Superior - Chapter 10

Chapter 10: Heart to Heart

The single overhead light of the MMA ring generated a sort of ethereal halo of light, beckoning me towards it. Jane had long since retreated back to the women’s locker room to return to her sexy gym getup, leaving me alone in a quiet gym to ponder my very existence. This was really happening. I was about to go toe-to-toe in the ring with my greatest rival.

I was tall, broad-shouldered and firm; she was small, hourglassed with enough sand to fill a desert and chubby in all the right spots. Other than the fact that I was fantasizing about her in my own analogies, my head was screwed on straight. I was firm on the side of logic and reasoning. So why did I fear the idea that I would lose?

It didn’t add up. But then again, when had it ever? She had bested me at every turn, in the projects, in the workplace, even at the gym with the bench press. But perhaps I had overcompensated my abilities in all of those fields. The MMA ring was not one of those cases. I was alpha-dog dominant once I had those gloves and exercise tape equipped. I had an undefeated win rate across my entire firm. Sure, I might lose if I ever considered making a career out of it, but I would most certainly get closer to the championship than Jane ever could.

The world skipped a beat as Jane returned in her familiar yet delightfully sensual getup. I was able to pull my eyes away from her massive, swinging breasts long enough to notice she didn’t have proper sparring gear. That, coupled with her sporting the same attire as opposed to my custom-fitted pants, clued me into a surefire victory. So, she’s a total newbie at this, huh? I thought to myself. This just gets better and better.

“Need to borrow some gloves and pads?” I asked, the j-curve of my smile bearing teeth.

“Yes, thank you. I don’t have any on me,” she replied with that same all-business composure.

My eyes never left hers as I quickly tossed shin guards, knee pads, hand wraps, headgear and a mouth guard. I expected her to drop at least one, but her expertly precise arms caught every single piece in one fell swoop, all without ever breaking eye contact or even flinching. I would then proceed to lose the unofficial staring contest between the two of us, me blinking twice in disbelief.

But I still had a leg-up on her. One final ace up my sleeve. One that would certainly embarrass Jane and throw her off her game before the round even began.

“Don’t forget your groin guard,” I added cheekily, dangling it in front of her face.

“What would I need that for?” Jane responded promptly. It took me a moment to realize what she meant by that, but once that moment passed, I quickly discarded the guard in shame.

“Fine, suit yourself,” I replied, trying to play it cool. Sure, her womanly parts may not be as sensitive, but it was still good etiquette to wear a groin guard. Any disadvantage to her was ultimately advantageous on my part, and while a portion of my brain was terrified of her beating me, a far chattier part of my brain wanted her absolute demolition by my superior fighting choreography to be as fair to both sides as possible. As willing to win as I may have been, the thought of cheap shots was absolutely not what I wanted.

Jane got suited up and I gestured towards her to bump my mitts so that the round could begin. Did she have no clue that was a proper round-starting procedure or was she silently making sure I was ready? I couldn’t tell anymore.

She was an enigma. But an enigma I was ready to pummel into the dirt.

We backed into our respective corners, eying each other down. My face has devolved into an all-out scowl, ready to finally set things straight. Jane just looked like her face-motor had glitched out to only show the same expression of cold collectiveness.

The invisible timer counted down to zero in both our heads, and we were off to the races. While Jane inched forward with a left-foot defensive approach, I dashed forward as fast as I could to instill fear within her, but she didn’t budge. That surprised me enough to screw up my entire approach, causing my stance to stutter a bit as I failed to account for her “deer in headlights” reaction. She immediately capitalized upon my error, faking me out with a punch to my head only to deliver a powerful jab to my side. She then finished with the promised punch to my face from earlier, only this time she didn’t whiff it.

I was taken off the offense, but immediately recuperated. My defense was my strong suit, after all. My first mistake was forgetting that when set to a task, Jane couldn’t be moved from it. She may have fear behind those emerald eyes, but none of it was reserved for this.

Okay then, you want fear? I’ll show you fear, Jane.

I mirrored a similar stance to hers, ready to counter anything she threw at me. While my initial approach may have netted me a few bruises, my quick start did offer me the positional advantage. Jane was backed into a corner, she had no choice but to try and reset to the middle if she wanted to begin pressuring me.

Needless to say, she had a strong posture for her first outing. Maybe it was because my reaction speed was slow on account of her massive bosom distracting me, but I was finding it rather challenging to keep tabs on her. She had good fundamental movement, never quite shifting her stance the same way twice. Getting a read on her seemed nigh impossible and she was utilizing her shorter stature to great effect.

Then, she actually went on offense.

She was a blur of amber flames, zipping and contorting around my strikes as if her true form was merely a mirage, and I was punching at fumes. My response timing was similarly impacted by her beauty, only made worse with every successive concussive punch she dealt to my helmeted head. The leeway space I had garnered from my explosive beginning was quickly being whittled away. Jane was slowly backing me into my corner from the other side of the ring.

How the fuck was this girl nervous when it came to being asked to dance just days earlier?

I managed to psyche her out with a well-timed dodge. I risked it all and went for a grapple, hoping to pin her down and finish the fight early. My hands successfully landed on her, only for it to be Jim all over again. She kneed me directly in the groin with a devastating strike. I may as well have not been wearing a guard there at all.

She then brushed my hands off of her like window curtains, only to crouch down and deliver a definitive uppercut to my exposed face. I collapsed like a timbering tree, crash-landing into the top turnbuckle and noisily smacking my head on every rope until being caught within the last one.

I didn’t get up. I wasn’t knocked unconscious, but I desperately wished I had been. The last thing I wanted was to be awake, defeated at the hands of a 19 year old who had clearly never been in the ring before.

She offered me her hand, but I didn’t take it.

