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BRYNNE
The place didn’t just smell like sweat, it actually reveled in it. From the moment you opened the door to your first steps inside, it punched you in the face with the sweet, salty scent of exercise and perspiration and the thick, heady scent of really hard work.
I knew immediately I was in the right place.
The sights and sounds were every bit as intimidating as the pungent, sweat-soaked atmosphere, too. To the left and right were workout areas, alive with movement. The metallic clanking of weights reached my ears in stereo with the thud of heavy dumbbells being dropped to the padded floor. Continuing onward, I passed men and women doing all the strange things you don’t normally see at the cookie-cutter gyms. Things like throwing around medicine balls, or climbing pegboards. Curling kettlebells, or whipping around those big, ridiculously-thick conditioning ropes you could use to tie a tugboat off to a dock.
The back of the gym held all sorts of secrets I couldn’t fully see, including two small boxing rings that appeared happily well-used. But it was the big, circular-shaped fighting arena that caught my attention. It rose up from the floor like a mini-volcano, acting as an impressive centerpiece of the whole place.
For two or three minutes I just stood there, hands on my hips, taking it all in. I watched as two men in blue and green shorts began exchanging a flurry of kicks and punches, while trainers and other fighters looked on.
“Can I help you?”
The woman who’d approached me from the side was exotically beautiful, and looked chiseled straight from a block of ebony. While her body was hard and sleek and wholly impressive, her smile was pleasant and non-confrontational.
“No, no,” I said without thinking. “I— I was just—”
“If you wanna stand back and watch that’s fine,” she grinned. “I totally get it. It’s exactly what I did the first time I came here.”
I smiled weakly, not knowing what else to say. Her pretty eyes were sizing me up.
“Just stay on this side of the red line,” she instructed, pointing at the floor. “Cool?”
Dutifully I nodded as the fighting in the ring continued. The punches were harder now. The kicks more furious.
“I’m Maya. If you need any information, I’ll be over at that desk right there.”
Eventually she faded away, leaving me as a silent spectator. The men fought for another two rounds, thrashing each other soundly. When the bell rang for a third time they touched forearms in a show of sportsmanship, then simultaneously began unwrapping their gloves with their teeth.
I didn’t know where to begin. There were dozens of guys milling about this place, maybe even close to a hundred. Most of them looked like fighters. Any one of those could easily be—
Holy shit!
I stopped dead in the process of turning away. One of the men who’d just fought had unwrapped his forearm to expose an entire sleeve of tattoos. One of which wasveryfamiliar…
My heart pounded as I watched him come down from the arena. He was at least six-foot four, dark-haired, and breathtakingly beautiful. He had the same well-manicured beard as my rescuer from last night, and the same square-set jaw. He carried himself the same way too, with an almost identical air of menace and danger.
But it wasn’t him.
No, this man was olive-skinned, and about three inches taller. His eyes also held an unsettling darkness to them. It set me back a step.
“Ummm…”
He’d crossed the red line and was walking past me now. His head was down, his fists clenched. He was moving purposefully in some direction.
“Excuse me?”
The tattooed monster stopped, turned, and regarded me coldly. Or at least it felt that way. His beautifully-tanned skin shimmered with sweat from the overhead lights.
“Could I talk to you for a minute?”
He sized me up, scanning me top to bottom. It wasn’t the normal way a man might scan a woman, either. It was more of an assessment.
“About what?”
“About your tattoo.”
He grunted. Laughed. Scoffed. Then he turned away.
