coming and going constantly, but there’s a sort of fighter’s code. I wasn’t too worried about them talking. There was a day when Alyssa said her dad had been a little distant and we wondered if he might have seen or heard something, but that turned out to be a migraine he was trying to fight through without her knowing it hurt.

Mason was as great as ever with me. Razor sharp in his suggestions, encouraging without overdoing it, and genuinely excited about my clash with Vlad. Things literally could not have gotten better. Or if they could, I wouldn’t have known how.

But history is full of people—let’s be honest, mostly men—getting what they want and then messing it all up for no discernible reason. Exhibit number nine billion?

Yours truly.

I know I’ve been talking a lot about the new me, reinvented, rising from the ashes, all that jazz. But some things hadn’t changed. No matter how good our habits become, there’s always going to be something unchangeable, or less changeable, in each person’s wiring. For instance, I’ve never been that good at making promises to myself. No, scratch that. I’ve never been great at keeping promises to myself. Making them is easy. Tomorrow I’ll stop drinking. This time it’s going to be different, and so on.

I’ll be good. Just not yet.

But this time I thought I had really changed. Then Alyssa had to travel for work and was gone for nearly a month. It was a cool gig. She flew out to the east coast to interview an American sumo and wound up staying longer to pursue some other opportunities. I was a little jealous. The sumo sounded like a cool guy and I’m sure I could have learned something from him. And of course, I was jealous of anyone spending more time than me with Alyssa.

Our first week apart was fine. We talked on the phone every day and had a couple of intense phone sex chats on Skype. I have to say that, while she had never been a shrinking violet, it was a damned delight to see her come out of the small shell she did have. Alyssa had turned into a wicked little fiend, making it all feel even more like an addiction.

If you’re going to be addicted to something, it might as well be something that makes you happy and doesn’t come with the diminishing returns of drugs and booze.

Then she got busy and we had to take a short break, even from the phone stuff. It was like the women could smell it. She’s gone. He’s defenseless. Get him, ladies! Drag him down into some debauchery! Well, I wasn’t defenseless, but I suddenly felt like I was under siege. I don’t want to let myself off the hook, but damn, it was hard.

They were there when I got to practice. They were there while I practiced. They cheered and draped themselves over anything they could find, the least subtle invitation you could imagine, over and over. After practice, they were lining the hallway in the locker room. They pretended like they weren’t obviously there just to give me my pick of them: can I have an autograph for my little brother? Can I ask you a question about fighting? Can you teach me to wrap my hands? How do I get a stomach as flat as yours? But all of that was just a prelude to me telling them when and where it was going to go down.

This little part of me kept nagging, saying “stop, Braden, stop.” I wasn’t even doing anything awful, but the conversations with the women were getting longer. I was getting a little chattier. The attention was making me feel good. Human nature and wiring, I’m telling you. The fact that all I had to do was wait for Alyssa to come back and give me all the attention I’d ever wanted—and the right kind of attention—wasn’t hitting me like it should have. I could tell I was headed into one end of a potential streak of self-destruction. How would it end?

Anyway, it’s not like I was going to do anything. I was just getting antsy.

It’s a terrible thing, to be strong and weak. Most people only know one or the other. I envy them sometimes. It’s harder to have a foot in both worlds.

Things came to a head with the sponsorships. That’s where the tipping point was. I had done a pretty good job of letting my agent handle things. There were always new deals, but not the ones you dream about when you’re getting into the game. There was enough to cover my bases and live a good life, but I wanted to be rolling in cash. I wanted a house like Mason’s. I wanted to be able to take Alyssa anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat. That kind of dough wasn’t there yet.

Then one day after a practice a guy in the nicest suit I had ever seen was outside. He was from Nike. Nike was the one everyone dreamed about, but so far they had limited most of their support to football and basketball players. It was one thing if you were a Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant or Joe Montana. It was something else entirely if you were a fighter. Every single brawler in the organization could have had a Ph.D. in quantum theory and the media still would have treated us like we were ignorant thugs. And to be fair, there were plenty of those in the fight game as well.

Nike. Nike. As in “Just do it,” all the biggest names, all the biggest contracts…My pulse started racing immediately and for all I know my face was either showing panic or giddiness.

“Braden,” he said. “I’m James Baldwin from Nike. I’m buying you lunch. You’re going to want to say yes to this. And call me Jim.”

I already knew that. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say yes yesterday. I didn’t even call my agent. James—excuse me, Jim—took me to a high-end restaurant where everyone addressed him by name. He took us to a private room in the back and laid out a deal that surpassed anything I ever could have dreamed of. I thought of Han Solo saying, “I don’t know, I can imagine quite a bit,” when Luke was trying to lure him into helping them with a promise of riches from Princess Leia. I, too, thought I could have imagined quite a bit. Not like this, though. Not even close. The whole thing was kind of like an out of body experience. Astral projection, a symptom of untold riches shoved into my face.

By the end of that lunch—I don’t even know what to call it, there were maybe nine courses and two bottles of wine—I had signed on the proverbial dotted line and we were in business. Big business. If I could keep improving and doing my thing, I was going to set for life. More than set.

Maybe I would buy a Scottish palace for Alyssa. Wrap it up in a bow two miles wide. Maybe a car. Maybe one of each kind of car. I could buy her an island. Maybe even a small planet. She could rule over it at her whim, a sexy intergalactic leader whose people would cheer for her in the streets. Maybe that was going a little too far, but it thrilled me that my thoughts went to her first, to all the things I could give her once this happened.

