I was pulling out of the driveway when my phone rang. Unknown number. I hit accept, putting it on speaker as the windshield wipers dragged across the glass, smearing rain and pollen. “Cole?” The voice was loud, bouncing around the cab of my truck—the protein-shake voice. “Derek speaking. This is Derek. Claire called me. She’s crying.” He paused, waiting for me to react. When I didn’t, he pushed harder, his tone dropping an octave to sound more imposing. “You think you can just walk out on her like that? Leave her with the mess. You’re a coward.” I merged onto the highway. The tires hissed against the wet asphalt. “She asked for a divorce, Derek. I’m obliging. You won the prize. Congratulations.” “Don’t disrespect her,” he barked. “You need to come down to my gym. We’re going to sort out this house situation face-to-face. You’re not taking half her equity, you lazy piece of shit. Come down here unless you’re too scared to face a real man.” I looked at the dashboard clock. 4:15 p.m. I had nothing but time. The cold hum in my jaw grew louder, vibrating against my teeth. “Give me the address,” I said.
Derek’s gym was wedged between a discount mattress store and a glowing neon-lit vape shop. The sign above the door read Apex Predator Martial Arts in sharp, aggressively angular red letters. I pushed through the glass door. The smell hit me immediately—a sickening blend of bleach, dried sweat, and the rubbery off-gassing of cheap neoprene mats. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sickly pale hue over the warehouse space. Heavy bags hung from steel chains, swinging gently. In the center of the room, on a raised blue mat, was Derek. He was younger than I expected, maybe late twenties. He had the physique of a guy who spent more time staring at his own abs in the mirror than doing functional cardio. Broad shoulders, a tapered waist, skin shiny with spray tan and fresh sweat. He was wearing an overly tight rash guard and gi pants, a worn black belt cinched around his waist. He was holding pads for a scrawny teenager, barking commands. “Hips! Turn your hips! Snap it!” I walked over to the edge of the mat. My work boots left dull, dirty scuffs on the pristine blue vinyl.
Derek caught sight of me. He stopped the drill, patting the kid on the shoulder, and swaggered over. He walked with that exaggerated wide-lat stroll, chest puffed out, arms hanging away from his sides like he was carrying two invisible watermelons. “Cole, I presume?” he said, looking down his nose at me. He had a couple of inches on my five-foot-ten frame, but his center of gravity was high. He stood too tall, too rigid. “I’m here,” I said, keeping my hands resting loosely in the pockets of my flannel jacket. “What do you want to say to me that you couldn’t say over the phone?” A few of the other gym members, mostly guys with cauliflower ear and tribal tattoos, stopped what they were doing and drifted closer. Derek was playing to an audience. “Claire deserves the house,” Derek said loudly, making sure the echoes bounced off the metal ceiling. “She put the down payment down. You’ve been coasting on her paycheck since you quit whatever loser sales job you had. You sign it all over to her.” “I sell HVAC,” I corrected quietly. “And I pay the mortgage. Has she been telling you I don’t work?” Derek scoffed, crossing his muscular arms. “I don’t care what you do. I know what you are. You’re a weak, pathetic man who couldn’t keep his wife satisfied. Now you’re trying to financially abuse her.”
I watched his throat as he spoke, the way his carotid artery pulsed just beneath the skin. I mapped the distance between us—two feet, a fraction of a second. I could drop my weight, drive my palm into the hinge of his jaw, and shatter his mandible before his brain even registered the movement. The thought didn’t bring me joy. It felt like opening a dusty, toxic box I’d sworn to keep padlocked in the basement of my mind. “The house gets sold. We split it fifty-fifty. That’s the law, Derek,” I said, turning away. “Take care of her. She likes her coffee black, by the way. Don’t put sugar in it. She hates that.” I took one step toward the door before a heavy hand clamped down on my shoulder. “I didn’t say you were dismissed,” Derek hissed. My body reacted before my conscious mind did. The instinct was pure, unadulterated muscle memory. I didn’t tense up. I simply rotated my shoulder, sinking my hips to break his grip, and pivoted, squaring off with him. I didn’t raise my hands. I just stared into his eyes. For a fraction of a second, the bravado in Derek’s face flickered. He felt the shift in the air. He felt the absolute, horrifying absence of fear in the man standing in front of him. But his audience was watching. His ego was a fragile, bloated thing, and it couldn’t let him back down.
“You think you’re tough?” Derek sneered, recovering his smirk. He bounced on his toes. “You want to settle this right now? Put on some gloves. Five minutes on the mat.” “I don’t fight for sport,” I said softly. “You don’t fight at all,” Derek laughed, looking back at his buddies. A few of them chuckled. “Tell you what. Friday night, we have an open-mat exhibition here. Claire’s coming. You show up. We do one round. If you survive five minutes with me without tapping or getting knocked out, I’ll pay her half of the equity myself out of my business account. I’ll buy you out. You don’t show up or you quit, you sign the papers and walk away with nothing.” It was a stupid, legally unenforceable bet born of pure testosterone and cheap movies. But looking at Derek, smelling his cheap cologne mixed with the sterile stench of mat cleaner, I felt a familiar, dark sludge pump into my veins. The utter disrespect. The sheer towering arrogance of a man who thought violence was a game played on soft foam. He didn’t know about the mud in Helmand Province. He didn’t know what it smelled like when a man’s bowels empty after you crush his windpipe in a dark alley in Fallujah. To Derek, fighting was points and tapping out. To me, it was surviving. I looked at him. I let my eyes trace the perfect unscarred line of his jaw. “Friday,” I said. My voice was a gravelly rasp. “I don’t need gloves.” I turned and walked out the glass doors, stepping out into the cold rain. My hands were shaking, but not from fear. The animal was awake, and it was hungry.
Room 114 at the Motel 6 smelled like a decade of stale Pall Malls, frantically masked by industrial pine cleaner. I sat on the edge of a mattress that sagged heavily in the middle, staring down at my work boots. The left one slipped off easily. The right one required me to manually lift my thigh with both hands to ease the angle on my knee. I peeled off my socks and looked at my own hands in the sickly yellow light of the bedside lamp. The knuckles were thick, calloused from stripping copper wire and carrying fifty-pound bags of rock salt, but scarred from older, uglier work. Jagged white lines of split skin and hurried field sutures crisscrossed the backs of my hands. My right knee throbbed in time with my pulse, a dull, rhythmic ache radiating from the microscopic shrapnel fragments still embedded in the cartilage. I walked into the cramped bathroom, turning the plastic knob on the sink. The water sputtered out violently, brown with rust for three seconds before running clear. I cupped my hands, drank from the tap, and popped four ibuprofen dry. Swallowing them felt like swallowing gravel. I was thirty-eight years old. I hadn’t been in a physical altercation since my deployment to Ramadi ended in a medevac helicopter. My body was a depreciating piece of machinery running on fumes and anti-inflammatories. I was heavy. I was rusty, and I was deeply, thoroughly exhausted.