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But I can still feel where Eli was inside me an hour ago. Still carry the ghost of Brady’s hand on my back, Dante’s arms around me, Cruz’s laugh vibrating through his chest against my cheek.

Eight hours. We just have to make it eight hours.

I pull on my hand wraps and get to work, pretending my heart isn’t across the gym with four men I fall deeper in love with every single day.

28

CRUZ

The gym after dark is a different animal.

The fluorescent lights hum overhead, half of them switched off, throwing long shadows across the mats. The heavy bags hang still. No music, no coaches barking corrections, no smack of gloves on pads. Just me and Brady in the cage, and the sound of our breathing, and the squeak of skin on vinyl every time one of us shoots for a takedown.

“Again,” Brady says, wiping his forehead with the hem of his shirt. “I keep losing the underhook.”

“You keep losing the underhook because you’re muscling it. You’re a striker, man. Stop trying to out-strength me.”

“Easy for you to say. You bench small cars for fun.”

“Flattery gets you nowhere. Hips first, then hands.”

We reset. He shoots, I sprawl, and we scramble across the mat in a tangle of limbs and sweat. His fight is around the corner, and his ground game is the hole in his armor, so when he asked me to stay late, I said yes before he finished the sentence. That’s what teammates do.

That’s what I told myself, anyway.

Forty minutes in, I start noticing things. The way his fingers curl into my shirt and stay there a beat past useful. The hitch in his breath when I climb his back to demonstrate the choke. Grappling is intimate by design, bodies stacked and locked and grinding for position, and normally I can flip the switch that keeps it technical. Normally.

Nothing about the last few weeks has been normal.

“Rear naked,” I say, sliding my arm under his chin. “Same one you finished Ortega with. Feel where my elbow lines up?”

“Yeah.” His voice comes out rough.

“Now defend it.”

He fights the grip, chin tucking, hands hunting for my wrist, and he’s good, he’s fast, but I’ve got fifty pounds and a decade of dirty tricks on him. I sink the choke slowly, controlled, my chest flush against his spine, my legs hooked around his hips. He taps my forearm twice.

I don’t let go.

He doesn’t make me.

We stay like that, locked together on the mat, his back against my chest, his pulse slamming against my forearm like it’s trying to punch through the skin. The cage feels smaller than it did an hour ago. The whole gym does. I can smell his sweat and the fabric softener on his shirt and underneath it justhim, and my arm isn’t a choke anymore. It hasn’t been for a few seconds now.

Brady turns his head. His temple is slick, his pupils blown so wide the blue is only a halo around black, and I watch the exact moment technique leaves his brain entirely.

He kisses me.

No hesitation, no question mark at the end of it. Brady doesn’t do anything halfway once he decides—I’ve got the bite marks to prove it—and his mouth crashes into mine hard enough to knock a sound loose from my chest. My brain whitesout. Then I’m kissing him back, my arm curling around his neck, pulling instead of controlling, and he twists in my grip until we’re chest to chest on the mat, breathing each other in.

We break apart, gasping.

The gym hum rushes back in. The empty gym. The two of us. Alone.

I watch it hit him. His whole body goes rigid against mine, and his eyes do that thing they do right before he spirals, flicking toward the cage door like the others might materialize there with judgment on their faces.

“Cruz. We just—the others aren’t?—”

“Hey.” My hand comes up, cupping the back of his neck before the panic can dig in. “Don’t you dare apologize.”