“She’s tryna work on your core.” He motioned jabs to my sides. “Don’t let her get that. She ain’t even a good fighter! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He was angry. Big angry… I didn’t realize I was losing. Matter of fact, I had been easy in this fight. I was trying to go for a mile and not just putting her on her ass.
“You’re not here!” Trisha shouted in my face. “We’re in the third round. This is not Tori “The Banger” McNabb!”
Dabbing my face with a cool, wet towel, Luke barked, “We coulda stayed back on campus and let you fly out here by yourself for this shit you putting up.”
That’s when I realized they were right. I hadn’t applied the plan. But I also hadn’t realized the slip in time. Where had my head been? What had I been thinking about?
Ashton…
I couldn’t help but wonder if he had been here, somewhere in the back of the gym where they didn’t care to put on the lights because the chairs were empty. He said he’d been to a few of my practices when no one knew. How had he managed to fly out to the Minnesota fight? That wasn’t local at all—
A crisp memory hit me.
“And not to mention, he flew out of town the other day, cutting his phone off. I didn’t hear from him for close to eighteen hours. His only explanation was ‘Panthers business.’ Like…what does that even mean? You hop on a plane and disappear when you want?”
Aivery in the bathroom at Verti with Karmen last month. That was days after my fight with Walsh. That had to be why he went missing for those eighteen hours. Who does that? What guy dipped out on his girlfriend for a girl he wasn’t cheating with? That was an expensive level of weird human behavior. Then again, I learned last week, over the quick trip home for Thanksgiving, he wasn’t the average guy. He had money. What kind, I didn’t know, but it was more than him buying me clothes all semester long let on to.
Speaking of that time last week… I felt…different. Yes, I was still a virgin, but my femininity didn’t feel invisible anymore.
The bell tolled and without command, my body moved to stand. I caught the plastic straw as I did and received my mouthguard. After rolling my head and shoulders to loosen up, I met her in the middle of the ring. Rodriguez came my way fast and head-first. I stepped and shoulder-rolled, eluding her right. But her left met my right side and I finally felt the efforts of her earlier blows. That pissed me the hell off. I moved away just enough to put the power I needed in my back leg to pivot on my foot, and twisted my hips, hooking her ass hard enough in the jaw to take her down. Rodriguez dropped like a bag of oranges. When her head hit the floor and bounced, her mouthguard popped out.
I watched her as the ref declared her defeat. Seconds later, I felt familiar pounding on my shoulders and head.
“What the fuck took you so long, girl?” Luke shouted at me, this time happy. While a crowd formed inside the ring, my attention was outside, in the darkest of corners, looking for him.
The plane was quiet. There weren’t many on this flight, and my team sat between the same two rows. I had the window seat, although it was pitch black out. I was dozing off, finally feeling the painkillers kick in. I waited until boarding to take them, wanting to sleep the flight off. The whole ride here right after showering and the post-fight meeting, I’d been beating myself up for stalling on Rodriguez. My head hadn’t been in the game, and losing to an inferior fighter would have taken us off the course the BSU team charted for me.
I had so much school work waiting on me back on campus. As soon as we returned from Thanksgiving break, I went straight into training for this fight, and Ashton did the same for an upcoming game. I hadn’t seen him much since our flight back. At most, we ran into each other on the athletic campus in the gym. Oh. And that one time I went to the cafe to pick up dinner after working out and I saw him and Aivery hugged up at the cool kids’ table. I didn’t know