“Just heading back to New York.”
“Well, let me ask you something.” There’s something strange in his voice. I can’t quite figure out what he’s about to say, but I know this won’t be a casual question. “How well do you like Atlanta?”
“Well, it’s my hometown,” I answer. “Joe, not that I don’t love hearing from you, but what are you getting at?”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line
After a moment he says, “You’ve been traded, kid.”
His words crash through me.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Joe sounds apologetic. “The Yankees traded you to the Braves for one of their sluggers and three minor leaguers. Look, we’ll talk about it more when you get here. The Braves want to bring you home—”
I can’t believe this. They can’t do this to me. I’ve been a loyal Yankee my whole career. I wear the pinstripes with pride. I had twenty wins last year for God’s sake.
“Knox, it’s a done deal.” Joe sighs. “It’s the Atlanta fucking Braves. You’re going to be a star for them. Hell, you will probably be their number one starter. Look, we’ll talk when you get back.”
The line goes dead. I stare at my phone, frozen.
Traded.
I know it happens to almost every player, but I didn’t see it coming. It feels like a betrayal, like I just got thrown under the fucking bus.
But even as the disappointment and anxiety start crushing down on me, I can’t help but see a glimmer of a silver lining.
Atlanta.
I’ll be back and for longer than a layover. With my friends, a new team, and the red-hot woman I met last night.
I don’t have Shelby’s number, but I damn sure know where she lives.
Maybe this isn’t the end of the world, after all.
I’m coming home.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Knox and Shelby’s sexy story is just getting started. Look out for KNOX, coming 2016
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RYDER
CH. 1
There are two smells in the world I love more than any others: a woman right before sex and this warehouse right before a fight. They’re different, of course. There’s nothing like a naked, wet, waiting woman, the scent of her skin salty with sweat but sweet at the same time, like swimming through an ocean of roses. The warehouse’s odor is far less pleasurable, phantoms of last round’s knocked-out teeth, bruised faces, and aching bones making the air heavy, grimy, stifling, like the smell of fresh dirt. But both are thrilling and unpredictable and make me want to explode.
Even when it was me in the ring a few years ago, my ribs about to get punched, my knuckles about to crash into someone’s cheekbone, the smell of this place would intoxicate me. Facing off with a guy whose sole intention for the next several minutes is to pummel you into submission is as terrifying as it sounds. And as exhilarating. The policy of bare-knuckles brawls is no shirt, no shoes, big problem standing right across from you. But all I had to do to calm myself was take a big inhale of this warehouse air, let the molecules seep into my lungs, into my bloodstream, and I won every match.
I always win.
So tonight, after Crutcher beats Miller in an upset, a big win for me for sure, when Tyler tells me that some kid is in for $10,000 and has disappeared, I tell him he’s got to have it wrong. “I would never have let Jamie McEntire run up that kind of tab,” I say. “I’ve seen him around. I wouldn’t give him ten dollars, let alone ten thousand.” When I took over running fight night two years ago, I did a little cleanup from the mess my predecessor left. No five-or six-figure debts to people we don’t know, no credit to anyone who’s welched more than once. We may be an underground operation, but there are standards. There’s also a dress code: women in heels, men in collared shirts, and our crowd is the type who likes to drop a lot of money on both. We have security guards. The bartender will call you a cab if you get too drunk. I run a tight ship. Even the police think so. That’s why they don’t hassle me. Sometimes they even take a try in the ring.
Tyler shrugs. “It’s been gradual. Losses on a couple fights, loans to cover him,” he says. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But I double checked the ledger, and it adds up.”
“Fuck me,” I say, and a blond woman in high heels and a dress so tight she must not have exhaled all night turns toward us. She raises an eyebrow at me, smiles like she might take me up on the offer.
And with the way she wraps her mouth around the neck of that beer bottle, keeping her eyes locked on mine as she takes a drink, I might just let her.