Chapter 17 #2
“I haven’t, so I don’t know where you’re getting that idea,” she says, following me despite her protests.
“Really?” I glance back at her. “You’ve never broken into anywhere? Not even once?”
She looks at me blankly for a moment, and then I watch her expression go from confused to annoyed to murderous in the span of about two seconds. The hardware store on Fifth Street, the summer before senior year, the two of us sneaking in through the back entrance at midnight.
“We agreed to never speak of that,” she says.
“Did we?” I lean against the side of the building and cross my arms. “I must have been distracted by something at the time.”
“I’m agreeing now, retroactively, on behalf of both of us.” She crosses her arms. “And if I recall correctly, back then I was in jeans and tennis shoes, not a dress and Louboutin heels.”
I hoist myself up onto the windowsill and swing my legs through, dropping down into the darkness on the other side. The floor is solid beneath my feet, dusty but stable. I turn back and extend my hand through the window. “Come on, Bennett. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
She looks at my hand, then down at her heels, then back at my hand. “If I ruin these shoes, you’re buying me new ones.”
“Deal. I’ll add it to the tab along with the bra.”
She mutters something under her breath that sounds distinctly like “fuck you, Midnight,” but she takes my hand anyway, letting me steady her as she climbs through the window frame. Her dress rides up as she swings her legs over and I keep my eyes firmly on her face as she drops down beside me.
We stand there for a moment, letting our eyes adjust to the darkness.
The streetlights outside provide just enough glow through the broken windows to make out the shape of the space: a boxing ring in the center with sagging ropes, heavy bags hanging from the ceiling like ghosts waiting for someone to wake them up.
Old posters on the walls, too faded to read from here.
A speed bag in the corner, still attached to its platform.
I walk through it slowly, running my hand along the ropes of the ring.
The canvas is dusty but intact, and when I press down on it I can feel the give that means the padding underneath is still good.
Whoever closed this place down didn’t even bother to gut it.
They just locked the door and walked away.
“It’s like a time capsule,” Brooke says quietly from somewhere behind me. She’s looking at the photos on the wall, old black-and-white shots of fighters in their primes, poses that were probably cutting-edge decades ago and now look almost quaint.
“My dad’s up there somewhere.” I join her at the wall and scan the faces until I find him, looking young and hungry, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, his fists raised and his jaw set with determination. “There, the third from the left.”
She finds him and studies the photo for a long moment. “He looks intense.”
“He was.” I touch the edge of the frame, feeling the dust coat my fingertips. “He was the most stubborn man I’ve ever known. It drove me crazy when I was a kid, but I get it now.”
We’re quiet for a while, just standing there in the dark looking at ghosts. I can almost hear the sounds this place must have held once: gloves hitting leather, trainers shouting instructions, the shuffle of feet on canvas and the grunts of effort. All of it silent now, waiting.
“I want to open a gym here,” I say, and the words surprise me almost as much as they seem to surprise her. “Not now, probably not for years. But someday. A second Midnight Boxing, in New York. I never thought I would, but I’m developing a love for this city.”
Brooke turns back to look at the posters, her face half in shadow. “Here? In this building?”
“My dad always talked about coming back.” I shove my hands in my pockets and look around the space, seeing it not as it is but as it could be.
New equipment, fresh paint, the ring restored to its former glory.
Young fighters learning the same fundamentals my dad learned sixty years ago, in the same place he learned them.
“Opening a gym in the city where it all started. He never got the chance.”
“So you’d do it for him,” she says, looking at me with an unreadable expression.
“I’d do it for both of us.” I meet her eyes. “It’s a stupid dream, probably. The real estate alone would be—“
“If anyone could do it, it would be you,” she says firmly.
I stare at her for a second, caught off guard. “Was that almost a compliment?”
“Don’t get used to it.” But she’s smiling, just barely.
We stand there for another few minutes, not talking, just existing in this space that meant so much to my father and is starting to mean something to me too.
Then Brooke shivers slightly and I realize how late it’s gotten, how the temperature has dropped, how she’s standing there in a dress and heels in an abandoned building in the middle of the night.
“Come on,” I say, moving back toward the window. “I should walk you home.”
“Chivalrous, but I can take care of myself, Dominic,” Brooke laughs. “I’ve lived in this city for fourteen years.”
“I know you can.” I hoist myself back through the window and turn to help her out. “But I want to walk you anyway. I’m not going to leave you to find your way home alone when I’m the one who dragged you to some abandoned building at midnight.”
She rolls her eyes, but she takes my hand and lets me help her through the window, dropping down onto the sidewalk beside me. “You’re still the same as you were in high school, you know that? Always thinking you need to protect everyone.”
“And you’re still the same too,” I say. “Always thinking you don’t need anyone’s help.”
“I don’t need anyone’s help,” she says, giving me a sidelong glance as we start walking. “There’s a difference between needing it and accepting it.”
We walk through the Lower East Side and up through the Village, past late-night pizza joints and bars with their doors propped open and couples stumbling home from wherever they’ve been.
Brooke points out places as we pass them, little pieces of her life here.
The corner where she got her first apartment, the bar where she used to drink with colleagues after deadlines, the bodega that knows her coffee order.
I listen and try not to think about how natural this feels, walking beside her through streets she knows by heart, watching her face when she talks about the city she’s made her home.
It’s dangerous territory. It’s exactly what I swore I wouldn’t do.
And then somehow we’re at her building, a brownstone on a tree-lined street in the West Village, and it hits me just how far she’s come.
She wanted to be a journalist since we were seventeen years old, used to talk about it with that fire in her eyes like it was the only future she could see for herself.
And she made it happen. She’s at the top of her field, living in a building like this, in a city like this, and despite everything between us, I feel something close to pride.
We walk up the steps together and she pulls out her keys, unlocking the door but not going inside. Instead she turns to face me, her back against the doorframe, and we just look at each other for a long moment.
The streetlight is casting shadows across her face and that mark on her neck is visible again, the one I left two nights ago, and I have no idea what she’s thinking but I know exactly what I’m thinking and it’s nothing good.
“This doesn’t change anything,” she says quietly. “One night of semi-civil conversation doesn’t mean I like you.”
“I know.” I shove my hands in my pockets to keep from reaching for her. “I don’t like you either.”
“Good.” She takes a step closer. “I’m glad we’re clear on that.”
I take a step closer, closing the distance between us until there’s barely any left. “Me too. It’s good to be aligned on these things.”
She looks up at me, her lips parting slightly, and I watch her eyes drop to my mouth and then back up again.
“Fuck you, Midnight,” she says, and then she grabs me by the front of my jacket and pulls me in and kisses me.
It’s angry and hungry and nothing like a kiss should be when you hate someone this much.
I grip her waist and pull her inside, kicking the door shut behind us, and her back hits the wall of her entryway before I’ve even registered what the apartment looks like.
Her hands are shoving my jacket off my shoulders while I’m trying to get closer, trying to feel every inch of her body in that red dress I’ve been thinking about taking off all night.
She bites my lower lip hard enough to sting and I groan against her mouth, pinning her against the wall with my hips. She’s got her fingers twisted in my shirt now, pulling me closer like she’s trying to crawl inside me or maybe just tear me apart, and I honestly can’t tell the difference anymore.
She pulls back just enough to speak, her lips still brushing mine. “This is the last time we’re doing this,” she says. “Just this once more. Then we’re done. And don’t go thinking one conversation changes anything between us.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I tell her, and then I’m kissing her again, lifting her up as her legs wrap around my waist, and I stop thinking about anything at all.