Page 98 of Main Event

It smells like concrete and old air and something chemical that every arena in the world has in common. The noise of seventeen thousand people filters down through the ceiling like something happening in a different dimension. Down here it’s just the two of us, the corridor light, and the sounds of the arena becoming someone else’s problem.

Andi walked me here. Not Mack, not my corner team—Andi. She just came through the door and walked beside me, and nobody stopped her because she carries herself like someone who goes where she intends to go and makes the room believe it was always the plan.

I’m still in my gloves.

She looks at me in the corridor light. Not at the gloves, not at the swelling above my eye, not at the evidence of twelve rounds. At me. The man she told to win, who went and did it.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

I think about it. The honest answer is that I feel everything at once—the accumulated cost of twelve rounds, the scoured clarity that comes after a fight when your body has spent everything and your mind is the clearest it’s been in months, the weight of what comes next, and underneath all of it, something quieter. Something that doesn’t have a word yet.

“I feel like myself,” I say. “More than I have in a long time.”

She holds my gaze. She understands exactly what I mean, which is the thing about Andi—she always understands exactly what I mean, even the things I don’t say clearly.

“The story is going to break Monday,” she says. “And the licensing complaints are waiting. And Daniel wants to meet tomorrow. And the machine is still running, just differently.” She pauses. “But right now, in this corridor, none of that is here yet.”

“No,” I say. “It’s not.”

We stand in the corridor for a moment. The arena above us going about its business. The world on the other side of the door waiting to come in.

I reach out with one glove and brush her hand with the back of it. It’s the closest thing to taking her hand I can manage right now, and she understands it for exactly what it is.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”

She smiles. Not the big one—the smaller one. The one that’s only ever for me.

We push through the door, and the world comes in.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

LUKE

The hotel suite is quiet by ten.

Brandon stayed for two hours. We ordered room service and had a family debrief, the culmination of a conversation for people who have been running hard for months and are learning to slow down without stopping completely. He ate half a steak and all the bread. He said he was in the second row for the entire fight, and the judges’ split decision was closer than it needed to be, which is his version of saying you did well. I told him the documentation goes to Bill Monday morning, and he said he knew. It was already done. He’d finished it in the hotel business center yesterday afternoon before the fight.

That’s Brandon. Despite his cracked ribs, injured jaw, and broken nose, he spent the afternoon before the biggest fight of my career finishing a financial analysis so it would be ready the moment it was needed.

He hugged Andi on the way out. Not the careful half-embrace of someone managing their injuries—a real one. She held on for a moment, and he let her, which told me more about where he is than anything he’d said all evening.

Now it’s just us.

Andi is across the room at the window, looking at the Vegas skyline. She changed out of the clothes she wore to the fight into something comfortable, her hair down, the relaxed version of herself that only exists when the day is finally over. I’m on the couch with my legs stretched out and ice on my left eye, which swelled more than I’d like. My hands are wrapped loosely, as Reyes insisted before he left.

She turns from the window.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

“Everything,” I say. “I feel everything.”

She smiles. Comes to the couch and sits beside me, legs folded under her, leaning into my side.

“Tell me about round twelve,” she says.

“What do you want to know?”

“What it felt like from inside it.”