10. Everett
EVERETT
She’s curled up against me when I wake up, which is weird. Not bad weird. Just... different weird.
I’m not used to waking up with another person in my bed, mostly because I’ve never let another person stay in my bed. Girls I’ve been with before got the couch, or they got a ride home, or they got the hint when I didn’t ask them to stay.
Isla didn’t get any of those things.
Her glasses are on my nightstand. Without them, her face looks younger. Softer. There’s a crease on her cheek from the pillowcase, and her hair is everywhere, fanned out across the pillow. She’s breathing in that slow, steady way that tells me she’s still out.
I should get up. I’ve got things to do. Laundry, playbook. The gym, if my hands cooperate. They’d better. I hurt them at the last fight, but I have another one tonight.
It was worth it. When I look around at my room and think about the house—the kind I always swore I would have one day—I remember how worthwhile it all is.
Isla shifts against me. Her eyes open, slow and unfocused, and the first thing she does is reach for her glasses. I grab them off the nightstand and hand them to her before she can knock anything over.
“Morning,” I say.
She pushes the glasses on and blinks a few more times, adjusting, then looks up at me. Her cheeks go pink like she suddenly remembers where she is and what happened last night. She’s clearly about to say something. I’ve learned it’s best to just let her get to it. “Your hands.”
Or she could just go straight for the throat. Cool. Good morning to me, too. “What about them?” I ask.
She sits up and pulls the sheet with her before reaching for my right hand.
I let her take it, since pulling away would make things worse.
She turns it over, studying my knuckles the way she studies everything: like she’s going to be tested on it later.
Okay, so the bruising is ugly. Purple and green at the edges, swollen across the first two knuckles.
There’s a cut on the third that I super-glued shut in the bathroom because I didn’t feel like going to urgent care.
“This isn’t from a heavy bag,” she announces.
“I told you—”
“You told me it was from hitting the bag too hard. That was days ago, but it looks worse now instead of better. And last night. That guy at the party. He said you hit him with a left hook, and his ears were still ringing.” She goes from looking at my hands to staring me straight in the eye. “I’m not stupid, Everett.”
“I never said you were.”
“Then stop lying to me.”
There it is. The edge she sometimes gets.
It doesn’t match the rest of her. Otherwise, she’s a shy girl who cries at Taylor Swift songs.
But underneath it, there’s a core of steel.
It shows up at the worst possible times.
Like right now, when I’m lying in bed with a stiff neck and a girl who’s decided this is the right time to interrogate me about my injuries.
“I’m not lying,” I tell her.
“Then what are you doing? Because something is going on, and you keep brushing me off every time I ask about it, and I don’t—” She stops and swallows. “I don’t want secrets. Not with you. I’ve had enough people in my life who kept things from me. I can’t do that again.”
The smart move would be to deflect. Change the subject. Maybe kiss her until she forgets what she was asking about. It’s worked before with other people.
Isla isn’t other people, though. She’s the kind of person who would pull away mid-kiss and say, “You still haven’t answered my question.”
So instead, I grunt, “Drop it.”
“No.”
“I said drop it,” I grunt.
“And I said no.” Dammit, she doesn’t flinch.
She doesn’t break eye contact or move away from me, or go quiet, or do any of the things other people do when I use that voice.
All she does is sit cross-legged on my bed in one of my T-shirts.
She’s still holding my bruised hand and still refusing to back down.
I can’t lie. It throws me. People don’t push back on me.
That’s sort of the whole foundation of my existence.
I’m the guy nobody pushes. Coaches tiptoe around me.
Teammates give me space. Random strangers cross the street, for fuck’s sake.
Since I was fourteen years old, the whole world has been treating me like something dangerous.
And now there’s this girl who weighs maybe a hundred pounds, sitting here telling me no like it’s nothing.
Like I’m nothing to be afraid of.
I don’t know what to do with it. So I do the only thing I can think of, which is tell her the truth. “I fight,” I admit. “On the side. For money.”
She doesn’t say anything right away. She just watches me and waits for more.
“It’s not boxing,” I continue. “Not MMA or anything like that. It’s nothing official or sanctioned.
There are no refs or rules or any of that shit.
Underground fights. We do it in warehouses, basements, parking garages.
