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“So what the hell was that?”
Joe doesn’t look up from his hands, unwinding the sweaty tape from between his fingers in a long, slow spool. “What the hell was what?”
“You lost .” Andy doesn’t quite slam the door, but the sound echoes loud against the tiles. It’s one of the perks of tonight’s venue - an old YMCA community center that had definitely seen better days. The roof was where all the action happened, but there were actual shower and locker rooms that made everything feel more legit.
Joe sighs. “I had a good streak, and it ended. Why are you so pissed?”
“I’m pissed because you shouldn’t have lost .” Andy crosses her arms. “You had him at the top of the third round, and you took a dive.”
“Fuck you, I took a dive! His footwork is good and he’s fast as hell. Doesn’t mean anything”
“He was faster but you had the stamina. Top of the third, he was getting winded and we all could see it. All you had to do was keep your head and stay away from his right hook. And you still lost. Want to explain why?”
“Why does it need explaining?” Joe snapps, standing up and rounding on Andy. “I lost this time, yeah. And he lost the time before that. Win some, lose some, it’s part of the gig. Why are we talking about this instead of getting out of here?”
Nile had come in at some point when Joe wasn’t looking and is leaning carefully against the wall, telegraphing I’m a neutral party as loudly as she could. “We got the room for a little longer. Coast is clear.”
Andy brushes her off, still glaring at Joe. “Every time, this happens. Every time with this guy! You’re on a hot streak, top of the game, you’re confident, you’re doing well, and then boom . This random fucking nobody shows up, and all of a sudden you’re making stupid mistakes and taking hits that you don’t have to! What is up with you?!”
“Nothing!” Joe throws his gloves into the duffel. “He’s making just as many mistakes. I knocked him out at Fountain Square. I ran him down in that weird-ass trailer ring. He just...gets lucky”
Shit. This is exactly what he had been trying to avoid. It was almost impossible to hide anything from Andy. She’d known Joe since he was an aimless wanderer backpacking his way through cities and odd jobs looking for...something, and he’d known her back before she lost Quynh. They’d gotten each other through heartbreak (Andy), identity crisis (Joe), and the bizarre terror of letting Booker and Nile into their lives after so many years of feeling like lone wolves. Nile had made about a hundred bad jokes about Booker being...well, actually good at being a bookie , but it didn’t stop her from enjoying the cash that came in once they figured out that they were making more money with Booker laying the odds.
"He didn’t ‘get lucky,’ Joe,” said Andy. “You left him an opening . Every time this guy wins, he does it because your head isn’t in the game.”
Andy steps forward, deliberately pushing into his space. “You aren’t focused. You miss shots. You let your guard down. And then you lose .”
Joe takes a hot breath to reply, but Andy barrels on. “And you shouldn’t be losing, Joe! This guy is sloppy! He’s inconsistent! He’s fast on his feet because he can’t decide where he’s going to go once you come at him. If you bring the fight close in, he folds! You should be taking every fight the way you took Fountain Square. But for some fucking reason, you’re letting him get in your head. So what is it? ”
It’s times like these that Joe really, really wishes that Andy wasn’t the closest thing he had to family. Anyone else, Joe could bullshit. He could flash his easy smile, show some charm, throw out a line that he ends up half-believing because it’s easy to say anything to anyone when you don’t actually have a fucking clue yourself. What could he say? “I keep losing to this guy because I get distracted by the color of his eyes?” “I think he smiled at me once right before the bell, and I kind of wanted to stop and ask him what he was thinking?” “I get a funny feeling in my chest whenever I see him in the lineup, and I don’t want to think too much about it because I know I’ll fight badly if I do?”
“Maybe this isn’t the best time or place.” Nile, ever the peacemaker, pushes off from the wall and takes a few steps closer to their tense little standoff. “Booker texted - he called in the last slips. We should go and get something to eat, yeah?”
Andy doesn’t stop glaring, but Joe can see her stance soften, that iron will bending the way they all do for Nile - the kid sister that none of them ever had. “We’re not done with this conversation.”
“Yeah, because why make our lives easier?” grumbles Joe, slinging the duffel bag over his shoulder and following them out.
