Chapter 36
CORNER WORK (LIZ)
Eden jerks her chin toward the hallway. “Bedroom, big brother.”
I smile and head for the kitchen while Leo pushes himself up and follows his sister, who is already gathering her hair up and shifting into work mode.
“Are you staying for dinner?” I call after them before they disappear down the hall.
“No. Heading to Tarrytown right after. Nate is making zucchini flowers. Apparently they’re in season, and we have to take full advantage.”
I hear Leo chuckle, low and tired, and then the bedroom door closes softly behind them.
The fridge is full of the pre-portioned meals Leo’s nutritionist had delivered, neatly labeled with our names.
Our names.
I pull out salmon, spinach, and rice and start plating dinner without thinking about it. Napkins. Water glasses. Cutlery. The motions come too easily now, as if this kitchen has started recognizing me back.
An hour later, the bedroom door opens. Leo steps back into the living room looking looser somehow, not rested exactly, but less tightly wound.
The hard set of his shoulders has eased, but camp still clings to him—the heavy stillness, the bruised fatigue, the kind of stripped-down physical presence that makes the whole room feel smaller when he walks into it.
I have to remind myself not to stare.
He glances toward the kitchen, sees the plates on the counter, then tips his head toward the hall.
“Eden wants you.”
I blink at him. “For what?”
A laugh carries from the bedroom. “Fifteen minutes. Get in here.”
I hesitate just long enough to make Leo’s mouth twitch.
“Go,” he says.
I set down the glass in my hand and start toward the hallway. When I reach him, his hand catches my waist and holds me there.
He pulls me in and kisses me.
I smile against his lips, a little breathless despite myself. “This seems medically inappropriate.”
“Take it up with my care team,” he murmurs.
Fifteen minutes later, when Eden lifts her hands away, my body feels looser than it has all week.
“There. Your head is back where it belongs.”
I sit up slowly. “You’re alarmingly effective.”
“I know.”
She disappears into the bathroom to wash her hands, and I stay on the edge of the bed a second longer.
Then she’s gone, the door clicking softly shut behind her. The apartment quiets around the two of us. Dinner on the counter. Evening gathering at the windows. His world closing neatly around me again.
He looks better than he did when I walked in. Less armored, but not softer. If anything, camp has stripped him down to something more dangerous, less polished, more essential.
“Better?” he asks.
“Much.”
He slides a plate toward me. “Sit down, Flash.”
“You’re very bossy for someone who needed cranial-sacral intervention an hour ago.”
“Being exhausted doesn’t make me less right.”
We eat at the island.
The salmon is excellent in the deeply annoying way all of these meals are excellent. I glance at the label still stuck to the glass container.
“Your nutritionist is terrifyingly competent.”
“Nate recommended her.”
“That tracks.”
“She handles my macros and has everything prepped and delivered. Makes life easier.”
I take another bite and look around the kitchen. The labeled containers. The supplement packets lined up beside the coffee machine. His schedule written in clipped black marker on the whiteboard by the fridge—training, rest, meals, recovery, all of it blocked out with military neatness.
“You know,” I say, setting my fork down, “this place is starting to feel less like an apartment and more like a high-functioning hostage situation.”
His eyes lift to mine. “How so?”
I tip my head toward the fridge. “The labels. The schedule. The pre-portioned food. I’m half expecting your water intake to be monitored by satellite.”
“It is.”
I narrow my eyes at him.
His mouth twitches. “Kidding.”
“Only because the technology doesn’t exist yet.”
“It absolutely exists.”
I laugh, but the sound fades quickly. My gaze drops to the whiteboard again, then back to him. “Does this help?”
He follows the direction of my eyes without turning his head. He knows what I’m asking.
“With camp, you mean?”
“With everything.”
He leaves the question there a second before answering. Then he sets down his fork.
“When it gets close to a fight, I don’t want extra decisions. I don’t want noise. I want the next thing in front of me, and I want to do that one right.”
I lean my forearms on the island. “It keeps you focused?”
“It keeps my head quiet.”
The answer lands between us and stays there.
“My father,” he continues after a moment, “thought I’d do something else.”
“Your parents seemed very cerebral. Not exactly the family people picture when they think of a professional boxer.”
A faint, tired amusement moves across his face. “That’s fair.”
He picks up his water, takes a slow drink, then sets it down again. “Boxing was part of the athletic program growing up. It was always there. It just was never supposed to become the whole plan.”
“What was the plan?”
His thumb drags once along the side of the glass. “Something respectable. My brother Ryan is in Washington teaching neurobiology. I think my father assumed I’d end up in some version of that lane.”
“That sounds...” I glance toward the living room, toward the books lining the shelves, then back at him. “Not entirely impossible for you.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. “I was smart enough. That was part of the problem.”
I smile faintly. “It explains the library.”
He lets out a quiet laugh, then his gaze shifts toward the windows.
