Page 157 of Slashed Bonds

Or our Malice knows how to fight.

She knows how to fight. That’s the finding. I’m on my back on a wet mat with the finding sitting on my groin.

I’m groaning. Not for show. I’m pooped, which is a word I haven’t used since I was nine and am using now because there isn’t a better one. Five rounds. Five, after two hours on the bags and a woman on her knees and a fire alarm, and somewhere in round three she stopped learning from me and started teaching, and I didn’t notice the handover until I was looking at the ceiling.

Drenched. The sprinklers did half of it and she did the rest.

Round one, I talked.

That’s the part nobody tells you about teaching a check. It isn’t the hit. It’s the standing still beforehand, bare feet on a soaked mat, two people in gloves not swinging, while you explain where the body weight lives.

“Hips,” I told her. “You already know that. Say it anyway.”

“Hips.”

“The shoulder’s a passenger. The fist’s a passenger. Everything above the belt is luggage, and luggage doesn’t win fights. Where do you hit a man?”

“Where he’ll be.”

“Where he’ll be. Not where he is. Show me.”

And she did. Stepped in with her weight under her and put a glove on my ribs with so much restraint I nearly laughed, because I’ve watched this woman put a two-hundred-pound defenseman on his back through geometry, and here she was tapping me like a girl at a door.

She’s holding it. She’s been holding everything for five years and she doesn’t know how to stop.

“Harder.”

“You said train, not hospitalize.”

“I’ll tell you when it’s hospitalizing. Harder.”

Round two she hit me.

Not hard. Correct. There’s a difference, and a man who’s stood in a crease for four years can feel it in his sternum. The hips came through first and the glove arrived a half beat later, and I rocked back a step and felt something in my chest that had nothing to do with the impact.

She can learn. Fast. The way she learned the mail-slot gap in my net in one shift and never fell for it again.

I stepped into her then, to show her the other half, the half that matters tonight. A sophomore defenseman on Ashford who pinches. Every tape Cash has pulled shows the kid stepping up at the blue line like he’s late for something, and a winger who steps up late is a winger who can be hit, if the woman doing the hitting arrives at the spot he’s about to occupy before he’s finished occupying it.

“He’ll come at you on the wall,” I said, circling. “He wants the outside. What do you do?”

“Take the wall away.”

“How?”

She didn’t answer with her mouth. She shifted, angled, and when I came in she wasn’t there, she was a foot inside the line I’d picked, and her shoulder found my chest at the exact moment my weight was committed to a step I couldn’t take back.

I went sideways. Not down. Sideways, into the ropes, and I came off them grinning like an idiot.

“That,” I said. “That’s Halvard tonight. He’s going to think the Omega’s soft and he’s going to try the outside once, and once is all you get.”

“Once is all I need.”

Round three she stopped listening to me.

I noticed it later. In the moment I noticed only that my instructions had gone from being followed to being anticipated, and then from anticipated to irrelevant, because she’d started reading me the way she reads a shooter. The hips before the hands. The weight before the step. I’d throw a slow one to teach her to slip it, and she’d be gone before I threw it, and the glove that answered was on my jaw before I’d finished the thought.

She’s reading my tells. The way she read Teller for two shifts in a scrimmage before she ended him. I’m the tape now. I’m being studied.