35. Dante
DANTE
The private dining room at Bellucci’s sits an hour outside Ravenwood Hollow, tucked behind a wine cellar door that the owner’s granddaughter opened for me with a knowing smile. One long table. Five place settings.
Five.
I stand back and look at the number and my throat does that tight thing it’s been doing all week.
The wine is breathing. The staff thinks I’m hosting a business dinner for out-of-town partners.
The playlist is low enough to talk over.
I’ve checked the parking situation three times, confirmed the back entrance twice, and paid enough extra that nobody will open that cellar door until I ask them to.
Cruz arrives first, and I almost don’t recognize him.
“Say one word,” he warns, tugging at the collar of an actual button-down, sleeves rolled to show the eagles and roses inked up his forearms. “One word, Jackson.”
“You iron that yourself?” I tease.
“My last roommate left his iron. I have YouTube.” He turns in a slow circle, arms out. “Verdict?”
“Verdict is I’m gonna have trouble keeping my hands off you through the appetizers.”
His grin splits wide. “That’s the correct verdict.”
Brady comes through the door ten minutes later in dark jeans and a henley, hair still damp from a shower, looking like a kid on his first real date. Which, in a way, he is. He stops at the threshold and takes in the candles, the wine, the table.
“Dante.” His voice cracks on my name. “What is this?”
“This is dinner. Sit down before you cry in the doorway.”
“I’m not gonna—” He clears his throat. Sits. His knee bounces under the table until Cruz clamps a big hand over it.
Then the cellar door opens again and Eli walks in with Dakota on his arm, and my chest forgets how lungs work.
She’s in a dress. Deep green, simple, nothing fancy, but I’ve only ever seen her in training gear and hoodies and the occasional pair of jeans, and now her hair is down over her shoulders and there’s makeup on her face and she looks at the table set for five and her whole expression comes apart.
“You did this,” she whispers.
“I did this.”
“For us,” she replies.
“For us.”
She crosses the room and kisses me, right there.
Eli shakes my hand like we’re sealing a contract, but his grip lingers, thumb pressing into my wrist. “An hour out. Private room. Paid staff.” His green eyes move over the logistics the way he studies fight film. “You thought of everything.”
“I learned from watching you obsess over training camps.”
“Smartass.” He pulls me into a brief, hard hug, and against my ear: “Thank you.”
We sit, and for a moment, nobody speaks.
We’re in public. Together. All five of us at one table with no cover story we actually need, no gym bag props, no staggered arrival times that matter. Dakota’s hand rests on the tablecloth, and Brady’s hand rests two inches away, and then his fingers slide over hers and stay there.
“Okay,” Cruz says finally. “Somebody pour the wine before I get emotional and ruin my shirt.”
Dinner unspools slowly. Burrata and prosciutto, bread, pasta that no macro tracker on earth would forgive.
Fighters treat food like fuel, weigh it, log it, apologize to it.
Tonight we eat like humans. Dakota moans over the gnocchi in a way that makes Brady choke on his wine, and Cruz launches into the ongoing saga of his war with the gym vending machine.
“Three quarters. Three. It took my money and gave me half a granola bar hanging on the coil like it’s taunting me.”
“You punched it,” Brady says.
“I tapped it,” he defends.
“You tapped it so hard Victor made you sign an incident report.”
Cruz shrugs. “That machine started it.”
Dakota laughs, throwing her head back. Eli watches her laugh with an expression so unguarded it makes me look away, like I’ve walked in on something deeply private.
Six months ago this man didn’t smile at anything.
Now he refills her glass without being asked and steals bites off Cruz’s plate and lets Brady lean into his shoulder while telling a story.
We’re on the second bottle when I decide it’s time. “I want to ask you all a question.” I set my fork down. “And I don’t want the funny answer, Cruz. Not first, anyway.”
Cruz raises a brow. “Rude but fair.”
