The crowd roared. Barnaby’s fingers tightened on his lanyard.
Lex did it again. And again. He goaded the Kazakh with his positioning, and with the saucy angle of his chin. Every time the Kazakh committed, Lex was already somewhere else, and his counter came back clean and precise.
He hadn’t expected to find boxing beautiful. He’d braced himself for the noise and brutality of it. What he got was art dressed up as violence; the economy of Lex’s movement, the way each punch began somewhere deep in his body and arrived at its target with no seeming intervening thought. Barnaby was leaning forward in his seat, his weight shifting with Lex’s, his shoulders turning a fraction each time Lex threw a punch.
By the end of the round, the Kazakh had stopped coming forward. He was circling, resetting, giving ground he hadn’t intended to give. Lex let him have it. He stood in the centre of the ring with his gloves up and watched the man retreat.
The bell sounded. Barnaby exhaled as he watched Lex drop down onto his stool.
His corner swarmed him. They plied him with water and a towel, as his coach spoke rapidly into his ear. Lex spat into a bucket and tipped his head back while a hand pressed an enswell to the skin beneath his left eye. His chest was heaving. Sweat ran in sheets down his neck and pooled in the hollow of his collarbone.
He looked up, and his gaze swept the stands. It tracked across the British section, past the flags, clearly scanning the crowd. As ridiculous as it may be, having known the man for only a week, Barnaby knew that Lex was looking for him.
When he found him, Lex’s roaming gaze stopped. Across the width of that arena, through the heat and the noise and the thousands of people between them, Lex looked directly at him, and Barnaby smiled.
He didn’t plan it. He didn’t run it through the series of filters that normally governed what his face was permitted to do in public. He simply looked at the man sitting in the corner of that ring, bloodied and breathing hard, searching the crowd for him specifically, and he smiled.
Lex’s mouth guard was in. His face was flushed and beginning to swell beneath the left eye. He gave Barnaby a single nod, fast and tight, and then his corner was pulling him back, talking strategy, and the moment closed.
The bell rang for the second round.
Lex came off the stool like a different fighter. His patience was gone. He pressed forward, cutting the ring, driving the Kazakh back toward the ropes at a pace that he’d held back in the first round. His combinations came faster, sharper, the punches linking together in sequences that Barnaby couldn’t track individually. The crowd was on its feet. The noise was deafening.
Every punch carried an extra degree of flourish, every slip held an additional half-second of hang time where he let themissed blow whistle past his jaw just a fraction closer than necessary. He was performing. At one point, after a slip so outrageously close that the Kazakh’s glove brushed his jaw on the way past, Lex’s eyes flicked to the stands. It was fast: a fraction of a second, gone before his guard reset, but Barnaby knew Lex was making sure that he had seen it.
The fucking show-off.
The Kazakh landed a hard right to Lex’s body. Barnaby flinched. He actually flinched, his shoulders pulling inward, his hands gripping the edge of his seat. Lex absorbed the impact, and came back with a left hook that snapped the Kazakh’s head sideways and sent his gum shield spinning in a white arc across the canvas.
The referee stepped in. The Kazakh staggered, found the ropes, and held on. The count began, and somewhere during it the sound in the arena reached a fever pitch that Barnaby felt in his chest.
The Kazakh beat the count. The round continued, but the ending was already written. Lex stalked him for another forty seconds, his movements controlled and unhurried. When the final combination came, it was three punches thrown so close together they looked like a single movement. The Kazakh dropped to one knee. The referee stepped between them, arms wide, and the arena detonated. Lex threw his head back and roared, letting out a primal sound, and Barnaby was on his feet before he really understood what had happened.
His hands were raised over his head. His body had bypassed his brain entirely and decided that the appropriate response to this moment was to leap to his feet in a packed arena full of strangers. Around him, the British contingent was screaming. Somewhere to his left, a woman he had never met seized him in a full embrace, sobbing into his shoulder. Barnaby patted her back. “There we are,” he said. “Well done us.”
In the ring, Lex turned. His face was swelling properly now, the skin beneath his left eye darkening. His lip was split in the corner. The referee held his arm aloft, and Lex’s corner erupted, climbing through the ropes to reach him. But Lex was looking past all of them, straight into the stands, and when his eyes found Barnaby, standing, hands raised, being openly wept on by a stranger, he grinned. It was big and oafish, and distorted by the gum shield still wedged between his teeth. It was the least attractive expression that a human face had ever directed Barnaby’s way, and yet he threw his own grin right back at Lex.
He couldn’t help it. His face split wide open in a grin that matched Lex’s, stupid and unguarded and entirely unlike any expression he’d ever allowed his features to display in public. He held it until he noticed the group sitting three rows ahead of him. Two of Lex’s friends were looking directly at him. One nudged the other, who quickly flashed Barnaby a look. Their heads moved close, and one of them laughed, before darting another glance his way.
Barnaby sat down.
He pulled the cuffs of his sleeves over his wrists and straightened them, one then the other, smoothing the fabric with precise little motions. He crossed one ankle over the other, the British spectator offering measured support to a countryman’s athletic success.
Chapter Seven
Lex’sleft eye had swollen to a slit by the time he made it to the 7-Eleven, and his lip had crusted over where the Kazakh’s jab had caught him in the second round. His ribs ached when he breathed in too deep, and there was a bruise developing along his jawline that was going to photograph magnificently for the next three days. He looked like he’d been mugged, but he still felt like a god.
A woman stacking onigiri on the far shelf looked up at the sound of the door opening, saw him, and made a small involuntary sound of alarm. Lex gave her his best smile, which pulled on his battered eye and probably made things look even worse.
He grabbed a basket and got to work.
Tokyo’s convenience stores operated on a principle that Lex deeply respected, which was that anything could be a snack if you were brave enough to put it in your mouth. Tonight’s mission required range. He’d just put a man on the canvas in front of twelve thousand people, and in approximately fourhours he was going to be sitting on a sofa celebrating with Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester.
He moved through the aisles with purpose. Sakura Kit Kats went in first, three packets, because Barnaby had devoured them two nights ago. A bag of prawn crackers shaped like tiny sea creatures. Something labelledCHEESE CURRY CORN PUFFthat had a cartoon dog on the packet.
An elderly man in the next aisle stopped and stared at him. Lex was used to being recognised in London, where his face was on billboards and bus stops and the occasional protein powder advert that his agent had talked him into doing shirtless. This man wasn’t staring because he knew who Lex was. He was staring because Lex looked like he’d crashed face first into a lorry.
“Boxing,” Lex said, miming a jab with his free hand. “Olympic boxing. I won.”
