Prologue #2
He charges again. I wait longer this time—let him close the distance until I can count the beads of sweat on his forehead. Then I grab the leg he kicks at me, twist, flip him. My foot connects with his stomach on the way down. The sound he makes is the sound of a body remembering it has limits.
He gets up. I’ll give him that. He gets up and squares again and comes at me with his fists this time—sloppy jabs, too wide, telegraphing every shot. A few land. Glancing. Nothing that reaches the place where the real pain lives.
That’s the secret nobody tells you about fighting.
You’re not trying to avoid getting hit. You’re trying to get hit exactly enough—enough to feel it, enough to remind your nervous system that you exist, enough to overwrite the other sensations that live in your body when you’re not being punched.
The closet. The rope. The nine hours of silence before I pushed the door open and found my mother’s bare feet three inches off the closet floor.
The kid’s breathing hard now. Mouth open. Arms dropping. The adrenaline tank running on fumes. I’ve been conserving—moving, dodging, letting him tire himself on his own ambition. It’s time.
I kick. Heel to jaw. His head snaps sideways and blood arcs from his mouth and the crowd surges.
He stumbles back, spine against the cage, and I close the distance.
Knee to the ribs. His hands come up to protect his face and that opens his body.
Three punches to the temple, each one landing with the wet, dense sound of fist on skull. His eyes go glassy. His legs give.
He goes down.
The ref pulls me back. Grabs my wrist. Raises my hand. “Xander Anderson wins!”
The crowd is noise. Just noise. I don’t hear them.
I hear the bass from the overhead speakers and the ringing in my ears and the particular silence that lives underneath all sound when your body has just done something violent and your nervous system hasn’t decided yet whether to feel powerful or disgusted.
My eyes find Penny through the chain-link.
She’s exactly where I left her. Arms crossed.
Face unreadable. Watching me the way she’s always watched me—like she’s trying to find the boy underneath the damage, the Xander who used to sit with her on the swings and eat snacks from her pink backpack and walk home together after school.
The Xander who beat a man unconscious with a lacrosse stick at thirteen because something was happening to her and the world hadn’t taught him any other way to make it stop.
That Xander. The one she keeps looking for. The one I keep burying. I spit blood. Wipe my mouth. Head for the cage door.
I’m three steps out of the cage and someone is talking to her.
He’s big—mid-twenties, thick neck, shoulders that strain the seams of a flannel shirt rolled to the elbows.
The physique of a guy who used to fight and now just watches and drinks and looks for other things to do with his hands.
A beer in one fist. The other one resting on the wall above Penny’s head, his body angled to box her in, creating a pocket of space where she’s between him and the cinder block with nowhere to go unless she ducks under his arm.
She hasn’t ducked. Penny doesn’t duck. She’s standing her ground with that tilt of her chin, the one that says “I am not impressed by your size or your proximity,” but her body is telling a different story—weight shifted to the back foot, shoulders angled toward the exit, the geometry of a girl who’s mapping her escape route while her mouth buys time.
“—see you around here before.” His voice carries. Low, syrupy, a man who thinks volume control is the same as charm. “You somebody’s girl, or you here lookin’ for some action?”
Penny smiles. The deflection smile. “Just watching the fights. My friend is one of the fighters.”
“Friend, huh?” He leans closer. His beer hand comes down to rest on her arm—fingers circling above her elbow, thumb pressing into the soft skin on the inside.
Not squeezing. Testing. The way you’d test a doorknob to see if it’s locked.
“What kind of friend? The kind that goes home alone, or the kind that needs a ride?”
“The kind that fights in cages for fun,” Penny says. Still smiling. Still deflecting. But I can see her pulse in her throat from ten feet away—fast, visible, the body’s truth underneath the mouth’s performance. “So probably not someone you want to piss off by touching his stuff.”
He laughs. Loud. The laugh of a man who finds resistance entertaining rather than instructional.
“His stuff? That’s what you are? Some fighter’s little toy?
” He tugs at the teal streak in her hair, rolling it between his fingers like he’s evaluating fabric.
“You’re too pretty to be somebody’s stuff, sweetheart.
