Faking It(48)

I felt him building towards his own orgasm inside me. His abdomen tightened. His breath grew ever quicker. The veins on his neck stood out in sharp relief over his torso that was now slick with our sweat. When Braden came I put my hands on his thighs and marveled. Caught in his passion, he looked like he was sculpted from marble. He trembled again and again, then finally collapsed on top of me.

I felt like I had simultaneously been emptied of everything thought, been brought back to life, had enjoyed the greatest meal of my life, and won the lottery. But had it been good for him?

“Oh my God,” he said into my ear. I traced the muscles of his back as his breathing began to slow.

“What?” I said.

He leaned up on his elbows and smiled down at me. After kissing me once, he said, “That’s the kind of sex people pay to see. I’m telling you, there is nobody on the entire planet who had it better than we did tonight. You are a masterpiece. You just brought my body to life, little Alyssa Edwards. Or, from the way I’m feeling now, you just may have brought on a coma. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to move again.”

I laughed, which made me snort a little, which made us both collapse into giggles like we were kids at a slumber party. “I feel the same way.”

As it turned out, once we had a few minutes to recharge, our bodies took over and we found that yes, we could still move.



Chapter 8



When I’m trying to promote a fight—or myself, for that matter, which usually amounts to the same thing—I’ve never been a stranger to hyperbole. But when I say that first night with Alyssa was the best night of my life, that isn’t me overselling it. If anything, it’s an insulting understatement to what happened. I thought about the Transformers I played with as a kid. You could take an ordinary pickup truck and reassemble it with a few clicks and twists into a robot.

It was like Alyssa had grabbed me—in fairness, I grabbed her first—and turned me inside out, upside down, cranked my limbs and my personality, and turned me into...what?

Something better. It felt like she made me into something better.

I’ve always had a strange relationship with sex. Well, strange might not be the word. I wanted it constantly, but what young guy doesn’t? The difference with me was that, after high school, where I was often ignored by girls, I could have it constantly. I found that I liked the chase, but no one was making me chase them anymore.

My night with Alyssa hadn’t been the result of a calculation or a pursuit. And it hadn’t been the sort of spontaneous one-night stand I was used to. It had been a singular event that made me think I needed to divide my whole life into Before Alyssa and After Alyssa.

Why not? BC and AD had a good run, as far as notating significant events in human history. Maybe it was time for BA and AA.

There is a reason that there are entire religions based around sex. Some of them say that when you’re really into it, that’s when you see God, literally. Alyssa, all of her, body and soul, made that finally click for me. I wasn’t religious, but I was feeling pretty damned worshipful. Maybe I needed to start a church and install her as some sort of alluring high priestess.

I wasn’t sure what might happen next. We hadn’t talked about expectations or plans. We spent that night absolutely drunk on each other, and parted wondering when we would see each other again.

I thought it might fade. Lots of things happen late at night when people start breathing hard. Things that have a very different sheen in the harsh light of day.

Not this, though. If anything, my attraction to her got more intense.

The next month was pretty wild, to say the least. I meant it when I had told her that we were having the kind of sex people usually watch alone on their laptops. It was all like something out of a novel. It had only been an hour after she left when I called her. I couldn’t stand it. We made plans to go out again that night. I wanted to see her all the time, and she felt the same way.

I kept waiting for the euphoria to fade. It kept not fading. In fact, it kept not fading even more every time I saw her. It was the opposite of not fading.

There was a very real problem, however: her dad. Getting away with it once had been lucky. We had had the shield of the interview, if we turned out to need it. But that excuse wouldn’t last forever. No, we had to stay off Mason’s line of sight. I wasn’t sure how he would react on her end, but the fighter in me imagined him finding out about us, kicking me out of his gym, calling the heads of the organization...then soon I would be fighting for sandwiches on Youtube. Unlikely, yes, but you can’t always control the places your mind goes.

In some ways, this made it all way hotter. It would have been smarter to lie low, but we couldn’t control ourselves. I had never been wanted like this, I only thought I had. And I had never wanted like this. Not anything, let alone another person.

I liked to be disciplined in my fighting, always hoping that it would trickle out into the rest of my life. Sometimes it had. But there was no way I could have been disciplined when it came to her.

Alyssa had to sneak out to see me, or we would meet somewhere in public and fool around in one of our cars. One of our hottest trysts happened when she was driving me somewhere and then suddenly pulled into a car wash. Once we were in the bay and the windows were soaped up, she unzipped me and gave me the best blowjob I had ever had. Then I insisted on driving, drove to another car wash, and returned the favor. We felt like high school kids. An hour after that we drove to a cheap hotel and rolled around in bed for two hours before I had to get back to the gym.