Chapter 9 #2
The man who confirmed the appointment over the phone had sounded gruff enough to chew glass, so yes, I had expected someone built closer to a refrigerator. Not a woman with gray eyes, taped knuckles, and a voice capable of dismantling my concentration.
Her expression cools. “What? Disappointed it’s a woman?” Distaste leaks through her tone.
More like entranced.
“N-No. I—”
Jesus fucking Christ. Speak human, idiot.
My discomposure must be written across my face, because her expression softens before she huffs out a laugh. The sound sends a quick, disarming current of warmth through my veins, and the corner of my mouth betrays me with the faintest shift.
“Relax,” she says. “I’m pulling your leg. No need to look so wounded.” Her attention moves over me with open assessment, not quite mocking. “Unless you are disappointed. In which case, speak now.”
She folds her tanned, muscled arms beneath her chest, the movement tightening the black sports bra against her ribs. Tape wraps her knuckles. A thin sheen of sweat trails along her collarbone.
She looks so… mythic.
“I’m not disappointed,” I manage.
“Good.” Her smile deepens, revealing dimples. “I’d hate to bruise your ego before your face.”
I blink. The bite lacing her words is a goddamn contradiction to the seraphic smile on her face.
She passes me, produces a set of keys, and locks the door behind us.
All the while, I am disgracefully preoccupied with the trace of vanilla trailing in her wake.
“Well.” She jingles the keys. “Now you’re stuck with me, Xavier.”
My name in her mouth lands with disproportionate force, and for one absurd second, I feel weightless .
I swallow.
This is untenable. I need to request another coach. Someone less distracting. Someone whose mouth doesn’t make my brain abandon basic function.
I can’t focus like this.
◆◆◆
Forty minutes into whatever private hell my coach considers a beginner’s session, she finally calls time.
Sweat has saturated the back of my shirt, my shoulders throb with mutinous intent, and I am no longer certain my lungs are still cooperating.
My coach, unfairly, looks barely winded. I never doubted her ability, but now I understand why Karras trusts her with his fighters.
We started with a skipping rope, which I resented within the first minute, then moved on to stance, guard, footwork, and the humiliating revelation that knowing how to endure pain did not translate into knowing what to do with my feet.
When she strapped on the pads, I thought I understood the mechanics. Hit what she presented. Simple.
I threw the combination.
“No.”
My jaw tightened. “I did what you asked.”
“You used force,” she said, adjusting the angle of the pad. “I asked for control.”
Except nothing about her was simple. She called combinations without raising her voice, adjusted angles I didn’t know existed, and made me repeat the same movement until my muscles burned with something close to insurrection. “Cleaner,” she said every time I hit harder. “Not angrier. ”
I limp to the bench where my hoodie lies, every shred of dignity left somewhere on the canvas behind me.
She must think I am pathetic by now. A twenty-six-year-old man who knows how to absorb punishment but not how to return it.
Not that I would find it offensive. Weakling is an old verdict, one I learned to stop flinching from years ago. Hearing it from one more person should mean nothing.
Every time I was hit, I learned to take it quietly.
That was the first rule in my father’s house: silence made the damage easier to conceal.
The one time I broke it, I was nineteen and stupid enough to believe courage mattered.
I had gone into his library looking for a file he kept locked away beneath the ledgers, something with my mother’s name on it and sufficient signatures to make him nervous.
He caught me before I found it.
Afterward, there were gaps. The smell of old paper.
The brass lamp shattered across the Persian rug.
My father’s gold cuff links glinting while he dragged me through the corridor toward the stable block.
A lunge line biting into my wrists, rope repurposed into another instrument he considered useful when properly handled.
By morning, I had two cracked ribs, a split scalp, and an arm I couldn’t lift without tasting blood. My mother didn’t ask if I could breathe, let alone whether I was okay. She looked at the damage and said, Clean yourself up before someone sees.
So I did.
Later that day, I stole the pieces of jewelry she was least likely to miss right away and ran to the only place I hoped his reach might falter.
Wishful thinking, as it turned out, was another luxury I had mistaken for strategy.
