Tiffany…

“Make a fist,” he ordered and I did. He shook his head slightly and stepped forward, taking my hand in his gently and untucking my thumb from inside my fingers.

“That’s how you get a broken thumb, always keep it on the outside, okay?”

“Okay.”

He put up a hand, flat and said, “Punch it and I mean really punch it.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said and kind of cringed at the thought of full-out hitting his hand.

He smiled at me, a broad grin, and said, “That’s the whole point. If you throw a punch, you have to mean it, eh.”

He took a stance and held up his hand and I took a deep breath and swung. My fist slapped into the center of his palm and I swear I squeaked. He laughed, shook it out and a female voice called across the empty gym, “Not bad, first things first, though. We need to work on her stance.”

I took a step back from Nik and turned my head, looking down. He’d managed to convince me to pull my long hair into a ponytail and keep it out of my face for this but he hadn’t said anything about anyone else being here. Just when I was warming up to him, too, despite Lia’s worried nagging the whole way here.

“Ah, yeah, Tiff I’d like y’t’ meet Mali, she’s my bro’s woman and knows a thing or two about a good street fight.”

“Yeah, I think the reason he called me down here has more to do with the fact that I’m a woman and most of the fighting I’ve done my whole life has been against dudes that are usually easily twice my size when it comes to muscle mass.” She held out her hand to me and her arms were covered in flower tattoos. I blinked and shook it, still unwilling to meet her eyes, feeling awfully exposed. I recognized her tattoos, though.

“Weren’t you serving drinks a few of nights ago at the MC?” I asked.

“Yeah, that would be me. Full-time ink-slinger and part-time drink-slinger. The bartending is a hobby while my man Data is balls deep in his computer systems rather than me.” Her voice held the edge of a smile and I glanced up. She leaned around and nodded.

“Zeb.”

“Ah, yeah?”

“Please tell me I’m teaching her how to whoop ass so that if whatever douchebag did that to her decides to come around, she has the potential to cave his nuts in.”

“Ah, yeah, that would be why, Mali. Just in case whatever reason I’m not there.”

“Excellent. Okay, first thing’s first, you need to widen your stance; we need to work on your balance and center of gravity.” She redirected her attention back to Nik and asked, “You teaching her to shoot?”

“Thought Trigger would be better suited to do that, eh?”

“You’re not wrong and good deal. Should get Reaver involved with his knives, later down the line, but a knife is going to be pretty useless if you don’t have the basics down.”

Finally, she decided to address me, just as I was starting to get irritated about being talked around. Still, annoyance aside, I was rapt on her every word. I shifted and took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “This is a lot,” I said with a nervous laugh. It was a lot, and I wasn’t exactly sure I could do what she was expecting of me. I mean, I’d never really been good at the whole hitting another person even if it was in self-defense. My personal superpower had always sort of been that I could take a beating until help arrived. Which, sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. At least not always on time.

I swallowed hard, mouth suddenly dry and watched the other woman move. Mali pulled her messenger bag off over her head and dropped it over by the wrestling ring. She pulled down the sleeves of her leather jacket from where they were rucked up around her elbows and shrugged out of it completely, hanging it off the corner post.

“It is a lot, but honey, you want to be a victim forever?”

“No,” I said quickly. No, I did not. I wanted to have a life. I’d worked too hard to give myself one after Silas, and I didn’t want to let him have what I’d managed to build without a fight. I wanted out of this town and I wanted to help people. That was the goal, by any means necessary. Never give up, never surrender…

“Cool,” she said. “Now that’s out of the way, watch me…”

She and Nik went through the proper way to stand, the proper way to punch and then the real work began. She would have Nik go at her, would evade with expert moves and twists and would use his own weight against him. It was fascinating watching Mali, who wasn’t built much differently than me, actually throw Nik around.

They would then break apart and run me through exercises and drills of the same thing over and over until we were all panting and sweating. My body was not going to like me, and I worried about it possibly affecting my work, but the sensations wrought by the workout and drills weren’t unfamiliar ones. I’d felt the same sort of aches, pains, and fatigue to get where I was when it came to pole dancing.

“Okay, I think that’s enough for today,” Mali said after what felt like three or four hours of the torturous exercises. I looked across to Nik who was sweating and panting right along with me.

“I don’t feel like I am going to make it in time…” I said.

“How d’you mean?” Nik asked.

“Learn all this before he finds me; before he gets to me.”

