“Aye.” Real low under all the noise around us.
I got a feeling in my chest before he said another word. Like I already knew. Like my body got the information before my brain did and decided to react early.
“Don’t let this take you off your square. Keep your head where it needs to be.”
“Just say what you gotta say.”
He didn’t say nothing else. He just cut his eyes toward the entrance of the basement and I followed them before I could stop myself.
And just like that, nothing else in that room existed anymore.
Brielle was coming through the crowd with Simone right behind her and she moved through all those bodies and all that noise like she belonged wherever she decided to put herself. She had on jeans, a denim jacket, hair pulled back, nothing extra, andit didn’t matter because Bri never needed extra. She was one of those women who was just naturally put together in a way that had nothing to do with what she was wearing or how much effort she put in. She could walk in looking like she just woke up and still be the only one worth looking at in the room. I had known that since we were thirteen years old in the same homeroom at Westfield Academy and it hit me the same way every single time I was around her even when I didn’t want it to.
We came from completely different worlds. I grew up in the hood with a mama working two jobs and a father who was dead before I was old enough to really know him. She grew up with two parents, stability, money, and a family that had a very specific idea about what kind of people their daughter was supposed to have around her. I was the kid her family would’ve never approved of and we both knew that from jump which is why what was between us had to stay on the friendship level. It couldn’t become something real even though we both felt it. We had been friends since that homeroom and somewhere in that friendship something else grew that neither one of us ever named out loud. We wanted each other. Had since we were teenagers and anybody who spent any time around us could see it even when we were acting like it wasn’t there. But life had pulled us in different directions and we weren’t as close now as we used to be. Still though, every time I was around her it was the same thing. Like something between us was just sitting there unfinished waiting on one of us to finally do something about it.
She hadn’t spotted me yet. She was scanning the room and I watched her eyes move through the crowd until they found the cage.
Until they found me.
She didn’t make it into a thing. No big wave, no smile for the people around her. She just looked at me and that look had everything in it that we had never said out loud — all the years, all the history, all the back and forth that never went anywhere. Something about her being here in this basement, in my world that she knew her ass had no business being in, it did something to me that I wasn’t prepared for and couldn’t talk myself out of. Bri had always been able to do that. She could bring something out of me that I kept away from everybody else without me ever fully letting her in.
I broke eye contact first. I had to. I needed to keep my head where it needed to be.
“Don’t,” I told Gutta.
“I ain’t said nothing.”
“You was about to.”
“I was about to say she came all the way out here for you and this ain’t her type of spot so you already know what that mean. Stay focused. but use it as motivation, my nigga. You take a L in front of Bri tonight you will never in your life recover from that. She will never look at you the same my nigga.”
“Gutta. I don’t wanna hear that shit. Nigga I’m about to have the fight of my life and you talking about taking L’s. Mane, whats wrong with you?”
“I’m just saying cuz.” He put both hands up but that smirk was already on his face and I already knew he was going to hold onto this and bring it back up at the worst possible time because that was just what he did. A whole lifetime of being my closest person and he still thought that was funny.
But I felt it now. That heavy feeling sitting in my chest that wasn’t there a minute ago. Seeing Brielle always did something to me and I hated admitting that even to myself. I didn’t want her in this basement watching me take punishment from a man who had knocked out twenty nine people. I didn’t want her to see me wobble or grab the cage or show any version of myself that wasn’t fully standing. There was the version of me that the streets saw and then there was the version that only existed around Bri and she had always had access to that second one without me ever officially giving it to her.
But she was here now. And now that she was here I wasn’t taking a loss in front of her. I didn’t care what Champ’s record said or what that right hand felt like or how many men had gone down under it. She was not about to watch me hit that concrete. Tonight she was going to see exactly who Xavier Hendrix Jr. really was in these streets, and she was going to remember it.
That cold stillness landed in my chest like always, right before everything went violent. All the noise, the crowd, Gutta’s voice, all of it just dropped away and there was nothing left but the cage in front of me and what I was about to go in there and do.
There was also Tavarus’s thirty thousand sitting somewhere in the back of my mind reminding me that tonight wasn’t just a fight. Tonight was survival.
“Open the door,” I said.
I stepped toward that cage like I had nothing to lose and everything to gain because honestly that’s exactly what it was. That nigga Champ might have been hungry but I was starving and I was about to make sure he felt every bit of that difference.
The cage door shut behind me and the lock clicked. That was it. I knew that I had to do my best shit, and go harder than ever.
Everything outside of this chain link stopped existing. Tavarus, the thirty thousand, the seven day clock, them three niggas in the alley — all of it got shelved the second that door locked because none of it could help me in here. The only thing that mattered right now was the man on the other side of this cage and what I was about to do to him.
Champ was already moving around on his side, loose, throwing light combinations at nothing, looking comfortable like this was somewhere he lived. Up close he was built different than he looked from across the room. Wide through the chest and shoulders, arms with real length on them, legs that were solid and planted every time he shifted his weight. And he moved light. Too light for how big he was. His footwork was clean and trained and I clocked all of it in the first ten seconds becausethat’s what you did when you were a fighter. You learned the man before the bell rang, so nothing he did after that surprised you. He smirked when he saw me enter. This was a cocky nigga. In his mind, he already knew he had the fight on lock. The nigga knew wrong.
The referee brought us to the middle and ran through the rules. I wasn’t really listening. I was watching Champ’s eyes because that’s where the truth lived in a fighter before the bell rang. Some niggas showed nerves. Some showed aggression they were trying to use to cover up the nerves. Champ’s eyes showed nothing at all. Just flat and empty like I was already a done deal and he was standing here going through the motions. I saw it in his eyes that he looked at me as an easy win. Nobody must had told this nigga about me.
We touched gloves. He looked at me across his knuckles.
“You bouta make this shit too easy,” he said quiet, with a smirk. All that did was piss me off. I returned the smirk because I knew what I came to do.