“I got into Stanford and went because that was the move. It kept everybody calm. It kept me on the path.” His mouth flattens a little. “And for a while, I managed both. Classes. Training. The version of my life that looked right on paper.”
I let that sit. “But?”
“But my brain didn’t love it as much as everyone else did.”
He says it so plainly that it gets under my skin.
“It started second semester,” he says. “Not one dramatic moment. More like my body started objecting before I had language for it. In class first. Then during exams. Too much sitting still. Too much trying to care about things I didn’t actually care about.”
I don’t interrupt.
He taps two fingers lightly against his sternum. “My chest would lock up. I’d lose my breath. Couldn’t think straight. The first time it happened I thought I was having a heart attack for about five very stupid minutes.”
The stripped-down way he says it undoes something in me. There’s no flourish or self-pity. Just the memory of a body turning against itself.
“What did you do?”
“Kept going. Because that’s what people do when they don’t know what else to do.”
I look down, then back up.
“I did therapy. Behavioral stuff. Breathing. Structure. I got better at functioning.” His expression turns dry. “From the outside, I was doing great.”
I know that tone. I know exactly what lives under it.
“And boxing?”
That faint shadow of a smile comes back.
“Boxing was the only place it stopped.”
The words land in me with a strange, sharp force. Of course. The stillest, most controlled man I know is built around impact.
Sitting across from him in his immaculate kitchen, with the whiteboard on the wall and the meals labeled to the gram, I feel it more clearly than I want to: all this order is wrapped around something capable of enormous damage.
I wait.
“In training, sparring, amateur fights, whatever level I was at, there was just the next decision. The next movement. The next read. No spiraling. No static. No ten thousand thoughts at once. Just the thing in front of me.”
The conversation stops being casual.
“So I trained harder. Studied. Kept the other lane going because I could. But by then I already knew. Every year I leaned further into the ring and felt more like myself there than anywhere else.”
“And when you graduated,” I say softly, “you chose.”
“Yes.”
He glances around the kitchen then, at the containers, the board, the precision of his evening, and when he speaks again, his voice is quieter.
“The ring taught me what helps. If I narrow the frame, I’m fine. One move. One read. One decision. That’s all.”
I look at him across the island, at the broad, exhausted weight of him, the control that seems to live under his skin, and suddenly the labels on the meal containers, the whiteboard by the fridge, the rigid camp schedule all make a different kind of sense.
Not obsession.
Relief.
“This,” I say, glancing around the kitchen, “is you keeping your world in order so there’s no room for the noise.”
“Yes.”
Before I can answer, he reaches for my plate, stacking it with his.
“I can do that.”
“I know.”
He puts both plates in the dishwasher, movements slow but automatic. I watch the line of his back under the T-shirt, the easy competence of his hands, the way even fatigue doesn’t make him careless.
It should read domestic. Safe.
Instead, something in me reacts the way it always does around him, as if competence in a man built like that is its own kind of trouble. As if the quiet, controlled way he moves through space only makes it easier to forget what he could do if he ever stopped holding himself back.
There’s something reckless in how much I like this.
When he turns back around, drying his hands on a dish towel, I’m still looking at him.
His attention settles on me with a kind of precision that feels physical. My skin prickles before he says a word.
“Come here.”
There’s no point pretending I was going to do anything else.
I slide off the stool and walk to him. He hooks a hand around my waist and pulls me in until my body fits against his.
He’s tired. I can feel that too. The drag of the day in his shoulders, the weight of camp still sitting in his body.
It doesn’t make him gentler. It makes him feel denser somehow, all force packed tighter. Less like a man winding down, more like one pared to the bone.
The kiss he gives me is slow and unhurried, making the apartment tilt around us.
When he lifts his head, his thumb brushes once over my lower lip.
“How was your first day really?”
I let my forehead rest briefly against his jaw, breathing him in.
“Overwhelming,” I admit. “And good. And terrifying. And kind of amazing.”
His arm tightens at my waist. “That sounds about right.”
I smile against his skin. “Apparently tomorrow is supposed to break the heat.”
He makes a quiet sound that is not quite agreement. “They’re saying storms.”
“I’ll take storms over this. At least the city might cool off.”
His hand slides once along my back, steady and absentminded in a way that feels far too good.
“I’ll have the car downstairs at eight.”
The words are calm. Decided.
I lift my head. “Leo—”
“It’s supposed to pour. You’re not doing the subway in that.”
It’s thoughtful. Protective. Entirely in character.
Something shifts inside me. Not objection. Not even close. Just the unmistakable sensation of the next piece of my life clicking into place before I have chosen it, and the more dangerous recognition that some part of me likes the sound it makes.
Then his hand closes at the back of my neck—controlled and claiming—and want moves through me so fast, it nearly takes my footing.
And the worst part is that for one blinding second, losing balance feels a lot like relief.