Nik opened his mouth to speak, a frightening scowl on his tattooed face, but Mali beat him to it saying, “That’s not the point, honey. You aren’t going to learn this shit overnight. That’s impossible. All we can do with this is keep at it and give you an inside edge on staying alive if it comes to it.” She gave Nik a meaningful look and whatever he was going to say a moment before was gone.

Instead, he gave me a reassuring grin saying, “One step at a time, eh?” He put his hands on his knees, breathing heavy and gave me a nod that I think was meant to be encouraging.

I was beginning to honestly feel like I was right. That the only superpower I possessed, masked or otherwise, was that I really could just take whatever beating I had coming my way until help arrived. Mali laughed and I blinked at her. Had I said that out loud?

“Well, you’re ahead of most then. Most bitches crumble into dust and blow away in the face of this shit. You’re fighting back, and pretty hardcore at that. It’s always better to be proactive rather than reactive.”

“Wish I had been from the get-go.”

She gave a shrug.

“Meh, we all do stupid shit when we’re young, and trust me, you’re still young.”

I frowned and asked Nik, “The showers work here?”

“Ah, yeah, nah.” I was about to ask which it was but Mali interrupted.

“I’ve gotta go. You’re a quick learner, Tiff. I think your dancing is giving you an inside edge on this. I’ll do some thinking on how to make it work even further to our advantage.”

I nodded and tried valiantly to not feel completely discouraged. I really hadn’t thought I’d done well at all. I also didn’t know how I was going to fit this in around coming up with and practicing new routines on the regular. Winging it didn’t pay out as well as having a set idea of what to do on stage once the music started.

Mali shrugged back into her jacket over her workout clothes and lifted her messenger bag back over her chest crossways.

“Same bat time, same bat channel,” she called over her shoulder.

“See yah, Mali. Thanks again,” Nik called. I worried my bottom lip between my teeth for a moment, watching her go and turned back to him. He was watching me intently and I sighed.

“Wasn’t what I had in mind,” I said honestly and he nodded, dragging down a towel from where he’d hung it over the middle rope on the ring. Watching him toss it over his shoulders was a bit of a treat to watch, the muscles moving beneath his skin in his arms and chest as he wiped the sweat he’d worked up away. I swallowed hard, wondering where that had come from, trying to decide if it was getting around to that time of the month and I was just doing my regular hormonal thing or if the sudden appreciation of his physique was a real attraction trying to sneak in the back door. To help me make my decision, I took him in a little more thoroughly.

He wore a pair of cut-off sweatpants and a loose tank top and it gave him a rugged, no-fucks-were-given, look-at-me-wrong-and-I’ll-beat-a-man’s-ass sort of vibe that was appealing.

I wore my typical dance practice attire of athletic leggings and a sports bra. The only concessions from my usual practice attire were a comfortable pair of socks and sneakers. I tended to practice on the pole with a pair of heels, or if I was just playing around, barefoot.

The gym had working heat, but that didn’t stop the cold from outside from swirling in at Mali’s departure, gelling the sweat in place on my skin and causing me to start to itch. It didn’t help that the cold wanted to linger and I hated being cold for too long. Sometimes it was like the cold wanted to set in and I couldn’t stand that. It looked like this was going to be one of those times. Usually, the only cure was a hot shower or a lot of layers and some time by the heater or a fire.

“So, do the showers here work or not?” I asked again.

“Eh, yeah, they work, but nah, we aren’t supposed to use ‘em. Wasn’t part of the deal with me getting us in here after-hours.”

“Fair enough. I’m starting to freeze, though, so can we get me home so I can deal?”

“C’mon with me,” he said.

I nodded and we gathered our things. He put the hooded sweatshirt he’d had on when he’d let us in here around my shoulders and I followed him out onto the frozen, night-dark street. After locking up the front door of the gym, he waved me after him. I followed him half a block down to the front of this dive bar. He unlocked a door next to it and waved me through into a narrow stairwell. He threw the deadbolt into the locked position behind us and climbed the stairs ahead of me, two at a time. I lightly stepped after him, climbing them deftly without so much as getting even slightly out of breath.

At least the stripping had kicked up my endurance for this new sort of training. If anything, I had cardio covered in this whole endeavor. Though, I figured, I could stand to spend a little more time on a treadmill. I never knew if it would come down to me legit or straight up running in an encounter with Silas.

