10. Face-First #2
"That gets my ears inside." Hawk's arms recrossed. "It doesn't tell them what to listen for. The signal itself. What is it?"
"You'll know it when you hear it." I set the marker down. "I promise you, there won't be any doubt."
A second passed. And from the corner of my eye I caught Ghost's neck snap toward me, fast, his eyes gone wide, and I let a small smile form and turned it on him, and watched him understand exactly, precisely, down to the syllable, what was going to come over those speakers.
Hawk's gaze moved between the two of us, once, twice. Whatever he read in Ghost's face, it must have been convincing, because something at the corner of his mouth shifted.
"Good enough." He let it go. A man didn't run a club this size without knowing when an answer was better left wrapped.
"Then we build toward that." Hawk straightened off the table and swept the room. "Eight days. We drill this map until every one of you can draw it drunk. Dismissed. Tyler, stay a minute."
Chairs scraped. And in the noise of it, Tyler flipped his folder closed, and I caught the top sheet before it disappeared, a list of names and dates from the night we ran, and one line near the top with a word in it that stopped my blood.
Deceased.
The room kept moving. I didn't. Five days I'd carried that word without seeing it anywhere, and seeing it in print did something the memory had stopped being able to do, made it new again, the hallway, the spin, the crack I'd felt through my heel and into my knee.
I looked up. Tyler was watching me over the folder. And beside him Ghost was watching me too, and between the two of them something passed, fast, a look with weight in it, there and covered in under a second, the way you palm a card.
Ghost's hand went to the chest pocket of his cut. Touched it. Came away.
"You good?" His voice came out at the wrong speed, a half-step quick.
"Fine." I filed the look, the pocket, the folder. "Mat at two?"
"Mat at two."
Blade gave us forty minutes of his afternoon, which he spent taking my game apart and putting it back together for a different kind of fight.
"Pit fighters brawl. Whoever they put across from you eight days from now won't." He walked a slow circle while Ghost and I worked the hold he'd set. "A trained man hunts your rhythm. So don't have one. Change your timing all night. Make him figure you out fresh, every exchange."
He drilled us until my lungs burned and Ghost's shirt went dark down the spine, and then he picked up his water and headed for the door.
"Run those entries until they're boring. Both of you." The door swung. "Boring is what survives."
And then it was the two of us and the mats and the low buzz of the fluorescents, the same room where he'd pinned me two days ago, the same room where I'd kissed him twelve hours ago, and every square foot of it knew things about us.
We ran the entries. For a while it was clean work.
The gym had gone warm with the afternoon, and the mats gave off that smell they get under working bodies, rubber and salt and years of other people's sweat baked in under ours.
Skin slapped skin on every clinch. His forearms were slick under my grip and mine under his, every hold a negotiation that had to be renegotiated a second later, chalk dust from the lifting corner hanging in the light between us.
He was quick in ways that never stopped surprising me, angles instead of force, gone from where my weight expected him, his breath sawing bright and fast next to my ear on every tie-up.
I countered a duck-under and put him on the mat and followed him down into the pin Blade had taught us, forearm across, hips heavy, and his breath came up hot against the side of my neck and for one second neither of us was training.
His hands were on my waist. They'd landed there as grappling and stayed there as something else, thumbs just under the hem of my shirt, on skin, and my weight was on him the way it had been in a dream I'd told nobody about, and his eyes came up to mine, blown dark around the pale blue.
Then he tapped my arm twice and slid out from under me before I'd felt him go.
"Water break." He didn't take one. He stood by the wall with the bottle in his hand and didn't drink from it, rolling his shoulders, looking at the clock, the door, the bag. Everywhere that wasn't me.
We reset. It happened again, because in close work it can't not happen, bodies tight, hands inside each other's space, and I felt the exact moment the drill stopped being a drill, his grip going from technical to something with want in it, his hips coming half an inch closer than the move needed.
And I felt the exact moment he caught himself doing it and pulled his weight back out, a retreat as clean and deliberate as a step, and cracked a joke about my elbows that arrived a beat too late and landed on nothing.
The third time, I stopped moving entirely.
