3. Cruz
CRUZ
The gym empties out by seven. I’m the last one off the mats, running through some mobility work when Brady texts.
Rocco’s? We’re getting food.
I shoot back a thumbs up and grab my bag.
Rocco’s is three blocks from the gym, a dive bar that does surprisingly good wings and doesn’t care if you show up in training gear smelling like a boxing gym. The owner, Rocco himself, is a sixty-something Italian who calls everyone kid.
They’re already in the corner booth when I push through the door, Dante sprawled sideways with his long legs hanging off the seat, Brady sitting straight with a beer in front of him that he hasn’t touched. Brady always orders before I get there. Always waits to drink until I do.
Something about that gets me every time.
Dante clocks me first. He always does. His mouth curves, slow and warm, and he tips his chin at the empty seat across from them.
That’s all it is. That’s all it needs to be.
With Dante, it’s always been easy like that: the heat between us is comfortable as breathing, something we’ve never had to talk about; it just exists.
“There he is,” Dante says. He’s got a wing in one hand and a paper napkin tucked into his collar. “We were about to send a search party.”
“Mobility work.” I slide in across from them and grab a wing from the basket before I’ve even sat down properly. “My hips are a disaster.”
“Your everything is a disaster,” Brady says, but he’s smiling, nudging his beer toward me so I can take a sip before the server comes. It’s something we do. It started as a joke and never stopped.
I take a long pull, pass it back. Brady’s fingers brush mine around the bottle, and he doesn’t flinch, but his gaze slides sideways just slightly.
I let myself look at him for a half second longer than I should.
The line of his jaw, the tension he carries even when he’s trying not to.
Brady’s beautiful, and I’m pretty sure he’s bisexual like Dante and me, but he hasn’t opened up about it, and I respect that—you don’t force it; you wait for the opening.
“So.” Dante drops the clean-picked wing bone and reaches for another. His dark eyes find mine, sharp and curious. “You’ve been grinning like an idiot since you walked in. What happened?”
“We got a new fighter,” I announce.
“Yeah?” Brady turns his bottle slowly on the table. “Any good?”
“Brother,” I say, leaning back and letting the grin take over, “she is something else.”
Dante straightens. “She?”
“Dakota Fisher. Came in this afternoon, just walked in off the street basically and asked Victor for a tryout.” I shake my head.
“Stood in the middle of the gym and looked around like she was sizing the place up. Blonde, hazel eyes, tattoos on her fingers. Looks like she could absolutely ruin your day and probably would.”
“Okay,” Dante says slowly, “and?”
“And she’s a fighter. Like actually. Not just technically good. She’s got something behind it. Eli and I both sparred with her. She made me work for every single exchange, and you know I don’t say that about many people.”
Brady’s mouth curves. “She made you work.”
“Don’t say it like that,” I retort.
“I’m not saying anything,” Brady replies.
“You’re doing the face,” I point out.
“I don’t have a face.”
“You have so many faces,” Dante tells him, stealing Brady’s untouched second napkin for his fingers. He catches my eye when he says it, and I feel it land in my chest. It’s warm and direct, like standing in a patch of sun. “So she’s beautiful, and she can fight. What’s the problem?”
“There’s no problem,” I murmur.
Dante gives me a long look. “Cruz…”
“There’s a situation.”
Brady sets his beer down. “What did you do?”
“Nothing bad.” I pause. “Eli was doing the whole repressed-tornado thing he does, you know, where he’s clearly thinking something but his face is doing the constipated look thing, and I might have made a suggestion.”
“What kind of suggestion?” Brady asks.
“The kind where I told him he should bend her over something while I…”
“Jesus Christ,” Brady says.
“While I’m inside him.” I finish the sentence cleanly and reach for a wing. “It’s not a big deal.”
Dante bursts out laughing, the kind that doubles him forward over the table. A couple at the bar glances over. He doesn’t care. Dante never cares. When he sits back up, his eyes are bright, and he’s looking at me with not only amusement but intrigue.
“You told Eli,” he wheezes, “You told Coach…”
“He went red up to his hairline,” I confirm. “And then he went half-hard in his shorts, which he was absolutely not happy about.”
Dante covers his face with both hands, still laughing. Brady is very still, his expression doing something complicated that I have a very good read on by now, even if he doesn’t know that.
“So you want her,” Dante says, getting himself under control. His voice drops just slightly on the word want, and it’s not directed at Dakota anymore, not entirely. “And you want Eli. And you want them at the same time.”
“I want a lot of things. Life is short.”
“You cannot sleep with Coach,” Dante states.
“I’m aware of the professional complications.”
“Cruz,” he presses.
“I said I’m aware.”
Dante leans forward, elbows on the table, and there’s genuine heat in his expression now. He doesn’t hide things. “Tell me she’s not that good-looking, because if she is and she can actually fight,” He exhales. “Man. That’s a lot.”
“She’s that good-looking.”
“Then you better not be starting an orgy without me,” Dante says, completely serious.
I laugh, real and loud. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m realistic. This is what happens when you put four decent-looking fighters in a training group, and one of them is a woman who apparently…”
“Who said four?” Brady asks.
Dante glances at him as he picks up his beer.
“Don’t,” Brady says, not looking at either of us.