Nik stopped at a door at the end of the short hall at the top of the stairs and fished through his keys on the ring, selecting one and sticking it in the top lock. I shivered involuntarily and hated it. Cursing winter out silently inside my head, I followed him into the space beyond the doorway and blinked at the enormity of it.

“Wow, this place is huge…” I said, and it was. A kitchenette was off to my left, a doorway next to it. The place was a huge open floor plan but empty. Devoid of any real furniture except for a mattress on the floor up against one wall in a corner, and a spindly, old and scarred up dining room chair sitting next to it.

“Ah, yeah, the owner of the bar can’t rent it. The bar is too loud, comes right through the floor. They used to use it for storage, but the fire department said they couldn’t anymore. Seeing as I work there, I said I’d rent it. I’m working during the hours it would be loud anyhow.”

“So this is your place?”

“Ah, yeah. You said you wanted a shower, eh?”

“Are you serious? You’re cool with me taking one?”

“Yeah, through there. I’ll get you a towel.” He opened up a closet door on the opposite side of the room and dug through a big, old, green Army duffel bag, pulling a towel free. I blinked and stood still, my own gym bag with clean regular street-clothes dangling off my shoulder and stifled a bit of a laugh when he smelled the towel just to make sure it was a clean one before he brought it to me.

“There you are, fresh from the wash.”

“Thank you,” I murmured.

“Try to save me some hot, eh.”

“I can try.”

“One of them wahine, then.”

I blinked, “Wah-he-nay?” I said the unfamiliar word, dragging it out slowly.

“Ah, yeah, it means ‘woman’ in my language.”

I believed him, he looked sincere and didn’t have any of the usual tells that he might be having a laugh at my expense. I’d seen enough of that type of cruelty, both from Silas and his friends, as well as at Sugars, to know what it looked like.

“I see,” I murmured and rolling my lips together, took a step back toward the door he indicated was the bathroom and shut the door behind me.

“Hey, I hate to ask, but can you leave it open just a crack?” he called out.

I opened the door a crack and called back, “Why?”

“No ventilation, the fan doesn’t work and it likes to grow things in there fast otherwise.”

“Lovely,” I said under my breath. “Fine,” I said louder, but to make sure that he didn’t get any ideas, I said, “Sit down out there against the wall and talk to me.”

“Sure thing,” I heard his back thump against the wall beside the door and listened as he slid down it to the floor. “What would you like to talk about?”

I swallowed hard and got to work undressing and setting the towel within easy reach for when I got out of the shower.

“How about you tell me what all those markings are on your face?” I said and then grimaced inwardly. “Sorry, I’m just genuinely curious, I didn’t mean for that to come out sounding so rude!”

“No worries, and they’re specific, you know?”

I laughed slightly and started up the water getting it as hot as I could stand it. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking now would I?”

“Ah, well, that would mean I’d have to talk about home, wouldn’t it?”

His tone gave me pause and made me want to pry, but just a little. I thought carefully for a second on how to approach, and finally asked, “Do you miss it?”

“New Zealand?”

“Yeah.”

“I miss it a lot, actually.”

“Then why are you here?”

It was a long, pregnant pause before he answered.

“I did some dumb shit and crossed the wrong gang boss and now I’m here. Could be killed if I ever go back.”

“Oh… I’m sorry…”

“Eh, there are worse things. I like it here, too… and I got to meet you.”

Wow, that was actually a pretty sweet thing to say.

“Are you flirting with me?” I asked, to make sure. I was almost certain he was, but he laughed, nervously dispelling the notion.

“Nah, I didn’t mean it like that. I just think you’re interesting, Girl.”

“Me? Interesting?” I asked over the shower spray. I thrust my face into the water and listened intently for his answer.

“Yeah, you. I wonder a bit, what’s your story?”

“You know my story, I told you the other night at the diner.”

“No, you told me about how you got your warrior’s mark. That’s something that happened to you, not your whole story. That’s just a singular moment in time. A bad one, I reckon, but just a footnote in a chapter. Not the whole book.”

“You like to read?” I asked, massaging the soap into my long hair, the question more to buy myself some time to process what he’d just said. I mean, it was awfully profound. I hadn’t expected it to come from someone packaged like him. Of course, speaking of books, that whole adage of never judging one by its cover came to mind again.

“Yeah, I think it’s where I got such big ideas that I could change things back home. I got myself to thinking that I was smarter than everybody around me.”

“So what happened?” I asked, rinsing my head with the shower spray, listening intently for his answer.

