Officer in Pursuit by Ranae Rose Read Free Book Online

phone. Now, here they
were.
    She could feel him sneaking occasional
glances at her, though she pretended not to notice.
    “Thanks.” Cora popped her mouthguard
out and grinned. “I’ve been practicing that for weeks. Shelly’s
been helping me.”
    They started again – there were still
two minutes left on the timer that dictated how long their rounds
went.
    Two minutes – it shouldn’t be hard to
keep her head in the match for that long.
    But it was. She had to resist the urge
to see what Grey was doing, whether he was looking her
way.
    It was stupid, especially considering
that—
    “Damn it!” A familiar voice
followed a sickening thunk , and Kerry’s heart skipped a
beat.
    She and Cora rolled to a stop. So did
several other people. An unusual stillness swept across the mats as
people stared at Grey and the other new guy.
    “Oh, no.” Kerry’s stomach tied itself
in knots. Grey was covered in sweat and blood. The sight sent a
bolt of guilt tearing through her like a barbed arrow.
    The wound seemed to be located at his
temple. Blood trickled down his cheek, and he cupped a hand at his
jaw to catch it. It’d already dripped onto the blue tatami
mats.
    Kerry hurried back to the bathroom and
grabbed a roll of paper towels off a shelf. This was her fault:
she’d invited Grey and now he’d gotten injured. He’d probably shown
up because of his interest in her, not jiu-jitsu. As she hurried to
clean up the worst of the blood, she felt like some kind of con
artist.
    Why hadn’t she just apologized and
then gotten off the phone?
    “What happened?” she asked, kneeling
on the mats beside Grey. She handed him a few paper towels, which
he pressed to his head.
    He frowned. “Some other guys rolled
into us by mistake. Got a nice face full of foot and hit my head on
that.” He pointed toward the edge of the mat, where a narrow wooden
border no higher than the mat itself held everything in
place.
    “Sorry, man.” A tall guy who’d been a
regular long before Kerry had started BJJ stood and offered Grey a
hand. “Didn’t see you.”
    Grey accepted the assistance and
stood, knuckles flecked red against the bloody wad of paper towels
he held against his temple. “It’s all right.”
    Except it wasn’t. It was normal for
head wounds to bleed a lot, but still – Kerry got the creeping
feeling Grey would need stitches.
    “Come on,” she said, laying a hand on
Grey’s arm, “I’ll drive you to the emergency room.”
    “No need,” Grey said. “It’s just a
little cut.”
    “Let me see.”
    “Let me get off the mats.”
    Everyone had stopped moving and was
staring at the mini train wreck that was Grey’s injury.
    “I’ll get this.” An instructor
appeared, and he didn’t look happy. He sprayed disinfectant
liberally where Grey had bled on the mat. “He’s your boyfriend,
right? Go get him checked out. Might need stitches, or have a
concussion.”
    Heat flared in Kerry’s cheeks, and it
didn’t have anything to do with her recent roll with Cora. She
mumbled something about driving him to the hospital and
half-dragged Grey off the mats. She took a minute to change as
quickly as she could back into shorts and a t-shirt, stuffing her
sweaty gi into her gym bag.
    Afterward, Grey didn’t want to go to
the emergency room. Kerry managed to get him as far as the parking
lot.
    “Don’t make me use my jiu-jitsu to get
you into the car.” It was an empty threat, but she didn’t have any
good serious ones – not for someone his size.
    “Ha.” He dropped the hand he held the
wadded-up paper towels in, and blood trickled down his cheek again.
“Go ahead. You can use your jiu-jitsu on me anytime.”
    She pointed at her car’s side mirror.
“Look at yourself. You’re bleeding everywhere.”
    He bent down and squinted at his
reflection in the passenger-side window. “It probably looks worse
than it is.”
    “Then why do you look
sick?”
    “Because I feel like
puking.”
    “Afraid of blood?”
    “No.