Chapter 3: Crowd Service Spectacle
Bastion took the ringside seat the Gold Piping had saved for him, third row, dead center, and the section went up like he'd arrived on a title belt. Two weeks in the league and strangers were already chanting his name over the house music. He raised a hand, let them have it, and sat.
The odds board above the ramp scrolled fresh numbers. DELIA'S CARD: PRIYA GUPTA minus three hundred, BEA plus two-fifty. A service match, unrecorded, one of the crowd warmers the league ran before the main card to keep the gamblers lubed up. Winner's privilege: she chose any man in the building to help finish the loser. The Pit loved a service match the way other towns loved fireworks.
"There it is, the board of truth," Ryan said in the booth, mic hot. "Gupta minus three hundred. Delia, tell the people why."
"Because Bea talks," Delia said. "Three hundred percent of her prematch output is talking. I've watched her warm up. She shadowboxes at the mirror and tells the mirror she's pretty. Priya Gupta does yoga in silence and reads freight schedules. That's a minus three hundred human being."
Bastion's knee bounced. His body still hummed from Cassie's match two weeks ago, a low voltage he couldn't fully discharge in the gym. Every time he closed his eyes at night he got the triangle, the rhythm, the sound of his own voice on hot mic begging without words. He'd come here tonight to watch tape in person and to keep his name in the room.
The lights dropped to a single white spot and Priya Gupta came out through the curtain. Shirt knotted above her ribs, no top under it, the fabric straining over a heavy chest, and below, nothing but black bikini bottoms and bare powerful legs. Twenty-five years old, oiled bronze skin, black hair braided tight to her skull. She walked like freight. No waving, no playing to the crowd. She stepped over the top rope and started stretching her hamstrings while the announcer read her record.
Then Bea. pyrotechnics she'd paid for herself, a feathered robe in hot pink, arms spread like she'd already won. She shed the robe into the front row and paraded the ring's perimeter, and when she passed Bastion's section she stopped, planted a hand on the barricade, and looked him up and down.
"You're the rookie everybody's crying about?" she called. "You look like a loss waiting to happen, Gold Piping."
His section booed her on principle. Bastion just grinned at her and didn't spend a word.
Bea climbed in, all hips and strut, blowing kisses. Priya finished her stretch, stood, and looked at her the way you look at paperwork.
"Ref's ready," Ryan said. "Service rules, folks. Pin, tap, or knockout, then the finish, and the winner picks her man from anywhere in the building. Anywhere. I've seen a service match won from the press box."
"And I've seen one pick the hot dog vendor," Delia said. "He couldn't. She made him try. Legendary."
Nadia took off her warmup jacket at ringside and handed it to a stagehand. She was reffing this one too, black and white one-piece, whistle at her throat, and when she walked past Bastion's seat her eyes came down to him for half a second longer than regulation required.
"Hi, Bastion," she said. Just that. Two words, pitched so only the first three rows caught it, and his section screamed like she'd strip on the spot. Her mouth curved, barely, and she rolled under the bottom rope before he could answer.
The bell rang.
Bea came out jabbing the air, talking the whole time. "Gupta, honey, I'm gonna fold you up and put you away like laundry." She threw a sloppy overhand to back the words up. Priya slipped it without moving her feet, caught the wrist, and turned it into an armbar standing, hyperextending just short of the break rule, and Bea's patter cut off into a squeal.
"Sound off one," Ryan said. "That's the whole scouting report on Bea. She fights with her mouth and her mouth just got isolated."
Priya whipped her by the arm into the ropes and caught her on the rebound with a hip toss that landed flat and loud. Bea scrambled, got to a knee, tried a single leg. Priya sprawled, heavy and immediate, chest to her shoulder blades, and rode her down into a front headlock, and the crowd could see Bea's face go pink against Priya's stomach.
"Take it," Priya said, conversational, to the mic Bea couldn't reach. "You talk so much. Take it."
She dragged her up by the chin, wrapped a wrist behind Bea's back, and walked her in a tight circle like a mother with a misbehaving kid. Bea's heels skated on the canvas. She slapped at Priya's grip, and Priya answered by bending her over a knee, one hand pinning both of Bea's wrists behind her, the other peeling her bikini bottom aside and dragging two fingers slowly through her, and the arena noise went from roar to rumble as every gambler in the building recalculated.
"There's the service lever," Ryan said. "You don't have to knock them out if you can make them stupid."
Bea's knees buckled. She tapped the mat in frantic double taps and Nadia waved it off, no, not the finish, the submission only counts when it's final, keep wrestling, and Bea's face said she understood exactly how bad her night had just gotten. Priya pulled her upright by the hair and threw a knee into her stomach that folded her over the thigh, then a second, then swept her down and took mount.