As soon as the lunch was over I called her, desperate to share the news. She didn’t answer. About two minutes after that I got a message from James Baldwin, my new favorite man at Nike, asking if I could swing by a company party that night. He said there would be some business happening there, but he also wanted to use the night to introduce me to the Nike team.

“Braden, it’s time to see where you belong. You’ll have a good night and you’ll be the star of the show.” I was sure that he said this to all of his clients. I was also sure that he delivered on the promise with all of his clients.

Why the hell not? Surely I deserved a little celebration. It didn’t mean I had to drink, or party, or do anything that I hadn’t been doing. It’s not like I was going to show up at a hotel and go totally off the deep end. Self-control was my middle name since I met Alyssa. It’s not like this was going to hit the reset button for me.

Famous last words. My middle name wasn’t going to save me.

I spent the rest of the day training like a maniac and waiting for a message from Alyssa that never came. My focus wasn’t what it should have been, but I had a lot on my mind. Mason noticed. Of course, he did. When I told him the news he picked me up around the waist and swung me around like we were in a musical. “I am so proud of you.” He said it over and over and I couldn’t get enough of it.

He also gave me all the boilerplate warnings. With great fame/money comes great temptation/power/responsibility, et cetera. He reminded me that, now more than ever, it was time to get my head right and keep it there. He was right, and he didn’t even know the half of it.

“Nike, everyone!” Mason was yelling his head off. He waved all the other guys going and gave a speech about me and my work ethic and my willingness to buckle down and listen when it was time. I was now a shining beacon of hope for all poor, borderline-starving fighters. “Money isn’t everything, but it sure as hell isn’t nothing!”

I accepted the handshakes and backslaps and semi-jokes about buying houses for all of them and paying for their gym memberships.

I hit the showers and kept fighting the kinds of fits of the giggles that I hadn’t had since that first night with Alyssa. Oh my God, the money. But better than that, the freedom that would come with it. The endless amount of choices I would have!

After I was cleaned up I called my mom and told her. She was quiet at first. “That’s amazing, honey,” she finally said.

“Mom, what’s wrong?” Normally she would have yelled for Janie to come over to put it on speaker. “Is something wrong with Janie?”

“No, no, Janie’s fine. I’m sorry, it’s just...oh honey, I don’t want to distract you right now. I’m really proud of you. Let’s not talk about it now.” She exhaled loudly and slowly.

“Mom, come on. You know I’ll think about this all night. Just tell me.” I read once that waiting was a skill like anything else. It was a skill I had not cultivated.

Her voice was choked with emotion when she spoke. “It’s been awhile since I’ve heard from your brothers. I’m sure it’s nothing, but...I get anxious. Sean and Ryan were supposed to check in yesterday, and then again today. Haven’t heard a peep and can’t get anyone on the line. You know how it is.”

I sure did. My brothers, when we did talk on the phone or on Skype on those rare occasions that they weren’t on duty, said they were always on pins and needles when I had a fight. Knowing they were always on the verge of combat was that multiplied by about a million. They were always one bullet or explosion away from oblivion, leaving the rest of us behind.

“I’m sure they’re fine, mom.” They have to be. “Probably just out of contact or on maneuvers.”

“Yes. I’m sure you’re right.” She could not have sounded less convinced. “Hey, let me put Janie on.”

Before I could say anything, Janie was there, jabbering a mile a minute about a book she was reading. Normally it’s easy for me to get excited when someone is talking about his or her passion, but Janie’s book mania had never really sunk in. The book was about a Jewish man who had made it through one of the death camps. It was about how he had survived by keeping a good attitude, a fact that sounded like it could not possibly be true. But it was also about how, once he made it out, he devoted the rest of his life to helping people through a type of therapy he came up with.

Now, for the first time, I said, “I’m going to read that. What’s the title and author again?” I really did want to read it. It also registered that maybe me wanting to read about someone selfless coincided with the fact that I was teetering on the edge of doing something selfish that very night.

“Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. It’s short, don’t worry,” she said, laughing. “And don’t get fussy, I was just kidding. I know you could read a lot book, but I know you don’t really have time.”

I laughed too. “Love you, sis. Good night.”

When I hung up the phone it was only five o’clock. No word from Alyssa yet. The party was starting at six. I still hadn’t told James I’d be there or not. The sun was beginning to set, bathing the world in that evening glow that symbolizes the start of party time for a select few. Like myself, in the past.

Decision time. I honestly considered flipping a coin, but I couldn’t find one. Maybe Nike could give me a quarter so I could start using it to make my choices.

Before I knew it I had showered, shaved, and was putting on a suit. It was like an out of body experience. Just getting dressed, nothing has happened yet. Just walking out to my car, haven’t gone anywhere yet. Just pulling out of the driveway, just driving. Just pulling into the hotel where the Nike party is, it’s not like I’m going up there or anything. Just getting in the elevator, just smiling at the stunning hostess who greeted me by name and said everyone is waiting for me. No, she said dying to meet me. Could you actually be excited enough to meet someone that you would die of it? That would make for the most terrible, lamest tombstone.

Then I was stepping onto the rooftop, which had apparently been reserved for my shindig. The city spread out below us in all directions. James glided over with a drink in his hand and shouted for everyone to be quiet. And by everyone, I mean the biggest group of the most gorgeous-looking people I had ever seen. It was like walking into a jewelry shop that sold sparkling, expensive human beings instead of gemstones. And they were all looking at me like I was some mythical creature they had heard about, and now, to their vast delight, I had turned out to be real.

