Chapter 17: Unmasked

Dad took Dev and Finn home at one in the morning, and Cal stayed behind to lock up.

I stayed behind with him. Nobody asked me why.

The flagship was quiet, with one bank of lights still burning over the ring.

I sat on the edge of the canvas with my gloves off.

Cal sat down next to me.

"You don't have to decide tonight," he said.

"If I go down those stairs in a hood, Stahl rips it off in front of eight hundred people."

"Probably."

"If I take it off myself, every gym in the city knows the Kilbride joke is a ten-time champion."

"Thirteen."

"Thirteen." I looked at my left hand. "Dev will have to stand in the ring with everyone watching, and know it too."

"He already knows."

"That's different."

Cal said nothing for a while.

He picked up one of my loose wraps and wound it around his own fingers.

"It's yours," he said. "Not Stahl's, not your father's, not mine. Whatever you pick, I'll carry the bag."

"You'll carry the bag."

"I'll carry the bag and you, and the bag again."

"I don't need to be carried."

"I know," Cal said. "I enjoy it."

I took the wrap out of his hands and put it down.

"I'm going down without it," I said. "I'll take it off myself, on the stairs, in front of all of them."

"Good."

"Say it like you mean it."

"I mean it so much that I'm sitting on a boxing ring in the dark with my hands behind my back."

"Why?"

"Because you just made a decision, and you should get a second to feel it."

I turned and put both hands in his shirt.

"I've felt it," I said.

He kissed me.

It was slow at first, and then it wasn't.

He pulled me across his lap on the canvas.

His hands went under my sweatshirt and up my back.