Sweet Release (A Bad Boy Mafia Romance) (11 page)

Ella

We walked back to the gym, talking shit about how each of us was going to school the other. Mike was in his element a little more once we left the pasta place and were on our way to the gym. Mike had keys, he said, and he didn’t think Jarome would mind as long as we cleaned up after ourselves.

It took an effort for me to get into the right headspace myself. There were cameras at the gym. Getting carried away in the ring would be a bad idea. Then again, surely Jarome didn’t watch the tapes every morning—they were only there in case there was some kind of incident, right? But still…

So instead, I prepped myself mentally for all the different things that Mike might throw at me. Fighting-wise, of course. Even though my brain kept trying to go in another direction. Mostly punches and strikes, I figured, but I’d seen Jarome training him on a couple of different take downs. He favored a head-on tackle, given that his bulk was enough to drive most guys right over. I’d seen him do it to Jarome a couple of times. I had something for that.

Plus, thinking through those scenarios that I had drilled with Chelsea again and again until they were reflexes helped me keep my mind focused on this, and not on where I hoped the night would end up. This was totally foreplay—but I wasn’t about to throw a match just to play the helpless damsel. Hell. No.

And Mike didn’t seem to expect me to. The closer we got to the gym, the quieter he got, getting into his own head space. We were both grinning, though. There was an electric chemistry between us, that fissile potential finally beginning to spark and pop with impending explosion. We nudged and elbowed and joked about offering one another the option to put the ‘bout’ off for another few days.

But we ended up walking through the doors of the darkened gym. We left the overhead lights off, only switching on the office light in the back. Mike locked the gym doors. I had expected to experience a moment of panic—you had to use keys on both sides, so if I had to run I was either going through the glass or I was fucked—but it never came. Even though we were actually here to engage in a little friendly violence, and even though Mike was an actual ex-con, I just couldn’t bring myself to worry that he’d hurt me in a serious way.

And not just because I was certain I could cream him.

Mike apparently kept workout clothes here at the gym. He disappeared into the back to grab them while I stripped off my shirt. I had an athletic bra on underneath it that was tight and covering enough that I certainly wasn’t indecent for the cameras in the event someone actually did see them. But, it was revealing enough up close to give me an edge. Hey, you take whatever advantage you can get. Mike had probably a hundred and fifty pounds on me, so that was his advantage.

I don’t own clothes I can’t fight in, so my capris were perfectly serviceable and instead of wrestling shoes, which is what most everyone wore in the ring here, I went bare foot.

Mike came out in his usual under armor suit, and when he saw the state of my feet he took off his own shoes as well. We climbed into the ring together.

“Don’t go easy on me,” I said. “I won’t go easy on you.”

“Well, I’m about twice your size,” Mike said. “I wouldn’t wanna hurt you or anything.”

“So you think you could, huh?”

“Guess we’ll see. You ready for all this?” He gestured at the thick, muscular whole of him.

Oh, I’m ready for that. I’m so ready I’d prefer we just skip the foreplay and go right to the finish. I only smiled at him, and stretched my arms up to show off my shape a little. “You ready for this?” I countered.

Mike laughed quietly, and started circling. He was already falling into that fancy foot work, his hands up and loose, ready to grab or strike. Krav Maga is a little more practical. No fancy posturing; efficiency, Chelsea said, is the heart of our martial style. Don’t waste anything.

Still, if we circled all night we’d never get anywhere, much less where I wanted to get. We took turns feinting for a bit, the tension between us growing palpably as we both became more and more focused, more watchful, waiting for the fight to really start.

“I ain’t got all night,” Mike said.

“Neither do I,” I said. “You scared, or what?”

“Oh, okay,” Mike grunted. “That’s how you play it, huh?”

“What can I say,” I said, “I like when a man makes the first move.”

Mike let out a sharp breath, gave a nod, and smirked as he came at me, right cross.

It was a test, I knew. Slow; I’d seen him hit Jarome faster and harder. He wasn’t going to play all his cards, so neither did I. I blocked, close to my body, slipped into his guard, and tapped him lightly but swiftly in his gut, twice—boom boom.