A girl like you should be making her own choices. ”
“I am making a choice.” Penny pulls the streak free from his fingers. “I’m choosing to end this conversation.”
She tries to step past him. His arm drops from the wall and catches her waist—not gentle, not violent.
Somewhere in between. The gray area where men who know exactly what they’re doing operate because the gray area doesn’t leave bruises and doesn’t have a name and lets them say “I was just being friendly” if anyone asks.
“Hey, hey, hey.” He pulls her back. Close. Close enough that his mouth is near her ear and his belt is against her hip and his breath is moving her hair. “Don’t be like that. I’m just talkin’. You came to a cage fight in Bridgeport on a Friday night, beautiful. You knew what this was.”
I cover the distance. I don’t remember the steps. One second I’m at the cage. The next second my hand is on his chest and I’m shoving him off her hard enough that he staggers back three feet and the beer drops and glass shatters on the concrete. Penny stumbles sideways. I step between them.
He’s got four inches on me and probably forty pounds but I’m bleeding from the eyebrow and my knuckles are split and taped and I just put a man on the ground in under three minutes and every molecule of my body is broadcasting the frequency of a person who would welcome—pray for—an excuse.
“Can I fucking help you.”
He finds his footing. Looks at the broken glass. Looks at me. The smile drops. Rebuilds. The kind of man who smiles when he’s calculating.
“Was just chatting with this beautiful girl, man. Relax. Move so we can finish our conversation.”
“She’s mine. Back the fuck off.”
He snorts. “Yours? Didn’t look like she knew that. You two were arguin’ pretty hard before your fight. Looked more like a lover’s quarrel than a relationship.” He cranes his neck to look around me, finding Penny. “That true, sweetheart? He yours?”
“Don’t talk to her. Talk to me.”
“I’d rather talk to her. She’s nicer to look at.
” He steps forward. Not backing down. The kind of man who doesn’t back down from boys because he still thinks age is a weapon.
“You know what I think? I think she came here alone. I think she came here looking for something. And I think whatever you two got goin’ on is fucked up enough that she’d rather be in a warehouse in Bridgeport than wherever you came from. ”
Penny’s hand finds the back of my shirt. Not pulling me back. Grounding. The particular pressure of a person who knows exactly how fast this is about to escalate and is trying to keep it at a simmer instead of a boil.
“X. Come on.”
The guy hears her voice and grins. “X. That your name? What is that, a nickname? A stage name?” He leans in.
Close enough that I can smell the Bud Light on his breath and the cigarette smoke in his flannel.
“Let me tell you something, X. If she was mine, I wouldn’t leave her standing alone in a room full of dogs.
But you did. You walked into that cage and left her right there in the open, and every man in this building saw it.
So don’t get mad at me for noticing what you left unprotected. ”
He’s right. He’s absolutely fucking right, and the fact that he’s right is the gasoline and his grin is the match and I’m about to—
I kiss her.
I turn around and I slam my lips onto Penny’s and I kiss her like the building is on fire and she’s the exit.
My hands on her face. Her back against the concrete wall.
Not gentle. Not asking. Claiming. Making a statement that doesn’t require words and can’t be misread by anyone within eyeshot.
Her arms wrap around my neck and she pulls me in and kisses me back with a sound that’s half gasp and half moan and the taste of her—strawberries and mint and the faint salt of sweat—floods my mouth and drowns everything else.
When we break apart, the guy is gone. Dissolved into the crowd with the efficiency of a man who’s seen enough to know when the territory has been claimed.
Penny stares up at me. Chest heaving. Lips swollen. Her hands are still locked behind my neck.
I take her hand. Pull her away from the wall.
Through the crowd, down a hallway with busted fluorescent lights, past a storage room, to a closet at the end of the corridor.
The only door without a padlock. I shove it open, pull her inside, slam it shut, and push a crate in front of it because the lock is broken and I don’t trust anything in this building.
It’s dark. A single bulb overhead, bare, throwing dirty yellow light across boxes and cleaning supplies and grime in a room that hasn’t been cleaned since the building was a factory. It smells like bleach and dust and the cold concrete underneath.
Penny’s back is against the wall. I’m against her. My hands braced on either side of her head. Her breathing is fast. Mine is faster.
I should stop.