Page 123 of Filled

I throw the combination hard enough that my knuckles sing.

Cruz cycles through our area during the water break, towel around his neck, grin locked and loaded.

“Look at you.” He claps a hand on my shoulder. “Hands looking crispy for a guy deep in fight camp. What’s your secret, huh? New recovery routine?”

“Sleep,” I say. “Lots of sleep.”

“Sleep.” He nods, solemn as a preacher. “Yeah. Heard that’s important.”

His hand hasn’t left my shoulder. His thumb brushes the back of my neck, once, so light, but it travels down my spine like somebody set a match to a fuse. To anyone watching, it’s a teammate being a teammate. Cruz touches everybody. Cruz would hug a parking meter,might actually hump one too.

Shit. Focus asshole.

I know better. My skin knows better.

“Get your hand off him before I make you run the stairs,” Eli says without looking up.

“Harsh.” Cruz withdraws, palms up, all innocence. “Very harsh environment we’re building here, Coach. Hostile, even.”

Dakota finishes her round and walks past us toward the fountain, and her fingers trail across Cruz’s lower back. Half a second. Featherlight. She doesn’t break stride, doesn’t look back, and Cruz’s grin spreads an inch wider.

Nobody saw it. Probably.

We’re being so reckless. It’s ten in the morning on the first day since we all fucked, and we’re already playing with matches next to the gas line.

Victor comes out onto the floor around the half-hour mark.

He moves between stations, big and unhurried, saying a word here, adjusting a grip there. He stops by Eli, who’s drilling one of the newer guys, and says something too low for me to catch.

Then his eyes sweep the floor and snag.

On us. All of us, scattered across the gym in our separate corners and somehow still arranged like points around the same center, and I feel his attention land on me with weight.

He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t come over. Just watches for one beat longer than comfortable, dark eyes unreadable, then turns toward his office.

I exhale a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

“Breathe through the combination, not around it,” Cruz murmurs, mitts up.

Jab, cross, hook.

The rest of the session is two hours of what feels like walking a wire.

Dakota adjusts my stance during a partner drill, her hand pressing my hip a quarter-inch left, and I lose the sequence so completely that Dante has to say my name twice.

“Brady.” His voice stays level. “Underhook. Today, preferably.”

“Right. Yeah.”

Cruz makes a crack about somebody needing electrolytes and a nap, and it’s just familiar enough, just an inch too knowing, that Eli cuts him a look sharp enough to draw blood. Anyone else would’ve missed it. I’m not missing anything today. I’m a raw nerve masquerading as a fighter.

By the time Eli calls it, my shoulders are cooked and my brain is worse. Eight hours. We survived eight hours in the same room, and I feel like I went the distance with somebody who lands every punch.

How do we do this every day? How do I stand three feet from Dakota and keep my hands to myself? Walk past Cruz without leaning into him? Take corrections from Eli in that voice and pretend it’s just a voice? The professional distance fits like a suit two sizes too small, and I’ve only been wearing it since eight AM.

The floor empties out. Fighters peel off toward the locker rooms, toward the parking lot, toward their ordinary Mondays. I’m unwinding my wraps by the cubbies when I realize the five of us have drifted into the same fifteen feet of floor near the exit.

Not together. Nothing anybody could point at. Just close. Magnets pretending to be unaffected by the one beside us.