Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
LUKE
Three days before Christmas, Mack gives me one afternoon off.
Just the afternoon. He's generous like that.
I don't tell Andi in advance. I drive to the youth center—to the parking lot, not inside, because she's stepped back from day-to-day operations and I'm not going to be the reason she walks back in before she's ready—and I sit in the car and wait.
She comes out at quarter to four, the last one through the door, which tracks. She locks up herself, even though she's not supposed to be there in any official capacity. She probably tells herself it's just checking in. Probably believes it.
I get out of the car as she turns around.
She goes still for exactly one second—the involuntary kind that happens before the brain catches up—and then she crosses the parking lot in about four steps, and I meet her the rest of the way.
She doesn't say anything. She just wraps her arms around me and presses her face into my chest, and I hold the back of her head the way I know she likes, and we stand there in the cold parking lot for long enough that a kid inside notices and waves at us through the window.
"Hey, baby," I finally say into her hair.
"Hey." Her voice is slightly muffled.
"How are you?"
A pause. "Better right now."
I pull back enough to see her face. She looks like herself—steady, clear-eyed—but there’s something living just under the surface. The same thing I’ve seen since the boardroom. Not grief. More like a sustained alertness. The look of someone already braced for what comes next.
"Come on," I say. "I'm taking you somewhere that has nothing to do with any of this."
"Where?"
"Dinner. Somewhere loud, where no one knows us, and we can order too much food and not talk about anything important."
She almost smiles. "That sounds like the best thing I've heard in weeks."
"Right? That’s because it’s my idea." I feel her chuckle against my chest before she releases her hold on me.
She locks the car. I open the truck door. She climbs in and steals my jacket from the back seat before I've even started the engine, which she does every single time and will never stop doing.
"Luke?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for coming."
I look at her across the center console. She's already got my jacket pulled around her shoulders, her hair slightly wind-tangled, the center behind us, and she looks—for the first time in too many days—like she's off duty.
"I'll always come for you," I say.
She nods once. Doesn't make it bigger than it is.
That's Andi. She knows which things to keep small so they can stay true.
The restaurant is a Thai place in a strip mall in Decatur that we've been to exactly once before, about eight months ago, when we were still figuring out what we were to each other and neither of us would have admitted it.
The kind of place with too many tables packed too close together and a television over the bar showing a game nobody's watching and a menu that's three pages longer than it needs to be.
I chose it specifically because it has nothing to do with who we are right now.
We get a table in the corner—her preference. She likes her back to the wall, which I’ve never asked about and don’t need to. When she opens the menu, her shoulders drop just a fraction, like she’s setting something down she’s been carrying all day.
"Get whatever you want," I say. "We're ordering too much."
"You said that already."
"I meant it both times."
She laughs. Small but real. The first one I've heard in too many days that wasn't for someone else's benefit.
We order a genuinely unreasonable amount of food. The server—a college-aged kid who clearly recognizes Andi and is expertly pretending not to—sets down a basket of spring rolls before I’ve finished my water, and Andi grabs one before I’ve even registered that they’ve arrived.
"That fast?" I ask, amused at her uncharacteristic display.
"I haven't eaten since eleven," she says, which is not a surprise and is a conversation we've had before and will have again.
"What happened to lunch?"
"Board call ran long, and then I lost track of time."
"You have to eat, Andi."
"I know." She finishes the spring roll. "I eat. Just not always at the times I'm supposed to."
"You can't run on—"
"Luke." She looks at me. "I love you. But I did not come to dinner to be managed."
"Right." I take a spring roll. "Sorry."
"You're forgiven." She picks up her menu again, even though she's already decided. It's a thing she does—holds the menu like a prop while she thinks about something else entirely. "How's the training?"
"Good. Better than good." I lean back. "Mack added a new combination last week that I've been working into the rotation. It's awkward right now, but I can feel where it's going to land when I've got it."
"How long until the fight?"
"Five months, roughly. Joe wants the last eight weeks exclusively on fight prep. Right now, it's still conditioning and fundamentals."
She nods. She knows this world—she grew up in it—but she asks anyway, which I've always liked about her. She doesn't assume she already has the information.
"Tell me something about the tour," I say. "Something you're actually excited about."
She sets the menu down.
"There's a venue in Nashville," she says.
"Small—three hundred capacity, maybe. Travis played it years ago when he was nobody, and he still talks about it the way people talk about a place that got something right.
He put it on the schedule himself, against Katelyn's advice, because it doesn't make economic sense when you could fill a ten-thousand-seat arena instead.
" She looks at me. "I want to sing there. I've wanted it since he described it."
"What's it like?"
"Old. Converted from something—I think a church, maybe. Bad acoustics technically, but the bad acoustics are the point. The sound bounces off the walls in a way that makes it feel like the room is singing with you." She pauses. "He said it changes how you hear yourself."
I look at her across the table.
"That's going to be a good night," I say.
"Yeah." She picks up her water. "I think so."
The food arrives in stages—too much of it, exactly as ordered—and we eat and talk about nothing important the way we used to before the Commission and the board and the coordinated pressure made every conversation a potential crisis briefing.
The restaurant fills up around us. The game on the television evolves into something louder.
The server brings a dessert we didn't order, sets it down with a slightly star-struck expression, and retreats before either of us can say anything.
"He recognized you," I say.
"He recognized both of us," she says, looking at the dessert. "That's new."
"Is it weird?"
She honestly thinks about it, which is what she does. "It's strange," she says. "Not bad strange. Just—I spent so long being known for the wrong thing. Being known for something I built feels different."
"You should be known for everything you've built."
She looks at me for a moment. The restaurant is loud around us, the table between us has enough food on it to last another two hours, and she looks—still—like someone who is off duty. Who got to put the vigilance down for one evening.
"This was a good idea," she says.
"I know," I say. “It was mine.”
"Don't be smug about it."
"I'm not smug. I'm right. There's a difference."
She throws a napkin at me. I catch it. The server sees this and looks deeply uncertain about whether to intervene.
We get home at nine-thirty. She falls asleep on the couch before ten, which tells me how tired she's actually been underneath all the composure.
I sit in the armchair and watch her for a while.
I take in the specific peacefulness of her face when it stops working, the way the sustained alertness of the last several weeks releases all at once the moment she doesn't have to hold it anymore, the way her breathing evens out when the trials aren’t at the forefront of her mind.
I turn the TV off. Put a blanket over her. Leave the kitchen light on low so she won't be disoriented if she wakes.
Then I sit back down and stay with her.
Not doing anything. Not thinking through the Commission or the board or the specific shadow of what's moving against us.
Just being in the room with her while she sleeps, the way you sit with something you love when you're about to leave it, and you want to make sure you've looked at it properly before you go.
January is sixteen days away.
The quiet tonight felt like her. Like us. Like the thing we have when nothing is required of us and we're just two people who chose each other.
I want to remember what this feels like.
I'm going to need it.