La Kora was an after-fight tradition. The truck cycled reliably around the same four parking lots, and sitting around the folding table with his impromptu family nursing bruises and enjoying the smell of frying taco meat felt as much like home as anywhere Joe had ever been.
Andy grimly nurses a beer, still refusing to look at Joe. Booker scrolls through one of his phones, crunching on a tortilla chip and trying not to act like the beer in Andy’s hand was distracting him. Nile is downing her second unholy neon-colored soda (no matter how much she whined, she was still the youngest) when suddenly she comes to attention. “Hey, heads up everyone. Look who’s here.”
Joe stares. This cannot be fucking happening . Grey eyes, blond hair, wearing a clean t-shirt and jeans, he is strolling up to order at the trailer. Just like at their matches, he’s alone. He doesn’t seem to have a regular crew, as if boxing is his solitary weekend hobby and nothing more.
Nicky the Knife is his usual fight billing, which sounds more like a cliched mob nickname than a boxing alias, but whatever. Maybe he’s an accountant getting his rocks off on the weekends. Nobody asks because it doesn’t matter what you do outside the ring; it only matters what you do inside it. The first time Joe fought him and everyone heard that accent come out of his mouth, Booker sniggered that Nicky should have gone with The Italian Stallion instead, as if Rocky references were the height of hilarity instead of cheesy grandpa shit.
Nicky steps up to the trailer window to order food, neon lights reflecting off the line of butterfly bandages over the cut on his left cheek, from the corkscrew punch Joe had thrown halfway into round two. In response he’d pulled Joe into a clinch after that, stunned and swaying from the impact. His arms wrapped Joe up, pinning his elbows to his torso. Forehead on Joe’s bare shoulder as he heaved for breath, he’d muttered Italian into Joe’s skin. It was like hearing a secret he couldn’t decode yet, the other man’s blood dripping over his collarbone and tickling a path down his chest. He smelled of sweat and aftershave, his breath hot on Joe’s neck.
Joe wasn’t the one who took a shot to the head, but he felt dizzy anyway. He should have punched out of the clinch before the referee intervened - Andy didn’t hesitate to tell him so in no uncertain terms, the minute they were sent back to corners - but he just … hadn’t.
The four of them at the card table watch as Nicky pays with cash and steps to the side to wait for his dinner. Reaching into his back pocket, he glances around the crowded parking lot and makes eye contact with Joe first, and then the rest of them. Genuine surprise flickers across his face before he lifts his chin in their general direction, an acknowledgement and nothing more. Then he flips open the battered paperback he’d pulled out of his pocket and, shoulder against the corner of the trailer, starts to read.
“This motherfucker,” Andy mutters, just as Joe is trying to work out whether the pang in his stomach was from eating too many pellizcadas or from the glance that lingered a second longer in his direction than it had for the rest of them.
“Let the man have his dinner. It isn’t like we own this place,” Booker says, gesturing at the packed tables and people sitting on open truck tailgates.
Joe’s own soda is empty, so he snags Andy’s empty beer bottle and stands up. “I’m gonna get another. Anyone want anything?”
Booker pointedly crunches another chip, his mouth twisting into something like a smirk. “Nile will take another Fanta.”
“I’ll come with you,” she offers, popping to her feet alongside Joe.
Andy’s laser focus swivels from Nicky to him, calculating. “I’m still hungry. Get me another burrito, steak this time.”
“Ok, boss,” Joe replies, casual as anything. On the way across the lot, he and Nile discuss her training routine for tomorrow and prep for her upcoming match. A quick study and an incredible fighter, Nile has better instincts than his own, even though he’d never admit as much aloud. She’d managed to maintain a ten-win streak, something Joe certainly couldn’t compete with after tonight’s loss.
Even though Nicky’s eyes don’t move from his book, the weight of his attention shifts in their direction when they stop to wait in line. Nile is asking for pointers on her heavy bag work, and Joe absently replies that they should concentrate on her footwork tomorrow instead. Then he kneels down and pretends to tie his shoe, so he can catch a glimpse of the cover of Nicky’s paperback.