They immediately stopped and applauded. A standing ovation for doing nothing but showing up. Braden Dean, difference maker! Suddenly I was surrounded by well-wishers. James took my arm and introduced me to CEOs and one Prime Minister and a bunch of majority shareholders in this and that and the heads of various boards and philanthropic organizations. I don’t even remember when the drink appeared in my hand, but there it was and I was sipping it. I wasn’t even sure it was my first one. The familiar, boozy heaviness set in. I was starting to feel funny and wise, never a good combination when I was drinking. Braden Dean, genius, the last word on everything.

Everyone wanted to talk to me.

Touch me.

Know everything about me.

Give me anything I asked for.

I was in the fight of my life, trying not to indulge any of them in anything. I just wanted to be a gracious superstar and model center of attention. Things didn’t have to get weird or crazy.

Before long the room was spinning and nothing I did helped. I was trying so hard to keep from passing out or puking that I didn’t even recognize the woman who was suddenly sitting on my lap. I pushed her off, gently, I hope, and checked my phone. Still nothing from Alyssa.

I’m not sure when the party moved to the lobby, but we were downstairs and everything was a noisy kaleidoscope of neon and haze. That’s when I heard it.

“If they went over there to be butchers just so America can be an even bigger warmonger and imperialist, they deserved to die!”

I had a bottle in my hand. I threw it against a wall. The smashing sound registered dimly, as if I had nothing to do with it. “Who said that?” I said.

“Said what, champ?” said James, appearing at my elbow like a summoned genie.

“Who said that about America? About the soldiers?” Or did I say butchers? Everything was starting to run together. I had that sinking feeling of watching a disaster unfold in slow motion, and the even worse realization that I was the cause of it all.

Things got wild after that. The less said the better. But I didn’t realize just how bad it had been until the next morning when I woke up to a text from Alyssa. “Sorry. Dropped my phone in a puddle and couldn’t get it replaced until last night. Looks like you had a busy evening.”

There was nothing else except a link to Youtube. I didn’t click on it. I called her immediately.

“Hey,” she said softly.

“Hi Alyssa. How was your interview? Is everything going…” I trailed off, not wanting to sound like an idiot, just wanting to get to it.

“Braden, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to see you again,” she said. “I’ll run your interview, and I wish you well, but this isn’t going to work. I’m sorry.”

She hung up before I could say anything.

I was left there in a room I didn’t recognize—it turned out that it was the hotel next to the one I had flipped out in—with the link to that youtube video. After what felt like an eternity, I clicked on the link.

Chapter 9

I had just wrapped up the interview with the American sumo. He was, incidentally, as adorable as he was formidable and enormous. No diaper, either. It was one of the more fascinating athlete stories I had heard. Obsessions are always interesting, and to be elite at anything is to traffic in obsession. The point where it tips into pathology is what separates the psychos from the driven-but-not-quite-as-nuts. The interview had been a smash and I knew it was going to do some serious work for me. By the time I finished there was a message from my dad, wanting a report. I called him and gave him the recap, then told him I had to get out of there and eat. What I really meant was I was dying to call Braden. I knew he’d been messaging me but I had been so busy I could barely breathe.

Then I tripped, my phone flew out of my hand, and it managed to land in the only puddle on the entire street. It hadn’t even been raining. I pulled it out of the puddle. The screen flickered for a moment before dying, taking my hopes of a conversation with Braden with it.

I walked to the hotel and explained the situation to the concierge. They sent someone out to get me a new phone but didn’t guarantee a timeframe. My dad had sprung for the nicest hotel for me, of course, the kind of hotel where they’d go get you a new phone if you asked nice.

In my room, I couldn’t decide between napping and getting online to see if Braden was there. He was in an intense training block, so I didn’t expect to see him online. I was right about one part of it: he wasn’t logged in to Skype or any of the chat services we had used.

But he was on the Internet all right. In fact, he was all that anyone could talk about.

When I saw the headline to the video—BRADEN DEAN TRASHES HOTEL FULL OF BEAUTIES!!!—I couldn’t breathe. All I had to do was close the browser. I didn’t have to watch it.

I pushed play. Maybe it took me a second to decide, maybe a year, but I pushed play, telling myself that I wouldn’t cry.

The first shot of the video showed Braden laughing, head thrown back, a gorgeous blond in a red dress squirming around on his lap, both of them sloshing their drinks all over. Then Braden snapped to attention and started barking at someone off screen. The video shifted to a confused looking man at the bar. The shot showed that the entire lobby was full of the beautiful people. What was Braden doing there?

Suddenly he was in the guy’s face, demanding a slurred apology for something. He was bellowing at the top of his lungs, but I could barely understand a word he said. A guy in a suit was trying to calm him down. Braden yelled something like “Stay out of it, James,” and then he took a swing at the guy. Fortunately, he was so drunk that the guy had moved by the time Braden threw the punch. But he connected with one of the bottles on the bar, which shattered.

There was a horrible shot of Braden looking down at his bleeding hand in the seconds before he erupted. Well, erupted might be an insult to volcanoes. This was big. It was almost like he was possessed. Mad, molten, embarrassing. The video goes on for several minutes. He tips over a couch. He throws bottles. The women in the jeweled dresses scatter, screaming. Of course, whoever was filming it wasn’t the only one. There were so many videos out there, and so many comments.

I could only imagine what the feedback on my interview with Braden was going to be. Maybe I wouldn’t even be able to run it now. I knew what dad was going to say. “Cut ties immediately.” And behind it, there would be an “I told you so.” Of course, in fairness to my sometimes domineering dad, he had told me so.

