7. The Mat #3
"He's figuring him out." Blade, to Irish, low enough that he thought I couldn't hear.
The next kick came lower than I read it.
His shin caught my outer thigh and buckled my footwork, and Caleb was inside my range before I recovered, his hand snapping around my wrist, hauling me off my balance, his elbow driving for my stomach.
I got my forearm across it, bone on bone, the jolt of it running all the way up to my shoulder.
Close quarters. His world, not mine.
I pivoted, got an arm around his neck, tried to drag him into a clinch. He dropped his weight and drove his shoulder into me instead, and we went backward together. My spine hit the mat. He came down on top, one knee sliding between my legs, one hand planting flat to pin me.
His hand was on my bare chest. Palm flat against my skin, right over the bullet scar, his fingers spread wide. Hot.
I bridged, my hips up hard, throwing his weight off its line. He rolled and I rolled with him and we came up sideways, tangled, his leg hooked through mine, my arm slung across his waist, both of us hauling air.
I could smell him. Sweat, sharp and clean. The soap from that morning under it. The heat of him bleeding through every place we touched, his leg against mine, his side under my arm, the damp mat pressed to my shoulder.
We scrambled. I got on top for a second, my hand planted beside his head, my hips bearing his down into the mat.
His face was under mine. Brown eyes looking up.
I could see the sweat beaded at his temple, the last of the yellow bruise, the way his lips had parted because he was breathing through his mouth.
My hips were flush to his. I could feel both our pulses hammering through the places we pressed together.
He bucked and reversed. In one motion he was over me, one forearm laid across my collarbone, his face directly above mine.
Inches.
His breath landed on my mouth. His weight settled on my hips, his forearm against my collarbone, and every channel in my head, every calculation, every rapid-fire read that kept my brain running every waking second of my life…
It all went quiet.
All of it. Gone. Like a hand had reached into my skull and pulled the plug clean out of the wall.
There was nothing left in me but his face. Six inches over mine. The sweat at his temple. The way his eyes moved, dropping off mine to somewhere lower, to my mouth, and back up again, and I felt his eyes land on my mouth and stay there.
His forearm shifted on my collarbone. The pressure changed.
Past a pin now. Something else. The weight on my hips shifted too, the smallest movement, and the awareness that came behind it was so sharp and so sudden my breath caught, and I knew he heard it, because his jaw tightened and his eyes went dark and neither of us moved a muscle.
We were just there. On the mat. Breathing each other in.
The gym had gone silent. The clink of the weights and the buzz of the tubes overhead, all of it gone, and in its place sat the heavy quiet of a room full of people holding their breath at once.
Somebody cleared their throat.
Caleb blinked. The focus shattered. The room crashed back in, the light and the rubber stink and the buzz, and he shoved off me and was on his feet in a single motion, stepping back, hands dropping to his sides.
I sat up. The mat was damp where my back had been. My face was on fire. And my hands were shaking.
"Good round." My voice came out wrecked. I stood, knocked the mat dust off my shorts, and looked at nobody.
"Yeah." Caleb grabbed a towel off the bench and buried his face in it. Held it there a beat too long. "Good round."
I walked to the water station by the wall, grabbed a bottle, drank half of it because my mouth had gone to sand. I could feel the room at my back. The eyes. The conclusions being drawn.
Irish appeared beside me. Reached past for a bottle, his shoulder brushing mine.
When I glanced at him the grin was gone, and what had taken its place was quieter.
The same look Kai gave me years ago, standing over my bed in the med bay, when I'd cracked a joke about the scar and he'd stared at me with an expression I didn't understand until much later.
"Good round." Irish's voice had dropped to match the look. He popped the cap and drank. He didn't say another thing.
Across the gym, Caleb had the towel looped around his neck and was talking to Tank, his body angled away from me, his voice low and level and completely ordinary, like the last few seconds on that mat had been sparring and nothing else on earth.
Except the hand gripping the towel, his left, was clenched so tight the knuckles had gone white.
I looked away. Sat on a bench. Finished the water. Tried to boot up the dozen channels that had gone dark the instant his face was over mine.
They wouldn't come back. The only thing still running was his eyes looking down at me, the heat of his breath, the double pulse I'd felt where our bodies pressed, and the silence that had filled the gym to the rafters.
My knee was bouncing. I couldn't make it stop.