25. Brady
brADY
Ichanged my shirt three times this morning.
Three times. Standing in front of my closet like the fabric itself might snitch on me, like somebody at the gym would take one look at my gray tee and know exactly where my mouth has been all weekend.
I settled on black. Black says nothing. Black is a Monday shirt even if my dick is determined to replay Sunday on repeat.
When I push through the gym doors, Jonah’s voice carries from the far corner where he’s talking to Micah. Micah is nodding along with his gloves half-laced. Heavy bags thud in their familiar rhythm. Weights clang off the platforms.
Normal.
Then I spot Dakota by the mats, and my whole body says to hell with normal.
She’s stretching, one leg extended, folding over it in black leggings and a gray sports bra, ponytail spilling forward.
Twelve hours ago I watched her come apart between four sets of hands.
I know the sound she makes right before her body surrenders.
I know what her skin tastes like at the base of her throat.
And now she’s counting through a hamstring stretch like the world didn’t tilt on its axis this weekend.
I make myself walk to the cubbies. Drop my bag. Start my wraps with hands that feel borrowed.
Cruz arrives loud, no change there. His bag hits the floor hard enough that three fighters glance over, and he’s already grinning. His eyes find mine across the floor.
He winks.
Actually winks, bold as a billboard, before strolling to the water fountain like he didn’t just spike my pulse in front of thirty people.
We’re going to get caught in the first ten minutes. I’m going to die in this gym, and my tombstone will read Cruz Bennett cannot be subtle. Death by Pussy—film at eleven. Shit.
Dante comes in a few minutes later, quiet the way he’s always quiet, gym bag over one shoulder.
He nods at me in passing. Neutral. Perfectly, infuriatingly neutral, like Sunday morning didn’t happen, like I didn’t say things out loud into his shoulder that I’d been choking down my entire life. I envy him so much my bones ache.
Eli’s office door opens, and he steps out with a clipboard, a whistle around his neck, scanning the floor. His eyes stop on me.
Something flickers there. Half a heartbeat. Gone.
He jerks his chin at me.
I cross the floor, and my heart is doing its level best to climb out through my throat.
“Pads today.” He’s flipping a page on the clipboard, not looking at me. “Basic combinations. Your hands were sharp all camp; I want them staying that way. Nothing heavy this week.”
“Yes, Coach,” I reply.
The word comes out steady. Small miracle.
We set up near the cage, and he holds the focus mitts out for me to help him into them. When I slide the second one over his hand, his fingers graze the inside of my wrist. Just skin on skin, there and gone.
I nearly drop both mitts.
“Jab, cross, hook,” Coach says, and his voice is flat and even, the same cadence I’ve heard a thousand times. “On my count.”
I throw the combination. His hands eat the impact.
“Again. Rotate through the hook, you’re arming it.”
I throw it again. Better. The problem is I know that voice now. I know where it goes when his authority falls away, the register it drops into behind closed doors.
“Cross is lazy. Drive off the back foot.”
Jab, cross, hook. Jab, cross, hook. The rhythm helps. My shoulders start to burn, and the burn begins to quiet some of the static.
Then Dakota laughs from across the mat and my fourth hook sails wide enough to make me wonder if I’m in the right sport.
Eli catches it anyway. He catches everything. He steps in close, one hand settling on my waist to square my hips.
“Rotation starts here. Not your shoulder.”
The correction is textbook. Necessary, even. It also lasts a half second past necessary; his palm warms through my shirt, and my entire nervous system lights up like a pinball machine.
“Got it,” I manage.
He steps back, and there’s a smile so subtle at the corner of his mouth that I almost think I imagined it.
Across the floor, Dakota is drilling takedowns with Dante.
I’m supposed to be watching my own footwork.
Instead I’m watching Dante’s hands on her hips as he demonstrates the entry, watching her leg hook behind his knee, the two of them dropping and resetting in that smooth, practiced loop.
They look like training partners. They are training partners.
They’re also people who I’ve watched fuck, and my brain keeps trying to hold both facts at once and fumbling both.
Eli smacks the mitts together, one sharp crack. “Williams. You with me?”
“Yeah.” I reset my stance. “Sorry, Coach.”
“Eyes on your target.” A pause, barely long enough to register. “They’ll still be here after.”
My head snaps up, but his face gives me nothing.
I throw the combination hard enough that my knuckles sing.
Cruz cycles through our area during the water break, towel around his neck, grin locked and loaded.
“Look at you.” He claps a hand on my shoulder. “Hands looking crispy for a guy deep in fight camp. What’s your secret, huh? New recovery routine?”
“Sleep,” I say. “Lots of sleep.”
“Sleep.” He nods, solemn as a preacher. “Yeah. Heard that’s important.”
His hand hasn’t left my shoulder. His thumb brushes the back of my neck, once, so light, but it travels down my spine like somebody set a match to a fuse. To anyone watching, it’s a teammate being a teammate. Cruz touches everybody. Cruz would hug a parking meter, might actually hump one too.
Shit. Focus asshole.
I know better. My skin knows better.
“Get your hand off him before I make you run the stairs,” Eli says without looking up.
