Ruined: Loving An Alpha Male(2)

I should have known Alex wasn’t any of those people. A Philadelphia born and bred native, he fell right back into his life. We had seen a lot in our time as a SEAL. Hell, we did more shit than the norm. But nothing we did ever affected Alex. He would always chalk up what we did or saw to “a typical day in the hood.” Alex was dark skinned and as tall as I was at 6’3”. He was slightly bigger than me in bulk. We stayed competitive, using each other to make sure we stayed in shape and ready; mentally and physically. He became my close brother in arms. When he left, I felt like half of me was gone.

Alex grew up in North Philadelphia and, in order to keep him off the streets, his uncle taught him how to box. He kept Alex working and training in his gym that was located in their neighborhood. Alex loved boxing and was actually pretty good. But he didn’t want it to be a career. Instead, he wanted to fight for his country. He told me that once he got out, he would open a gym to train in boxing and mixed martial arts. I told him I would definitely look him up when I was finally released. That’s what I did, and I’ve been here for a little over a month.

Alex and an older friend of his, Lou Johnson, ran the gym out of a warehouse close to Center City and Penn’s Landing. When I got there and told Alex I wanted to fight, both he and Lou looked at me strangely, but for different reasons. Alex looked at me wondering if I lost my mind, but Lou looked at me as if I should be working on Wall Street instead of fighting. I didn’t blame him; I didn’t have the look of a fighter, in his eyes anyway. I felt, though, that that was my charm. Alex didn’t believe I could fight either, until one day I had to prove it.

When I arrived at Navy boot camp, I stayed to myself. I did what was required of me, but I never said too much to anyone. During the second week, I was tested. I was chosen, of course, because of the way I looked and the fact I barely said two words to anyone. I really wasn’t in the mood to talk. The day I left my family wasn’t a very pretty scene, and I was still feeling the effects of my decision and the fact that my body was still recuperating from the SEAL Challenge.

If you wanted to be a candidate for the Navy SEALs, you had to take the SEAL Challenge in the first week of boot camp to even be considered. I was ready for it, but it still kicked my ass.

Anyway, there was, of course, the biggest asshole I have ever seen, both figuratively and literally, living in my barracks. I mean, this guy had muscles coming out of his fucking eyes. It was unreal. He was a couple of inches taller than me, and I wasn’t average in height. But as I said, he definitely had more muscle than I did. I walked into my barracks getting ready to call it a night when I saw the behemoth and his two followers by my bunk, or what we call rack, looking in my shit.

“What are you doing?” I asked calmly.

“Yo’, you see this shit?” the behemoth said to his friends, pointing at a picture of me and my twin brother.

Yup, I have a twin.

The behemoth smirked. “I bet he’s the bitch in the relationship.”

I didn’t react, except that I just walked up to him and took the picture out of his hand. It was a picture of me and my brother with our high school basketball uniforms on, standing in front of our state championship trophy. We were smiling, holding up the trophy we just won.

“That’s my brother, you idiot. Get away from my rack, Lawrence,” I added in my southern accent to give emphasis to the name he hates to be called.

He told us he wanted to be called LR. But since I can be a complete asshole at times, I figured he should be called what his parents named him.

I felt everyone’s eyes in the room on me, including Alex’s. Alex and I hadn’t really said too much to each other yet, but we had a certain understanding. Sleeping next to each other on the bottom rack, we sometimes found each other still up in the middle of the night. We found we had a sick love for chess and started playing each other online using our phones. We never communicated while we were side by side, but we talked shit to each other via the web.

Lawrence walked up to me, as I knew he would, and asked, “What the fuck you say to me, pansy?”

I didn’t back down. I never back down from anything. I found that to be a downfall of mine—a character flaw, if you will—but there was one thing I wouldn’t do today, and that was to let the fucker intimidate me. He’d been throwing his weight around the barracks getting some people to do shit for him, but this ends today.

“There’s no way I stuttered, but maybe the effects of you being dumb as rocks is affecting your hearing.”

I kept eye contact, waiting for him to make the first move. When he did, I was ready. I dodged left as he threw a right at my jaw and grazed my ear. His arms were long as shit, so I had to come into his body to get a few of my hits in and then duck and dodge a barrage of fists being thrown my way. I didn’t want to hurt him, so I played along and delivered a few punches to his chest and stomach while he got a few in on me.