From mount it stopped being a fight and became a demolition. Priya posted high, trapped one of Bea's arms in a keylock, and ground her hips down in slow circles that had nothing to do with striking. Bea bucked twice, hard, actually impressively, and Bastion found himself leaning forward, marking the escape attempt for his own notebook, and Priya absorbed it, floated, and resettled heavier. Bea's face was doing something involuntary now. Her mouth had gone from taunting to open.
"No," Bea said, and it wasn't strategy anymore. "Not like this, not in front of..."
"In front of everyone," Priya said. "That's the sport."
She released the keylock only to peel the pink bottoms down Bea's thighs, off one leg entirely, and hook that leg over her own shoulder, folding Bea in half under her, and the crowd got the full view and expressed an opinion that shook the barricades. Priya's fingers went back to work, deliberate, curling, and Bea's protest broke into a moan on hot mic that the broadcast milked with a full-screen closeup.
"This is the part," Delia said, and her professional voice cracked at the edges, "where I remind you that Bea's plus two-fifty line is, oh, that's, she's making sounds like a kettle, folks."
Priya worked her steady, wrist deep in rhythm, thumb on her, unhurried, and Bea's heels dug trenches and her back arched off the canvas and she came with a wail that cracked on the way up, hips stuttering against Priya's hand, and Nadia was already kneeling with her hand raised before the wail finished, because a service finish doesn't need a pin when the orgasm is that loud.
"Winner by orgasm, Priya Gupta," Nadia announced, and her voice was level and her knuckles on the whistle were not.
Bea lay in the center of the ring, legs shaking, arm over her eyes, an entire ego draining out of her in front of two thousand people. Priya stood, wiped her fingers on Bea's abandoned robe, and took the mic from the announcer.
"Winner's privilege," she said, and walked the ropes slowly, scanning the crowd, and the whole building leaned toward her. Bastion felt the scan pass over his section and his pulse spiked stupidly, and then it kept moving, past him.
The scan stopped. Priya's eyes came back across two sections of reaching hands and found his, and she tilted her head, and Bastion's heart did something it had never done before a bell: it skipped.
"Oh, no," Delia said on the broadcast. "She's doubling back. She's doubling back on the rookie."
Priya stepped down off the apron at the barricade. A stagehand with a headset got between her and the crowd out of pure instinct and she moved him aside with one hand, the way you move a chair. She stopped in front of Bastion's seat. The Gold Piping held its collective breath. Up close she smelled of oil and mat cleaner and something warmer underneath, and her eyes went over him the way a buyer goes over a horse.
"You," she said. "Third row. The one everybody chants at."
"That's me," Bastion said.
"Get up."
He got up. He didn't think about it. Three hundred members of the Gold Piping screamed in surround sound, and somewhere behind him somebody was already starting a chant, and Priya took a fistful of his shirt collar, not hard, just proprietary, and walked him down the barricade toward the ring steps like a woman leading a dog on an invisible leash. Ryan's voice on the broadcast was somewhere very far away, saying something about the building coming apart at the seams.
She rolled him under the bottom rope first. He landed on the canvas on his forearms and looked back up at her through the ropes, grinning, and she stepped over the top rope after him and the noise hit a register that made the ring posts hum.
Bea was still on the mat where Priya had left her, sprawled, thighs sticky, arm over her eyes, breathing in shudders. When she heard the crowd change pitch she moved her arm and looked up, and her face went through three expressions in two seconds: dread, recognition, and something she tried very hard to smother and did not smother fast enough.
"No," Bea said. "No, no, pick literally anyone else, there's a whole arena out there, pick the hot dog vendor."
"The hot dog vendor can't do what he's going to do," Priya said.
She untied the knot at her ribs. The knotted shirt came away and she dropped it through the ropes onto the apron, and the arena got its first full look at her chest, heavy and high and oiled bronze, nipples dark and stiff in the ring lights, and the chant changed words. She knelt down over Bea's hips, weight settled across her thighs, and crooked two fingers at Bastion without looking away from him.
"Come here. Kneel over her head."
"Man, don't do this to me," Bea said, from underneath her.
"You talked for six minutes in your entrance," Priya said. "You can be quiet for six minutes now."
Bastion crossed the canvas and knelt astride Bea's head, his knees bracketing her ears, and up close he could see everything, the tremor in her legs, the damp crease of her, the pink bottoms gone entirely, her chest rising fast. He rolled his trunks down and freed himself, and the crowd noise when he came out into the air was not a crowd noise anymore. He was already half hard, and climbing.
"Hold still," Priya said, and it wasn't clear which of them she said it to.
She gathered her breasts in both hands, pressed them together around him, and slid. The oil on her skin made it slick and hot and crushing, and the first stroke through that soft tunnel pulled a sound out of Bastion that the front three rows heard and will be describing to strangers for years. Bea, pinned underneath, got the underside of it against her forehead, the heat of him and the weight of them brushing her hairline with every pass.
