29. Eli
ELI
My kitchen smells like a home instead of a place where a man eats standing over the sink.
Brady texted the group chat two hours ago.
Losing my mind over here. Can’t sit still. Need you guys. All of you.
The kid should be horizontal on his couch with his feet up, watching garbage television, letting his body rebuild. Instead he’s spiraling, and the four of us dropped everything without a single question, because that’s what this is now. That’s what we are.
Dakota knocks first. She’s got her hair down and worry in her eyes, and she walks past me into the kitchen like she’s lived here all her life.
“How bad did he sound to you?” she asks.
“He’ll settle once he’s here.” I hand her the salad bowl. “He needs food and people. In that order.”
Cruz and Dante show up together, Cruz carrying a six-pack of electrolyte drinks Brady lives on, Dante with nothing but his usual quiet. Cruz kisses Dakota’s temple on his way past, claps my shoulder, and Dante starts pulling plates out of my cabinets.
My apartment has never held this much noise. It squeezes my chest, watching them fill it.
Brady arrives last. I open the door and my stomach drops before I can stop it.
He made weight this morning and it shows, cheekbones sharp, skin dull, but that’s not what worries me.
It’s his eyes. Wired and hollow at the same time, jumping past me into the apartment like he’s cutting angles in the cage.
“Hey.” His voice cracks on the one syllable.
“Come eat,” I demand.
He steps in and Dakota is there before the door closes, her arms around his ribs, and I watch him breathe her in like the first clean air he’s had all day.
Brady eats, not enough, but he eats, and the conversation flows around him like water around a stone. Nobody mentions the fight. Nobody mentions weight or the opponent’s overhand right or the fact that tomorrow night he steps into a cage in front of three thousand people.
“So Cruz decides,” Dakota says, fork pointed at the man in question, “that the best way to demonstrate a suplex to the Saturday beginner class is on the crash mat that Jonah moved twenty minutes earlier.”
“Nobody told me it moved,” Cruz argues.
“You suplexed yourself onto concrete in front of twelve terrified students,” Dakota deadpans.
Cruz shrugs. “And I stuck the landing.”
Dakota shakes her head. “You made a sound like a church organ falling down stairs.”
Brady laughs. Actually laughs, and Dante catches my eye across the table with the smallest lift of his eyebrow. Progress.
“The students gave him a round of applause,” Dante adds, dry as sand. “One of them asked if that was part of the curriculum.”
“I told her it was advanced material,” Cruz replies.
The table breaks up and I sit back and watch them, these four people at my table, in my apartment, eating food I made with my hands, and I try to locate the moment this became my family.
I can’t find it. There wasn’t a moment. There was just Dakota walking into my gym, and then the slow collapse of every wall I’d spent years mortaring into place, and now this.
Laughter at my table. Plates that will need washing. A life.
Brady’s leg bounces under the table through all of it. He pushes rice into small piles. His eyes go long-distance between sentences, out somewhere past my walls, into tomorrow, into the cage, into every way it could go wrong. I know that spiral. I lived in it for a decade.
Dakota sees it too. Her eyes meet mine and a whole conversation happens silently in two seconds.
We migrate to the living room. Brady drops onto the couch and Dakota folds herself into his side immediately, her head on his shoulder, her hand flat on his chest over his heartbeat.
Cruz sprawls on his other side, one heavy arm across the back cushions.
Dante takes the chair, ankle over knee, watching everything.
I stand at the edge of it for a moment, just watching.
“You’re hovering, Coach,” Cruz says.
“I’m watching.”
“Watch from a chair. You’re making the kid nervous.”
Brady huffs. “The kid is already nervous. The kid has been nervous since Monday.”
“The kid needs to stop referring to himself in the third person,” Dante says. “That’s a Cruz habit. It spreads. Like fungus.”
Dakota’s hand has started moving on Brady’s thigh, slow circles through the denim, and I watch his breathing hitch and then lengthen. Watch his shoulders drop a quarter inch. Her fingers trace up, unhurried, and the air changes.
Cruz leans in close to Brady’s ear and whispers too low for me to catch. Brady’s eyes go dark. His throat works. Then Cruz’s hand joins Dakota’s on his other thigh, bolder, deliberate, and when Brady turns his head Cruz kisses him. Brady makes a sound into his mouth and grips Cruz’s forearm hard.
I know what they’re offering him. A way out of his own skull.
Every combat sport carries the old myth about abstaining before a fight, and it’s exactly that, a myth, folklore from men who confused suffering with discipline.
