33. Eli
ELI
Dakota’s jab cracks against the training mitt, and I call for the cross before her arm finishes retracting.
“Again. Faster.”
She resets, throws the combination, and the impact stings through my palms. Six months of coaching at Oath and I still get a jolt watching her work.
“Coach.” Marco stands at my elbow. I didn’t hear him approach, which means my attention was exactly where it shouldn’t have been. “Victor wants to see you in the office.”
“We’re mid-round.”
“Now, hermano.” His face gives me nothing. Marco’s face always gives you the truth of a situation, and right now it’s a locked door.
Dakota lowers her hands. Sweat tracks down her temple, and her eyes flick between us.
“Finish the round with Lisa,” I tell her. “Footwork drills. I’ll check your times after.”
I strip off the mitts and hand them to Marco, and walk across the floor. Fight cards. Scheduling. Maybe the sponsor meeting got moved up. Maybe Henderson’s camp filed a complaint about Brady’s post-fight interview.
I build a list of harmless explanations and believe none of them, because Marco delivers routine messages with a grin and a slap on the shoulder, and he just delivered this one like a process server.
Victor’s office has glass walls. Whatever happens in there, the whole gym gets the silent film version. I step inside. Victor sits behind his desk, forearms resting on a closed laptop, and he nods toward the door.
“Shut it.”
The latch clicks. I take the chair across from him without being asked, because standing would look like I expect a fight. “What’s up?”
Victor studies me. “How long you been here now, Eli? Six months?”
I nod. “About that.”
“Best hire I’ve made in years. Fighters trust you. Numbers are up across the board. Brady’s choke Saturday, that was your game plan executed clean,” he praises.
“He did the work.”
“He did.” Victor leans back. The chair creaks under his frame. “I watch my gym. You know that about me. I built this place out of nothing, and the way I keep it standing is I pay attention. To everything.”
“Okay.”
“Dakota looks for Brady every water break. Every single one. Cruz and Dante show up within five minutes of each other, every single day, like they synchronized watches. And you.” He taps one finger on the laptop.
“You track her across the floor even when you’re holding pads for someone else.
This morning you missed Kai dropping his right hand three times because your eyes were on the far cage. ”
My pulse hits my throat. I keep my hands loose on the armrests, keep my breathing even, fall back into the same body I use cornering a fight that’s going wrong.
“What are you asking me, Victor?”
“I’m not asking anything yet. I’m telling you what I see. Five people who move around each other differently than teammates do.” He watches my face. “So now I’ll ask. Is there anything happening under my roof that could put fighter licenses at risk? Anything the commission could use?”
“The commission would need actual grounds.”
“That’s not an answer.”
It isn’t. I make myself hold his eyes.
“This gym builds close teams. That’s the whole design.
You put out a call to every fighter who never had a safe room to train in, and they came, and they bonded harder than fighters bond anywhere else because for most of them it’s the first time they’ve been accepted unconditionally.
Dakota showed up with a duffel bag and nothing else.
Brady’s family doesn’t speak to him. Of course they orbit each other. You built the gravity yourself.”
Every word is true. None of it is responsive. Victor knows the difference.
“I fought to get where I am,” he says. “When I came out a year ago, I lost four sponsors in a week. Fighters walked. The commission sent an auditor sniffing around my books looking for any excuse, and they found nothing because there was nothing to find. They’re still looking, Eli.
Every sanctioning body in three states would love a reason to say the queer gym runs dirty.
A coach involved with a fighter, that’s not a headline we survive.
That’s revoked licenses. That’s an ethics investigation with my name on the folder. ”
I swallow hard. “I understand what’s at stake.”
“Do you?”
“Better than most.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Through the glass behind him, Cruz laughs at the squat rack, and the sound comes through faint and warm and completely wrong for this room.
