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Little did she know nothing she could have said would’ve stopped us. Stoppedme,anyway.
The fight—and therefore the date—never happened. My sister wised up and realized that going up against a hotshot fighter like Giovanni was a quick way to get herself seriously injured, and she was doing it for all the wrong reasons. Fox didn’t need her protection. The dude could’ve killed Giovanni all on his own if he so chose, and he didn’t.
Eventually, everything calmed down again. The Capulets and the Montagues settled their asses down and all went back to normal. At least as normal as it was for me to be hanging around at an underground MMA fight in a not-so-great section of Brooklyn.
I could say that the illegality of the fight taking place before me dimmed my interest in Giovanni, but that would be a lie. Because a doll on a shelf lives to get to play with the real dolls. And to do things no one would ever approve of, if only just to say that she got the chance.
Giovanni was just a few years older than me chronologically, but in life experience, he had decades on me. The tattoos that covered him from head-to-toe spoke of some of those experiences, and I ached to peel back his clothes to discover the rest. To listen to his rich, melodic voice tell me all the reasons I should stay away from him while his eyes demanded I stay.
The problem was, he didn’t seem to respond to usual flirtation. I wasn’t a pro at it or anything, having only been practicing my craft seriously for a couple of years, but I had some native skill. I had the aforementioned breasts, which usually acted as a pretty good icebreaker. Plus, I had long hair and blue eyes and an ass that made me lament low-rise jeans on a daily basis, all things that in theory should’ve added weight to my case.
Yet he barely seemed to notice.
Well, beyond the eyefucking. That never stopped. So naturally, I attempted to be in Giovanni’s sphere as much as possible to make it happen, oh, twenty-four/seven.
Hanging out at The Cage was both a thrill and a buzzkill. It offered both glimpses of a sweaty Giovanni post-workout and the chance of being detected by my beady-eyed, sex-destroying sibling. Mia was no joke. I kept waiting for the day she hid my birth control pills to try to force me to be good.
She didn’t mind me dating or having fun with boys. She just didn’t want me anywhere near Giovanni for some reason. Her explanations didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Yeah, he was a fighter. She and Fox had been too. So he was intense. No one could callhersweetness and light. But there was something she saw in him that immediately made her itch to enroll me in the nearest convent.
Which only made me want him more—and it also made me sneak out from under her watchful eye to attend his fights.
Like a bloodhound, I’d dug around until I discovered their location. That he never took notice of me in the audience wasn’t the point. I knew I wasn’t the kind of girl he usually ran with. Or even looked at twice.
I startled as Giovanni jumped down from the ring to speak to one of the girls in his harem before climbing back up into the octagon. He lifted his head and I swore he glanced my way. His gaze pierced me straight down to my toes but he didn’t so much as smile. He just stared at me—intome—then swaggered back over to his corner to talk to his trainer. The second round was starting soon, and he obviously didn’t have time to bother with little girls with crushes.
Screw that.
Hell, lately I barely had time to make my case for more with him. I’d been visiting culinary schools in the tristate area, trying to figure out which one suited me best, while working almost full time at Salad Hut. Preparing fancy salads all day for unappreciative teenagers and Jenny Craig escapees wasn’t exactly getting me ready for my future career as a chef, but it was a job and I needed one with school coming up.Expensiveschool. Grants and loans would only take me so far, and my sister wasn’t able to contribute much. That was part of why she’d come up with that crazy plan to fight a guy—to make more cash. She felt like she needed to look out for me, and that included pretending she was my mom because ours was dead.
As much as I loved her for it, I yearned to break free and do something wild. Something my sweet, overbearing sister would never, ever agree with.
Yeah, so I never said I was smart.
I also never said I knew what I was doing. How could I? At eighteen, no one really does, at least not someone like me who had lived in the shadow of a girl who’d been on a milk carton. Not really. But Mia had lived through something no one should, and as the one who’d been left behind for those three months she was missing, I’d been sheltered to the point of insanity.
Tonight, however, I was shedding the chains of overprotection. Mia and Tray had the night off and were catching a movie, which meant it was safe for me to be out later than usual.
So far, I was off to a rip-roaring start.
I didn’t get it. He wanted me. I would’ve staked my measly savings account on it. But he wouldn’t take that step. So I would have to. I just didn’t know how.
The second round started and Giovanni stalked across the mat to the now more visibly unsure X. Giovanni punched and kicked and spun until his opponent was a quivering mass, barely able to defend himself.
I couldn’t help staring at Giovanni. The man’s muscles were a masterpiece, and I saw a good amount of them parading through my apartment on a daily basis. Mia’s boyfriend was no slouch in that area either, and fighters apparently liked to be close to naked a lot.
I liked them to be close to naked a lot too.
Round two ended much like the first, and Giovanni was declared the victor. X shuffled out of the ring, his spirit broken but his body still mostly intact. They’d drawn some blood tonight, but I’d definitely seen way worse.
Eventually, Giovanni finished strutting around his female admirers and headed to the showers. I debated waiting to talk to him, then decided to take another tack. Talking had gotten me nowhere so far. He’d seen me, I was almost sure of it, and he still hadn’t come over to speak to me. Even a “hello” would’ve been nice.
Just the same, I didn’t want to flirt with the guy. Or not only flirt. I wanted to be the woman he saw me as. I knew he did. Why he kept denying us both, I didn’t know.
But I would.
By the time he came out of the back exit of the gym, I was biting my lip and trying to convince myself not to go any further. I could still go home and binge watchGirls. I hadn’t turned into a full-fledged stalker yet.
Then he climbed behind the wheel of a black Escalade with tinted windows, and I knew I wouldn’t be curling up on my sister’s dented sofa anytime soon.