Wherever they set it up that night.” I pull my hand out of hers, not because I’m mad but because I don’t want to be holding her hand when I tell her the rest. “It’s bare-knuckle.
It can get kind of brutal, but it pays cash. That’s why I do it.”
“How long?”
“Since freshman year. Almost two years now.”
“And the bruises? The ones you keep saying are from the gym?”
“From fights, obviously.”
She nods slowly. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“For one thing, it’s illegal. If the school finds out, I’ll lose my scholarship. If my coach finds out, I’m done. And because...”
I run a hand over my face and look up at the ceiling. “My scholarship only covers tuition and books. That’s it. There’s no housing or meal plan. No spending money. Nothing. My parents are...”
The word I want to use is “worthless,” but even that feels like it gives them too much credit. They’re just two people who had a kid they didn’t want and spent the next eighteen years making sure he knew it.
“My dad took off when I was twelve,” I explain.
“Mom was checked out a long time before that. Once he left, she stopped pretending. I basically got through high school on my own. The coaches looked out for me. They let me shower in the locker room and drove me to school when I didn’t have a ride.
When the scholarship came through, I thought that was it.
Problem solved. But it turns out tuition and books don’t keep the lights on or put food in the fridge. ”
I sit up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. “Fighting does. One or two fights a week, and I can cover the house, my expenses, and everything else. It’s the only thing I’m good at besides football, and football doesn’t pay me yet.”
The room goes quiet. I’m used to it—I don’t usually have guests around here. This is a different kind of silence, though. Heavier. Uncomfortable.
It lasts long enough that I start bracing for the part where she tells me this is too much. That she didn’t sign up for this. She wanted a guy to scare her HOA, not a guy who gets punched in the face in the back of a warehouse so he can pay his mortgage.
Nothing could’ve prepared me for what comes out of her mouth. “I want to see it.”
My head snaps around. “What?”
“A fight. I want to see one.” She wraps her arms around her knees and looks at me with an expression I wish I could read.
It’s not like she’s scared or disgusted.
More like she’s determined. Like she’s made a decision, and she’s going to see it through whether I like it or not.
“If this is part of your life, I want to understand it. I can’t just hear about it and fill in the blanks with whatever my brain comes up with, because my brain will come up with the worst possible version. I’d rather just see the real thing.”
“It’s not pretty.”
“I didn’t think it would be.”
“I’m serious, Isla. It’s not a football game. There are no refs, no rules, and there’s no one to stop it when somebody goes down. It’s ugly, and it’s loud, and people get hurt. People bleed.”
“Do you bleed?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you win?”
Something tightens in my chest. “Always.”
She nods once. “Then I want to see it.”
The warehouse is about forty minutes from campus. The kind of building you’d drive past a thousand times without even looking at it: gray cinderblock, no signs, a loading dock on one end that hasn’t been used in years. From the outside, it’s nothing.
From the inside? It’s a cage.
Not literally. There’s no cage. There’s just a circle of bodies, maybe sixty or seventy people deep.
They crowd around a space on the concrete floor that’s been cleared of pallets and debris.
The lights are industrial fluorescents, and half of them are out, so everything has this dim, yellow quality to it that makes the whole scene feel like it’s happening underwater.
There’s no announcer or walkout music. There’s just noise.
Talking, shouting, the sound of someone’s speaker blasting something with too much bass from a corner I can’t see.
Isla stands close to me. Her hand grips the back of my jacket, and she’s pressed against my side.
I can feel her pulse through the contact, quick and jumpy.
She’s overwhelmed, even if she’s trying not to show it.
The crowd, the noise, the smell—sweat and concrete, and cheap beer, and something metallic underneath all of it that she probably doesn’t recognize.
I do. I’ve tasted it enough times. The place smells like blood underneath everything else.
“You okay?” I ask, leaning down so she can hear me.
“Yep. Totally fine. Just a normal night in a warehouse full of strangers watching people fight for money.” Her voice is doing that thing where she talks faster when she’s nervous. “Very chill. Very casual.”
I almost smile. “Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t talk to anybody either. If anybody gives you trouble, you find Reece.” I point to a guy near the wall with his thick arms crossed as he scans the crowd. He runs the fights and owes me a couple of favors. “Tell him you’re with me. He’ll keep you safe.”