I was the last of our group to mount the stairs leading up to the plane. The sudden snow that covered half of London was slowly melting, and we were finally on our way to America, much to Earnshaw’s relief. He’d worked hard to get me this fight, and I’m not sure that his stress levels could have taken it if I’d gone through with canceling it.
My hands were buried deep in my jacket pockets, and despite that fact that I had the fight of my life ahead of me, I still hated the idea of leaving Em behind. The night before a test, when she was going through her notes, I always made her tea and toast with chocolate spread. It was kind of becoming a tradition, but who would do that for her with me gone? I swear I worried about the stupidest shit whenever she was away from me. But that stupid shit was marriage. Always worrying about the other before yourself.
I nodded to the flight attendant as I ducked to walk in through the door. We dominated the space as they directed us toward our seats, and all of us looked cocky and confident, as we tried to hide the fact that none of us had been on a long-haul flight before. Hell, most of us hadn’t ever been on a plane before. Even Danny went back to Ireland by ferry. Earnshaw had that relaxed, bored look about him that said he’d flown a thousand times. Tommy managed to hit practically every passenger down the aisle with his duty-free bag, then argued with Liam when he went to put it in the overhead locker.
“What is all this shit anyway?” Liam asked, opening the bag.
“Stuff to do on the flight,” he answered.
“Like what?” Liam replied. He opened the bag, and we all peered in. Inside was Tom’s weight in chocolate bars and a hardback copy of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.
“What the fuck is this?” Liam asked, pulling out the book.
“Em read it and told me it was really good,” Tommy explained. We all looked at each other wondering what it was about chick lit Tommy thought he’d enjoy.
“Jesus, Tom, I think you’re actually becoming a bird by osmosis. You’ve shagged so many women that estrogen is actually being absorbed into your skin,” Liam told him.
“At least it’s got words instead of pictures. Be thankful it isn’t a coloring book,” Kieran added with a smirk as we settled into our seats.
“Oh, I have one of those,” a pretty girl in the seat behind Tommy said, holding up an adult coloring book. Her friend leaned over the seat in front of her and pointed to the book Liam was holding.
“I love that book. Have you seen the film?” she purred sexily at Liam as she spoke and leaned farther forward, giving him an eyeful of her rack. I chuckled as I sat back on my seat and closed my eyes. She was in for a long flight if she was hoping to seduce Liam. Tommy grinned and wiggled his eyebrows at us all. Apparently the female attention he was getting totally vindicated his choice of reading material. If he flashed about that chocolate later, he’d be attracting women like magnets.
As it happened, he was barely in his seat for most of the journey. Like some kid with ADHD, Tommy could never sit still for long. Kieran kept me company for a few hours, watching movies on the screen in front of us, until a kid started kicking the back of his seat. He gave me a look that said he was about to murder him before addressing the mother. “Excuse me,” he said in his politest, most charming voice. “Your son is kicking the back of my seat, and it’s getting really annoying. Do you mind stopping him?”
The bitch looked completely pissed off at been interrupted in the middle of whatever she was reading on her Kindle. “This is a family flight, and if you wanted more distance between the seating, you should have paid for a first-class seat.” Even I turned around to look then.
“You’re seriously going to let that little shit keep doing it?” Kier asked. She didn’t get a chance to respond before he started talking directly to the kid. If this had been any of the gym kids, I knew what I’d do. Then again, I like to think they were too respectful for that. This little shit, who must have been about nine or ten, wore the smirk of a brat who always got what he wanted.
“Next time you kick my seat, kid, I’m gonna take my bottle of water and splash it all over your crotch. Then when you go to the bathroom to clean up, I’m gonna ask everyone to clear a path because my kid brother’s had a little ‘accident.’ For the rest of the flight, you’ll be the kid who pissed himself. You want that?”
“Really,” said the mother, outraged.
“Yeah! Really,” promised Kieran. The kid shook his head no and I closed my eyes again, smiling. Kieran really was something else.
A few hours later, the sun set and most of the passengers were quiet. The boys, having all gotten bored, had disappeared to the back of the plane. I sat listening to Kier’s iPod as I ran through all Temple’s previous fights in my mind, working out what my strategy was. It was the strong cloud of perfume filling my nose that made me open my eyes as a good-looking girl with long dark hair, perfectly manicured nails, and lots of makeup sat down next to me.
