Chapter Twenty-Nine
Gabe
The dull throbbing in my shoulder was familiar enough to be déjà vu. So was the scene in front of me: my coach standing in one corner of the room while a medic poked and prodded my shoulder, the tournament promoter pacing in front of where I sat.
I knew the words he’d say before he even opened his mouth. The exact ones I’d heard two years before.
You’re done.
Like hell.
Diego opened his mouth, and I cut him off before he had the chance to say it. “I’m fighting.”
He set his hands on his hips and stared me down. “It’s not up to you.”
I stared right back. “The fuck it’s not.” I went to stand, and pain shot down my left arm. The medic placed a hand on my chest to keep me in the chair. I glared at him next. “I’m fine.”
The medic ignored me and continued his inspection.
“That’ll be up to a doctor to decide,” Diego said. “And if he says you can’t—”
Don’t fucking say it.
“You’re done.”
The door to the room swung open, but I was too worked up to care who it was. “Fuck what a doctor says. I know my own body, and I’m telling you, I can fight.”
“Like you did those last three rounds?” Diego countered. “Is that how you fight when you’re fine?”
I had nothing to come back at him with, and we both knew it. My last three rounds tonight had been garbage. It had taken everything in me just to stay on my feet. The only reason I still won was because I’d done well enough in the first five rounds for my score to come out on top.
Barely.
“I need this, Diego,” I said. “Just one more fight. It’s not like I have a career left ahead of me I need to protect. If my shoulder’s blown, it’s blown. It doesn’t matter. Me winning this does.”
“What about my career, Gabe? If I let you fight while injured, I lose all credibility. Everything I’ve built here will crumble to nothing because no fighter will trust I have their best interest at heart enough for me to book them.”
I clenched my jaw against more than one kind of pain. My breaths came heavy through my nose.
“I’m sorry, okay?” Diego said. “I get it, man, I do, but it’s the doctor’s call. I’ll wait until the medical assessment tomorrow morning to make the official decision, but I’m letting Isaac Herman know to be ready to fight if you can’t.”
I kept my eyes glued to a dark splotch on the concrete floor. Eventually, I nodded. After another tense moment, Diego turned and left.
The medic gathered his supplies. “You’ll need X-rays to know for sure if it’s torn. Definitely ice it tonight.”
I nodded again, and he left too. The door latched shut behind him, sending a clang echoing through the silent room.
It didn’t stay silent for long.
“What’s your fucking problem?”
I hadn’t noticed when Coach Lou left, but he must have at some point because there were only two of us here when I lifted my head.
Evan stood in well-fitted jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, his normally perfect hair scattered across his forehead. The fluorescent lights cast his chiseled features in harsh shadows, made harsher by his fists curled at his sides.
Guess he was pissed at me. No surprise there.
My voice came out hollow. “Here to yell at me again? What did I do wrong this time?”
“Let’s see.” His words dripped with hostility.
“You were careless enough to enter into a boxing tournament when you haven’t trained in two years, thanks to a career-ending injury.
And now when that injury is back and probably worse than it was the first time, you’re willing to risk permanent damage, for what? A few bucks?”
I forced the fingers on my left hand to move, ignoring the ache in my shoulder and growing rage in my gut. “You don’t get it.”
“What don’t I get? That boxing is all that matters to you? That you’ll choose it over everyone and everything time and time again? Trust me, I get it. I just didn’t think you were stupid enough to choose it over your own well-being.”
A few months ago, I would have agreed with him. Welcomed his scorn.
Not now. Not with my muscles still buzzing with too much adrenaline and my mind muddled with pain as my shoulder screamed like someone had run it through with a red-hot poker and left it there to burn. My tolerance hit its limit.
“You know what, Evan?”
“What?”
“Fuck you.”
He scoffed, but I wasn’t done.
“Seriously, fuck you. I’ve tried to be patient these past few months.
I’ve given you space. I’ve let you shit on me without fucking complaint.
But you act like I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.
Like I beat you when we were kids or made it my mission to make your life miserable, and I’m sick of it.
I’m sorry I left Dad after the funeral—”
“You left me!” The words tore from him as if they’d been ripped from his skin.
As bloody and raw as the strain in his voice.
“You left me when I needed you most. Mom died, and Dad was falling apart, and I needed someone to fall apart with too, only I couldn’t because you were gone, and I had to be the one to hold everything together.
” He stabbed at his chest. “I was the one to go through Mom’s things because Dad couldn’t bear to step foot in their room for six months.
I was the one to make sure Dad ate when he wouldn’t cook anymore.
I was the one who read Mom’s mail and replied to the letters from her friends sending their condolences to Dad, who couldn’t do more than sit in his chair with a photo of Mom in his lap.
