She ended the call and finished making her tea.
Then she stood at the counter and didn’t drink it.
Finish Gear. Holy fuck.
*****
Six months out from a fight, Mila’s training was more about study than practice. She still worked out at least two hours every day, in addition to her morning run—and possibly excluding any trips to Los Angeles to meet with corporate suits about endorsement deals—but most of her time was spent sitting in the little screening room at Cap City, watching footage of her opponent—not just her fights but the promo footage the league did of any training, all her interviews, interviews with her coaches, even press day bullshit. And any other kind of news there might be. It was important for a fighter to know the mind as well as they knew the body of their opponent.
MMA fighting was violent, definitely. Fighters were often covered in blood at the end of a hard bout, and there were considerably fewer rules regarding what was fair game in the cage than in any other combat sport. She’d seen fighters with an eye half popped from its socket, with their lips literally half torn off their face, with their lower jaw hanging loose. Broken bones, dislocated joints, gashes in the head that cascaded blood. But toughness wasn’t enough. Strategy was key.
Mila knew all that and took it seriously, but the ‘school’ part of training camp drove her nuts, frankly. Sitting still, staring at a screen, taking notes, stopping to discuss, playing a bit over and over and over—god, it made her skin crawl. She wanted to be in the damn cage. Even drills. Shit, even the slip rope was better than watching film—which was Bobby called it, because he was an old man still clinging to an analog world. Footage hadn’t been on film, or tape, in years, but according to him, when you went into the screening room, you were ‘watching film.’
Bettina Lewison held black belts in both karate and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. She was an excellent grappler and a strong striker. But she had a glass chin and bled super easily. She won with speed and grace on her feet and sinewy flexibility on the ground, but if you could get inside and land some solid punches to her face, there was a good chance she’d spend the rest of the fight with blood streaming in her eyes—and if you could get her chin with a solid strike, she was going down.
She was a hothead, in and out of the cage. In reality, Bettie was a pretty nice person, but she had skin like tissue paper—her psyche bled as easily as her body. She got pissed at any kind of question with the slightest kiss of challenge or criticism, and she took the weigh-in face-offs seriously, carrying massive chips into the cage every fight. When she lost, it was because her opponent got in her head and pissed her off. Once she lost her cool, she’d start throwing punches, which were not her best tool.
Punching was Mila’s best tool. She had black belts in krav maga and muay thai and a brown belt in aikido, and she had some strong classic wrestling game, too, but punching was what she loved best.
She’d made a big splash when she’d first joined the league because she was so small for her weight class. At just shy of five-one, she was assumed by just about everyone to be a strawweight. And, naturally, she was.
Before she’d started fighting, she’d held fairly steady at a hundred and five. Tiny and skinny was a dangerous combination, which she knew from bitter experience. That bitterness of her experience had led her to Cap City and as much muscle and strength as she could get on her body.
Thor Vaduva, a former light-heavyweight on the Cap City team and now Mila’s favorite trainer, called her a ‘tiny tank.’ Sometimes he even said it like a name.
It was her favorite nickname ever. She wished she’d gotten it before she was ‘Crazy Cat’—a name she’d gotten because she stayed home alone so much, Bobby teased her that she was turning into a crazy cat lady.
She’d had only Arya and Sansa at the time. Hardly a hoarding situation.
Bobby loved the alliteration of Camila ‘Crazy Cat’ Castro. Mila thought it sucked ass, but at the time she’d been too excited to be getting a fight name at all, so she’d let it ride, and here she was. Crazy Cat. Awesome.
Right now, in April, three months after her latest fight and six months before her next, she weighed one-fourteen. But by October, she’d add at least five or six more pounds of muscle and weigh in at around one-twenty, hopefully a little bit more. Flyweight.
She was always the shortest in the cage, height and reach both, which looked on paper like significant disadvantages. But she was quick and agile, and her punches came in fast and hard. Her first opponents hadn’t known that until she was punching them fast and hard.
Her first few fights, she’d dominated, finishing with true or technical knockouts in four consecutive bouts. She’d skyrocketed up the rankings and caught the notice of the league. But then her opponents started watching her film, and she wasn’t so surprising anymore. She lost twice in a row as her opponents’ strategies adjusted to address her chief strengths—if they could keep her at a distance, she couldn’t get anything good in.
So Mila started adding new tools—taking her martial arts training more seriously, advancing through the belts, learning better moves to get under her opponents and get close, where she could beat their shit. After she finished her next fight—down card on a pay-per-view night—thirty-four seconds into the first round, a match that got declared the ‘fight of the night,’ she got her first main card bout.
That was a win. January, her second time on the main card, had been a loss. If she lost in October, she’d probably drop low enough in the rankings to be passed over for future main card bouts.
That was not going to fucking happen.
So she studied the fucking film on Bettina Lewison. That bitch was going down.
*****
With the notable, and notably pleasant, exception of Darion’s call about her exciting new endorsement opportunity, it was a nice, predictable Monday. Mila spent the morning watching film and talking initial strategy and planning with Bobby, Thor, Amos, and Tyrone. Then she went home for a couple hours for lunch and to let Norm out and give him and the kitties some love.
Since she fought up a class from her natural weight, Mila never had to cut. That did not, however, mean she could eat anything she wanted. Even when she wasn’t prepping a bout, she liked to keep her BMI low and her muscle tone high. So she avoided sweets for the most part, was careful with carbs, and ate a fuck ton of protein, fruits, and vegetables. Her one fairly consistent cheat was bread. She loved bread too much to set it aside completely, so there was usually at least a roll in her daily menu. Preferably sourdough.
For this lunch, she made herself a grilled chicken breast with avocado and tomato on a slice of sourdough toast and two hard-boiled eggs. And drank a liter of water with it.
Norm sat beside her chair and made sad eyes at her while she ate, but she ignored him, even when a thick glob of drool oozed from his jowls and he whimpered, really selling it. He got his good food at dinner time.
But she did put some peanut butter dog treats in his Kong before she went back out.
Shani wasn’t yet earning enough in the cage to support herself, so she worked part-time at Sephora, and she was working today, so Mila meant to run a few errands before she headed back to Cap City, and put off her day’s workout until her friend got there later in the afternoon.