He skipped back, and he wasn’t grinning anymore. I think it dawned on him, just then, to take me seriously. So, he did.

Mike was fast. He had those long arms and legs and he used them. Chelsea taught me that blocking and parrying comprised a sphere half the size of my full range. “Don’t reach for a block,” she’d said, again and again, “block close, go for openings, dodge if it’s outside this sphere.” So I danced around a bit, drew him in close, and then let my training take over when he did.

We didn’t have gloves or pads, and were conscious of that, but as Mike got a little faster, so did I. The faster you move, the harder it is to pull punches. When he threw a jab, low, toward my midsection when I raised an arm to parry a higher one from his other fist, I dropped my center, caught his forearm with mine, and twisted as I hooked the back of his neck with my other.

Mike toppled forward into the ropes, and popped back up on defense when I snapped a kick at his side. He swallowed it with his arm, curling over it, and tried to drive me down onto the mat.

But I was ready for that, too. As he drove me back I let myself fall, and hooked my foot against his hip as I did. The rookie mistake is to keep that foot planted and try and recover, but you can’t. Instead, use what’s there. Waste nothing.

He didn’t expect it, and fell forward toward me; except he bent at the waist where I had him braced, so I grabbed the back of his shoulders and pulled him over. For a split second, our faces were inches away.

“Gotcha,” I grunted, and heaved.

Mikes momentum carried him over me, and a little help from my frankly Wonder-Woman-esque legs, and off he went to the other side of the ring. He landed hard, his hands slapping the mat to break his fall.

I could have followed for a pin, with his hands out like that, but it wouldn’t have been the one I wanted. I had something special in mind, if I could drive him the right way.

We both popped back up.

“Alright,” Mike said, breathing hard from our little meet’n’greet. “You got some moves.”

“You giving up?” I asked.

“Not a chance.” He moved again, right at me, that tackle he’d practiced with Jarome.

Being light and small has some distinct advantages; you can do things bigger opponents don’t expect. Like hop right off the ground and roll over somebody’s back. My shoulder hit him as I rolled over, and he had to straighten up to compensate, which is when I hopped back toward him and tugged his broad shoulders back. Down he went, both hands striking the ground before he did, again, to break his fall.

He laid there a moment. “Aingt there some rule about keeping both feet on the ground?”

I skipped back and forth, Cassius Clay style. “Float like a butterfly, right?”

“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” Mike groaned.

While I laughed at him a little, his iron hand caught my ankle as he turned.

It was a scary fall, but I was quick enough to break it when I went down. In a second Mike was on me, in my guard, fighting to pin my arms. He was between my thighs, and opposing forces tugged me in different directions as my body told me in no uncertain terms that it was absolutely ready to take this whole affair to the next level; while my reflexes told me to shrimp up and take out one of his legs rather than fight his upper body.

I tried to take out his leg, but he was too strong. Eventually, I had no choice. I slapped my hand against the mat. I was tapping out.

We were inches away from one another again, our breath hot and fast against our faces, heavy with spice and garlic from dinner, mixing with the scent of fresh, clean sweat from the workout.

“A girl that can handle me,” Mike said quietly. “That’s pretty damn hot, you know that?”

“A guy who doesn’t mind me handling him,” I said, “that’s pretty damn hot, too.”

“What’re we gonna do about that?”

Suddenly, we were rolling again, and Mike’s lips crushed against mine, and then I tasted his tongue, and felt his lips on mine as I pressed through them. I clawed at his chest, and then his abs, and then was pulling his shirt up to get at his skin. He groaned appreciably into my mouth, and I pulled his shirt further up to feel his bare skin against my stomach.

He hunched his hips forward, grinding against me on the mat, and I wrapped my legs around him. I wanted this. I wanted it now, here; on the mat, I didn’t care who saw the security tapes.

Suddenly, there was a sound at the door. Someone was coming in! Shit.

