Page 18 of Fool Me

She turned toward the edge of the ring, intending to climb out, but when she lifted her foot, the shoe she’d been wearing didn’t travel with it. Apparently, white fabric flats are not the ideal footwear for mud pits. Seeing her lose her shoe elicited a whole new round of laughter from the crowd. Increasingly annoyed now, she reached into the hole in the mud left behind, found her shoe, and yanked it out. It was filled with the stuff, and that gave her an idea. Removing the second flat too, she used them like scoops to gather up generous blobs of thick, sticky muck.

“Down & Dirty! Down & Dirty!” the crowd yelled.

Grant had barely gotten to his feet when she let the first mudball fly. It hit him square in the chest, and he staggered backward as if it had been a shotgun round. The crowd whooped, so she took a quick bow before lifting her second shoe in the air, ready for war. This time, Grant fell to his knees, his hands in a prayer pose. Plaintive eyes blinked up at her, begging for mercy.

She turned to the crowd with a questioning look. “Should I spare him?” she asked. They booed and yelled for her to show no pity, which suited her fine. The second mud missile splatted the side of his head, whereupon he toppled over, execution style.

Her work done, she headed again toward the edge of the pit, this time barefoot and stomping mad. But as she grabbed its sides and got ready to lift a leg over, an avalanche of mud cascaded down her back. Turning, she saw that Grant had removed his shirt, filled it with the lumpy stuff, and dumped it over her from behind. Her bouncy blonde ringlets hung limp and straight under a heavy grey coating, and she was pretty sure the gap at the back of her jeans meant she’d be throwing her panties away later.

A shirtless Grant looked back at her with challenge in his eyes. Her cheeks burned, and something inside Sadie snapped. The grin she sent him this time wasn't about relief—it was pure animus.

It…was…on.

The next several minutes were a blur of flying mud, dancing lights, and the roar of the crowd. Grant kept up the physical comedy by pretending to take a leisurely bath in the mud, or by running in place toward her, Road Runner style, as Sadie held him at arm’s length, her hands flat against his chest—all while Sadie legitimately tried to wrestle him into submission.

If Grant could take down Slinger, surely Sadie could outwit Grant, right? But with his shirt off, his skin was so slippery. There was no way she would risk grabbing a handful of his shorts! For his part, he mostly let her push and pull him around the ring, but if she ever truly started getting the upper hand, he pushed her away with as much difficulty as flicking a beetle off his arm. It didn’t help that his silly antics kept making her giggle despite herself.

Just as her energy flagged, he winked at her and told her in a whisper to blow air on him. She waited until he charged toward her like an enraged rhino, then jutted out her chin, pursed her lips, and blew the tiniest puff of air in his direction. Instantly, he went stiff as a board, elbows bent and hands facing front. She circled him once leisurely—a hunter toying with her prey—then blew on him a second time from behind, whereupon he fell face forward, like a toppled tree, into the gunk.

Ruse or no, Sadie took advantage. She pounced on him, straddling his back while the excited crowd counted, “Three! Two! One!”

The air horn symphony sounded again, and she led the crowd in the required “Down & Dirty” winner’s chant. Her breath came out hard and his chest heaved under her.

Waving at her adoring fans, she said just loud enough for Grant to hear, “I might keep you down there forever, Mister Grant Mason.”

“And I might let you,” he said back, with a finality and simplicity that momentarily stilled her ragged gasps. She whipped her head round to look at him, and their eyes locked. Neither of them smiled, and neither of them looked away or even blinked. The noise and swirling lights seemed to dim, and she couldn’t tell whether her rapid heartbeat stemmed from exhaustion or something else. She commanded herself to look away, but the tractor beam of his gaze held her in place. What was this sorcery?

Fortunately for her, the man who’d marched Grant away at the beginning of the evening climbed into the ring with them, breaking the spell. He offered a hand to Sadie to help her up, lifted Grant to his feet, and stood between them, raising an arm of each high in the air to signify the end of the match. The crowd cheered and demanded more in equal measure as Sadie and Grant straddled the low wall and were led toward the showers and lockers.

Sadie’s skin pinked again under a welcome, hot shower. She rinsed her clothes out too and was grateful that the bar had an extra set for her to wear home.

A wary euphoria overcame her as rivulets of mud circled down the drain. Had that just happened? Had she mud wrestled Grant Mason at a grungy bar?

When she closed her eyes, why could she still see him wearing nothing at all but shorts and mud? Why did her fingers still have the feel of his damp skin under her touch? Why did the chant, “Kiss her! Kiss her!” linger in her ears? Probably it was the crowd—she never could resist an audience—or the exhaustion and adrenaline of the wrestling itself. Whatever the reason, it felt like some part of her had been left behind in that mud pit, or some new part had been added.

Silence once again reigned on the drive home, but Sadie’s recalcitrance wasn’t to blame. As the velvety scent of night-blooming flowers swirled round them through rolled down windows, the quiet between them felt like an unspoken agreement. The evening they’d just shared sat like a bright, shiny coin that talking could only tarnish.

12

“To Mom and Dad,” the sisters said, but Sadie’s contribution came out in a whisper. Never had a Sunday sister brunch at Rick’s been the last place on earth she wanted to be. Their traditional toast complete, Monique stared daggers at her while Ginny amused herself—even more enthusiastically than the previous Sunday—with her social media feed.

“Oh, oh! Look atthispicture,” Ginny said, spinning her phone toward them. A study in grey, Grant cradled a relatively clean Sadie high in his arms. “The caption says, ‘A Couple of Mud Bugs.’ But that’s only the start. Search on#themudcoupleand there’s dozens more pics!”

“I know,I know,” Sadie said. She poked at her fried egg with her fork. The partially hardened yoke made a weak attempt at oozing over the white. “Can we stop looking at them now?”

But Ginny, being Ginny, would never let up. “The series of three as he pulls you over the barrier and into the gunk with him is getting meme’deverywhere. I mean…,” she giggled, “your expressions!”

Sadie knew the pics all too well—the bulbous eyes in the first one as his muddy arms wrapped round her, her head tilted back and mouth like a dying trout as he yanked her from the floor in pic two, and the tightly closed lips and frightened, squinting eyes in the third as she prepared to hit the pit face first. He hadn’t let that happen, of course, but the picture series didn’t show that.

“Can we just…not?” Sadie pleaded. She snatched Ginny’s phone and turned it off. “None of that was how it was supposed to go.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Monique growled. She sounded as perturbed as Sadie had ever heard her, and that was saying something. “We had this all arranged. What happened to him getting shoved him in the mud in his fancy suit? Wasn’t he wearing a fancy suit? He was supposed to think you were going out to a nice dinner.”

“He did think that, and his suit was stupid, shiny silk. He’d even polished his leather shoes himself, because of course he’s into that sort of thing! But the second he saw that mud pit, he couldn't wait to wrestle!” She puffed her cheeks and blew out a long breath that momentarily lofted a stray curl from her forehead. “How was I supposed to know he’d been a champion mud wrestler as a kid?”

“Know thine enemy,” Monique muttered.

Two teenage girls approached their table. “Are you the Shirley Temple Mudslide Girl?” the taller of the two said, her round eyes blinking with hope and adoration.

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