Ringside (11 page)

Sloane

I sat there for a
minute or two, letting that sink in. I suppose it made sense, in a twisted sort
of underworld, mobster, everyone has a price way. Set Angel up in a nice place
with some cash and a cool car. Let him get used to the lifestyle. Once he’s got
a taste for it rig the next fight so he’s got some confidence. Maybe he’s
willing to sign on to fight a guy he’d
never
have considered fighting before.

Maybe he oversteps
himself.

The bad guys bet
big against him, and Angel gets the message - Go down or get slaughtered.

Easy.

Simple.

And with Angel’s
habit of planting his damn feet and taking the sort of punishment he did, it
probably wouldn’t be hard to find a fast, nimble fighter that could pick him
apart.

“Okay,” I said
eventually. “The way I see it you’ve got three options. Ready?”

He nodded.

“Option one.
Retire. Get out of the game and do something else. Run, if you have to. I saw
those guys Jessie was talking about. They may be scary, but they didn’t look
bigtime enough to have contacts in Nowhere, Kansas. Get out of New York and
never look back.”

“Can’t,” Angel
said. “There’s not much else I can do besides what I’m doing now. Strong-arming
for one of the gangs is the only fallback position, and that’s not something
I’m interested in. “Besides,” he added, “you’re not in Kansas.”

“Option two,” I
said quickly, before he could do something crazy like ask me to run away with
him and I could do something even more insane and say ‘yes’. “Swallow your
pride and go along with what they want. I know it’ll suck, and I believe you
when you say it might end your career, but in the short term, doing what they
want is probably a lot safer than
not
doing what they want.”

“No,” he said, his
voice raw with emotion. “Never.”

I reached out and
put my hand on his. “Good.”

He squeezed my
hand, clearly thankful for the support. I found myself wondering, not for the
first time, how much strength a man like Angel actually received from the
world. It seemed like anyone as strong as him would be constantly asked to lend
himself, and rarely supported.

“What’s the third
option?” he asked.

“Option three is
the harder one.”

“Let’s hear it.”

I bit my lip for a
second, trying to gauge the best way of telling him. I’d just told him to
swallow his pride a second ago, but this was on a whole new level. “Your
footwork is crap, Angel. It’s too the point where you don’t even try to get out
of the way. I know you watched some of my ballet footage on the internet. Well,
surprise surprise, big guy, there’s some of you on there too. Over the years I
can watch your technique deteriorate. It’s like you got used to being hit, like
you learned you could take it and therefore stopped working on the things you
weren’t good at, like your footwork, and concentrated on the things you
were
awesome at, like throwing punches…”
I let my voice trail off, worried that I’d hurt his feelings.

He just looked at
me, the muscle in his jaw working.

“You know what I
mean?” I asked softly.

“So what’s option
three?”

Fair enough. I
knew I’d have been pretty pissed off if some guy who’d never danced a day in
his life tried to tell me what I was doing wrong in the ballet world, so I
tried to let his anger roll off my back. “Option three is that you get better.
I work with you on your movement, and we forget some of the shit that you’ve
taught yourself. We make you into a fighter that can get out of the way, duck
underneath punches and counter before the guy who’s swinging at you knows where
you went.”

He was quiet, so I
pushed on.

“Boxing is just
ugly dancing, you know. Sure, you’re trying to smash the other guy’s face in
and everything, but if they recognize where and when the punch is going to be
thrown, they can dictate terms. I don’t see that in you; at least not last
night. You waded in and got it, and when you could you attacked. It meant you
got hit a lot, and if the fight wasn’t rigged I think we both know who would
have won…”

“Let me get this
straight,” he said. “You think you, a ballet dancer a third of my weight and a
foot and a half shorter than me, can somehow improve my boxing. Not just
improve it, but make me win against an opponent they’re certainly going to
handpick to defeat me?”

“Yes,” I said
without hesitation, even though I wasn’t so sure about this, when he put it
that way. Still, if I showed worry, I knew he’d give up on himself.

“Okay,” Angel
answered. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Angel

And that was the
start of it.

There we were,
naked. I knew Sloane was right. If I didn’t change my technique, I’d be in
trouble no matter who I got put into the ring with.

It was hardly a
shock. I could tell how hard it was for her to come right out and tell me, but
it was hardly the first time I’d heard it.

She got up to turn
on the light, and I made a face when she pulled on a pair of spandex shorts and
a sports bra.

Even though she
saw my obvious disappointment in her newly-covered body, she gave me a wink and
assumed a more than competent boxing stance, hands up to guard her face,
rocking back and forth on light, agile feet.

“How am I doing so
far?” she asked.

“Pretty damn
good,” I answered honestly, getting up and following her lead by yanking my
boxers back on before I went over to adjust a few weaknesses in her stance.
“Hold your hands like this, though,” I said, pushing them a little farther away
from each other and making her hunch her shoulders more. “You can’t block your
vision with your fists. Remember, a real boxer is wearing gloves, so they’re
even more in the way than this. You can’t fight what you can’t see.”

She nodded,
accepting the adjustments and adjusting. “Okay, cool,” she said.

I watched her from
a couple of feet away, until she waved me over to stand in front of her.

I did as she
asked, pretending to be her sparring partner even though what I
really
wanted to do was drag her back to
the mattress and have my way with her.

She was gorgeous,
and the light in her eyes as she tried to adapt to a stance so new to her.

Still, the next
thing she said snapped my attention back to the task at hand. “Try and hit me.
Go slow, but don’t treat me like a child, huh?”

“What?” I asked.

“You heard me just
fine. I want to see what it feels like to have a fist coming at you when you’re
standing like this.”

