"What does mine mean?" he asks.
I look at him. The gym is quiet except for our breathing and the buzz of the overhead bulb and the muffled sound of the compound above us. His face is open in a way that faces shouldn't be open when you've known someone four days. He's not performing. He's not deploying charm. He's asking a real question and waiting for the real answer
"Haven't figured it out yet," I say.
He nods and raises the pads again.
"Take your time. I'll be right here."
I throw the next punch harder than any of the others and he absorbs it without blinking.
We keep going. Another ten minutes, and by the end my arms are shaking, and my lungs are on fire and I feel better than I've felt since before Delaware. Since before the club. Since before any of this, when I was just a bartender closing out a Tuesday and the worst thing on my mind was whether the ice machine would survive the weekend.
Emilio unwraps his hands and tosses the tape. I do the same, peeling the wraps off my knuckles, and the skin underneath is red and tender and sweaty.
He hands me a water bottle from the shelf. I drink half and pour the rest over the back of my neck, and the cold runs down my spine and I don't care about the mess because the relief is worth it.
"Same time tomorrow?" he asks.
He's leaning against the heavy bag with his arms crossed and his hair in his face and his chest still heaving, and the casualness of the question doesn't match the way he's watching me. He wants me to say yes. Not for the intel, not for the assignment. He wants me back in this gym tomorrow because thirty minutes of hitting things together is the most intimate either of us has been since we met.
I know this because the same thing is sitting in my chest right now, and impossible to pretend isn't there.
"Nah, let’s do six," I say.
“A.M?!”
“Yeah, I hate mornings and I hate you, so might as well knock two birds out with one stone.”
He grins. The full one. The one that takes his whole face and makes him look younger and less dangerous and more oblivious to how much trouble the woman he's supposed to be handling is going to cause him.
I walk past him toward the door, and my shoulder brushes his arm on the way by. The contact is brief, fabric against hot skin, and the heat of him registers through my damp t-shirt and settles behind my ribs where the bottle cap can't reach.
I don't look back. I take the stairs two at a time. By the time I reach the second floor my hands have stopped shaking but the attraction I feel has doubled and I’m going to need a long, hot fucking shower to calm the traitorous demon between my legs.
But six a.m. tomorrow I'll be in that gym.
And so will he.
And I'm fucked, so very, very fucked.
Chapter Five: Emilio
IcallClaudioateleven because the twin frequency has been screaming all day and if I don't talk to someone I'm going to put my fist through the drywall again and Leone already made me patch the last hole myself.
He picks up on the second ring. "What."
"I need advice."
"No, I’m with Char, go away."
"You don't even know what about."
"I don't need to. The last time you needed advice at eleven p.m., I spent three hours explaining why you couldn't challenge a Castillo underboss to a fistfight at a funeral."
"That was a reasonable idea and the circumstances were exceptional."
"The circumstances were that you were drunk and offended by his tie."