I rolled off the edge of the mat and let myself fall onto the floor, catching myself, just as the front door to the gym opened, letting through a ray of light.

“Oh, hello, Michael,” I heard Neena say in her amazing accent. “What are you doing here?”

I could practically feel Michael running his hands through his hair. “Oh, you know, just thought I’d get a late night session in.”

“Sorry to bother you,” Neena said. “I got home and realized I forgot my purse, I had to come back and get it to buy groceries for dinner.”

“No problem at all,” Michael said. I could have sworn I was breathing so hard Neena was about to ask who was in there with him, but I heard her footsteps go towards the back rooms, then a minute she came back.

“Have a good night, Michael. I will see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, you too.”

The door closed with a thud behind her, and I finally allowed myself a moment to breathe.

“Well… damn,” Mike said as he looked over at me. Suddenly, I couldn’t help myself. I burst into laughter.

“Can you imagine if she was two minutes later?” I asked Mike, and he broke into a grin as well. Oh boy.

The mood completely ruined, we awkwardly decided just to call it a night and head home. So close, and yet so far.

Ella

Mike was as good as his word. We practiced together in the ring, and worked out a few times on the mats. He gave me pointers on my striking, and I worked with him on his ground and throwing game. Jarome even pointed out that he was improving, and I took full credit with a big stupid grin on my face. “He learns fast,” I admitted. He’d even managed to pin me a couple of times fair and square.

After work every night, we went out. Each time, we ended up going our separate ways after a few heavy kisses. After apparently getting a gentle word from Jarome—turned out he did actually check the security footage each morning—Mike suggested that a tradition of after-hours ‘training’ was probably not a good idea.

It was nice. Frustrating, for sure. But nice. The closer I got to Mike, the more I understood in strange mix of qualities he had. There was a temper there, but it was focused on a goal; it had an outlet. He wasn’t another Robert, whose outlet was, well, me. He was gentle with me, but there were some topics that were clearly off limits and he wasn’t shy about telling me when I touched one of them. Family was a hot button, so I avoided touching it. There were things, I supposed, that Mike needed to guard a little at first.

I understood that, but tried not to do the same. Keeping things hidden was how I had lived when I was with Robert and it ate me up inside. Not that I had the same kinds of secrets to keep now, but I had adopted a general policy of being more or less fully open with anyone I thought I could trust. So I gradually told Mike about Robert, when he asked, and what it was like living with that kind of shame and pain, and the strange ways my mind found to make excuses for him throughout all of it until the very end.

“It’s weird, looking back on it,” I told him one night. “Like it was all just a bad dream. Except, I’ve got souvenirs I can’t even throw out.”

Mike pursed his lips and jerked a chin at my shoulder. “That where the scar’s from?”

“That is more of a trophy than a souvenir,” I said, smiling a little. “I got it the night that I finally stood up to him. We argued, he… did his thing, and I tried to fight back so he shoved me and down I went. Right into a glass table. Can you believe he was pissed that I broke it? Me; like I had dived into it to be spiteful. I was just covered in blood, and all he could think about was how he won that shitty table in an auction for some insane amount of money. The glass was handcrafted, you see, as well as the driftwood base, so—one of a kind.”

Mike stared at me, rightfully aghast, his eyes wide and furious. I admit, there’s a part of me that wanted to sick him on Robert. But, that would ruin two lives and one of them didn’t deserve it. “Piece of work,” he said, shaking his head. “He take you to get stitched up?”

“Yeah. Once he realized how badly injured I really was, he drove me to the emergency room himself, and made up a story to the intake nurse that I was clumsy and had fallen. Tried to get me to go along with it.” I grinned, recalling his shock when I didn’t. He’d sputtered, and turned red, and then started crying. “I told her the truth. You should have seen it. God, I thought all that time he was some untouchable… beast. Like no one would believe me if I told them; Robert was charming, you know? Everyone liked him. My mother constantly bugged me about when we’d have kids. Hell, she even tried to convince me to work things out with him instead of getting divorced.”

