Real

The crowd goes crazy, calling all the way to the lobby, “Riptide! Riptide!” and then they fall completely quiet, as though something unscripted has just happened.



I wonder about the eerie silence when pounding footsteps echo at my back. A warm hand engulfs mine, and the touch frissons through me as I’m spun around with surprising force.



“What the…” I gasp in confusion, and then stare into a sweaty male chest, and up into glowing blue eyes. My senses reel out of control. He’s so close the scent of him tears through me like a shot of adrenaline.



“Your name,” he growls, panting, his eyes wild on mine.



“Uh, Brooke.”



“Brooke what?” he snaps out, his nostrils flaring.



His animal magnetism is so powerful I think he just took my voice. He’s in my personal space, all over it, absorbing it, absorbing me, taking my oxygen, and I can’t understand the way my heart is beating, the way I stand here, shivering with heat, my entire body focused on the exact spot his hand is wrapped around me.



With trembling efforts, I pry my hand free and glance frightfully at Mel, who comes behind him, wide-eyed. “It’s Brooke Dumas,” she says, and then she happily shoots out my cell phone number. To my chagrin.



His lips curl and he meets my gaze. “Brooke Dumas.” He just fucked my name right in front of me. And right in front of Mel.



And as I feel his tongue twist roughly around those two words, his voice sinfully dark, like things you crave to eat but really shouldn’t, desire swells between my legs. His eyes are hot and almost proprietary when he looks at me. I’ve never been stared at like this before.



He steps forward, and his damp hand slides into the nape of my neck. My pulse skitters as he lowers his dark head to set a small, dry kiss on my lips. It feels like he’s marking me. Like he’s preparing me for something monumental. That could both change and ruin my life.



“Brooke,” he growls softly, meaningfully, against my lips, as he draws back with a smile. “I’m Remington.”



I still feel his hands on the ride home. I feel his lips on mine. The softness of his kiss. God, I can’t even breathe right, and I’m as coiled up as a cobra in a corner of the back seat of a taxi, staring blindly out the window at the passing city lights, desperate to vent from the sensations spinning inside my body. Unfortunately, I have no one to vent with other than Mel.



“That was so intense,” Mel says breathlessly at my side.



I shake my head. “What the hell just happened, Mel? The guy just kissed me in public! Do you realize there were people with their phones trained on us?”



“Brooke, he’s just so hot. Everyone wants a picture of him. Even my insides are buzzing from the way he went after you and I’m not even the one he kissed. I’ve never seen a man go after a woman like that. Holy shit, it’s like porn with the romance.”



“Shut up, Mel,” I groan. “There’s a reason why he’s banned from his sport. Clearly he’s dangerous or crazy or both.”



My body is wound up with arousal. His eyes, I can feel them on me, so raw and hungry. I feel instantly dirty. My nape pricks where he touched it with his sweaty palm. I rub it and it won’t stop pricking, won’t calm my body, won’t calm me.



“Okay, seriously, you need to get out more. Remington Tate may have a bad rap, but he’s sexier than sin, Brooke. Yes, he was banned for poor conduct because he’s a naughty, wicked boy. Look, who knows what shit went on in his personal life? All I know is it was god-awful and made a couple of headlines, and now nobody even cares. He’s the favorite in the Underground League, and all kinds of fight clubs adore him. They’re packed with girls when he’s on.”



A part of me can’t even believe the way the guy stared at me, honed in on me, from a crowd of screaming women, he just looked at me, and it winds me up even more when I think about it. He looked at me with crazy hot eyes, and I don’t want crazy hot eyes. I don’t want him, or any man, period. What I want is a job. I’ve just finished my internship at a local middle school, and I’ve been interviewed by the best sports rehab company in the city. But it’s been two weeks and no call.



I’m at the point where I’m starting to get into the mental funk where you feel no one will ever call.



I’m beyond frustrated.



“Melanie, look at me,” I demand. “Do I look like a whore to you?”



“No, sweetie. You were easily the classiest lady out there.”



“If I wore a suit to this sort of event, it was precisely to avoid slime like him from noticing me.”



“Maybe you should start dressing more like a slut and blend in?” She smirked, and I instantly scowl.



“I hate you. I’m never coming with you to this type of thing ever again.”



“You don’t hate me. Come get a hug.” I lean into her embrace and hug her lightly before remembering her betrayal.



“How could you give him my number? What do we even know about this man, Mel? Do you want me to end up murdered in some dark alley and my body parts tossed into some trash can?”



“That’s never going to happen to someone who’s taken as many self-defense classes as you.”



I sigh and shake my head at her, but she grins an adorable grin at me. I can never really stay angry for long.



“Come on, Brooke. You’re supposed to be reinventing yourself,” Mel whispers, perfectly reading me. “New and improved Brooke has to have sex now and then. You used to like it when you competed.”