The Book of Love . He’s reading fucking Rumi, of all the improbable things. Joe hasn’t kept many items from his life before - before he walked out of everything he was born into, before the restless wandering, before Andy and boxing - but he still has a dog-eared copy of Dīvān-e Kabīr on his nightstand, a permanent holdover from his undergraduate studies .
The universe absolutely has to be fucking with him.
When Joe stands up from triple-knotting his laces, he discovers Nicky has noticed his not-so-subtle staring. He’s staring back, crinkles at the corners of his eyes like a smile that doesn’t involve his mouth. Joe isn’t sure whether he’s being laughed at. It’s especially hard to tell, given the other man’s swollen left cheek and the bruises still forming around his eye socket.
Mocking or not, heat floods Joe’s face anyway and he turns his back, facing Nile instead as she orders from the lady behind the register. “Twelve thirty-four,” the lady says, after shouting the burrito order at the cook in the other half of the trailer.
Nile lifts an open hand toward Joe without looking, fingers wiggling. He reaches for his back pocket and realizes, to his horror, his wallet is in his duffel bag, in the car. Nile is always broke, or at least she pretends to be; she won’t pay.
Joe huffs in frustration and glances back at Andy and Booker, both of whom have pulled their chairs to one side of the table to get a better view of Joe and Nile at the trailer, as if they’re at the theater.
“Momento, por favor,” he says to the woman, and then tersely to Nile: “I don’t have my wallet. Go ask Booker for a twenty, would you? Tell him I’ll pay him back.” The three of them are going to give him shit about this for weeks. Booker’s going to smirk in that annoyingly knowing way of his, dropping fake-helpful pickup tips that would probably get him punched. Nile will be eager and nosy because any hint of drama means that she isn’t the one being forced to take advice for once. Andy...Andy will probably try to corner him for an actual discussion at some point, which will either be a fight about getting hurt or a horrible quiet talk about getting hurt .
“Allow me.”
Joe jumps.
Grey eyes. Looking right into his, about two feet away because it turns out that not only is he fast, he is quiet. Quiet, fast Nicky. Standing two feet away. Currently pulling a twenty out of his own wallet (Joe hastily looks back up) and handing it up to the window where it is promptly whisked away. Fuck .
“Uh…thank you? I can pay you back.”
“Not a problem.”
Joe moves out of the line to the pickup window, trying not to stare as Nicky follows him back. He swallows down the first billion impulsive things he wants to say: did you know I would be here? Is this some kind of weird ego trip for you - kick my ass, then buy me dinner? Is there any way I can convince you to stay and talk to me instead of fading away?”
He clears his throat. “Um. Good match.”
“Thank you.” Nicky nods, gesturing to the butterfly bandages. “You never make it easy.”
Apparently I do. “Look who’s talking.” Joe gingerly rolled his shoulders. “You, uh…” say something smart, idiot “...I haven’t seen you here before.”
“First time.” Nicky’s shoulders shifted slightly. “I do not want any trouble…”
“No! No, no trouble! It’s fine, we’re all good here.” Joe clears his throat again, looking back at the table. Nile, the traitor, has sat back down and turned her chair right alongside Andy’s to watch the show. “Just surprised.”
“Me as well.” Nicky follows Joe’s glare. “I didn’t realize that I would see anyone from the circuit here. I did not mean to intrude.”
“It’s not like we own the place,” Joe said, echoing Booker. “The truck served iftar a couple years ago , and we’ve been coming here after fights ever since. I mean it,” Joe said, looking at Nicky. “It’s cool if you wanted...if you wanted to stay.”
Fuck. Those eyes meeting his. That smile he’d hoped to see. Almost shy, curling slowly up like it was just for Joe , a secret written open on the face of the world like it had waited a thousand years for someone to come along and read it. If he had a thousand years, maybe he’d figure out a better way to ask Nicky to do it again.
Thankfully, the moment is snapped by two glass bottles clicking down by the window. Joe snapped the top off his own bottle, pointedly ignoring Nile’s distant grabby hands as he takes the first sugary-sweet sip. Nicky’s eyes flick to the bottle, then away. His face has that strange faint expression on it again.
