Chapter 4: Chapter 4
The broadcast booth smelled like burnt coffee and Ryan's regret. He had the Saturday card sheet in front of him, printed an hour ago, and it was already wrong.
"Delia." He tapped the paper. "The Starla-Cassie bout is gone."
Delia leaned over, reading glasses sliding down her nose. "Gone where?"
"Struck. Both of them. Calloway's office pulled the challenge and the rematch clause off the card at nine this morning. Bastion's booked instead." Ryan read the line twice before saying it out loud. "Against a jobber. Unnamed opponent. Debut record builder."
Delia took the glasses off entirely. "Calloway pulled a main-event caliber challenge between the number one newcomer and the richest woman on the circuit, to feed Bastion to a curtain-jerker?"
"That's what the sheet says."
"That's not management, that's sabotage of my Saturday entertainment."
The odds went up on the board before Ryan could answer. BASTION O'SULLIVAN vs OPPONENT TBA: O'Sullivan -1400. The crowd money would come in ugly and lopsided, and Delia read the line on air anyway, her voice flat with contempt. "Minus fourteen hundred, folks. The books think our boy walks through whoever this is. I think the books are being generous to whoever this is."
The feed cut to the corridor outside Calloway's office, and that was where the real show was. Cassie Vale stood in the doorway in street clothes, baby pink cardigan, arms crossed, lawyer on speakerphone from her bag. Starla Gates was already inside the office doorway, and the two of them were talking over each other loud enough to catch on the hall mic.
"You can't strike a filed challenge," Cassie was saying. "Doris processed it. There's paperwork. I have paperwork."
"You have a rematch clause I agreed to fight on Saturday," Starla said. "You don't get to not have Saturday."
Calloway's voice came through the door, unhurried, gravel over silk. "Ladies. The challenge bout is struck. The clause rolls to the next eligible card. That is the office's call and the office's right."
"Who is he fighting, then?" Starla again, sharp.
"A management assignment."
The hall mic caught Cassie's laugh, one note, no warmth. "Management assignment. Meaning you found him a body."
"Meaning the boy is one and two with a service match on his record and no wins," Calloway said. "He needs a record before he headlines anything. This is prime management. Every promotion in history has built a star the same way."
Nobody was buying it. Ryan could hear nobody buying it through the feed. Starla said something low and filthy that the delay filter caught, and Cassie's lawyer on speakerphone said, "We'll file an objection," and Calloway said, "File whatever you like, the card is what the card is," and the door shut on both of them.
The board updated at four. Ryan was mid-sandwich when the sheet feed chirped, and the line under the odds filled in where OPPONENT TBA had been.
"Delia." His voice came out strange. "Come look at this."
Delia leaned in, read the name, and put both hands flat on the desk like the booth had tilted. "Rylee Calloway."
"Rylee Calloway."
"Niece Rylee Calloway."
"The niece," Ryan said, "of the man who just struck a number one contender's challenge to give his nephew-in-law slot a warm-up."
"Cousin, actually, I think it's cousin, there was a thing in the program notes last spring when she debuted down south." Delia pulled the glasses back on, then immediately took them off again, because the glasses were for reading fine print and this needed no magnification. "You know who Rylee Calloway is? Nobody knows who Rylee Calloway is. Four matches in some regional card out in Phoenix, three wins, every one against women who retired within a month. She hasn't fought a live body since March."
"Minus fourteen hundred," Ryan said, reading the board again. "That line was put up before they had a name. Somebody knew."
"Somebody wrote the line."
The feed cut to the corridor again, and again the corridor was ahead of the booth. The door to Calloway's office had reopened, and this time Doris was in it, holding a card sheet, and she had the specific posture of an eleven-year veteran about to become briefly but intensely hated. She held the sheet out flat so both women could see it.
"Requested assignment," Doris said. "Signed by the office at nine-forty this morning. Opponent slot four: Rylee Calloway."
Starla took the sheet. Read it. Read it again. Then she laughed, one hard note, the laugh of a woman standing on the last nerve she had.
"Rylee Calloway," Starla said. "Rylee. Calloway."
"You know her," Cassie said, and it wasn't a question, because Starla's face was doing something Cassie had never seen on it outside slide nine, something structural.
"I know her." Starla threw the sheet back at Doris, who caught it with the reflexes of long practice. "Phoenix. Roxy and I went down there on a co-promote two years ago. She's Calloway's sister's kid, she's twenty-four, she's built like she was ordered from a catalog, and she's got a smile the regional blogs called 'disarming.' She won three matches in a row against women the office had already told were getting cut. Everybody knew. Nobody said it out loud."