I had packed a few Ambien for the trip but had been so exhausted at the end of every day that I hadn’t needed any. But I took one that night, vowing that I wouldn’t say anything to Braden or my dad until I had slept on it and had some time to think.

I slept deep and dreamlessly, but I didn’t wake rested or calm. Tranquility seemed to be a word that only applied to people who weren’t involved in any way with Braden. Maybe now that included me. A million feelings and thoughts battled in my head. I was so furious with him, and so disappointed. But the second I would think about how he had let me—and himself—down, it would be replaced with one of the many, many thoughts about the things he had done to me, or I had done to him, and how intoxicated we had been on each other. Or I would think about his vulnerability in that first interview.

I can’t remember which book it was, but I read once that it was better to do a thing than to be scared of it. I was scared to talk to him, but I was even more afraid of losing my self-respect. No matter what my dad said, or what justification Braden thought he had, part of me was just done with letting other people make decisions for me and tell me how I should feel.

I felt heartbroken, but I felt pissed off, too. I deserved a man who didn’t lash out like a child. Sure, there was probably more to the story, but not everything needs context. There were more than a few sides to most people as well, but that didn’t mean that every side had to be tolerated and accepted.

Tough talk, Alyssa. I thought I was right, but I had to call Chantelle. The first thing I did in that conversation was tell her that I was sorry for how absent I had been. My time with Braden had been an all-consuming black hole. Nice for the most part, but not something I had dipped in and out of.

Not surprisingly, Chantelle had seen the video.

“I wanted to make sure you called me first,” she said. “I figured you had a lot to process.”

This was a level of insight for Chantelle that I did find surprising. Oh hell, we both loved to gossip, I was no better than she was. “Your restraint is admirable,” I said.

“What are you going to do?”

“I need to call him,” I said. “We have to talk.”

“And say what?”

“Not sure. Maybe nothing. Maybe I need to call him just to hang up on him.” Yeah, I’m sure that would just destroy him. He would spend the rest of time wallowing, whining about the time when Alyssa Edwards hung up on him. Yep.

“Ha! Do it. Maybe, if you’re going to talk to him again in the future, maybe the real conversation isn’t the first one. Maybe it’s a couple of times away. Just go with your gut.”

My gut was telling me to throw up. My gut was telling me that I should be in tears. My gut was telling me that I wanted to throttle Braden and put an end to his fighting career once and for all. The best way to do that would probably have been just to tell my dad. He would have had Braden out on his ass in the blink of an eye.

But I wanted to figure this one out for myself. I couldn’t let my dad do everything for me. Not forever.

After a couple of drinks with Chantelle, I went home. Dad was out somewhere so I had the place to myself. After wandering through a few rooms like Citizen Kane, I laid on my bed upstairs and entertained a brief fantasy of Braden throwing pebbles at my window. I would open them and give him a piece of my mind. He would be abject and apologetic, then I would throw down a rope and he would come up and tell me it was okay.

Some fantasy. He was probably out with one of the bimbos from the video. I had been a fool to think I could trust him. I focused on the pain, telling myself that it would remind me of how stupid I had been the next time I believed something a handsome, pushy, unstable man told me. No matter how attracted I was to Braden, he was never going to be who I needed.

I had been crying for a few minutes, staring at my phone but unwilling to make the call, when I heard the doorbell ring.

Figuring it was just a package—my dad basically had all of the city’s independent booksellers on speed dial—I brought my face back to something like non-crying normalcy and went downstairs.

When I opened the door Braden was on the porch.

Chapter 10

It had been a hard day. I had taken a few steps that I was happy about, but none of it was going to undo the idiocy I had caused at the hotel.

Braden Dean, my tombstone would say one day: Could not get out of his own way.

I sat in Alyssa’s driveway for several minutes before walking up and ringing the doorbell. It would have been so simple to turn around, find another woman, and drive away to my new life, whatever that would mean. My agent had assured me that the video would blow over. It would even lend an edge to my image. Notoriety was easy to play up, and in the coming showdown with Vlad it would make for great press. Taciturn killer tangles with hothead bad boy womanizer idiot who can’t get out of his own way.

In any case, I knew how short people’s attention spans were. That video would be replaced by another video. Within a week people would have something else to fuss over and I would fade from their memory until it was fight time.

I didn’t want to fight with Alyssa, and I didn’t want to get defensive. For the first time in my life, I wanted to own my mistakes and take my lumps like a man.

That said, the walk to the door still felt like it was a trek across the Himalayas. Or maybe to the moon. It was a long, long way, and my heart grew heavier with each step. Maybe I had actually lost something precious to me. I would know soon. Too soon.

When Alyssa opened the door I lit up with what I hoped was a big smile. It faded when I saw that she had obviously been crying. I have never felt like such a piece of shit. If someone else had made her cry I would have snapped his neck. Maybe she needed protecting from me, and the only way I could be sure was to leave her alone for good. But I had to try.

“Alyssa,” I said, “I know you must hate me right now.”

She crossed her arms and nodded. “I think you might really be underestimating how I feel about you right now, but nice try.” But she wasn’t slamming the door in my face, so I soldiered on.

“And that’s okay. Even if you never speak to me again, I need you to know that, however much you think you hate me right now, I hate myself a lot worse. A lot of people say they’re their own worst critics, but they don’t have a clue how other people actually feel about them. I am definitely my own harshest critic. I have barely slept since we talked. I can’t eat, I don’t want to train, it’s all falling apart, and the responsibility is completely mine.”

