Episode 167 · Nothing Held Back

Krista hit the bell.

Now, it turned out, he was afraid of his hands. Every time he threw something, part of him grabbed it by the collar halfway there. His punches arrived politely, like letters.

Tesa had come out without the threes, in the rhythm he had been learning all week. It helped him for about twenty seconds.

Then she began to lie to the floor.

She settled over her back leg and let him feel the plank ease beneath his foot. When he moved to meet the attack, she stayed where she was. His step carried him past her guard, and she touched his bruised ribs as he tried to turn back.

She knows I read the boards. She’s known since the first morning. She’s been saving it.

Then, in the center of the ring, she sagged. Her knees went soft and her chin came up, the way a body folds when a punch from two minutes ago finally reaches the legs. He knew that fold. He had done it himself, on the ropes, with a dead man’s patience in his head.

He did not want to follow anybody down, ever again. He hesitated.

She came up out of it with the hand he had not been watching, and he saw her face as she came. It was not the face of someone springing a trap. It was the face from the mud by the blocks, before either of them had known the other’s name.

She saw me hesitate. She thinks I’m sparing her.

All week that hand had been carried and taped and saved, and he had stopped seeing it, the way you stop seeing a part that never moves. It hit him in the eye with everything the tape had been keeping from her. White light, then water. Through it he saw her good hand already coming. It went into his ribs, and the ropes caught him and held him up when his legs would not.

She did not step back. She stood over him a beat longer than the round needed, breathing through her teeth.

— You taught me that one, she said. About three minutes ago. Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.

Krista hit the bell. Two to one. Tesa turned away before he could answer, and he saw the taped hand shake once before she pressed it to her ribs.

— She drops it afterward, Krista said behind him. The bad hand. She uses it once and puts it back against her ribs. Every time.

He looked across. The taped hand lay in Tesa’s lap like something borrowed.

— And you’re hitting like you’re apologizing, Krista said.

— I nearly—

— You didn’t. I was there. I was counting. Now hit her, Soles. She’d hit you.

— I can hear you, Tesa said from across the ring.

— Good, said Krista.

Maxim held the bottle for Tesa without looking at her.

— For what it’s worth, he said, he’s stopped being scared of you. He’s scared of himself. Personally I’d find that more worrying.

Tesa stood.

— Last one. Nothing held back.

Soles knew what he would do, and it was simple. No pushing. Nobody else’s arms. Close, the way she had taught him at the bag, and turn, and let the hand be the end of the turn. If the strength came, it would go where he sent it and nowhere else.

Krista hit the bell.

They met in the middle. Her feet were true now; when the plank eased, she was really coming. He slipped her left and stayed where he ended up, beside her, close enough to see blood on her lip and the tape fraying at her wrist. His feet wanted to leave. He told them no.

He turned. Back foot on the ball, hip complaining, shoulder, and the glove last, a very short way into her raised guard. The strength came with it. Not all of it, and not someone else’s. Only as much as the turn could carry.

It moved her a full yard. She hit the ropes on the window side, and the top rope tore out of its turnbuckle with a crack like a shot and came whipping across the canvas. On that side, the ring was open to the dark.

Tesa came off the ropes before they had finished falling. Soles backed toward his corner by the mirror, keeping the open side of the ring to his left. She followed and set her feet in front of him.

He looked for the heel, through an eye that was already closing. It was flat. She had fixed the one thing he could read.

So he read the floor. The board eased under her front foot as she turned her whole weight into the punch. He had watched that movement make the bag jump on its chain.

He moved his head just far enough. Her tape grazed his ear, and the glove struck the post behind him, the one with the bell. The post tore away at its base, taking the edge of the old platform with it. Canvas and boards dropped toward the broken corner; the brass bell hit the floor with a long, dented clang.

Krista jumped clear of the apron as it went.

— That wasn’t the bell! she shouted.

— Tell the bell, Maxim said.

Tesa made no sound. She stood on the slope with her good arm hanging dead from the shoulder, and Soles saw it in her face first: the force had come back up her arm, the way it had come up his at the prison gate.

She brought up the other hand. The taped one.

— Thirty seconds, said Krista’s phone.

She came at him one-handed on the slope. The dead arm stayed clamped to her ribs, and on that side there was no guard at all.

There. That’s the door. She’d go through it.

He went in close. Back foot, hip, shoulder, and his own short punch into the place under the dead arm where nothing could stop it. He had decided on the way in how much would go with it.

It was enough. Tesa folded and went down on the slope and slid a little toward the fallen corner.

— One, Krista said. Two.

At eight she was up, swaying, the bad hand in front of her face, her eyes fixed on him.

— Ten seconds.

She came anyway. And he saw it: the guard gone on the dead side, chin up, weight going forward with nowhere to put it. The same opening as the night in the mud, when she had hit before the bell and he had hit after it, with his whole weight, square on her nose.

His hand was already back. He did not throw it.

Krista’s phone played a cheerful little tune nobody had chosen and nobody knew how to change. Under the circumstances, it was the bell.

Soles let his hand drop.

Tesa stopped in front of him with her guard down, and he understood that she was waiting for what had come last time.

It did not come.

— After the bell, he said.

She laughed. It broke off halfway, the way it had that first morning in the gym, and she touched her nose with the back of her glove. Then she held the taped hand out between them.

— This is how we do it.

— After.

He touched his glove to hers. Once, lightly.

— Two knockdowns to one, said Krista, back on what was left of the apron, holding the wrench like evidence. Soles.

— Let the record show, Maxim said, that I was in the losing corner and still had the best seat.

The light came on at the back of the gym. The old man stood there in a cardigan and slippers and looked at the ring for a long time: the rope lying loose, the split canvas, the corner post snapped off with the bell beside it, still faintly humming.

— Who’s paying?

— He is, Tesa said. He won.

— I fix things, Soles said.

— You’d better.

He went back upstairs. Krista was already kneeling by Tesa, asking her to move her fingers one at a time.

Soles looked at his glove. The last punch had not been a push. It had been a turn, and the strength had gone where he sent it and no farther. For the first time since the washroom, he thought he knew what he was taking into that room.

He also knew what else was coming with him. Phenom had not said a word since the second round. Soles did not think that meant he had gone.