"That's not a record," Cassie said slowly. "That's a curated record."
"That's a gift-wrapped record," Starla said. "He's feeding her to him. Or feeding him to her. I genuinely don't know which and that's what's making me insane."
Inside the office, Calloway's voice carried through the door with the door open, which was a choice, which meant it was for an audience. "Rylee Calloway is a talented young athlete under exclusive management contract with this office. Management may assign opponents at management's discretion. Nothing in the rulebook requires the office to book its talent against killers."
"Nothing in the rulebook," Starla called back through the doorway, "requires you to book his sister's daughter against him either, you grotesque old toad, but here we are."
Calloway appeared in the doorway. He was in his sixties, silver hair combed like a man being photographed, and he looked at Starla the way men like him look at weather they intend to wait out. "Miss Gates. You have a card Saturday?"
"You know I don't."
"Then your Saturday is free. Take it up with the athletic commission if you think the assignment rules were violated. The commission will tell you what I'm about to tell you. The books say minus fourteen hundred. If my niece is a body, that's your best investment of the year." He stepped back inside. The door stayed open, which meant he was done being generous.
Cassie's lawyer was still on speakerphone in her bag, and Cassie finally picked the bag up and looked at the phone. "Cancel the objection. There's no rule to file on. He built it this way on purpose." She put the phone away and turned to Doris. "One question. Booking procedure. Could I have bought the slot?"
Doris met her eyes. "The slot was assigned before it went public. Contractual office right."
"So nobody could save him."
"Nobody could save him," Doris said. "And for what it's worth, and it isn't worth much, I put her name on my own list a year ago. Between matches. She's better than the record says. Maybe a lot better. Or maybe the record is the record." She folded the card sheet into quarters. "Card's Saturday."
Down the corridor, at the bottom of the stairs, the feed caught a third figure who had clearly been listening to all of it. Dez Marsh, smoothie-less for once, arms folded, wearing the particular expression of a big friendly man watching something he didn't find funny. He waited until Cassie and Starla had both turned to leave, then raised his voice just enough.
"Ring school's tonight," Dez said. "Basement. Film room. Old guys yell. The rookie's going to be there."
"He doesn't know?" Starla said.
"He knows he's fighting a debut record builder. That's what he was told." Dez shrugged, dreads shifting. "He doesn't know it's Calloway's family. He doesn't know what that means yet. I figured one of you two might want to be the one to tell him, seeing as how you're opponents and everything."
Neither woman answered that. Dez smiled at both of them without warmth and went down the stairs.
In the booth, Delia had pulled up the Phoenix footage. Ryan watched her scrub through it frame by frame, jaw tight, and then he watched her stop scrubbing and sit back.
"What," Ryan said.
"Look at her sprawl on this takedown. Look at the second one. Look at the hips on the third." Delia tapped the screen. "Ryan. I've called four hundred matches. Nobody sprawls like that at one and three fighting cut girls. That's a sprawl you build against live bodies."
"You're saying the record's fake in the other direction."
"I'm saying either Calloway found his niece a lane and she's actually dangerous, or he's been sandbagging her to spring her on somebody." Delia pulled the odds sheet over and drew a line through the minus fourteen hundred with a pen, hard enough to tear it. "Either way, somebody in this league is about to get jumped, and the books have our boy at a number that shouldn't exist."
Ryan looked at the corridor feed one more time. Starla and Cassie were standing in the parking structure entrance, ten feet apart, both looking at the same card sheet photo of Rylee Calloway that Doris had handed out like a subpoena, smiling with teeth in every publicity frame.
"Delia. What do you want to bet both of them are in that basement tonight?"
"I don't bet on things that are already true," Delia said, and turned up the feed from the parking structure, where Starla was already asking Doris for the ring school address.
The basement film room had emptied by eleven, and Rylee Calloway had watched the service match tape six more times after the last veteran left. She sat cross-legged on the floor with a laptop balanced on one knee, pausing at minute nine, unpause, rewind, again. Free hands. He stayed. Her uncle thought she was obsessed with winning. He was only half wrong.
She'd called him Tuesday. Not the office line, his cell, the one he answered on the second ring for exactly three people. "Book me against the rookie," she'd said. "The one Priya called underpriced. O'Sullivan."
"You've seen his numbers?" Calloway had asked.
"I've seen him finish Bea twice in eleven minutes. I want him." A pause, and then, because her uncle liked clean deals: "You get a headline, I get a real opponent, the books get to look stupid. Everybody eats."
