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The fist swings at him, but Strike takes a quick step back and easily evades the blow. His opponent follows up with a jab, too weak to break through Strike’s guard. They dance around each other a bit, gloved fists raised, Strike grinning into his mouthguard. He feels light on his feet, months of training paying off, and his new prosthesis gives him the mobility and balance he needs.
“Come on, big boy,” his sparring partner - as big as Strike and grinning as well - teases him, motioning at his chin. “Need your reading glasses to find the spot?”
Strike chuffs, taking the friendly dig in stride. He may be forty now, but he hasn’t felt this fit in a long time.
“I’m good,” he growls and launches into a swift left-right-left combination that lands in his partner’s guard, but not without making him grunt under the impact. “I can smell you just fine.”
They both laugh, breathing hard, sweat running down their bare backs as they continue to circle each other.
Behind his partner’s back, Strike catches a glimpse of someone entering the otherwise empty gym. A beige coat. A bright, pretty face. Strawberry blonde hair. Rob-
“Ouff…!”
A fist to his stomach takes Strike’s breath away, and his head whips around when the subsequent right hook connects with his eyebrow. As his false foot slips out from underneath him, he gropes for the ropes, but they’re too far away and, flailing inelegantly, he falls hard on his side.
Robin cannot suppress a startled little gasp as she sees Strike go down and lie still. She drops her handbag and, with a few quick strides, reaches the boxing ring and climbs up and through the ropes.
Strike’s sparring partner - an imposing black man she knows is called Jed - is already kneeling by Strike’s side, tearing off his boxing gloves.
“Shit, Strike!” he curses. “This wasn’t supposed to happen! You alright, man? Talk to me!”
To Robin’s relief, her partner is stirring, and she hears him groan as she bends over him. His eyes - the left one already swelling - are squeezed shut in a grimace of pain. Blood is trickling from a cut on his brow.
“Fuckin’ 'ell…” He grunts as he spits out his mouthguard and rolls onto his back.
“Cormoran?”
At the sound of Robin’s voice, Strike opens his eyes.
“What- …. what are you doing here?” His eyes look uncannily green in his flushed and bloodied face. Robin blinks mesmerization away. Strike clumsily tries to sit up.
“Causing you to drop your guard, apparently,” Jed says wryly, but with a hint of relief. He’s helping Strike sit. “Man, you gave me a fright! Thought I’d knocked you right out.”
“Nah. Takes more than that,” Strike replies, bravado slowly returning. “You still punch like my sister.”
Jed snorts.
Robin, equally relieved, cannot help but smile at the heroic antics and at the lopsided smirk on her partner’s face. She feels a flutter in her chest as she studies him under the disguise of worry: He’s dropped several pounds since last year, and now that she’s seeing him shirtless, she secretly enjoys the view of his muscled, sweaty chest and the hint of an emerging sixpack.
“Well, you are bleeding,” she comments. “And this might need stitches.” She nods at his cut eyebrow. Now that he’s sitting, blood is trailing down his cheek and beginning to drip off his jaw.
Strike paws at the cut with his still-gloved hand.
“Nah. Couple of butterfly stitches, and I’ll be good to go. Jed?”
His sparring partner has apparently been boxing long enough with Strike to know about his dislike for hospitals, because, after a critical gaze at the wound, Jed nods.
“Yeah. Butterfly stitches will do. Lemme go get the kit.” He gets up and wedges his large body through the ropes. “I’ll be right back.”
When he’s gone, Strike motions to the corner behind him.
“Could you fetch me my stool? Will be easier for Jed if I don’t sit on the floor while he patches me up.” He wriggles his good eyebrow. “... and less embarrassing for me.”
Robin smiles.
“Of course.”
She hurries to fetch the sturdy stool from beside the ring and places it in the blue-padded corner.
In a concerted effort that makes her very aware of Strike’s physical proximity, they get him up. He’s slick with sweat, his waist firm under Robin’s grip, his upper arms so muscular, she can’t get her hands around them. One big hand on Robin’s shoulder, he blinks and stretches his back.
“Dizzy?” Robin inquires.
“No. Just a bit sore.”
“You could have a concussion, you know.”
“I don’t.”
The hint of an edge in Strike’s voice tells Robin not to pursue the matter any further. Plus, he looks steady on his feet, he’s neither pale nor disoriented, and he doesn’t give the impression of having to throw up anytime soon. And being a boxer, she assumes he knows what a concussion feels like.
Tentatively, Strike puts his weight on his false leg and takes a step, testing for damage. A satisfied hum confirms that his new prosthesis is as reliable as it was designed to be. Once more, Robin’s gaze is drawn to the new definition in Strike’s leg muscles.
He drops onto the stool with a sigh and lifts his gloved fists.
“Help me get these off?”
“Sure.”
Heart beating faster, Robin crouches down before him and begins to undo the laces of his boxing gloves. She feels his breath on her, smells his familiar scent, intensified by his body heat, through the gym’s locker room smell. Quietly, obediently, he lets her free him, and Robin finds herself enjoying the pull of attractiveness just as much as the natural ease between them. For a moment, their boundaries become transparent.
“Got it!”
Jed returns, jogging across the gym floor with a first aid kit. He’s also brought a towel that he transfers to Strike when he’s back in the ring.
Robin, who’s managed to pull both gloves off Strike’s hands, steps aside to give him some room.
“Yeah, that doesn’t look too bad,” Jed comments while he pours antiseptic onto a wad of gauze and begins to clean Strike’s wound.
In spite of his reassurance, Strike’s eye is swelling shut in earnest now, and Robin has a feeling he’ll look too frightening tomorrow to deal with clients. She can already see the ice packs they keep in the office fridge for his stump doing overtime on his face for the next day or two. And yet, he looks decidedly daredevil, and the fact that he isn’t going to moan and complain about it the way Matthew always did after a sports injury makes him attractive in an entirely wrong yet enticingly audacious way.
“You know you’re going to have to follow concussion protocol, right?”
Expertly applying the butterfly stitches, Jed puts a bit of off-handed sternness into his words.
As anticipated, Strike protests. “That’s not necessary. Honestly, I’m fine. There really is no need to-”
“I’ll look after him.”
Buoyed by Jed’s example, Robin crosses her arms in front of her chest and plants herself in Strike’s line of vision.
“I’ll stay with him tonight. Wake him up every hour or so when he sleeps. He can stay at my place.”
He scowls at her from out of his one good eye and opens his mouth. But then he pauses, expression changing. She sees his face shift into surprise and curiosity. A silent, titillating question flickers in his gaze.
Robin isn’t sure whether it’s her resoluteness, his evolving acceptance for self-care or - maybe, possibly - him also feeling that same warm, undeniable pull between them that makes him relent. After all, they’ve had moments like this, magnetic and scary, many times in the course of the last few years. Moments that remained unacknowledged or were ruined by either of them.
Something feels different tonight.
“Yeah, okay.” Strike sounds hoarse when he says it, still looking at Robin, and Jed tssks when Strike’s nod dislodges a butterfly stitch he’d just been applying. “Yeah, thanks, Robin.”
She smiles again, skin tingling.
Tonight may just end in Strike falling asleep on her folding couch with an ice pack on his face and snoring louder than ever.
Or, if his stamina is as good as he’s been claiming, and if they’re both brave enough, it may end somewhere entirely different.
Either way, Robin is ready to find out.