Page 143 of Filled

Nobody elaborates. Nobody needs to.

We lie there a long time, tangled and sweat-slick, breathing in a rhythm that gradually syncs. Eventually Cruz’s stomach growls loud enough to make Dakota laugh, and someone says the word pizza, and the ordinary machinery of five hungry people starts to turn again.

But I don’t move yet. I stay right here in the center of them, riding the double high—the win in the cage and the bigger one, the one nobody announced, the one where I’m finally exactly where I belong.

31

DAKOTA

The morning session ends the way they all do now—Eli calling time, fighters peeling off toward the water fountains, the smell of sweat hanging thick under the warehouse rafters. I towel off the heavy bags and take inventory of my hands. The wraps are shot. Frayed at the wrists, gray where they used to be white, and I’ve been meaning to replace them for a week.

The equipment closet sits in the back corner, past the grappling mats, a door most people forget exists. I slip inside and pull the chain on the bare bulb overhead. Shelves crowd both walls—boxes of tape, spare sixteen-ounce gloves, jugs of mat cleaner, and somewhere up top, the hand wraps.

I’m stretching for the box on the highest shelf when the door opens behind me.

It clicks shut. Soft. Deliberate.

I don’t need to turn around. I know the way he takes up space, the heat that comes off him like he runs three degrees hotter than everyone else.

Cruz leans against the door, arms crossed, wearing that cocky grin.

“We shouldn’t,” I say.

“I know.” He pushes off the door.

“Cruz. There are forty people out there.”

“Thirty-eight. Jonah left early and Micah’s at physio.” His hands find my hips. “I counted.”

“That’s not the point,” I protest.

“Sweetheart.” He walks me back a step, and the shelf edge presses into my spine. “I have kept my hands off you for eight hours a day, five days a week, for two weeks. I helped you stretch yesterday and had to think about tax brackets the whole time. I’m dying out there.”

“You’re dramatic out there,” I state.

“Both things are true.” He kisses me before I can build another argument, and every argument I had dissolves.

Two weeks of nothing but glances across the gym floor other than at night, of his fingers grazing mine when he hands me a water bottle, of watching him coach deadlifts with his forearms flexing and pretending I’m looking at the barbell. It all catches up to me at once. I grab the front of his shirt and pull him in.

He groans into my mouth.

I break away long enough to hiss at him. “Quiet.”

“You’re the one who moans,” he whispers.

“I do not?—”

His hands slide under my sports bra and I make a sound that proves him right. His palms cover my breasts completely, rough and warm, and my head tips back against the shelf. A box of athletic tape shifts somewhere above us.

This is insane. The door doesn’t lock. Anyone could need tape, wraps, or cleaner. Marco restocks the coaching bags on Wednesdays. Victor does inventory whenever the mood strikes him.

Cruz drops to his knees.

“Cruz—”

“Shh.” He hooks his fingers in my leggings and drags them down with my underwear in one pull, all the way to my ankles. “You said quiet.”

“I hate you,” I protest.