Our eyes meeting is like our own private conversation. I’ve got tunnel vision. All I can see is his crystal-blue orbs.
Win this fight, I think to myself, looking from Duncan toward his opponent already in the cage. Beat his ass.
Duncan climbs into the cage, puts his mouth guard in, greets the referee then taps fists with his opponent.
A bell dings. The fight starts. Duncan lunges.
Chapter Seventeen
One charge, a flurry of punches, and Duncan’s opponent is reeling. Each hit is a loud thump that makes me wince. It’s like the beat of a bass drum.
The aggression I suddenly see in Duncan shocks me. He’s turned into a creature in the cage. He’s right up on his opponent, crowding him against the chain-link barrier, landing punch after super-quick punch into his gut, side of his head, mouth, neck.
His opponent blocks one fist, Duncan swings with the other. His opponent flails wildly, and Duncan easily slaps the errant hook, lands his own counter straight at the man’s eye.
Finally, when his opponent drops to his knees on the ground, Duncan wraps his arms around his neck from behind, pushes his knees into his lower back, and bends him backward, using his own bodyweight to choke him.
It’s not long before he’s tapped out.
Duncan gets up the winner, pulls the loser to his feet, slaps his head with the kind of affectionate camaraderie I only expect fighters to have, and then is out of the cage, storming past Dad, who looks on in wide-eyed surprise.
The whole basement has fallen silent. The aggression, the violence everybody just witnessed has shocked them speechless.
A bunch of fucking mobsters and gangsters who kill and prostitute people for a living are beyond words.
And so am I.
I turn toward the changing room, see the door swing closed.
I go back there, see Duncan on a stationary bike.
“Lock the door,” he tells me, and without hesitation, I do.
He looks at me, almost as if he’s worried I disapprove, but then starts pedaling faster.
“That was insane,” I tell him.
“I saw it in his eyes.”
“What?”
“He was all about the show,” he says between pants. Sweat drips off his chin. “Expected us to test each other, dance before we fight. Embellish. He’s a show fighter.”
“And?”
“So I got up on him hard and fast. Overwhelmed him.”
Duncan’s voice is completely neutral. He explains it to me matter-of-factly, as if recapping last night’s news.
How the hell can he divorce that kind of aggression from his natural emotional state?
He wipes blood off his knuckles, and I go to him, brow pinched together, a surging worry in me. “Are you bleeding?”
“Yeah,” he says. He lifts his knuckle up to me, shows me, and I gasp, covering my mouth.
“Oh my God!” I cry, stepping back. There’s a tooth lodged in between the knuckles of his middle finger and forefinger.
“Idiot didn’t wear a mouth guard,” Duncan says, and he pries the tooth from his flesh, pushes a towel against the open wound that immediately bubbles blood. The sound of the loose tooth dropping against the floor is just a dull clack.
“Does it hurt?” I ask, feeling stupid the moment the words leave my mouth. Of course it hurts.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s fine, though.”
“Did that guy even get a hit on you?”
“No.”
I take a trembling breath of air, then calm myself down. I guess I’d never expected it to be that brutal. I guess I’d expected it to be more of an artistic dance, like martial-arts movies, than a tooth embedded in a fist.
“How long before the next round?”
He glances up at the clock. “Fifteen minutes.”
“Are you serious?” I ask. “You don’t get to rest?”
“Better that way. Won’t cool down.”
He hops off the bike, digs into his locker and pulls out a jump rope.
I feel so awkward just standing there, watching him do his jumps, cross the rope over effortlessly, reverse his swing so he’s going backward.
His timing is damn-near perfect, and he’s skipping faster than I ever could. Better than I ever could in gym class.
When he’s out of breath he throws the rope against the bench, almost violently, puts his hands on his hips, sucks in huge gulps of air.
There’s a knock at the door, and Duncan walks toward it, slides open the rusty deadbolt.
Dad’s head pops in again. “This guy is Falcone’s fighter,” Dad says. “Quick hands.”
“Right.”
Duncan shuts the door, turns to me, wipes his face with a towel.
“Kiss for good luck?”
I frown at him, make a face. “Are you serious?”
But just as I finish the sentence he’s closed the distance, grabs me by my waist and kisses me. I’m caught by surprise, let out a yelp, and when he sets me down I slap his sticky chest, a little grossed-out by the thought of his opponent’s sweat being there, too.