Through the windows I can see the street beyond, slick with earlier rain and reflecting the glow of streetlights. I glance back once to scan the crowd for Brooke, but she’s disappeared somewhere in the sea of bodies. I hesitate for half a second, then keep walking. There’s somewhere I need to be tonight, something that’s been nagging at me ever since I got to New York.
The night air hits me as I step outside, warm and heavy with humidity. The bass from the party fades to a dull thump behind me as the door swings shut. I’m halfway down the steps when I spot her standing on the sidewalk with her phone out, the glow of the screen lighting up her face.
“Bennett,” I say, and she looks up, startled.
“Holy hell.” She presses a hand to her chest, her phone screen going dark as she lowers it. “Make some noise when you walk, Midnight. I almost had a heart attack.”
“You’re standing right outside the door,” I point out, coming down the last few steps to join her on the sidewalk. “It’s not exactly a surprise attack.”
“Still.” She slides her phone into her bag and crosses her arms. “Sneaking out early? The man-of-the-hour coach, abandoning his own party?”
“I’ve shaken enough hands for one night.” I come down the last few steps to join her on the sidewalk, keeping a few feet of distance between us. “If one more person tells me they always knew Roman had it in him, I’m going to start asking where they were six months ago when nobody would return my calls.”
“The fair-weather fans come out of the woodwork after a win,” she says. “I’ve seen it a thousand times. Everyone wants to be part of the story once the story’s already written.”
“Spoken like a journalist,” I say.
“Spoken like someone who’s been paying attention.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and the movement draws my attention to her neck, to the faint mark still visible just below her jaw from where I bit her.
“What about you?” I ask, dragging my gaze back to her face. “Heading home?”
“That was the plan.” She gestures vaguely toward the street. “I’ve hit my limit for champagne and small talk. I was just about to call an uber.”
We stand there for a moment, neither of us moving toward our respective escapes. Somewhere down the block music spills out of a bar, mixing with the distant wail of a siren.
“Do you want to go somewhere with me?” I turn to her, the words come out before I’ve fully decided to say them.
“What?” She blinks like I’ve just asked her to help me bury a body.
“There’s an old boxing gym on the Lower East Side I’ve been meaning to check out,” I say. “My dad’s first gym, from when he came to New York from Croatia. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk from here.”
She looks at me for a long moment. “You wantmeto go somewhere withyou?”
I shove my hands in my jacket pockets, considering how to answer that. I don’t know what possesses me to be honest,maybe being in this city, maybe coming off the high of the win, maybe it’s that despite how I’ve spent my entire adult life hating her, Brooke knows me in ways that most people don’t. I’ve spent a long time trying to pretend that history doesn’t exist, and standing here on a Manhattan sidewalk at eleven o’clock at night, I’m too tired to keep up the act.
“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
She looks at me for a long moment, long enough that I start to think I should just take it back and tell her to forget it, and then a smile slowly spreads across her face.
“What the hell, Midnight,” she says. “Let’s go.”
“Alright then.” I nod toward the street, and she falls into step beside me.
The streets are quieter now than they were a few hours ago, with closed storefronts and restaurants with their lights dimmed and the occasional taxi cruising by looking for a fare. I navigate us downtown without thinking about it, turning left on Houston and cutting through toward the Bowery, and after a few blocks Brooke glances over at me with a curious expression.
“You seem to know where you’re going,” she says.
“My dad brought me here once,” I tell her, stepping around a pile of trash bags waiting for morning pickup. “When I was sixteen. Just the two of us and we spent a whole week in the city. It’s changed since then, but I remember this area really well. He wanted to show me where it all started.”
“Hank Midnight’s origin story,” she says.
I turn us onto a side street, the buildings getting older and more worn as we move further from the shiny, renovated blocks. “He came over at nineteen. Real name was Domic Mihnev, but the promoters couldn’t pronounce it, so he became Hank Midnight for the American audience.”
“Hank Midnight,” she repeats. “That’s quite a stage name.”
“He picked it himself. He thought Midnight sounded like a fighter’s name, like someone who worked in the dark while everyone else was sleeping.” I can hear my dad’s voice in my head, telling me this story while we walked these same streets so many years ago. “He trained at a gym down here, and had his first fights on their Friday night cards. This was all before he met my mom and moved to Washington.” I glance over at her. “I thought you knew all this? You did your research for the article.”
“I know some of the facts,” she says quietly. “But I never really heard it from you…”
