31. Dakota
DAKOTA
The morning session ends the way they all do now—Eli calling time, fighters peeling off toward the water fountains, the smell of sweat hanging thick under the warehouse rafters.
I towel off the heavy bags and take inventory of my hands.
The wraps are shot. Frayed at the wrists, gray where they used to be white, and I’ve been meaning to replace them for a week.
The equipment closet sits in the back corner, past the grappling mats, a door most people forget exists. I slip inside and pull the chain on the bare bulb overhead. Shelves crowd both walls—boxes of tape, spare sixteen-ounce gloves, jugs of mat cleaner, and somewhere up top, the hand wraps.
I’m stretching for the box on the highest shelf when the door opens behind me.
It clicks shut. Soft. Deliberate.
I don’t need to turn around. I know the way he takes up space, the heat that comes off him like he runs three degrees hotter than everyone else.
Cruz leans against the door, arms crossed, wearing that cocky grin.
“We shouldn’t,” I say.
“I know.” He pushes off the door.
“Cruz. There are forty people out there.”
“Thirty-eight. Jonah left early and Micah’s at physio.” His hands find my hips. “I counted.”
“That’s not the point,” I protest.
“Sweetheart.” He walks me back a step, and the shelf edge presses into my spine. “I have kept my hands off you for eight hours a day, five days a week, for two weeks. I helped you stretch yesterday and had to think about tax brackets the whole time. I’m dying out there.”
“You’re dramatic out there,” I state.
“Both things are true.” He kisses me before I can build another argument, and every argument I had dissolves.
Two weeks of nothing but glances across the gym floor other than at night, of his fingers grazing mine when he hands me a water bottle, of watching him coach deadlifts with his forearms flexing and pretending I’m looking at the barbell.
It all catches up to me at once. I grab the front of his shirt and pull him in.
He groans into my mouth.
I break away long enough to hiss at him. “Quiet.”
“You’re the one who moans,” he whispers.
“I do not—”
His hands slide under my sports bra and I make a sound that proves him right. His palms cover my breasts completely, rough and warm, and my head tips back against the shelf. A box of athletic tape shifts somewhere above us.
This is insane. The door doesn’t lock. Anyone could need tape, wraps, or cleaner. Marco restocks the coaching bags on Wednesdays. Victor does inventory whenever the mood strikes him.
Cruz drops to his knees.
“Cruz—”
“Shh.” He hooks his fingers in my leggings and drags them down with my underwear in one pull, all the way to my ankles. “You said quiet.”
“I hate you,” I protest.
“You really don’t.”
Then his mouth is on me, and my opinions die on my tongue.
My hand flies up and I bite down on my own knuckles.
He doesn’t ease into anything, his tongue finding my clit like he’s been thinking about it all day.
Probably has. His stubble scrapes my inner thighs, rough where his tongue is soft, and the contrast short-circuits me.
My free hand grabs the shelf above my head.
Steel, cold, bolted to the wall. I hold on like the floor might tilt.
Twenty feet away, someone’s working a heavy bag. I can hear it. Thud, thud, thud, the exhale on every strike. There’s a whole gym out there, coaches and fighters and Victor’s office with its glass wall, and I’m in a closet with Cruz Bennett’s face buried between my legs.
The wrongness of it is like pouring gasoline on a glowing ember.
He hums against me—satisfied, smug, the bastard—and the vibration nearly takes my knees out.
His hands clamp on my thighs, holding me up, holding me open.
I bite my knuckles harder. The tension coils low and tight, winding faster than it should, faster than it ever does, because every second in here is borrowed and my body knows it.
Voices drift past outside. Not close enough. My heart slams anyway, and the fear folds itself into the pleasure until I can’t tell them apart.
“Cruz.” Barely a breath. A warning. A plea. Both.
He doubles down.
I come with my palm jammed against my mouth, teeth sinking into the meat of it, my whole body pulling taut against the shelf. He works me through it, doesn’t let up, keeps going until the pleasure tips into too much and I’m pushing at his head with a shaking hand.
He stands. Grinning. His face is wet with me and he doesn’t wipe it off, just looks at me like he won a title fight.
“You’re a menace,” I whisper.
“You taste incredible,” he replies.
“We need to—”
He turns me. One big hand between my shoulder blades, bending me forward, and I catch myself against the concrete wall.
“Cruz.” My voice cracks on his name.
“Tell me no, sweetheart.” His lips brush my ear. “Say it and I stop.”
I push back against him instead.
He releases his thick cock and fills me in one slow thrust, and my lip catches between my teeth hard enough to sting. He’s not gentle about it, but he’s careful about the noise. His hand comes around and covers my mouth before I even need it.
