Gabe knew him well. They’d been friends almost from the week Sean arrived in Portland. Sean had wandered into the bar looking for a cold drink and a distraction from his stress, and he’d found a friend instead. He’d been there when Gabe’s first wife died in a car crash seven years ago, and through all the messy stuff that came after. And Gabe had been there for him as he struggled to get his gym up and running, backing him financially when he would have had to fold otherwise, and kicking his ass when Sean was low on optimism. Since then, Sean had paid back both the money and the ass-kickings. Civilized ones, of course.
But there was still a lot his friend didn’t know. Shit about Ivy. How could he possibly explain what happened last night? Gabe knew Sean had a brother serving time back in Chicago, but he didn’t know what had landed Jordan in jail in the first place.
Guilt poked at him for keeping this secret from his friend, but sitting down with Gabe and telling him about all of his many shortcomings wasn’t anywhere near the top of his list of things he should have a chat about.
He’d rather do a round in the ring. Lifting a shoulder, he said, “Sure.”
They made their way across the gym and slipped between the ropes. They started off dancing around each other, tossing the odd jab to test the waters. Sean was by far more skilled in any and every kind of martial art than Gabe. He’d had years of training and practice that Gabe couldn’t compete with. But Gabe had spent a lot of time in the ring with Sean, so he was well versed in his fighting style, and had learned how to stay on his feet. Plus, Gabe was no wimp, his muscles had muscles, and he was well over six-feet. Because of that, Sean never doubted it was a fair fight. And it wasn’t like Gabe ever got pulverized.
They lay into each other for a couple of minutes, landing a few solid punches each. Releasing his frustration in this calculated, disciplined fashion was what had attracted him to martial arts in the first place. It was all mastery and restraint. Biding your time and being strategic, as opposed to losing control and lashing out. At the same time, it provided an outlet. A safe place for him to let out his emotions, which happened to be a hell of a lot of frustration today.
His father had started both him and Jordan in lessons when they were quite young, believing it wouldn’t hurt for his boys to build street smarts and self-defense knowledge from an early age.
Fond memories from those days long ago flickered through Sean’s mind like an old movie. His dad sitting on an old wooden chair in the dojo, observing his boys as they received their training from the instructor who seemed at least a hundred years old. Repeating movements over and over with his brother beside him. The scent of bleach, stale sweat, and old wooden floors thick in the air. The single floor fan whirling in the corner by the chair where his dad sat.
It had been a crumby place, the cheapest option, but Sean had fallen in love with it right away, along with the sport. And as his dad had hoped, he’d pursued his training with a passion that, ultimately, kept him too busy to get wrapped up with the other extracurricular activities that many young men, his brother included, ended up getting involved in. Gangs, violence, and crime being the top three of those activities.
Barely dodging an uppercut from Gabe, Sean gave his head a quick shake. He needed to get his mind together before he gave his friend bragging rights for life. Shit, with his brother and Ivy occupying every inch of real estate in his brain, he was losing his hard-earned focus.
He counter attacked Gabe with a quick double jab and a straight right punch to the body getting himself back in the fight.
Jordan. The text from this morning had been on his mind all day. Jordan had always been the fucking renegade. Never could follow a single goddamn rule to save his sorry ass. The martial arts had tempered his defiant nature somewhat, but after their father had died, and they had moved to an even worse part of town, he’d amped it up again. Not coming home until all hours, sometimes not at all. Stints in juvenile detention for getting wrapped up in low-level crimes. It had broken their mother’s heart seeing her oldest son spiral down that path.
So, Sean had done everything he could to make up for his brother’s lack of direction. He stayed focused in school, got a part-time job to pay for his continued training, and helped his mom in any way he could. When he’d been halfway through high school, his mother had started talking about him attending college, even though he knew they could never afford it. But in the end, it hadn’t even mattered, because she’d gotten sick, and every spare penny had gone into paying for her medical treatment.
Who knew it would take a terminal diagnosis to bring his wayward brother home?
When Sean went in for a knee strike, Gabe caught him around the waist in a clinch and almost brought them to the ground. Jesus, he was more zoned out than he thought because he hadn’t even realized when their friendly spar had crossed the line into the fight zone.
Focus. If Gabe knocked him down, he’d never hear the end of it. Striking out with a hard left foot jab, he put some distance between them and regained his footing.
Fucking memories. He threw out another jab, harder than the last one. Every time the past bubbled to the surface, a renewed regret swamped him. He’d made so many mistakes in his life, so many things he wished he could take back. And he’d been pretty good at pushing the guilt down. The outrage and self-disgust. But lately, it was getting harder to keep all of the monsters at bay.
The crack had emerged when his brother had started reaching out to him again, a sliver of an opening that let his suppressed feelings about his past slip through. Then Ivy had come up with her hair brained idea, pushing against the crack until it burst wide open, and now feelings he’d worked so hard to clamp down over the years were reawakening.
All at the same fucking time.
Anger, frustration, grief, despair, not to mention the fear that he was going to make another wrong move and lose yet another precious thing in his life. They were all working together to chip away at his hard won, easy-going persona, revealing the true Sean Thompson that lived beneath. And it was becoming abundantly clear that there was nothing easy-going about him at all.
Vaguely, as though from a great distance, he heard a pained grunt coming from Gabe followed by the sharp cry that sounded terrifyingly like Ivy. Emerging out of the past, he grappled to regain control. But it must have been worse than he realized, because when he turned his head towards where he’d heard Ivy call his name, he found her trying to crawl through the ropes and into the ring.
What the fuck was she doing?Sean attempted to reach for her, but like he was moving through sludge, his limbs wouldn’t cooperate. His brain remained trapped somewhere between the past and the present. The two not reconciling in time with his body.
That’s when two horrifying things happened. Greg Lewis grabbed Ivy around the waist, trying to pull her out of the ring. She resisted him, gripping the rope, but slipped and her cheek smacked the canvas hard at the exact same time he heard the crack of a glove against his jaw.
And then all the lights went out.
CHAPTERNINE
Ivy stood in front of the bathroom mirror and pressed an ice pack to her cheek, trying to work through what had just happened. Never in all the time she’d known Sean had she seen him like that before. Unfocused. Disengaged. Like he wasn’t even there.
When she approached him in the ring, she knew he’d lost control of the fight. To anybody else, it might have appeared like he was taking it easy on Gabe, who was an amateur fighter. But Ivy knew Sean too well, and had seen the shift almost the moment it happened. A blankness had entered his eyes that told her he was somewhere else entirely.
Greg had been standing by her, so she’d voiced her concern, but he’d laughed it off. “Thompson doesn’t lose control. His focus is like granite, un-fucking-breakable. And believe me, I’ve tried.”
But that hadn’t sat right with her. Something was wrong, very wrong. And when things quickly spiraled she reacted instinctively by trying to jump into the ring yelling and screaming. Truthfully, she hadn’t even been thinking. She’d simply reacted. Like jumping into churning waters to save someone from drowning, without even considering whether you could keep yourself afloat first.
Not that she even got close, because Greg had pulled her down before she could, and Sean received the knock-out punch.
