Chapter 403 | A Rattle in the Engine

Chapter 403: 403 | A Rattle in the Engine

Six-thirty in the morning at Iron Coast smelled like every other six-thirty in the morning at Iron Coast, which was to say it smelled like a decision Jordan’s body kept regretting and making anyway. Rubber and iron and industrial cleaner and the faint ghost of somebody’s protein fart from the day before. He wrapped his hands at the edge of the mat, looping cotton around his wrist with the muscle memory of three weeks that felt like three years, and tried not to think about the fact that thirty-four percent of him had shown up to spar with a professional fighter who read him like a spreadsheet with a grudge.

Maya was already in the ring. Of course she was. She was always already in the ring, like she got dropped there by a helicopter at four in the morning and just decided to stay.

She wore black compression shorts and a dark sports bra and her hair in the braid that hung down her spine like a warning label. Sweat already sheened across her shoulders. She’d been at the bag for at least twenty minutes, and every man in the building had found a reason to face her direction while pretending to stretch.

"You’re moving wrong," she said, before he’d even gotten through the ropes.

"Good morning to you too."

"You favored your left the whole way across the mat." She caught the bag mid-swing and stilled it with one hand. Dark eyes tracked down his body, clinical, cataloging. "Hip. You did something to your hip."

Jordan opened his mouth to lie.

"Don’t," Maya said.

He closed his mouth.

She let the bag go and settled into her stance, weight forward on the balls of her feet, chin tucked, the whole thing so economical it looked less like a martial art and more like a natural law. "Whatever you did this weekend, you did too much of it. That’s fine. Bodies recover. But you show up here at thirty percent, I train you at thirty percent, and then I find the other seventy and I take it."

That was, Jordan reflected, the single most terrifying sentence anyone had said to him this month, and this month included a magical phone offering him a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to emotionally dismantle his ex.

"Cool," he said. "Great. Love that for me."

THWAP.

Her jab caught his guard before his brain finished the sentence, and the impact traveled down his forearm and settled into his teeth. Not hard. Controlled. But it rearranged his understanding of how awake he was.

"Faster," Maya said. "Your hands are asleep."

"My hands walked twenty-two miles this weekend."

"Your hands don’t walk." Another jab, this one to the body, a soft graze against the ring of teeth marks Kumiko had left on his left pec. Maya’s eyes flicked to it. One millimeter of pause. Then nothing. "Reset your stance. You’re leaning."

The thing about Maya was that she didn’t care. Not in the cold way, not in the mean way. She simply operated on a plane where Jordan’s social life, his Instagram, his two girlfriends and the third one texting him from a Newport estate, and the towel photo that had rearranged Kyle’s entire model of reality, all of it registered at exactly zero relevance. In Maya’s ring, Jordan was a body with a rattle in the engine, and she was going to find the rattle and beat it out of him whether he liked it or not.

He found it weirdly restful. Which said something deeply broken about him that he chose not to examine at six-thirty in the morning.

They went three rounds. By the second, his lungs had stopped complaining and started participating. By the third, something clicked into the space behind his ribs, the same click he’d felt on the twelfth jab his first day, the click that meant his body had stopped asking permission and started just doing the thing.

Maya threw a feint. His guard didn’t move.

She stopped mid-motion, fist frozen a foot from his jaw, and for a second the whole gym went quiet in the way rooms went quiet when something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen.

"You read that," she said.

"I read that."

"How."

Jordan lowered his hands and rolled his shoulder, the purple bruise pulling under the skin. "Honestly? No idea. Your left elbow drops a hair before you fake. Or maybe I’m just really smart and handsome and gifted. Could be either."

The joke sat there and died in the sweat-thick air, because Maya Santos did not laugh at jokes, and Jordan had learned this and kept trying anyway, because a man had to have hobbies.

She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. Studied him. That look again, the one that started clinical and traveled somewhere Jordan didn’t have a filing category for.

"Nobody reads my feint in a month," she said. "You’ve been here three weeks. Genetics don’t do that. Effort doesn’t do that." A beat. "So either you’re lying to me about something, or you’re the most interesting problem I’ve had in this ring in two years, and I don’t know which one I hate more."

"Can it be both?"

"Wrap it up," she said, ducking through the ropes. "Thursday. Dirty boxing. Close range." She grabbed her towel off the post, and the muscle in her back shifted in a way that Jordan filed away and immediately un-filed because his life had enough complications without adding a woman who could put him in the hospital.

She paused at the edge of the mat.

"That mark on your chest." Her voice didn’t change. Flat as ever. "Somebody’s got a temper."

Then she walked to the women’s locker room, braid swinging, and left Jordan standing in the ring with a heartbeat that had nothing to do with cardio.

Kyle materialized at ringside holding two water bottles and the expression of a man who had watched the whole thing and would be unbearable about it for the rest of his natural life.

"So," Kyle said.

"No."

"I didn’t even ask a question."

"You had a question face. I could see the question forming. The answer is no."

Kyle handed him a bottle. "She noticed the bite mark."

"She noticed my form was garbage."

"She noticed the bite mark," Kyle repeated, with the patience of a man laying out evidence, "and then she said something about someone having a temper, and then she left before you could respond, which is a move, Jordan. That’s a whole move. My cousin’s wife did the exact same thing three weeks before they got engaged."

"Your cousin’s wife could kill me with her thumb?"

"No, but the principle transfers." Kyle drank half his water in one pull. "You’ve got two girlfriends, a scary boxing lady doing whatever that was, and Alexis Van Der Berg texting you at midnight. I want you to know that when this all collapses, and it will collapse, I’m going to say I told you so, and then I’m going to help you move, because that’s what friends do."

Jordan cracked the bottle open and drank. His hip throbbed. His pec throbbed. The bruise on his shoulder throbbed. Every input in his body was a small red light saying you did too much and he agreed with all of them and would do it again.

"It’s not going to collapse," he said.

"That’s what my cousin said."

"Your cousin sounds like an idiot."

"My cousin," Kyle said, "is a happily married man with a mortgage, so." He clapped Jordan on the good shoulder. "Come on. You’re benching the bar today and you’re going to like it."