“I like you,” Victor says. “I like all of them. Whatever people do on their own time, in their own homes, I’ve got no interest in policing. But professional boundaries inside these walls aren’t optional. We don’t get the benefit of the doubt other gyms get. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Then we’re good.” He opens the laptop. “Send Marco in on your way out.”
I stand on steady legs, which surprises me. At the door I pause with my hand on the handle. “Victor. There’s nothing you need to worry about.”
He doesn’t look up from the screen. “Then I won’t.”
The gym noise hits me when I open the door, all thudding bags and the whir of jump ropes and someone counting out sprawls, and I walk back into it feeling like I just went two rounds without landing anything.
Dakota catches my eye from the far cage. She’s mid-drill with Lisa, but her rhythm hitches.
I turn to Kai on the bags. “Your right hand’s living at your hip. Fix it.” I hold pads for the next three hours and see almost none of it.
The message I send that evening takes me four drafts.
Eli: Team dinner at Dante’s tonight. 8pm. Need to go over some scheduling stuff. All five of us.
Scheduling stuff. In a chat that any investigator would read for tone, it’s the best I can do.
Cruz: wouldn’t miss it coach
Dakota: I’ll bring food
Dante: door’s open
Brady: ok
Brady’s single word tells me he already knows it’s bad.
Dante’s apartment is tense as we arrange ourselves around the living room. All of them watch me stand by the window like I’m about to announce a death.
“Victor pulled me into his office this morning.”
Cruz stops with a spring roll halfway to his mouth. “About what?”
“About us. Not in those words. He never said it straight out. But he listed what he’s seen.
” I count it off on my fingers. “Dakota watching Brady at water breaks. Cruz and Dante arriving in lockstep every day. Me tracking Dakota across the floor while I’m coaching other people.
He called it a pattern. Then he asked me point blank if anything was happening that could put licenses at risk. ”
“What did you tell him?” Dakota asks.
“That the gym builds close teams. That he designed the gravity himself. True things that answered nothing, and he knew they answered nothing. He let me walk out anyway. Then he reminded me the commission is still hunting for a reason to bury Oath, and that a coach involved with a fighter is the headline that does it.”
The room goes quiet. Dante sets his fork down without eating.
“He knows,” Brady says.
I bite my lip. “He suspects. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?” Brady’s knee bounces. “Victor doesn’t say things by accident. He gave you a warning shot.”
“Then we take the warning.” I sit down on the arm of the couch.
“I need everyone to understand what actually happens if this comes out. Not the vague version. The real one. The commission revokes my license first, because coach-fighter is the clearest violation. Then they look at the four of you, training partners sharing beds, and they call it compromised competition. They can pull all five licenses while they investigate, and investigations take years. Meanwhile Victor loses whatever sponsors survived the last purge. The gym gets audited. Every fighter at Oath gets a cloud over their record just for training there. Everything he built goes down with us.”
Cruz shakes his head. “Victor would understand. Come on. The man is engaged to Theo. He built this whole place so people like us could exist.”
“Understanding it and condoning it aren’t the same thing.
” Dante’s voice stays level. “I’ve been out my whole career.
I know exactly how much space the sport gives you.
Victor can love us like family and still have to fire Eli, because if he doesn’t, the commission fires everyone.
He doesn’t get to choose his feelings over the rulebook. Not with a target on his back.”
“So we’re a liability,” Dakota says. “That’s what you’re telling us. Loving each other makes us a weapon pointed at the one place that has become our home.”
Nobody answers her, because that’s exactly what I’m telling them.
She stands and walks to the window, keeping her back to us. “Then answer me this. If it comes down to it, if someone gets proof and we have to choose. The relationship or the careers. What do we pick?”
The silence stretches long enough to hurt.
Brady breaks it, quiet. “My family would disown me. Fully, this time. My dad hasn’t spoken to me since I left home, and my sister sends a text on my birthday like she’s paying a toll.
If it got public that I’m bisexual, that I’m in a relationship with three men and a woman, they’d call it deviance.
Perversion. Whatever the pastor’s word of the week is.
