29. Eli #2
“Brady. You feel her? That’s for you tonight. All of this is for you. My good boy, you’re going to walk into that cage tomorrow knowing exactly who’s got you.”
Brady’s answering sound is half sob, half growl, and his hips drive up harder.
“Dante, Cruz, look at you two. Perfect together. You’re holding this whole thing steady, both of you. So proud of you. Proud of all of you.”
Cruz drops his forehead to Dante’s spine. Dante’s rhythm turns urgent, breaking apart at the edges. And Brady, I watch the exact second he lets go. His face opens. Every locked muscle in his jaw and shoulders and chest releases at once, and he surrenders, fully, to the people holding him.
Dakota goes first. She comes with Brady and Dante buried inside her and me in her mouth, and her whole body locks up, a scream muffled against me, and the chain reaction is instant.
Brady shouts and empties into her, hips stuttering.
Dante follows two strokes later with a broken sound against her spine.
Cruz drives deep into Dante and goes rigid, groaning.
And I let the thread snap, spilling down Dakota’s throat, my hand cradling her jaw, her eyes on mine the whole way through.
Dante eases out of Dakota first and she hisses, then hums, and he and Brady both freeze until she laughs at them. “I’m perfect. Stop looking at me like I’m made of glass.”
“You took both of us,” Brady says.
“I asked for both of you.” She stretches, feline and glowing. “Best decision of my week.”
Cruz flops onto his back and drags Dante down with him. “Everyone alive? Sound off.”
“Alive,” Dante says.
“Alive,” Dakota says.
Brady just breathes, long and slow and even, and when I look at his face I see a man I haven’t seen since before fight camp started. Loose through the shoulders. Soft around the eyes.
“Better?” I ask him.
“I can’t feel my legs, Coach,” Brady replies.
“That’s a yes,” Cruz says.
I bring water and a warm cloth, and Dakota lets me clean her up while Cruz mother-hens Brady into drinking a full bottle of electrolytes, and then we pile into my bed, which fits five people the way a duffel bag fits a heavyweight’s gear, badly, but we make it work.
Brady ends up in the middle where he belongs tonight.
His head finds my chest and stays there.
Dakota fits against his side, her leg over his, her hand splayed on his stomach.
Cruz tangles their ankles together from the other side, and Dante anchors the whole pile from behind Dakota, his arm stretched across her to rest on Brady’s hip.
I run my fingers through Brady’s hair and feel his heartbeat slow against my ribs.
Outside my window, Ravenwood Hollow settles into itself for the night.
Somewhere across town there’s a cage waiting for him, an opponent watching tape of his last three fights, a crowd that will scream for blood without caring whose.
Tomorrow me and Cruz will stand in his corner and yell about angles and pressure.
Dakota and Dante will sit in the crowd. We’ll all wear the masks.
“I love you,” Brady says, quietly.
His body doesn’t tense when he says it. That’s how I know it’s real.
“All of you. I’ve been feeling it for weeks and I kept swallowing it because I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That saying it would break the spell or scare somebody off. But I’m walking into that cage tomorrow and I needed you to know it first. I love you.”
The room holds still for one heartbeat.
“I love you too.” Dakota’s voice is thick “God, Brady. All of you. I love all of you. I’ve never said that to anyone and meant it before.”
“Well, damn.” Cruz clears his throat, and I hear him fail to make it into a joke. “Yeah. Me too. Love you, pretty boy. Love you, sweetheart. I love the quiet one back there. I even love the old man.”
“The old man is holding your boyfriend’s head,” I say. “Careful.”
“Love you, Coach.” And there’s nothing joking left in it.
“I love you,” Dante says. “All four of you. Been true for a while. Just needed one of us dumb enough or brave enough to go first.”
They wait. I feel them waiting, four heartbeats in my bed, and the old machinery in my chest grinds against years of habit.
Walls I mixed the mortar for myself. Distance I called discipline.
Control I called safety, right up until a blonde fighter walked into my gym and showed me the difference between a fortress and a coffin.
“I love you all too.”
Five words. They come out rough and low and certain, and they cost me less than I had imagined they would.
Brady turns his face into my chest. Dakota’s hand finds mine and grips it.
And then it starts moving around the bed, the words passed between them like a flask, Dakota to Dante, Dante to Cruz, Cruz to Brady, back again, each repetition wearing the strangeness off until the words stop being a confession and start being a fact.
They drop off one by one. Brady first, wrung out and finally quiet in his own head. Then Dakota, then Cruz mid-mumble, then Dante with his arm still stretched across the pile of us.
I stay awake the longest. I always do.
Brady’s heartbeat taps steady under my palm.
Dakota’s breath warms my shoulder. The weight of four people presses me into my own mattress, and I lie there and take inventory of the man I used to be.
The one who ate over the sink. The one who structured every hour so no want could find a gap to crawl through.
The one who believed, all the way down, that keeping himself sealed was the same thing as keeping himself safe.
Five words took the walls apart brick by brick and used the rubble to build a heart big enough for five.
Tomorrow there’s a fight. Tomorrow there are masks and distance and a secret worth all our careers. Tomorrow the world gets the version of us it can tolerate.
Tonight we declared the truth aloud without shame or remorse.
I close my eyes with Brady’s heart beating under my hand, and the words follow me into sleep. Not just that I said them.
That I meant them. Four people. One truth.