I am genuinely afraid something is wrong with me.
Normal women don't get turned on watching men beat each other unconscious. Normal women don't spend the entire drive home pressed against the car window trying not to squirm because they're so wet it's uncomfortable. Normal women don't go home and lie in bed with their hand between their legs thinking about a man who terrifies them.
Sarah drops me off at my apartment. I thank her, tell her I had fun even though I'm not sure that's the right word, promise to text her tomorrow. She makes me promise twice, which means she's worried, which means I did not hide my reaction as well as I thought I did.
I go inside. Archie greets me at the door, winding between my ankles, demanding attention. I pick him up, bury my face in his fur, and try to ground myself in something normal. Something safe.
It doesn't work.
I put Archie down. I go to my bedroom. I lie down on my bed still fully clothed and I stare at the ceiling and I think about Cole Steele in that ring.
The way he moved.
The sound he made when that fist connected with his face.
The look in his eyes when they found mine.
My hand slides between my legs before I make a conscious decision to put it there. I'm still wearing my jeans and I can feel how wet I am through the denim, through my panties, soaked and aching and I have never been this turned on by anything in my entire life.
I should feel guilty about this.
I don't.
I slip my hand inside my jeans, inside my panties, and I touch myself thinking about him, about his hands, about what it would feel like to have him pin me down with that same brutality he used in the ring. I come in less than two minutes, biting my lip to stay quiet even though I'm alone, my body arching off the bed as the orgasm rolls through me in waves.
And then I lie there in the aftermath feeling satisfied and confused and absolutely certain that I am in serious trouble.
A few days later…
By the time Tuesday rolls around, I've almost convinced myself not to go.
I've spent the last six days trying to talk myself out of it. Telling myself I can find another gym, another instructor, someone who doesn't make me feel like my entire nervous system is short-circuiting. Someone who didn't beat a man unconscious while Iwatched. Someone I didn't go home and masturbate to thinking about.
But when two o'clock approaches, I get in my car.
I drive to Blackwater Falls.
I park outside Steele's Gym.
And I sit there for five full minutes with my hands on the steering wheel trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing.
The smart thing would be to leave. To send him a polite email canceling future sessions, to wish him well, to find somewhere else to learn self-defense. The smart thing would be to acknowledge that I am clearly having some kind of breakdown where my judgment is concerned and remove myself from the situation before it gets worse.
Instead, I get out of the car.
I walk into the gym.
He's behind the front desk again, same as last week. Same position, back to the wall, eyes on the entrance. He looks up when I walk in and our eyes meet.
There's a bruise on his face. Purple-black along his cheekbone, the kind of bruise that says someone hit him hard. I did that. Not directly, but I might as well have, because he was looking at me when it happened.
"Hi," I say.
My voice comes out smaller than I intend.
"Chloe," he says.
Just my name. Nothing else. But the way he says it does something to my stomach, something warm and fluttering that I absolutely do not have time for right now.
