I underestimated him—mentally. I knew better than to underestimate him physically.
Rubbing my shoulder where it had impacted the wall instead of the mat, which was what I got for not paying attention, I grumbled, “Sneaky bastard.”
Folding his arms, not a bead of sweat on him, he looked down at me with raised eyebrows. “Would you like to tell me what you did wrong with that particular move? Everything. Every single thing you did was utterly wrong.”
“Isn’t it usually?” I rolled from my side to my back, making no effort to get back to my feet. The sparring area of our converted garage apartment was generally the most humbling place around for me. Nik was right. If I stopped using the gates as first line of defense or offense—offensive on so many levels—that was me. If I did stop and then went sideways in the worst possible way, he could handle me—the same way he was handling himself now. With perfect ease.
Nik was good. Fine. Better than I’d begun to hope back at the restaurant.
I, conversely, wasn’t doing such a bang-up job. Unless you counted the banging-into-the-wall part of the workout.
His eyes narrowed as he studied me. “You’re thinking. When you should be thinking, you don’t. When you shouldn’t be, you do. Research puts you in a virtual coma. There have been times I’d have been tempted to check your pulse if I couldn’t see your drool spreading over my antique books. And this”—his bare toe prodded the bottom of mine—“should be pure muscle memory by now, but your brain is bouncing so hard inside your skull that you ran into a wall simply because I stepped out of the way.”
Flipping me over his shoulder—hell, nearly over his damn head—was not “stepping out of the way.” But in our version of a sparring routine it was close enough to the truth that I let it slide.
Crouching next to me, he swatted the side of my head. I’d been thinking all right and as usual Nik knew what about. “Do not be an idiot, little brother. You’re still you. You told me you needed my help to keep you that way. I should’ve listened. I didn’t, not like you needed me to. Now I know. I’m not humoring you any longer and that means I’ll make damn certain you will stay Cal. Now and always.” His lips quirked fondly as he gave me a light pat to the chest. “The once and future king of smart-ass.”
Knowing the truth and feeling exactly the same about me, wasn’t that better than denial? Hell, yes. It was the best. If you got that in your lifetime from anyone, you were damn lucky. Feeling an ugly knot of bristling barbed wire unwind itself in me, I grinned up at him. “You’re getting your feelings all over me. It’s disgusting.”
“There are many times, uncountable really, that I’ve mentally replaced you in this scenario, Caliban. You can’t imagine.” Robin had drifted silently, as always, through our locked door to lean against the concrete wall and watch us.
“You’re right. I can’t imagine. Don’t want to imagine. Your fantasies have to have been banned by the Geneva Conventions as psychological torture.” I sat up. “And even you can’t find being smacked and lectured a turn on.”
The smirk was so rapacious I could see the neon XXX pop up over his head like in an old Acme cartoon . . . with an added huge dash of porn. “Do you think I’ve not been so naughty in my life that I didn’t deserve some discipline?”
The images of Catholic uniforms, rulers, the principal’s office—basically every porno cliché I’d seen in my life with the addition of Goodfellow and my brother shut down my brain instantly. For my own protection. Minutes later when it rebooted or whatever computers do when you turn them off and then back on after kicking them viciously, I was still sitting on the mat and Niko and Robin were talking about Jack.
“No,” the puck was saying. “I’ve had no luck. The paien community wants nothing to do with him. They’ve a good track record of they leave him alone and he sticks to humans for the entire skinning and horrific deaths situation. If they knew anything, which they don’t, they wouldn’t help. They’re quite big on survival instinct.”