Chapter Three Walking Through the Door
She noticed his shadow on the glass before she noticed him — a big shape blocking the afternoon light, standing there a beat too long.
Mika looked up, expecting a client, and found instead a man she recognized from a poster Renee had taped inside her locker eight months ago: Amir “THE CORNER” OWENS, some undercard fight at the Church Street centre.
He looked different in person. Less like a poster and more like a person who was nervous, which did not compute with anything she thought she knew about famous people.
“This Prescott & Nash?” he asked, even though the gold lettering on the door behind him answered the question.
“It is.”
“I got a two o’clock. Sponsorship thing. My manager set it up, I don’t really—” He stopped, scratched the back of his neck. “I’m early. Real early.”
“You can have a seat.” She gestured at the little waiting area, the same three chairs and the same sad ficus that had been dying slowly since she started working there. “I should replace that. Brighten it up maybe..” Mika mumbled.
He didn’t sit. He stood at the desk instead, hands in his jacket pockets, looking at her name plate. “Mika,” he read. “That’s pretty. Short for something?”
“Amika.” She felt her face get warm and hated it. “But.. nobody calls me that.”
“I might.”
It wasn’t a line, or it didn’t land like one — there was something almost shy in the way he said it, like he’d surprised himself. She looked back down at her computer screen, not because she had anything to type, but because she didn’t know what her face was doing and didn’t trust it.
“You go to school around here?” he asked. “I see you with them big books.”
“Temple Law. One more year.”
Something shifted in his face — a kind of open respect that she wasn’t used to getting from men, especially not men who looked like they’d stepped off a magazine cover. “Law,” he repeated. “That’s serious. That’s real serious.”
“It’s mostly just reading.”
“Everything worth having is mostly just the boring part nobody sees.” He said it easy, like a fact, like something he’d learned the hard way and paid full price for. “I get up at five every morning to hit a bag by myself in the dark. Ain’t nobody clapping for that part.”
She looked up at him again. Really looked. And for the first time in longer than she could remember, Mika Bryant felt like somebody was actually seeing her back.
“What made you want to box?” she found herself asking, surprising them both with how quickly the question came out.
He considered it seriously, like nobody had asked him that in a long time either.
“Wasn’t really a want, at first. Was more like — I needed somewhere to put everything.
All the anger, all the fear, all of it. Gym gave me somewhere to put it that didn’t end with somebody getting hurt who didn’t deserve it, or even worse me getting locked up, or worse.
” He shrugged, like he was surprised at his own honesty.
“Took me a minute to actually love it. But I do now. It’s the one place in my whole life where the only person I gotta beat is who I was yesterday. ”
“That’s a good way to think about it.”
“You don’t gotta be nice. I know it sounds like something off a motivational poster.”
“I wasn’t being nice.” She meant it, and something in her voice must have carried that, because he smiled again, smaller this time, more private.
His two o’clock came out of the elevator and called his name, and he had to go, but he paused at the door.
“I’m gonna come back through,” he said. “That cool?”
She should have said something professional. Something that kept the glass between them the way it was supposed to stay. Instead she said, “I’m here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”
He smiled — a real one, the kind that made the toughness in his face fall away for just a second — and walked out into the cold.
Mika sat there for a long moment after the door swung shut, her heart doing something embarrassing and unfamiliar in her chest, and thought: this is a bad idea.
She thought it again the next morning, when he showed up with two coffees and no meeting at all.
She was right. It was a bad idea. It was also the best thing that had happened to her in years, and she was too tired of being careful to turn it away.