He'd struck the Starla-Cassie card to clear the lane for it, which she'd found out Thursday and had not pretended to be sorry about. Two of the most dangerous women on the circuit were going to spend Saturday night in the front row watching her, hating her, and that was fine. Rylee had spent two years in Phoenix winning against women who already knew they were fired, sandbagging her sprawl, keeping the real thing in a drawer. The drawer was open now.
Saturday. She stood in the corridor outside the curtain in the thing her costume designer had argued for and won: firefighter cosplay cut for the circuit. Charcoal gray turnout coat, sleeves torn off at the shoulder, front unzipped to the sternum, and nothing underneath but a black sports bra and a pair of suspenders hanging loose against her ribs. The turnout pants had been replaced with something that obeyed league gear rules: black shorts cut high, and above the scuffed firefighter boots her legs ran long and bare and hard, calves like she'd kicked down doors in them. Yellow reflective stripes on the coat caught the corridor light. A helmet sat under one arm, red plastic, dented on purpose.
The Gold Piping was loud through the curtain. Six hundred of them now, someone had said. Their chant rolled in waves: BA-STION, BA-STION.
Nadia stuck her head through the curtain, ref's whistle around her neck, and did a double take at the coat. "Firefighter. Subtle."
"I rescue people. It's on-brand." Rylee settled the helmet on her head, tipped it back so her face showed. "How's he look?"
"He looks fine." Nadia said it too evenly and disappeared back through the curtain. Rylee filed the flush in the woman's voice and smiled at the curtain.
Then the music hit, and Bastion came through it, and every thought she'd organized about him rearranged itself.
The trunks first, black with gold piping, exactly like the tape, and then the rest of him. He was tall the way distance runners were tall, long through the leg, and his thighs filled the trunks like they'd been poured in. Skin shining under the ring lights, close-cropped hair, the gold stud winking when he turned to lift an arm to the crowd. He moved loose and economical, no wasted steps, a man who knew precisely how fast he was. The crowd noise was a physical thing. He gave it his grin, that grin, and the Gold Piping came apart at the seams.
Rylee's stomach did something she hadn't budgeted for. She'd asked for this match on tape and reputation. Walking to the ring was a different sport. She watched him duck through the ropes, watched him stretch one long leg up onto the middle rope and fold over it, hamstrings standing out like cable, and she did not regret a single phone call.
"You're staring," said her corner handler, a silent contract man Calloway had assigned her.
"Recording," Rylee said, and made herself look away and roll her neck. "That's different."
In the booth, Delia's voice was already working. "Ladies and gentlemen, our scheduled sacrifice, minus fourteen hundred on the board, but Ryan and I have both watched the Phoenix tape now, and we'd like to formally withdraw the word 'sacrifice.' Give me the official tale of the tape."
"O'Sullivan, one and two, both losses by knockout and orgasm to elite opponents, and, Delia, a service match win of sorts that doubled his price."
"His opponent, Rylee Calloway, three and oh out of a regional card, niece of the boss, dressed like the last fire you'll ever regret setting." Delia dropped her voice. "I called four hundred matches. Look at her legs, Ryan. That's not a body they fed to a record builder."
The odds, read on air anyway: O'Sullivan -400, Calloway +320. The line had moved all week and the books did not know why.
Rylee walked out through the curtain into a wall of boos she hadn't earned yet and enjoyed anyway. The turnout coat swung at her thighs. She stopped at the top of the ramp, took the helmet off, held it high, and some section of the crowd, against its own interest, cheered. She could feel Starla and Cassie from here, front row as promised, sitting with one empty seat between them like a demilitarized zone, both of them watching Bastion warm up and both of them watching her.
She climbed the stairs, stepped through the ropes, and the ring was suddenly small and real and full of him. Bastion had straightened from his stretch and was looking at her openly, the way she'd watched him look at Bea's entrance on tape, reading her body before the bell. Coat. Boots. Legs. He read all of it and his grin changed, less performance in it.
"Nice coat," he said. "Rescuing anybody tonight?"
"Depends who's on fire." She hung the helmet on the corner post and unzipped the turnout coat, slow, and shrugged it off her shoulders so the suspenders and the sports bra and all that catalog-ordered architecture were under the lights. The Gold Piping booed. Somebody near Starla yelled something filthy. Nadia called both fighters to center ring.
"League rules," Nadia said, and her eyes were only half on Rylee. "Pin, knockout, or tap-out, then the finish. Keep it clean until it isn't. Touch gloves."
Rylee put her glove out. Bastion's palm met it, warm, big, callused in the right places, and he held the contact a half second past regulation, the same half second Nadia always gave him. She felt it in her teeth.