"There it is," Ryan said. "There's the sound. The hot mic is earning its salary tonight."
Priya set a rhythm, slow and deep, her chest rolling around him in long waves, and she watched his face the whole time, cataloguing him the way she'd watched tape. His abs drew up. His thighs tightened. She squeezed harder on the downstroke and his teeth showed.
"You're the one they're all fighting over," she said, conversational, while she worked him. "The buyer's project. The rookie with the mouth on the tape. I watched that tape."
"Which one," he managed.
"Both." She slowed, dragging it out, letting him throb between her, and her smile was small and knowing. "Good purchase. Whoever signs that S.G. has taste."
"That wasn't S.G.," he said. "That was a fake."
"I know." She sped up. "I like knowing things."
Bea made a muffled complaint against the inside of his thigh, and Priya looked down at her, and Bastion felt her chest still around him for one beat while she spoke.
"He's close," Priya said to Bea, sweetly. "Feel that against your face? That's what a loss buys you tonight."
"Let him finish on me, then," Bea said, and then heard herself, and Bastion felt her go rigid under his knees, and the crowd, which caught every word on the hot mic, made a noise like a building settling.
"See," Priya said, to the whole arena, "the loser knows what she wants."
She squeezed him one last time, a slow full pass from base to tip, the oil squelching, and he had to grab the top rope to keep his balance, breath ragged, right on the wire, and she let him go. He groaned at the loss and she laughed, low, and pressed her palms flat on his stomach.
"Enough. You don't spend it on me." She looked down at Bea between his knees. "Winner's privilege, and I've decided how I'm spending it. You're going to wreck her, and you're going to do it where everyone can see, and you're going to do it until she can't talk anymore. That's your job tonight. Do you want it?"
Bastion looked down at Bea. She was looking up at him from between his thighs, flushed and furious and biting her lip, and her eyes did the same thing her voice had just done, the thing she couldn't smother fast enough.
"Yes," Bastion said.
"Good boy," Priya said, and the front row lost its mind, because the last man who'd heard that phrase on this canvas had a fan club and a betting pool.
He got off Bea's head. She scrambled back on her elbows, knees pressed together, mouth opening for another protest, and Priya simply took Bea's ankles in both hands and folded her legs back and open in one economical motion, presenting her to the arena and to him, and whatever Bea had been about to say came out as a shaky exhale instead.
"Wait," Bea said. "Condom, at least, there are, they have them at the..."
"Service match," Priya said. "It's all covered in your contract. Read your contract. You signed one, I watched you sign it, you were talking while you signed it."
Bastion rolled his trunks the rest of the way off. He ran a hand down himself, spat in his palm, worked it twice, and Bea watched him do it from her folded position and her hips gave one involuntary tilt that every camera in the building caught.
"Last chance to tap out of the privilege," Nadia said, kneeling at their level, whistle at her lips. Her voice was professional. Her eyes were not. "It's your right, Bea. The privilege is opt-out."
There was a silence. The whole arena leaned in. Bea looked up at Bastion, at the rookie she'd called a loss waiting to happen forty minutes ago, and something in her face stopped pretending.
"Don't stop," Bea said.
"I'm not going to," Bastion said.
He lined up and pushed in.
The first inch made her back arch off the canvas. The second made her grab two fistfuls of Priya's discarded shirt on the mat beside her head. By the time he bottomed out she was making a sound that had no consonants in it, long and ragged, hips already rolling up against him to take more, and the hot mic carried every syllable to the rafters, and the broadcast put her face on the big screen in glorious closeup while two thousand people watched a mouthy undercard fighter come apart on a rookie's cock.
"Oh, that's the footage," Delia said, and her commentary completely dissolved for four full seconds.
He took her slow at first, long dragging strokes, feeling her out, and she was soaked and clutching and panting "okay, okay, okay" against his chest on every downstroke like she was talking herself through it. Then her heels locked behind his back and she said his name, actually his name, Bastion, like she'd practiced it, and something competitive lit up in him, and he changed the angle and picked up the pace.
That was when Bea stopped talking.
Every stroke drove a sound out of her that the crowd answered, call and response, the building thumping the barricade in time. Her breasts bounced with each impact, the feathered robe's pink glitter smeared across her collarbone, and her head thrashed side to side and she grabbed his forearm and dug her nails in and pulled him deeper instead of pushing him away.
"Look at that," Ryan said. "The rookie reads a body like a tape. Two weeks in this league and he's already finishing people with his hips. I retired too early."
Priya knelt alongside them, one hand flat on the small of Bastion's back, guiding the rhythm, coach and spectator at once. "Deeper," she said, near his ear. "She's clenching on the shallow ones. Give her the whole thing and stay there a beat. Feel her give?"
