Page 16 of Takedown

was fun.

Twenty years old. First time I'd caught myself enjoying my own life with the door closed. The museum voice started up on schedule — this is proximity, this is the season — and for once, that morning, I couldn't hear it over the sound of us.

"Eat something before six a.m. sessions," I said, when we'd recovered. "That's coaching."

"Can't. Weigh-ins Friday, I'm cutting."

"Then we go live for twenty minutes and I'll drive you to the dining hall after and watch you eat a grapefruit like a prisoner. Deal?"

"You're gonna watch me eat. That's the plan. That's the whole plan."

"I'm invested now. You're my project."

"Jesus Christ," he said, but he was still half-grinning, and the room was warm even though the radiators hadn't started, and we went live.

* * *

Live drilling with no one watching is a confession booth. I know that now. I knew it then, too, about four minutes in, and did it anyway.

Because we stopped being polite. The new stance made him faster and he knew it and got greedy, and I got proud, and inside ten minutes we were wrestling for real — not practice-real, real real, the conversation at full volume with nobody to interrupt it. His grip on my wrist saying found you. My level change saying not yet you didn't. Sweat in the cold air steaming off both of us like the room was developing a photograph.

Rex — my grandfather's dog, forgive me, this is what passes for an oath in my family — he was beautiful to wrestle. I've never said that about anyone. Correct men had drilled with me my whole life, technicians, boys with camps and pedigrees, and it was chess by correspondence. Wrestling Danny Kovac was an argument in a burning building. Everything mattered. Everything cost. When he finally hit the new setup on me — clean, no announcement, weight forward, the half-step and then the world tilting — I went down almost happy about it, and he followed me down to finish like the sport demands, and we ended in the oldest position there is: his chest on mine, his forearm barred across me, my hand locked on his shoulder, both of us blowing like horses.

And then neither of us moved.

One second is the position. Two seconds is finishing. Three seconds, in an empty room, at dawn, with no whistle on earth coming to save you, is —

His eyes were six inches from mine. Sweat ran off the end of his nose and landed on my throat, and I felt it slide, and he watched it slide, and the room went so quiet I could hear the seam of the mat under my shoulder settle, and his gaze came back up from my throat by way of my mouth —

by way of my mouth, slow, like a man reading a sentence twice —

The main lights went on. All of them. The room detonated into fluorescent white and we came apart like the two halves of something dropped, three feet of mat between us before my heart had managed one full beat, and Coach Halloran stood in the doorway with his keys in his hand and his thumb still on the switch panel, looking at the pair of us the way he looked at film.

Nobody said anything for a hundred years.

"Setups," he said finally. Not a question. Not anything. A word placed on a table.

"His weight was on his heels," I said, in a voice that had testified before Congress.

"Mm." Halloran hung his keys on the hook by the Ledger, the way he'd done for thirty years, and walked past us toward his office, and just before the door he stopped — not turning around, talking to the wall clock, to the room, to 1908 — "Stance looked better," he said. "Both of you. Team breakfast's at seven. Eat like you mean it, Kovac, you're cutting stupid."

Office door. Click.

Danny looked at me. I looked at Danny. The distance between us was three feet and also the exact width of everything neither of us was going to say with the lights on.

"Grapefruit," I said.

"Shut the fuck up," he said, warm as anything, but he grabbed his hoodie, and he held the side door for me on the way out, and our shoulders touched in the frame because the door is narrow — one inch of contact, cotton to cotton, half a second, nothing, nothing —

I drove us up the hill with the heater on and one inch of my shoulder still broadcasting like a struck bell, and I thought: Friday. Weigh-ins Friday. We cut weight together Friday.

I had no idea yet what a weight cut does to two people. God help me, I was looking forward to it.

Chapter 8 — DANNY

Here's what nobody tells you about cutting weight: it's the one poverty money can't buy your way out of.

I mean that technically. Monday of dual week, Halloran posted the lineup card — KOVAC, 174, in block capitals that ended three weeks of speculation and started my rent clock for real — and the whole room began the oldest ritual in the sport. Forty guys checking the scale like it owed them money. Plastic bottles appearing in lecture halls. The dining hall turning into a chess game everybody loses.