“Mom left me, and Dad did too, and you were supposed to be my big brother who I could count on to have my back, and you didn’t even ask me how I was doing at the funeral I planned.
You didn’t call afterward like you used to.
You ghosted me like I was some girl from a fucking dating app who meant nothing to you, and now you’re back, making more reckless fucking decisions without thinking about how they’ll impact the people around you. ”
Hurt poured from him like a dam that had broken, each word threatening to drown me. The weight settled onto my chest like a concrete block, pushing me below the surface one heavy truth at a time as I fought to keep my head above water.
He was right. I knew he was right. My baby brother was alone and in pain, and I’d helped put him there. I’d fucked up in more ways than I could count, and I hated myself for it to a degree I might never be able to recover from.
But I couldn’t deal with it now. Not until after.
“This doesn’t impact you,” I gritted, my chest tight.
“It does impact me,” he insisted, anger and heartbreak and fear tearing his voice apart.
“You getting hurt impacts me. It impacts Dad. It impacts the people who care about you, you fucking asshole. You think Aubrey is okay right now?” He pointed at the wall to the arena.
“You think she’ll be okay watching you fight tomorrow, watching you get your face beat in while your shoulder is fucked?
You think that won’t affect her? That it won’t crush her? ”
“It shouldn’t.” My heart thrashed against my ribs at her name. “This has nothing to do with her.”
“Really? Because I thought you were friends. Or was that nothing but a ruse to get her to sleep with you?”
Fresh anger flared in my chest, burning my throat. “Leave it alone, Evan.”
“Why should I? She’s my best friend, and she deserves better if this is the kind of shit you’re going to put her through.”
There, we agreed. They both deserved better than me. But I couldn’t deal with that now either. My mind felt like it was slipping across an oiled surface toward an edge there was no coming back from, and all I could focus on was trying to claw my way to stable ground.
“You make it sound like I’m going to die,” I said, grasping for any sort of ledge to hold on to. “It’s just a boxing match.”
“Exactly! It’s just a fucking boxing match! So let it go—”
“I can’t!” I shouted, not realizing I was on my feet until an agonizing heat exploded in my shoulder and wrenched me into a free fall of memories I’d tried like hell to suppress.
Every step and jab of the championship fight in Japan two years ago that injured my shoulder the first time.
Leaving the hospital after a full day of tests to a voicemail from Dad about Mom taking a turn for the worse.
Coach Peters helping me find the flight that would get me home the quickest.
Thirteen hours on a plane, my mind spinning the whole time with the urgency to go faster, to get home, to make it to her before it was too late.
Landing for my layover in Chicago to another voicemail that she was gone.
The blur of time that came after.
I’d sat in the terminal at my arrival gate for four hours, my phone in my hand, tears streaking my face as I missed my connecting flight.
Then I missed the one I’d been rebooked on two days later because I couldn’t shake the fact that going home would make it real.
I’d be there, and she’d be gone, and nothing would make sense anymore, but at the airport, it was like time was suspended.
I was in the moment of falling before everything hit the floor and shattered, and if I could just stay there a little longer, I wouldn’t have to hear the jarring crash of the glass breaking or deal with picking up the jagged pieces.
Her funeral was the reason I got on a plane. Knowing it would matter to her I was there. That I owed it to her to honor her in at least that way.
But facing it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
Surviving that week. Seeing her open casket. Not recognizing the face lying there, her skin too flat, her lips somehow wrong.
Everything just wrong.
I refused to let this tournament end the same way. Refused to lose boxing the way I’d lost my mom.
I couldn’t control her cancer or her surgery, and I couldn’t get her back, but I could control my own body. I could control this.
I would fight tomorrow.
I would win.
I would get my gym, and through it, I would hold on to this one thing I had left, and I would rip my arm clean off my body if that was what it took to do it.
“I can’t,” I said again, tone heavy with tears I would not let fall. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when Mom died. You’re right. You shouldn’t have had to handle it on your own. But I need this.”
“More than you need me?” he asked, his voice cracking.
The weight of the ocean settled on my chest. “It doesn’t have to be one or the other.” I willed him to understand. “Evan—if I win, I stay.”
No more goodbyes. No more missed holidays. No more piecing together snapshots of each other from secondhand accounts, trying to grasp enough of them not to feel like strangers. He had to want that too.
“What if you don’t win? What then?”
I will.
It was the only answer I had, the only option I could focus on right now. The only future I could accept.
It wouldn’t be enough for him.
He saw the truth of it on my face. His nostrils flared as his eyes dimmed with resignation. “Looks like I lose either way.”