"Let's give 'em something to look at"

The arena lights hit like a second opponent. Scarlet felt them before she saw them, that hot white wash pouring down from the rafters, turning every bead of sweat on her skin into something the front row could probably see from their seats. Smoke curled lazy from somewhere ringside, drifting up past her cheek in thin grey ribbons, and she could hear the low churn of the crowd behind her like surf against a breakwater.

She stood with her back to them. On purpose.

Her braid, thick and red as a struck match, rested against the shelf of her upper back, diverted by the sheer rise of her traps. They climbed from the base of her neck in two gleaming slopes, so full they made the thin straps of her black sports top look like they'd been drawn on with a marker. The strap dug a shallow canyon into each trap and then disappeared, swallowed by muscle, reappearing lower like a river going in and out of a gorge.

Below the traps, her back opened up. That was the only word for it. Opened. Her delts flared out from her shoulders in three polished heads each, the rear delts sitting like a pair of clenched fists under the skin. From there her lats swept down and out, wide, impossibly wide, fanning into that taper that made her waist look like a joke someone was telling at her expense. Every time she shifted her weight, the whole sheet of back muscle rearranged itself, lats folding and unfolding, the deep groove of her spine flanked by two thick columns of erector that ran all the way down to where the real problem started.

Because her shorts sat low. Low, and then lower, because there was only so much fabric in the world and her hips had opinions about where it was allowed to go. The black waistband cinched in at a trim, almost dainty lower back, the kind of waist that had no business being attached to a back that size, and then, just beneath that cinch, everything flared again. Violently. Her glutes sat high and full and heavy, two round, gleaming hemispheres of muscle so dense the overhead lights didn't so much illuminate them as slide off them, pooling in the deep cleft between and running down the outer curves in long wet highlights.

The trunks she was wearing were the kind fighters wore when they wanted their hamstrings free to move, high-cut at the back, the fabric pulled up into a narrow black strip that vanished straight down the middle and left the twin swells of her glutes almost entirely on display. Almost. The word almost was doing a lot of work. Every time she so much as breathed, the muscle shifted underneath, and the little logo patch stitched to the waistband lifted and fell with the motion like a boat on a slow swell.

A single bead of sweat broke loose from the small of her back and tracked down the seam, and Scarlet felt the whole slow journey of it. Her glutes tensed reflexively, once, hard. It was the kind of involuntary clench that happened when a woman knew, with absolute certainty, that several hundred people were watching the exact same square foot of her body at the exact same moment. The tension rolled down into her hamstrings, and those answered in turn, the long bellies of them standing out in two thick ridges, flexing and releasing in little nervous pulses as she shifted her weight from one leg to the other.

The shifting didn't help. The shifting made it worse. Every transfer of weight made one glute load and the other relax, a slow alternating rise and fall, round and full and polished under the lights, and she could practically feel the front row's collective attention tracking the motion like they were following a tennis match with only one ball.

Scarlet tilted her head just enough to glance back over her shoulder. Her amber eye caught the light, and the corner of her mouth pulled into a slow, lopsided grin. Not cocky, exactly. More like she'd just been let in on a joke and wasn't sure if she was allowed to laugh yet.

"Round's not even started," she murmured, half to herself, "and I'm already sweating through the tape."

She lifted one bandaged hand and flexed the fingers, just to have something to do with them, but her other hand betrayed her. It drifted back on its own, thumb hooking into the waistband of her shorts at the hip, the gesture small and a little shy, the kind of thing a fighter does when she's trying to settle her nerves and ends up just drawing more attention to the part of herself she was already self-conscious about. The pull of her thumb tugged the fabric taut across one glute, and the muscle there answered by flexing, slow and involuntary, because that's what muscles that dense did when the skin over them moved.

A low wolf-whistle cut through the noise from somewhere in row two.

Her grin twitched wider in spite of herself. She ducked her chin and felt heat climb up the back of her neck, the bad kind, the shy kind, the kind that had nothing to do with the lights. Her free hand stayed hooked in her waistband, and she realized a half-second too late that holding it there was pulling the shorts down a fraction more on that side, exposing another sliver of the deep curve where glute met hamstring. She didn't fix it. She couldn't quite make herself fix it. It felt, obscurely, like fixing it would be worse than leaving it.

Another whistle. Then a camera shutter, rapid-fire, from somewhere near the corner post.

Scarlet exhaled slowly through her nose and rolled her hips once, just a small loosening motion, a fighter getting her lower body warm, and the entire back half of her rearranged itself in the light. Glutes lifting, hamstrings tightening, the little logo patch on her waistband riding up and then settling back down. A second bead of sweat started its journey from the small of her back, and she was aware of that one, too, in that helpless hyper-specific way her body got when it knew it was being looked at.

"Okay," she said quietly, to no one, to herself, to the empty square of canvas in front of her. Smoke drifted past her cheek again. "Okay. Breathe."

Her amber eye flicked one more time toward the crowd over her shoulder, held there half a second longer than she meant it to, and the crooked little grin came back, softer this time, almost sheepish, as if she'd caught herself enjoying it and wasn't sure what to do with the information.

She cracked her neck. The traps jumped. The glutes answered. Somewhere in the back of the arena, a camera shutter went off about forty times in a row.

"…let's give 'em something to look at."