“You like poetry?” Joe says desperately, gesturing to the paperback half-hidden in Nicky’s pocket. Nicky doesn’t seem the type, but if he gets defensive about his manliness or starts spouting the usual mangled spiritualist shit then that’s as good a way as any for Joe to cut his hopes off before they get too high.
Like you always do.
“A little at a time.” Nicky shrugs, carefully smoothing a wrinkled corner of the cover back into place under the fabric. “I think maybe I do not understand every part, but I can try. Difficult, in another language.”
“No kidding,” says Joe, which - yeah. He’s been there, in more ways than one. “You far from home?”
Nicky laughs, which does not help Joe’s situation at all. “Far enough. But I don’t think I’ve been in any one place for too long for a while now.”
It’s almost bizarrely easy to talk to Nicky after that, considering that he only just learned Nicky is his real name (“I did not choose the ring name,” Nicky groans, leaning his head back). At some point either Booker or Andy comes up to actually pick up the food because Joe forgets completely, lost in the heady feeling of how easily the conversation comes. They talk about books they share, places they’ve been, food they’ve liked.
Nicky turns out to be Nicolò from Genoa, but hasn’t been home for years (“he’s Italian Italian,” says the gleeful Nile voice in Joe’s head, which he firmly ignores). Both of them miss the ocean, and the many benefits of a port city. Nicky picked up fewer languages, but a bigger collection of weird scars. Joe has been more places, but has stronger nostalgia for the few he liked.
It’s almost as if he’s been travelling the world with Nicky this whole time, barely one step apart the entire way. Would this have been what it was like? This comfortable shared space, fragile and impregnable all at once? The easy rhythm they set together, so different from the wide loneliness of everything before?
Andy was right. This was bad.
“I think I have kept you too long,” Nicky says at last, looking over Joe’s shoulder. “I don’t want to keep your team waiting.”
Joe turns, half-guilty. Booker is actually asleep, his feet up on Joe’s abandoned chair. Nile and Andy are scrolling listlessly through their phones - as Joe watches, Andy catches his eye and raises a judgmental eyebrow.
The next thing Joe says is solid proof that he cannot have nice things , because before he can stop himself Joe blurts, “You know, they think I threw the match.”
Nicky turns to look at him with a strange expression, promptly wincing as he pulls at the cut on his cheek. “If that is their idea of throwing a match, then I hope I never have to fight your friends.”
Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why don’t you just tell the guy you’re a sore loser instead? “I mean, we train not far from here, at that old gym on Birch Street, if you ever want to try your luck.” Fucking hell, why can’t he stop digging himself into this hole?
Nicky grins again - gingerly, careful about the cut on his face - and ducks his head. Pink suffuses his unbruised right cheek, and Joe is rooted to the spot, quivering with his need to tear the moon from the sky and give it to this man he has punched hundreds of times and yet still only just met.
“Joe! We’re leaving!” Andy’s voice rings out across the mostly empty lot, sharp as a whip crack. “Come on, or you’re walking!”
“It was nice to meet you. Properly, without the gloves on,” Nicky says.
“Yeah,” Joe replies. Before he turns to walk away, Nicky gives a little wave to the others. Nile and Booker wave in return; Andy’s mouth twists into a shape that means she’s biting back an earful that Joe’s going to get later.
In the car, before the others drop him off home, he carefully filters the panic from his voice when Nile asks if he gave Nicky his number and it dawns on him that no, in fact he did not. Nile spends the rest of the ride trying to run down Nicky’s nonexistent social media accounts. After a long, careful study of Andy’s face in the dash lights, Booker offers to contact the people who organized the fight. Joe waves them off, thinking about fate as he walks up six flights to his tiny apartment.
The next morning, Andy takes him to get coffee and they discuss it without discussing it. They talk about the stock broker in New York with the secret drug addiction, and Andy brings up Eiji without mentioning his name, because it was so long ago - at the beginning in Tokyo, during the first few months they knew each other, before she lost Quynh - and it was the one that left him the most broken.