I nodded. “So that
you can show me how to move my feet? You’re really going to try and fix my footwork,
aren’t you?”

She shrugged. “I
can’t watch you just stand there and take that sort of punishment again. And,
more to the point, I don’t think you’re going to win very many more fights if
all you do is try and weather the storm. I mean, what happens when the other
guy is faster than you, or has a longer reach?”

Now it was my turn
to shrug. “I do what I’ve always done, push forward, take the shots and give
‘em hell.”

Sloane shook her
head. “Stupid. Now go easy but try and hit me.”

I sighed. There
was really no point in arguing with her. I knew already that she was going to
do what she was going to do. I could rant and rave, but I wouldn’t be able to
change her course, not once she’d made up her mind.

And I loved that
about her.

So I dropped into
my stance and threw a slow motion punch. She dipped a shoulder and did
something with her feet that let her slip away. The next thing I knew I felt
her small fist against my ribs.

“Show me again,” I
said, and Sloane smiled and reset herself in the stance.

This time when I
punched, I watched her feet.

The importance of
footwork had always been drummed into me, but it wasn’t until right then,
watching Sloane’s bare feet on the polished cement of her apartment, that I
really
got
it.

Suddenly, the way
she moved connected with me. I watched her a few more times, and then got her
to stand behind me and teach me the steps.

“It’s just like a
dance,” she said, her hands on my hips. “The punch comes from your left, you
move like this,” as she put pressure on my waist and tapped my feet until I
moved them the way she wanted. “You move like this. And counter punch. Is that
what it’s called?”

I nodded, shaking
my head and smiling. Five minutes, and I could already tell this was
working
.

She laughed.
“Counter punch sometimes. Not always, but often enough that the other guy knows
he can’t leave himself open for it. That way you’ll be in his head, and you’ll
give him something to worry about.”

“Sloane,” I said,
turning around and wrapping my arms around her. “What did I ever do without
you?”

“You got drunk,
hit on an endless parade of girls, got your face punched in and punched in
other people’s faces both in and out of the ring. At least, that’s me guess.”

I had to admit,
she was pretty damn close.

Sloane

He may not have
had the proper training, but once he got some direction Angel took to the steps
like a natural.

At first, I’d
thought that he refused to get out of the way of the incoming punches, that it
was the result of some pig-headed macho attitude, but the more I watched him
the more I decided that he’d simply never been taught the right way.

“It takes years
and years to learn one form or another,” I told him, “but I imagine it won’t
take too long for your body to get the hell out of the way, especially once you
see how much easier it is to get inside the other guy’s guard once you’re not
getting smashed in the face on the way in.”

He nodded. “I’m
not an idiot. It’s just… Well, you’re a really good teacher.”

I smiled. “When’s
your next fight?”

Angel shrugged.
“Not really sure. I get a call from Jessie a week or two out, usually. Though,
considering the way things are between me and him, there’s every chance I’ll
get a lot less notice this time around.”

“Well, when you go
to the gym to work out, or whatever, I want you to work on this, okay? Same
footwork, same motion, same everything. With any luck you’ll be able to drum it
into your thick head before your night fight. And the good news is if you
do
teach yourself to fight this way,
your opponent will be expecting the old Angel and will find himself getting
into the ring with someone very different.”

He looked at me
funny, cocking one sexy eyebrow and staring at me with that smoldering look
sometimes I wonder if he even knew he had.

“What?” I said at
last, unable to take him looking at me like that without touching him. “Don’t
you think I’m right?”

“Of course you’re
right. It’s not that.” He shrugged, stepping closer to me, and I felt myself
take a similar step to close the distance between us. His arms came up around
me, and my breasts pressed against his body in a way that made me feel like my
veins were being drip-fed lava.

“So what is it?” I
breathed.

He looked down at
me, dipping his head for a moment to capture my mouth with his, tying my tongue
up in a kiss that made my knees so weak I had to cling to him to stop from
falling down in a heap. I dared to peak at him as we kissed, and my heart
banged away in my chest even harder when I saw that his eyes were shut.

That had always
been the way I’d know, at least that’s what I’d told myself. I wanted a man who
met the world with open arms and who kissed me with eyes shut tight.

When the kiss fell
away, Angel smiled warmly. “You don’t even know how much you’ve changed me
already, Sloane. When I think about the guy I used to be, I don’t even
recognize him. Sure, he may look the same, but who
is
he? I don’t know what I was thinking, or why, for that matter. I
wasted so much time looking for things that weren’t going to make me happy.”

I felt myself
blushing, and I turned away. “You sure you aren’t just saying that?”

His arms came up
around me again, and I pressed my back against him. “I’m sure,” he said.

“Well,” I told
him, trying to make my voice so light and full of humor, even though I meant
the words with all of my heart. “You found me know, whether or not you meant
to. Don’t screw it up, okay? I can’t take knowing you exist like this, only for
you to go back to what you were, or for something to happen to you.”

“I won’t,” he
said. “I promise.”

“And that goes for
the boxing too,” I told him. “You get out of the way of the punches, huh? I
don’t want something to happen to you, especially now that you may just be
smart enough to move your damn feet and avoid what the other guy is throwing at
you. I don’t want to have fallen in love with you just to condemn myself to
watching you eat through a tube because some asshole broke your jaw or
something, on account of you going back to fighting like a bull and not a man.”

He nodded, though
the sincerity that sparkled in his eyes made me realize I’d let something slip.
Angel had caught me, and his next words confirmed it. “You’ve fallen in love,
huh?”

I nodded, unable
to say the words again without first hearing them.

“I love you too,
Sloane,” Angel said. “I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you.”