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Brad’s sure there must have been a time when he didn’t go home with scarred knuckles and blood-lined teeth and a pocket full of crumpled bills like some cheap whore, but he can’t remember it much. He remembers his mother dying, he remembers leaving home, and he remembers the war. He doesn’t care to remember much else.
The beer in his broken fridge is warm and the food is rotten, he drinks one and throws the other out, kicks at the empty fridge with scuffed boots and flicks the light switch hopefully. He gets a weak, flickering light, and decides it’ll have to be enough. He runs the tap over his knuckles and rinses his mouth with lukewarm beer, spitting it out into the sink.
He made sixty three dollars tonight, in return for two fights, a black eye and bruised ribs. He figures it’s probably worth it. In his pocket, his phone buzzes. He doesn’t answer it.
-
Nate wakes up sweating, muscles screaming with tension. When he looks at the clock, he sighs, kicks the sheets off and rolls out of bed, padding into the bathroom to splash his face with water. He’s not sure how long he stares at his reflection in the mirror, wondering when he got so fucking skinny, but suddenly his alarm is beeping at him from the other room. He clicks it off and dresses in shorts and an old t-shirt with a hole in the underarm, laces his running shoes and jogs down the stairs of his apartment block. He runs until he can’t feel his legs.
-
Brad goes back to the gym eventually. He walks past it three times before pushing at the door, cautious, like he’s not sure things will be the same inside. He doesn’t know why he thought that. The same, wiry, tattooed, ADHD kid is still sitting at the front desk with his feet up, chewing tobacco like some kind of hick and flicking through a battered paperback book. There are couple of familiar faces in the boxing ring, another at the punching bag, two more in the cage, but even from here Brad can tell they’re new, probably only been training for a couple of months judging by their technique. One of them takes the other’s back just as Ray looks up from his book and his face splits into a huge grin. He spins in his chair and flails his arms in the direction of the guys in the boxing ring. ‘Poke! Poke! Get your Mexican ass up here, the prodigal has fucking returned!’ Brad rolls his eyes and unzips his hoody as Ray bounces over the front desk and they bump fists before hugging, one armed. Brad forgot how small he was.
Poke emerges from the gym floor with a kid that Brad vaguely recognises, and pulls him into a one armed hug as well, slapping him on the back. ‘We thought you were fucking dead, dawg,’ he says, and Brad grins, sharp, and says ‘yeah, so did I for a while.’
Poke introduces him to the new blood, shows him the new equipment (‘Times have fucking changed since you and me, Iceman. It’s all fucking computer operated now, look at this shit.’) and tries to get as much information out of him as possible about where the hell he’s been the last two years. Brad is almost silent, non-committal when he does speak, but he does agree to a couple of rounds of rolling with Poke and Rudy, two of the only guys still at the gym from when he fought out of it. He gets Poke with a triangle choke from back mount, much to Ray’s amusement, and then gets his ass handed to him by Rudy who gets him on his back with a hip throw and then puts all two hundred plus pounds of his weight on Brad’s ribcage, leaves him coughing and wheezing from the choke. He doesn’t realise the whole gym had stopped to watch them until Rudy’s helped him up and challenged him to another round, which he declines. ‘My boy Reyes is still undefeated,’ Poke says, sounding like a proud parent. Brad can see why. They shake hands, and Rudy goes back to instructing, showing two kids Brad can’t remember the names of how to defend from a leg lock.
Poke takes Brad up to his office and they have a beer together. Poke talks about his girls, how he has another one on the way, how his wife is still beautiful and terrifying. Brad doesn’t doubt that. Gina Espera was a semi pro female mixed martial artist when Poke met her, and she gave it up to settle down and have kids with him, but Brad knows she could break his neck with her thighs. It’s not fear, he’d always said to Poke, it’s a healthy dose of self preservation.
One beer turns into three, and turns into a bar down the street, and Poke ends up convincing Brad to come and train with them again. He scribbles up faux contracts on napkins, says he’ll employ Brad as an instructor, that he only fights if he wants to, but Brad wants to fight in a ring again, is tired of fighting in parking lots and warehouses with bad lighting and medics who are just doctors with suspended medical licenses. Poke’s gym has a top rate medic, an ex-army seal that Brad’s known for years and trusts a hell of a lot more than those hacks. They shake on it, and Poke buys Brad another beer in celebration, and he staggers home in the early hours of the morning feeling buzzed, but settled. He’s signing contracts tomorrow, and he can start work the day after. It feels like before he joined the Corps again.