He felt it. He felt her open around him on the third deep stroke, felt the resistance dissolve, and Bea's whole body shuddered and her voice cracked up an octave.
"I hate this," Bea gasped, pulling him closer. "I hate that it's you, I hate that I said the thing about your fan club, don't stop, I hate this, don't stop."
"He does this to everyone," Priya said. "It's not personal. It's worse if it's not personal."
Bastion drove in to the hilt and held, grinding his hips in a slow circle exactly the way Cassie's body had taught him two weeks ago, and Bea's protest folded in half. Her legs shook. Her mouth hung open. The chant of his name that started in the third row, in the Gold Piping section, with his own personal fan group, spread outward through the tiered seats like fire along a fuse, and Bea came with her back bowed off the canvas and her eyes rolled white and her nails carving four lines into his forearm, wailing his name on hot mic, and Nadia counted it with her palm flat on the mat even though there was nothing left to count.
The orgasm ran through her in long waves and he rode them out without stopping, because Priya's hand on his back said keep going, and the second one built fast on top of the first, Bea's overstimulated body jerking and clutching and begging in fragments, "wait, wait, no, again, again," contradicting herself on every thrust, and when the second one hit she went limp and boneless and slack, mouth open, eyes unfocused, a woman with no patter left anywhere in her.
"Winner's privilege, completed," Nadia said, and her whistle hand was shaking, and Bastion noticed, because he noticed everything about Nadia lately.
He pulled out slow. Bea lay in the center of the ring, spread and dripping and wrecked, one arm flung over her face, chest heaving, and behind the arm, where only Bastion and Priya and the closest cameras could see, her mouth was curved in a small, secret, deeply satisfied smile, the smile of a woman who had come twice in front of two thousand people on a rookie she'd talked trash about, and had absolutely no intention of filing a complaint about any of it. She mouthed something at the canvas that the mics didn't catch. The front-row cameraman caught it anyway, and it looked, frame by frame, like same time next card.
Priya took the mic from the announcer one more time. She stood over the two of them, bare chested and unbothered, and the crowd noise was a standing ovation.
"Service match," she said. "You tip your waitress. Gold Piping, third row, your boy works for free and he's underpriced. Someone tell the booking office before I book him myself."
She stepped over the top rope and walked up the ramp without a robe, and the arena parted for her like water.
Bastion sat on the canvas catching his breath, trunks still down around his thighs, and Bea rolled onto her side next to him, and for a moment neither of them said anything, just two fighters lying in the aftermath in front of an audience that wouldn't sit down.
"Hey," Bea said finally, hoarse, arm still over her eyes. "You're still a loss waiting to happen. But like. A good one."
"Thanks," Bastion said.
"Delete that from the tape." She lifted her arm just enough to show him the grin. "Or don't."
Nadia offered him a towel and a hand up at the same time, and her fingers closed around his and stayed a half second past regulation, and her voice was pitched for the first three rows again, exactly like before.
"Hi, Bastion," Nadia said.
"Hi, Nadia," he said, and her mouth curved, barely, and she rolled out under the bottom rope before the section could start its chant, and above the ramp the odds board scrolled to the next card, and the next card had his name on it.
The bar above The Pit was called the Split Decision, and Starla Gates hated how well it suited her mood. She pushed through the door with her warmups still on, hair damp from a shower she'd taken out of spite, and found her corner booth already occupied by the three worst people she knew.
They had a phone propped against the beer pitcher. The screen was playing the service match.
"There she is," said Marisol, sliding over to make room she had no intention of letting Starla use comfortably. "Miss Rematch Clause herself. Sit down. You're going to want to sit for this."
"I don't want to watch that."
"You watched it twice from the barricade," said Jo, on the end, not looking up from the phone. "I saw you."
Starla had, in fact, watched it from the barricade. She'd come out for the main card warmups, found the service match already running, and told herself she was scouting. Then Priya had doubled back to the third row, and Starla's feet had carried her to the railing all on their own, and she'd stood there for eleven minutes watching Bastion O'Sullivan, the man who'd choked out unconscious in her scissors and kissed her back afterward, drive some feathered nobody into the canvas until the building chanted his name.
She sat. She took Marisol's beer without asking.
"Play it from the middle," Marisol told Jo, and Jo scrubbed the clip backward, and the phone filled with the sound of Bea's voice breaking apart, that long ragged okay, okay, okay, and Bastion's hips setting the rhythm, the flex of his stomach on every stroke, the sheen of sweat on his chest under the ring lights.
"See the angle change?" Jo said, like she was breaking down game film, which, in this bar, she was. "Right there. He reads her clenching on the shallow strokes and switches it up mid-match. That's two weeks in the league, Starla. That's not a rookie body."
"He lost to Cassie."
"He lost to Cassie and she begged on the mic," Marisol said. "That's not a loss, that's a casting call. Half the booking office wants him now. Priya Gupta said he's underpriced. On the mic. Into a hot mic. You know what that does to a card price."
