April
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The Sig roared in my hand, bucked, my finger working the trigger so fast the two booms seemed almost to be one. My eyes processed the holes appear in the paper silhouette downrange, and I sprinted to the next stage, fought to keep my hammering heart rate from jerking my aim all over.
Boomboom boomboom boomboom
Three more targets perforated, and I sprinted off to the next station.
I got my scores upon returning to the spectator area. As I suspected, just a little bit better than the middle of the pack. I don't endeavor to be the fastest gun in the west, but I do like knowing that among the competitive shooters in the city, I'm better than average for my class. By the end of the day, I'd probably have dropped a hair, but I placed what to my mind was well.
Well enough to accurately dispatch Morgan Skolnich if it came to that.
I grabbed a bottle of water from the refreshment table, gave it to Jessie, and she chugged it while waiting for the course to be reset. The competition was coed, organized alphabetically, but Don let Jessie shoot immediately me despite having a completely different last name. She handed the bottle back to be and did jumping jacks, wrung out her hands. "Wish me luck."
"You don't need it."
She grinned, and someone from the firing line called "Next up" and she pressed her lips to mine for a brief kiss, then sprinted away.
I turned to Sienna. "Seriously, this is what you wanted for your birthday?"
It was a warm day in April, unseasonably warm actually, with just the barest hint of a cool breeze chilling exposed skin. I'd been overjoyed at the chance to get out and run and gun this early in the year, and Jessie had suggested checking with Don to see if he was running any competitions this month.
He was, and the two of us had signed up. Unlike the other shooters here, we weren't dressed in Under Armor cold-weather gear, weren't carrying several thousand dollars in race guns. We wore street clothes and competed with what we carried. Because to my mind, there wasn't any other point.
Sienna had a birthday this month, and when Jessie has asked her what she wanted - a trip to a spa perhaps, or gift certificates to clothing stores or restaurants - the blonde had thought for only a moment before saying she wanted to spend the day with us.
Well, ok then.
So here she stood at the back of the range, Jane alternately balanced on her hip or holding her hand at her side, the little girl looking comically undersized with a giant set of ear protection on her head.
"Absolutely." The blonde's voice was distorted by the electronic speaker in the earphones - magnifying quiet noises, dampening loud - but the smile on her face was unmistakable. She'd been in a bit of a funk ever since Trey, and it was nice to see her out and enjoying life. "It's nice to get out and do something besides work."
I knelt down by her daughter. "And where do you want to go for lunch when this is all over?"
The little girl chewed on her lower lip and thought for a moment.
"Someplace really grown up where you have to sit really still and quiet as you eat your Brussel sprouts?"
She wrinkled her nose and giggled, shook her head. "Nuh-uh."
"Somewhere with really gross food like dog kibble?"
"No! Silly!"
"McDonald's?"
Jane nodded so vigorously I had to reposition her ear protection and then buried her face against the leg of her mom's jeans. I straightened. "Gotta manage expectations."
Booms started echoing from downrange, and I stood on tiptoes to try and get a look at Jessie over the crowd in the way.
"I'm still surprised you wanted to come HERE," I told Sienna."Have you shot since the cabin?"
She blushed, thought back. "Once or twice with Morgan? I just wanted to do something else, something grown-up, with some adults."
"You wanna try it out? At the end, they've got a beginner's run."
That earned me a chuckle. "Maybe next time. I'd need some, any practice before I'd wanna give that a shot. Literally."
When Jessie came trotting back a few minutes later, she was breathing hard, and she gave me a look of wild joy and jumped up into my arms, wrapping herself around me like a spider. "Better time than yours!"
I laughed and squeezed her. "That's my girl."
###
After lunch - McDonald's for Jane - I cleaned our guns and equipment, changed into workout clothes, and started lifting. Jessie joined to spot me, and I spent almost as much time ogling her in athletic shorts and a sports bra as I did actually lifting. Once I was done with the bench, we traded off, the smaller woman tackling her own reps.
I don't think she was eyeing me as much as I had her - her headphones were in and there was a look of concentration on her face as she muscled the bar up and down in a controlled, methodical manner.
Next was flat flies, and we took turns on the bench, arms out to the sides, pulling the dumbbells vertical and then lowering them again as the ache built in our muscles. I looked up at a soft knock on the door, and Sienna stuck her head around the jam. "Can I join you?"
Jessie sat up and removed an earbud, smiled. "C'mon in."
