An MMA Champion Kicked a Black Man’s Car to Provoke Him — 5 Minutes Later, He Begged for Forgiveness
Chapter 11
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He got a grip on Brent's lead arm and used the man's own forward movement to redirect the vector. It was not elegant: this was not a gym; the asphalt was uneven; the grip on Brent's shirt was imperfect; and Brent was strong and trained and genuinely dangerous. He fought back hard, twisted against the control, drove into Darius with his shoulder, tried to work his arm free.Darius took an elbow across the top of his right shoulder that sent a white flash of pain down to his wrist. Something tore across his left forearm—the edge of Brent's watchband, probably, or the van panel, he didn't know—but he kept the position.It was not a submission hold; it was a control position: Brent's movement limited, Darius's body wedged against him in a way that made effective striking close to impossible for about four to six seconds. That was all it was: not a victory, not a statement—a window.He used the window to speak."Stop." His voice was strained with effort, but it was still recognizable as the same voice he'd been using for the past nine minutes. "I don't want to hurt you. Stop moving."Brent had about four inches on him and a significant weight advantage, and he was not accustomed to being controlled by anyone. He kept moving.Darius adjusted his grip, shifted his hip, and took the position deeper. Brent's forward pressure worked against him now instead of for him; he went nowhere.Three seconds after that, two people arrived simultaneously from different directions: the volunteer in the yellow shirt, who had found Pauline and was leading her back at a near-jog, and Devon from Core Surge, who had apparently been watching long enough to decide something needed to stop and had covered the 30 feet at a run.Devon put himself in between them—not physically, but by presence and volume. "Hey! Hey! Break it up!"Darius released Brent immediately. He stepped back three full steps and held his hands open at his sides. His right shoulder was already beginning to stiffen; the forearm had a scrape along it that was bleeding a thin line. He breathed out slowly and looked at Brent.Brent was breathing hard. He straightened up, pulled his shirt down, and looked around at the crowd that had grown to somewhere between 20 and 30 people. Tyler still had the camera up; the live view said 481 viewers.The sequence had lasted less than 30 seconds. It had probably looked, to anyone who arrived partway through, like two men fighting. Brent understood this immediately. He understood it faster than Darius would have credited him for, which said something about how often Brent had thought about moments exactly like this one.