"You're the jobber?" he said, low, and there was a real question under the joke.
"I'm the assignment," she said. "Ask your fans who wrote it."
The bell rang.
He came in fast like she knew he would, level change, shot at her lead leg, textbook beautiful, and Rylee sprawled the way she hadn't sprawled in two years, hips slammed down, legs driving, and the first sound the crowd made was not a chant. It was silence, four hundred people forgetting to breathe, and then Delia's voice tearing out of the speakers: "THE SPRAWL. THERE IT IS. THAT'S THE PHOENIX SPRAWL, FOLKS."
Bastion popped back up to his feet inside a second, better than anyone she'd dropped with it, and they circled, and his grin had gone quiet and serious, and so had hers. He'd adjusted already. She could see it in his stance.
"Okay," he said, breathing easy, eyes bright. "So you're not the jobber."
"No," Rylee said, and shot at him.
She hit his midsection like a door going down, and Bastion folded over her back, and the ring shook with both of them rolling. Rylee came up on top in a front headlock, chest pressed flat to his, and the crowd found its voice again, half of it screaming for the upset and half of it screaming for the upset to fail.
"LOCKED UP," Delia bellowed. "Calloway's got the neck. Rookie's in the firefighter's kitchen and the stove is on."
Bastion walked his hands. That was the thing the tape had shown and the tape had undersold, the way his hands moved like they had their own calendar. He hooked her wrist, pried, rolled his hips hard to the left, and suddenly his shoulder was under her jaw and they were stacked and Rylee's legs were scissoring air.
They broke apart at Nadia's count, both up, both breathing. Rylee pulled the strap of her sports bra back onto her shoulder where the scramble had dragged it, unhurried about it, and the front three rows made a sound that had nothing to do with technique.
"Cute," Bastion said.
"Effective. You looked."
"I looked."
She shot again, and this time he sprawled. His hips came down on hers with two hundred people audibly gasping, and his long legs wrapped and squeezed, and Rylee had to post on both hands to keep her shoulders off the canvas while he crushed the air out of her. She turned into him. Elbow in the ribs, sharp, professional, and he grunted and loosened a quarter inch and she was out the back door and up.
"God," she said, shaking out her arm, grinning for real now, sweat starting to shine on the slope of her chest above the bra line. "That's a real squeeze. That's a runner's squeeze. I've missed that."
"You're sandbagged," Bastion said. "Phoenix is fake. Nobody fights cut girls like this."
"Phoenix was a drawer," Rylee said. "You're looking in the drawer."
The next five minutes the booth stopped selling. Delia's commentary came in shorter and shorter bursts, and Ryan filled the gaps with numbers nobody needed, because the numbers had inverted: Rylee's sprawl count, Bastion's escape rate, the cardio both women had supposedly been lacking. Bastion took her back once, hooks in, boots hooked inside hers, and Rylee fought the hands for thirty seconds with her head cranked back and her throat offered up to the camera and did not tap. He let the waist go when she posted and dumped him over. She took his back once, and the Gold Piping sang, and she sank a body triangle that made Ryan half stand up out of his chair, and Bastion peeled her ankle off with both hands like a man unwiring a bomb and rolled.
Minute eleven. Both of them shiny, both of them breathing in the red zone, the suspenders hanging loose off Rylee's ribs and swinging every time she changed level.
"Her hips," Delia said, hoarse. "Ryan, look at her hips when she levels off. That's two years of sandbagging at least. Calloway hid a contender in a regional card for two years and we're watching the drawer empty."
Bastion caught the shot. That was the turn, and every veteran watching saw it coming before Rylee did. She'd shot the same way four times and he'd read the level change off her left knee dip, and the fifth time he wasn't sprawled, he was already turned, and his arm slid under her chin from the side as she ran through, and he sat back into the figure-four with the calm of a man closing a car door.
Rylee's hand went for his wrist. Her other hand went for the rope and found nothing, because they were center ring, and she'd been the one who chose to shoot there.
"Got her," Ryan said quietly. "Got her clean."
Her face went from focused to flushed in six seconds. The dented helmet had long since been discarded and now her head thrashed once against Bastion's shoulder, dark hair stuck to her temple in a wet comma, mouth open, the crowd noise compressing into one held vowel. Nadia was in low, checking the hand. The hand came up. Came up again, slower.
"She's not tapping," Delia said. "She's absolutely not going to tap, look at her, she'd rather sleep than quit."
"She's going to sleep," Ryan said. "Look at her eyes."