I knew what a man's body said when it wanted forward and went backward.
Twenty years on mats had taught me that language whether I'd asked for it or not.
And Ghost, who twelve hours ago had pulled me back into a kiss by two hands on my shoulders, was fighting his own hands, and losing, and hating it.
He was pulling back because of last night. Because he'd had twelve hours to think about the kiss, and thinking had done to him what it does, and now he didn't know how to say it with the taste of me still in the room.
"That's enough for today." I stepped off the mat and grabbed my towel, and my voice came out level, which took work. "Boring achieved."
"Caleb—"
"Good session." I was already at the door.
He knocked on the guest-room door at nine.
I'd showered, eaten with the second dinner shift, said maybe eleven words to anybody, and spent an hour on the narrow bed watching the ceiling and building the conversation in advance the way I'd build a fight plan, entries and counters.
So when the knock came, two fast raps and then a third like an afterthought, unmistakably his, I already had my opening line ready.
I opened the door. The hallway light was cheap and yellow and made everybody look tired, and it caught him standing there in a gray T-shirt with his hands jammed in his pockets, hair still damp from a shower, the smell of plain soap and the night's cold coming off him in equal parts, like he'd stood outside somewhere gathering himself before he came in.
His eyes had trouble in them. I didn't let him start.
"If last night was a mistake, say it standing still." I kept the door wide and my voice flat. "You've been running from me since two o'clock. You don't run, so whatever it is, look at me and say it, and I'll take it fine."
His mouth opened. Closed. And then his face did something I hadn't built a counter for, it fell, the trouble in his eyes doubling, and he pulled his right hand out of his pocket and there was a folded paper in it, soft at the creases like it had been opened and closed all day.
"It's not the kiss." His voice had none of its speed. "God, Caleb, it's the opposite of—I've been trying to find the second all day and every second had thirty people in it or had your hands on me, and there was no—can I come in? Please."
I stepped back. He came in past me, bringing the soap and the cold with him, and I shut the door, and the room was suddenly very small, a bed, a chair, a narrow window with the yard lights making bars on the floor.
The heater tick-ticked in the wall. He stood in the middle of the little room and didn't move.
He held out the paper.
"Tyler was in the county systems yesterday, chasing the wire. Records started falling out. He confirmed it this morning, before Church, and I've been carrying it since." His hand was steady. His voice wasn't. "Read it."
I unfolded it. Two pages. The top one was a coroner's intake sheet, Clark County header, a name I didn't know, a date I knew like my own birthday. And a line of typed text under CAUSE that my eyes went over four times.
Blunt force craniofacial trauma. Massive frontal impact consistent with unbroken fall onto concrete surface.
Frontal. Facial. Face-first.
The hallway came back the way it always came back, in pieces I'd handled so many times the edges had gone smooth.
My spin. My heel. His chin. The cinder-block wall behind him, and the back of his skull meeting it, and the way he'd folded down the block like his strings were cut.
The back of his skull. I'd thrown a man's head backward into a wall.
The man on this sheet had gone face-first into a floor.
"That's not my kill." My voice came out of somewhere far away. "That's?—"
"Mine." Ghost stood very still in the middle of the small room.
"Both hands on his ankles. I ripped the feet out from under a two-hundred-pound man who never heard me coming and he hit the concrete with his face and I dragged you through the door and never looked back at him.
" His jaw worked. "The enforcer at the hospital told you one dead, one gone.
You did the math with the only numbers you had.
But it was my man who died, Caleb. Second page. "
The second page was a printout, a hospital record, a facility up in Summerlin. A name. Admitted the morning after the pit. And a block of chart language I read three times to be sure I was reading it right.
Severe traumatic brain injury. Comatose. Intracranial swelling decreasing. Neurological responses improving. Prognosis: gradual recovery anticipated with rehabilitation.
The enforcer had said vegetable. The enforcer had said his life was over.
The chart said a coma, swelling on its way down, a man expected to wake up and come back, slowly, over months, but back.
Even their cruelty had been sloppy. They'd rounded a sleeping man up to a ruined one because it made a better story to beat me with.
My man. Alive. And one day going to wake up.