Chapter 1 – Roman #2
He’s slowing. He’s tired. He’s big and used to relying on his size and strength, so his stamina is shit.
By the time we reach round five, he’s winded, hardly able to catch his breath despite the two-minute break we had.
So much so that as he charges at me, I don’t move.
He was fun at first, but now he’s starting to bore me.
I rear back and nail him right in the face. His nose shatters beneath my fist, and he tumbles to the concrete in a bloody heap.
I’m breathing hard, blood trickling down my cheek, and my knuckles are raw despite the wraps.
Arnett checks him and declares a TKO, or technical knockout, and me the winner.
And that’s that. Match over. Cheers ring out, but after he holds my bloody fist in the air, I retreat back into the room I came from, immediately followed by Braelyn, Hayes, and Forest.
“Twenty grand,” Forest tells me. “You turned that into forty. Do you want me to manage it?”
“Sure,” I reply as I dry my hands with a wad of paper towels. “Along with my winnings.”
“You got it.”
“Come here, Hercules,” Braelyn teases, her voice soft but commanding. I know what she wants, and she won’t let me get away until she’s examined me, ever the nurse. “He got your lip good, and you’ll have a nice shiner by the end of the night. You also look tired.”
And for the first time all day, I smile a genuine smile. “Says the woman who just worked a twelve-hour shift in the ER,” I quip, sitting on the edge of a metal table.
“Yes, but I’m genetically blessed. You’re just pretty, which requires maintenance, including sleep.”
“I’ll get some later,” I promise her. “Where’s Adam?” Adam is her fiancé and one of my closest friends, but I’m not upset he didn’t join her tonight.
“Getting his beauty rest,” she teases.
She removes the tape from my hands and cleans up my cuts and scrapes with a solution and then dabs them with an antibiotic ointment. Her gloved nail brushes along the underside of my left ring finger against my tattoo, and my heart gives a jerk that quickly passes as she continues her assessment.
“That cut’s not too deep,” she tells me, applying an antiseptic solution to my face that burns like hell. “You don’t need stitches unless you decide to do something stupid before it heals.”
“Define stupid,” I retort, staring at her face as she places a butterfly bandage over it.
“I think you could define that better than I could.”
“Probably. How was your shift?”
“Not bad. Three overdoses after a party we managed to save and a kid who stuck a Lego up his nose. No fatalities.”
“How do you deal with people like that?” Forest asks, shuddering to himself.
She laughs. “Unlike the two of you”—she points at Forest and me—“I happen to like people.”
“I don’t hate people,” I defend. “I just prefer them at a distance. Preferably separated by a kitchen door.”
“Says the man who voluntarily gets into a ring and exchanges bodily fluids with strangers.”
“Are you trying to make us all throw up?” Hayes grouses. “That’s fucking nasty.”
Braelyn shrugs as she rips off her gloves and sanitizes her hands with her travel pump. “Just saying I’d get a few extra vaccines if I were you. And I want to take a look at your eye in a couple of days to make sure it’s healing well.”
“I’ll be fine,” I assure her.
“You two sound like an old married couple,” he continues. “Explain to me how it is you’ve never hooked up before?”
My shoulders tense reflexively. Typically, no one asks us this, but every now and then, Hayes likes to be a dick and push shit he shouldn’t.
Braelyn and I have been best friends since I lost my brother, who was her boyfriend at the time, when I was twenty-four and she was eighteen.
It’s also how I became so close with Adam, who was best friends with both of them.
My friendship with Braelyn has only grown stronger over the years, and now we’re all but inseparable.
But it’s not like that with us. It never has been. At least not from her side.
Yet she nails me with, “I tried to kiss him once. He rejected me. Bruised my ego terribly, and I’ve never recovered.”
“That’s not how it happened,” I interject, shocked she’s even bringing this up when she never does. “You were trashed after party hopping. You tried to kiss me on your apartment front steps, nearly falling over in the process, and because I’m not a total fucking asshole, I didn’t take advantage.”
“Please,” she scoffs. “I was perfectly coherent. I remember every detail, including you pushing me back and saying, and I quote, ‘Not like this, Brae.’”
“Because you’d been doing so many tequila shots, you could hardly stand up.”
I get an eye roll and a folding of her arms across her chest. “Three. I had three.”
“It was six,” I counter, standing to my full height because what the fuck? “And you threw up in the bushes of the party like twenty minutes before, which was why I was driving you home.”
She tilts her head. “Oh, right. I sort of forgot that part of it.”
Now it’s my turn to fold my arms. “Yeah. Shocker there.”
She waves me away. “Anyway, that’s ancient history. Roman and I are way better like this. Bad boy Roman doesn’t date, and I’m about to become an old married lady.”
There’s a reason bad boy Roman doesn’t date, and I’m looking at it. And her becoming an old married lady is why I’m leaving the country for a while. Only Braelyn doesn’t know about that yet. No one does.
“Seven weeks,” Forest says, noticeably changing the subject. “You might want to schedule your next couple of matches around Brae’s wedding.”
“Oh my god!” Braelyn turns on me, a finger jabbed in my direction. “You freaking better. If you show up to my wedding as our best man maid of honor with a black eye and ruin my pictures, I will kick your ass. And win.”
I hold up a hand in surrender. “I promise I’ll be the handsome guy in the tux standing by both your sides. I’ll be the best best man maid of honor ever.”
“Excellent. Now I need to get home. I have a shift starting at eleven tomorrow and I promised Adam I wouldn’t be home too late.”
“I’ll walk you out.”
I toss on my T-shirt, foregoing the jeans and leather jacket because I’m still overheated. The four of us walk out together, both Forest and Hayes saying good night, knowing I’ll walk Braelyn to her car. I give her a sweaty hug, and she kisses my cheek.
“Get home safely on your deathcycle.”
I give her a sardonic look but smile all the same. “Yes, Nurse Albright.”
She climbs into her car and starts it up but rolls down her window. “Hey, Ro?”
“Yeah, kid?”
“It was a good match tonight.” She lingers on my face for a moment, then rolls up her window and drives off.
I watch the taillights fade into the dark Boston night, but her words from earlier sit heavily on me, unshakable.
I did reject her that night. But not because she was drunk, though she was, and not because she threw up, because oddly enough, I didn’t care about that.
It wasn’t because I was being noble either, though I tried to be.
It was because she was twenty and I was twenty-six and we’d lost Nash only two years prior. I was in no shape to be anything good to her. Nothing that she deserved or needed from a guy. I was a fucking mess, and she was my lifeline, and I knew she’d regret it the next morning.
I was certain of it.
That was the first and only time she ever tried anything like that with me or even hinted at something. She was so trashed and likely would have kissed a garden hose if it showed interest.
But the truth is, our timing never lined up, and my guilt kept me away. After that, it was too late. Our lives perpetually diverged, only intersecting at all the wrong points. But now, with her marrying Adam in seven weeks, I can’t help but wonder. What if I had kissed her that night?