Page 70 of Punchline
“I’m just saying,” he said as he ran his fingertips across my upper back, “you sure as hell fill out a suit.”
“It looks ridiculous.”
“It doesn’t. Seriously,” he added when he saw my raised eyebrow, “it looks good! I mean, yeah, it might as well be painted on, but it’s not like you don’t have an amazing body. You can pull it off.”
“I look like a red-pill podcaster,” I said dryly, and Ethan began to laugh. At leasthedressed up nice, in a blue suit a few shades darker than his eyes and a crisp white shirt. He wasn’t in the sling anymore either, just a cast slim enough to fit under the suit. He looked so good I was tempted to say fuck it to the tickets and stay home after all, but then I remembered the three unopened boxes of shit in my living room and decided otherwise.
This suit was all I had. It would have to do. If I ended the night feeling fucked up about my body image, I’d set up an emergency session with my therapist.Wouldn’t be the first time.
“All right,” I said with a sigh. “Let’s go.”
The EFC had recently opened its own event complexdowntown, and the process of getting in was seamless, apart from the guy checking phones doing a double take when he saw my tickets. “Old school,” he commented as he scanned them in.
“You’re telling me,” I muttered. Once we were in the complex, we spent a while walking around, taking in the sights and checking out the six-sided ring in the middle of the floor. It was admittedly thrilling to be there, and if a little part of me saw the ring and yearned for a place in it, well… that was nobody else’s business, although given the way Ethan squeezed my hand when he caught me staring, he got it.
We got nachos, which were fuckingly expensive even compared to the Aces’ bougie nachos, then grabbed a few beers and headed for our seats as the lights got low. It wasn’t that I was avoiding Gene Dimon, but I wanted to be able to enjoy the fights without being on edge thanks to stirring up a lot of shit right before everything began. Luckily, he was even later than we were, and by the time he showed up the first fight was underway and I could barely be bothered to look away from the ring, much less talk to anyone.
A pair of female fighters went first, and theirs was a long and technical bout, lasting all three rounds and going to decision. The lady out of Texas won on points, which tracked given her boxing expertise, but the other woman had a crazy good ground game and would be a killer once she figured out how to close the distance better.
The second fight ended early due to an arm injury in the first round, which got a lot of grumbling from the crowd. “Ouch,” Ethan murmured as we saw the hurt fighter wince and cradle his left shoulder. “Looks like he threw it out of the socket.”
“Could be.” That was a rough one to come back from,especially for a fighter in the lower echelons who wasn’t after a title yet.Damn.
The third fight was another long one, the two fighters taking similarly conservative routes and having to be forced into proximity by the ref. They toyed with each other for two whole rounds, and it wasn’t until the third round that one of them finally got the other in a leg lock, of all things, that the other fighter couldn’t roll out of and had to tap to, or risk tearing apart his entire knee.
The crowd was getting restive again, but the fourth fight fed their hunger by giving us a knockout by heel kick in the first. Fucking. Round. “Never say Tae Kwon Do can’t win anything, baby!” the winner said in his post-fight interview.
The fifth fight was the first title fight, with two guys a little over Carson’s size going after each other with brutal speed and fantastic technique. I didn’t know either of them, but by the end of the first round they were both bleeding from cuts to the face. In the second round, the fight was called due to a TKO when one of them got a cut opened up on the bridge of his nose that just wouldn’t stop bleeding.
TKOs were often frustrating ways to win, but given the amount of cheers and applause from the crowd full of bloodlust, this time it was an entertaining one. I was still explaining the finer points of the match to Ethan as the lights went up, indicating the intermission.
“I don’t get why he couldn’t roll away,” Ethan confessed.
“That style of kimura actually doesn’t allow for it,” I said, standing up so I could stretch my legs. “You saw how he rolled through and pushed down with his grip? It doesn’t look like it, but that’s actually an immobilizing position. The only reason Marquez got out of it was because Preston lost the grip when he went for theback, and?—”
“Mr. Radovitz!”
Shit.I’d gotten so involved in the fights that I’d forgotten who’d paid to get us here. I put on my professional face as I turned to the short, wide man wearing a golden suit and top hat. He wore an enormous chain around his neck with a diamond-encrusted EFC at the bottom of it. He was simultaneously compelling and repulsive, but I was feeling more repulsed right now. “Mr. Dimon,” I said as evenly as I could. “Thank you for the tickets.”
He smirked at me. “I thought I’d get through to you with those.” People were moving all around us, jostling as they headed for the bathroom and to get more food and drinks, but I ignored them all and focused on getting through this next part unscathed.
Dimon’s smirk widened. “A real fighter never gives up a chance to get a good look at his competition. Who would you rather go up against—Barovsky or Tachiyama?”
“Either would be an honor,” I said.
“A gentlemen’s answer, but I don’t want the nice-guy façade you’ve got going on.” Dimon’s eyes were sharp. “I want the guy who choked out his opponent with a smile on his face at that tournament last month. I want the guy who spiked his opponent into the mat when it looked like he was going to lose.”
I went stiff with anger, and Ethan reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. It calmed me down enough to get the next part out. “Sorry to disappoint, but I’m not going to be fighting for the EFC.”
Dimon scowled. “What, you signed with someone else?”
Um, no? “Nope, I just want to stick with Jiu Jitsu.”
He shook his head. “No way. You’re too good for that.”
“Agree to disagree.”
“I want to know who bought you out from under me.”