Sex tonight won’t cost Brady a thing tomorrow.
Walking into that cage strung like piano wire will.
Dakota pulls back from Brady’s neck, where she’s been working slow kisses under his jaw, and finds my eyes. The question sits there in the hazel, asked out of respect rather than need.
I nod once.
Her smile could power the building.
“Bedroom,” I command. “We’re doing this right.”
There’s a quality to tonight that our other nights haven’t had.
No desperation. No dam breaking. We undress Brady like unwrapping a gift wouldn’t return for all the money on earth.
Cruz peels his shirt over his head; Dante’s patient hands loosen his belt; Dakota kisses every inch of skin as it appears.
Brady stands in the middle of it, trembling.
“Lie back,” Dakota tells him, and he goes, stretching out on my bed.
She straddles him, and the sight steals my breath all over again. She’s already bare, her clothes a trail behind her, and she takes Brady’s face in both hands.
“You’re here. With us. Tomorrow doesn’t exist right now.”
“Angel—”
“Nowhere else. Just here.” She sinks down onto him and Brady’s whole body arches, a sound tearing out of him that has nothing to do with weight cuts or game plans.
Dakota sets the pace slow. Her hips roll like the tide coming in, and I watch the anxiety drain from Brady’s face with every movement, replaced by that stunned reverence he still gets, like he can’t believe he’s worthy.
Cruz kneels up by the headboard, and Brady turns his head without being asked, opens his mouth, takes him in. The moan Cruz lets out fills the room, and I watch Brady’s hands, one gripping Dakota’s hip, one wrapping Cruz’s thigh, anchoring himself to two bodies at once.
Dante moves in behind Dakota with the lube from my nightstand, and heat rolls through me at what that means.
We’ve done this before, Dakota stretched between two of us, and the memory alone tightens my gut.
Dante works with the patience he brings to everything, one slick finger, then two, and Dakota’s rhythm on Brady stutters, her spine bowing.
“Okay, baby?” Dante asks against her shoulder.
“More. I’m ready, I’m—Dante, please.”
“There she is.” He kisses the back of her neck. “How could anyone deny you when you beg so beautifully…”
When he pushes into her, seated deep alongside Brady’s cock with only that thin wall between them, the sound the three of them make together raises the hair on my arms. Dakota’s cry, Brady’s groan around Cruz, Dante’s long exhale like a man setting down a weight he’s carried for miles.
I stand at the foot of my own bed, hand around myself, and I direct. Because that’s what I’m good at.
“Slow, Dante. Let her adjust. Brady, don’t move yet, let her have the stretch. Good. That’s good.”
Dakota’s eyes find me, glassy. Her lips are parted, and she’s taking little panting breaths, fighting to gain control.
“Look at you, princess. Taking them both. You’re doing so well.”
She whimpers and clenches, and both men inside her curse in unison.
Cruz laughs breathlessly from the headboard. “Daddy’s voice does it for her every time.”
“It does it for all of us,” Dante says, strained.
They find a rhythm, Dante and Brady trading strokes, never fully leaving her empty, and Dakota rides it with her head thrown back and Cruz’s hand gathering her hair out of her face so Brady can watch her.
Brady’s eyes have changed completely. He’s here, fully here, buried in the woman he loves while he swallows Cruz, and the last of fight week burns off him like steamy vapor off morning water.
Then the configuration shifts, bodies rearranging by instinct. Cruz pulls free of Brady’s mouth and moves behind Dante, slicks himself with lube, and I watch his huge hands settle on Dante’s hips.
“Yeah?” Cruz asks.
“Took you long enough,” Dante replies.
Cruz pushes in and Dante’s whole body shudders forward, driving him deeper into Dakota, who cries out and drops her head to Brady’s chest. And there it is.
A chain. Cruz into Dante into Dakota onto Brady, four people connected in one unbroken line on my bed, moving together like a single organism learning its own heartbeat.
The sight is obscene. The sight is the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed.
“Daddy.” Dakota’s hand reaches for me, fingers spread, grasping at air. “Need you. Please.”
I go to her and kneel on the mattress beside Brady’s head, and she turns and takes me into her mouth with a moan that vibrates up my spine and detonates behind my eyes.
Her throat swallows around me while Dante and Brady move inside her, while Cruz drives the whole chain forward, and my legendary control, the thing I built a career on, the thing I built a life on, frays down to a single thread.
I don’t fight it. I use it.
“Look at my girl. Three at once and you still want more. Such a good girl. So good for us.”
She moans around me, hips grinding down.