Shadowboxer (Tapped Out 1)

I didn’t want to think like that. I wasn’t a pessimist by nature, the past few months of discontent aside. But as happy as Mia made me, she also made me more terrified than I’d ever been in my life.

The possibility of losing her—of being left to wonder what we could’ve been—was more than I could face. So I didn’t.

Instead I savored her flavor on my tongue as we shared a private grin. And I fought to hold on, harder than I’d ever fought in my life.

When we walked up the hall to her apartment, hand in hand and juggling bags, we were too busy laughing to notice who had camped out in front of her door.

“Yo. Not a-fuckin-gain.” Kizzy jumped to her feet, jostling precariously the covered cake pan she held. “I’m sitting here waiting with a cake I slaved over all day while you two were out engaging in pleasures of the flesh?”

“I engaged in no pleasures,” I said soberly, only to have Mia stomp on my toe.

“Then why does she have a sex glow?”

“I do not. God.” Mia pulled out the key, jammed it in the door, and headed inside.

I motioned to Kizzy to follow. “She’s lying,” I said in a deliberately loud whisper. “She absolutely has a sex glow.”

Kizzy slapped Mia on the ass. “I knew it. You’re such a shameless skank.”

Except Mia wasn’t smiling anymore.

Neither was I.

I watched Mia carefully set her bag on the counter. Too carefully. Her face had closed down like an under baked cake sinking in on itself. Her eyes had shuttered. Sex glow—gone.

Kizzy was her usual oblivious self, stomping around the kitchen and rampaging about glitter sprinkles and pudding filling. Mia put things away and didn’t reply to Kizzy’s tirade. Then she excused herself and went to the bathroom while I stared up at the ceiling and wondered what the hell to do.

I didn’t know how much Kizzy knew, so I couldn’t tell her to watch her mouth. For that matter, I wasn’t supposed to know anything myself. Mia had never mentioned telling me anything again after that moment in the locker room and I definitely hadn’t pushed it.

Besides, how could I be sure she’d intended to tell me about the kidnapping? Maybe she’d planned to tell me about her and…those guys. Damn that bartender at Vinnie’s for pantomiming Mia’s back room activities and putting that picture in my head. I really didn’t need to know. It wasn’t going on now—it couldn’t be. So none of that was important, unless she wanted to tell me.

But the skank comment had hit home for a reason. Either because of that fucker who’d imprisoned her or because of the men she’d…serviced. I didn’t know. I could make her come, but I couldn’t figure out how to fix the broken places inside her. I wasn’t even sure where they all were.

“She didn’t even look at my cake.” Kizzy dropped the thing on the counter and yanked off the lid.

“I’m sure she’ll be right out.”

“Probably brushing her teeth.” She stuck her tongue in her cheek in an obvious imitation of a blowjob and grinned.

I didn’t grin back.

“Hey, what’s wrong? You guys seemed cool when you came down the hall.”

“We were.”

She drew her brows together. “Then what’s the problem?”

I sucked in a breath and swallowed all of it—the regret I couldn’t make it better, the recrimination I hadn’t already told Mia what I knew, the helplessness. Especially the helplessness. “She’s sensitive about certain things. So you know, if you could not make the skank comments, that’d probably help.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You know about that?”

So those guys and the blowjobs were a real thing. Down deep, I’d hoped otherwise. “Not exactly. Just rumors. It doesn’t make a difference to me. What happened before doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does.”

We both looked up guiltily as Mia stopped on the threshold of the kitchen.

“It matters that I can’t take a joke. It matters that my…someone I’m seeing has to wonder what he’ll hear about me next. And that most likely, it’ll be true.” She rubbed her wrist over her mouth. “But I can’t take any of it back. It’s who I am.”