Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ANDI
Phoenix in May is a different color than anywhere we've been on this tour.
The desert light is sharper here. Less forgiving.
Everything is very visible in a way that feels pointed—the mountains in the distance, the dry air, the clarity that comes from no humidity and nothing between you and the sky.
After almost five months of the East Coast and the Midwest and the flat dark of the Southwest, the light here feels like an accusation.
Like it's refusing to let anything be soft or ambiguous.
I step off the bus at seven in the morning and stand in the parking lot of the venue for a long time, just looking at it.
Luke's fight is tomorrow night.
I've known for three weeks that the tour has two dates near Vegas—Phoenix and Los Angeles.
I've known for three weeks that if I wanted to, I could rearrange things.
Get there. See him. Not announce it, just be in the building to watch him during one of the most important fights of his career.
I've been planning it in the back of my mind, the way you plan things you're not sure you're going to do—running the logistics, identifying the obstacles, leaving the decision unmade.
I haven't told him.
That's been the recurring theme of the last month.
We talk. Not every day—the windows are shorter now, or maybe we've just gotten more careful about what we put in them.
We say the true things but in smaller doses, as if we're both rationing something we're not sure we have enough of.
He asks about the tour. I ask about training.
We talk around the thing that sits between us, and we're both aware we're talking around it, and neither of us has figured out how to stop.
The arrangement ended two weeks ago. His athletic commission file is closed.
Officially, publicly, we are no longer separated.
The youth center board pressure at the center has eased, which was the point—the thing I can't quite get past—not that it didn't work, but that it did.
That his logic was correct. Those sixty days of managed distance produced exactly the result he predicted, and I still can't make that feel like the right thing.
I set my coffee cup down on a concrete barrier and look at the mountains.
What I'm afraid of—the thing I've been circling for three weeks without saying directly, even to myself—is that I’ll go to Vegas and find out we're already different people than we were.
That our five months of parallel crisis management, careful phone calls, and the specific loneliness of solving our own problems have quietly, without either of us choosing, built two separate versions of us that don't fit together the same way anymore.
That's the fear.
Not that he stopped loving me. I know he didn't. Not that he'd do it again—I think he understands now in a way he didn't before.
The fear is subtler than that and harder to fix.
The fear is that we got through it by ourselves, each of us, and that being through it means we needed each other less than we thought, and that needing each other less means something has changed shape permanently.
I've been carrying that thought for three weeks, and I haven't said it to anyone.
Travis finds me in the parking lot at seven-fifteen with two coffees, which means he's been up since before seven.
"Phoenix morning," he says, handing me one.
"Yeah."
He stands beside me and we look at the mountains together for a minute. This is one of the things about Travis that has grown familiar over nearly five months—he doesn't require conversation. He simply occupies space beside you without demanding anything.
"You're thinking about going," he says.
"I'm thinking about a lot of things."
"You've been thinking about a lot of things for three days. It's starting to look like a decision."
I turn the coffee cup in my hands. "His fight is tomorrow night."
"I know."
"If I go—"
"I know that too." Travis drinks his coffee. He just lets me get to it.
I look at the mountains.
"If I go," I say, "I need it to be for the right reason.
Not because I'm hurt and I want to see him before I've decided anything.
Not because I'm afraid that if I don't go, something will break that can't be fixed.
" I pause. "And not because it's easier to show up than to keep sitting with the question. "
"What's the right reason?"
I think about that. Actually doing it. Separating what I want from what I'm afraid of, from what I actually believe is true.
"Because I love him," I say. "And because I want to be in the room when something important happens to him, regardless of where we are. Because that's who we are to each other, even when everything else is complicated."
I pause.
"And because I think the version of me who stays on the bus to avoid the risk of a hard conversation is not the version of me I want to be."
Travis nods slowly.
"That sounds like a right reason," he says.
"It might also be the same as the wrong reason dressed differently."
"Yeah." He finishes the coffee. "That's usually how it works."
We stand in the Phoenix morning, and I make the decision the way you make the ones that matter—not when you have all the information, but when you've run out of ways to avoid knowing what you already know.
"I'm going," I say.
"Okay." He doesn't make it larger than it is. "I'll come with you. You shouldn't drive out there alone at night."
"Travis—"
"I know the territory," he says. "And I have a motorcycle I've been wanting to take out on that desert highway." He looks at me sideways. "It's fine, Andi. That's what friends do."