“You’ve always been a romantic.” She sips her third shot of espresso and doesn’t say And I have to help mop up in the aftermath.
Five days later, Nicky shows up at the gym. They’ve got the place to themselves, mostly because it’s a complete dive. The owner probably only keeps it open as a money-laundering scheme, a state of affairs that Andy and Booker have already started looking into just to make sure they aren’t associating with the wrong sort of criminals.
Nicky stands in the door frame with a duffel bag on his shoulder, not crossing the threshold. “Joe said I could stop by.”
Everyone looks at Joe, then at Andy. She pulls in a breath and squares her shoulders, mouth in a flat line. “Nile and I are in the ring first,” she says to Nicky without a greeting, as if they’ve been expecting him all along. “Get warmed up.”
As Joe holds the heavy bag steady for Nicky, bracing against his punches, Nicky says, “I will tell you a secret.” Joe glances at Nile and Andy, busy with speed drills in the ring, and Booker on a folding chair off to the side, taking calls for their next fight booking. He nods, and Nicky continues, “I wanted to come here the day after we talked at the trailer, but I thought it would seem desperate.”
Joe shifts his feet, adjusting his stance so he can brace the bag better as Nicky lands two particularly hard hits. “I get that,” Joe says. “Took me forever to find a good crew to work with. I’ve noticed you don’t have a team at our matches. Are you looking for -”
Punch, jab-jab, punch - fast, hard, and loud on the bag, it interrupts Joe as surely as a shout. Nicky’s mouth pulls up into that small, secret smile he always seems to be wearing, and he glances at Joe through his eyelashes before landing a hook. “I did not mean that I am desperate for training partners.”
“Aha.” Joe swallows, staring right back at him. “Yeah, I get that too.”
Twenty minutes later, in the ring, Nicky lands a punch that knocks Joe flat. He’s on his back, woozy and staring at the burnt-out fluorescents, when Andy’s face comes into view. She leans over him, hands on her hips. “I told you, you’d get hurt.”
“Worth it,” Joe groans, taking the hand she offers to help him up. He turns his head, squinting, just in time to catch Booker slipping Nile some money beside the ring - obviously the fulfillment of a bet. Fuck.
Joe’s had harder knocks, and after the workout he really doesn’t need Nicky’s hand on his shoulder as they walk out the back, into the alley, but he doesn’t say anything. The door bangs shut behind them and they’re alone, aside from the cat delicately picking at the nearby dumpster.
“You still seem unsteady. Are you sure you should drive?” Nicky asks so gently that Joe starts to feel properly lightheaded.
They’ve been dancing around each other for weeks now - in the ring, during the conversation at the trailer, today in the gym. Joe has never been the most patient person, and he gets the feeling that, left to his own devices, Nicky might let this dance continue for weeks yet.
Without answering his question, Joe side-steps and puts them face to face. His mouth is on Nicky’s before any more words come out; his ears roar with the sudden silence, with adrenaline and blood and desperate, desperate need. His eyelids flutter open and he pulls away just enough to see the other man’s face.
Nicky looks happy.
There are a thousand Rumi verses dancing along Joe’s taste buds, sweet and ripe as raspberries, and he can’t remember how to speak a single word of them. Instead, his hands find Nicky’s waist and he leans forward again, because maybe the words aren’t necessary. Maybe it will be enough just to breathe them into his mouth.
Nicky’s lips open first, the tip of his tongue hot against Joe’s bottom lip. Joe forgets everything he’s ever known about poetry, his head enthusiastically tilting to the side to deepen the kiss.
In the ring, they’re always testing each other, finding weaknesses, looking for openings to exploit; here in this alley, they are gentle and trembling and ravenous. They end up against the nearby wall, bricks scraping Joe’s back through his t-shirt as Nicky pins him fast. Between them is the taste of sweat, and the quick pulse beneath Nicky’s ear when Joe slips a hand around the back of his neck, and the echoing thump in Joe’s own chest.
“You really shouldn’t drive,” Nicky repeats after a while, grinning against his lips. “I’m going to insist on giving you a ride home.”