My coach stands a few feet away, holding out a towel, studying me with something perilously close to concern. No—disappointment? I can’t tell. Reading people has never been one of my finer abilities, and the uncertainty opens a small, inexplicable ache behind my ribs.
“Are you okay?” she asks .
Oh.
Concern.
The question does something absurd to my chest. No one has ever asked me that without already deciding what answer they wanted.
“No.”
The truth leaves me before pride can intercept it, dragged out by the unbearable gentleness of her voice.
She gives me a smile full of private mirth and deposits the towel in my hand. “Dry off, Xavier. I know the perfect solution.”
◆◆◆
Rain needles the glass overhead, moonlight diffusing through it while steam curls from two paper bowls of ramen on the narrow table between us.
When she said she knew the perfect solution, I honestly don’t know what I expected. Certainly not ramen in a candlelit staff room, with rain composing the background noise to something my mind keeps trying to misclassify as a date.
The last time I went on anything resembling a date, I was still in Madrid, bound by debts I couldn’t outrun no matter how hard I tried. The memory arrives with the acrid weight of things I’d carve out of my past if I could.
My focus shifts to my coach as she retrieves two cold cans from the fridge.
She is taller than I first realized. A little over five-seven, if my estimation is correct, which it usually is.
I confirmed it during training when she stepped close to adjust my guard and barely reached my chin.
Somehow, that made her more intimidating, not less.
Her midnight-black hair is pulled back into a ponytail, the ends brushing her deep olive-gold skin with every movement .
I’ve been in London a little over a year now—long enough to know the city is full of beautiful women. None of them held my interest for more than a passing second. No one ever has.
This is different.
Beautiful is too tame a word for her. I file that inadequacy away for later, along with the nameless thing coalescing in my chest at the sight of her.
She isn’t going to see me as her type. She probably prefers strong, capable men. Men who know what to do with their bodies. Men who can hold their own in a room built for violence instead of standing there like an overeducated fool in borrowed gloves.
I go to the gym. I am not fragile. But muscle without command is only decoration, and if I ever expect someone like her to look at me with anything other than professional pity, I need to become more than a man who knows how to endure a hit.
I push aside the small, idiotic spark of hope in my chest.
“Are you ready for the time of your life?” she whisper-yells, excitement brightening her face in a way that sends something reluctant and warm through my chest.
I shift in the chair, straightening before she can notice how thoroughly I have folded into myself, and attempt to look less dismantled than I feel.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she settles into the chair opposite me. “What kind of fitness trainer eats junk food at this hour?”
It is barely eight, and I haven’t thought that once, but correcting her feels unwise.
She pops open one of the cans and slides the other across the table. Our fingers graze when I reach for it, and a sharp current travels up my arm, precise and startling. My hand jerks back from the can.
She clears her throat and tucks a loose silky strand of hair behind her ear. Even in the dim glow of candlelight, I see color climb into her cheeks.
A perfect reflection of the chaos under my skin.
“It’s my little ritual after a long day. The rain is just trying to make it cinematic.” She adds. “Ramen, yuzu soda, and bad decisions. Elite combination. ”
Back home, my mother would’ve suffered an aneurysm if anything like this came within ten feet of our table. She considered instant noodles an indictment of character, proof of poor breeding and weak discipline.
After I left home, started juggling three part-time shifts and school, and learned that hunger did not give a damn where I came from, instant noodles became less an indictment and more a necessity. My stomach objected at first. Eventually, it adapted.
I nod, choosing to remain quiet. I’d rather listen to her talk than risk interrupting whatever spell her voice has put over the room.
“So, Xavier.” Her mouth tips with mischief while she rolls the chopsticks between her palms. “Since we’re doing this, I’d prefer to know the man I’m about to torment twice a week.”
I imitate the motion before thinking better of it.
Her smile widens.
Christ. I like that smile. Far too much.
“We’ll start easy.” She digs into her noodles, unbothered by my silence. “I’m Yara Markakis. From Kriti. Crete, if we’re being English about it.”
Yara.
“I know Crete.”
“Good.” She points her chopsticks at me. “One less emergency.”
The corner of my mouth defects.