I look at the mountains in the sharp Phoenix light.
"Okay," I say.
He teaches me three chords on his acoustic guitar that afternoon, sitting on the floor of the tour bus with the desert heat pressing against the windows. Not because I ask—just because he picks up the guitar and starts playing and eventually turns it toward me and says, "Your turn."
I'm terrible.
"You're not terrible," he says.
"I'm terrible, and you're being polite."
"I'm never polite. You're a beginner. There's a difference." He adjusts my hand position on the neck. "Try it again."
I try it again. It's marginally less terrible.
"There," he says. "That's a G chord. You can play half of all popular music with G, C, and D."
"That seems like an exaggeration."
"It's almost not."
He takes the guitar back and plays something simple — three chords cycling, steady and familiar—and then adds a line over it.
In a small room with no production around it, his voice is different from the one he uses onstage.
Less polished. More exposed. There's an uncertainty in it that somehow makes it better.
"Is that a song?"
"The beginning of one." He keeps playing. "I've been working on it for a couple of weeks. I can't find the second verse."
"What's it about?"
He lifts his eyes to mine. Just long enough for the answer to register.
"Someone who belongs somewhere else."
I hold his gaze for a beat. He lets me—doesn't look away, doesn't soften it. Then he drops his eyes back to the guitar, fingers still moving, careful not to let the moment go further than it should.
I think about what it's cost him—five months of proximity, of being the person I called when I had fifteen minutes between soundcheck and doors, of knowing the texture of my life in ways Luke couldn't because Luke was in Vegas and Travis was here. Of wanting something he never tried to take.
That's not nothing.
And the thing that breaks my heart a little is that I can see he's already done it. He's set it down.
"Travis."
"I know," he says. "Don't."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"I know. That's why I said it." He sets the guitar down.
"I'm fine. I'll finish the song, and it'll be better for having felt it, and then I'll move on.
That's how it works." He looks at me directly.
"I'm not telling you this to complicate anything.
I'm telling you because I think you should know that what you have with him is visible. Even from where I'm standing."
I look at him for a moment.
"I know you're fine," I say. "I've known that for a while. That's not what I was going to say."
"What were you going to say?"
"That you're one of the best people I've met on this tour. That I'm glad it was you standing here." I pause. "That I'm sorry it was hard."
He's quiet for a moment.
"It wasn't hard," he says. And then, more honestly, "It wasn't only hard."
I nod once. That's all it needs.
He picks the guitar back up. Plays the three chords again—G, C, D—and this time doesn't sing over them. Just lets them sit in the warm afternoon, unfinished and true.
"Go see your fight," he says at last. "Tell him all the things you haven't been telling him. Don't wait for the right moment. There isn't one."
I pick up the guitar and try the G chord again.
This time, it sounds almost right.
I call Luke at nine that night. Not to tell him I'm coming. But because it's nine o'clock and we have a window, and I want to hear his voice.
He picks up on the second ring.
"Hey." His voice has that late-camp quality—stripped down, everything unnecessary burned away. I've missed that voice. It's the most purely him it ever sounds.
"Hey." I'm sitting in the venue's green room, empty except for me. Through the wall, I can hear the crew doing load-out from tonight's show. "How are you?"
"Ready," he says. "That's the only word I have right now."
"That's the right word."
A pause.
"How's Phoenix?"
"Sharp," I say. "The light here is different. There's nowhere to hide from it."
"That sounds like you'd like it."
"I do."
We're quiet for a moment. Not the comfortable kind we used to have. The careful kind—both of us present, both of us not quite saying the thing.
"Luke."
"Yeah."
"Win tomorrow."
A beat. Something in his exhale.
"That's the plan."
"Goodnight."
"Goodnight, Andi."
After I hang up, I sit in the empty green room for a while.
Tomorrow night, he'll step into a ring that is the exact culmination of everything he's built toward. Everything Joe Caruso has pushed him toward, everything Mack has been preparing him for since before I knew his name.
I will be in the building.
He won't know I'm there until it's over.
That's the right way to do it. Not announcing, not inserting myself into the moment before.
No expectations or anticipation of facing me.
I'll just be present for something that matters.
The way he showed up in the youth center parking lot on his one afternoon off — not asking permission, not making it about himself, just close enough to matter.
I owe him that.
I close my eyes and listen to the crew working through the wall.
Tomorrow.