Alyssa was softening. Her posture hadn’t changed but her eyes were no longer shooting daggers at me. Kindness was built into some people. Forgiveness as well. God how had I been so stupid?

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “Whenever I’ve messed up before, I don’t even try to stop it. I see it coming and I don’t care. I messed up again, but I fought it that entire afternoon. Even when I was there. Because all I could think about was you.”

“How am I supposed to feel about that?” she said. “You tried, sort of, then gave in anyway, for me?”

That let the air out of me but I knew she was right. “Fair enough. I’m just saying that it’s progress. And if the progress is too slow for you, I understand. I will probably always be a work in progress and I have to make my peace with that. But I will always keep trying to get better, for you.”

Alyssa wiped her eyes. “I just couldn’t believe it. I missed you so much. I couldn’t wait to talk to you and see you again. When I did...that’s how it happened. Like you were someone I’d never known or met. Honestly Braden, it made me wonder all over again if you’d just been playing me the whole time.”

I wanted to hug her but had no idea how she would react if I tried to touch her. “I’m not that good of an actor, Alyssa,” I said. “I’ve never even tried to act like I loved someone before. I wouldn’t even know how to start.”

Her head snapped up. “What do you mean like you loved someone?” She bit her lip. I really hoped I hadn’t said the wrong thing. “I love you” gets tossed out there far too quickly, by far too many people. It can even be used to manipulate someone, or as the key to their cage as long as they’re willing to stay with someone who’s no good, but who will say those three little words.

I couldn’t help it. I swept her up in my arms and squeezed her. She stiffened, then put her hands on my back. “I love you,” I said. “I know it. I never knew what it felt like. Now I do. And I know it mainly because now I’ve learned what it feels like to lose someone you love.”

She pushed me back a little so she could look up at me. “I don’t think you’ve lost me. Some things have to be different. And clear. But I don’t think this has to be it if you mean what you say.”

“If I knew how to convince you with words, I would say them,” I said. “But I’m just going to have to show you. I know it will take time to regain your trust, but that’s what I want, if you’ll give me time.”

She started to say more but stopped at the sound of footsteps somewhere behind her. Her eyes widened. “Go,” she hissed. “I’ll come find you later.”

But it was too late. Mason had come up from the basement and was standing behind his daughter.

“Braden!” he said. “I didn’t know you were here! Alyssa, show him in, I was about to make dinner! I heard about the fight!” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do!”

“I told him you weren’t here, dad,” said Alyssa. “Where were you?”

“Downstairs. I’ve been putting in some soundproofing on one of the rooms. Considering getting a music setup down there, but wouldn’t want it to deafen anyone upstairs. I’ve had my eye on a Les Paul Epiphone guitar down at the store. Are you guys okay?”

My heart was hammering. “So,” I said. “Have you…”

He sidestepped Alyssa and punched me lightly in the chest. “I saw the video. Can’t say I’m impressed, Braden, but you already know that. We need to put that behind us for now and work. Looks like, ultimately, no harm was done. Maybe just to your pride. I don’t like the promotional side of things, but your agent will find a way to make this work for you, I’m sure. You’ll probably have a bunch of movie offers soon. Every action movie needs a hothead who can’t hold his liquor, right? Alyssa, drag him inside, will you? I also want to hear about how the interview wrapped up.”

“Coach…”

“Braden, this is no time for you to beat yourself up. I appreciate the remorse you obviously feel, but we need to compartmentalize. Vlad deserves your undivided attention. So does your long-term health, for that matter.”

“I’m not taking the fight,” I blurted out.

Their heads swiveled to me in unison. “What?” they both said.

Better to just do it. “I have to tell you something. Both of you. Something about my plans. I…did something today.”

Mason stepped back and cocked his head. He watched me like he was a scientist with a clipboard, detached, simply waiting to observe the behavior of his latest subject. “Define ‘did something.’”

“I didn’t come here to see you, coach,” I said. “I’m here to see Alyssa.” I reached out and took one of her hands in both of mine.

“What the hell is this?” said Mason, stepping forward. “Alyssa?”

Alyssa put a hand on his chest. “It’s okay, dad.”

“I say what’s okay in this house. I demand an explanation.”

Whatever happened next, it was going to be a relief to step over this line and see just where I stood. I could handle whatever was coming. I knew I was making the right choice for once.

“I’ve been seeing your daughter,” I said. “And I’m in love with her.”

“Braden,” said Alyssa. “I think that’s—”

“Say that again,” said Mason, stepping between us. “Say it slowly and clearly so I can make sure I understand it all.”

“Dad.”

“Alyssa, if this is true, you’ve been sneaking around behind my back. You’ll get your turn to talk, and if you’ve been hiding this from me, you’re going to forfeit some of whatever anger you might feel towards me when we’re done here.” He turned towards me again. “Because we are done here. Meaning you and me, Braden. As for you and my daughter—”

“Dad!” she said again. “Let him talk or I’m going with him right now! I am not kidding.”

That got his attention. Mason stepped back until he was behind her. He pointed at me over his shoulder. “You’ve got two minutes.”

“I didn’t plan this, coach,” I said. “I just fell in love with her. When she came to do the interviews with me, I tried to treat it like I would anything else. Anyone else, for that matter. But she’s not like anyone else. I didn’t know what was happening to me, and it’s because I had never been in love before.”

“Ninety seconds,” said Mason.

