Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 79870 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79870 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Other conference rooms were designated for the media, so that fighters could be interviewed. Marco was always nearby, watching over Kage and waiting. He was ready to get the weight cutting underway. We walked through the open workouts, where the main card fighters were putting on a show for the fans, and Kage paused to watch. “We don’t have time for this,” he growled as he hustled Kage by the crowd on our way out the door. “If you want to make weight, you have to sweat.”
Kage stopped a couple of times to take selfies with fans, while Marco crossed his arms over his chest and glared. Then Kage and I found ourselves sitting in a deserted hallway while Marco disappeared to somewhere to confirm that we could just go into the gym and use the sauna. I really wasn’t sure what to expect, but everything I’d heard about weight cutting didn’t sound good. I was really worried about Kage. The guy looked exhausted. Hell, I was exhausted, and I wasn’t even fighting or cutting weight. In fact, I wasn’t doing much of anything besides tagging along. I felt very disposable.
“Tell me again why you’ve had to put yourself through eleven days of torture to lose weight,” I said as we sat on the carpeted floor outside the gym, which was currently closed to the public. “I don’t like it. Can’t you just fight at your everyday weight next time? Why don’t you just be a Middleweight? Then you’d never have to lose anything, except maybe a couple of pounds if you ate a greasy bacon burger and a gallon of vanilla root beer.”
Kage chuckled quietly, no doubt remembering the fattening dinner we’d shared on my birthday. Those were simpler times for us, when we were first discovering our feelings for each other. I hadn’t realized it so much while it was going on, but the two of us had existed in a bubble for a while— a bubble that excluded everyone and everything else in the whole damn world. When we’d gone to visit my family, that bubble had popped, ultimately letting real life pour in and taint what we’d had.
I was desperate to get that back, but it felt like an impossible feat. Was I doomed to forever comparing the rest of my life to the time I’d lived with Kage in the Alcazar? Was that the most alive I would ever feel? It made me a little sick to think that, at the tender age of twenty-one, I’d already left the best days of my life behind me.
“Jamie, you really don’t understand how all this works” Kage said, thankfully snapping me back into the conversation and out of my morbid thoughts. “Remember what I told your mom? I don’t want to be the small guy in the octagon. If I fight at my everyday weight, I’ll be fighting against a guy who cut twenty pounds to make weight, then put it all back on through rehydration. So basically it would be my little skinny hundred-eighty-five pound ass going up against a monster who weighs over two-hundred pounds. I’m good, and I’m confident, but I don’t want to step into the ring at a disadvantage.”
I sighed and picked idly at the edge of my new blue and white gym shorts where the piping met the fabric. “Okay. I get it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And I definitely don’t like that you have to drop even more weight. You’ve already lost so much. Seems like they could just make a rule that would level the playing field, you know? Just reset the bar in a different spot.”
“Well, the problem is that somebody figured out an underhanded way to get an advantage over the competition, and ever since then we’ve all been chasing our tails to keep up. It’s kinda like the airbrushing thing on the magazine covers that people are always fussing about. If all of the models agreed to have no airbrushing done, that would reset the bar. But you know there would be that one bitch who just couldn’t help herself… They’d airbrush the shit out of her, people would bow at her feet, and then it would start all over again. There’s really no easy solution, not when humans are involved.”
“I know that.” I looked around to make sure there was no one else nearby who could see us, and I reached over and ran my index finger down his forearm, following the impressive contour of muscle and thinking he must have popped a lot of cans of spinach over the years. “It’s just that you’ve lost so much already, you know? You look… different.”
“What’s the matter? You don’t like the way I look?” He echoed my words from the elevator a couple of nights before, but his smirk left no doubt that he knew exactly how his looks affected me. Even now, when camp had left him wiry and gaunt, I couldn’t keep my eyes off of him.