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I fall asleep alone in my bed, but alone isn’t the right word anymore. Two months ago I was drifting—dates that didn’t stick, a bed that felt too big, a life that fit like someone else’s clothes.

Now I’ve got four people stitched into me, and tomorrow we’ll all stand ten feet apart at the gym pretending we’re merely teammates, and it’ll be the hardest thing I do all day.

Worth it. Every impossible second of it.

29

ELI

The chicken rests under foil while I check the rice for the third time. It’s 6:40 PM. They’ll be here in twenty minutes. I wipe down the counter that’s already clean and catch myself doing it, burning off the same nervous energy I lecture fighters about before weigh-ins.

My kitchen smells like a home instead of a place where a man eats standing over the sink.

Brady texted the group chat two hours ago.

Losing my mind over here. Can’t sit still. Need you guys. All of you.

The kid should be horizontal on his couch with his feet up, watching garbage television, letting his body rebuild. Instead he’s spiraling, and the four of us dropped everything without a single question, because that’s what this is now. That’s what we are.

Dakota knocks first. She’s got her hair down and worry in her eyes, and she walks past me into the kitchen like she’s lived here all her life.

“How bad did he sound to you?” she asks.

“He’ll settle once he’s here.” I hand her the salad bowl. “He needs food and people. In that order.”

Cruz and Dante show up together, Cruz carrying a six-pack of electrolyte drinks Brady lives on, Dante with nothing but his usual quiet. Cruz kisses Dakota’s temple on his way past, claps my shoulder, and Dante starts pulling plates out of my cabinets.

My apartment has never held this much noise. It squeezes my chest, watching them fill it.

Brady arrives last. I open the door and my stomach drops before I can stop it. He made weight this morning and it shows, cheekbones sharp, skin dull, but that’s not what worries me. It’s his eyes. Wired and hollow at the same time, jumping past me into the apartment like he’s cutting angles in the cage.

“Hey.” His voice cracks on the one syllable.

“Come eat,” I demand.

He steps in and Dakota is there before the door closes, her arms around his ribs, and I watch him breathe her in like the first clean air he’s had all day.

Brady eats, not enough, but he eats, and the conversation flows around him like water around a stone. Nobody mentions the fight. Nobody mentions weight or the opponent’s overhand right or the fact that tomorrow night he steps into a cage in front of three thousand people.

“So Cruz decides,” Dakota says, fork pointed at the man in question, “that the best way to demonstrate a suplex to the Saturday beginner class is on the crash mat that Jonah moved twenty minutes earlier.”

“Nobody told me it moved,” Cruz argues.

“You suplexed yourself onto concrete in front of twelve terrified students,” Dakota deadpans.

Cruz shrugs. “And I stuck the landing.”

Dakota shakes her head. “You made a sound like a church organ falling down stairs.”

Brady laughs. Actually laughs, and Dante catches my eye across the table with the smallest lift of his eyebrow.Progress.

“The students gave him a round of applause,” Dante adds, dry as sand. “One of them asked if that was part of the curriculum.”

“I told her it was advanced material,” Cruz replies.

The table breaks up and I sit back and watch them, these four people at my table, in my apartment, eating food I made with my hands, and I try to locate the moment this became my family. I can’t find it. There wasn’t a moment. There was just Dakota walking into my gym, and then the slow collapse of every wall I’d spent years mortaring into place, and now this. Laughter at my table. Plates that will need washing. A life.

Brady’s leg bounces under the table through all of it. He pushes rice into small piles. His eyes go long-distance between sentences, out somewhere past my walls, into tomorrow, into the cage, into every way it could go wrong. I know that spiral. I lived in it for a decade.