Bait me

He's ready for me, I can see the expectation in his eyes the moment my feet push me off the ground and I speed towards him. My right arm swings wide, bouncing painfully off his ridiculously hard forearm when he throws it up to block my first hit. Lost to my rage, I'm not giving up that easily, so I swing a punch at him with my other arm. He blocks this one too, but I don't anticipate it when he crouches down and grabs each of my legs before knocking me backwards off my feet.

We land on the ground, with me on my back and him between my legs while my head bounces off the mat and I let out a whoosh of air from surprise. Ryker's head comes up from where it hit me in the stomach to look me in the face and gives me a wide, happy grin that I can feel in my bones. The feeling is enough to put my anger away back where I had it locked up, and I am surprised by how easy it is for him to calm me down.

"Why are you smiling?" I scoff at him, wondering what he was thinking.

"It was easier to make you mad than I thought," he says. "And your punches weren't half bad, so you shouldn't need much practice with that."

I shake my head at him in disbelief. "Why were you trying to bait me anyway?" He sits back on his heels and then stands up, holding a hand out for me to take. I offer him my own and he pulls me to my feet and I rotate my shoulders and stretch my arms, looking for any lingering pains. I'm happy to find none, glad for the mat that broke my fall.

"Something was holding you back and now you know there is nothing to worry about." I nod my head slowly with one eyebrow raised while I look away from him and glance to the side. My overly perceptive friend is right, I was hesitating. Since fighting Javier and the chick I still can't remember the name of, I have had a savage streak in me that hadn't been there before. Javier looked healed the last time I saw him, clearly having no issues with his werewolf abilities and fast healing, but I am still uncomfortable with the fact that I had exploded like that. Even if he did deserve it.

Then when Ryker punched Javier earlier, I reveled in the violence. Sometimes I feel bloodthirsty, and other times I am disgusted with myself. Just add it to the long list of many other things I am confused about.

I was worried to fight with Javier since I have had no control. For reasons I now know about, sometimes I am weak and incapable of tapping into my werewolf abilities, and sometimes my boundless rage fuels my thirst for violence and I lash out in unpredictable ways. I'm a pit of uncertainty and contradictions, and the last thing I would want is to hurt Ryker or do something I would regret later. Besides tricking me into a magical and soulbinding deal, he has been there for me and doesn't deserve that.

I let out a huff of breath while playing his words on repeat in my head.

"I'm a bit unstable. Are you sure you can handle it?" I ask when I look back to him.

"I can handle what you can throw at me. I take it as an insult that you are worried about me," he says with a raised eyebrow, not entirely serious but letting me know that I should relax.

I rub a hand down my face and give in. I trust him, and I did want his help with training, so I let go of my reservations and rotate my neck to loosen up. I shake my arms, shift from foot to foot and give him a nod in consent.

He walks me through my stances, showing me how to utilize what strength I do have and maximize my impact in a fight. We then start with basic maneuvers, things that people with little to no training do and how to be smarter than them and how to counter their moves.

I'm awkward and stiff at first. But we go through those few stances and movements several times, not changing them up until my movements become fluid and natural. We spent over an hour going through the basics, and whatever reservations I had before became fleeting and immaterial. Ryker is a great trainer; he is confident and is a natural teacher.

It was important for me to feel comfortable when put in a vulnerable situation. And even though he was always close to me inside my personal space and our bodies were tangled together in unfamiliar positions, he kept his teasing to a minimum and focused on the task at hand.

We're near the end of the session and he is standing in front of me with his feet firmly planted and his fists raised in front of me waiting for me to make a move. He told me that we need to have one real fight before we leave so I can demonstrate the techniques I learned and work on my aversion to fighting. He lectured me about how even if I don't need it or plan to use it in the future, it is a skill I need to have.

The supernatural realm is full of creatures, many of which are predators who hunt and overpower their latest prey. Even if my new life does calm down and has less twists and turns, I will feel more confident when I know I can protect myself or launch an offensive when needed. I need to make sure that I am the best as I physically can and want to be.

And after a workout like this, I am positive that I will be stronger and be much more in shape soon. I'm so thoroughly worked out, in fact, that I am nearly comatose and am having a hard time tapping into my inner ferociousness that would help me to not make a fool of myself in this last fight.

I close my eyes, trying one last time to feel my connection to my wolf. I knew I wouldn't be able to, but I wanted to try anyway. Disappointed but not deterred, I sorted through my emotions and tried to focus on my anger. It's there, but quieted, subdued by both physical exhaustion and Ryker's calming effects.

I frown, open my eyes and look to Ryker pleadingly. "Gotta help me out here, pal," I tell him, with my two hands open, palms up and motion with my fingers for him to come at me. "Come on, incite my inner rage. Let's go."

He scratches his head and twists his lips in a contemplative frown. "Alright," he says slowly. "I'm okay with doing this now, but you can't always use your anger as a crutch when fighting. You won't build control that way," he adds.

I motion with my fingers again tauntingly. "Less talky talky, more punchy punchy," I say and he snorts, gives a shrug and stalks towards me slowly in effortlessly lethal movements. He takes his time, weaving around me and building the tension between us.