“I learned that no matter how smart you think you are, there’s always a bloke out there smarter than you.”

“That’s all?”

“That and it’s never a good idea to try and get one over on a gang boss as powerful as the one I tried to fool. There’s a reason he’s boss. I’d like to think I’m over being that young and dumb.”

I wanted to ask him, what did you do exactly, but it was none of my business. Just like there were certain things about me that were none of his.

So he’d gone from outsmarting crime bosses to escorting and protecting a whore. I honestly would consider that a downgrade in lifestyle, but thinking on it, whatever he’d done that was viewed as a betrayal, it was probably a downgrade he was more than happy to live with, considering he got to live.

Live and learn. It was honestly all any of us could do.

“So,” he called out, interrupting my introspective silence, “What’s your story?”

“I’m just a girl trying to crawl out from under the mountain of debt her poor choices left her buried under,” I said. Which was true.

“Alright, I’ll give you that,” he called. “But you know something I like, so what about you? Name something you like.”

He liked to read, I liked to read, too but I had a feeling if I said that it would come across as evasive, or like I was trying to purposefully be difficult.

“I… I guess it’s been a long time since I thought about what I like, or what makes me happy,” I said finally.

“That’s a bit depressing, isn’t it?” he asked carefully, and I couldn’t disagree, but wondered at the change in his tone.

“I like to dance,” I said finally. “Delia is the one that convinced me to take pole dancing as a means to stay fit and have fun after…” I trailed off and finished with a bitter, “Well, after Silas.”

“You like your job, then? That’s good.”

“I like parts of my job, not all of it.”

“Yeah, I could see that. What parts do you like best?”

“I like the creativity part. I like coming up with new dances and new moves. I like the music and finding the perfect song. That’s the fun part.”

“I can see it,” he said and I smiled.

“I liked today,” I said honestly. “Downstairs, the learning new things… I think it was a good idea. I wish I had done it sooner but I never really felt right going to the self-defense classes around here.”

“Why not?” he sounded curious.

“I had one of the instructors tell me that because I was a stripper, I was asking for trouble.”

He scoffed and declared, “What a tool!”

“Yeah, Lia and I didn’t go back after the first class. We went back to her apartment and ate ice cream. Besides, he was less about actually teaching the girls anything and more about feeling them up and fishing for a hookup.”

He laughed and I smiled to myself. It was a good sound. I was just finishing up and shut off the water saying, “Don’t laugh. I mean, it’s my job, I would know.”

“Too right, I reckon.”

I worked on drying myself off and practically jumped into my street clothes. His apartment wasn’t exactly warm, and the heat from the shower was quickly dissipating from the bathroom.

I pulled my hair dryer from my bag and thought better of making him wait to shower until I’d dried it in here. Instead, I stepped out and he stood up. It made me smile how quickly he got to his feet. It reminded me of a bygone era when men leaped up from their seats anytime a lady entered the room. Except I was no lady. I don’t think I could ever be considered ‘classy’ not even by today’s standards. Still, there was something about how Nik moved around me that almost made me believe I could be. It was nice.

“I don’t want to hold you up, is there someplace I can plug this in out here and dry my hair?” I held up the hair dryer and he smiled.

“Most of the power points out here don’t work,” he said, “But the one by the bed does, under the chair.”

“Thanks,” I said and he gave me a nod.

“I’ll be out nek minute, no worries.”

I started across the open space towards where he said and turned last moment, blurting out, “And thanks for what you said, you know, about my face. Um, I’m not sure why you called it that, though.”

“What, yer warrior’s mark? Because you are one. You didn’t just survive, Girl. You thrived, you made yer own way. That takes courage that a lot of people lack. That’s a survivor’s mark you can be proud of, eh.”

I blinked but he was gone, inside the bathroom, just the thinnest sliver of golden light coming through the crack in the door. I swallowed hard and went over to the chair that seemed to be serving as some sort of an end table more than a chair. It had a bunch of things on it that I didn’t want to disturb, so I sat on the edge of the bed and plugged in my drier.

I sat up, and brush in hand switched the loud machine on. The warm air was welcome against my scalp and I worked the heat through my long hair, which was a real bitch to dry. Still, I was so not getting on the back of a motorcycle, in winter, with wet hair, helmet or not. Just the thought gave me a cold shiver. I would never get warm again.

