Play Rough (Blackwater Falls: Fighters #2)

Chapter 1 - Rampage

The bag doesn't apologize.

That's what I like about it. One hundred and fifty pounds of leather and sand hanging from a chain bolted into a ceiling I reinforced myself, and it doesn't care what I did or didn't do in the Kandahar province eleven years ago.

It doesn't look at me with that particular combination of pity and relief that people get when they find out I'm the one who came home.

It just hangs there and takes whatever I give it, and right now I'm giving it everything I've got because it's four-thirty in the morning and I've been awake since two and the walls of my apartment have started doing that thing again where they feel like they're getting closer.

Left. Left. Right. Left.

My knuckles are already split from last night's fight. I can feel the skin pulling apart with every combination, warm wetness across my right hand, and I don't stop. The pain is useful. The pain is the only thing that exists right now.

The burn in my shoulders, the pull across my chest, the sharp reality of leather against bone. Pain lives in the present tense. Pain doesn't take you back to a road outside Kandahar at fourteen hundred hours on a Tuesday.

I keep going until the rhythm takes over. Until my brain finally, mercifully, shuts up. This is the only meditation I've ever understood.

By six, I've showered, dressed, and unlocked the gym's front door.

Steele's Gym opens officially at seven, but I'm always here before that, moving through the space like I'm checking the perimeter, which I am, if I'm being honest with myself, which I try not to be before coffee.

I check the windows. I check the side door.

I check the lock on the storage room and the lock on the door that leads down to the basement.

Then I go behind the front desk, pour coffee from the machine I prepped last night, and stand where I can see both the front entrance and the back hallway simultaneously.

I have never once sat in that chair with my back to the door.

I've tried. Twice, in the early days, I made myself sit facing the wall like a normal person who runs a normal gym, and both times I lasted less than three minutes before I was on my feet, back against the wall, heart going like I'd been running sprints.

I don't try anymore. This is just how I stand now.

Back to the wall, eyes on the entrance, and if anyone has a problem with it, they can find themselves another gym.

Nobody has found themselves another gym.

I don't know why. I'm not friendly. I don't do the thing other gym owners apparently do, where they learn everyone's name and ask about their kids and make you feel like you're part of a community.

I run clean equipment, I charge fair rates, and if someone needs direction on form, I'll give it to them once and correctly, and after that, they're on their own.

The regulars seem to understand this. They come in, they train, they leave, and they nod at me on the way out, and I nod back, and that's the entire extent of our relationship, and it suits me perfectly.

Blackwater Falls suited me the moment I drove through it five months ago.

I wasn't looking for it specifically. I was just driving, which is what I do when the city gets to be too much, which is what cities eventually always do.

Too many people. Too much noise. Too many car horns that sound like something else at the wrong moment.

I'd been in three different cities since I came home, and each one lasted less than a year before I had to leave, before the combination of crowds and sirens and strangers standing too close on sidewalks started doing things to my nervous system that I couldn't power through anymore.

I've been here five months. I haven't left once.

The first two clients of the morning arrive at seven-ten, a pair of brothers who come in three times a week and spend ninety minutes competing with each other in ways that have nothing to do with me. I let them in, they sign in, they go to the weight floor. I go back to my coffee.

By ten, I've taught a group self-defense class — four women, one man, all beginners — in the open training area near the back.

This is the part of my day that I didn't anticipate would matter to me as much as it does.

When I moved here, the self-defense classes were an afterthought, a way to fill hours and justify the space.

What happened instead is that I discovered I have patience for this particular thing that I don't have for much else.

I like watching people learn how to protect themselves.

I like the moment it clicks: when someone who came in with their shoulders raised to their ears throws their first proper palm strike, feels the solidity of it, and looks at their own hand like it's just become something new.

It matters. That people know how to be safe. That they have something to reach for when something comes at them.

I don't analyze why this matters to me. I've learned not to dig into my own motivations too much.

The therapy they sent me to after I got back tried to do a lot of digging and the only thing that came out of it was six months of appointments I stopped attending and a diagnosis that told me things I already knew in terminology I didn't need.

The group class ends at eleven. People file out thanking me. I'm wiping down the mats when my phone buzzes on the equipment shelf.

I check it.

*Your 2pm appointment confirmed. Private session. Name: Marsh, C.*

I'd forgotten about this. I took the booking four days ago over the phone, a woman who'd called asking specifically about private self-defense instruction, specifically not group classes, shy voice in the way of someone who's chosen their words before dialing.

I said yes because I always say yes to private self-defense requests.

The money is good and the reason people want private sessions is usually a reason I understand without needing them to explain it.

I put my phone back on the shelf and keep wiping down the mats.

At one forty-five, I'm behind the front desk when the door opens. She almost doesn't come in.

I see it happen. The door pushes open, she steps into the frame, and then there's a half-second pause where her whole body considers retreat.

I've seen this before. First-timers, people who've worked themselves up to walking through the door and then find that the reality of the space is larger or louder or more intimidating than they'd prepared for.

Usually, they push through it, or they don't, and either way, it's not my business.