The blonde moved hesitantly into the room, looking around. "I'm never in here except for cleaning," she told us. "You've got a really nice setup here."
"Possibly the single safest room in the house," I boasted. "When we built this place I had the floor under this room reinforced for all of the extra weight it'd be carrying."
"Nice. So... What are you guys all doing?"
I split off from the girls do to my own lifting, working up the ascending weights of my squats, abandoning the rack a few reps before my max so Jessie and Sienna could do some low intensity squatting. My gothic lover giggled when I gave her a disapproving grimace at being forced to abandon my workout early.
I moved on to the deadlift, and in the time it took me to work up to my sweating, straining maximum, the girls had moved on from squats to the pull-up bar across the room. I eye-fucked Jessie as she worked out - admiring the way the muscles under her back and arms flexed and stretched, the sheen of sweat on her skin, the swing of her short, black ponytail against her pale neck. Dammit, she was a pretty girl.
I retrieved a set of heavy dumbbells and began working on my clean and press station, preferring the individual weights to a bar for anything I hosted over my head. More isolation, more difficult. Sienna was holding the heavy bag for Jessie by the time my arms were a feeling like jello, and I watched as the gothic-looking woman worked the canvas over with punches, elbows, knees, and low kicks, dancing backward and then exploding forward to unload a combo of meticulous fundamentals.
Good girl.
Considering the wobbling state of my arms for a minute, I grabbed my MMA gloves, pulled them on, and headed over to the bag. "Can I rotate in?"
Jessie looked over at me, a sweaty flush on her skin, the ferocity in her eyes dissipating as her attack was interrupted. "I'm almost done, then sure."
"Please, finish. I'm just gonna wait and suck down all the oxygen in the room." My water bottle was against the wall, and I crossed to it, guzzled, felt like I was drowning, quite possibly because I preferred breathing to hydrating.
The bag shook all the way up to the ceiling as Jessie closed with it in a flurry of punches, hammered it with elbows and knees before retreating with a kick that would've broken an assailants knee. She stood, breathing hard, and gave me her trademark feral grin "Now I'm done."
I stepped over and pulled her into a quick, smelly hug. "That looked great. Good job."
She watched from the sidelines and sucked down water as I put in a similar workout. I concentrated on quick jabs and powerful elbows. If I was going to close the distance with someone for a physical attack, I wanted to overwhelm them. The bag rocked and my fists burned and Sienna struggled to hold it steady for me.
Jessie walked over and put a hand on my shoulder. I'm gonna go downstairs and get more water, try to cool down. See, I'm assuming Jane is playing in the living room?"
Sienna stepped away and checked her phone. McKenna had loaded the same software onto her phone as ours, and as long as there was a tablet or laptop front-facing camera facing the little girl, we'd get an alert when she left its field of view. A smile crept across the blonde's face. "Yeah, she's still down there."
"Awesome. I'll check in with her."
My lover gave me a peck on the cheek and headed out, and as soon as Sienna resumed holding the bag steady, I picked up my thunderous assault.
I quit when I felt like I could not physically throw another punch. The workout had stressed my limbs, and the literally dozens of hits I'd landed on the bag made my arms feel like spaghetti. "You want to go?" I asked Sienna.
She shrugged, chuckled. "I don't know how to hit anything, but sure."
"Let me show you?" I got her to imitate my stance, showed her how to throw basic hooks and jabs, and then stepped to the side to steady the bag. She punched it experimentally as if testing to see if it was solid, if it would hurt her hands through a borrowed pair of Jessie's gloves.
It apparently didn't hurt at all, because she started wailing on the canvas, arms working like a sewing machine, abandoning the beginner's techniques I'd shown her in favor of just straight up beating the shit out of the equipment. Her fists hammered the bag with a machine-gun rhythm, rocking it slightly in my grip.
Sienna stepped back, breathing hard, full breasts heaving under her t-shirt, skin flushed with exertion. She swallowed hard and ground her teeth, and something tightened in her face, some angry, unhappy emotion that she was fighting to master. "This feels good."
"I'm...glad," I said cautiously.
She stepped forward again to start bashing on the bag, slamming it over and over and over, short blonde hair swinging around her pretty, determined face.
Another step back and she wiped her forearm over her eyes to clear the sweat. She avoided my gaze when I tried to make eye contact.
"See, are you ok?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. This is good, this is a WORKOUT."
"Not what I meant."
"Why wouldn't I be?" She returned to firing shots into the heavy bag, low hooks that rocked it in my grip, high jabs that barely moved it.