He starts to move. Controlled. Measured. No slap of skin, no rhythm that could carry through drywall. Just deep, deliberate strokes that make my eyes water, his chest a furnace against my back, his breath ragged and hot at my neck.
“You feel that?” he whispers against my ear. “My cock deep inside you while everyone is out there, training.”
His other hand slides down my stomach, finding my clit. I moan into his palm. He presses his hand tighter over my mouth. I clench around him. He swears under his breath, a whispered string of it, his rhythm faltering for one beat before he steadies.
I’m climbing again. I shouldn’t be able to, not this fast, but the door doesn’t lock, and the gym is full, and every nerve in my body is running hot on the danger of it.
Voices again, out on the floor. Marco laughs at his own joke.
Someone drops a barbell. Ordinary sounds, ordinary morning, and Cruz buried inside me twenty feet from the gym floor.
His fingers work my clit faster, matching those deep, deliberate strokes, and the coil snaps. I come with his palm sealed over my mouth, the scream with nowhere to go but back down my own throat, my whole body shaking silent while the gym stays ordinary on the other side of the wall.
I clamp down around him and it takes him with me. His breathing breaks apart against my neck. His hips stutter, once, twice, and then he goes rigid, pulsing inside me. He bites down on the fabric of my shirt at my shoulder to kill his own groan.
We freeze like that. Him still inside me, both of us locked in place, listening.
Heavy bag. Voices.
The orgasm haze burns off fast, and what’s left underneath is stone-cold clarity. His eyes meet mine over my shoulder and I watch the same realization land on him.
We just did that. Here.
He pulls out and I feel the immediate consequence of it, warmth, starting its slow slide down my inner thigh. No towel. No tissue. Nothing in this closet but tape and gloves and mat cleaner, and I am not using mat cleaner.
“Cruz,” I whisper.
“I know. I know.” He tucks himself away.
I straighten my sports bra, blot my face with the inside of my shirt collar, and rake my ponytail tight. My cheeks are on fire. There’s no fixing that. He finger-combs his hair, rolls his shoulders, and shakes himself like a dog coming out of a lake.
“How do I look?” he breathes.
“Like you just did exactly what you just did,” I deadpan.
“Perfect. You too.”
“Cruz—”
Footsteps.
Heavy ones. Male. Coming down the back hallway.
We go statue-still. His eyes lock on mine, wide, and my pulse hammers so loud I’m convinced it’s audible through the door. The footsteps get closer. Closer.
They pass. Keep going. Fade toward the locker rooms.
Cruz exhales through pursed lips, long and slow. I sag against the shelf.
“Okay.” He eases the door open an inch and puts his eye to the gap. “Clear.”
“You first. Left,” I state.
“I know the drill, sweetheart.” He pauses with his hand on the door. “For the record—”
“Go.”
He slips out and turns left toward the main floor, unhurried, hands loose, every inch the strength coach heading back to work. The door clicks shut behind him.
I count. Thirty seconds. My legs still don’t fully believe in themselves, and I can feel the wet warmth spreading along my inner thigh with every shift of weight, hidden under black leggings but there, undeniable evidence I’m going to carry across that gym floor in front of everyone, smelling like his cum.
Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty.
I grab a fresh box of hand wraps off the shelf, which was the entire reason I came in here, and step out, turning right toward the bathrooms like that was always the plan.
In the mirror, I look flushed and bright-eyed, which could be cardio.
I clean up after Cruz and then splash cold water on my face, giving it another few minutes.
When I walk back onto the floor, the gym hasn’t changed.
Fighters drilling, bags swinging, Marco calling out corrections in Spanglish.
Nobody looks at me twice. Nobody knows that under these leggings, Cruz’s cum is still dripping down my thigh.
That ten minutes ago I had Cruz’s hand jammed against my mouth in a supply closet while the whole world trained on the other side of a door with no lock.
My face heats all over again. Lower than my face, everything clenches.
I find a bench in the corner and start wrapping my hands. The ritual usually settles me. The thumb loop, around the wrist, up over the knuckles, the same pattern years deep in my muscle memory. Today my fingers shake on the second pass and I have to start over.
This was reckless. This was the kind of reckless that ends careers, gets licenses pulled, hands the athletic commission everything they’ve been waiting for. Eli would have an aneurysm. Eli can never know. Eli is absolutely going to know, because Cruz has never kept a secret to save his life.
I finish the left hand and glance up.
Across the gym, Cruz is spotting Reese on a squat. He senses me looking and his eyes find mine over the top of the rack.
He grins, slow and shameless, then turns back to his lifter like nothing in the world is wrong.
I focus on my right hand and wrap it tight, biting the inside of my cheek against a smile I can’t afford to wear in public.
Worth it. God help us both, completely worth it.
And we’re going to do it again.