Rylee's hand came up a third time and dropped. Nadia called it, slapped the canvas twice, and Bastion released her instantly and let her head down onto the mat with care that looked almost out of place in the middle of four hundred people roaring.
"One and three," Delia screamed. "ONE AND THREE, AND HE JUST OUT-FIREFIGHTED THE FIREFIGHTER."
Rylee wasn't out. Not quite. She was on her side, chest heaving under the black sports bra, blinking at the lights, blood coming back in tides. Bastion sat back on his heels beside her and watched her the way he'd promised two women in a corridor he'd watch a tape: studying. Her ribs flared against the sports bra with each breath, the swell of her chest lifting the fabric, the loose suspenders lying across her like shed reins. Her shorts had ridden up in the scramble and the shape of her was doing things to the front row that would show up in fourteen separate recordings.
Nadia stepped in. "She's stirring. Regulation permits the finish when the opponent is responsive."
"She's responsive," Bastion said, and Nadia's throat worked and she stepped back, and the Gold Piping started to chant the word that ended every match in this league.
Bastion took Rylee's wrist and pulled her arm across her back, not cruelly, and rolled her to her hands and knees. She came to enough to swear at him, a single slurred syllable that the corridor mics would argue about for a week.
"There she is," he said softly.
He gathered her hair off her neck with one hand, wrapped his other arm under and around, and stood her up on wobbling legs, and then he walked her. Front first, bent at the waist, hands flopping, toward the ring ropes, her heart-shaped ass swaying with each forced step in those black cut-high shorts, the crowd on its feet, phones out, Delia's commentary disintegrating into laughter and appalled delight.
"He's WALKING her," Delia managed. "Like a show dog. Folks, the rookie is walking the undefeated niece of the circuit boss to the ropes on legs she does not own right now, and I have never called anything like this in four hundred matches."
"Look at her face," Ryan said. The camera was. Rylee's head hung, hair curtaining, cheeks flushed dark, eyes glassy and half-lidded, lips parted, gorgeous and dazed in the hard ring light, a magazine face wrecked in the best possible lighting. Some editor was going to freeze that frame forever.
At the ropes, Bastion turned her. He lifted one of her limp arms and threaded it between the top and middle rope, twisted her torso so the rubber band of the rope locked across her chest and collarbone, then fed her other arm through the gap on the far side, and the ropes held her bent over the top one, arms trapped behind the ring's edge, immobile, her torso twisted so the crowd along that side of the arena and every camera had a clean shot of her face over her own shoulder. Her chest hung heavy under her against the top rope, the sports bra stretched and shiny with sweat, the swell of her pressed to the canvas band. Below it her spine dipped, her hips sat high, and the black shorts had wedged fully between the round cheeks of her ass, which was the actual reason he'd picked the ropes on this side. The Gold Piping screamed. Starla was standing. Cassie was standing. Neither of them remembered standing.
"Responsive," Nadia repeated to herself, and raised no hand.
Rylee laughed. Breathless, slurred, half-conscious, aimed over her own shoulder at him. "Uncle's going to kill you."
"After this he's going to buy you," Bastion said, and hooked his fingers into the waistband of her shorts and peeled them down.
Slowly. Over the full curve of her ass, the fabric dragging down sweat-slick thighs, past the long hard quads, off one boot and then, with a foot's help, the other, and Rylee Calloway hung in the ropes in nothing but a sports bra, boots, and hanging suspenders, bare from the waist down in front of four hundred people and a pay feed. She was waxed neat and small and pink between the tan lines, and the wet shine on her was not all sweat, and the front row could see it and said so loudly.
"Oh, she's into this," Delia said, and the delay filter died a merciful death.
"That's arousal, folks, that is unambiguous, look at her, she's soaked and she got choked out two minutes ago, this league, this league, I love this league."
Bastion pulled his own trunks down just enough, and the crowd noise changed key, because everybody in the building knew what he was carrying and seeing it freed and heavy in his fist made a section of the Gold Piping physically fall over the barrier rail. He gripped her hip with one hand, steadied himself with the other, and pressed in.
Rylee's mouth opened and nothing came out at first. Then sound came, a long low cracked vowel as he pushed through her tight wet heat, inch after inch, her walls gripping him, her whole body rocking against the rope with the pressure of it. Her trapped arms strained uselessly behind the ring edge. Her face went from dazed to undone, eyes fluttering shut, lips wet, the blush spreading down her throat toward the bra line.
"Still with me?" Bastion murmured.
"Deeper," Rylee said.