“No shit,” Mike grunted. “Yeah, moms have one thing on their mind where I’m from—grandkids. You can’t make ‘em fast enough.” There was a hint of old, worn-out sadness in it. His mother had passed away some years ago; I knew that much. Maybe he really did regret not making babies fast enough for her to see them.

I had the good sense to steer us away from that iceberg by now. “Anyway, all the nurses sort of converged at the same time. Incredible women. They ushered him out, got me in touch with the police, convinced me to file a report and for divorce. One of them introduced me to Chelsea, who was both my instructor and my sponsor at the, ah… the women’s shelter.” I swallowed a lump. It had been an emotional time, and for a short period I’d felt like I was homeless—I was homeless, in fact; but I felt like I’d gotten there through some failure of my own. Like I’d slacked off at work and gotten fired, instead of fleeing a toxic marriage.

“And the rest, as they say, is history.” I finished off the neat whiskey and set the tumbler down just a little hard.

Mike just gazed at me, with that expression of open pride he showed me more and more lately. It felt good, being around a guy who not only respected my strength, but was proud of it and, I knew, even turned on by it. One-eighty kind of good. Maybe for the first time in a long time, both Robert and the cringing victim he’d tried to make me into seemed really and truly a part of my distant, dreamlike past instead of some lump of cancer lurking in my psyche, waiting to hatch and metastasize again, dragging me back there.

“What?” I asked him. He was still staring.

He blinked, and his eyes refocused on the present. “Just thinking, is all. Bout my Ma. She’d have liked you. That woman…” he smiled at her memory. “She was a spitfire. Pure, hotblooded Italian, my Pops used to say.”

“I’m mostly an anglo-mutt,” I told him.

He shrugged. “She’d have said you had the heart of an Italian.” Mike laughed a little. “Yeah, by now she’d be bugging me about…” He cleared his throat, sipped his water, and shrugged. “Uh, you know, just if I was being a proper gentleman and all. I hope I am.”

“I think we’d have to widen the definition a little,” I chuckled, “but, yeah. You are.”

The way I said it must have hit a nerve a little. “But?”

First, I waved it off. No big deal, and all. But, Mike pressed me, starting to get concerned about the wrong things entirely.

“I feel entirely safe and comfortable with you, Mike,” I said, smiling at him.

* * *

Pembry took a short hiatus from the gym, which I was beside myself with happiness about until he showed up again almost a week later. I’ll say this for Pembry—to keep that weight on under the auspices of a place like the gym took real commitment. He couldn’t have lost so much as a pound no matter how much he sweat. Probably because of the empty calories he consumed as a raging alcoholic. I didn’t know if he’d come to work out while actually drunk before, but at this point the scent of liquor and ammonia followed him around like his own personal cloud of stink, Pig-Pen style.

Fortunately for me, my book was full. I saw him stop by the front desk to check it, and felt a surge of bile try to rise out of my stomach. Please, whatever powers up there listen, don’t let me get a cancellation.

By this time, Jarome and I both had hawk-eyes out for Pembry. Every time he made a move toward the benches, someone had eyes on him. I had suggested to Mike and Jarome both that Mike just stop leaving his bag there, but Jarome believed that the better option, if we wanted to actually get rid of Pembry, was to let him screw himself over by trying again. He and Mike both believed that Pembry would, in fact, try again.

And sure enough, he did.

I saw it when it happened, and was even watching closely enough from the heavy bag where I was burning off some extra calories before lunch that I saw what he was sneaking into the bag—a little baggie with something white in it. Cocaine, maybe? Whatever it was, Pembry barely got it in there; maybe he was drunk after all. He left with his phone after that, and went toward the doors to the back hall and bathrooms.

Jarome was off on some business errand, and I didn’t want Mike to risk getting some trace of drugs on his hands. So when it looked like Pembry was entirely out of sight, I went to Mike’s bag and checked the outer pocket. There it was. I didn’t know the first thing about weighing drugs, but I assumed that any amount would be enough to send Mike straight back to prison. I palmed it, and went to the bathroom.

