Page 29 of Make Me, Break Me

Something cracked, and the man groaned.

I sent him a smile that never reached my eyes. “Enjoy the healing process, my friend.” I leaned down and punched him in the face.

Finally, the chicken-shit ref and his whistle got into the cage and yanked me off the man who blew bubbles in the blood pouring around his mouth. I barely managed to stop myself fromnailing the ref as well, and I wasn't done yet. One of the busty bunnies who loitered at the cage door in hope of a sweaty lay with the victor handed me a towel.

I swiped the rag across my face and threw it back at her without a second glance, unwilling to see her plastic pout and thrust barely-concealed fake tits I didn’t want into my face.

“Next.”

And the next, and the next.

By the time I was done the cage had made more money than was reasonable for any regular Saturday night, even for an illegal cage fight, while I earned a few extra stripes etched into my arm. There were more scars under my name now than anyone else's, including the guys who'd been fighting on the regular for years. Dudes with more numbers in their age than I had seen summers, but I didn't give a shit.

“Next.”

"You're done for the night." Jericho gave me a hard look and shoved an obscenely heavy wad of bills that I didn’t need into my hands. He nodded toward the back area where I left my kit before we started hours ago. My limbs started to grow heavy without the constant deluge of chemicals from the ring that I’d programmed into myself day after day. "Clean up and get out. See you next week.”

"Next week." Blood ran into the corner of my mouth from a cut I hadn't felt open.

Adrenaline still pulsed faintly through me, raging in my blood. The shakes would set in soon, then the exhaustion. They might be done for the night, but I wasn't. I changed out of my running shorts and into my jeans, wiping my face with the towel.

I couldn't explain why the fuck I looked so beat up to any cop who might see me, so I popped my tee over my head to cover the bruises and bashing I’d taken in my pursuit of conquering fear and out distancing heartbreak.

Not that any of it worked. I still ached for Zin, craving her in dark and desperate ways. She used to pretend to hate me while I fucked her senseless once a week, pushing me away when I found her after class or in the library, and kissed her.

It still wasn’t enough. Nowhere near fucking enough.

What had been enough was the knowledge that when I begged her for a date those cold eyes that only lit once a week when I was in her bed flamed for me right then. When I promised her I’d treat her right, that I wanted to screw her rules—and her—to the wall and wake with her in my arms every fucking morning, that pledge turned something on inside her. Something that she hid from herself.

When I found her again and kissed her under the oak tree at the Kingsman House, erasing another man’s taste from her lips, she kissed me back like she yearned for more. And then she cried, because though she thought I walked away, I stayed. I made sure as fuck Nelson got her home safe.

If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be breathing right now. Not after what he started.

That night—it didn’t start as a test, but it felt like one for both of us. That kiss wasn’t real. We all knew that. But seeing her break for me when I faced off against her…I never wanted to see her hurt like that ever again.

When we talked about love and commitment, back when I kissed her in front of the campus knowing she’d hate the publicity stunt, I saw her eyes light. Then I saw the fear that shadowed the burn we had for each other. The man who hurt her before…I’d rip him limb from fucking limb and shove every one of his digits into a fresh orifice I tore apart with my own hands the moment he emerged from his cell. His punishment was far from done.

My feet walked the walk toward the exit on my behalf, heading around the ring like Jericho directed me. I’d feel everyhit come at sunrise, but for now my system pumped with a numbing high that left me chasing inevitability. My shirt smelled like Zin the moment I put it on from the last time I’d been in her room, or maybe when she’d stayed with me for a brief time, sharing my space. When I’d last been insideher.

No matter what I did, no matter how many miles I ran or how many hard punches I threw, I couldn't be free of her.

Did I want to be free of Zinzi? No. I wanted to fuck her in her shower and crawl into her bed. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, worship her curves soft and breathe in her fucking delicious scent when she moaned beneath my battered body. I wanted to feel her mouth on mine and her dripping cunt wrapped around my cock while I made her scream for me in an admission that this—us—was so much more than just lust.

And I was hard again.

Painfully so. Some screwed up kink in me liked that I ached for her, that she denied me. My jeans strangled my cock, the denim already too tight with tonight’s accumulated sweat and grit that shrank my pants a size too small. Night air assailed my swelling face as I pushed open the back door to the ramshackle building.

I spat a glob of saliva mixed with blood into the gutter outside the nondescript structure situated in a block of similar dingy warehouses and filthy, unlit alleys. After years of fighting here first weekly and now almost every night, the cage had started to feel like a second home.

Rather than catch the train back to campus, I decided to run my excess rage out into the pavement, but a vision of glossy black locks and painted red lips slammed into me like a derailed freight train.

Zinzi leaned against the back of the building like she’d known exactly where I'd exit the place after my fights.

Fuck me. I knew I saw her here.

That was months ago. Motherfuckingmonths.

She’d known I was fighting all this time. That she’d known and lied to me didn’t bother me because only one thought lingered at the front of my mind, freezing me in place.

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