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Dante glances at him as he picks up his beer.

“Don’t,” Brady says, not looking at either of us.

“I didn’t say anything,” Dante says.

His eyes narrow. “You were going to.”

“I was going to include you in a hypothetical.”

Brady’s wound tight. “I don’t want to be in the hypothetical.”

Dante tilts his head. His expression is gentle underneath the teasing. That’s the thing about Dante, he’s so perceptive. “Why not?”

“Because it’s…” Brady sets the bottle down again. Rotates it. His jaw is tight in the bar light, the shadows catching the line of it. His neck tattoos dance across his skin. “It’s not my thing.”

“Okay,” Dante says, easy as breathing.

Brady glances up.

“Okay,” Dante says again. “No pressure. I’m just saying, new girl, Coach, the whole setup has got energy. I’m not going to pretend I’m not interested in seeing how that plays out.”

The tension in Brady’s shoulders drops by half a degree. That’s how it goes with him. You back off, and he comes back to himself.

Brady is so careful with himself. All that heat he carries, all that awareness, and he spends so much energy keeping a lid on it that sometimes I wonder what would happen if someone just didn’t let him. If someone made it easy enough for the lid to come off on its own.

I’ve been watching Brady Williams for two months. Watching his gaze linger, how he leans in during contact drills, and then covers it by cracking a joke. The way he went still last month when Dante and I were messing around after training, mock-grappling on the mat, and Dante ended up on top of me laughing, and Brady stood at the edge of the mat with a water bottle and watched with an expression that told me he was fighting with himself.

He’s not ready for me to say it out loud. So I don’t.

“She’s joining our training group,” I say, steering back to safer water. “Victor’s pairing her with Eli as coach. She’ll train with us.”

“Our group?” Brady looks up.

“Victor’s been doing the cross-division mixing thing for a while now. Dante, you said it yourself—it diversifies the work.”

“It does,” Dante confirms. “Better grappling since you joined the sessions.”

“Thank you.”

“I said the grappling. I didn’t say it’s better with you,” he retorts. His foot nudges mine under the table as he says it. A graze, easy and deliberate, gone before Brady could notice.

“Devastating.” I press a hand to my chest. “Anyway. She officially starts next week. Eli looked like a man being handed a live grenade that he was afraid to put down for fear it might go off.”

Dante snorts. “Poor Eli.”

“Not poor Eli. Eli’s been walking around this gym for months like he’s got something stuck up his ass. Maybe this will be good for him.”

“And the suggestion you made,” Brady says carefully, “was also good for him?”

“The suggestion I made was just me being honest,” I reply.

“Honest and appropriate are vastly different things,” Brady supplies.

“They are,” I agree. “I lean toward honest.”

Brady gives me a look that’s half exasperation and half something else, something warmer that he packs down fast.

Dante orders another round. The bar fills up around us, the noise rising, Rocco shouting something in Italian at the television behind the bar. Brady slowly unspools his tightposture into something more relaxed, three beers and good company doing their work.