“What do you want? Long-term. Not next week, not next fight camp. Years out. Where does this go?”
Dakota’s hand disappears under the tablecloth.
Eli’s jaw clenches.
Cruz sets his wine glass down, and for once, doesn’t reach for a joke.
Brady answers first, which surprises me.
“I never let myself think about it.” His thumb traces the stem of his glass.
“Long-term meant a future, and any future I could picture, my family wasn’t in it.
Or I wasn’t in it. Not the real me.” He glances up, blue eyes catching candlelight.
“But lately I keep... I’ll be driving, or cooling down after a run, and I catch myself imagining stuff.
A house. Big one. Enough rooms for everybody.
Holidays where nobody’s checking their phone at the door to make sure the story’s straight.
Getting old with four people instead of alone.
” His voice drops. “Then I feel stupid for imagining it.”
“It’s not stupid,” Dakota says. She looks down at her plate.
When she speaks, her voice is steady in the way I’ve learned means she’s working hard to keep it that way.
“I learned young that people leave. My dad left. My mom left without ever going anywhere, just checked out into a bottle and stayed gone for twenty-five years. I learned that love is a thing with conditions, and wanting it to be permanent is how you get your heart handed back to you in pieces.” She lifts her eyes, glancing around the table at each of us.
“And I want it anyway. I want you. All of you. I want to stop waking up at four in the morning convinced that today’s the day you’ll all figure out I’m too broken and cut your losses. ”
“Baby.” It comes out of me before I decide to say it.
“I know. I know you’re not going anywhere. Knowing it and my heart believing it are different muscles, and mine’s underdeveloped.” She wipes under her eyes with her knuckles. “But I’m training it. That’s my answer. I want the long haul and I’m training for it.”
Cruz reaches over and covers her hand with his, engulfing it.
“My turn?” He waits for her nod. “I spent my twenties like a man running out the clock. Bar fights, bad decisions, waking up places I didn’t remember getting to.
Never planned past Friday because honestly, sweetheart, I didn’t figure I’d have much past Friday.
Guys like me ended up dead or in prison, and I’d made my peace with both.
” He turns his glass slowly. “Victor gave me a future I didn’t ask for.
And now I’m greedy with it. I want forty years of annoying every single one of you.
I want to watch Brady’s career go where it’s going.
I want to keep learning Eli’s moods. I want to make Dakota laugh until she snorts, which she does, by the way, when it’s a real laugh. ”
“I do not,” Dakota retorts.
“You do and it’s my favorite sound on earth.” He looks at me last. “And I want Dante’s steadiness. That thing you do where everything goes sideways and you don’t. I want that in my life until they put me in the ground.”
The table goes quiet. Eli hasn’t spoken. He’s staring at the candle flame, jaw working, and we all wait because rushing Eli Morgan is like rushing a tide.
“I’m forty years old,” he finally says. “And I had given up. I decided I wasn’t built for love, and I constructed a life to match.
Schedule. Discipline. The walls were so high I forgot there was a man behind them.
” His eyes are wet with tears as he glances up.
“Then the four of you walked through those walls like they were smoke. And now I sit in my apartment on the nights we’re apart and the silence I used to call peace makes me feel empty.
” He exhales. “I can’t imagine my life without you in it.
I don’t want to imagine it. That’s my answer. ”
Dakota gets up out of her chair, walks around the table, and kisses him. He holds the back of her head with one careful hand and closes his eyes.
“Dante,” Brady says quietly. “You asked. You answer too.”
Fair.
“I want a life built together. Whatever that ends up being. I don’t need it to look like anything anyone else recognizes.
No marriage certificate is ever gonna have five names on it.
Fine. I don’t need the state’s permission or my family’s approval or a single soul’s understanding.
I need the five of us to choose this. Every day.
On the good days when it’s easy and on the days when it’s work, because it will be work.
I need us choosing each other intentionally, out loud, over and over. ” I look around the table.
