Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,32

until my turn and feel like an idiot while I jerk my head up and down. Out of the corner of my eyes, I see Jason watching me from the chin-up station, looking at me like he doesn’t mind my thick legs. So I do it some more, even slower. He watches the whole time. I wonder if his dick is good—

What’s good dick, anyway? Like, specifically?

—even though I’m trying to focus.

A few minutes later our gloves are off and we’re clinching.

It’s only me, Amanda and Noor until Jason joins us to partner me. I guess he thinks he’s helping out, even though he’s actually the worst at clinching. We start slap-sparring until one of us pulls the other in. I feel his arms come around me, not in a clinch, really. His form is terrible, but I don’t care about that right now. And when he sneaks a hand up to my head, it pauses at the base of my neck and brushes the little hairs there. We’re both sweating and as we pull toward each other, I feel him hard against my thigh.

He disengages and walks off the mats to the washroom. I think he’s embarrassed until he sends me a little smile. A little flutter of warmth spreads from my lower stomach and I feel this ache between my legs. Like, it hurts even. I feel full and empty at the same time. What the actual fuck?

I wonder, did he do that on purpose?

Kru leaves for the night, leaving Ricky to lock up. It’s only the fighters left, anyway. Ricky plays a clip from a gym in Thailand, where two fighters are conditioning with blows to the body. No gloves, wraps, wrist or ankle guards. They deliver and take hit after hit, until red splotches show on their brown bodies. So we do a bit of that, too. Jason stays away from me, either because he doesn’t want to hit me like that, or he doesn’t want to repeat what happened in clinching.

We leave, one by one. I wait for him in the parking lot. Noor and Amanda have gone home, both laughing at me before they left because it seems like everyone knows what’s up. Jason sees me from the door and smiles again, but I can tell he’s nervous. He keeps wiping his palms against his jeans. We walk to the train station together.

One moment we’re just talking and the next we’re kissing by the entrance of the station.

His lips are softer than I expected them to be, but I kinda like it. Okay, I more than like it. Here I am, now an eighteen-year-old virgin being kissed by a college boy.

I highly recommend it.

Eventually we say goodbye. I think about Jason all the way home. I’m unable to do my economics homework for the rest of the night. I can’t even think about Florida. That’s how spun I am. I want more, but there’s too much going on to ache this much. Right?

I can’t do homework. I can’t sleep. So I turn Dad’s phone on. I haven’t really wanted to before this. There was so much about Dad’s life he kept from us that I’m just used to him being a bit of a mystery. I plug it into my charger because the battery is low and scroll through his messages. The steel pan blares from it, jarring me into motion. I answer the call quickly, but I don’t say anything.

“Hello?” says a male voice. “Who is this?” He sounds uncertain, his Trini accent like molasses. Like a thick, dark melody, running slow.

I almost hang up the phone, but something crazy in me doesn’t want to just yet. “Trisha. Who is this?”

“Junior.”

It’s a name I’ve heard whispered my whole life. Somebody important in Dad’s world, who I never got to meet. Who Ma never wanted me to.

“Why are you calling? Dad is dead,” I say.

There’s a pause and I start to regret ever picking up the phone. “I know that. I call every so often to hear his voice on the message system. Sometimes I call for you.”

Junior. This person who’s been in Dad’s life for almost as long as I have. I know Ma would be so pissed if she knew I was talking to someone in Dad’s other family. The one he kept down on the island.

This time I do hang up.

I turn off the phone and toss it in my gym bag where nobody in their right mind would ever go