Chapter 38
ROADWORK(LEO)
By the third round, Lukas is breathing harder than he wants me to notice. He comes in off the jab just late enough, trying to turn his shoulder fast and hide the drag in his footwork. I clip him clean to the body before Ray calls time.
Lukas steps back with a muttered curse, glove brushing over his ribs.
Sweat runs down the side of his face and drips off his jaw onto the canvas.
The gym smells like old leather, disinfectant, wet wraps, and effort.
A radio mutters low behind the front desk.
Rain ticks against the high windows, dull and steady now, the storm reduced to background noise.
Ray leans through the ropes and looks at Lukas. “You trying to impress me or die pretty?”
Lukas spits his mouthpiece into his glove and glares. “Could be both.”
Ray snorts. “Take a lap. Then come back when your feet remember they belong to you.”
Lukas drops out of the ring with all the dignity available to a man who just got folded with a liver shot in front of witnesses. I stay where I am, elbows braced on the top rope, breathing hard but even. Sweat runs down my spine under the compression shirt. My pulse is up, but my head is quiet.
That’s the thing about camp when it’s going well. Everything unnecessary burns off. The noise. The static. The extra thoughts. There’s only the work in front of me and my body answering it.
Ray hands me a towel. I drag it across the back of my neck and over my face.
“You’re sharp,” he says.
I grunt.
“Sharper than you should be this deep in.” He studies me a moment, one thick forearm hooked over the top rope. “You’re sleeping better or getting laid or both. Keep it going.”
I look at him over the towel.
He grins. “That wasn’t a question.”
“Mind your business.”
Ray’s grin widens. “Nah.”
I drop the towel onto the stool in the corner and reach for my water. The bottle is cold enough to sting my palm. Across the gym, Lukas is pacing the far wall, breathing through his nose and pretending not to listen.
Ray keeps watching me.
“What?”
“You’re less ugly this camp.”
“That’s your professional assessment?”
“That’s me saying whatever’s going on in Brooklyn seems to agree with you.”
The bottle pauses halfway to my mouth.
Brooklyn.
Her.
He’s not wrong.
It’s there in stupid places now. In the way I look at the clock between sessions and count how long until I can get back.
In the way the apartment feels wrong without her and settled the second she’s back in it.
In the way her things have spread through my place so gradually, I could pretend not to notice if I wanted to, except I don’t want to.
I like her hair tie on the nightstand. Her face wash on the bathroom counter. The mug she reaches for without thinking. The shape of her in my bed before dawn, warm and still and close enough to make every harder instinct in me sit up before I shove it back down.
Real enough to make the rest of my life feel temporarily theoretical.
Jessica gave us the exit. Fade it naturally. Keep it quiet. No new drama, no public unraveling, just let it stop being a story if that’s what we wanted.
Liz kept the ring on.
I haven’t asked what that means. Not because I don’t want the answer. Because I do. Too much. But the first week of med school is not the moment to pin her down just because I finally know exactly where I stand.
Be patient. She called me her boyfriend. She’s practically living at my place, even though her co-op on Seventy-eighth is still hers.
Let her settle. Let her breathe. Let her come to it in her own time. That’s the right move. The only move.
Doesn’t make it easier. Just makes it necessary.
Ray’s voice cuts back in. “You with me, or are we all just standing here while you daydream?”
“I’m deciding whether to fire you.”
“You can’t afford to.”
I huff a laugh despite myself and set the bottle down.
“Again.” Ray jerks his chin at Lukas, who pushes off the wall and comes back toward the ring with that expression fighters get when pride has replaced good judgment.
He climbs through the ropes and raises his gloves.
“Try not to hit me where I’m already regretting my choices,” he says.
“No promises.”
The bell sounds again.
The next two rounds go cleaner. He adjusts. I adjust faster. Rain taps the windows. Ray tells me to shorten the hook and stop admiring my own work. I move because movement is easier than thought and because this is the one place in the world where every answer arrives in the body first.
By the time Ray finally calls it, sweat has soaked through my shirt and my forearms feel heavy in a satisfying way.
I step out of the ring and pull the gloves off. Lukas bends at the waist, hands on knees, still trying to recover enough dignity to speak.
Ray claps him on the shoulder on his way past. “You lived.”
“Go to hell,” Lukas says.
Ray looks back at me. “Wraps off. Then ice. You’ve got physio later?”
I think of Eden’s hands, the precise quiet of cranial sacral work, the way it knocks the edges off the static when the camp grind starts to stack up in my neck and jaw and chest.
“We’ll see,” I say.
He gives me a look that tells me he heard the deflection for what it is—an answer from a man who already knows exactly what he’s going to do and just doesn’t feel like explaining it yet.
I peel the tape down from my wrist and let my thoughts drift where they’ve wanted to drift all afternoon.
Liz sleeping in my bed this morning.
Liz starting med school, all nerves and stubbornness and sheer force of will.
Liz moving through the city alone while Drake has gone quiet in a way I don’t trust for one second.
That thought hits harder than the rest.
Silence doesn’t mean gone. Not with a man like him.
I know Drake’s shape. Prideful. Mean in the quiet ways.
The kind of man who would rather scorch the earth than admit he lost. The last time we fought, in Atlantic City, I beat him in front of a room full of people he wanted to impress.
He looked at me afterward like he was still arguing with reality.
Men like that don’t absorb humiliation and grow boundaries. They get quiet. They wait. They look for the next seam.
And one bad second is all a man like that needs.
Camp means I don’t get to close every gap I want to close. So I do what I can. I tell myself that’s not the same as closing around her.
It’s a thin line.
I sit on the bench and start unwinding the last of the wrap from my left hand.
Across from me, Lukas is toweling off, quieter now.
Ray is speaking to one of the assistant coaches near the lockers, voice low, hands moving through something technical about angles, recovery days, and where he wants my weight sitting by the end of the week.
The gym settles into its usual between-round hum.
Men moving around each other. Ice packs.
Water bottles. Wraps hanging off fingers.
The ordinary aftermath of damage done in controlled amounts.
My phone vibrates once on the bench beside me. A text from Eden from earlier, buried under camp notifications and weather alerts. I pick it up and type without overthinking.
LEO
Can you come by again tonight or tomorrow? Neck’s tight
My thumb hovers over the weather notification. I tap it open.
Tomorrow looks ugly. Gray all morning. Heavy rain by midday. Transit delays already predicted, because New York runs on infrastructure held together by spite alone.
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, and pull up the car service app.
She should be thinking about school. Not trains. Not weather. Not how to get herself from Brooklyn to First Avenue without wasting half her focus before lunch.
The car takes less than ten seconds to book. I hit confirm and sit back, wrap hanging loose from my hand, rain ticking softly at the windows.
One thing. No more than that.
The ring is still on her finger.
I sit with that for a long time.
Then I check the weather for the day after tomorrow.