Pembry passed me, gave me a sneering look and scratched his crotch. Asshole. I hoped he’d called Mike’s parole officer again. And that I’d caught everything he put in there.

After I emptied and flushed the baggie, I went back to the heavy bag and waited. It was remarkably like clockwork; Pembry hadn’t wasted any time, probably because of the last two misses. Since Jarome had cleared the last two attempts at framing Mike, he probably though this time was the win. I wanted to laugh in his face, but that would have let the cat out of the bag so I kept myself focused on the bag. I imagined Pembry where the heavy bag was, taking every hook and jab right in the face.

And hey, look at that—normally it was Robert I imagined there. Call that finally moving on. Thanks, Pembry.

The parole officer showed up in about fifteen minutes after Pembry left the bathrooms. She didn’t even bother to pull Mike aside, just had him empty out his pockets—there was nothing in them, he merely pulled them inside-out—and then asked to see his bag. Mike caught my eye after he pulled it out, his jaw bulging with the strain of gritting his teeth. I gave him a slight nod that I hoped he took as an indication he was safe.

Maybe he did. He relaxed just a little bit, and watched the woman with the red hair pick through his bag with clipped efficiency. When she found nothing for a third time, she sighed, and pushed herself up with an obvious effort and plainly displayed irritation.

“Pembry!” The woman snapped. Oh, she was done with this. You could hear it in her voice. Everyone in the gym stopped what they were doing and watched. I had to school my face into a mask of passive disinterest so I didn’t grin because the fluttering excitement in my stomach was enough to make me laugh.

“Check it again,” Pembry said. “I saw him with it earlier, it’s in there!” He reached for the bag like he would check it himself. “Maybe he moved it.”

“Just stop this foolishness, Pembry,” the woman said. Had Mike called her Annemarie? “Listen, I have fifty eight parolees to deal with. Fifty eight, Pembry. Some of them have fresh assaults, come in high or drunk to check-in, and are due to take another spin through the legal system. You have wasted three hours of my work day so far. Maybe you don’t realize this, now that you’re behind a desk, but some of us are busy as hell and I’m one of them. I will not take another call about this from you, do you hear me? Leave this boy alone; go get a hobby, for God’s sake. Take up fishing or something relaxing that’ll stave off that cardiac event that looks like it might be just around the corner for you, you understand me?”

Pembry threw his arm out toward Mike. “But I saw him with—”

“When I asked if you understood me,” Annemarie growled, “it was both rhetorical, and the end of this conversation. Far as I’m concerned, Michael Frazetta is doing his best to turn his life around. Let him. Go do your job somewhere else, or have you forgotten what your job actually is? Get back to it, before you haven’t got one to go back to, are we clear?”

Pembry smoldered quietly.

“That time it wasn’t rhetorical, Pembry,” Annemarie said, her fists on her hips as she stared the fat-ass officer down like a toddler.

“Sure,” Pembry muttered, just like a toddler that had no intention of behaving.

“Show’s over everyone,” Annemarie announced to the room. “Get back to… whatever you all was doing.” She turned and stalked out of the gym, her red curls bobbing as she shook her head.

I got a thrill of victorious excitement. It was over. Pembry would leave, right? He had nothing else to gain here and it was obvious that he wasn’t actually here to train. The gym was expensive, as far as gyms went; this whole endeavor had cost him. Jarome would absolutely dissolve his contract.

But Pembry didn’t leave. Instead, he whirled on Mike, jabbing a pudgy finger in the air at him. “You shit. You crooked, dirty piece of street trash; you think I’m just gonna let you get away with making me look bad? You got another thing coming, asshole.”

Mike’s hands had balled into hard fists, but he didn’t swing. I worried he would, though; and assaulting an officer, even Pembry, would do what Pembry’s failed setup hadn’t. I moved to intercept.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Officer Pembry,” Mike said, his tone flat.

“You know,” Pembry snarled. “You fucking know!” He took another step, he and Mike were almost nose to nose—although Pembry had to practically stretch himself up to get there.