He sleeps without dreaming for the first time in six months that night.
-
Nate’s not really sure how he ended up a high school English teacher, but it’s not the worst job. The school’s in a good area, most of the kids are receptive, his colleagues ignore the fact that eight months ago he was in Iraq wearing Kevlar and a rifle, and that he’s one of the top amateur mixed martial artists in the country. The principal gives him warning looks when he turns up to class with visible bruises, but he’s used to that, dabs them with concealer and wears long sleeves, and no one’s any the wiser. The kids love it, are always asking questions about it, but he thinks it’s less curiosity, more the fact that they hate Of Mice and Men, and true, it’s not what he’d choose to teach, but he’s constrained by the syllabus, so he sucks it up.
He’s teaching when he gets the phone call about Lockdown, and he flinches as his phone buzzes in his pants pocket. He ignores it, and keeps drilling his AP class about The Great Gatsby, and when he checks it later, it’s a number he doesn’t recognise. He checks his answerphone and there’s a message from a Mr Ferrando asking him to call back as soon at his earliest convenience. He calls during his free period in the afternoon, perched on the windowsill of his classroom and finds out he’s been shortlisted as one of eight of the best mixed martial artists in the continental US, and if he wants it, he has a place on Lockdown in Atlanta. He says ‘yes’ before he’s even really thought about it, and as soon as he’s hung up, he calls Mike. Mike Wynn is a lawyer by trade, but also a damn good personal trainer, and Nate’s been working with him for the last seven years, bar the time he’s spent deployed.
‘What do you think?’ he asks, when he’s laid everything out.
Silence on the other end of the phone, before Mike answers in his slow drawl. ‘I think it depends how much you want it.’
Nate thinks about it, really thinks about it. ‘I want it,’ he says, and he can almost feel Mike grinning down the phone.
‘Then I’ll meet you after work,’ he says, and hangs up. Nate looks down at his phone after hitting the end call button, and he realises that he does want it. So much. He loves teaching, and he loved the Marines, but MMA is his. He’s been training since he was seventeen years old, but before that was karate and ju jitsu and Krav Maga, any martial art he could get his hands on. He won his debut bout at nineteen, and he’s only lost seven fights since then. He’s twenty five now, and it feels like he’s been training for this for the last eight years.
-
Brad falls into a pattern fairly easily, rising early to run before starting work at seven. He technically only works nine to six, but anyone who’s committed enough to train at seven am, Brad is happy to work with for free. He mostly does weightlifting, spots for Rudy, who’s there even earlier than Brad. They don’t talk much, or rather, Brad doesn’t, happy to let Rudy keep up a steady stream of chatter about whatever he wants. Brad learns that Rudy’s one of eight martial artists that was picked for a special event in Atlanta in six months, he’s been training for it for the last three. Brad doesn’t know who else is fighting, but they’re going to have to be good to fight Rudy and have a hope of winning.
-
Nate brushes the sweat out of his eyes. Mike’s in front of him holding thai pads and wearing a gum shield and shin pads. Nate flexes his gloved hands and blinks hard, tuning back into the combinations Mike’s shouting at him, left right left right sprawl left right hook uppercut sprawl right knee left left right kick, until he can feel his thighs cramping and the lactic acid burning his shoulders. They break and he sips at water slowly, rubbing the sweat off his forehead with his fingertips. Sweat drips off the end of his nose and he strips his shirt off, wipes his face and chest with it. He looks up to see Mike rolling his eyes as he sips at his own water, rotating his shoulder. ‘Show off,’ he mutters, and Nate grins and flexes, before prodding at the fading bruises on his ribcage from where Mike caught him with a sharp kick a couple of weeks ago.
He gets five minutes break before Mike’s swapping the pads for gloves, and sweeps at Nate’s head, making him spill water down himself. He slides his gumshield back in and flexes his hands again, and slips into the headspace he has when he fights, the one where he doesn’t flinch away from being punched in the face. Mike’s not as fast as him, but he’s stronger, and if Nate doesn’t keep his hands up, he’ll have a hell of a black eye to cover up tomorrow before work.