He gave her deeper. Bottomed out with his thighs flush to hers, both of them shuddering, her ass rebounding off his hips, and then he started to move, slow at first, long dragging strokes that pulled her up on her toes and set her back down, the top rope biting across her chest so that every thrust rubbed her hardened nipples through the strained fabric of the bra. The slick sounds carried on the arena mics. Sweat ran down the deep line of her spine into the cleft of her raised ass.
The camera found the front row. Starla Gates had a fist pressed against her own mouth and her other hand fanned in the air like she was cooling a burn, thighs pressed hard together, and beside her Cassie Vale had her phone recording with a hand that shook so badly the footage would be unusable, her breath fogging the screen, her face burning crimson above the collar of the pink cardigan.
"Look at them," Delia said, delighted and cruel. "Two number one contenders watching their prize take the assignment apart, and neither one of them can sit still, and I want it noted I called this match straight down the middle despite everything."
Bastion picked up the pace. His hips slapped against Rylee's, her cheeks quaking with each impact, and Rylee started coming apart in honest increments, groans turning to cries, her dazed gorgeous face tipping back over her shoulder toward him, asking without words. He gave it to her harder, one hand fisting in her hair to hold her head back so the crowd could watch her go, the other arm hooked under her thigh to change the angle, and the new angle ground against the front wall of her and she sobbed.
"There it is, there it is," Delia chanted. "She's climbing, folks, she's going up cloud nine in front of her uncle's entire booking office, and his record is about to read one and three against a woman who came all over the ring ropes."
"I'm close," Rylee gasped, barely a word, mostly air. "Don't stop, don't you dare stop."
"Wasn't going to."
He reached around her with the hand in her hair and found her through the wet heat where they joined, two fingers strumming her swollen clit in time with his thrusts, and Rylee's whole body locked, arms jerking against the ropes, back arching, and she came loud, a scream that flattened into a broken moan, her cunt clamping around him in hard rhythmic spasms that milked him to the edge and past it. He groaned low in his chest and thrust through her orgasm, deep, and his own followed, hips jammed flush, head dropping against her shoulder blade.
Nadia counted it out loud, flushed to her ears, and rang the bell herself.
Bastion eased out of her and held her hips steady while her legs remembered their job, then untwisted her arms from the ropes one at a time. Rylee sagged back against him, trembling, cum and slick starting a slow shine down her thigh, and he caught her under the arms and set her on her feet facing him.
"Good match," he said.
"Worth the phone call," Rylee managed, and grinned at him, wrecked and satisfied, before her handler finally got a towel over her shoulders and steered her toward the steps. She collected her shorts off the mat on the way, held them up to the crowd like a trophy, and got a standing ovation from the half of the building that had booed her at the ramp.
"Your winner by knockout and orgasm, BASTION O'SULLIVAN," Delia screamed. "One and three, ladies and gentlemen, the debut record builder just built a record on the boss's own family, and somewhere in that office Calloway is doing math he does not like."
The math was visible. In the front row, Starla and Cassie were standing face to face over the empty seat between them, both breathing hard, both flushed, both having watched the same finish, and the corridor cameras caught the exact moment Starla said, "Front row was supposed to be for studying."
"It was," Cassie said, and stopped the recording, and deleted it, and looked at the ring where Bastion was pulling his trunks up, gold piping catching the light, while six hundred fans chanted his name. "I need to talk to Doris in the morning."
"You and me both," Starla said, and for once they walked out of the arena side by side, neither one of them pretending it was a coincidence.
The lights go wrong first.
That is the thing nobody tells you about getting choked out. It is not dark, it is bright, the ring lights going soft and enormous, like the arena ceiling is descending on you at the speed of warm syrup. My hand came up because I told it to. It came up again because I asked nicely. The third time it just floated there, an idea of a hand, and somewhere far away a canvas got slapped twice, and I thought, distantly, with the last of my professional brain: he got me. Figure-four off a read. Nobody in Phoenix ever got me. This is what the drawer feels like from the inside.
I wasn't gone. I want that in the record. I was there, folded down into myself like a lawn chair, listening through cotton. The crowd was a single held vowel. Nadia's voice came from underwater, checking the hand. And then the vowel broke apart and became chanting, and I knew the word they were chanting, everybody in this league knows the word, and my body knew it before my head did because heat went through me like someone had opened a furnace door.
He rolled me over. I felt it in pieces. Wrist. Shoulder. The canvas cool against my cheek. Hands and knees, which is a position I have been in a hundred times in practice rooms, except practice rooms don't have four hundred people and a pay feed and a man gathering my hair off my neck with one hand, gentle, almost tender, like he was doing me a favor.
I said something. I know I did because he answered it.
