Chapter 432 | My Ring is My Ring

Chapter 432: 432 | My Ring is My Ring

Jordan grabbed his hand wraps from the bag and started wrapping his left hand, looping the fabric around his wrist and through the fingers the way Maya had shown him three weeks ago. The cotton was still damp from Thursday’s session. He didn’t mind anymore. The smell of old sweat and rubber had become associated in his brain with the specific feeling of not thinking about anything except keeping his hands up and his chin tucked. Which was exactly what he needed right now.

"I’m heading to Maya’s class," Jordan said.

"Tell her I said hey."

"She doesn’t care that you said hey."

"I know. Tell her anyway. It’s the principle."

Jordan walked through the connecting hallway between the rec center’s main floor and the combat room where Maya held her morning sessions. The space was smaller than the weight room, with padded walls on two sides and a boxing ring occupying the center. Heavy bags hung from ceiling chains in a row along the far wall. The floor was black rubber that absorbed impact and smelled like it had been cleaned with something industrial approximately one time in the last calendar year.

Maya Santos stood in the ring with her back to the door, her long black braid hanging between her shoulder blades like a cable. She wore black compression shorts and a sports bra that left the architecture of her back fully visible. Every muscle group was defined with surgical clarity. Her traps, her lats, her rear delts, the deep groove of her spine, the sharp ridges of her obliques where they met her waistband. She held a skipping rope in both hands and turned it with a rhythm that made the rope invisible, just a continuous hiss of braided leather against rubber.

Jordan ducked through the ropes and settled into his corner. He finished wrapping his right hand, pulled on his sixteen-ounce training gloves, and waited.

Maya let the rope slow and stop. She turned.

Her dark eyes swept from Jordan’s gloves to his face. They paused on his neck for one-point-two seconds, which meant she’d clocked the bite mark Kumiko had refreshed last night through the collar of his henley. She didn’t comment on it. She never did. But she saw everything.

"McKnight. You’re one minute early."

"I’m always one minute early."

"You’re one minute early because you know I’ll make you run laps if you’re late and you fear the laps."

"I respect the laps."

"Same thing." Maya coiled the rope around her forearm and set it on the ring post. "Wrap check."

Jordan held out both hands. Maya took his left wrist without ceremony and turned it, checking the tension across his knuckles and the padding over the metacarpals. Her fingers were warm and calloused and strong enough to crack walnuts. She squeezed twice, testing the give, and released.

"Right."

He offered his right hand. Maya repeated the inspection with the same focus she brought to reading his footwork. She found a gap between his ring and middle finger where the fabric had bunched instead of laying flat.

"Rewrap this. You’ll bruise your fourth knuckle."

Jordan pulled the wrap loose and started over. Maya watched him do it, her arms crossed and her weight shifted to one hip. The pose should have been casual. On Maya, nothing was casual. Every position she occupied in space felt like a decision to allow that space to continue existing around her.

"How’s the hip?" she asked.

"Better. Still tight on the lateral rotation but the range is back."

"We’ll test it. Three rounds today, then pad work." She paused. "You ate breakfast?"

"Eggs. Rice."

"Good." Maya stepped to the center of the ring and settled into her stance. The transition happened in under a second, like a light switch being flipped. One moment she was a twenty-year-old woman standing in a gym with her braid over her shoulder. The next she was something else entirely, something that moved through space with the coiled readiness of an animal that had never once in its life been prey.

Jordan finished the rewrap, checked it, and met her in the center.

They touched gloves.

Maya threw a jab that he saw leave her shoulder, tracked through the air, and felt land on his guard before his hands could do anything about the information his eyes had provided. The impact jolted his forearms. She followed with a cross to the body that he managed to block, barely, and a hook that he slipped by rotating his torso the way she’d taught him last Thursday.

"Better," Maya said, and threw four punches in the time it took him to process the compliment.

They worked for eight minutes. Jordan’s world narrowed to the ring canvas, the sound of leather on leather, and Maya’s dark eyes tracking his weight distribution with the attention most people reserved for car accidents. He threw combinations. She countered. He attempted a body hook that she parried with her forearm and answered with an uppercut she pulled an inch from his chin.

"Guard." Her voice carried no heat.

Jordan raised his guard.

His phone rang.

The sound came from outside the ring, muffled by his gym bag on the bench. Not a text notification. An actual phone call. The ringtone was the default Apple tone, which meant it was someone who wasn’t in his contacts with a custom sound. Which meant it was either a spam caller or Cassie using a different number.

Jordan’s eyes moved.

Maya’s fist didn’t.

The body shot landed clean on his floating rib, below his guard and above his hip, in the exact spot where a bruise from last Thursday had faded to a pale yellow-green smudge. The impact sent a bolt of white through his torso. Jordan folded sideways, caught the rope with one glove, and gasped.

"Hhkkk..."

Maya stood three feet away with her fists still up and her expression unchanged. The phone continued ringing from the bench. Four rings. Five. Voicemail.

"Your phone," Maya said.

"I noticed."

"You noticed it during a combination. You turned your head. Your guard dropped. Your weight shifted to your heels. I could have put you on the canvas."

"You did put me on the canvas. The canvas is where I currently live."

Maya dropped her hands. "Twenty burpees."

"I just did twenty burpees with Kyle."

"Now you’re doing twenty with me. And mine count."

Jordan pressed his glove against the spot where her fist had landed. The rib beneath throbbed with each heartbeat. Tomorrow it would be purple. The day after, it would hurt to laugh, to sneeze, to roll over in bed when Chloe stole the blanket.

He climbed through the ropes and started the burpees on the floor beside the ring. Down. Chest to ground. Push up. Jump. Repeat. Maya watched from the apron with one forearm resting on the top rope and her braid hanging over the edge.

"Who called?" she asked on rep six.

Jordan hit the floor, pushed up, and jumped. "My sister."

Maya’s eyebrow moved one millimeter. This was the equivalent of a standing ovation from anyone else on the planet.

"You have a sister."

"She works in finance in San Francisco. Now she’s flying down again Thursday to interrogate me over coffee."

"Forty-seven."

"She’s thorough." Rep eleven. Jordan’s quads screamed. "She’s also five-nine, has a black bob that’s never had a single hair out of place in her entire life, and she can end a conversation with a smile that makes grown men question their career choices."

Maya said nothing for three reps. Jordan finished fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, each one slower than the last. His lungs felt like they’d been scraped with sandpaper.

"So don’t answer the phone in my ring."

"That’s your takeaway?"

"My ring is my ring. Your sister is your problem." Maya straightened from the ropes. "Your family doesn’t understand what’s happening to you. They see the result and they can’t trace the cause. The cause scares them because they can’t control it."

Jordan stopped on rep seventeen, breathing hard, sweat dripping from his jaw to the rubber floor. He looked up at Maya.

She looked down at him with the same flat expression she wore while breaking down his footwork and adjusting his guard. No warmth. No coldness. Just observation.

"My father thought I was on drugs," Jordan said.

"Are you?"

"No."

"Then finish the burpees and get back in the ring."