The image of a naked Remington pops into my head, and it is so disturbingly hot that I squirm in my seat and glance angrily out the window, shaking my head more emphatically this time. What angers me most are the feelings the mere thought of him rouse in me. I feel … fevered.



No, I’m not against having sex at all, but relationships are complicated, and I don’t have the emotional equipment right now to deal with any of it. I’m still a little broken from my fall and trying to find my way into a new career. There’s an awful video of me on YouTube.com, titled Dumas, her life is over! which was taped by some amateur during my first Olympic tryouts and has had quite a bit of traffic—like all videos of humiliated people do. This is where the exact moment that my life shattered around me was perfectly immortalized on film and can now be played and replayed, over and over, so the world can watch for their enjoyment. It shows the very second my quads knot up and I stumble, and the instant that my ACL—the anterior cruciate ligament—just tears and my knee gives.



It lasts for over four minutes, this charming little video. In fact, my anonymous paparazzi stalker kept the camera solely on me and on no one else. You could hear her voice, “Shit, her life is over,” in the background. Which obviously inspired the title.



So there I am, in this real-life homemade movie, hopping in miserable pain out of the track, crying my heart out. Crying not because of the pain in my knee, but from the pain of my own failure. And I just want the world to swallow me and I want to die because I know, know, know right this second, that all my training has been for nothing. But instead of the earth opening up and sucking me right in, I get filmed.



The slew of comments under the video are still fresh in my mind. Some people wished me well in other endeavors and said it was a shame. But others laughed and joked about it, like I had somehow begged for this to happen.



These same comments have plagued me with doubts, day and night, for years as I replay both days and wonder what went wrong. And I say both because I tore my ACL not only once, but a second time when, refusing to believe “my life was over,” I stubbornly went for tryouts again. Neither of those times do I even know what I did wrong, but obviously it is now physically impossible for me to do it again.



So now I’m just trying very hard to go on with my life like I never intended to compete in the Olympics in the first place, and the last thing I need is a man taking up time I could dedicate to building a future in the new profession I’ve chosen.



My sister, Nora, is the romantic, the most passionate one. Even though she’s barely twenty-one and three years younger than me, she’s the one living out in the world, sending me postcards from different places, telling Mom and Dad and I of her “lovers.”



Me? I was the one who spent her entire young years training her heart out, my one and only dream being a gold medal. But my body gave up long before my soul wanted it to, and I never even made it for a worldwide competition.



When you need to accept the fact that your body sometimes can’t do what you want it to, it hurts almost worse than the physical pain of being injured. This is why I love sports rehab. I might still be depressed and angry if I had not received the help I needed. This is why I want to try to help some young athletes make it, even if I didn’t. And why I want to get a job so I can feel, maybe, at last successful in something.



But strangely, as I lie awake at night, it’s not my sister I think about, or my new career, or even, the awful day the Olympics became unreachable for me.



The only thing on my mind tonight is the blue-eyed devil who put his lips on mine.



The next morning, Melanie and I go for a run in the shaded park in our neighborhood, like we do every weekday, rain or shine. Each of us wears an armband with our iPod inside, but today, it seems we’re listening to nothing but each other.



“You made Twitter, you whore. That was supposed to be me.” She’s clicking through her cell phone, and I scowl, trying to peer at what she’s reading.



“Then you should’ve given him your cell instead of mine.”



“He call yet?”



“‘City Hall at eleven. Leave the crazy best friend home,’ was all he said.”



“Haha!” she says, grabbing my phone, handing me hers, and pressing my pass code to get into my messages.



I narrow my eyes because the devious little cat knows all my passwords, and I probably couldn’t hold a secret from her even if I wanted to. I pray she doesn’t see my Google history, or she’ll know I’ve been stalking him. I honestly don’t even want to get into the fact that I’ve been punching his name into the Google search bar more times than I can count. Thankfully, Mel just checks my missed calls, and of course, there’s no call from him.



Judging from the articles I read last night, Remington Tate is a party god, sex god, and basically, a god. And a troublemaker, to boot. At this exact point in time, he’s probably hung over and drunk, littered with sated naked ladies in his bed and thinking, “Brooke who?”



Melanie snatches her phone back, clears her throat, and reads the Twitter feed. “Okay, there are several new comments you should hear. ‘Unprecedented! Did you all see Riptide kissing a spectator? Holy crap, what a rush! I heard a brawl ensued when he tried to go after her and shoved a man! Fighting out of the ring is illegal and RIP might not be allowed to fight for the rest of the season or for eternity. Yeah, that’s why he got kicked out of pro! Well I’m not going if Rip isn’t fighting.’ These are all multiple commentators,” Melanie explains as she lowers her phone and grins. “I love that they call him RIP. So his opponents rest in peace. Get it? Anyway, if he’s fighting, he’s got just this Saturday before the fight moves to the next city. Are we going or are we going?”