“I didn’t say anything,” Dante says.
His eyes narrow. “You were going to.”
“I was going to include you in a hypothetical.”
Brady’s wound tight. “I don’t want to be in the hypothetical.”
Dante tilts his head. His expression is gentle underneath the teasing. That’s the thing about Dante, he’s so perceptive. “Why not?”
“Because it’s…” Brady sets the bottle down again. Rotates it. His jaw is tight in the bar light, the shadows catching the line of it. His neck tattoos dance across his skin. “It’s not my thing.”
“Okay,” Dante says, easy as breathing.
Brady glances up.
“Okay,” Dante says again. “No pressure. I’m just saying, new girl, Coach, the whole setup has got energy. I’m not going to pretend I’m not interested in seeing how that plays out.”
The tension in Brady’s shoulders drops by half a degree. That’s how it goes with him. You back off, and he comes back to himself.
Brady is so careful with himself. All that heat he carries, all that awareness, and he spends so much energy keeping a lid on it that sometimes I wonder what would happen if someone just didn’t let him. If someone made it easy enough for the lid to come off on its own.
I’ve been watching Brady Williams for two months.
Watching his gaze linger, how he leans in during contact drills, and then covers it by cracking a joke.
The way he went still last month when Dante and I were messing around after training, mock-grappling on the mat, and Dante ended up on top of me laughing, and Brady stood at the edge of the mat with a water bottle and watched with an expression that told me he was fighting with himself.
He’s not ready for me to say it out loud. So I don’t.
“She’s joining our training group,” I say, steering back to safer water. “Victor’s pairing her with Eli as coach. She’ll train with us.”
“Our group?” Brady looks up.
“Victor’s been doing the cross-division mixing thing for a while now. Dante, you said it yourself—it diversifies the work.”
“It does,” Dante confirms. “Better grappling since you joined the sessions.”
“Thank you.”
“I said the grappling. I didn’t say it’s better with you,” he retorts. His foot nudges mine under the table as he says it. A graze, easy and deliberate, gone before Brady could notice.
“Devastating.” I press a hand to my chest. “Anyway. She officially starts next week. Eli looked like a man being handed a live grenade that he was afraid to put down for fear it might go off.”
Dante snorts. “Poor Eli.”
“Not poor Eli. Eli’s been walking around this gym for months like he’s got something stuck up his ass. Maybe this will be good for him.”
“And the suggestion you made,” Brady says carefully, “was also good for him?”
“The suggestion I made was just me being honest,” I reply.
“Honest and appropriate are vastly different things,” Brady supplies.
“They are,” I agree. “I lean toward honest.”
Brady gives me a look that’s half exasperation and half something else, something warmer that he packs down fast.
Dante orders another round. The bar fills up around us, the noise rising, Rocco shouting something in Italian at the television behind the bar. Brady slowly unspools his tight posture into something more relaxed, three beers and good company doing their work.
By the time we’re deep into an argument about which submission chain is the most underrated in modern MMA, he’s got one arm along the back of the booth, and he’s leaning toward me without seeming to notice.
Dante catches my eye over Brady’s shoulder. Just for a second. There’s something in his expression—knowing, patient, and a little wicked.
Later, I think. That look is a promise, and Dante keeps his promises.
“Okay, but rear naked as a finish,” Brady starts.
“Is always the right answer,” I finish.
“See, you always say that, but you never credit the setup,” Brady whines.
I tilt my head. “The setup is irrelevant if you can’t get it locked.”
“The setup is everything,” Brady counters.
“He’s right,” Dante says, pointing at Brady with a wing. “I hate agreeing with him, but he’s right. The path matters.”
Brady grins, wide and unguarded, and points at Dante like exactly, thank you. Brady’s shoulder knocks into mine and stays there for just a second too long before he shifts away.
“Dakota’s good on the ground,” I say. “Really good. Her escapes are clean. She’s going to shake up our scrambles.”
“Good,” Dante says. “We need it.”
Brady nods, quieter now. I can see him building a picture in his head, adjusting to the idea of someone new in the tight unit we’ve made. He’s cautious about new people, Brady. Slow to trust.
“She fled something,” I say, without entirely planning to. “You can see it. The same way you can see it on anyone who comes here with that kind of need in their chest.”
Nobody says anything for a moment.
Dante looks at his drink. Brady looks at me.
It’s not a comfortable observation, but it’s true. Oath MMA collects people running from things and turns that into something worth staying for. It’s the whole point.
“Well,” Brady says finally. “She picked the right place to land.”
“She did,” I agree.
The game on the TV over the bar goes to a roar, and Rocco shouts back at it, and Dante starts a new argument about footwork, and Brady laughs at something, and the live wire between all three of us hums along quietly under everything else.
Like it always does.
Brady’s arm is still slung along the back of the booth, loose and unthinking, and Dante is watching me over the rim of his glass with that steady, unhurried look he gets when he’s decided something and isn’t in a rush to say it out loud.
The bar noise rises around us. Someone feeds the jukebox and it shifts to something slower, and none of us move to leave.
I let my gaze travel between them, Brady, who is avoiding looking at me, and Dante, who very much can’t stop.
We order another round and I’m sure tonight is the night Dante and I finally cross the line.