Grace shook off her brother’s comment, not knowing how to articulate the worry that loomed over her like a dark cloud. As she gained the upper hand on Mark by slipping from his reaching hands, she turned around to land a kick to the center of his back. He tumbled forward, catching himself before he fell against the flooring. He turned around quickly after recovering, shooting her a smile that was lined with irritation. Mark opened his mouth to say something, but his eyes shifted from hers to behind her.
“Mark, Grace,” their father’s voice called from behind Grace.
Turning around, Grace felt like a child being caught for pushing their sibling in the middle of the grocery store, but the feeling passed when she saw his phone in his hand, barely an inch from his ear.
Mark stepped in place beside his sister, shooting her a questioning glance as if she knew what was going on.
Their father looked up from his phone, the seriousness on his face fading away as a forced smile spread across his face. There was a slight twitch underneath his eye that he tried to blink away. “There’s been a slight change of plans for tonight.”
Mark let out a groan. Tossing his head back to look at the ceiling, the man let out a soft sigh. “Let me guess,” he said, looking at his father with his mouth pinched together. “My opponent’s backing out after realizing who he was really fighting?” His feigned irritation fell from his face as he said this, elbowing Grace’s mid-section.
Grace and her father shared a laugh at Mark’s expense as their father shook his head. “Nothing like that,” he said, leaning on the black cord of the boxing ring. Despite the apprehension Grace was feeling at the moment, she liked seeing her father look more comfortable around the ring. As her father prepared what he was going to say next, there was a hesitance that made Grace wonder if he was leaning on the cord as a source of emotional support as well as physical. “The Kellys will be joining us.”
Grace’s shoulders dropped, her hands naturally falling out of their position on either side of her face. Her eyebrows, which had been lined with concentration on landing a blow in one of Mark’s various openings, now arched. Any semblance of determination had dropped from her face.
“Why would you invite the Kelly Family?” Grace demanded.
“I didn’t,” he admitted. “They invited themselves.”
8
The smellof sweat hung heavily in the locker room, thickening the air that Grace pulled in through her nose.
Each breath seemed thicker than the last, inflating her lungs with a sickly warmth that made her feel more and more claustrophobic the longer she was in the room. Inside of her, her heart started beating faster—hammering against the side of her ribcage as images of her brother, bloodied and bruised in the boxing ring, passed through her mind.
A wave of nausea churned at the back of Grace’s throat, boiling the tissues and fibers with its relentless strength. She bit it back with a daring swallow, praying that the bile working its way up her throat would settle underneath her saliva. As soon as her muscles relaxed, she felt the sticky webbed fingers of the nausea claw at her skin. It tore its way back up, reaching even higher than before.
She pulled in a deep breath through her mouth, feeling a cooling sensation in the back of her throat despite the humid air of the locker room. Despite her efforts, the unpleasant scent still worked its way into her nose. It almost reminded Grace of the sharp tang of vinegar and tangentially, the cloying aroma of white fish—mixed together with the humidity that leaked out from the showers, the smell was verging on overwhelming at this point. She exhaled slowly, breathing out of her mouth as though she was trying to blow out a persistent candle wick.
“God,” Grace said, shaking her head at her brother as she sat next to him on one of the walnut-colored benches. “I don’t know how you can stand that smell.” Her fingers pulled at the packaging for a new strip of gauze, grateful for the sterile smell that burst from the packaging as the cardboard backing pulled away from the molded plastic. The gauze rolled out into Grace’s hand and she pulled the end of it, sticky with adhesive, away from the rest of the black netting. Winding the gauze around each of her brother’s fingers, she looked up at him.
His face had an easy smile on it, one that lit his face up and reminded Grace of their younger days, but there was a stale element to his smile that made Grace’s eyes linger. She’d covered his hands for fights many times before and was pleased to see that her hands were operating on muscle memory alone—winding the black gauze in between his callused, bruised knuckles. His eyes lifted to hers then, narrowed with a mischievousness she’d learned over the years not to underestimate. “It’s really not that bad,” he laughed. “You’re just a drama queen,” he arched his brows at her, practically challenging her to respond.
Grace rolled her eyes at him, determined not to take the bait. Taking his other hand as he lifted it, Grace finished off the gauze on his dominant hand. She knew his fighting style well enough to know that this hand in particular needed extra cushioning around the knuckles—her stomach flipped at the thought of her twin brother throwing a punch towards another person.
