The bell rang. Lex walked back to his corner and sat on the stool. Malik pressed the enswell against the bridge of his nose and murmured instructions at him. “He’s loading up on the right. Every time. He drops his elbow before he throws it.”
“I know.”
“Then start making him pay for it.” Malik pulled the enswell away. “Get the body shots in. Break his ribs or break his will, I don’t care which. Go.”
The second round was Morozov’s.
Lex knew it by the end of the first minute, when a straight right caught him on the cheekbone and sent a white flash across his vision. He’d been moving left into it. His mistake, stepping into the power hand, and Morozov followed it with a left hook to the body that folded him forward. The air left his lungs in a single compressed burst. His mouthguard tasted of copper. He clinched, wrapping his arms around Morozov’s shoulders, and the Russian drove a short uppercut into his ribs from the inside that the referee didn’t see.
The crowd noise shifted. It had a pitch to it now, a frequency that Lex recognised from the wrong side of momentum. They smelled a knockdown.
He survived the round through sheer stubbornness and instinct. Rolling with shots he couldn’t dodge, tying Morozovup when the bigger man pressed forward. By the time the bell sounded, his left eye was swelling and his ribs sang with every breath.
Malik said nothing about the eye. He pressed ice against it and held Lex’s chin with his other hand, tilting his face towards the arena lights.
“You’re behind on points.”
“I know.”
“Do you want to be behind on points?”
“Not particularly.”
“Then get off the ropes, stop fighting his fight, and remember that you’re the best heavyweight on the planet.” Malik’s grip tightened on his chin. “You didn’t fly to Las Vegas to lose to a man who drops his elbow.”
Round three opened with Lex throwing a right hand that cracked against Morozov’s guard and drove the Russian backwards two steps. The crowd’s noise swelled in approval. Lex followed it with a left hook to the body, digging under the elbow. The impact travelled up through his wrist and forearm as Morozov’s ribs absorbed it. The Russian’s mouth opened behind his gumshield. Lex hit him there again. And again.
By the fourth round, a cut had opened over Lex’s left eyebrow. The blood came in a slow, persistent seep that the cutman stemmed between rounds with adrenaline solution and Vaseline. He wasn’t worried: his body knew how to bleed and keep working.
But his body was hurting, and when his body hurt, it wanted Barnaby.
He’d promised himself he wouldn’t think about him. He’d told himself that he would walk into this ring as a boxer, not as a man in love who’d been emptied out. Everything beyond the ropes would stay outside where it belonged while Morozov was still on his feet. But his conviction had lasted only four rounds.
He’d been thinking about Barnaby since the presser. Since Morozov had puckered his lips and made a kissing sound and asked him:you miss your boyfriend?
Yeah. He missed his boyfriend.
He missed the common room sofa in Tokyo at three in the morning. He missed the feel of Barnaby’s hair under his hand, fine and pale, slipping through his fingers like water. The first time he’d touched it, Barnaby had gone so still that Lex could hear the air conditioning unit mounted above them…
A jab snapped his head back. Lex reset, and circled left. Morozov was breathing hard now, the body shots accumulating, his combinations losing their crispness. But the Russian was built for attrition. He had the frame and the bloody-minded Siberian endurance that no amount of body work would erase in five rounds. This was going the distance.
Fine. Lex could go the distance.
The fight settled into a grinding, technical war. Morozov’s jab opened the cut over Lex’s eye twice more. Lex’s body shots had slowed Morozov’s output, the Russian’s right hand arriving later and later as his damaged ribs protested the rotation. Lex could feel the fight balanced on a wire, tilting with each round, with a margin so thin that a single clean shot could tip it either way.
Between the eighth and ninth rounds, Malik leaned close. His breath was warm against Lex’s ear, and his hands worked the muscles of Lex’s shoulders with a pressure that bordered on violence.
“Three more rounds. You need two of them to win. Can you give me two?”
“I can give you three.”
“I didn’t ask for three. I asked for two,” Malik snapped.
The ninth round bell rang. Lex rose from the stool and touched gloves with Morozov, and they went back to work.
His mum was in the arena. Third row, behind the commentary desk, wearing the sequinned jacket she’d bought from Debenhams for his first professional fight nine years ago. She’d worn it to every one since, though Debenhams no longer existed and the sequins had begun to shed.
He threw a combination — jab, jab, right cross — and the cross landed flush on Morozov’s chin. The Russian’s legs stuttered, a momentary disconnect between intention and execution, and the arena erupted. Lex pressed forward, throwing with both hands, targeting the head now. Morozov’s guard was dropping, his damaged ribs making it impossible to keep his elbows tight. But Morozov survived. He clinched, he held, leaning his seventeen-stone frame onto Lex’s shoulders.
