Chapter 15 #4
“The one where something is happening in your head, and you’re deciding whether to say it.”
I pick at the edge of the blanket. “You changed my life.”
Her expression stills. Not in fear. In attention.
“You know that?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer immediately. “I know we changed each other’s lives.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Her gaze softens. I look out at the water because some things are easier said when I’m not staring straight at what they could cost.
“I thought I knew who I was before you. I thought boxing had taught me everything important about discipline, endurance, and getting back up. I thought loyalty meant standing in front of someone and taking the hit if it came. I thought protection was mostly about force.”
I pause. The cicadas hum above us, loud enough to fill the spaces between words.
“Then I met you,” I say. “And you kept showing me something I didn’t have a name for.
You’d have the worst day imaginable, and the next morning you’d get up and help somebody else survive theirs.
You’d be hurt, lied about, threatened, and exhausted, and somehow you’d still notice who else needed a hand.
Not because it made you look strong. Because you couldn’t leave them there. ”
She looks down at her hands. I keep going because if I stop now, I might not get it all out.
“I spent years thinking resilience meant absorbing damage and staying on my feet. You taught me that resilience is getting back up for someone other than yourself. It’s building a door because you know what it felt like when nobody opened one for you.
It’s telling the truth even when people have spent years teaching you that truth is dangerous. ”
Her throat moves.
“You changed what strength means to me,” I say.
“You changed what home means. You changed what I’m fighting for.
Before you, every fight was about proving something.
To Mack. To my father. To myself. Now I don’t want to prove I can win.
I want to build something worth coming back to once the winning is done. ”
Andi’s eyes lift to mine. “What does that look like?” she asks quietly.
I look at the lake. “I don’t know all of it yet.”
“That’s allowed.”
“I know some pieces.”
“Tell me.”
I take a breath. “A place where nobody has to be impressive all the time. Kids who need somewhere to learn to stand without being taught to swing first. A gym, maybe. Not a flashy one. Not one built for cameras. One where a kid can walk in angry and leave tired enough to tell the truth.”
Her eyes shine, but she doesn’t look away.
“And a lake,” I add.
“A lake?”
“I can do a lake.”
Her mouth trembles into a smile. “You can do a lake?”
“I’m serious.”
“I know. That’s why I’m smiling.”
I reach for her hand. “I can do a lake, Andi. Maybe not this one. Maybe not now. But someday. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere clear. Somewhere that feels like this.”
She looks toward the water. For a while, she doesn’t speak. When she does, her voice is softer than I expect.
“When I was little, before my parents died, I used to imagine living near water. I don’t even know where the idea came from.
We weren’t lake people or boat people. But I had a picture in my head of a small house with trees around it and water close enough that I could hear it at night.
” She pulls her towel tighter around herself.
“After they died, I stopped picturing houses. Houses became places other people decided whether I could stay.”
I close my hand around hers.
“I never told anyone that,” she says. “It felt ridiculous to want something that quiet when I couldn’t even keep a bedroom.”
“It’s not ridiculous.”
“I know that now.” She looks at me. “I think you helped me know that.”
I go still.
She turns more fully toward me, towel slipping from one shoulder, her face open in a way that does something devastating to my chest.
“I spent so much of my life believing people stayed only until loving me became inconvenient. Until the paperwork got complicated. Until the truth got ugly. Until the cost rose higher than they thought I was worth.” She takes a breath.
“You have never once made me feel as if loving me was inconvenient.”
I can’t speak right away. She looks down at our joined hands.
“You make steady feel real,” she says. “Not like a promise someone makes when the room is warm, and the stakes are low. Real steady. The kind that shows up at hospitals, sits on floors, and parks two blocks away because I asked you not to stand where someone could see you. The kind that tells me the truth even when it would be easier to let me sleep. The kind that doesn’t need me to feel smaller to feel strong. ”
My jaw tightens. Not from anger. From trying to hold onto what she’s giving me without breaking the moment by reaching for too much at once.
“You changed my life too,” she says. “Not because you saved me. I know you hate it when I say this, but I need you to hear it the way I mean it. You gave me room to stop surviving every second of every day. You made it safe to want things again. Small things. Dinner. Sleep. A stupidly good peach. A house near water someday.” Her smile flickers.
“You made the future feel like something other than a threat.”
I bring her hand to my mouth and press my lips to her knuckles. She lets out a shaky breath.
“I don’t know how to leave you anymore,” I say.
Her eyes close. “I don’t want you to know how.”
“I don’t.”
She leans into me then, and I wrap both arms around her.
Not to protect her from anything. Not because anything is coming.
Just because she’s there. Because I can.
Because for one afternoon beneath an old oak tree by the clearest water I know, nobody is asking us to bleed for the right to keep loving each other.
We sit like that for a long time. The sun shifts. The shade moves. The peaches get warm and bruised in the bag. Somewhere across the lake, a boat engine rises and fades again.
Eventually, Andi says against my chest, “We have to go back.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I know that too.”
She pulls back enough to look at me. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
I brush damp hair from her cheek. “Thank you for coming with me today.”
“It’s called being kidnapped.”
“Surprise transported.”
“Lake assaulted.”
“Refreshed.”
“Fruit compromised.”
“That one was your fault.”
She smiles, and the whole day folds itself carefully into the space behind my ribs, where I already know I’ll keep it.
We leave as the sun starts to lower.
Andi changes into one of my old hoodies from the truck because her shirt is still damp, and the sleeves swallow her hands. She climbs into the passenger seat with lake-wet hair, bare feet, and a paper bag of peaches tucked safely between her knees like treasure.
I look at her for one second too long.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
“That is never true.”
I start the truck. “I was trying to picture you as sixteen.”
Her eyebrows rise. “And?”
“I finally can.”
She looks out the windshield, smiling faintly. “Was I trouble?”
“The exact amount.”
“You have no basis for that conclusion.”
“You threw a rock seven times across a lake and called it strategy. You were trouble.”
“I was resourceful.”
“That too.”
She settles deeper into the hoodie. “What were you at sixteen?”
“Hungry.”
“That tracks.”
“And angry.”
“That also tracks.”
“And convinced nobody understood what I was going to become.”
She looks over. “Did they?”
“No.” I pull onto the road. “But I didn’t either.”
The mountains gather around us as we drive away from the lake.
The road curves through late light and shadow, past little houses, roadside signs, and fields still wet from the rain that passed before us.
The windows are down because Andi asks for them that way, and the warm air moves through the truck, carrying the smell of lake water, cut grass, and peaches.
She stays awake for almost an hour. Then her head tips toward the window. I reach over and take her hand before she goes fully under. Her fingers close around mine.
By the time we reach the outskirts of Atlanta, the storm has passed. The pavement is wet, and streetlights glow against it. Branches litter the edges of the road. The city looks rinsed and tired, exactly as we left it, except something in me is not the same.
Tomorrow, training will be waiting. The Commission will still have questions. Bill will still have files. Evelyn Carrington will still be out there, moving pieces across a board she thinks belongs to her.
But today, Andi laughed in my arms at a lake that remembered me before I learned to fight. Today, she wore my hoodie and ate peaches beneath a tree. Today, for a few hours, we were not evidence, targets, witnesses, headlines, or liabilities.
We were just Luke and Andi.
And that is not small.
That is the thing. That’s the whole reason I’m going to step into that ring in six weeks and win. Not because winning proves I’m strong. Because I know what I’m coming home to now. And I know exactly what it’s worth.