-
Three weeks before Lockdown, Rudy breaks his arm. It’s no one’s fault, really, he’s rolling with one of the new guys in the gym, a guy they call Manimal, just big enough that Poke won’t let him roll with anyone but himself, Rudy and Brad, just new enough that he’s still using strength instead of skill. He throws Rudy too hard and he lands wrong, and there’s a crunching sound that Brad hears from outside the cage, and Rudy turns grey. Brad’s there in seconds, wrenching the cage door open and hauling Manimal off him, and Ray’s on the phone for an ambulance before anyone else really knows what’s going on. Bryan’s there seconds after Brad is, and he’s a fucking good doctor but there’s nothing he can do apart from coax him into a position that doesn’t put any pressure on his shoulder, and ice it so it doesn’t swell too much.
Bryan goes in the ambulance with him and Poke and Brad follow in Poke’s truck. When they get there, he’s being rolled straight in for x-rays, leaving Bryan in the waiting room muttering darkly that if they don’t know a broken arm when they look at it, they must be fucking morons. Brad drinks three cups of shitty coffee, and Poke paces, getting more and more unsettled until Brad has to drag him outside for a cigarette break, and by the time they get back, they’ve released him, looking pale and spaced out, cast still drying. They drop him off at his place with Bryan, who’s going to fill his prescription for him and stick around for if he needs anything, and Poke drives Brad back to the gym where he’d left his bike. They’re in the parking lot of the gym, both just sitting in the truck still, when Brad says ‘Let me fight in Lockdown.’
Poke looks at him. ‘No way.’
‘Come on, Tony, you know I’m the best fighter out of this gym, excluding Rudy. And since he’s out, if you don’t put a new fighter in, this gym loses its place in the event.’
Poke keeps looking at him, pauses for a few seconds and then says ‘I’ll call Ferrando. No guarantees.’ Brad grins, and Poke repeats himself, ‘No guarantees. And if Ferrando says yes, I want you here training every day until Lockdown. And I get the final say. If you’re not ready, I’m pulling you out. You will not embarrass my gym.’ Brad nods, and gets out of the truck.
Before shutting the door, he leans back in. ‘Thanks, man. Really.’
Poke just nods, and pulls his phone out of his pocket. Brad shuts the door while he dials, and climbs on his bike, watching the truck pull past him before starting it up and heading home sedately.
-
Nate’s hands shake all the way to Atlanta. He’s ready, he knows he is, but he can’t stop them fluttering against his thighs, so much so that Mike threatens to dose him up for the flight, if it wouldn’t interfere with the doping tests. Nate cracks a smile at that, and he manages to calm down long enough to make the flight from Boston to Atlanta.
There are lights everywhere when they land, and there’s a car waiting to take them to the hotel that all the fighters and their coaches are staying at, and Nate shifts his bag from one shoulder to the other and tries not to stare.
They’re checking in when he glances over his shoulder out of habit and he sees a tall blond guy striding across the lobby with a Hispanic man following him, and Nate forgets how to breathe. He’s across the room before he even thinks about it, and he stops in front of the guy. ‘Brad,’ he says, and Brad stops and looks at him, really looks at him, and his eyes widen. The Hispanic guy looks between them, says ‘Brad , do you know this guy?’ and Brad just nods, before turning and walking away in the direction he’d just come, going out the front doors of the lobby and striding off down the street.
Nate runs after him, pushing past people and follows him down the street, shouting his name. He catches up, grabs Brad by the arm and he spins around and punches Nate straight in the jaw. Nate reels, spits out blood and blinks hard to clear his vision. Brad disappears around a corner just as Mike catches up, followed by the Hispanic guy who glares at Nate, and watches Brad vanish.
‘Who was that?’ Mike says at the same time as the other guy says ‘Who the hell are you?’ and Nate’s really sure which one to answer first, so he just says ‘He’s my brother.’
-
Brad’s head spins and he feels like he’s the one who got hit in the face, so he vanishes into the crowds, finds a newsstand and buys a lighter and a packet of cigarettes. He knows he can’t smoke them on pain of death from Poke, so he just turns one over and over in his hands.
It’s dark by the time he makes his way back to the hotel, and he looks at his phone for the first time all day and finds a shitton of missed calls from Poke. He calls him back, and sits through the barrage of abuse aimed at him down the phone. He waits in the hotel bar until Poke storms down in sweats and a t-shirt and drags him to the hotel gym because if he’s going to vanish for six hours the day before the most important set of fights in his career, then he can damn well get some training in now. Brad silently makes his way through the reps while Poke fumes and mutters and fields calls about where exactly Brad had disappeared off to. He’s finally dismissed, covered in a thin sheen of sweat, and he stands in the shower cubicle until his skin is red and oversensitive, and he thinks.
