Untamed (A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance)(47)

I think about her lips, our kiss, the feel of her hot breath on my face, being so close to her, so intimate.

Glass thumps me in the gut, and I fall over in a heap. I growl, get to my feet quickly, angry at the unprovoked attack, but he just stares at me.

“Look down.”

I look down, and am a little embarrassed to find I have an erection.

Glass slaps my head, and I strike out instantly, stop my fist at the last moment hovering millimeters from his face. He’s winced, leaned back, recoiled.

I pull back my fist. “Reflex,” I tell him bluntly.

He points a finger at me, tells me to focus. “I know what it’s like to be your age, but focus. Stop thinking about girls. You’re a fighter now, an athlete. Girls will only unravel you. They will only prevent you from becoming all you can be.”

He walks stiffly on, and I become aware of the other boys in the camp gazing at me. I meet their eyes, and we all share a cheeky, childish snicker, and then I get myself into a handstand again, and start dipping.

Girls. Glass wasn’t too far off the mark, but he was wrong enough. I wasn’t thinking about girls in the plural. I was only thinking about one girl.

The days blur together. Glass and McNamara teach me old-school moves, and new-school ones, too. They teach me how to feint, how to feint like I’m going to feint, and then how to feint that I’m going to feint that I’m going to feint.

Fighting’s not just two brutes wailing on each other in a cage. If you’re a moron, you’ll never be good at it.

I learn how to chain moves together. You don’t reset after each punch, kick, or block. Fighting is fluid, flows like water taking bends in a creek. You read and adapt. Read and adapt. You bend like water. Obstacles don’t stop you, you just go around them, over them, under them.

Opponent jabs, I dodge, use my momentum, turn it into a kick. Opponent ducks the head kick, I spin into an elbow. Opponent slaps the elbow away, I duck into fast gut punches. And so on. All moves strung together, no pauses, no stops, no resets. You think on the fly, and you have to think.

People fancy that boxers, that MMA fighters, that kickboxers are stupid, fools, idiots. Just men who get hit in the head too much that they slur their speech.

They don’t understand that fighting is like chess – not that I’ve ever played it – but you know what they say, always be thinking so many moves ahead.

Before I know it, three months have passed, and I know that I’m over the hump, on the downside of the hill now. Now, I see Dee in fewer days than I’ve been away from her.

We’ve not been allowed any contact with the outside world. In here, there is one thing and one thing only: Training. Sure, the other boys and I shoot the shit. A lot of them are like me, just looking to do something with their lives.

It burns me that I can’t contact Dee, can’t even call her. No phones on the camp, no computers, no internet. No kid has a mobile phone. There is only a payphone five miles away – I snuck out there one night, ran the road, to call her. The payphone was busted, looked like it hadn’t been used in years.

So every day I wonder how she is. I wonder if she does well at school… she seems like she would. I don’t get the impression she works her ass off, but I think she’s a good and smart student.

I wonder what she does day to day. How different are our daily schedules? And then I think of her eating dinner alone, every night. Heck, she probably prefers it. She has a laptop, and there’s the huge television, and then there’s the library in the house, and all those books…

Books. I don’t think I’ve ever finished a book… at least not one that I can remember.

The second half of my training involves endurance. Not fitness, not motor, not how long you can go for, but how much you can take.

Fighting’s not about how hard you hit. You don’t have to hit that hard to knock someone out, to force the brain to fire synapses that pull a person into unconsciousness as a protective mechanism.

No, fighting’s about how hard you can get hit. Fighting’s about pain threshold, toughness. These are things that can be trained, and we train them.

I take hits from Glass and McNamara. To the face, to the arms, to the shoulders, to the chest, the trunk, the legs, the calves.

They kick me and punch me, and I come roaring back for more. I swear at them, shout at them, unable to hit back. I bellow curses at them, and when they think I’ve had enough, I taunt them, ask them if that’s all they’ve got.

But then I get used to it. Then I take it silently. Kicks, punches, slaps. Every night I have new bruises, and every day we do it again.

Desensitization, and mental discipline. That’s all it is.