“Hi, I hope you don’t think I’m being too forward. Your friends back there didn’t think you’d want to join us but I didn’t want you to feel left out.”
I pulled off my headphones, not wanting to seem rude. “That’s kind of you. But I’ve got a big week coming up, and I’m happy just sitting in my seat and relaxing until the plane lands,” I told her politely.
“Maybe I could relax with you?” she suggested with a tilt of her head. She bit her shiny lip. Why girls did that I had no idea; it had zero effect on me. Actually that was a lie. Em always bit her lip—when she was working out math problems. She had absolutely no idea she was doing it, and it was sexy as fuck.
“Look, I don’t want to seem rude, and you’re welcome to sit here if you’re after a bit of peace and quiet, but I’m probably going to listen to music and try and get some sleep.” I told her. Maybe I was being rude, not wanting to make idle chitchat with a stranger but being rude was pretty much what I was famous for. At least it used to be.
As soon as I went to put my headphones back on, she started talking again. “The guys told me all about your fight. They said that when you win you’re going to be really famous. You must be totally pumped.” Her perfect manicure was waving around excitedly as she talked about the fight.
“Yeah, I guess,” I replied, trying to replace my headphones again.
“Listen, call it fate,” she said, “but I’m in town for two weeks when your fight is on. Maybe we could hook up sometime?” She tucked her hair behind her ear and bit her lip again.
I looked at her and couldn’t help but mentally compare her with Em. My girl hardly ever wore makeup, not because she didn’t need it, which she didn’t, but because I think it never occurred to her to wear any if she wasn’t going out. She told me that waitressing made her nails all dirty so she kept them short and unpolished. Em was all natural, nothing false about her. There was no comparison. It wasn’t this girl’s fault. It was just that I gave my heart away the day I first clapped eyes on Sunshine, and I never wanted it back.
“Look, it’s really nice of you to offer, but I’m married,” I explained, holding up my ring finger. Leaning toward me, her weight on the armrest next to me, she looked down her shirt at her own cleavage, then raised her eyes to me to see if I’d caught the show and whispered, “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
I leaned in next to her to give her my reply. “First time you come on to me, you’re misinformed. Second time, you’re disrespecting my wife. So how about you fuck off back to your seat before I decide to get offended?”
The look on her face told me this had never happened to her before. She flew out of the seat with a mumbled “arsehole,” and I finally got back to my music. I let out a heavy sigh. No way was I traveling without Em again.
* * *
The warm Las Vegas temperature was a welcome relief from the harsh weather we’d left behind in London. Of course, Danny sucked away all of my appreciation for the climate when he started pointing out that Temple had trained for months in this heat while I’d trained in the cold. Eyeing me up and down as we waited for our luggage like I was twenty stone and not two hundred twenty pounds, he grumbled about the amount of work we had to do. We queued for a taxi after getting through customs and when the driver asked what hotel we were staying at, Danny gave him the name of the gym, and the boys all grumbled.
“This ain’t a feckin’ free holiday!” Danny yelled at them. “You wanna go and lie on a nice beach? Fuck off to Spain. You wanna stay and see how winning is done, you pull your weight. Heath is gonna be busy with promotion, so Kieran, you’re Con’s sparring partner, and Liam and Tommy, you’ll run circuits with him.”
To be fair to Temple’s camp, the gym they’d hooked us up with was small but decent. It wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods, but as I shook hands with a few of the local fighters, I had to admit that Southside Gym had the same vibe to it as Driscoll’s. As far as Danny was concerned, jet lag was just a myth, and, giving us ten minutes to change, we were up and working before we’d even learned everyone’s names.
“Right boys. A lot of shit has gone down in the last week. Tough. This ain’t the time for fucking distractions. For the next six days, you’re all gonna eat, sleep, and dream boxing. When it’s done—you get a day off.”
That was it. The end of his groundbreaking motivational speech. Kier and I both grinned as we looked at each other. At least until Danny shouted, “That’s it. What the feckin’ hell you still standing around for. Get to work!”
