“Kick him in the balls!” Heidi shouts.

Jake squeezes his eyes shut and shakes with laughter. “She beat me to the next part.” He straightens up and is all business again. “Now, you’re probably thinking she should knee me in the groin, right?” He gives Trinity a warning look that makes us laugh.

She grins at him. “I won’t this time.”

I didn’t realize how fast my heart was racing until Trinity smiled and spoke. He’s not actually hurting her.

“You can try that,” he says. “But you’re already at a disadvantage. If you miss, you might end up getting hurt worse.”

Something similar had actually happened to me when I was a dancer. The long-forgotten memory makes me shiver. Back then, I shook it off. Figured working as a stripper, what did I expect to happen to me?

“Instead,” Jake’s strong voice pulls me back into the lesson, “there are two things you can try. I prefer one over the other, but both can be effective and are targeting the same weakness.”

He nods at Trinity again. “Instead of trying to pull him off from the outside, pull your arms underneath and explode outward.”

Trinity does it so fast it’s hard to see and Jake has her repeat the move.

He has her do it a third time, but this time, he captures her wrist as she tries to escape.

“Now she has a new problem,” he says. “I’ll get to that in a minute.”

He releases her and resumes the choke hold. Trinity tightens her body in a slightly different way. Bringing her elbows in to her side, she makes a swift duck and spin move to free herself. Jake grabs for her, but she’s already at the edge of the mat.

“See?” He motions Trinity back to the front of the room. “I won’t choke you again,” he promises.

“Liar.” Trinity stands in front of him with her hands on her hips. “Make sure you duck low enough, so you don’t hit his arm,” she says, explaining why that move worked. “You’re using the weight of your body against his thumbs to break the hold.”

As she finishes, Jake comes up behind her and hooks his arm around her neck, dragging her backwards. “This one’s a little more complicated,” he says.

“Jesus, this is hard to watch,” I mumble.

Mara places her hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

Jake wasn’t kidding about it being more complicated. Trinity needs several tries and a lot more effort to unravel herself from the hold. Jake explains the shoulder slip, the mechanics of why it works, and then has us try it on each other.

“I’m too short to play anything but victim,” Mara whines.

“I wish Aubrey could’ve come today,” Jake says. “She’d be perfect.”

“I knew you had to have a girlfriend,” Mara says.