“Are you going to be alright, John?” There was my name again, rolling off her tongue like she owned it—which she basically did at this point.

“H-how…?” Was all I could manage to blurt out.

“I simply recognized the weakness within your stature and-“

“No. How… are you… so good at everything?” I painfully admitted. At my lowest point, my pride and ego thoroughly trampled, I couldn’t keep making excuses for her vast superiority over me.

Then, the strangest thing happened. She popped a seat next to me, as if to level with my confusion. She rested her back on the rung above mine, that air of professionalism dropping as she literally took the weight off her shoulders, letting gravity slide off her hand-wraps.

“Do you remember how I froze up during that holiday party?”

Interesting place to start, but at this point if I wanted answers I had no choice but to play her game. “Because you were lonely?”

“Yes. I was lonely…” she then shot me an icy glare, “but not because I didn’t have a knight in shining armor to rescue me or anything.”

Ouch. I suppose I deserved that. She had me read like a book that night and apparently I was wrong about her true intentions.

“Then what was it? Why were you so lonely?”

She tensed up, evident through the sharp whine of the rubber rung as she squeezed it so hard her knuckles turned white. I wasn’t sure if she was going to give first or it was.

“Because, John… in that moment I saw that I had everything, and nothing all the same.”

“I’m… not sure I follow.”

“In the business world, you’re not allowed to show weakness. It’s a dog eat dog world. That’s what my mother always told me. When I expressed an interest in organizing at a young age, she quickly shipped me off to business school. I became hardened and walled-off, I had to be. I was a young woman in a man’s space. A quick punchline for water-cooler talk. I was ahead of my field and worked harder than anyone’s ever had to work to get where I am today.”

“Sounds to me like you got everything you could ask for,” I remarked, wondering where she could possibly go with this.

She sighed, sounding almost ashamed. “That’s just it. I did. I got exactly what I wanted. Right before that party, Carl somewhat casually mentioned that I was the top contender for senior VP. I should’ve been happy, but I felt nothing.”

I felt my breath get caught in my throat as I stifled a grimace. Though I was surprised I was able to stifle it. I should have been furious, this cutthroat bitch was sure to take it at this point. But looking into her glistening eyes revoked that point of view. She didn’t even want the position. Was it really her fault that she had been groomed into this situation by her mother?

“But I’ve been making mistakes, becoming more aggressive.” Jane continued, her remorseful face falling farther. “I tried my hardest to sway office opinion and become a revered member of the workforce, but I acted on impulse and now Jim’s side of Legal probably despises me. That’s the nature of this world. The same world that was going to eat Nadia alive if I wasn’t there to protect her.”

“Nadia? Your secretary?”

“...Yes.”

That was the most hesitant I had ever seen her. Even when emotional, her responses were always punctual and instant. Her rapid-fire brain knew how to deliver concise responses, but she had paused for a full two seconds before speaking.

She then turned her head and looked directly at me. I had never seen so much determination behind her glistening green irises.

“The truth is, John: I know what it’s like to see a woman so beautiful, so pristine, so perfect, so…” she trailed off. Her usual machine-like word delivery failed as her eyes became misty, clearly daydreaming about Nadia. “It’s that feeling… you become obsessed. You find you have to dedicate every part of your being to win them over. It’s like we’re back in the jungle, desperately doing mating dances to win over some semblance of a human connection.”

“I know you’re madly in love with me, John. This isn’t the usual workplace romance, you’ve dedicated every tool at your disposal to try and take me down. I probably haven’t left your head since I arrived at Curritech.” Her truth bombs left me devastated like the end of a world war on my mind. She was so thoroughly dissecting me I felt no different than a frog in a high school science class.

“And for a while, I thought I was better than you. Well, I was better than you, but I didn’t understand why you did what you did. How you could be my bitter, often-humiliated rival one day only to offer me to a dance the very next. But now I understand. Once my gaze fell upon Nadia, it all clicked for me. Her bre—her body hasn’t left my mind’s eye since it first caught her strutting down the hallway into work before that fateful meeting where we were paired up.”

I thought back to the time I had caught her pleasuring herself in the bathroom. Perhaps the only time I had seen her completely out of her element. I didn’t even think she knew about me knowing about that. She had even known about the camera somehow. That was the one time I had truly caught her out of her element, and it was all because she had the hots for her own secretary.

“And I know that if the chips are down, I’ll choose the senior VP job over Nadia in a heartbeat, even if the heart it came from is irreparably saddened because of it. I was at the top. I’m still at the top. I’ll climb further soon. It’s very lonely up here, and I don’t know how to do anything else but climb farther.”

The silence that followed was deafening. We broke our eye contact, letting the moment sink in for both of us. It was as if her grand realization had clicked for her the same time it had clicked for me.

It would be almost a whole minute before Jane finally broke the silence again. “Is that a satisfactory answer?”

I was dumbfounded. But her question seemed genuine, and I found that I did actually have a qualm to raise.

“So, are you telling me the reason you’re so…” I hesitated. The word I was looking for was “superior,” but I couldn’t bring my lips to utter it. “Uh, the reason that you’re such a hard worker is because—you work yourself to death?”

I wish I had just bit the bullet and said the word. My question appeared far clunkier without it.

“Well, I wouldn’t say that’s the only reason,” Jane replied, a hint of secrecy breaking though as she retrieved a photo from within her sports bra. Her paranoid green eyes darted back and forth, making absolutely sure that there was no one else around to witness what she was about to show me.

“I have my theories and my suspicions, but this is the only reason I can think of that explains everything.”

She held the photograph up to my face, though calling it two photos was perhaps more accurate. It was a side-by-side comparison of two different images. I didn’t even seem to notice the correlation at first.

But then when my mind finally connected the dots—my jaw dropped.