Page 2 of Caged

“Barely,” Jack said, taking a dig at his younger brother. “Didn’t the Marines teach you that on time is late?”

“They did.” I answered, drawing Jaden’s attention.

He did a double take when he noticed my black eye.

“What tbe hell happened to you?”

I didn’t have time to answer before AJ asked, “Dude, you share an office. How the hell didn’t you notice before now?”

Jaden cringed at the question. “I was busy working.”

What he didn’t say was, in an attempt to avoid conflict, we ignored each other as much as possible when we were in our office. It irritated me to no end that he couldn’t act like aprofessional, instead he acted like a brat mumbling comments about my organized desk, lunch habits, and work methods.

Just yesterday he’d given me shit for thinking.

“Must you do that?” His voice thick with irritation.

“Do what?”

“Tap your pen like that?”

Tap my pen, on my chin? How much noise could I be making? “How does this,” I tapped my pen on my chin, “annoy you?”

He turned, giving me a dirty look as he answered. “The tap tap tap is annoying.” He accented each tap with a slap on his desk.

“Fine. I’ll stop.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

I hadn’t realized how often I tap my pen against my chin while thinking until he called me out for doing it again. He huffed and walked out, saying, “I can’t work like this.”

Back in the present, Doug said, “Apparently, the Marine Corp doesn’t teach their spec ops guys to be aware of their surroundings.” As the only Air Force veteran, he took advantage of the few opportunities he had to make fun of the other branches.

“Watch it, Sharpe,” John said, defending the Marines. The branch he, Jaden, and I had in common.

“Even we learned that, and we were Army infantry,” Jack said while fist bumping AJ, celebrating their shared time in the trenches.

“Let’s get to work,” John said in his fun-killing tone.

Protocol was for us to work out for thirty minutes to warm up before sparring.

I snagged one of the two treadmills, grateful Jaden’s entry had taken the focus off me and my black eye.

AJ grabbed the other one. “You ready for another ass kicking?” he asked.

Unlike the stick-up-their-ass dickheads I’d worked with at the FBI, AJ’s energy was more frat boy, military brotherhood than corporate sexism.

I held onto the anger that always surfaced when I thought about my former co-workers, knowing it’d serve me well on the mat.

When it was time to face off, John pulled Jaden’s name from the hat. When no one volunteered to be his first challenger John picked a second name.

Mine.

Not for the first time, I noticed the tattoos covering Jaden’s arms. The short sleeves of his tight t-shirt showed off more of his inked up, muscled arms than I normally saw. Giving me an eye full of art to appreciate. The only color, at least that I could see, was the American flag on his right upper arm. It was a reversed, or fighting forward, flag military personnel wore on the right arm of their uniforms. Among the black and white art on his left bicep was the Marine Ranger insignia.

I put my guard in my mouth and strapped on my headgear.Focus. Tonight wasn’t just the first time Jaden and I would spar, it was the first time any of us would see him on the mat. No one doubted he’d be hard to beat, having just returned from the Special Forces and still in a fighting mindset. Not to mention, full of piss and vinegar.

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