32. Cruz
CRUZ
Dakota: You up? Can I come over? Just me.
Not the group chat. Just her, just me. I’m typing before I finish reading.
Door’s open, sweetheart. You know where I live.
Dakota: Bringing food. Don’t argue.
Twenty minutes later she’s standing in my doorway with two takeout bags and a smile that stops somewhere south of her eyes. Her hair’s down, still damp from a shower, and she’s wearing sweats and one of Dante’s hoodies, the gray one he’s been looking for all week.
“Dante know you have that?” I ask.
“Dante knows nothing.” She pushes past me into the apartment.
She sets the bags on my kitchen counter and looks around, taking in the place. It hits me that she’s never been here alone. We’ve all crashed here in a pile once or twice, but that’s different from standing in a man’s apartment at eleven at night with the lights low alone.
“I’m always surprised it’s so clean,” she says.
“That an insult?” I ask.
“It’s an observation. You seem like a guy who’d have empty protein tubs stacked in a corner and a couch that smells like Axe body spray.”
“Had both. Circa 2019.” I pull plates from the cabinet because my mama raised me better than eating pad thai out of the carton in front of a lady.
“Victor made me deep-clean the gym showers for a month after I left my gear bag open in the locker room. Taught me the value of not living like an animal.”
She laughs, and it’s real, but there’s a hitch underneath it. Something’s riding her tonight. I can see it in her shoulders, in how she picked my apartment instead of her own bed, instead of Dante’s or Eli’s.
We eat at my little kitchen table, the one I bought secondhand and refinished myself because sanding wood turns out to be good for a temper.
She asks about Brady’s next fight, whether Victor’s going to push for the regional card in the spring.
I tell her about Dante making us all sit through a movie last weekend where a man punched a helicopter.
“He cried at the end,” I say. “Actual tears. Over the helicopter movie.”
Dakota smiles. “He cries at commercials. He cried at that insurance ad with the dog.”
“That dog was going through it, to be fair.”
She smiles and pushes a piece of chicken around her plate. Third lap around the rice without a bite. I put my fork down.
“All right. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I’m tired.”
“Sweetheart.”
“I am tired.”
“You’re tired every day. We all are. Tired doesn’t make you drive across town at eleven at night to watch me eat noodles.” I keep my voice easy. “You don’t have to tell me. But don’t feed me the tired line.”
She sets her fork down. Wraps both hands around her water glass like she needs the anchor. The kitchen hums quiet around us, just the refrigerator and the traffic three floors down.
“I’ve been having nightmares,” she says. “About Gerald.”
Everything in my chest goes still and icy at that name.
“Started a couple weeks ago. I wake up and I’m sure he’s in the room. Like, certain. I can feel his hand on my wrist.” She rubs her thumb over the inside of her left wrist where the bruises faded months ago. “Takes me a full minute to remember where I am. Sometimes longer.”
“You been sleeping alone those nights?”
“Yeah. And I keep thinking. He knows I train. He knows MMA gyms are findable. My name’s going to end up on a fight card eventually, and fight cards are public, and then he just... shows up. At the gym. At my door.”
“Why didn’t you tell us you were struggling?” Cruz asks.
“Because you’d all lose your minds. Eli would want to install cameras. Brady would sleep in my hallway.” She looks up at me. “And you’d offer to kill him again.”
“I am absolutely offering to kill him again,” I deadpan.
“Cruz.”
“One name. One address. He stops being a problem.” I mean every word—she knows I mean every word, and that’s exactly why she’s shaking her head before I finish. “There are people from my old life who owe me favors. It doesn’t touch you. It doesn’t touch the gym.”
“It touches you.” Her voice cracks. “You’d be throwing away everything you built. Five years, your record, this whole life. Over a man who isn’t worth the gas money to Florida.”
“You’re worth it.”
“I’m not asking you to prove that by destroying yourself.” She reaches across the table and grips my forearm, right over the eagle on my sleeve. “I fought him off. Twice. I broke his nose and left him on the floor of my bedroom. I don’t need you to be my weapon, Cruz. I need you to just be there.”
I turn my arm over and take her hand. “Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
We sit like that for a minute. Then she tilts her head at me, studying.
“You said your old life. You never talk about your old life. Not really. You gave us the highlight reel that night at Eli’s. Bad temper, Victor saved you, happy ending.”