She’d seen it many times before, but there was always an anger that lined his face when he fought that caught her off-guard—she decided it was because he’d always been so carefree when he spoke to her. “And you’re just nervous,” she countered after another silent moment. Her eyes flickered to a pair of socks just beyond Mark’s sneakers. A smirk worked across her face as her brother’s eyes followed hers. “You can’t tell me that doesn’t bother you.”
He let out a wry laugh, a mockery of what his genuine laughter sounded like. It made Grace look at him more clearly than before. As the laughter faded away from his voice, the smile that he’d been holding onto began to droop as well—as if a mask had fallen away from his features to reveal what he was really feeling.
His brow was laced together tautly, pulling at the skin of his forehead until it formed into crumpled waves. She could tell by the way his mouth twitched from side-to-side rapidly—as if her brother had learned to move in fast-forward—that he was focusing on something in his mind, something complex and hard to vocalize. “I am actually nervous, you know?” Mark asked, not looking up from his wrapped hand. He flexed it, spreading his fingers out to form a large, spider-like shape in front of himself.
Grace looked up at him then, pausing in her wrapping just as she wound it around the base of his thumb. “Why?” She lowered his hand in her lap, tucking a strand of her wild hair behind her ear to get a better look at Mark’s face. “You’ve done this many times before, tonight won’t be any different.” As she spoke, she felt a swelling of bile inside of her throat—she began regretting her choice of words as she watched a flicker of irritation work through her brother’s features, as though she couldn’t possibly understand what he was feeling.
“It’s entirely different, Grace,” he started, pulling away his partially-wound up hand from her grasp to finish it himself. Grace watched as Mark finished lacing up his own hand. He let out a slow breath as he lifted himself from his seat on the bench. With his back to her, Grace could see how tense he’d become in anticipation for the fight tonight, and despite the intense nerves he had, Mark had done what he always did—try to make Grace feel better. He turned around, smoothing out his features with a broad stroke of his wrapped-up palm. He fought to keep a composed expression, but his uncharacteristic seriousness leaked out into his words.
If she listened close enough, Grace was certain that she could hear the faintest shaking in his voice. “I could get seriously hurt if I go about this the wrong way. You and Dad keep telling me that it’s going to be the same thing as the last time I was in the ring, but I really don’t think either of you understand—” Mark’s voice trailed off as his eyes worked themselves across the floor. He was biting at his bottom lip furiously now, picking at the small pieces of skin around the corners of his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he began shaking his head at himself.
Looking at her brother with newfound respect and admiration, she felt a pang of guilt work through her body. It urged her forward, pushing her to wrap her brother in a hug. At first, his body stayed firm against hers, like he was holding a breath inside of himself and if he let go of it, he’d float off. Grace sighed into her brother’s shoulder and rubbed at his tense shoulders to relieve some of the stress that he was holding within him. “No,” she whispered as she pulled away, giving him an apologetic glance. “Don’t be sorry.” She wanted to swat away the dismissive things she’d said to him earlier.
In all of her enthusiastic, unguided cheering, she’d completely forgotten about actually listening to her brother. She’d left him to deal with the anxieties of tonight’s fight by pretending that she wasn’t feeling the same way. Another pang of guilt echoed inside of her when she came to this realization—the realization that she’d committed the very same act that her father had done to her in the past. She wanted to swallow the feeling inside of her, to bury it somewhere dark and hidden where no one would be able to access it again.
She opened her mouth instead. “I know you’re worried. We all are.” She reached forward to place her hand on Mark’s shoulder once more. “But you’re a great fighter,” she nodded her head at him, looking into his eyes to make sure he really understood what she was saying. “And that’s why I know that you’re going to make it out of this okay.”
Mark watched her face carefully, his eyes narrowing into small slits for a moment before he smiled at her. “It’s kinda freaky how you always know what to say,” he said. Despite the soft grin, there was a still a palpable sense of anxiety that radiated off of him.
Grace smiled back at her brother as they filed out of the locker room and towards the main ring. As they moved through the back section of the gym, winding through hallways of offices and storage areas, Grace began to pick up on the noise coming from the main area of the gym—the loud, continuous thumping of heavy bass, and hundreds of guests trying their best to talk over it, combined together into low rumbling that carried through the walls. In her mind, an uncontrollable surge of water was all Grace could picture on the other side of the double doors she and Mark walked towards. Just before opening the door for Mark, Grace turned to look at him.
“You ready?” she asked.
