“Here you go, Cheryl,” he said as he looked into her flushed and tear-streaked face. You can stay the night with me, okay.”

‘I hope I can swing something with Linda over this.’

She looked at him in disbelief, so on impulse he ripped off her face filter and kissed her on the forehead and the fangirls went crazy. The bikini girls were seated closest to the cube and he was being pelted with a storm of tops and G-strings as he turned around, the goons swatting the flying attire away to keep their line of sight open.

This had never happened before. It was not something he had been taught about in the CCP Academy. Pointing towards an already naked and giggling shaggirl seemed to make no sense and waving would have been dismissive and would have resulted in him waving round feminine attire which was far from stoic. He was momentarily stunned by the response. His momentary break in composure was noted by the shaggirls, who screamed in glee and by the shagboys who booed like a base section to their siren leads.

But old Brett Scott grabbed a top from Bronson’s shoulder slung it over his own shrunken shoulders—a huge bikini top with cups that would have served as a hat for each of them, grabbed one G-string and put it on his face like an old-fashioned face filter—causing even the goons to grin like giant children. Brett then stood aside with Thomas and Bobby and motioned at Bronson, who now regained his composure.

The cube-side goon stepped up to the airlock beneath the cube and slammed the big red button, and with a gush of grey smoke his airlock opened and he stepped in, turned and waved to the booing fanboys, pointed and winked to the fangirls, and saluted the execs above in the booths.

The plexi-lock slid shut behind him and he looked down at Cheryl, shivering in a semi-fetal position in the best seat in the house, cubeside, in a princess throne of pink, where she shivered and shrank.

Below he saw Brett take the corner phone and he heard the voice of his only trainer that he had ever known in the airlock, “Dumb fuck! Listen up, don’t roll with dis Mandingo. Dem hands ‘ill grip ya good. Dis shit is calculated to lose you edge. Da higher ups is fuckin’ us, boy! Member you bareknuckle lessons what dis ole nigga taught ya—body of a rock, muvafucka, body of a rock!”

He could hear the fanboys roaring and the fangirls booing as his rival, Shaka Hulu, danced in the cube above, through the bottom of which he could see as the airlock slowly ascended through its base and the lean, ebony fighting machine, used a hula-hoop of silver love dust swirling about his gyrating hips until it achieved the velocity necessary to burst into a sparkling display and the fanboys shrieked like sarong girls. [5]

In the airlock, as it breached the cube and elevated him on the level with Shaka Hulu, who stood glaring menacingly at him from across the cube, Brett snarled, “Boy, you bes’ whoop dis gay nigga’s ass!”

Bronson wanted to grin, but kept stiff-lipped as the airlock opened and the platform slid out above the cube floor by a “cunt hair” as Brett would say and left him standing 18 feet from his rival, both of them undefeated in the cube.

‘Strength and honor, Bronson Caan. Do or die.’

‘Did real men, way back when really say such things in their mind?’

‘Sure they did—I can feel it echo within.’

Footnotes

-5. Sarong girls are women too fat to wear a dress. Dress girls are women to fat to wear a bikini. Bikini girls are selected for their athletic or shapely forms and placed at cube-side near the princess throne as her attendants.