Knockout Read Online Free Page A

dad reminded me for the millionth time.
    “I know, I know. My lips are forever sealed.”
    “Good.”
    “Does Kellen know we’re here?”
    “He knows I was goi ng to try and bring you, yeah. I think he was more excited about you coming than about the match.”
    I felt a glow in my cheeks. “Well, he already knows he’s going to win.”
    “Tell that to his opponent.”
    I looked where he was staring and I saw what he meant. The guy looked huge.
    Kellen was a big guy himself, tall and pushing 175 pounds of muscle and lean meat. He was in the upper tiers of the Middleweights. He told me he was only three pounds away from landing in the Light heavyweights and he did not want that. If he went up to that class, he’d be the small guy going against the Goliaths. It’s not that he was scared of fighting them, it was just better strategically for him to be the Goliath if he could manage it. And he spent a lot of time and focus managing it.
    I hadn’t understood how much training, time and thought actually went into hitting a guy for three rounds. Not until Kellen laid it all out for me one afternoon.
    “I run five miles a day, five days a week,” he’d said, making my jaw drop. He grinned at my reaction. “I have to watch what I eat. I make sure I eat a lot of protein to build muscle from my workouts, but I have to be careful not to put on too much muscle weight. I’m toeing the line of my weight class as it is. After running, I jump rope for about forty-five minutes to keep my legs strong. Then I hit the heavy bag until my shoulders and arms are mush.”
    “That’s insane.”
    “That’s not all. After that warm-up—“
    “Warm-up?!”
    He laughed. “That’s to get me ready. At this point, I haven’t even entered the ring yet. Once I’m in, it’s sparring with my coach and one of the other guys he’s working with.”
    “How do you have time for all of that on top of school and everything else?”
    He shrugged. “I make it work. Being at the gym is better than being home. I’ve been slacking lately, though. I need to step it up.”
    I felt sick in my stomach. Guilty. “You mean you’ve been tutoring me and that’s taking up your time.”
    “No,” he said firmly, looking at me hard, “this is something I want to do. That’s why I make time for it, because I like it and I like you, Jen. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
    I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. “Good. ‘Cause I like having you here too.”
    After that, Kellen stopped having dinner with us as often. He told my mom that it was because he had things to take care of at home, but I knew what it was. He was training at night after he tutored me instead of in the afternoon right after school. He started doing his schoolwork there at the house with me so he’d have more time at night and he told me he had moved his runs to early morning. I still felt guilty, but the fact that he gave up his very limited free time to stick around and help me meant the world to me. My grades were skyrocketing since he had started tutoring me and some of the tension that had been building between my mom and I over it disappeared. It was nice.
    “Did you tell Kellen over and over not to let mom know I was here?” I asked dad, thinking of mom and tension and arguments.
    He snorted. “No. Kellen can keep a secret.”
    “So can I .”
    “Not like Kellen.”
    “How do you know?”
    My dad’s face fell slightly. “Because no one keeps secrets like he does.”
    I was about to ask what that meant when there was a shout from the ring in the center of the gym.
    “Here we go,” dad said excitedly.
    We moved closer so we could see Kellen enter into the red corner. There was a tall man with a gleaming bald head standing beside him talking in his ear. I assumed it was his coach because when I looked at the guy getting ready to fight Kellen, he had a man talking away in his ear too.
    It felt like forever before anything really happened. A ref wandered around