5. Brady
brADY
The gym smells like rubber mats and dried sweat at six in the morning, and I love it. Always have. There’s something about being here before anyone else, before the noise and the heat of bodies filling up the space, that strips everything back to what matters. Just the work. Just the grind.
Except I’m not the first one today.
I hear her before I see her. The sharp crack of knuckles connecting with the heavy bag, rhythmic and relentless, each strike landing with a precision that pulls my attention before I’ve even rounded the corner from the locker room. I stop in the doorway.
Dakota Fisher.
She’s in a sports bra and shorts, blonde hair twisted up, moving around the bag like she’s having a conversation with it.
Not just throwing punches—reading it, circling, feinting, drawing it in before she unloads a combination that rattles the chain holding the damn thing to the ceiling.
Her eyes are locked forward, jaw set, a fine sheen on her skin catching the light.
Lean muscle, strong shoulders, the kind of form you don’t get from casual training. She’s put years into this.
Years, and then there’s something else. Like she’s burning through demons that have nothing to do with fighting and everything to do with deep wounds that have left some parts of her scarred.
I stand there longer than I should.
Christ, Brady. Stalker much?
I pull myself through the door, drop my bag on the bench, pull out my wraps, and tell myself to act like a normal human. She hasn’t noticed me yet.
Eli is over near the far wall with a clipboard, making notes. He glances up when I come in, gives me the standard coach nod. Then his eyes slide straight back to Dakota.
He’s not subtle about it. Not aggressive, not creepy—but the way his attention is drawn to her is unmistakable. He watches her the way you watch something that unsettles you, like you can’t stop even when you know you should look away.
Now that I’ve seen her for myself, I get it. God help me, I get it.
My wraps are already done by the time Dakota slows her pace on the bag, turning, and that’s when she spots me. Her whole face shifts, the focused set of her jaw relaxing into a smile that lands somewhere in my chest before my brain has a chance to run interference.
Full smile. Warm. The kind that lands in your stomach like a medicine ball on core day.
Don’t be an idiot.
“You must be Brady.” She pulls a wrap free, extending her hand. Her grip is firm, a fighter’s grip.
“That’s me.” I shake it. “Cruz told me about you last night.”
Her brow lifts, eyes bright. “Good things, I hope.”
“He said you made him work.”
She laughs, and the sound makes my stomach flip. It’s genuine and melodic.
I grin before I can help it. “Right, so should I be concerned?”
“Probably.” She tilts her head, assessing me with pretty hazel eyes, open rather than pointed, curious instead of sizing me up for combat. Yet. “You’re the striker.”
“Speed and footwork. Are you a ground fighter?”
“I’m whatever the fight needs me to be.”
Eli writes something on his clipboard. Neither of us paying any attention to him.
We fall into warming up naturally, side by side on the mats, no formal arrangement—just the comfortable sync of two people who know their routines.
I’m aware of every time she moves in my peripheral vision.
The stretch of her shoulder when she reaches across her body.
The focused exhale she makes resetting into stance.
Cruz’s voice from last night is still stuck in my head.
Eli bending her over the—Stop. Stop that right now.
I’d been tipsy when Cruz had said it at the bar, but it had stuck tight enough that I couldn’t scrub the image from behind my eyes all the way home.
Eli, and Dakota, and Cruz in a chain of pleasure.
The thought had evolved in the dark of my bedroom when I’d looked up our new fighter.
It moved in a direction I hadn’t expected, hadn’t steered, just watched happen like a passenger in a runaway car.
Her mouth. How she’d look with her lips wrapped around my dick. Whether she’d make noise or go silent.
I am very aware, standing three feet from her now, that I need to function like an adult.
“Alright,” Eli says, walking over, clipboard tucked under his arm. His green eyes dart between us and land on me. “Brady. You two spar. Light contact, I want to see how she adapts to a different style.”
“Light contact,” I repeat.
“Don’t get cute,” Eli retorts.
Dakota’s mouth curves. She absolutely clocks the exchange, knows Eli is saying it as much for his own benefit as mine.
We take our positions on the mat, touching gloves, and then she rolls her neck and looks at me over the top of her guard, and I think okay, she is definitely flirting, or at the very least she knows exactly what she’s doing. And then she moves first and I have to stop thinking entirely.
She’s fast. Not Cruz-fast, not power-driven.
Her speed is different, clever, the kind that works angles.
She doesn’t come straight for me, she comes diagonal, and my body handles it before my brain catches up, slipping right and throwing a jab that she rolls under without breaking rhythm.
My follow-up cross finds nothing but air.
“Hm.” She circles left.
“Was that a taunt?” I ask.
“Just observing.”
I go for a leg kick, she checks it clean, returns a body shot that I take on my elbow but still feel up into my ribs. Good hip rotation. She’s got a nasty compact frame for that, not tall but built like a loaded spring.
“You lead with the jab to bait the cross,” she says, not breathless at all, which is mildly offensive.
“That’s a trade secret.”
“Cruz told me you do that.”
“Of course he did.”
We circle. Eli is quiet along the edge of the mat, watching.
I push forward, throwing a three-piece combination, and she covers well but backs up, and I chase because I’m a striker and that’s what I do, and she uses my aggression, pivoting neatly to put me off-axis and tagging me clean on the temple with a right hook.
