Epilogue #2
She hugs me first—throwing her arms around my neck, then slapping me upside my head for making her wait fifteen minutes by herself.
“Everybody’s been staring at me like I’m some loser or something,” she hisses, pulling back and holding me at arm’s length.
She eyes me up and down like it’s been years since we’ve seen each other when it’s only been a little over a month.
“You look…” her voice trails off and she tilts her head. “Happy.”
Her eyes jump from my face to my side where Slim stands next to me, gripping her clutch. I drop my hand on top of her head, smoothing back her wild baby hair that she brushed down on the way here while she vented to Yesenia on the phone about this very moment.
Her and Arnez stare at each other awkwardly until Slim clears her throat. “Sorry we’re late. It was my fault.”
Arnez shrugs. “It’s cool. Better late than never, I guess.”
We all shuffle to our table where our menus are already sitting upright around a lit candle. Me and Slim sit on one side and Arnez sits on the other.
Our waiter rounds the table with a glass of water and pours it into the empty glasses next to our menus. He smiles big when his eyes roll from Arnez to Slim.
“Ahhh. So they made it?” he asks in some sharp accent I can’t put my finger on.
“Mhmm,” Arnez replies, opening her menu and eyeing it. “I told you I had people, while you was tryna play me.”
He laughs, tilting his lanky body to the side and looking down at us. “Welcome to Del Frisco’s, Arnez’s people. I’m Shaya.”
I nod my head at him because I still ain’t gotten used to overly friendly waiters and hostesses in places like this, but Slim said even if I never get used to it, it’s okay. She said she’ll just cook more at home.
“What can I get you all to drink? Cocktails?” he asks.
Slim slides her hand under the table and squeezes my thigh. “I’ll take a French 75 and he’ll have a Jack Daniel’s neat.”
He nods without writing anything down, then raises his bushy eyebrow at Arnez. “And you, beautiful?”
“I’m good with water.” She rolls her eyes, cocking her head toward me. “And that’s my baby brother right there. He boxes. So chill with all that ‘beautiful’ shit.”
Shaya laughs at first until I blink at him with a straight face, then his eyes get big.
He holds his hands up. “I meant no disrespect, my guy. She’s gorgeous and I just—”
“Should probably go get our drinks,” I finish for him.
Slim squeezes my thigh harder than the last time.
“Yes, sir. Right away.”
After he scurries off, me and Arnez look at each other and bust out laughing. It feels good—feels like we’re little again and some boy at school is going around talking about he likes her until he finds out I’m her brother.
My shoulders bounce up and down, and I look into her eyes and see the love in them I thought was gone forever at one point.
Then her eyes flutter over to Slim, and she tilts her head to the side as her laughter tapers off. “So why’d you have my brother late?”
That awkwardness settles between us again while Slim bites down on her lip to keep ahold of whatever smartass comment she has to say.
She unclasps her clutch, digging inside it, pulling out a handful of banana Laffy Taffys and dumping them in the middle of the table.
“There’s only one gas station in a ten-mile radius that sells banana Laffy Taffys.
Rich told me to just forget about it and that we’ll get them for you tomorrow, but I have a feeling I probably won’t see you tomorrow or at all during this week you’re here visiting so I just wanted to get you a little something to say, ‘Thanks for being my pain in the ass sister. I love you even if you haven’t learned to love me yet. ’ I’m being patient, though.”
I think I count six different expressions on Arnez’s face in the span of a few seconds, but the one that sticks makes my chest ache in a good way.
Her eyes light up and her shoulders hike up to her ears until she lets out the ugliest sob I’ve seen her let out since she cried in my truck outside of Jazzy’s.
LOVIE
In our first week of training, we’ve spent seven hours a day at De La Torre Boxing Gym with Roberto and his team because Roberto says it’s important I stay with Rich.
So that’s forty-two hours in a hot gym full of sweaty men and rumba music—twelve hours of bag work, eight hours of pad work, ten hours of cardio, and twelve hours of weightlifting.
Every day I watch Rich float around the gym while I fill out my second FIT application, and every day Roberto teaches me something new about training a boxer because for some reason he’s just as interested in me as he is Rich, but Yessenia says that’s normal.
“He’s Cuban. Family is very important to them…and you’re also probably great eye candy for them—you and your high arches that just can’t function in sneakers.” She laughed. “They probably go home with hard dicks every night.”
“Amore!” Roberto yells from the ring.
He can’t say “Lovie.” He says it doesn’t roll off his Cuban tongue, so at the gym I’m “Amore.”
“Come. Let me show you.” He waves his mitt-covered hand and smiles at my heels as I sit my laptop on the chair next to me and push up from my seat outside the ring.
Rich follows his eyes in the same way he follows every man’s eyes that linger on me longer than a few seconds as I gait up the stairs leading into the ring.
As soon as I climb inside and stand upright, Roberto grabs Rich’s arm and pulls him to me.
We look at each other and smile in the way that annoys Arnez when she’s not being moody and lets us spend time with her.
“Say hello to each other, esposa and esposo,” Roberto says.
“Hi, Rich,” I murmur to him.
“Hi, baby,” he rasps back.
Somehow, I see our uneventful morning replaying in his russet irises.
I made his breakfast, then listened to him explain to Aunt Faye which ceiling fan to buy from Home Depot so he can install it in the master bedroom when we fly home to visit.
Afterward we rushed out of the condo and got in his truck to head here.
“Listen to me, Amore. La esposa is the backbone of the husband in boxing.” Roberto gestures to Rich’s back and drags his hand up and down. “You understand?”
“I do.”
“Tell me what that means to you.”
I smirk at Roberto and his strange boxing lessons that never feel like they have anything to do with boxing. “It means I take care of him.”
“Uh-huh…and Pup, what does that mean to you?”
“It means she the boss of me.”
Roberto throws his head back, laughing. “Perfecto. Now, hold your hands out, Pup.”
He holds them out, and I drag my eyes across the frayed tape wrapped around them.
Roberto reaches out and unwraps them, slowly exposing my other friends I’ve grown to love over the past month. They’re not as pretty as his biceps, triceps, or deltoids, but that’s the thing I love about them the most.
“Street fighter’s hands,” Roberto mutters, looking from me to Rich’s sunken knuckles as if I can fix them.
“Uh-huh.” I nod, reaching out and threading my fingers through Rich’s.
“How long did he street fight?”
“Fourteen years,” I reply just as easily as I do when I’m asked anything about Rich.
“Fourteen years is a long time, so we have to start slow when we train a fighter like Pup. It’s like pulling a wolf out of its natural habitat—it’ll cause him stress. We’ve already taken him from his home…. ”
“I understand,” I murmur.
“So no gloves for fourteen years—just bare knuckle boxing.” He whistles. “You know these hands the best, don’t you, Amore?”
Rich smirks while I nod.
“I…I do.”
“Listen, I wanna put gloves on Pup, but I need to know if he’s ready for that, and you’re the only person here who can tell me if he is.”
I look down at our hands tangled together and stare at his scarred ones. I see all the calluses that scrape against the softest parts of my body. I see each sunken knuckle he says I’ve made better with my kisses. I even see our future in the light colored scars that decorate his knuckles.
I blink up at Roberto. “He’s ready.”