Alyssa’s eyes were shining. I held out the ridiculous hope that if Mason didn’t kill me where I stood, Alyssa would come with me when this was over, no matter what. But I still had to tell her about my plans as well.

“But now I’m here and it has happened. I love your daughter. And I want to be the kind of man she deserves. I want to earn my time with her.”

“You think my little girl deserves no better than someone who trashes a hotel on the Internet and makes a fool out of himself? Not to mention my gym. Do you know what people have been saying to me about you in the business? Things I kept from you, so I could help you focus on your fight, which, refresh my memory, is not happening now? And why would that be, other than the fact that you don’t have a coach anymore?”

“He is not the guy from that video,” said Alyssa.

“I have no idea who he is,” said Mason. “And open your eyes, there are going to be other videos. Not even he has any idea what he’s about to do next, and I’m sick of being jerked around.”

“I’m a guy who isn’t going to fight anymore,” I said. “For now, that’s all I can assure you of. I need to prove to myself that there’s more to me than what I’ve shown the world.” I got on one knee. “Alyssa, you’re not going to like this, but I enlisted today. The marines. I’m going to be going into basic training soon. I am going to serve my country like I should a long time ago. When I’m done, maybe fighting will still be here for me. But all I really want is for you to still be here for me. I am going to show you who I am. And I’m going to show myself.

“Get out,” said Mason. “Get out now while you can still stand upright.”

Alyssa touched my cheek with the back of her hand. “I love you,” she said. “And I’m proud of you.” She turned and went inside, closing the door softly behind her.

“You are never to look at my daughter again, do you hear me?” said Mason.

I stared at the door. She had said that she loved me. Nothing else to be afraid of. I finally felt like I was living in a world without pressure. Almost without pain.

Chapter 11

I couldn’t believe it. Duh. Of course I couldn’t believe it! Of all the things he could have said...I wasn’t sure if I was more surprised that he said he loved me or that he was racing off into the military to prove a point that, in my view, he didn’t have to prove.

I put my ear to the door and listened to Braden and my dad talk. Well, it was more like I heard Braden’s quiet murmurs and my dad’s incoherent bellowing.

Finally, he came back in. Dad closed the door and leaned against it, closing his eyes. I tried to slip out of the foyer quietly but he heard me. “Alyssa,” he said. “I only want what’s best for you.” He was telling the truth. Every father wants what’s best for his kids. But that doesn’t mean he always knows what it is. We all do the best we can, but that never guarantees that we make the right choices.

“I know,” I said. My voice sounded lifeless. Unrecognizable. Not a voice anyone would listen to a podcast. “Have you ever thought that might mean letting me make a decision of my own? Like an adult?”

“Alyssa, you don’t—”

“No dad. I do. What I understand is that I’m grateful to you for everything you’ve done for me, and I’ve also let you do way too much for me. I couldn’t have got this far without you. But I can’t go as far as I want to unless I do it myself. That applies to my job and my relationships.”

Dad looked at the ceiling and sighed. “Honey, relationships that are founded on deceit never work. It’s not the right foundation for stability.”

I went to him. “Dad, we hid from you, but we never deceived each other. In fact, I think it’s the most honest Braden has ever been. And it was definitely the best month of my life. I’m sorry you feel let down, but I’m doing this one on my own.”

He hardened his face. “Well then, that makes two of you. You want to be independent? Be my guest, sweetheart. I’ve given you enough of a head start that I know you’ll be fine. But I’m done with Braden. When he backs out of this he’s going to want back into the gym. I can’t let that happen. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

That didn’t worry me. Braden could always find another gym. Maybe not someone as good as my dad, but there were options. “I know you’ll do whatever you need to, dad. But you’re wrong about him. There’s no way he’s coming back to the gym. I have a feeling his next fight is going to be on another level entirely.”

With that, I went upstairs and cried. I knew I was right. Braden was headed into something bigger than the octagon. True danger. In that moment I just felt so bad for us all. When I felt composed I called Chantelle. She came over and brought a box of little bottles of champagne, small enough that we used to sneak them into movie theaters.

She let me whine and moan and whimper at her all night. When I thought I had it all out of my system, she asked me if I wanted to watch Braden trash that hotel again, just for old time’s sake.

We laughed until we were sick.

At one point I heard my dad’s footsteps in the hallway. I knew he wanted to knock. To poke his head in and see if things were alright. To feel useful.

But his footsteps moved away.

Eventually Chantelle lay down next to me and we slept. I dreamed of Braden, gunfire, flames, fear and the day he came home.

In the morning there was a text from him. He was going to be away for two weeks at a camp that would serve as a precursor to basic training.

Chapter 12

When I signed up, the military gave me a huge battery of aptitude tests. The tests were meant to show them what you were best at, or most inclined to be good at. That way, they could shuttle you around to wherever you would do the most good in the service. I figured that that tests weren’t going to reveal that I should be a nuclear scientist, a submarine pilot, or anything on the fringe, and I was right about that.

To the surprise of no one—including my recruiter, who asked for an autograph the second I walked in—I was a lock for training people in hand-to-hand combat. But there was one surprising thing to me.

They assured me that I would make a perfect officer. I had the bearing, the leadership skills, and the courage that men would follow. At least, that’s what the tests said, and who was I to argue with a piece of paper that said here’s how you’re going to spend the next three years of your life?