I let my eyes wander, as drying one’s hair was typically one of the most boring pastimes on earth. Especially without my setup at home. I’d usually just sit at my little dining room table with a textbook propped on a cookbook stand and read out of my assigned chapters while drying. Don’t judge. I liked to be efficient and look good.

Now I just let my gaze roam around Zeb’s large, rundown, and mostly empty apartment. I twisted in my seat and nearly singed the top of my ear with the drier, I was so frozen by what captured my gaze.

Taped to the wall beside his bed was a crumpled twenty, a smear of familiar red lipstick across Jackson’s face.

Had he gone back to the diner for it? I’d wondered what he was doing, and here it was staring me in the face. Surprising me the most was the fact that my first reaction upon seeing it was that it was a sweet gesture before my general paranoia about everything kicked in.

I went back and forth for several moments wondering about his intent when it came to the bill. Trying to decide whether it was a sordid trophy or whether it was as a sweet gesture that was my initial reaction to seeing it there.

I shut off the hair drier and finger-combed my hair to feel for any excessively damp spots. It took me a full minute to realize I wasn’t hearing the shower run. I twisted back around and he was standing there, watching me, barefoot and bare-chested in just a pair of jeans, his longish dark hair pulled into a short ponytail.

“What is this?” I asked softly, pointing to the bill.

“Ah, shit, uh, for me? A good memory.”

I frowned, “Explain please?”

“Well, you see I went to this titty bar and there was this dancer there, and she’s a pretty thing. Fierce, you know? Out of all the blokes sitting around her stage, she picked me to dance for and I gave her a tip worthy of her show and she made taking it such a part of her performance. It was special. I liked it, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how she took the money.”

He wouldn’t really look me in the eyes and I realized just how shy he was. I studied him carefully and he radiated a certain amount of embarrassment over having been caught with the reminder taped to his wall. I stood up slowly, leaving my hair drier on the small pile of other things on his chair and my brush behind on the floor.

I was firmly on the side of not creepy but sweet when I went to him. I carefully hugged him and his hands lightly went to my hips. He smelled good, earthy and like a clean man, which why did ‘clean man’ smell so damn good?

“I think it’s sweet,” I whispered and he leaned back so he could look me in the eyes, a small smile playing on his full lips. My gaze wandered the intricate whorls and designs of his tattoo from forehead to chin, but only on the one half of his face. I didn’t understand that but I didn’t want to ask and possibly offend him.

“But?” he asked softly, his voice strained, swallowing so hard it very nearly clicked.

“But I’m not a good person to get involved with, like, at all,” I told him.

I’d looked away, fixing my eyes on a crack in the wall, down by the baseboards. His thick fingers found my chin in a light, gentle touch that brought my eyes back to his.

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that, eh?”

“Because I don’t want to hurt you,” I said truthfully.

His mouth was coming closer to mine and he whispered just above my lips, “I’m a big boy, I can take it.”

“You sure?” I murmured and almost hated how faint my voice was, how much I wanted his lips to touch mine. It’d been so long since anyone who had wanted to kiss me saw me for more than just tits and ass. I knew it down to my very soul that Nik did. That this wasn’t the same as the men from the club. There was something far more to this than that, and I was especially surprised to feel that I wanted it, and then his lips touched mine, warm and sensual, and I lost myself for just a moment.

I kissed him back, Pretty Woman Art of Hooking Handbook be damned. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t a hooker. I wasn’t a sex worker. I was a woman and I felt like a real one at that. It was amazing, breathtaking, and so beautiful. I hadn’t realized how starved I was for it and at the same time, it frightened me so completely to have that strong of a reaction to him, to any man again after what Silas had done.

I pulled away abruptly, my chest heaving, and turned away, pressing my hands to my mouth as much to hold onto the lingering sensation of his kiss as to keep myself from spilling over into heavy sobs. I was so torn between so many emotions. Want, need, and longing warring with the safety, independence and yes, even loneliness. I was lonely, and I hated that about myself, but it was something that I just had to do.

“Hey, hey, none of that,” he whispered soothingly, stepping up to my back and wrapping his arms around me. He rested his lips against my shoulder and he swayed gently; soothingly.

I closed my eyes and breathed deep and slowly relaxed, lowering my hands and murmuring, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, eh… It was nice.”

I scoffed, nearly choking on the bitter, mocking sound. He smiled and gave me a gentle squeeze before letting me go.

“Well, it was for me,” he said softly, and I immediately felt bad.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said, tone grave. “It was nice for me, too.”

And that was the problem, wasn’t it?