“So we’re doing this,” Cruz says. “For real. Exclusive?”
“Yes.” Dakota, instantly.
“Yes.” Brady, no hesitation.
“Yes,” Eli says, and I say it with him.
“Yeah,” Cruz breathes. “Yes. Unanimous. Damn.” He laughs, shaky. “Look at us. Five for five.”
“What does marriage even mean for us?” Brady asks. “Legally there’s no version of this.”
“Legally, no,” Eli says. “But people build structures. Trusts, power of attorney, medical proxies. There are ways to bind lives together that don’t require a courthouse or divine entity to bless it.”
“You’ve researched this?” I ask.
Eli shrugs. “I may have researched this.”
Cruz whistles low. “Coach has been googling how to marry four people. I’m never letting that go.”
“I googled estate planning,” he defends.
Cruz chuckles and, in true Cruz fashion, wiggles his brows at Eli as he retorts. “Romantic estate planning.”
“Kids?” Dakota asks.
She’s gone pale, and her hands are folded so tight on the table her knuckles stand out white.
“I never let myself want that,” she says into the silence.
“Ever. What did I know about mothers except how to survive one? But you asked what I want long-term, and if I’m being honest, all the way honest—” Her voice thins.
“Someday. Maybe. With people who’d actually show up. ”
“We’d show up,” Brady says, hoarse.
“Every day,” Eli says.
“Kid would have four dads and the toughest mom in Virginia,” Cruz says. “God help their teachers.”
Dakota makes a sound that’s half laugh, half sob, and covers her mouth.
“We’re not figuring everything out tonight,” I say. “Any of it. One dinner isn’t a blueprint. But it’s out there. It’s real.”
“It’s real,” Dakota repeats.
Eli raises his glass. “To real.”
Five glasses meet over the table.
Outside, the town is quiet and cool, the kind of small-town main street where the shops close at eight and the only sounds are a passing car and music drifting from a bar down the block. Nobody here knows us.
Dakota steps onto the sidewalk and I reach out and take her hand.
In public. In the open. Under a streetlight, where anyone driving past could see.
She freezes and then stares down at our linked fingers. And then her face crumples and she squeezes so hard it hurts. “We can do this here,” she whispers.
“We can do this here,” I reply.
We walk. Five people down a small-town sidewalk, the shape of us shifting like water—Dakota between Eli and Cruz, a hand in each of theirs, then tucked against Brady’s side, then her fingers finding mine again.
Cruz slings an arm around Brady’s shoulders.
Eli keeps a hand at the small of Dakota’s back like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Tonight it is.
We look ridiculous. Obvious. Exactly like what we are, and for one hour in a town sixty miles from home, nobody has to care.
Under the streetlight outside the closed hardware store, Cruz stops, catches Brady’s jaw in one big hand, and kisses him. Slow. In full view of the empty street and the lit windows and God and everybody.
Brady makes a sound against his mouth like he’s been hit—like being kissed where people can see is a violence and a gift at once. When Cruz pulls back, Brady’s eyes are shining. He doesn’t wipe them.
“All my life,” Brady says. “Nobody ever kissed me like that before.”
“Getting kissed like that every day from now on,” Cruz tells him. “Doctor’s orders.”
Eli comes up behind Dakota and wraps her in his arms, chin resting on her head. She leans back into him and closes her eyes, and I stand there watching my family, and my chest cracks open along a seam.
This is the thing we can’t have at home. The ordinary, everyday nothing couples spend without counting—a walk, a held hand, a kiss under a light. We’re stealing it, and it tastes so sweet it aches, because we all know tonight will have to come to an end.
“Hey,” Dakota says, eyes still closed, wrapped in Eli’s arms. “Thank you, Dante. For everything.”
“Night’s not over,” I state.
Her eyes open and find mine, flaring with heat. “No,” she agrees. “It’s not.”
And we all head for our cars, one thing in mind.