But I watch her.

She's small. Not thin, but small in height. Long, light brown hair pulled back from her face. Glasses. She's wearing a zip-up sweatshirt that she has pulled close like armor and she's holding the strap of her bag with both hands like it's an anchor.

The half-second becomes a full second.

Then she squares her shoulders.

It's a subtle thing. A slight lift, a straightening, a decision made and committed to in the span of a single breath.

And then she walks up to the front desk and looks up at me.

She has to look up considerably, which most people find unsettling, which is something I stopped apologizing for some time ago, and her brown eyes behind those glasses are doing the thing where someone is scared and absolutely refusing to show it.

"I have an appointment," she says. "Two o'clock. Marsh."

Her voice is steady. I'll give her that. Whatever she's working through to be standing here, it's not showing in her voice.

I look at her for a moment. She holds the look without flinching, which surprises me slightly.

"That's me," I say, and come around the desk.

She takes one involuntary half-step back and then catches herself.

She's doing math, I realize. The same math everyone does when they meet me, running the numbers on how large I am, how scarred my hands are, how little of me looks like anything other than what I am.

Usually, it ends with people keeping their distance. Usually, that's fine.

"The training area's in the back," I say. "Follow me."

I keep my voice level. I keep my body language neutral.

This is the particular patience I discovered I have.

The understanding that someone showing up here, making this decision, walking through that door, took something from them.

It cost something. And the least I can do is keep the cost as low as it needs to be.

I head toward the back of the gym. Behind me, I hear her follow.

She squares her shoulders again before we reach the training area.

I don't turn around to see it. I just hear it in the quality of her footsteps, the way they firm up and steady.

We reach the mat, and I turn to face her.

She stops a few steps away, chin up, glasses slightly askew from her walk, hands still gripping that bag strap.

"First question," I say. "Have you ever thrown a punch?"

She looks at me like this is the most reasonable question she's ever been asked and also the most terrifying.

"No," she says.

"Good," I say. "We'll start before that."

I gesture to the mat.

"We start with your feet," I say.

She steps onto the mat. Bag on the floor, chin up, brown eyes on me like she's taking notes.

"Wider," I say. "Shoulder width. That's where you start. That's where everything starts. You control your base, you control what happens to you."

She adjusts her feet. It's not quite right.

"May I," I say, and it's not quite a question but it's not quite a statement either.

It's the thing I say before I touch a student, the single warning I give so that contact doesn't become something unexpected and frightening. Most students nod immediately. She takes a half-beat longer, like she's running the request through some internal verification process, and then she nods.

I crouch down.

Her feet are still too close together and angled wrong, weight distributed forward in a way that means anyone who knows what they're doing could topple her with one hand.

I've corrected this a hundred times on a hundred different people.

It's mechanical. It's instruction. I put one hand on her left ankle and move it outward two inches, then do the same with the right, and stand back up and tell her to feel where her weight sits now, to notice the difference in her foundation.

She nods. She feels it. Good.

"Now your hips," I say. "You're square. You want to be angled. Turn your right foot out slightly and let your body follow."

She tries. Her hips shift, but her shoulders stay stubbornly forward, disconnected from the movement below them, and this is the most common beginner problem in the world, the body not yet understanding itself as a single integrated system. I've corrected this a hundred times, too.

"May I," I say again.

Another half-beat. Another nod.

I step in behind her to guide her hips into the correct angle.

And that's when it happens.

I register it before I can stop it, before I can route it somewhere else or shut it down or do any of the things I would absolutely be doing if I had any warning whatsoever.

My hands settle on her hips, and my cock thickens before I've finished the thought, filling and hardening with a speed that is completely beyond my ability to negotiate with.

I adjust her angle in approximately one and a half seconds and step back.

Put distance between us. Reasonable instructional distance.

I keep my face neutral because my face is something I have mastered over years of necessity, because a face that shows what's happening inside is a liability I cannot afford, and I am deeply, profoundly grateful for every single hour of that practice right now.

"That's the angle," I say. My voice comes out even. I'm unreasonably proud of this. "Feel that? Your weight distributes differently now. You're harder to move."

I thank every god I've stopped believing in that she's facing forward, because I am hard, fully, embarrassingly, throbbing hard, pressing against the inside of my training shorts in a way that is not remotely concealable if she turns around, and I cannot remember the last time my body did this, cannot remember the last time I let anything close enough to cause it.

"Shift your weight forward slightly. Onto the balls of your feet. You want to be ready to move, not planted." I tell her.

I have taught women half her size and twice her age.

I have taught women who were objectively beautiful by any conventional measure, who flirted openly, who wore things specifically designed to be noticed, and my body remained entirely professional and entirely uninterested, because I am not a man who does this, because I shut this part of myself down so thoroughly and so long ago that I had essentially stopped believing it still functioned.

I have not been with anyone in so fucking long. I do not count the years anymore because the number stopped being useful information.

And now I'm standing six feet away from a small woman in a zip-up sweatshirt who can't yet throw a punch, and I am deeply grateful that her eyes are on the mirror and not on me.

I need to keep it that way.