I spent two weeks at a camp upstate that was an introduction to becoming an officer. It wasn’t basic training yet and there were very few physical demands beyond a morning run and a general series of calisthenics that were far easier than my usual training regimen. The camp was more of a primer for the mental aspect and the philosophy of warfare and combat that I would need to have command of when I led a unit. A lot of it came naturally to me. I knew tactics and strategy. Adaptation and improvisation. I knew how to think under pressure and while in pain. My time in the gym with the other guys had also shown me that they would always follow my example, for better or worse. That was a big responsibility, but one I took great pleasure in.

No, that doesn’t say enough. I loved it. It felt right and it felt real. I was at peace.

When I told my family about my decision, my mom lost her mind. Janie was supportive, but it definitely made her nervous. My brothers still hadn’t resurfaced and whoever was in charge of them over there was being incredibly tight-lipped about it all.

“I know you need to do it.” My mom said that over and over. “I know you need to, I just wish that weren’t true. I can’t lose you all.”

I had made a promise to myself that I would not contact Alyssa before she contacted me. I needed to focus. The stakes were going to be higher than any I had ever faced. My mistakes were going to have the potential to affect other people in grave ways. There was something zen about this level of detachment from all but the goal I was working towards.

She didn’t call. She didn’t text. I went into those two weeks knowing that I might have blown my shot with her. I would have to accept that. This was something I had to do. If Alyssa was the one for me, she would find a way to recognize that and to let me know, in the near or far future. To do so, she would have to become her own person, shaking off her dad and sticking up for me. If it turned out that she couldn’t do it, I knew that I would never blame her. I wanted to know for sure, rather than to be wracked with uncertainty.

Once I got to the camp I did my best to put her out of my mind, although I did tack a small picture of us on my small desk. It was a picture a sparring partner had taken of her in the gym, at my request, using my phone. I had it printed out and brought it with me. In the photo, Alyssa is standing next to a hanging heavy bag that is nearly as tall as she is. Her wrists are wrapped and she’s making what she considered a furious face. “Go crazy!” I had shouted at her. “Show the world what a savage Alyssa Edwards is!”

Guys stopped by my desk every chance they got to whistle at the photo and ask me questions about her. Every time I said the same thing: “That woman changed my life.”

“How?” they would say. Like all guys in a group, we were desperate for stories about women. But I wouldn’t say.

She would be there or she wouldn’t. It was now out of my hands.

The day the camp ended was bittersweet, which made me feel silly. I would be seeing most of the guys a week later when we reconvened for basic training. Still, the seeds of a real brotherhood were already developing. We all knew that we were heading into the most serious thing imaginable, and it would be up to us to keep men, and each other, safe. Our goodbyes were curt but heartfelt.

The octagon had been the only place where I knew I was doing exactly what I was born for. Or so I had thought. This was different. This was doing what I was born for, but it came with a sense of honor and duty that fighting didn’t.

My agent hadn’t been happy about my decision. But as soon as he saw that I was serious, he went into spin mode. “If your tour is only three years, you’re going to be a young, young man when you come back. And if you’re still training other guys in fighting, you’ll still be sharp. We’re going to make this work. If you can go do your thing and stay safe, we’ll be able to bank on it later.”

I liked the thought of that, but it wasn’t my priority.

When the car dropped me off at my house I had a lump in my throat. This was the house where I had been raised. Where my brothers and I had teased each other and fought and slept and taken care of my mom. Most of the days of my life had been spent beneath its roof.

My thoughts were interrupted by mom opening the door and holding her arms out. I could see the outline of one of Janie’s wheels behind her.

When mom hugged me, she was strong and sure. “I’ve got a surprise for you, baby,” she said. “Come on in.”

Janie was so thrilled to see me that I thought she might start to float. She kept trying to spoil some surprise, but my mom hushed her over and over as we walked through the house.

“All right, the mystery has got to stop,” I said with a laugh. “You two are driving me nuts.”

Mom stopped in the living room and made a grand gesture at the coffee table. An open laptop was on it, its back to me. “Have a seat, Braden,” she said.

“Yeah Braden, have a seat,” said a voice from the laptop. Then another.

When I sat down in front of the laptop that lump in my throat broke apart and the dam burst.

Ryan and Sean, my two brothers, looked back at me from inside of what looked like the ugliest beige tent in existence. As soon as they saw me crying they burst into wild laughter.

“You two stop it!” said my mom. “You can’t laugh at him like that, he was worried just like I was!”

“Yeah!” said Janie. “Braden is very sensitive! Leave him alone!”

Needless to say, that did not get that to back off, nor would I have wanted them to. They were still the brothers I had known. I was so happy they were alive and whole that I could barely speak, so they did the talking for a while.

During a covert operation on an outpost in the mountains, where it was suspected that an enemy target was hiding, they had been taken prisoner. Of course they had lost all ways to communicate, and this explained why no one had been willing to tell us anything about them. At first, no one had known where they were, and had feared the worst. But soon the enemy had sent a ransom demand. It turned out that they had been taken by run of the mill kidnappers, not by the Afghan armed forces. Their demands had been simple: money.

Unfortunately, there were complications. The leadership of Sean and Ryan’s unit could not convince the administration that the kidnappers were not in league with the enemy. Therefore, paying them would have meant cooperating with hostile forces.

“So what the hell happened?” I said.

“We’re going to be able to tell you more about that in person,” said Sean. “I don’t want to be coy, but it’s really not something we can talk about on an unsecured channel.”

“But the short part is,” said Ryan, “We escaped. They couldn’t hold us. Not the most, uh...vigilant captors, you might say.”

My mom crossed herself and Sean and Ryan laughed.