Not hard. Barely contact. But placed because she knew she had the window.
“Good,” Eli says, voice rougher than I’ve ever heard it.
I shake it out, grinning despite myself. She’s grinning too, lower lip caught briefly between her teeth, and my whole body takes note.
“Alright.” I reset. “You’re better than I expected.”
“You’re better than I expected too,” she says. “You don’t overcommit. Most strikers are sloppy up close. Though that’s expected at your size.”
“My size.” I look down at myself, then back at her. She’s not much shorter than me, maybe three inches, and she holds her ground like she’s made of concrete. “You’re calling me small.”
“I’m calling you compact for a striker.” Her eyes are laughing.
“Right.”
We go again. And somewhere in the fourth or fifth exchange, when she ducks a hook and comes up inside my guard, close enough that I can hear the breath she pulls, close enough that I could count the beads of sweat on her collarbone.
I forget what I’m supposed to be doing with my left hand for about half a second.
She doesn’t capitalize on it. But she notices it. She knows.
The realization is faintly mortifying and also sort of thrilling in a way I can’t justify to myself, so I shove it into the same drawer as Cruz’s fantasy and dark bedroom spank bank and get my hand back where it belongs.
We run three rounds. Real rounds. Whatever light contact was supposed to mean went out the window somewhere in round two when she caught a body kick I didn’t disguise well enough.
She drove back into me leaving me making me sprawl on instinct.
We ended up grappling in a way that wasn’t really sparring anymore as much as it became two people figuring each other out through sheer force and will.
She’s strong. Surprising on the ground, which means she wasn’t lying about being adaptable. When I try to control the clinch she doesn’t panic or scramble, she thinks, working my grip, finding the angles. I get dominant position twice but it costs me effort I didn’t plan for.
“Where did you train before?” I ask during the water break between rounds.
She rests her forearms on her knees, wrist wraps unraveling at the end. “Florida. Independent gym, good coaches, terrible management.” She says it like she’s reciting a fact, neutral, but something behind it is more bait and switch than neutral. She doesn’t want me looking any closer, so I don’t.
“Their loss.”
She glances up, and this time the look is different. Less sparring partner, more caught off-guard. Grateful, almost, for the simplicity of it. “Yeah.”
Eli crouches beside us, elbows on his knees, and the three of us end up in this low triangle of proximity.
He smells like fresh sweat and whatever product he uses in his hair, and he looks at Dakota’s wrap coming loose with this expression I know—I’ve seen it a hundred times on a man’s face. He wants her.
His eyes linger too long on her face when she looks back at him, and his jaw does this slight thing, a tightening and release, and I watch the whole thing happen in under two seconds.
He’s absolutely gone for her.
Dakota holds his gaze for a beat, just long enough to be deliberate, then drops back to her water bottle with a composure that I find genuinely impressive.
Eli clears his throat.
“Round three.” He stands up, back to being Coach, no deviation on his face now. “Brady, I want you to let her set the pace. Don’t chase.”
“Sure.”
Round three, she sets the pace.
It’s different when she leads. She’s patient in a way that makes me impatient, which is probably the point.
She draws me in with feints, reads my weight shifts, makes me feel like I’m making decisions when really she’s been four moves ahead since we started.
I land more than I expect to because she’s not invincible, her defense has gaps on the right side she compensates for with footwork rather than blocking, but she lands more than I’d like to admit.
When Coach calls it, she rolls her shoulders and shakes her hands loose, not even fully winded.
“You’re going to be trouble,” I tell her.
She grins, full and unreserved, and it does the same thing to my chest it did the first time. Maybe worse. “Good trouble or bad trouble?”
I pick up my water bottle and pretend to think about it seriously. “Ask me again in a month.”
She laughs again, and Eli makes some notes on his clipboard, and the gym is starting to fill—the distant bang of the main door, voices, someone’s playlist bleeding through the locker room wall.
She fits here. That’s the thought I keep circling back to, rolling it around, looking at its underside. She fits here, and it isn’t just about the fighting. She fits in the particular chemistry of this place.
She fits in the specific frequency of us.
Which is a thought I am absolutely not equipped to handle this early on a Wednesday morning with sore ribs and Cruz’s voice still rattling in my skull.
I collect my bag, drain the last of my water, say something normal to Dakota about seeing her at the afternoon session. She nods, restarting her cool-down like she’s been doing this routine here for years instead of hours.
Eli watches her.
I watch him watching her.
Then I walk out into the gray morning and stand in the parking lot for a solid thirty seconds, doing nothing except breathing cold air and acknowledging, quietly, to absolutely nobody, that I am in an enormous amount of trouble.
The worst part isn’t even the attraction. Attraction is simple; I know what to do with attraction.
The worst part is that when I picture her in Cruz’s stupid hypothetical—her, and Eli, and the heat of that scene—I put myself in. Her soft, plump lips wrapped around my hard cock.
And it doesn’t feel wrong. It just feels like the beginning of something I have no bearing to navigate by.
I get in my car and drive home, and I can’t stop thinking about being part of an orgy with Dakota in the middle, Cruz fucking Eli while Eli fucks her.