Body Shot (Tapped Out) by Cari Quinn

1
    Carly
    H e was everything I wasn’t supposed to have.
    Tattooed and muscular, with eyes that said he wanted to fuck me. And I wanted to let him.
    No, I wanted to make him.
    Watching Giovanni Costas strut into the octagon at some random abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn didn’t deter me either. Finding out the location of tonight’s super secret fight hadn’t been easy, but I’d taken to hanging out at The Cage, the gym where Giovanni trained, and that allowed me to overhear stuff. Especially when I flirted with the right guys and wormed my way into the right conversations.
    Tonight Giovanni was fighting a guy named X. Just X. The smoke machines were pumping, the rap music was blaring, and the crowd was cheering and stomping their feet even before the two men in the ring tapped gloves as a show of respect before the match.
    Then it was on.
    I didn’t claim to understand what drove people to fight. I was the kind of girl who waged domestic wars in the kitchen. My battleground was trying to perfectly julienne vegetables or attempting to get my gravy to be the correct thickness. My life’s ambition was to prepare food for appreciative guests.
    Apparently Giovanni’s was to disfigure faces and maim bodies.
    As was his style, Giovanni struck first. He didn’t waste time in dancing around his opponent, just started in on him straightaway. I didn’t know all the technical terms for the jabs and kicks and combinations—my older sister, Mia, and her boyfriend, Fox, were the former fighters and current trainers at The Cage, not me—but even an untrained eye couldn’t miss how dangerous Giovanni seemed.
    Deadly.
    Hot as hell.
    Normally these matches went for a couple rounds, but considering Giovanni was systematically battering X’s face, I didn’t think the other guy would last that long. The sooner he was put out of his misery, the better. For both him and me, because I was more than a little squeamish about blood.
    In no time, Giovanni had X on the mat, shoulders pinned. He punched him mercilessly around the torso, his muscles rippling and his golden Italian skin gleaming with sweat with every movement. Shouts erupted around me as the ref counted it off and announced Giovanni the victor for this round. He stood and grinned at his entourage of chicks on the opposite side of the ring before retreating to his corner to guzzle water and confer with his trainer.
    Meanwhile, the ring card girl sashayed into the octagon to purr that the next round would be starting soon, so make your bets now.
    I shook my head in disgust and tugged hard on the hoodie I wore with a T-shirt and short denim skirt. I wouldn’t be winning any fashion awards, but I’d wanted to watch Giovanni without being spotted by anyone. If he saw me at one of his fights, he’d surely try to shoo me away. Because that’s what everyone thought they had to do with me. Protect me like some doll meant to be tucked on a shelf. God forbid my sister or her boyfriend show up either. Luckily they’d stopped attending bouts when they’d ceased fighting or else I’d never be able to indulge my Giovanni spying in peace. It was bad enough that Giovanni himself was more discouraging than encouraging my interest lately.
    I’d just turned eighteen a couple of months before, and we’d been dancing around each other since the day we met. Granted, that meeting hadn’t occurred under the best of circumstances. Mia had gone to meet with Giovanni to set up a fight. She’d been scheduled to fight her now-boyfriend, Fox Knox, but Giovanni had fought Fox and put him in the hospital with a fractured eye socket. Naturally Mia had wanted revenge, though at the time I doubted she would’ve classified it as such. She wasn’t real accepting of her unexpected feelings toward Fox at first. Her overriding ambition at that time had been fighting a dude so everyone would see she had the biggest balls in all of Brooklyn, and so she’d get paid accordingly once she won, but that was a