Fix You: Bash and Olivia by Christine Bell Page A

standard toe touches and whatnot.
    It wasn’t easy. Every move he made highlighted another section of his body I hadn’t fully admired yet. After the first minute, I decided to keep my gaze locked on the floor until this part was over. Surely once we got to the nitty and the gritty, I’d be too focused to notice the way his chest tapered down to a lean waist that surely led to one of those sexy V’s of muscle that I’d only seen on television.
    When we finished, he took a second to dig through the bag and came up with some worn black mitts. “First thing I want to do is make sure you know how to throw a punch. Not because it’s your best defense. It’s not.” He leaned in and held out a clenched fist. “But sometimes it’s a gut reaction, and if you’re going to do it, you should do it right or you can really hurt yourself.”
    I held my arm out and mimicked him, squeezing my fingers together to form a tight ball.
    “Nope, loosen up a little.” He took my hand and the touch was electric. We both stayed there, frozen for second, but he recovered quickly and tapped my thumb lightly. “Not to the side like that. Cross it over your index and middle fingers.”
    I swallowed hard and did as he told me, earning a low grunt of approval.
    He let me go, stepping back, and I felt instantly bereft. I didn’t have time to think too hard about it, though, because then it got serious. He tugged on the mitts and patted them together, bending at the knee until he was almost my height. “Don’t punch hard for now. Just try to be accurate and fast, okay?”
    I nodded, the nerves kicking up butterflies in my stomach. What if I sucked at it? I took a halfhearted swing, and hit his left mitt with a pathetic thunk .
    He stood straight and gave me a deadpan stare before hunkering down again. “Be for real. Snap the arm out, and try to connect with your first two knuckles. They have the most structural and wrist support so you get more power from them, and those bones are also way less likely to break on impact.”
    Well, that was an excellent tip, because the last thing I wanted was to punch someone who was trying to hurt me and wind up hurting myself.
    I tried as he asked, still feeling self-conscious and tentative. A few minutes later, though, under his soft words of encouragement, I started to let it rip, just whaling away. It was both exhausting and cathartic and I loved every second of it. I would’ve kept going but he straightened and stepped back.
    “Good enough. It takes a lot of stamina so don’t overdo it. We’re not trying to make a boxer out of you, although with that kind of speed, you’ve got some great tools for it.”
    My already sweat-dampened skin warmed with pleasure at the compliment as he yanked the mitts off and tossed them on the floor.
    “What we want to focus most of our attention on is doing exactly enough to get out of a bad situation. You’re small. You’re not built to whoop anybody’s ass, and that’s okay. You just need to disarm them long enough to get the fuck out of there, okay?” His gaze was serious and he seemed unwilling to look away until I answered what I’d thought was a rhetorical question.
    “Yeah, got it,” I said and bent at the waist to suck in a breath. Boxing was hard. I couldn’t imagine doing that round after round. Nobody would have to punch me. They’d just need a little patience. After ten minutes, I’d fall to the floor all on my own.
    “One of the most important things to remember about basic self-defense is to go for the soft spots. Eyes, neck, or balls, if you’ve got a shot at ‘em.”
    He demonstrated several moves. A knee to the groin, eye gouging, and then he showed me how to slam the heel of my hand into someone’s nose.
    Bash stood still and let me practice on him. I’d gotten comfortable with several of the moves, and was about to run through them again when he abandoned the statue routine and rushed at me. His hand came up like he was going to