So it goes for three weeks. Samantha tears me down. Carrson builds me back up.
I’m exhausted from both of them. Bruised and battered from both of them. Somedays I’m not sure which one I hate more…but that’s a lie.
Because with Carrson, sometimes, when the adrenaline is high and my blood pumps so fast and hot it feels like it might boil out of my skin, when he grabs me mid-move or pulls me flush against him to demonstrate a block or pin, I feel it.
The heat. The weight of him. The way his body wraps around mine.
In those moments, some primitive, shameful part of me responds not with fear.
Withwant.
It’s not romantic. It’s not sweet.
It’s chemical.
Lust in the middle of war.
I know he feels it too. It’s in the way he holds me a little too long when I stagger. In how his eyes linger on parts of my body that have nothing to do with fighting. It’s most obvious not by how close he gets. It’s when he steps back. Like he needs the distance to keep himself in control.
We both ignore it, never acknowledge it, this fire sparking between us.
What would be the point? It’s not like we’re going to fall in love.
***
In the fourth week, I knock Samantha down. She lands on her back in the large entryway of Rosewood Hall, surrounded by a couple dozen sorority sisters. It’s become a routine now. The Sisters gather every day to watch me get my ass kicked.
When instead it’s Samantha who falls, there’s a stunned silence. I stand breathing heavily, a trickle of blood from a cut she gave me running into my eye. I wait for one of the other women to take Samantha’s place or for them to yell at me, call me names. Remind me I don’t belong.
They don’t. Everyone stays frozen, like they can’t believe the tables have turned. Samantha sits up slowly and rubs the back of her head, which must hurt given how hard it bounced off the marble floor.
Slowly and deliberately, she gets to her feet with her eyes locked on mine. She drags the back of her hand across her mouth, where blood has gathered from a split lip I gave her. Her brow furrows when she looks down at that smear of red on her hand, as if it surprises her.
Sam turns her unsmiling gaze to me. She runs her eyes up and down my body, like she actuallyseesme for the first time. She takes a step closer, and every instinct in me screams to flinch, to avoid, to run, but I remind myself of Carrson’s lessons.
Never show weakness.
Sam keeps coming until she stands a foot away, glaring at me.
“You got one hit,” she murmurs. “Congratulations.”
She slaps me,hard, right across the face.
I take it.
I don’t raise my hand back to her, even though I could.
Carrson will be so disappointed. He would never let someone else get in the last hit, but the truth is that I’m tired.
Tired of fighting.
Tired of being scared.
If I keep challenging Samantha, she’ll escalate until one of us ends up dead, because any other option makes her look weak in front of her sisters. She can’t afford that. It threatens everything she’s built.
As much as I don’t like her, Idounderstand her. As far as she’s concerned, I’m the girl who stole her future, who made a fool of her. If our positions were reversed, I’d hate me too. I’ve thought about it a lot. Obsessively looked at it fromevery angle, trying to figure a way out. How to stop the battling. This is all I’ve come up with.
Show her I’m strong enough not to be broken but weak enough not to be a threat.