"There she is," he said, soft, and I hate how good that sounded to me, how my body heard there she is and went toward it like a plant.
He stood me up. My legs were rumor. He walked me, one arm banded under my ribs, my own weight mostly an abstract concept, and through the cotton I could hear the crowd losing its mind and Delia's voice doing something I'd listen to on the ride home, and I could feel my own ass swinging with every step because I could not do a single thing about it, and God help me, some piece of me that survived the chokeout was proud of the view I was giving them. Firefighter. Rescue brand. The last fire you'll ever regret setting. I'd rehearsed that line in a mirror.
Then the ropes. I felt him thread my arms through, one and then the other, felt the rubber band settle across my chest, and I understood the geometry of it before I understood anything else: bent over the top rope, arms trapped behind the ring edge, face out over my own shoulder for the cameras, ass high and offered. He'd planned this. Not the chokeout, maybe, but this. The front row lost its collective mind and I heard two specific voices in it, one sharp, one breathless, and I thought, through the fog, they're both standing. Both of them. Good.
"Responsive," Nadia said, to herself more than to anyone. I could have told her responsive was an understatement. I was more responsive right now than I had been on any date in two years.
I laughed at him. It came out slurred and it cost me most of my air, but I got it over my shoulder. "Uncle's going to kill you."
"After this he's going to buy you," Bastion said, and hooked my waistband, and the word buy went through me somewhere low and embarrassing, and then his hands were pulling my shorts down and thinking stopped being available.
Slow. That's what I remember most, that he took them off slow, the fabric dragging down my thighs inch by inch while four hundred people watched, the air of the arena cool and huge against skin that had been covered all night, the wet stripe of sweat down my spine suddenly exposed to everyone. Over the curve of my ass, down the quads, one boot, the other, and I hung there in a sports bra and boots and loose suspenders with nothing else, and I was not mortified. That was the surprise. I should have been. I was soaked and half-choked-out and hanging in a ring my uncle's office had booked me into, and instead of mortified I was hungry, a whole-body ache, two years in Phoenix with nobody worth the drawer and this was the thing the drawer was for.
The crowd said what they saw. I heard it. I've been told since there's footage. Fine.
His trunks came down and the noise changed key, and I heard it change and felt my pulse answer it, because I knew what he was carrying, everyone who watched Bea's tape knew what he was carrying, and knowing was different by a full order of magnitude from the first press of it against me, hot and heavy and blunt, sliding through the slick I had absolutely no defense for.
My mouth opened. Nothing came out. Then it did, a long cracked sound that didn't feel like it belonged to me, and I heard myself say "deeper" before my brain cleared the request, and he gave me deeper.
Bottomed out. Thighs flush to mine, both of us shuddering, and the stretch of him was a fullness that rearranged my priorities instantly and permanently. He held there a beat, let me feel all of it, every inch seated in me, my walls gripping down around him like my body was afraid he'd leave. Then he moved.
Slow at first, long dragging strokes that pulled me up onto my toes on the boots and set me back down, the top rope biting across my chest so every thrust dragged the fabric of the bra over my nipples, and that friction stack, him inside me and the rope and the strap, was doing math I couldn't follow. The sounds were obscene and on the mics. I knew they were on the mics. Part of my skull that was still employed noted it and filed it under later problems.
"Still with me?" he murmured.
"Deeper," I said again, because it was the only word with a job left.
He gave it to me. His hips started slapping mine, my ass rebounding off him, cheeks quaking with each impact, the suspended weight of me rocking against the rope, and the half of me that was still barely conscious rode the top of it like a passenger on something much faster than it looks from the ground. My arms strained back against the ring edge and got nowhere and that nowhere was part of it, I'll admit that here because I've admitted it to myself a hundred times since: the ropes held me and I didn't want out. The helplessness was the point. I'd spent two years in control of every match, sandbagging, curating, choosing opponents who were already fired, and the first time in my professional life I was genuinely caught, genuinely handled, my body went thank you.
He fisted my hair. Held my head back so the crowd could watch my face do whatever it was doing, and I hope it was doing something worth the frame rate because I could feel it going, the flush, the open mouth, the eyes rolling back and then fighting to focus on nothing. His other arm hooked under my thigh, changed the angle, and the new angle put him on the front wall of me and I sobbed. Out loud. On a hot mic. In front of my uncle's booking office.
"There it is," Delia was screaming somewhere above us. "She's climbing."
I was climbing. Every stroke was a stair. My ribs heaved against the bra, sweat sliding down the line of my spine into the cleft of my raised ass, my clit swollen and aching and untouched and then, then, his hand came around and two fingers found it, strumming in time with his hips, and the conscious fraction of me got very small and very loud and started screaming the only two things it knew: don't stop, and I'm close.