I shrug. “That’s the long and short of it.”
“I just gave you my nightmares. Give me the rest of yours.”
Fair trade. I get up, grab two glasses of water because neither of us should be drinking for this conversation, and sit back down.
“Nashville,” I say. “I was bouncing at clubs from twenty-two on. Big guy, mean look, they hired me on sight. And I liked it. That’s the part nobody wants to hear. I liked having a reason to hurt people. Every drunk who swung on me had permission.”
“I know that feeling,” she says.
“I figured you might.” I turn the glass in my hands.
“The temper wasn’t a thing I had. It was a thing that had me.
It went off whenever it wanted, and I built my whole life around feeding it.
Bar fights on my nights off. Drinking to slow it down, which never worked, just made it sloppier. My twenties were one long fuse.”
“The assualt?” She asks.
I nod. “Yeah, I sat in a holding cell at three in the morning looking at felony assault. Years, potentially, with my record of stupid. And the thing I remember clearest is realizing I wasn’t surprised.
Some part of me had been waiting for that cell my whole life.
Like I’d finally arrived somewhere I had a reservation. ”
“And Victor,” Dakota asks.
“Victor shows up at four AM. I barely knew the man. He’d seen me fight a few amateurs; that was it.
Pays my bail, drives me to a Waffle House, orders us both hash browns, and tells me I have a decision to make and he’s only offering once.
” I can still see it. Victor’s dark eyes over a coffee mug, my knuckles split and stinging.
“Put the violence somewhere with rules and purpose, or keep going and end up dead or locked up. He said he didn’t care which one I picked, but he wasn’t going to watch me waste it. ”
“Waste what?” Dakota asks.
“That’s what I asked. He said, Whatever it is you’re carrying. It could build a life instead of ending one.” I laugh. “Sounds like a fortune cookie now. At four in the morning with a court date pending, it sounded like the only true thing anybody ever said to me.”
“The charges?” Dakota asks.
“Pled down to misdemeanor assault. Community service. The other guy had a record longer than mine, and Victor knew a lawyer who fought for context.” I shake my head.
“But the plea deal didn’t save me. The gym did.
And I want to be honest with you, sweetheart, because everyone thinks it’s a clean redemption story.
It wasn’t. That first year I almost quit a dozen times.
I almost walked back to the bars because chaos was familiar and discipline felt like drowning.
Taking coaching from Victor made me want to put my fist through a wall.
Following the rules made my skin crawl.”
“What kept you?”
“Victor kept showing up. I’d blow a session, mouth off, storm out. Next morning he’d be there like nothing happened. You’re late, Bennett. Bag work, four rounds. Never punished me for the day before. Never brought it up. Just kept the door open until I got tired of walking out of it.”
Dakota’s quiet for a long moment. Then she trades me. Piece for piece, the whole ugly ledger.
She tells me about her mother. Rebecca. The drinking that started before Dakota has clear memories, the slow slide from functional to gone.
Making her own dinners at seven years old.
Forging Rebecca’s signature on permission slips because her mother couldn’t hold a pen steady by evening.
Lying to teachers about the same clothes three days running, learning which lies teachers wanted to believe.
“The loneliness was the worst part,” she says. “Worse than hunger, worse than the mess. Being invisible in your own house. I used to stand right in front of the TV to make her look at me. She’d just tilt her head to see around me.”
“And your dad?”
“Gone at three. I don’t remember him at all.
There was one photo in a drawer and she never talked about him, so eventually I stopped asking.
” She pulls Dante’s hoodie sleeves down over her hands.
“Gerald showed up when I was fourteen. And here’s the thing nobody understands.
For six months, it was better. He worked construction, didn’t drink, and paid bills on time.
The refrigerator had food in it. I thought we’d been rescued. ”
“Then the mask evaporated like fog on a sunny day,” I supply.
“And after everything he did he was there for eleven more years anyway, because my mother needed him and I needed my mother, and I told myself I could handle it as long as he never touched me again. And he didn’t.
He just watched. Waited. And when she finally died, he waited exactly two months before he tried the door again.
” She meets my eyes. “That’s the night I came here. That’s the whole story.”
I reach across and cover her hand. Her fingers are cold. She lets me hold them.