He thinks about Nate, and he thinks about the ten years since he’d last seen him, and he thinks about what Nate called him the last time they’d stood face to face. Brad had been the one who got punched that day, he remembers.
‘You’re a fucking coward,’ Nate snarls, cradling his chest with both his arms like he’s having trouble breathing, like he’s trying to protect himself from something, but it’s Brad dripping blood on the floor between them. ‘Mom’s dying, and you’re going with Dad?’
‘I-’ Brad tries to explain himself, but Nate just talks over him, fifteen and angry at everything, angry at whatever made his mother sick, angry at Brad for not wanting to watch her die.
‘And what about me?’ he says, almost shouting now, and Brad feels sick, right down to the pit of his stomach. ‘What about… us?’ Nate says, and his voice cracks on the last word, and he sounds young, looks young. Brad has nothing to say to that, nothing that isn’t the word ‘sorry’ and that’s what got him punched in the first place.
‘You’re… you’re fifteen years old.’ Brad tries to make him understand, but there are tears in Nate’s eyes now, and Brad doesn’t know if they’re angry or heartbroken, but he thinks it’s both, and that just makes him wish Nate was still hitting him. He understands violence. ‘You’re my brother,’ he says, eventually, and Nate looks at him with furious eyes.
‘I don’t care,’ he says, and he reaches out and grabs Brad’s wrist, curves long fingers around the fine bones. ‘I don’t. Why do you?’
Brad has nothing to say to that. His mouth opens, but nothing comes out, and he closes it again. He twitches his wrist until he’s holding onto Nate’s hand, fingers laced together, and when the car horn beeps from outside and he hears his father shouting his name, he tugs Nate forward and kisses him, sliding one hand around his waist and resting it in the small of his back. He knows he probably tastes of blood but Nate kisses back anyway before backing away and the tears have finally spilt over, clumping his eyelashes together, and his jaw is set in the way that Brad knows like he knows his own face. He untangled his hand from Nate’s and picks up the final bag before he turns and leaves. Nate watches him leave silently. Brad doesn’t look back, but he hears the door close.
His father doesn’t ask him why he’s crying.
The water’s cold by the time Brad steps out, the same ache in his chest that there had been that day. He rubs his face with a soft cream towel, dries the rest of himself and falls asleep on top of the covers wearing boxers and a t-shirt, sprawled across the too small bed.
-
Nate doesn’t sleep a lot that night, tosses and turns in his bed, flicks through the program of the event and wonders at how he hadn’t seen it before. Brad was using their father’s name, he hadn’t thought about that, but then he sees him, Brad ‘Iceman’ Colbert fighting out of San Diego MMA. He doesn’t know how he missed it, he really doesn’t.
It’s three am before he gets to sleep, and even then he dreams about his mother.
He’s woken up by Mike hammering on his door at eight, and he showers and dresses before they head down to the car taking them to the gym the event is in. Weigh-in’s at midday, the first fight is on at six.
‘Where’s your head, Fick?’ Mike says, in the tone that Nate guesses means he’s said it at least three times already, and he realises he’d been staring at the fight card in his hand. His only guaranteed fight is with a Dave McGraw, from a gym in Montana somewhere, and he looks big and mean. His gloves have the American flag on them. Nate doesn’t know what to say to that. It’s the third fight of the day, at seven, and if he wins, he’s fighting the winner of the fourth fight, between Evan Stafford from Illinois and Gabriel Garza from New York, at nine thirty. Nate shakes his head and reaches for Mike’s coffee, held just out of reach. ‘Not till weigh-in,’ Mike warns, and Nate sighs, leans back in his seat and closes his eyes, intending to doze until they get to the gym.
He weighs in at 76kg, which seems to please Mike, because he lets Nate dig into the Tupperware of chicken and pesto pasta he produced seemingly out of nowhere in the hope of putting on a few pounds between now and the fight. He doesn’t see Brad in the weigh in room, and then he’s dragged to the room he’s supposed to warm up in. He eats, does three reps of the bench press and sleeps for a couple of hours. Mike wakes him up at four, runs through drills with him, swapping thirty seconds of skipping with thirty seconds of burpies for ten minutes and then running through reps of push ups, crunches, squats, until Nate’s covered with a thin sheen of sweat. They break for him to eat again, and he showers before stretching and warming up. Halfway through his stretches, the intercom buzzes and calls Colbert and Patterson. Nate vaguely knows Patterson, knows he’s a good fighter. But Brad wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t a good fighter too. He remembers the strength in the arm he’d grabbed in the street, knows Brad held back when he hit him. Nate arches his back for neck bracing and closes his eyes, tuning out the faint buzz of cheering from the audience in the arena.