Starla drank. Her stomach was doing something she refused to name. On the screen, Bea's nails were carving lines into his forearm and her heels were locked behind his back and she was gasping don't stop, I hate this, don't stop, and Starla watched Bastion's mouth, the grin under it, the same grin he'd aimed at her from the canvas of her debut while she rode out her own win.
"You know what I keep thinking about," Jo said, scrolling to the end, to the moment he pulled out slow and Bea lay there with her secret smile. "You had him first. And then you spent two weeks filing paperwork for a rematch instead of, I don't know, seeing him."
"I saw him. Backstage. After Cassie's match."
"And how did that go?" Marisol asked, all innocence, and Starla remembered exactly how it had gone, the two of her and Cassie turning toward him like compasses, him laughing at both of them, and she took another pull of the beer and said nothing, and Marisol made a sound like a kettle. "That's what I thought."
"There's a queue," Starla said. "That's what I told her. There's a rematch and a queue."
"Babe, the queue has a queue," Jo said. "The referee wants him. You know Nadia said hi to him twice on the broadcast tonight? Twice. The internet has slowed the footage down. Her fingers stayed on his hand for like nine seconds."
"Regulation time is two," Starla said, before she could stop herself.
The whole booth went silent, and then all three of them screamed, and Starla put her face in her hands because she had just revealed that she knew regulation touching time from memory, like a person with a problem.
"Okay," Marisol said, wiping her eyes. "Okay. So. The woman who lost her composure on her own debut tape, who told Cassie Vale to her face there's going to be a problem about you every card, who threatened to fight Roxy Vance over a booking, is jealous. Of Bea. Of Nadia. Of Cassie. Of a hot dog vendor, probably, if he got close."
"I'm not jealous. I'm strategic. He's my rematch. I bought the rights to that finish when I made him tap out. Nobody else gets to finish him until I run it back."
"On the record?"
"On my record. It counts."
"You're jealous," Jo said, delighted, "of a man you already beat."
Starla looked at the phone again. Jo had it looping, the end of the finish, Bastion's breath ragged, Bea boneless under him, and Starla felt that voltage in her own stomach, the exact one from her debut, the one she'd spent three weeks pretending had been a one-time operational cost. She remembered his mouth. She remembered how he'd kissed back, greedy, unguarded, like a man with nothing left to hide, and how she'd walked away from it and immediately started building a legal case for why she should get it again.
The bar's big screen was playing the card replay with the sound down, and his name scrolled across the bottom of the next-card graphic, BASTION O'SULLIVAN, opponent still blank, and every person in the Split Decision was watching that blank space the way gamblers watch a wheel.
"There's a simpler solution," Marisol said, sliding the pitcher closer. "You're a fighter. You have a corner girl problem, a Cassie problem, and a Nadia problem, and one solution to all three. Go to Doris tomorrow with something better than coffee."
"Roxy's already doing coffee."
"Then go with the one thing Doris can't say no to," Jo said. "Say you'll take him on the next card, main event, loser's side of the ledger, whatever it costs. Because if you wait, some other feathered disaster is going to book him first, and you'll be watching the clip of it in this booth with this beer."
Starla drummed her fingers on the table. On the phone, looping, he was pulling out slow again.
"Fine," she said, standing, draining the beer. "But if I book him, none of you are allowed at ringside."
"We're buying front row," Marisol said. "Matching shirts."
Starla was already at the door. "Matching shirts and you're all dead to me."
She pushed out into the corridor, and behind her the phone looped again, and her last thought before the stairs was not strategy. It was that she remembered exactly how heavy he'd felt through the spandex, and that Bea had gotten to find out, and that was an error in the record she intended to correct.
The booking office opened at nine. Starla hit the door at nine-oh-one, still in warmups, hair wet from a second shower she'd taken to stop thinking, and Doris looked up from her coffee like a woman watching weather arrive.
"Starla Gates," Doris said. "Office hours are nine to five, not nine to furious."
"I'm here about the next card."
"You and two thousand other people. There's a line. There's a folder. Roxy Vance sent pastries, which frankly outranks whatever mood you brought."
Starla put both palms flat on the desk and leaned into Doris's airspace. "Pastries are Roxy's ceiling. I'm your floor. Main event. Me and Bastion O'Sullivan. Next card, no wait, no queue, no feathered disasters jumping it."
Doris took a slow sip. "The line on him started forty minutes after his debut and it hasn't shortened since. Cassie Vale holds a rematch clause. Priya Gupta said, on a hot mic, that she'd book him herself. The referee has stopped pretending her stops are regulation. You're number four in a folder that gets longer every time that boy sneezes in public."
"Number four." Starla's jaw set. "I made him tap out. I own the first finish."