“Wait,” I said. “What did you mean I’ll be able to tell you in person?”

They looked at each other. “Oh, hadn’t you heard? You’re coming over to take charge of a unit adjacent to us. We’re going to be able to show you the ropes and watch your back. Just like you’ll watch ours.”

It was all too much. “I can’t wait,” I said. “To tie you in knots. I haven’t been getting kidnapped but you guys have no idea what you’re in for when I get my hands on you. Next time you’ll be tough enough so that no one will be able to kidnap you.”

We joked and made fun of each other for another half hour before they had to go. When mom closed the laptop I hugged her and Janie and thought about how lucky we all were. The day was almost perfect.

Alyssa would have loved seeing that. I think. For that matter, it would have made a hell of an episode for her podcast.

Thinking about her, about what I had cost us both, was definitely going to bring down the mood, so I did what I could to put it, and her, out of my head.

A car’s horn started honking outside, driving all thoughts out of anyone’s head. “Good grief,” I said after it had gone on for at least a minute. “Is that someone’s alarm?” I got up to go check.

“No,” said Janie, “Alarms are consistent. That sounds like someone just messing around.”

“Well it’s driving me crazy and I’m going to go make them stop,” I said. “Don’t worry, mom, I’ll be nice. Firm but fair, that’s me.”

The last person in the world I expected to see when I opened that door was Vlad. The killer from another continent, there on my mom’s doorstep. I was even more surprised when he embraced me. “I served my country for years before I began fighting,” he said. “Service was compulsory for us so I had no choice. The fact that you are making the choice tells me everything I need to know about you. One day, maybe we fight. But every man who serves his country is a brother. All respect, Braden.”

Over his shoulders, I saw something more surprising yet. I’m not sure how they did it so quietly, but it looked like everyone I had ever known was on my lawn. My agent was the first one I saw, on one knee, snapping pictures of me and Vlad. All of the guys from the gym were there—minus Mason, of course. They rushed me, slapped me up and down, play fighting for the cameras that were filming the event from scaffolds that had been rigged up out by the curb, behind the crowd.

High school friends. James from Nike. Most of my teachers from elementary school on up. Neighbors. All of them cheering and crying and saying that they supported me. People were waving signs and ordering me to stay safe.

To say it was overwhelming would be a big of an understatement. I’m not sure I had ever been so moved.

Vlad stepped to my side and began clapping in rhythm. The crowd joined in. Something was happening, a shift in the ranks. The sea of people parted further, then further, and then there they were.

Holding Mason’s arm as if she were a bride being given away, Alyssa was there. She and her dad walked towards me with huge smiles on their faces. I couldn’t make sense of it and I didn’t give them a chance to get closer. I was running towards them, sweeping her into my arms, and spinning her around like we were in some corny musical.

“I’m getting dizzy!” she said.

I put her down and gaped at them both. “What are you doing here?”

Mason put his hands on my shoulders. “I felt terrible about the way I spoke to you. Just horrible. Alyssa and I had a very long talk about you, her, me, and what we all want for each other.” He smiled. “Braden, I’m not an easy man to love, unless I’m your coach. I’ve got a lot of blind spots, especially when it comes to Alyssa. But she has helped me see that I’ve overdone it in some ways. As a fellow serviceman, I respect what you’re doing, more than you understand yet. As a coach, it drives me crazy. As a father, I need to just back off a bit and let Alyssa live her life. But if you two are going to be together, I just wanted to tell you that you’re everything a man could want for his daughter.”

“I’ve got a lot of things I still need to work out,” I said.

“You sure as hell do,” he said, laughing.

“Is that what you want?” I said, turning to Alyssa.

“First,” she said, “I have to tell you some good news.”

“Please.”

She lit up like the sun and took a deep breath. “ESPN picked up my show! It’s going to be small to start, but High Impact is going to get a thirty-minute slot and sometimes it’s going to air during halftime of NBA games!”

“What? That is amazing. How did it happen?”

She threw her arms around me and kissed me hard. “It just so happens that while you were away, I released our interview episodes. I think you’ll like the final result, but I don’t want you to listen to it until you’re in basic training. It will give you something to think about that I think will be good for you. That’s how it happened, though. The producers said it was one of the most moving things they had ever seen in a sports piece. It’s just a trial run, but it looks like it’s really going to happen!”

I wasn’t even surprised. I mean, you’re never really prepared for something like that, but as I looked at her, thought about her, remembered all the things I loved about her, it was only what she deserved. There was no way that Alyssa was ever not going to take the world by storm.

“They’ve commissioned a follow-up piece as well,” said Mason.

“What is it?” I said.

“Once you’re situated,” said Mason, “we’re going to be able to talk with you once a week, assuming that you’re not in the middle of maneuvers. It’s going to be an ongoing profile of you and the life of an athlete who gave it up—temporarily, I hope—to serve something bigger than himself, bigger than sports. So you two will get to be in more contact than you would have otherwise.”

“Depending on the conditions,” said Alyssa, “I might even be able to come over for a visit, somewhere safe, when you’re on furlough.”

Janie rolled her wheelchair next to me. “I want to go too!”

“We’ll see,” said my mom. “I’m not sure I want anything to do with it. But it would be fun to go see all three of your brothers, wouldn’t it?”

Alyssa kissed me again. “I am so proud of you. I can’t believe how fast this has all happened, but I’m so glad it did. I will be here when you get back. You go do whatever you have to. I am always going to be here. Always.”

It was all I had ever wanted to hear.

The End