-
Brad takes a deep breath when his name is called, strips off his sweats and opens his mouth for Poke to slot his gumshield in. He hops one from one foot to the other at the door, and he can see the cage, can see the crowds, can see Patterson already in the cage, pacing restlessly. He’s not as big as Brad, but he’s been fighting longer, he’s probably faster. Poke knows this too, and just before Brad’s name is announced, he tells him to knock him the fuck out. Ray echoes this. Bryan says nothing, just rubs some gel into the bridge of his nose and just above one eyebrow. Brad wrinkles his nose and Bryan grins. ‘You’ll be alright,’ he says, and then they’re calling Brad’s name, and people are cheering, and Brad’s walking down the tunnel with his cornermen behind him and he’d almost forgotten what this felt like. It’s the best fucking feeling in the world.
-
Nate watches Brad’s fight on the TV in his room and he grins when he comes down the tunnel without music, face set. Nate remembers that face.
Brad wins his fight, of course he does, knocks Patterson out thirteen seconds into the first round and doesn’t bother sticking around to celebrate. Mike turns off the TV and Nate finishes his stretches, does more drills, and then Mike breaks out the thai pads. Nate takes his time wrapping his hands and flexing his gloves, throws a couple of practice punches and finishes warming up just before they call his name. He strips off his sweats and steps into his shorts, rinses his mouth out before biting down on his gumshield and pulling his hoody over his head.
Nate wins his own fight narrowly, and suffers for it, twisting his shoulder awkwardly to get the kimura in the third round, and Mike gripes at him in the room afterward, taping a cooling pad in place and telling him not to move his damn arm.
He eats awkwardly, left handed, and Mike moves his shoulder around, checking he has full range of motion. Nate endures it, knows that a dislocated shoulder hurts like hell, and by then it’s time to warm up for his second fight. He missed the fourth fight, doesn’t know who won, but his money’s on Garza. He bounces from foot to foot while he’s getting checked over by one of the judges, strips his t-shirt off and paces in his corner. He doesn’t know why he’s so restless, and then he sees Brad in the crowd, near the back. It’s not a big venue, pretty exclusive and the tickets cost an arm and a leg, so he can see the entire audience, pretty much, and he looks straight at Brad. Brad stares back, and his expression doesn’t change, and Nate knows why they call him ‘Iceman’. Stafford comes stalking into the cage, and he’s small, but Nate’s heard he’s one of the fastest strikers, and as soon as they’ve touched gloves he’s in Nate’s face trying to get his underhooks. Nate’s not a brawler, has always been more comfortable on the ground so he turns, throws Stafford over his shoulder and lands on his knees in side control. Stafford bucks, and Nate nearly gets unseated, but he eventually drags his knee over Stafford’s belly and ends up in mount.
Stafford makes a rookie mistake then, turns to his side and Nate strikes, coils an arm around his neck and falls to the side, hooks his heels around the inside of Stafford’s thighs and gets him in a rear naked choke. Nate’s bigger, stronger, and after two or three seconds of pressure, he feels Stafford tapping on his thigh and he lets him go, bouncing to his feet and he scans the crowd. Brad’s still there, still staring, and Nate looks away, suddenly embarrassed. He accepts the win, the handshake from Stafford and Mike hugs him when he steps out of the cage, but he just feels drained and like he could sleep for a week.
They’re in the parking lot when Brad looms out of the shadows, and Mike steps in front of Nate defensively, but Nate puts a hand on his shoulder, says ‘it’s okay.’
‘He’s not gonna try and hit you again?’ Mike says, glaring at Brad, who says nothing.
‘I can handle it,’ Nate says. ‘Go wait in the car, Mike. Please.’
Mike goes, and Nate turns to face Brad, looks up at him. ‘I saw your first fight,’ he says, and Brad shrugs it off, turns and walks away from all the cars, long legs climbing over a barrier to the closed off section of the parking lot. Nate waits a second, glances back at where he knows Mike is waiting, before following Brad over the barrier.
