“Thank you for this,” she says. “I know what it costs you.”
“It costs me an hour.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.” I step onto the mats. “Come on. Show me where you are, and we’ll build from there.”
She comes on carefully. We start with stance, balance, the basics of not falling down, and at first she is exactly what her chart says she is, a starved woman fresh out of a cell, weak, willing, grateful, wobbling on the turns. She shows me the frailty first, and watches whether I soften.
I don’t soften. I correct her stance with two fingers and keep the pace exactly where a recovering body needs it, and somewhere past the opening drills, the frailty stops being the whole story.
It’s small things. Her eyes run my reach, my stance, the space between us, and the running is efficient. She resets her stance from the ground up, feet first, a fighter’s reset, without being told twice. When I sweep her, slow and announced, a teaching fall, she takes it well. Slaps the mat. Rolls to her feet with an economy that a starved beginner shouldn’t own.
Catherine moves trained. It’s there in the first honest exchange and it never goes away.
Somebody taught her. Somewhere in Konstantin’s keeping, somebody taught her to move, and taught her well, and taught her in a school I recognize, because I’ve watched Konstantin’s people fight and I fought Valentina’s, and the deliberate control of a body that learned what its keeper rewarded is written in her footwork where a beginner’s clumsiness should be.
Midway I feed her a jab, slow, telegraphed, a teaching strike she’s supposed to see coming and step away from. She steps away from it. But the step is wrong. Not wrong as in clumsy. Wrong as in better than the lesson, a slip at an angle I haven’t taught her, her weight already loaded for a counter she doesn’t throw, and for half a second the beginner is gone and something built stands in her place. Then she stumbles the recovery, one beat late, and looks embarrassed.
“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t know what that was.”
“Beginner’s luck,” I say, and we both hear what I don’t say.
We drill on. Between rounds she talks, light, harmless, the register from the dinner table. “You fought before. Before all this.” Not quite a question.
“For money.”
“Were you good?”
“I’m alive.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only answer that ever mattered.” I reset my stance. “Guard up.”
She puts her guard up. It’s flawless. A breath, and it’s less flawless, and I pretend not to watch the adjustment.
Partway in, the two of them wake. The flutter under my ribs, the shift of small live things registering effort, and I ease the tempo down two notches without breaking rhythm and let the next drill be footwork. Catherine’s eyes flick to my midline and away, one beat, filed. She files everything. So do I.
She’s hiding most of it. That’s the part that matters. The wobbles are placed. The gratitude is placed. Her breathing is wrong for the effort, too even, and a starved body burns through its reserves fast, and hers is pacing itself. She’s showing me a recovering victim learning her first stance, and underneath the performance there’s a trained body holding itself down to the role, and she’s good enough that if I didn’t read opponents for a living, I’d have believed every wobble.
Near the end she rests, hands on knees, selling winded, and asks the question the whole hour was maybe for.
“Does he know you’re doing this?” Casual. Eyes on the mat. “Maximus.”
“He will.”
“He won’t like it.”
“He doesn’t have to.”
She straightens. Something crosses her face that she lets mesee, which means it’s a move, and what it looks like is respect. “He never let me learn,” she says. “Anything that could have saved me. He kept me safe instead. You know how that ended.” She rolls her shoulder, winces on schedule. “I used to think it was love. Now I think it was inventory management.”
It’s aimed at my marriage and it lands in history instead, and I file the miss with the hits. Even her misses are information. She’s telling me the story where Maximus caged her, and inviting me to wonder what he’d do to me, and the story would work on a woman he hadn’t already tried to cage and lost to.
“Water,” I say. “Then footwork.”
I know an audition when I’m in one. I just haven’t worked out yet what part she thinks she’s reading for.