I went with the same basic routine I followed at home. Only this time, some of the local fighters had in on the action. When I would run, Samuel, their head coach, made me run with a tennis ball. I’d squeeze it and then relax my hand, repeating the exercise for a mile and then swapping hands. I also didn’t run alone anymore, mostly because it was easy to get lost and time was something I had precious little of left. I did ten miles in the morning but Danny replaced the afternoon run with sprints.
We shared the gym with Samuel’s two bull mastiffs named Leonard and Dempsey. When the guys sprinted, they did too, adding a little extra competition. My days were filled with skipping, circuits, hitting tires with a sledgehammer, and punching sandbags. Unlike punching bags, the harder you hit sandbags the harder they flew back at you. Unless you wanted a smack in the head, you had to hit and learn to duck or dodge, fast. I wasn’t used to training in the heat and my muscles knew it. By the end of every day, I was exhausted but felt like I could actually do this.
The friends we made at Southside should have been in Temple’s corner. They were American, after all. But poverty and a certain respect for the sport and the old ways unified us, until they felt as much a part of our camp as the rest of the guys.
Samuel’s wonderful wife, Odell, cooked for us all. She owned the diner across the road from the gym and was used to cooking for boxers. There was no give in the special diet I was on, not this close to a fight. She looked after us in a way a hotel never would. Pretty much the only time we even went back there was to sleep and grab fresh clothes.
Kieran continued to spar with me, but after a day, Samuel put me together with Leon. He was the nicest, gentlest guy I ever met, until you climbed into the ring with him. He was six feet eight inches and built like an absolute fucking tank. What he lacked in technique and footwork, he made up for in sheer blunt force trauma. Nine times out of ten, he couldn’t get near me, and we could only spar for a few rounds before he’d worn himself out. But if he ever caught me, I felt his punch for hours. If ever there was a lesson in staying fast, it was Leon. Soft fucker was always the first one to stop and help me up when he knocked me down though. Made it kind of hard to hate the guy who hit you when he was so apologetic.
Tommy brought the famous soundtrack with him, and the Southside guys mocked us, but after a couple of days, even they were skipping to the rhythm of the same tunes that kept us pumped. Danny still made me do a criminal number of push-ups and hanging sit-ups. They weren’t as much fun without Em to do the counting but she gave me something to think about as I worked through the pain.
Like most fighters, I led with my right hand. My right hook was famous, and Danny always let me lead with it. But he was learning as much as I was. Between him and Samuel, they decided to tie my right hand behind my back before putting me in the ring with Leon. Talk about a crash course in learning to lead with your left. I moved faster and harder between four ropes than I ever had before. Tying my hand was a risk. It fucked with my balance, and there was no need to read me. There was no question of which way I’d be punching, only where. In five hard fucking days, I learned to lead with both arms, and the first time I spared with Kier after that, I was all over him. He’d spent his whole life learning how to read me as a fighter. He knew my form, my technique. Shit, he knew how I’d fight depending on what mood I was in. Now he had no clue where I was coming from, and I knew then why they’d done it.
As I helped Kier up off his arse, we both smiled. Everyone did. There was electricity in the air, like something special was coming. Right now I was the underdog. The one statistically most likely to lose. But that also made me most likely to surprise people. I didn’t need people to love me or believe me. I only needed it from those I loved. Because of Em and these guys, there was absolutely nothing that I couldn’t do.
The only thing missing in all this was my wife. She would have loved meeting Samuel and Leon, and I could almost picture her perched by the ring cuddling and petting Leonard and Dempsey. No matter what I was doing, I called her every night before I went to bed. So far she said the exams were going well. I knew in Em’s code it meant she was fucking acing ’em. She had a gift for math like I’d never seen before. It wasn’t so much that she found it easy, it’s that she could see a beauty in the numbers where other people couldn’t. Maybe it’s why she understood my sport so well. Those of us who loved boxing saw a beauty in the art of the sport, where others only saw violence.
Every day the hole in my heart from missing her grew bigger. By Friday, the tension between wanting more time to train and missing her badly became meaningless. The fight was tomorrow whether I was I ready for it or not.