‘I’m sorry I hit you,’ Brad says when Nate’s caught up. ‘I was shocked, I guess. And then you were there, and I could feel you touching me. I freaked.’
Nate nods, but it’s dark, and so he says ‘I understand.’ Brad doesn’t say anything else, and Nate licks his lips. ‘I missed you,’ he offers, and watches Brad flinch.
‘Don’t,’ he says, rough, and so Nate doesn’t, but he’s starting to get angry and he doesn’t know why. ‘Your technique is good, but you’re too slow with your footwork,’ Brad says, out of nowhere, and Nate bristles. ‘That’s why McGraw nearly threw you, and that’s why you couldn’t pin him, and that’s why Stafford was so in your face.’
‘Thanks for that,’ Nate says hotly. ‘I’m sorry we can’t all knock our opponents out in thirteen seconds.’ He sees Brad smirking faintly in the shadows, and Nate grits his teeth, but neither of them say anything else until
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah. You said that,’ Nate bites out.
‘No, I mean for…’ Brad trails off, and Nate understands, but he’s not going to make it easy for him.
‘For what, Brad? For leaving? For walking out on me, on Mom?’ Brad says nothing, and Nate can feel himself getting angrier and angrier. ‘You know what? Save it,’ he spits, and turns to leave. Brad grabs his shoulder and spins him back round, and Nate has to fight not to lash out at him, and to keep his voice down.
‘Please, Nate,’ Brad says, and he’s pleading, fucking pleading with Nate.
‘You know,’ Nate says, ‘I never realised until today just how much damage you did by leaving.’ He sees Brad move, like he’s been hit in the gut. ‘You know Mom asked for you the day she died?’
‘I…’ Brad says. ‘I couldn’t..’
‘Couldn’t what?’
‘Stay,’ Brad says eventually.
‘Why not?’ Nate demands, ‘What was stopping you?’
‘You,’ Brad says like a confession, and Nate stops.
‘Me.’ It’s not a question.
‘It was all… too much,’ Brad says, hesitant, like he’s feeling his way through the words. ‘You were too much.’
‘So you left.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Brad says, ‘you don’t know-’
‘I don’t understand?’ Nate says, incredulous. ‘You weren’t the only person in that… whatever it was.’
‘Relationship, Nate. Call it what the fuck it was.’ Brad’s getting angry. Good, Nate thinks.
‘In that… relationship.’ Nate says.
‘And you weren’t the only person left alone.’ Brad snaps.
‘No, I wasn’t. But you left, Brad. That’s what it comes down you. You left me.’ Nate’s struggling to breathe evenly. ‘I was in fucking love with you, and you left me.’ He stops, closes his eyes, doesn’t move. Brad is silent. Nate opens his eyes.
‘You were-’ Brad starts.
‘Don’t say that I was just fifteen, just don’t. I was old enough for you to fuck me, don’t tell me I wasn’t old enough to know what love is.’
‘I wasn’t…’ Brad says, quickly. ‘I was going to say…’ He pauses. ‘I don’t know what I was going to say.’
‘That makes a change,’ Nate says, bitter.
‘Don’t do that. Don’t pretend you’re the only one of us hurting.’
Nate turns to leave again, and he makes it almost to the barrier before Brad catches up to him. He grabs him, turns him around, and Nate kisses him, open mouthed and angry, and Brad kisses him back, and he feels like coming home.
-
Nate bites at Brad’s lower lip like he wants to draw blood, and Brad lets him, and eventually it’s Nate who pulls away. Who pulls loose of Brad’s grip, climbs over the railing and back into the floodlit part of the parking lot. He climbs into the car, and even from here Brad can see him shaking with anger, but he just shuts the door and the car drives away. Brad gets a taxi just outside of the arena, he’d told Poke and Ray and Bryan to head back to the hotel over an hour ago, and he rides back to the hotel in silence. His hands drum on his thighs, a nervous habit he thought he’d gotten rid of years ago.
He gets back to the hotel and it’s deserted, just the night concierge looking bored and a few people in the bar. He heads straight up to his room, fumbles the key card and that’s when he realises how tired he really is. He tries again and keeps getting the little red light, and he just blinks when someone opens the door from inside, and he looks up from the handle to Nate’s face. His eyes are red-rimmed, but he’s composed, and he smiles tentatively. Brad tries a few openings in his head, but Nate just moves aside, curls his fingers around Brad’s wrist like he did ten years ago and tugs him gently into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him. ‘I talked to one of your entourage, told him I was your estranged brother, we needed to have a heart to heart, he gave me the spare card.’ Nate says all this in a conversational tone as he unzips his hoody, lets it slide off his shoulders. He pads up to Brad, says, whisper quiet, ‘I want this. Do you?’