"You own a tape. So does Cassie. Hers sold better."
Starla pulled the visitor's chair around backward and sat on it wrong, arms folded over the backrest, close enough that Doris's coffee had competition for the airspace. The office smelled like toner and cold espresso. A whiteboard on the wall had the next card sketched out, four slots, three names inked, and the fourth slot said O'SULLIVAN with a question mark that Starla wanted to strangle with her hands.
"Give me the number," Starla said. "What does he cost."
"It's not about cost with him. It's about who the card wants." Doris set the cup down and laced her fingers. "His numbers since the debut. Sixty members in his fan group after one match. Three hundred after two. The service match last night wasn't even his and the clip of it did more traffic than Cassie's whole finish, which, and I say this with respect, Cassie's finish was a religious event."
"So put the religious event against the woman who baptized him."
Doris looked at her for a long moment. Then she turned the whiteboard around, and underneath the visible layer was a second list, written smaller, in the handwriting of someone who'd been doing this for eleven years. Starla's name was on it. Top of it.
"You had him penciled before Priya opened her mouth," Starla said.
"I had everyone penciled. That's the job. I pencil, the card decides." Doris tapped the question mark in slot four. "The holdup isn't you. The holdup is that his card is owned. Cassie Vale bought it confidentially, which means she has right of approval on his bookings until the clause runs out, and she has been very clear with the office about what she'll approve."
"She'll approve her own rematch."
"She'll approve her own rematch. Anything else goes through her lawyer, who answers email slower than Roxy answers criticism."
Starla stood so fast the chair went over backward. It clattered against the filing cabinet and Doris didn't even flinch, which told Starla how many times this exact sound had happened in this office.
"So the whole league is queued up behind a contract," Starla said. "And nobody's fought about it. In a fighting league."
"There it is," Doris said, and her mouth did something that was almost fond. "Took you nine minutes. Roxy took twenty and then cried."
"What do you mean, fought about it."
"There's a mechanism. Ancient, ugly, barely legal, used twice in league history. A contender's challenge. You put up your booking rights against hers. You and Cassie Vale, on a card, winner gets the next slot against him. Loser goes to the back of the folder." Doris opened a drawer and pulled out a form that looked like it had been photocopied from a photocopy. "I keep one copy. Nobody ever asks."
"Because it means fighting Cassie Vale."
"It means fighting Cassie Vale for him. Publicly. On a card. In front of the Gold Piping and the hot mics and whatever Nadia does with her face." Doris slid the form across the desk and set a pen on top of it. "I'm not saying do it. I'm saying it exists, it's stamped, and if you sign, the office can enforce it against her clause by end of week."
Starla's fingers closed on the pen. She had the cap half off when the door opened without a knock.
Cassie Vale came in carrying an iced coffee and a tablet and wearing a blazer over athletic wear, like she'd come from a board meeting and was heading to a mat. Her hair was immaculate. Her eyes were not. There was something raw and distracted underneath the polish, the look of a woman who had watched the same twelve minutes and forty seconds several more times since the last time anyone had counted.
"Cassie," Doris said, flat. "We're closed."
"It's nine-oh-four."
"We're closed to you."
Cassie set the tablet on the desk, turned it around, and tapped the screen. The booking portal glowed. A rematch request, filed this morning, timestamped six-eleven a.m., approval signature already stamped from her lawyer's office. Fast, for a lawyer who answered email slower than Roxy answered criticism.
"I'm exercising my clause," Cassie said. "Bastion O'Sullivan. Next card. Main event if the office has the nerve, co-main if it doesn't."
Starla stood up so fast the backward chair went over for the second time in ten minutes. The filing cabinet rang like a bell. Doris didn't flinch, which confirmed the count had risen.
"You," Starla said.
"Starla Gates." Cassie looked at her the way she'd looked at the ring from the barricade, sizing, cataloguing, a little bored on the surface and not bored underneath. "You're here for the same thing I'm here for. That's adorable. You're what, number four in the folder?"
"Number four in your folder. Top of hers." Starla pointed at the whiteboard, at the second list, and immediately regretted revealing it, and decided she didn't care. "I made him tap out. You bought a piece of paper after the fact."
"I bought him." Cassie took a sip of the iced coffee and her voice came out steady and then didn't. "And yes. The rematch is filed. Enforceable. End of week, per your own office. So whatever photocopy Doris just slid across the desk is now worth exactly what it was worth last time somebody used it, which is nothing."
"You watched the service match," Doris said, watching her over the coffee cup. "Both of you did. I can tell because neither of you has blinked since."
Cassie's jaw moved. She set the cup down on the desk with a click, and for a second the composure slipped its leash and Starla saw what was actually underneath, and it was worse than jealousy. It was hunger with a spreadsheet on it.
