Page 122 of Filled

Actually winks, bold as a billboard, before strolling to the water fountain like he didn’t just spike my pulse in front of thirty people.

We’re going to get caught in the first ten minutes. I’m going to die in this gym, and my tombstone will read Cruz Bennett cannot be subtle.Death by Pussy—film at eleven.Shit.

Dante comes in a few minutes later, quiet the way he’s always quiet, gym bag over one shoulder. He nods at me in passing. Neutral. Perfectly, infuriatingly neutral, like Sunday morning didn’t happen, like I didn’t say things out loud into his shoulder that I’d been choking down my entire life. I envy him so much my bones ache.

Eli’s office door opens, and he steps out with a clipboard, a whistle around his neck, scanning the floor. His eyes stop on me.

Something flickers there. Half a heartbeat. Gone.

He jerks his chin at me.

I cross the floor, and my heart is doing its level best to climb out through my throat.

“Pads today.” He’s flipping a page on the clipboard, not looking at me. “Basic combinations. Your hands were sharp all camp; I want them staying that way. Nothing heavy this week.”

“Yes, Coach,” I reply.

The word comes out steady. Small miracle.

We set up near the cage, and he holds the focus mitts out for me to help him into them. When I slide the second one over his hand, his fingers graze the inside of my wrist. Just skin on skin, there and gone.

I nearly drop both mitts.

“Jab, cross, hook,” Coach says, and his voice is flat and even, the same cadence I’ve heard a thousand times. “On my count.”

I throw the combination. His hands eat the impact.

“Again. Rotate through the hook, you’re arming it.”

I throw it again. Better. The problem is I know that voice now. I know where it goes when his authority falls away, the register it drops into behind closed doors.

“Cross is lazy. Drive off the back foot.”

Jab, cross, hook. Jab, cross, hook. The rhythm helps. My shoulders start to burn, and the burn begins to quiet some of the static.

Then Dakota laughs from across the mat and my fourth hook sails wide enough to make me wonder if I’m in the right sport.

Eli catches it anyway. He catches everything. He steps in close, one hand settling on my waist to square my hips.

“Rotation starts here. Not your shoulder.”

The correction is textbook. Necessary, even. It also lasts a half second past necessary; his palm warms through my shirt, and my entire nervous system lights up like a pinball machine.

“Got it,” I manage.

He steps back, and there’s a smile so subtle at the corner of his mouth that I almost think I imagined it.

Across the floor, Dakota is drilling takedowns with Dante. I’m supposed to be watching my own footwork. Instead I’m watching Dante’s hands on her hips as he demonstrates the entry, watching her leg hook behind his knee, the two of them dropping and resetting in that smooth, practiced loop. They look like training partners. They are training partners.

They’re also people who I’ve watched fuck, and my brain keeps trying to hold both facts at once and fumbling both.

Eli smacks the mitts together, one sharp crack. “Williams. You with me?”

“Yeah.” I reset my stance. “Sorry, Coach.”

“Eyes on your target.” A pause, barely long enough to register. “They’ll still be here after.”

My head snaps up, but his face gives me nothing.