Tornado (18+)

3- Paisley

I won't lie, I've been a hot mess since leaving Fight or Flight. All thoughts have been consumed with Castleford and Tez Blackwell. I can't help myself. As soon as I left my fathers' office, I canceled my appointment with my bank manager and called an emergency I-need-fucking-help meeting with Bailey instead. She's always my voice of reason whenever I enter scatterbrain mode.

Bailey and I met at the stars and stripes nail bar on Bromley High Street four years ago. We often joke about the way we started talking, but for me at the time, it was mortification at its finest. I'd had both of my credit cards declined. The mandarin lady serving me wasn't impressed; causing a scene for everyone to witness and threatened to remove all my new nails if I didn't cough up the thirty-five-pounds I owed.

Tears of shame rolled down my cheeks as I tried to get in contact with both parents and my brother to bail me out, but to no avail. I was on the verge of admitting defeat and allowing the she-bitch in front of me to remove them when an angel from heaven came to my rescue and handed over her credit card.

Bailey Marshall. My savior.

When Bailey refused to take the money the next time I bumped into her at the nail bar, I took her out to lunch and threw in a few pink gins instead to thank her for her generosity. And that's how our friendship formed. At nearly six feet tall with a Kardashian-esque figure and grey ombre hair, you'll be forgiven for thinking she's just stepped out of a fashion magazine, but get on the wrong side of her, and boy will you know about it. Her bite is definitely worse than her bark.

Like the time she threw paint stripper all over Steve's Mercedes because he stood her up two nights in a row without explanation. Or the time she open fired the pressure washer on the window cleaner because she overheard him making vulgar innuendo's about her. He fell from his ladder breaking a leg and fracturing his wrist. Karma she'd said.

Lucien thinks she's a little unhinged. I think she's the sister I never had.

"This had better be good, Paisley, I've had to re-arrange my Brazilian wax for this."

Bailey strides through my front door dressed in long black boots and a purple jumpsuit. She drops her handbag to the floor and takes up her usual place in my lounge - the bucket chair by the window so she can 'people watch' as she calls it.

"It's life or death so of course, it's good."

Her long black lashes flutter rapidly as she pins me to the couch with an impatient stare. I turn my laptop around and show her the glorious technicolor photograph of Tez. His toned biceps and legs are holding his body steady at the foot of a rock-climbing wall. He's beaming towards the camera, clear blue eyes hypnotic, broad shoulders, and sculpted arms carved from the gods. Not the physique of the lad I remember. Now he's all man.

As soon as I'd gotten home earlier, I turned into a detective sleuth and googled the shit out of Mr. Blackwell. I made notes of his short MMA history, saved as many photographs as I could find and copy and pasted the few interviews I'd found into a word document.

The only social media account I could find for him was Instagram, where he'd been documenting the last year of his career in photographs. I'd made a side note of the four blondes, a brunette, and the red head he was all over in some of them. I titled that section as 'skanks.'

As I sank a large glass of wine, I told myself this was all in the name of research for my father and not about the boy of my teenage fantasies.

"Now that's what I refer to as a sex god. I bet he'd do some damage in the bedroom. Who is he?"

"His name is Terence Blackwell, Tez for short. I used to live opposite him before I moved here."

Bailey's peach tinted lips turn up into a smile. "Oh, Christ. Please tell me you shagged him before you left?"