"He finished her in eleven minutes," Cassie said. "He read her body mid-match and adjusted. He did to Bea what I charted for two weeks and paid for with a team of six, and he did it by instinct, and then Priya Gupta called him underpriced on a hot mic, which means by Friday his card price doubles and I paid for him on Tuesday." She picked the tablet back up and hugged it against the blazer, and her voice dropped, almost to herself. "I've watched the tape fourteen times now. There's a moment at minute nine where he chooses to stay. Free hands, and he stays. Do you know what that does to a person. I need the rematch. I need it like breathing."
"You need a cold shower and a therapist," Starla said, and her hands were fists at her sides, and she was doing arithmetic, and the arithmetic was: this is the woman from the corridor, this is the compass that turned when he laughed, this is the clause standing between her and him, and the woman was standing three feet away hugging a tablet like a body pillow with his finish on it.
She did not strangle her. It was close. Her right hand came up off her hip and Doris cleared her throat, loud, a referee's throat-clear, and Starla put the hand back down and breathed through her teeth.
"I'm filing the contender's challenge," Starla said. "Today. You and me, on a card, for the slot. You want your rematch, Cassie? Win it in a ring. Against me. Not on a lawyer's letterhead."
"You'd lose," Cassie said. "I've seen your tape too. Your sprawl is elite and your cardio falls off a cliff after minute six, and I know that because there's a slide about it."
"There's a slide about me?"
"There's a slide about everyone." Cassie's mouth curved, and it was the wobblier, truer smile from the end of her match, briefly, before the commercial version caught up. "Forty-one slides. Yours is slide nine. You're very good. He's better."
"Slide nine," Starla repeated, and something in her voice made even Doris look up. "You built a deck on the man I finished and the woman he finished, and you're telling me my falloff curve like it's foreplay."
"It's analytics."
"It's nine in the morning and you're wet over a wrestler in a booking office."
The silence that followed had weight. Doris reached for her coffee and drank it slowly, a woman enjoying the single best perk of an eleven-year career. Cassie's ears went pink above the blazer collar, and she lifted her chin, and did not deny it, which was its own kind of filing.
"Here's what happens," Doris said, setting the cup down, all business now, because someone in the room had to be. "Cassie's rematch is filed and stamped. Starla's challenge form is on my desk, unsigned. The mechanism exists. If Starla signs, the office schedules the challenge before the rematch, because the challenge determines who holds the slot when the rematch executes. That's the order of operations. It's ugly. It's the rules."
"So I fight her," Cassie said slowly, "and if I win, my rematch goes ahead, and if I lose..."
"Starla gets the next slot against him and you go to the back of the folder with the pastries."
Cassie looked at the form. She looked at Starla. Something moved behind her eyes, the competitor's panic, cold and clarifying, the same flash Starla had heard about secondhand from a body triangle at The Pit.
"Fine," Cassie said. "But I want conditions. No corner interference. No Gold Piping chants timed to my disadvantage. And if I win, Gates, you don't touch that folder again until my clause runs out."
"And when I win," Starla said, taking the pen, "you delete the poses. All of them. He asked you once."
Cassie was quiet for a moment. Then she pulled the visitor's chair upright, sat down in it properly, crossed her legs, and smiled like a woman signing a merger.
"Make me," she said. "On a card. In front of everyone. If you can."
Starla signed. The pen tore a little grove in the photocopy of a photocopy, and Doris stamped it twice, and the whiteboard's fourth slot lost its question mark and gained two names instead of one, a challenge bout above a rematch, the whole league's appetite fed through one ugly ancient form.
"Card's Saturday," Doris said. "Both of you. Travel safe. And Vale, put the tablet down before you leave, you've been watching the finish loop this entire conversation."
Cassie looked down. The screen was playing. Minute nine, free hands, a man choosing to stay. She hadn't noticed it start.
"I know," she said, and stood, and walked out with it still playing.
The corridor outside the booking office was narrow and smelled like floor wax, and Starla made it four steps before Cassie caught up to her, blazer buttoned, tablet hugged to her ribs like a shield.
"Saturday," Cassie said. "Hydrate. Slide nine has a hydration protocol."
"Slide nine can hydrate me."
They were both reaching for the double doors at the end of the hall when a voice came around the corner, warm and loud, the voice of a man who had never once entered a room quietly.
"No way. No way, is that the Gates? And the Vale? Hold up, hold up."
He came down the corridor like weather. Big, broad through the shoulders, brown skin, dreads tied back with a strip of athletic tape, gym bag over one shoulder and a smoothie in each hand. Starla placed him in half a second: Dez Marsh, mid-card fan favorite, the man who'd held the longest win streak in the featherweight bracket before somebody from the heavyweight division ended it on a holiday card. All smiles. All elbows. He hugged people whether they consented to it or not.
And he wasn't alone.
Walking half a step behind him, towel around his neck, duffel bag over his shoulder, gold stud catching the fluorescent light, was Bastion O'Sullivan.
