Chapter 50
THEO
Victor comes back to my place at three in the morning.
He doesn’t talk much. He showers, gets into bed, presses his back against my chest, and is asleep inside two minutes. I lie awake for another hour with one hand on his ribs, counting breaths.
In the days that follow, he stays. He sleeps badly. He doesn’t talk about the bank, doesn’t talk about the Hartwell visit he made the same afternoon—I learn that name from Marco, not from him. He works on his laptop late, takes calls in the kitchen, and lets me feed him things he doesn’t taste.
The first piece falls into place by Wednesday. Reese Aguilar of Guardian Athletic, 2 PM, at the gym.
I get to the gym a half hour before Reese is due. Victor’s sat at the office desk, sleeves rolled, going through what looks like the kind of paperwork that doesn’t get done in daylight hours. He looks up when I come in. The shadows under his eyes haven’t moved in two days.
“You didn’t have to come,” he says.
“I do. Some of this is my doing.”
He doesn’t argue.
I sit on the corner of his desk the way I do when I want him to feel my weight.
“Three things,” I say. “The rep’s name is Reese Aguilar.
They use they/them. Senior Director of Partnerships at Guardian Athletic.
They’re going to walk in here and pretend it’s a routine pitch, and it isn’t.
They’ve been wanting in on you for years. ”
Victor leans back in his chair. “Years.”
“Their CEO’s a former boxer. They’ve watched you build this place. Reese is the closer because Reese closes the deals the company actually wants. They flew in this morning.”
“Okay.”
“Just listen. Let me run point. If they ask numbers, I’ll handle the numbers. You don’t have to say yes today. You probably shouldn’t.”
He looks at me for a long second. Something shifts in his expression telling me he understands.
“All right.”
We hear the gym doorbell from the office. Victor stands up. Pulls his jacket on.
For a second, in the way he sets his shoulders, I see the man I met at Purgatory a year ago—the king of his own corner of the world. The fighter. The one who walks into rooms knowing he doesn’t have to apologize.
The leak didn’t kill him. It just made him have to find that man again.
We walk out together.
Reese is in the lobby talking to Marco. Mid-forties, athletic in a way that suggests a serious past in some sport—probably basketball, by the height—wearing a charcoal blazer over a Guardian Athletic t-shirt that costs as much as the blazer.
Dark hair, short, no makeup, two small studs in one ear. They turn when Victor walks in.
“Mr. Kaine.”
“Reese.” Victor extends his hand. “Good of you to come down.”
“My pleasure. Theo, hi.” A nod my way. Reese has the kind of warmth that doesn’t ask permission to be warm—confident, not perform. “Conference room?”
“Office is fine.”
We walk back. Reese’s eyes are taking in the gym as we go—the mats, the cage, the rack of speed bags, the kid in the corner working a heavy bag with the concentration of someone who’s twelve months from a serious career. Reese clocks all of it without slowing.
In the office, we sit. Reese sets a leather portfolio on the desk and doesn’t open it.
“I’ll save you the deck,” they say. “Guardian wants to put our entire incoming season behind your gym. Full equipment line—gloves, wraps, mats, apparel, the whole fit-out. A six-figure marketing campaign with you and your fighters at the center of it. National. We pay for everything; you wear it and train in it. We launch fall. The collection becomes your gym, and your gym becomes the public face of the line.”
Victor doesn’t react. I watch him not react. The man who walked into a conference room two days ago with a folder of cashflow projections and watched a banker not open it is sitting across a desk from the largest LGBTQ-owned sportswear company in the country, and they are pitching him.
Reese leans forward slightly.
“I want to say something off-script before we get to the numbers, Mr. Kaine. We’ve had our eye on you for years.
Long before what happened this week. Our CEO watched your last professional fight on tape after his second knee surgery and talked about it to the whole executive team for a month.
We’ve been waiting for someone like you to be in a position to be honest about who he is.
We didn’t think we’d live to see it happen the way it happened. But here we are.”
Reese pauses, allowing that to sit.
“We’re not interested in saving you. You don’t need saving. We’re interested in being on the right side of the next ten years of this sport. That’s what we’re here for.”
Victor’s hand tightens on the arm of his chair. He doesn’t speak.
I do. “What’s the timeline?”
