“It might be cheesy, but it definitely pumps you up,” Liam pointed out.
“Fucking told you bitch, didn’t I?” said Tommy, smirking. Kieran grinned at me, and I gave him a rare grin back. We all felt it. We were the underdogs, the misfits, the castoffs who wouldn’t amount to anything. Temple had state-of-the-art training facilities, and we had the Rocky soundtrack and a beat-up old gym. But we had each other. We had the fire and the drive to win, to succeed. I wasn’t alone in this. We were brothers, and we were bringing it to the fucking table.
*
The first day of serious training is always the worst. I was always in good shape but a few weeks of eating takeaway food and Em’s baking had taken its toll. The six-pack never went anywhere but my body knew the difference. My diet was so strictly regimented I didn’t dare even open one of the tins at home for fear I’d be licking cake crumbs out of desperation. I was up at 5 a.m. and running by 5:30. A five-mile jog started off the day, followed by bag work, circuits, core training, sparring, and more running. I landed more punches an hour than I cared to count. Danny pushed me to the absolute limit of what I ever imagined my body could do.
The worst part was the mental game. Every day he waited for me to quit, to tell him that I’d had enough and needed to rest, and every day I took pleasure in disappointing him. I came pretty close a few times to caving. There were days when my arms hurt so much that I could barely lift them. I had enough energy at the end of the day to stand under the blissfully hot spray of the shower, and I let water and gravity do the rest. There were times when Em came into the shower with me. These were painful and pleasurable in equal measure. She’d massage her fingers gently into my scalp, making me groan. Despite the fact that I could barely stand some days, my cock apparently hadn’t received the memo that energy was in short supply. Every single time she stood in the shower next to me, water beading down those beautiful pale tits of hers, my cock was rock hard. After staring hard at her gorgeous body, I succumbed once and sucked one of her pert, pink nipples into my mouth and hated myself for it. I was seconds away from sinking my dick inside her and damning the consequences when, with a moan of complaint, she reminded me of the sex ban.
This time Danny had imposed it from the first day of training, and I swear to God, he knew when I’d so much as thought about sex. The day after I’d copped a feel with Em, he pushed me harder than ever before, scowling the whole time. I swear to Christ he acted as though Sunshine really was his daughter. I tried really, really hard not to be naked with Em again or to watch her bend over or brush her hair or laugh or do any one of a million fucking things that turned me on when it came to my wife.
When it came to my training, Em was as fierce as Danny. Maybe more so. He’d created a monster. Although she’d been back at school for a while now, there were often days where her classes would finish at three or four and she’d head straight for the gym just in time to see me hit the mental wall of pain that every athlete hits at some point in his training. That point where you feel like everything is about to shut down and you just can’t go on. Around four o’clock every day was that time for me. And my cure? The one thing that got me past the pain barrier? Sunshine.
“Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five…” Earnshaw called out the numbers as I repeated each hanging sit-up. My legs hooked over the back of the crossbar and my hands behind my head meant that I was completely upside down between each sit-up. I’d done fifty this morning at the start of training, no problem. Now I felt like puking.
“Forty-six, forty-seven…” that quiet, gentle voice I’d know anywhere took over the count and I no longer thought about the pain. I thought about impressing my wife. What was she wearing? How had her day been?
“Forty-eight, forty-nine…” With me still upside down, she gently held my head and kissed me deeply. With Em there, everything was instantly better. Unhooking myself from the bar, I dropped down and kissed hard, telling her without words just how much I missed her. Once upon a time, Danny had frowned on having Em in the gym. Once he realized how much of a motivator she was, she became a permanent fixture. Now it was an unspoken rule that I had five minutes alone with my wife when she arrived. It was precious little of the day to be spending together but I’d take whatever I could get when it came to Em.