EPILOGUE — Unanimous （Leo） #2
By the end of the second, I know his timing. He dips before the right. He squares up when he wants to trade. His feet get heavy when the body work starts to tax him. He’s strong and live and proud enough to stay dangerous. He’s also behind.
The third goes faster. I split him with the jab and follow with a right that lands flush enough to draw the first true roar from the house. His head snaps back. He answers with a hook that glances off my guard. I dig left to the liver. He folds a fraction. Enough.
The fourth is the one that reminds me this is a fight and not a clinic.
He comes out desperate and sharp, willing to spend whatever he has to change the pattern. I see the left hook late because I’m already thinking two beats ahead. It clips the edge of my jaw and snaps my head just far enough to make the crowd lose its mind.
The shot is not clean enough to hurt me, but it’s clean enough to anger me.
The old version of me would have answered that with violence.
I feel the urge rise, hot and immediate. Put him down. Make him regret touching you. Break the room open.
Then I hear Liz’s voice in my head, low by my ear in the locker room.
“Win your fight. Then I want you alone.”
The anger settles into focus.
I give him the jab. Then the body. Then another body shot after he brings the guard high in anticipation of the right. His breath leaves him in a short burst. He tries to hold. I walk him off and put him back at the end of my left until the bell saves him.
When I sit, Ray looks at me. He knows exactly what almost happened and exactly what did not.
“That,” he says, “is called maturity. Try it again.”
The middle rounds belong to attrition. He keeps trying to drag me into exchanges that flatter his chance and shorten mine.
I keep making him fight the one that wins cards.
Touch. Turn. Counter. Punish the body. By the eighth, there’s blood somewhere around my mouth and a slice opening under his right eye.
My shoulders are hot. My lungs are working.
When the referee wipes my gloves, I glance toward ringside.
Liz has not changed posture once. Eden says something to her. Liz answers, then looks straight at me and touches the ring with her thumb.
He opens up in the ninth and tenth because he knows what the numbers probably say. We trade hard for ten seconds near the ropes, the best exchange of the fight. He lands to the body. I answer over the top. For one clean instant the old hunger rises and tells me to finish him here.
I let it pass.
I don’t need the knockout badly enough to get stupid chasing it.
Winning is enough.
Winning under control is better.
In the twelfth, I box. Clean jab. Right to freeze him. Hook to the body when he reaches. In the last thirty seconds, he comes forward on pride and fumes, and I meet him with the cleanest combination of the night. Left. Right. Left hook. He stumbles, catches himself, and makes it to the bell.
Then the sound comes.
The final bell always feels different from the first. It empties the body in one rush. The work is done. Whatever remains belongs to judges, headlines, and the stories people tell tomorrow.
I lower my gloves and walk to the neutral corner while the referee gathers us.
Ray gets up on the apron. “You won.”
Mickey presses the enswell under my eye and wipes the blood at my lip.
Then we are called to center ring. The announcer steps forward with the scorecard in his hand and all that amplified theater in his voice. The arena falls into that giant-room hush where twenty thousand people decide together to hold their breath.
He reads the first card.
118-110.
The second.
117-111.
The third.
119-109.
“By unanimous decision…”
The rest disappears under the roar.
My hand is raised. Cameras flash white in every direction. The belt is brought in. The crowd gives back noise in waves big enough to shake the canvas.
I don’t jump the ropes or pound my chest. I give them what they paid for, nothing more.
I turn my head and look for her.
Liz is on her feet with Eden beside her, both of them clapping, both of them laughing now with the release of it. The light catches the ring again when she lifts her hand to her mouth for one brief second before she catches herself and lowers it.
The rest of the official machinery takes time.
Gloves off. Mandatory interview in the ring.
Medical check. Another interview in the corridor because no one in this sport ever believes one answer is enough.
By the time I get back to the locker room, I’m scrubbed raw with fatigue and still lit from the inside.
This is the part Liz meant.
The adrenaline from the fight has nowhere to go. It moves under the skin, along the spine, into my hands. My body is still built for impact. My head is clear enough to be dangerous, and my restraint is one layer thinner than it was an hour ago.
After a quick shower, I drop on the bench. Mickey tapes an ice pack under my right eye. Ray tells me I boxed smart. Elliot is halfway through a lecture about post-fight media obligations when the door opens.
He stops talking, and Liz steps into the room. Ray takes one look at me, one look at her, and says, “We’re done here.”
Thirty seconds later, it’s just us.
She closes the door behind her and leans there for one second, looking at me with a heat that wipes out the rest of the room.
Then she walks toward me.
Up close, she smells of jasmine, warm skin, and the faint trace of coconut in her hair. I know the scent so well now, I could find her blind in a crowd.
She stops between my knees and lifts her hand to my jaw. The ring glints when her fingers brush the swelling under my eye. Her touch is light and precise, nurse hands with no softness wasted where it would not help.
“You split your lip,” she says.
“He clipped me in the fourth.”
“I noticed. I had several thoughts.”
“Useful ones?”
“Not even remotely. Most of them involved getting everyone in this building out of my way.”
That gets a real smile out of me.
Her thumb slides once across my lower lip, careful around the cut. My body responds all at once. Every live wire from the last half hour tightens.
Her gaze drops to my mouth. Then lower, to my chest, where bruises are already starting to bloom.
“You’re still buzzing,” she says quietly.
I lean forward enough to bring us closer without touching more than her hand. “You started it.”
Color rises under her skin, but she doesn’t look away. Six months ago, she might have. Even three months ago, maybe. Now she holds my gaze and lets me see exactly what she means to say before she says it.
“Good,” she answers. “Come back to the room and let me deal with it.”
My hands flex on my thighs.
“You are about three seconds from getting carried out of here.”
“I’m comfortable with that outcome.”
I stand.
She draws in a breath when the full height of me comes into her space, but she doesn’t step back. Her palm stays on my chest. I can feel the ring against my skin when she flattens her hand there.
I take her wrist gently, turning her hand so the stone catches the fluorescent light over the mirror. For a second, I just look at it there, on her, where it belongs.
Then I lift her hand and press my mouth to her knuckles.
When I straighten, her eyes are bright and dark at once. The breath she lets out shakes at the edges. “You were magnificent out there.”
I hold her gaze. “I was thinking about you.”
She laughs under her breath and steps in closer. Her forehead comes to rest against my chest. I put my hand at the back of her neck.
This is the place the night was always going. To the point where after the work, I get to turn and find her waiting.
I tip her chin up.
“You wanted me alone.”
“Yes.”
“You have me.”
The kiss is slow. Her mouth opens under mine with a soft sound. My hand slides into her hair. Hers fist in the drawstring of my sweats. By the time I pull back, both of us are breathing harder and the space between us has gone from fluorescent locker room to a private threat.
She touches the split in my lip again and smiles. “Can you walk?”
I bend and pick up the black team jacket from the bench. “I can walk. For a few more minutes.”
She steps aside to let me pull it on. When I reach for her hand, she gives it to me at once.
The ring sits warm against my palm.
Outside the locker room, the arena is still roaring for itself. Media are still talking. Sponsors are still smiling for cameras. Somewhere down the hall, Elliot is probably building a sentence out of the words dominant, disciplined, champion, and legacy.
Let him.
I walk out with Liz at my side, her fingers threaded through mine.
The best part of fight night has nothing to do with the bell.
THE END