Faking It(49)

Alyssa would come watch me practice and then we would hit the locker room for another “interview.” Once I got so wild for her that we did it in Mason’s office, which didn’t even have a lock on the door.

There were other benefits as well. I had never noticed how much focus went into all the different women I was trying to string along. It seemed like since they were always coming to me that I wasn’t putting any effort into it at all. But going through the motions with new people all of the time was a time suck. Everything was just a prelude to sex, sex had honestly just meant having an orgasm with another person, and it had cost me. I realized that now my headspace was devoted to two things: Alyssa and training. Focusing on her made it easier to focus in general. Apparently, I wasn’t one for multitasking. It was like the rate at which I could improve was, itself, improving.

And opportunities were appearing out of nowhere. Sparring guys like to gossip. Clips of me training were making their way onto the Internet. If results were anything to go by—spoiler, they always are—then I was killing it. I had sponsors sniffing around wanting me to endorse everything from pain relievers to wrist wraps to pre-workout drinks. And I wasn’t going out and chasing them. I was spending less time thinking about my image than I ever had and I owed it all to her.

Interviewers were showing up at all hours, wanting to know how it was going, how I was feeling about Vlad, and so on. I didn’t have time for most of them, which was a great feeling. I really didn’t have time for them. There was only preparing for the fight and dreaming about the next time I saw Alyssa. There was a thrill in the stripped-down, monkish austerity of the whole thing.

The facts were indisputable: Less womanizing equaled a better Braden. I didn’t party. I didn’t drink. I was more or less on Alyssa’s schedule when we could see each other, and there was only one vice we both loved.

We had a couple of close calls, which heightened both the tension and our desire. I’m sure the other fighters noticed the attention. Alyssa was coming and going constantly, but there’s a sort of fighter’s code. I wasn’t too worried about them talking. There was a day when Alyssa said her dad had been a little distant and we wondered if he might have seen or heard something, but that turned out to be a migraine he was trying to fight through without her knowing it hurt.

Mason was as great as ever with me. Razor sharp in his suggestions, encouraging without overdoing it, and genuinely excited about my clash with Vlad. Things literally could not have gotten better. Or if they could, I wouldn’t have known how.

But history is full of people—let’s be honest, mostly men—getting what they want and then messing it all up for no discernible reason. Exhibit number nine billion?

Yours truly.

I know I’ve been talking a lot about the new me, reinvented, rising from the ashes, all that jazz. But some things hadn’t changed. No matter how good our habits become, there’s always going to be something unchangeable, or less changeable, in each person’s wiring. For instance, I’ve never been that good at making promises to myself. No, scratch that. I’ve never been great at keeping promises to myself. Making them is easy. Tomorrow I’ll stop drinking. This time it’s going to be different, and so on.

I’ll be good. Just not yet.

But this time I thought I had really changed. Then Alyssa had to travel for work and was gone for nearly a month. It was a cool gig. She flew out to the east coast to interview an American sumo and wound up staying longer to pursue some other opportunities. I was a little jealous. The sumo sounded like a cool guy and I’m sure I could have learned something from him. And of course, I was jealous of anyone spending more time than me with Alyssa.

Our first week apart was fine. We talked on the phone every day and had a couple of intense phone sex chats on Skype. I have to say that, while she had never been a shrinking violet, it was a damned delight to see her come out of the small shell she did have. Alyssa had turned into a wicked little fiend, making it all feel even more like an addiction.

If you’re going to be addicted to something, it might as well be something that makes you happy and doesn’t come with the diminishing returns of drugs and booze.

Then she got busy and we had to take a short break, even from the phone stuff. It was like the women could smell it. She’s gone. He’s defenseless. Get him, ladies! Drag him down into some debauchery! Well, I wasn’t defenseless, but I suddenly felt like I was under siege. I don’t want to let myself off the hook, but damn, it was hard.

They were there when I got to practice. They were there while I practiced. They cheered and draped themselves over anything they could find, the least subtle invitation you could imagine, over and over. After practice, they were lining the hallway in the locker room. They pretended like they weren’t obviously there just to give me my pick of them: can I have an autograph for my little brother? Can I ask you a question about fighting? Can you teach me to wrap my hands? How do I get a stomach as flat as yours? But all of that was just a prelude to me telling them when and where it was going to go down.

This little part of me kept nagging, saying “stop, Braden, stop.” I wasn’t even doing anything awful, but the conversations with the women were getting longer. I was getting a little chattier. The attention was making me feel good. Human nature and wiring, I’m telling you. The fact that all I had to do was wait for Alyssa to come back and give me all the attention I’d ever wanted—and the right kind of attention—wasn’t hitting me like it should have. I could tell I was headed into one end of a potential streak of self-destruction. How would it end?