Starla's spine locked. Cassie's tablet slid half an inch down her ribs and she caught it with a hand that was not entirely steady.
"Look who I found sulking by the loading dock," Dez announced, slapping Bastion on the back hard enough to rock him. "Rookie wouldn't take a smoothie. Can you believe that? Free smoothie. You take the smoothie, man, that's the whole culture of this league, you take the smoothie."
"I took the smoothie," Bastion said, lifting the cup in his other hand. "I'm drinking the smoothie."
"You're nursing it. There's a difference."
He hadn't seen them yet. That was the thing, the unforgivable thing, the thing Starla would replay later: Bastion looked up mid-stride, saw Dez's attention snag on something over his shoulder, followed it, and there he was, eye level with both of them, mouth already curving into that grin, the one from the canvas of her debut, the one from minute nine of Cassie's tape.
"Hey," he said. Easy. Unhurried. Like the two of them hadn't spent a combined nine days of their lives watching his finish on loop. "Starla. Cassie."
"Cassie," Cassie repeated, because her brain had apparently filed his name under things to say back.
"You know each other," Dez said, delighted, looking between the three of them like a man reading a menu. "Oh, this is good. This is going to be a great card."
"We're opponents," Starla said, too fast, and heard how it sounded, and hated it.
"Sure you are." Dez handed Bastion's smoothie back to him so he could spread both arms. "Gates. Come on. You know the rule. Nobody leaves a corridor un-hugged on my watch."
"I will end you."
"She'll end you," Cassie said, helpfully, and then Starla turned and looked at her, because that was a betrayal from an unexpected direction, and Cassie's ears went pink again above the blazer collar. "I mean. Statistically he's bigger than you."
"Statistically," Starla said.
Dez hugged Cassie first. She endured it stiffly, tablet held out to the side like a woman protecting an experiment, and over his shoulder her eyes were locked on Bastion, who was watching her get hugged and drinking his smoothie and doing absolutely nothing to hide that he was enjoying it.
Then Dez turned to Bastion. "Rookie. You know the handshake yet?"
"I don't think there's a handshake."
"There's absolutely a handshake. It's elaborate. It has a snap in it." He demonstrated against air. "Gates taught it to me. Wait, no, that's a lie, Roxy taught it to me. Gates hit me with a chair."
"That was a different league and you deserved it," Starla said, and Bastion laughed, and the laugh went down the corridor and into both of them, and both of them felt it land, and neither of them looked at the other one while it happened, which was its own admission.
"Anyway," Dez said, retrieving his smoothie, utterly oblivious or perfectly aware, it was impossible to tell, "I'm dragging this one to ring school. New guys watch film with the veterans on Thursdays, that's the rule, I just made it up. It's a good rule."
"Ring school," Bastion repeated.
"Film room. Basement. You'll love it, it smells terrible and old guys yell." Dez shouldered his bag and paused, and his grin sharpened into something almost useful. "Hey, real question. Saturday's card. You seen it? Slots three and four went up on the board this morning."
"I saw there was a challenge bout," Bastion said. "Didn't read who."
Neither woman moved. Neither woman breathed. The corridor's fluorescent hum filled the silence with the fidelity of a stuck microphone.
"You're looking at it," Dez said.
Bastion looked. At Starla, warmups, arms crossed, chin up, the woman who'd choked him out and kissed him awake. At Cassie, blazer, tablet, the woman who'd bought his card and ridden him under a countdown. Back and forth. His mouth worked through something, and what came out was not strategy and not surprise.
"Winner gets me," he said.
"Winner gets the slot," Starla said.
"That's what I said." He drank the last of the smoothie. "You know I'm going to watch that match front row."
"You're going to watch it from wherever the booking office puts you," Cassie said.
"I'm going to watch it front row," Bastion said, to both of them, pleasant as a man discussing lunch, "and I'm going to study, because one of you is fighting me next and I don't lose the same way twice."
"You've lost the same way twice," Starla said.
"And I won't a third time."
Dez made a low whistle and steered Bastion by the shoulder toward the stairs. "Ring school, rookie. Before you get sued."
They went. Bastion's footsteps echoed down the corridor, and at the turn he glanced back once, at the two of them standing exactly where he'd left them, three feet apart, not touching, and lifted the empty smoothie cup in a small toast, and disappeared around the corner.
The doors at the end of the hall let in daylight. Neither of them walked toward them.
"Slide nine has a hydration protocol," Cassie said finally, to nobody.
"He's studying," Starla said. Her voice had come out rougher than she'd planned. "He's actually going to study the tape."
"Which tape?"
"That's not funny."
"I'm not laughing," Cassie said, and she wasn't. Her thumb was moving on the tablet screen, and the screen was showing minute nine, and she didn't remember opening it.