Brad swallows. Licks his lips. Thinks about ten years ago. Thinks about Nate underneath him, biting at his collarbone, only fifteen but so good for Brad, good to Brad. He pulls his own hoody over his head and drops it on the chair, and runs a hand over the side of Nate’s neck. Nate leans into it, and suddenly it is ten years ago, and they’re both new and awkward about everything. He drops his hand down so his thumb is brushing Nate’s collarbone, and he tightens his grip enough to pull Nate closer, to pull him into a kiss. It’s softer than before, but Nate still nips at his lower lip, like he always did, and his hands are on Brad’s hips, gripping hard. He’s reminded that this isn’t fifteen year old Nate with soft edges and room to grow, but twenty five year old Nate, all hard lines and angles, not an extra pound of weight anywhere on him and probably just as strong as Brad. Brad presses his thumb into the pulse point under Nate’s jaw and parts his lips with his tongue.
They jerk each other off quickly, brutally, silently, gasping into each other’s necks as they come, and lie tangled while the sweat cools on their skins. Eventually, Nate gets up, and starts dressing. He’s gone, vanishing out the door before Brad can say anything, and so he just lets him go, drops his head back down on the mattress. His phone rings just as he’s drifting off, and he picks it up automatically, smiling as he hears the voice on the other end.
‘Hello you,’ she says, and he feels all the tension drain out of him.
‘Hey,’ he says, softly.
‘We saw you on the TV tonight, didn’t we, baby?’ Gurgling in the background, and Brad chuckles. ‘He would have been so proud, Brad. He would have been right there with you.’
The smile fades, and Brad swallows hard. ‘I know. I know he would.’
‘Do you miss him?’
‘Every damn day,’ he sighs. ‘Listen, I have to go. I’ll call you tomorrow night, after I win.’
‘You’d better. Say goodbye, Maisie.’ The baby says something approximating ‘Goodbye’, and Brad hangs up and rolls onto his side to stare at the flashing on the digital clock.
-
Nate doesn’t sleep much that night, either.
-
Brad wakes up at six am and goes for a run through the streets of Atlanta until he no longer feels like he can’t stop running. He jogs back to the hotel, showers, dresses, and even has time for breakfast before being dragged to the arena again by Poke. He doesn’t see Nate at all, but he watches his fight with Kocher on the screen in his room, watches him get punched straight in the sternum, watches him gasp for breath. Watches Kocher hit him in the back of the head, and accident or not, that’s a foul, and now all Nate has to do to win is stay on his feet.
He does, barely, gets in a couple of good glancing blows and tries for a takedown the third round that only half works but gets him in half-guard, and that’s where he stays until the bell goes, giving him the win by decision, putting him in the final. Something curls in the pit of Brad’s stomach. If he wins against Brunmeier in twenty minutes, he’s going to have to fight Nate.
Someone knocks at the door to his warm up room and Poke answers. It’s a journalist, and Brad’s willing to ignore her until he hears Nate’s name, and he looks up just as Poke forces her out of the room. ‘Mr Colbert, Mr Colbert,’ she says, trying to get past Poke. ‘Is it true you and Nate Fick are estranged brothers? What happened there? What do you think of his performance so far, what do you think will happen should you face him in the final?’ Poke finally shuts the door on her, but she keeps shouting through it. Brad tunes her out, goes back to stretching his back out, and by the time he lets himself think, they’re calling his name.
Brunmeier’s huge, bigger than Brad, and Brad’s not sure he can beat him. He has to though. There are just no other options, he can‘t go back to Samantha and tell her he didn’t win, that he didn’t win the money. That they have no way of paying for the surgery his dead best friend’s daughter desperately needs.
He closes his eyes. Takes a breath. The bell goes.
They touch gloves and he lashes out, gets him square in the nose and follows it up with a kick to the stomach that makes him stumble. Brunmeier goes for a double leg, misses, and Brad snakes an arm round into a Darcy choke. Brunmeier’s got a thick neck, and Brad has to arch his back until something pops, but eventually he gets the tap, and it doesn’t hit him that he’s going to be in the final until he sees Nate in the crowd, standing exactly where Brad was standing last night.
