“Do you?” I countered. “I won’t promise not to hit you again.”
He clutched his chest in shock, mockingly. “I would never dream of asking you to hold back on my account.”
We kept the cold compresses close at hand. When had things gotten so easy with him? So comfortable? After he slept on my couch? After the bond he made between us? I felt like I understood him a little better than I had when we first started working together. Then, he’d been this magical creature, now he was just...Fin.
He snapped his fighters. “Are you paying attention? I said ‘go’ but you didn’t move.”
I shook myself back to the ring, the mats, the fight. “Yes, sorry. I zoned out for a moment. Where were we? Have I won this fight yet?”
“Not a chance,” he said, on the tail end of a chuckle, then lunged for me.
I feigned to the left and then dove to the right. He landed flat on his belly on the mat. Faster than I anticipated, he rolled over just as I launched myself at him, his long legs wrapped around my back.
Unlike him, I didn’t have the strength to lift him off the ground and slam him hard enough to get him to release. I shoved my forearm into the meaty part of his thigh. His hold loosened enough to allow me to shove my bent knee over his thigh. Using momentum, I reached out, grabbed the collar of his T-shirt, and flipped myself over his leg.
Even out of his guard, he recovered, coming back up on his knees before I could get him a choke.
“Damn. I wanted to finish that,” I
said.
“Not a chance.” He swatted out his arm, testing my balance. Little did he know, I’d trained with Hawk more times than I cared to remember, a man with zero balance, and all bulk.
I countered his parry with a shove straight to his abdomen.
He toppled back onto his ass with a grunt. “What the hell was that?”
“You test my balance, I test yours. The captain would be appalled.”
His face shifted from open and smiling, to inscrutable. He came at me again, this time catching hold of my wrist, dragging me into him.
I tried to pry off his fingers, but he jerked me hard to the right. I went down on my back.
Before he could make his next move, I wrapped my legs around his hips and then locked my ankles. He could take me up and slam me down, but it would be harder for him to escape.
But he didn’t. He stayed on the mat and stared down at me, his crystal eyes churning while he looked at me.
“Do you ever wish you had a different life?” he asked, completely out of the blue.
If this was a new tactic to throw me off and make me release him, he underestimated my need to win.
I squeezed my legs around him tighter. “No, because if I wished for a different life it would cheapen the one I have, make the sacrifices and trials I’ve endured meaningless.”
He settled his hips against me almost casually. “You don’t wish you could take back the things you’ve lost, go a different route?”
He seemed to have zero idea how uncomfortable I was feeling with him pressed so intimately into me.
“Do I wish I could see my family again, the people that I’ve lost? Of course, but I also have to believe I’ve made the right choices in my life, that where I end up will make everything worth it.”
He smiled, the corners of his lips ratcheting up slowly, like clouds parting across the sun. “Wow, who would have thought it? You’re a closet optimist.”
“Not an optimist,” I grumbled. “A pragmatist. It’s much less work and I get to wear sweatpants and hate the world sometimes.”
He scanned my features, looking for the truth, hunting for it between the lies I told and the jokes I lived behind.
“Sir.” The captain’s voice came from the stairwell leading into the training room. “We have—”
“I’ll deal with it in a moment,” Fin said, his tone sharp, but his eyes never leaving my face.