"I heard that Javier and Sadie spend so much time together, they are practically living with each other," he starts, and I am already grinding my teeth from his words. "They spend every night together, as though they can't bear to be apart. Which makes sense, I suppose, because they have been fucking for nearly two months now." My face pales as those two words ring through my head. Two. Months.

Javier had been playing me, lying and betraying me for two whole months. I had kissed him, and I was ready to do more, but his body was already being touched and used by another.

"What was it?" He continues. "What was it about you that made him run to another woman, I wonder." Color creeps back into my face, coloring my cheeks and neck with a rosy tint, when he voices the question that has been plaguing some of my darkest thoughts. He angles his head downwards slightly, focusing on my chest area to better see my attack, which causes his dark, wavy hair to brush over his eyebrows and gives him a menacing appearance.

"The way I see it, you're either too uptight and prudish to be intimate, or you're utterly dismal in bed." A growl starts to creep its way up my throat and I crouch, ready to pummel his stupid, smug face in the ground. "Ah, that's it," he sneers at me, "you're a terrible lay."

I give a war cry at about the same time red tints my vision, then I clench my fist and throw it towards his face. But since this one was a jab, I followed up with my strong hand and put fire behind it. It lands, but my suspicions about that are confirmed when he uses the opportunity to get inside my guard and wraps an arm around my neck, yanking me to the ground. I put my hands out, pushing off from his chest to put distance between us and stopping myself from falling forward. He hugs me closer and swings his arm back to ready a punch, so I throw an elbow into his side and squirm away from him.

I barely have a moment to right myself before he is on me, his fist coming quickly towards my face. I have a moment of clarity where this feels familiar and I pull out a move we were practicing earlier. As his right arm swings towards me, I bend my left arm at the elbow and raise it to deflect his punch higher. This gives me a chance to quickly pull his arm forward and drop it, putting him off balance, and giving me an opening to land a hit in his gut.

He grunts, noticing the extra power I packed behind it in response to his infuriating verbal foreplay. Still bent down and in a vulnerable position, I bend over him and throw my right elbow into his back. Ryker's arms wrap around my waist and he forcefully pushes me back, separating us once more.

With the fight not over, and my blood still boiling, we start to close the distance between us. My arms are raised, ready for the offensive. But my plans go cock up when he deftly kicks forward like a pendulum and uses the return momentum to hook his foot behind my ankle and kick it out from under me.

My arms flail when I find myself surprisingly airborne, but he gives me no reprieve and wraps a hand around my throat to keep me in a hold all the way down to the mat. One moment I am in the air ready to claw Ryker's eyes out, the next I am pinned to the floor in an unrelenting, but not threatening, chokehold. I growl in frustration, trying to pry him off of me. But I clearly lost the dominant position, if I even had it to begin with. He has probably been going easy on me so I can learn.

He straddles me, overpowering me in an instant. I buck to try and slide my small frame through his legs, but with the chokehold I realize I can't escape. The red slips from my vision in resigned defeat.

"Uncle!" I cry, deciding to wave the white flag of my surrender.

Ryker stares at my neck as his fingers slowly release me, looking like he has his mind elsewhere and is lost in thought. When his heat leaves my skin, I rub my neck where his fingers were and my motions seem to snap him out of his daze. He looks me in the eyes and I don't know what I expected to see, but the dejected look he gives me was not it.

"Ryker?" I ask him, reaching out to hold his hand that is still lingering in the air above me. He looks lost and like he is in inexplicable anguish.

He swallows and takes a moment to respond. "I'm sorry I said those things," he looks away from me ashamedly. "I didn't mean it."

My face drops into a frown because he actually looks torn up about this when I was the one who asked him to make me mad enough to want to fight him.

"It wasn't true?" I ask hesitantly, wanting to be clear about which part was a lie.

"The things I said about you weren't true," he clarifies. Two months is a long time to lie to someone, and I feel like a complete fool for not noticing the signs earlier. It shows me that Javier wasn't the person I thought he was and that we clearly had different views of our relationship.

When trust is broken, it is an awful feeling.

A sinking feeling takes over my stomach so I start to cut myself off from feeling the emotions that are threatening to overwhelm me. I let the cold, loneliness seep into me since it is an easier pill to swallow than the creeping bitterness and fiery hatred. A partner shouldn't make someone feel this bad, and I need to be strong enough to realize that his decisions do not reflect on the type of person that I am.

Without the overwhelming emotions, I can think more clearly and decisively. If he was looking for pleasure in the arms of another, then it was a symptom of an underlying issue. There was nothing left in the relationship for me anymore, and while I wouldn't have preferred for it to end in such a messy way, I am certainly glad that it is over.

A breach of trust this large extends beyond the ramifications of the one relationship, and the effects from it will spill over into my relationships for years to come. I may look closer at my judgments of the people in my life and who I trust, but I will take it one step at a time and make sure that those that are around me are those that I am willing to do anything for. Those that I am willing to die for, those that will become like family to me.

I look into the sunflower eyes of the one who has helped keep me balanced in this new world of constant unknown variables, and I wonder to myself if Ryker is going to be one of the people that I would risk everything for.