Brad leaves the cage as soon as the door’s open, leaving Poke and Ray and Bryan to follow him back up to the room, where he’s ripping his gloves off and yanking at his handwraps and pacing, and he can’t even explain it, but he’s just so acutely aware of everything that happened in the last twenty four hours and it’s just too much, all of it.
Poke lets him have a small breakdown for about twenty minutes, gets rid of Ray and Bryan and sits in the corner while Brad paces and mutters and occasionally makes loud incoherent noises, but when those twenty minutes are up, Poke grabs him by the shoulders, sits him down, and gives him a Tupperware of noodles and tells him to fucking sit still and eat, so he does, and isn’t sulking, no matter what Poke says. He has about a six hour break before the final, so he eats, showers and then naps until Poke wakes him up for more carbs and yet more skipping.
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Nate doesn’t know why he watches Brad’s fight, but there he is, and he’s about to leave when Brad looks up and sees him, looks right at him, and Nate feels like he should stay. So he does, long enough to see Brad storm out as soon as is humanly possible, and that’s when Nate leaves, heading back to his own room to try to sleep, he’s not going to win anything if he’s so tired he’s seeing double.
Mike turns the TV on while Nate’s eating, and it’s recaps of the fights, and information about some of the fighters and fights, and that’s when it flashes up, a camera poking into a warm up room that he realises is Brad’s, a woman shouting about Brad and him being estranged brothers, and the haunted look in his eyes before the door closes. ‘Nate Fick and Brad Colbert: Brothers?’ flashes on the bottom of the screen, and Nate pushes the food away, ill. Mike scowls and pulls his phone out of his pocket, trying to get through to Ferrando and have the story yanked, but it’s no good, it’s aired, and if Nate’s seen it, so has Brad. ‘Let’s just warm up,’ he says, wraps his hands almost automatically now and tugs his gloves on, shadow boxes idly while Mike straps the thai pads to his forearms and they run through some combinations for about half an hour.
It’s both too soon and not soon enough when Nate’s name gets called, and his hands are shaking again as he puts his gumshield in, rinses it with water and spits into the bucket, and Brad’s already in the cage, not bouncing, not pacing, just standing there, hands by his side, staring straight at Nate just like he always has. Nate climbs in the ring and feels like he’s going to his execution.
The bell goes, they touch gloves, and they circle, hands held up in front of them. Nate feints left, goes right, but Brad’s there, kicks him in the ribs twice and goes for a left hook that Nate barely blocks. They lash out at each other a few times until Brad fumbles a kick and gets knocked off balance, Nate takes advantage and gets his underhooks in, turns and hip-throws him. Brad hits the ground and tangles his legs with Nate’s immediately, gets him in half guard and then somehow guard. Nate goes for the Americano but misses, Brad takes wrist control and twists into a kimura, the same move that nearly wrecked Nate’s shoulder when he beat McGraw yesterday. Nate cries out without meaning to, but he doesn’t tap. Won’t tap, not to Brad. ‘Tap,’ Brad says, slurred through his gumshield. ‘Come on, Nate, tap. It’s over.’ Nate can hear one of Brad’s cornermen shouting to break his fucking arm, and Nate wriggles, ignores his arm screaming in protest and kicks out, tries rolling into Brad to relieve the pressure. ‘Nate,’ Brad says, and Nate ignores him. ‘Nate. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I love you. But this is over. Tap. Tap.’ Brad’s grip tightens and he lifts his hips, and something cracks and it’s like Nate’s been shot. He’s broken bones before, but not like this.
It feels like there’s broken glass in his shoulder, and Brad’s off him in seconds, gripping the other shoulder and lifting him up, getting him on his feet, pulling him into a hug. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’s saying, over and over again, and his voice is tight like he’s going to start crying, and for some reason, Nate focuses on that rather than the pain in his shoulder. The medics are there, forcing him into a seat and icing the joint immediately, telling him it’s not broken, it’s just dislocated, but he’s barely listening, he’s gripping Brad’s hand like he’s oxygen. They fit a mask over his mouth and he breaths slowly, in and out, in and out, and they relocate his shoulder right there, but still all he cares about is Brad saying ‘I love you, I’m sorry,’, over and over, like he can’t say anything else.
‘I love you. I’m sorry.’