I move behind her again.
This is just instruction. This is just teaching. This is what I do. I wrap my arms around her, and this time I can't keep my hips back far enough. My cock presses against her, and there is absolutely no way she can't feel it. She goes still. Completely, utterly still.
I should step back. I should apologize. I should end this lesson right now and figure out how to never see her again.
Instead, I stay exactly where I am.
"Remember," I whisper, my mouth close to her ear. "Drop your weight. Drive your elbow back. Create space."
She's not moving. She's barely breathing.
"Chloe," I say.
"Yes," she says, and her voice is barely above a whisper.
"The defense."
"Right. Yes. Sorry."
She drops her weight suddenly and drives her elbow back. It connects with my ribs. Not hard enough to hurt, but solid enough that she's clearly understood the concept. I let her go, and she turns and steps away, putting several feet between us.
Her face is flushed. Her breathing is uneven. And she's not looking at me, not quite, her eyes focused somewhere around my collarbone instead of meeting my gaze.
She felt it.
She absolutely felt it.
"Good," I say, because I need to say something, because we need to keep going, because the alternative is acknowledging what just happened and I cannot do that. "That was good. Let's run it again."
We run it again. And again. And again. Each time I grab her, my cock presses against her back. Each time, she goes still for just a half-second before executing the defense. Each time, neither of us acknowledges what's happening.
After the fifth repetition, she turns to face me and says, "Where did you learn how to fight?"
The question catches me off guard.
"What?"
"Where did you learn," she repeats. "How to fight like that. Like you did at the Pit."
I don't talk about this.
Not to anyone. Not the few people in Blackwater Falls who've tried to make conversation. Not to the therapist the VA sent me to. Not even to myself most days, because thinking about it toomuch means going back there, and I've spent eleven years trying very hard not to go back there.
But she's looking at me with those brown eyes, waiting for an answer, and something about the directness of her question makes the usual deflection stick in my throat.
"Military," I say finally.
Her eyebrows raise slightly. "You were in the military?"
"Three tours. Infantry."
"Where?"
"Middle East mostly. Afghanistan. Some other places."
She nods slowly, processing this. "That's where you learned."
"Yeah."