“Harsh.” Cruz withdraws, palms up, all innocence. “Very harsh environment we’re building here, Coach. Hostile, even.”
Dakota finishes her round and walks past us toward the fountain, and her fingers trail across Cruz’s lower back. Half a second. Featherlight. She doesn’t break stride, doesn’t look back, and Cruz’s grin spreads an inch wider.
Nobody saw it. Probably.
We’re being so reckless. It’s ten in the morning on the first day since we all fucked, and we’re already playing with matches next to the gas line.
Victor comes out onto the floor around the half-hour mark.
He moves between stations, big and unhurried, saying a word here, adjusting a grip there. He stops by Eli, who’s drilling one of the newer guys, and says something too low for me to catch.
Then his eyes sweep the floor and snag.
On us. All of us, scattered across the gym in our separate corners and somehow still arranged like points around the same center, and I feel his attention land on me with weight.
He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t come over. Just watches for one beat longer than comfortable, dark eyes unreadable, then turns toward his office.
I exhale a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“Breathe through the combination, not around it,” Cruz murmurs, mitts up.
Jab, cross, hook.
The rest of the session is two hours of what feels like walking a wire.
Dakota adjusts my stance during a partner drill, her hand pressing my hip a quarter-inch left, and I lose the sequence so completely that Dante has to say my name twice.
“Brady.” His voice stays level. “Underhook. Today, preferably.”
“Right. Yeah.”
Cruz makes a crack about somebody needing electrolytes and a nap, and it’s just familiar enough, just an inch too knowing, that Eli cuts him a look sharp enough to draw blood. Anyone else would’ve missed it. I’m not missing anything today. I’m a raw nerve masquerading as a fighter.
By the time Eli calls it, my shoulders are cooked and my brain is worse. Eight hours. We survived eight hours in the same room, and I feel like I went the distance with somebody who lands every punch.
How do we do this every day? How do I stand three feet from Dakota and keep my hands to myself?
Walk past Cruz without leaning into him?
Take corrections from Eli in that voice and pretend it’s just a voice?
The professional distance fits like a suit two sizes too small, and I’ve only been wearing it since eight AM.
The floor empties out. Fighters peel off toward the locker rooms, toward the parking lot, toward their ordinary Mondays. I’m unwinding my wraps by the cubbies when I realize the five of us have drifted into the same fifteen feet of floor near the exit.
Not together. Nothing anybody could point at. Just close. Magnets pretending to be unaffected by the one beside us.
Dakota hoists her bag onto her shoulder, keys already in hand. She doesn’t look at any of us directly.
“See y’all tomorrow,” she says, loud enough to carry.
Ordinary words, except for the question lingering just beneath the surface of them, and every one of us hears it.
Dante lifts a hand in a goodbye. Cruz follows a minute later, stretching his arms overhead with a groan about needing food before he eats a heavy bag. Eli has already vanished back into his office.
I finish my wraps slowly.
The parking lot is glowing with late afternoon sun, and I lean against my truck and watch the parking lot as if it owes me money.
Dante drives out first. Then Cruz. Then Dakota. Then Eli.
And one by one, every single one of them rolls past my truck.
And one by one, every single one of them turns right out of the lot.
Right goes to Dante’s place.
I sit in the cab with my hand on the keys and give being a responsible adult its full thirty seconds. We have rules. And every rule exists because our careers are hanging by a thread. A thread that the commission would love any excuse to cut.
I start the engine.
I turn right.
Because eight hours today was already unbearable, and I spent twenty-five years being good at denying myself. I know exactly what that costs. I paid it in silence and shame, and a father’s belt that never missed its mark. I am done paying and hiding.
The drive takes twelve minutes, and my heart hammers through every one of them. When I pull into Dante’s lot, four familiar vehicles sit in a row like a confession waiting to be photographed. If anybody from Oath drives past, it’s just a group of fighters hanging out. Sure it is.
We lock our cars and walk toward the building in loose formation, spaced out just enough to pretend.
I’m the last one through the door.
It closes behind me. The deadbolt clicks.
And Dakota is there before I finish exhaling, rising onto her toes, her mouth finding mine, and the relief of it hits harder than anything anyone threw at me today.
Hours of not touching her collapse into nothing.
Her fingers curl into my shirt, and I hear myself make a sound against her lips that I would be embarrassed about if I had any shame left.
That ship has sailed; the days of being ashamed of who I am have left the building.
“Hi,” she whispers.
“Hi, angel.”
Cruz’s hands find my hips from behind, his chest solid against my back, his laugh low in my ear. “Told y’all he’d turn right.”
“Nobody bet against you,” Dante says, already pulling his shirt over his head as he disappears down the hall.
“Bedroom.” Eli’s voice cuts through the apartment, and it is no longer his coaching voice. “All of you. Now.”
This is going to be a problem. I know it with total clarity even as Dakota tugs me forward by the shirt, even as Cruz’s mouth grazes the back of my neck right where his thumb touched me on the gym floor.
We can’t keep our hands off each other. Not for eight hours. Not with our careers on the line, not with Victor’s eyes sweeping the floor, not with everything we could lose stacked up like weights on a bar.
And I don’t know how we survive this without getting caught.