Reese turns smoothly to the numbers. They were never going to make Victor speak first; they read the room within ten seconds of walking in.
The negotiation goes for forty minutes. I run point on the clauses. Victor jumps in twice, both times on the fighter-protection language. Reese flexes on both points without flinching. Their lawyers already drafted the protections we’d been about to ask for.
When they leave, they shake Victor’s hand for a full five seconds. He keeps eye contact through it.
“Take a week,” Reese says. “Read the deck. Call our counsel. Don’t sign anything you don’t fully understand.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
The door closes behind them.
For a long moment, Victor doesn’t move. Then he turns to me, and his face does something I’ve never seen before.
“Theo.”
“Yeah.”
“I—” he stops. Looks at the floor. Looks back up. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
I cross the room and put my hands on his shoulders. He doesn’t move into me, doesn’t move away. Just stands there, holding what just happened.
“You don’t have to do anything with it tonight,” I say. “Just let it be true.”
Two days after Reese leaves, a fighter shows up at the gym at noon.
Marco knocks on Victor’s office door frame. “Boss. Guy out front says his name’s Rodriguez. From Dawson’s gym.”
Victor looks up. “Rodriguez.”
“Yeah.”
A pause. We both know who Rodriguez is—the project Dawson’s been bragging about for nearly a year, the fighter Dawson said yes to when he said no to others.
“Bring him back.”
Marco nods and leaves.
Victor doesn’t get up. Doesn’t fix anything on his desk. Just sits, waiting.
When Rodriguez comes in, he’s in a hooded sweatshirt and gym shorts, hands still taped from a workout. Mid-twenties, welterweight build. He stops in the office doorway like he’s not sure crossing the threshold counts.
“Mr. Kaine.”
“Rodriguez.”
“I won’t take much of your time.”
“Take what you need.”
Rodriguez’s jaw works. He glances at me, then back at Victor. Embarrassed, but not enough to leave.
“I want out of Dawson’s gym. I want to sign with you.”
Victor doesn’t react. I watch him not react, the same way I watched him not react two days ago when Reese pitched him. Discipline he’s built across nine years of running this place.
“Walk me through it,” Victor says.
Rodriguez looks at the floor. Then back up. “He had us in the locker room yesterday morning. The whole roster. He was talking about you.”
“Go ahead.”
“He said you’d lied to every fighter in your gym for a decade about who you were, and that’s why nobody could trust you to tell them anything true, because you’re… I don’t want to repeat the word he used.”
The room goes still.
“He said it in front of everyone,” Rodriguez continues.
“And the room was quiet. Nobody pushed back. Not one guy. And I sat there and thought—that’s the gym I’m in.
That’s the gym I’ve been in for a year. I’m twenty-six years old, and the room I’m in goes quiet when a man lies about another man’s character and speaks about someone like that. ”
He looks at Victor. His chin is up.
“I don’t know you, Mr. Kaine. I’ve fought against your guys. I trained for two days against one of your fighters, and he told me that you stayed late with him to work on his footwork because he didn’t have anyone at home who could. I don’t know if you remember that. He remembers.”
Victor doesn’t move. His face doesn’t move.
“I want to train with someone who’d stay late,” Rodriguez says. “I don’t care about the rest of it. I came here to sign.”
A long silence. I can hear the heavy bag two rooms over—somebody working it in unbroken eight-counts, the sound of someone who’s been doing this for a long time.
Victor stands. Rounds the desk. Puts a hand on Rodriguez’s shoulder. The kind of grip Victor uses on his own fighters.
“Sit down. Let’s talk through what would make this work for you.”
Rodriguez sits.
Victor opens a folder on his desk—not the bank folder, a different one, blank—and starts asking questions. Salary. Training schedule. What his current Dawson contract looks like, which clauses bite, which ones don’t. The conversation goes for an hour.
When Rodriguez leaves, Victor walks him out personally. Shakes his hand at the door for a long time.
He comes back. Stands at his desk. Doesn’t sit down.
“Theo.”
“Yeah.”
“That kid drove an hour to get here. He told his coach to go fuck himself. He came to my gym alone because nobody at his gym would back him up.” Victor exhales slowly. “I have to be a person who deserves that.”
I cross the room to him. I don’t hug him. I just stand close enough that he can feel me there.
“You already are,” I say. “You just don’t know it yet.”