” His hands twist together in his lap. “I’d lose the last thread.
And I keep telling myself the thread’s already dead, but it isn’t. Not to me.”
Dakota crosses the room and sits beside him, close but not touching, giving him the choice. He leans into her shoulder.
“I lost jobs for being out,” Dante says.
“Early on. Two gyms told me flat out they didn’t want that around their fighters, and a third just stopped returning calls after I showed up to an interview with my ex.
I’m established now, but established means visible, and visible means the wrong person only needs one story to tear it down.
I’ve rebuilt before. I don’t want to find out if I can do it again. ”
I look at the floor, because it’s my turn and this is the part I’ve never given them whole.
“I didn’t leave Apex because I was bored.
That’s the version I tell. The truth is a fighter accused me of misconduct.
It wasn’t true, and the review cleared me, but cleared doesn’t mean clean.
The whispers follow you. Half the gyms that courted me went silent.
Victor hired me anyway, on Marco’s word and his own judgment, when my name was still smoldering.
” My throat feels tight. “If a second scandal lands on me, and this one’s real, I will never work in this sport again. I’m forty.”
Dakota’s eyes are on me, and there’s no judgment in them.
“I have three professional wins and a duffel bag,” she says.
“Oath is the first place that ever gave me a real shot. If I get blacklisted, I’ve got twelve years of training that turn into nothing overnight and nowhere to go.
So don’t any of you think I’m asking that question lightly. I know what I’d be losing either way.”
Cruz drags both hands down his face. “This is such shit. Victor gets to marry Theo in front of God and the sponsors, and we have to act like strangers or lose everything. How is that the world we’re expected to live in?”
“It’s the world we fight in,” Dante says. “Fair’s got nothing to do with it.”
“So what do we do?” Brady asks.
“Stricter rules. Nobody arrives together, nobody leaves together, ever. Staggered schedules, and I mean actually staggered, Cruz, not four minutes apart. No private conversations at the gym that anyone could watch through glass. No touching. Not a hand on a shoulder, not a fist bump that lasts too long. Dakota trains with Lisa and Reese more, spreading the pairings out. In that building we are a coach and fighters and nothing else, eight hours a day, every day.”
“Eight hours of lying,” Dakota says.
I clench my jaw. “Eight hours of surviving.”
Cruz laughs, and there’s no humor in it.
“Can we actually do that? Long term? Because I’m being honest, the two weeks we tried being careful nearly killed me, and Dakota and I still ended up in the equipment closet.
” Dakota winces. “Yeah, I’m saying it, because pretending we’re good at this is how we get caught.
So somebody tell me. Can we live double lives forever?
Hide what we are every day and just, what, hope the pressure never blows a seam? ”
Nobody answers.
“I can’t give up fighting,” Dakota says finally. “It’s the only thing that’s ever been mine.”
“Nobody’s giving up anything,” Brady says. “That’s the whole problem. We can’t quit the sport and we can’t quit each other, so we’re stuck holding onto both and praying our grip is good.”
“Then we hold both.” I look at each of them in turn. “One day at a time. We knew this was complicated from the first night at Rocco’s. We tighten up, we protect what Victor built, and we protect this. It’s possible.”
“You believe that?” Dante asks.
“I need to.”
He holds my eyes for a long moment, then nods, and one by one the others do too. But the worry stays on every face, and no amount of nodding removes it.
Dante walks each of them out. Dakota hugs me at the door, quick and fierce, her face pressed to my chest for two seconds before she steps back into the person she has to be in parking lots.
“Goodnight, Coach,” she says, loud enough for the hallway.
“Goodnight, Fisher.”
Brady goes last before me, and at the threshold he stops.
“Eli. If it ever does come down to the choice. I already know what I’d pick.” He doesn’t say which. He doesn’t have to. The look on his face says it, and it terrifies me, because it’s the same answer sitting in my own chest. I’ll choose them over everything else.