I said them. Both. "I'm close. Don't stop, don't you dare stop."
"Wasn't going to."
He didn't. He fucked me through the last of it, fingers working my clit, cock slamming that angle over and over, and I locked. Arms jerking against the ropes, back arching as far as the hold allowed, and I came, hard, a scream that broke in the middle into a moan I'll hear in my head on quiet nights for the rest of my career, my cunt clamping around him in spasms I could feel from the inside, whole waves of it, milking him, and I felt him lose it too, felt him jam flush against me and groan low in his chest, and the heat of him pulsing inside me dragged a second, smaller aftershock out of me that made my knees genuinely quit.
Nadia counted it out loud. Her voice cracked on the number. Then the bell.
The cotton came back. Different cotton, softer, aftermath cotton. I hung in the ropes with his spend and my own starting a slow warm shine down my inner thigh, breathing like I'd run my Phoenix matches back to back, and he untangled my arms one at a time, patient, careful, and caught me when I sagged back into him.
"Good match," he said.
"Worth the phone call," I said, and grinned at him, wrecked, and meant every syllable. He didn't know about the phone call yet. He'd know by the drive home.
My handler got a towel on me and steered me to the steps. I picked my shorts up off the canvas on the way and held them over my head, because half the building had booed me at the ramp and I wanted the other half's ovation to sting them properly. My legs shook on every stair. The ovation was real and enormous and I stood in the corridor afterward letting it wash through the curtain, towel around my shoulders, nothing under the towel, and I felt, for the first time since March, honestly and completely awake.
Calloway found me there. Silver hair, photographed composure, jaw working like a man chewing his own ledger.
"Three and one," he said. "Against a record builder I was told you'd dismantle in four minutes."
"You watched the sprawl," I said. "You've known about the sprawl for two years. You knew what was in the drawer."
"I knew what I put in the drawer." His eyes went over my shoulder, through the curtain, to where the Gold Piping was still chanting a name that wasn't his niece's. "The line was minus four hundred."
"The line was right." I toweled off my throat. "He's worth every point of it. That's why I called you Tuesday, Uncle Gerald. I didn't want the record. I wanted to find out if there was anyone on this circuit who could actually catch me." I looked at the curtain. "There's two, maybe. And one of them choked me out in eleven minutes with his reading of my left knee."
"You're not fighting him again for a while. That's management."
"That's management," I agreed, "until you see the buyrate from tonight, and then it's math, and you always go with the math."
His jaw worked once more. He didn't argue, which from Calloway is a signed contract. He left me at the curtain and went toward the office, and I heard Starla and Cassie's voices out in the parking structure feed, both of them talking about Doris in the morning, and I laughed into the towel, because they thought tonight was the loss.
Front row, both of them standing, neither able to sit still, one recording with a shaking hand and one with a fist pressed to her mouth. I'd seen them when he walked me to the ropes. I'd been barely conscious and I'd still seen them, and what I'd seen on both their faces was not concern for me.
I flagged Nadia on her way past, still flushed to the ears, whistle dead in her hand.
"Hey, ref. The chokeout. How long was I actually under?"
"Three seconds, maybe four. He released the instant I called it." She said it fast, defensive, like the answer reflected on her.
"That's what I thought." I pulled the towel tighter. "So tell whoever asks. He put me in the ropes and I stayed. There's a difference, and I want it on the record, and I want it on the tape."
Nadia looked at me for a long second, a professional reading a body, and whatever she read made her nod once.
"Responsive," she said, and walked off, and I headed for the shower with my shorts over my shoulder, already composing the text I'd send at minute nine's next rewatch: worth the phone call, booked it myself, and next time I'm not tapping out to anything but the finish.
The shower didn't help. Her apartment didn't help.
Rylee lay on top of the sheets at two in the morning, towel-dried hair fanned on the pillow, and her body would not file the night away. She pressed a palm flat against her stomach and felt the ghost of it anyway, the stretch of him seated deep, the rope across her chest, her own voice saying deeper on a hot mic.
Her fingers slipped lower. Wet again, easy, embarrassingly easy. She bit her knuckle and worked her clit in slow circles, hips tipping up off the mattress, chasing the exact angle his thigh hook had opened.
"Cocky son of a bitch," she whispered, and came in under a minute, quiet, thighs shaking, his name unspoken and enormous in the dark.
She reached for her phone. The text to herself read: minute nine, rewatch, tomorrow. She changed it to tonight.