Kiva’s Fight Journal

[Kiva]

Thank you all again for your comments, likes, or if you read and enjoyed it. I noticed that the concept of two women fighting in front of their husbands is a favorite fantasy here, with the presumption of great sex for the couples, especially the winner. This story was me having fun with this idea by throwing in a twist. Kiva (fictional) had to find a surrogate husband and chose a very trusted gay friend partly because she expected him to not be interested in post-match sex with her. Of course, it backfired when she underestimated the powerful aphrodisiac effect of victory, and she was stuck with a dud in bed. Did you catch the self-deprecating line: "A fiction writer never would come up with this."

I like the Calvin character. I don't mean to promote the stereotype of male nurses as gay. I've had many gay colleagues. I've also worked with many guys with wives and kids. I've had special friendships with some of them over the years like I described in Part 1. Calvin is a composite of those guys. Great humans. Great nurses.

[The speech prof]

Thank you all again for your comments, likes, or if you read and enjoyed it. I noticed that the concept of two women fighting in front of their husbands is a favorite fantasy here, with the presumption of great sex for the couples, especially the winner. This story was me having fun with this idea by throwing in a twist. Kiva (fictional) had to find a surrogate husband and chose a very trusted gay friend partly because she expected him to not be interested in post-match sex with her. Of course, it backfired when she underestimated the powerful aphrodisiac effect of victory, and she was stuck with a dud in bed. Did you catch the self-deprecating line: "A fiction writer never would come up with this."

I like the Calvin character. I don't mean to promote the stereotype of male nurses as gay. I've had many gay colleagues. I've also worked with many guys with wives and kids. I've had special friendships with some of them over the years like I described in Part 1. Calvin is a composite of those guys. Great humans. Great nurses.

If people are getting upset about a story on freecatfights.com, then you are lost

[Kiva]

Chapter: The Woman Who Kept Walking (Part 1 of 2)

I closed my eyes and I could make it real
And feel it one more time

Can you hear it, babe
Can you hear it, babe
From another time, from another place
Do you remember it, babe

And the radio played like a carnival tune
As we lay in our bed in the other room
When we gave it away
For the sake of a dream in a penny arcade
If you know what I mean
-Neil Diamond

I slow down on the sidewalk as the crowd surges around me. Yellow taxis honk up the avenue; buses hiss to a stop at each corner. Countless voices blend together. It's that familiar Manhattan noise I haven't heard in years.

For a moment, I just stand.

I live in Texas now. I'm a nurse. My conference badge is tucked into my pocket. But I still feel like the little girl who pressed her nose to the train window as the skyline came into view.

Back then, Manhattan was magic. My parents took the family on the train down here every December as an annual pilgrimage. I'd step into the cold and feel swallowed by buildings that blocked the sky. We'd wander through Central Park, then drift toward the huge glowing tree at Rockefeller Plaza. My father would lift me onto his shoulders so I could see the lights above the crowd.

And there was always FAO Schwarz, where the toys seemed bigger than life. I smile at the memory as the light changes and I cross.

Now I'm here for a different purpose. A nursing conference. Tomorrow, I will stand in a ballroom of healthcare professionals giving a talk titled Nursing Care of the ECMO Patient, trying to make extreme life-support situations sound both practical and hopeful.

Hardly the stuff of childhood dreams.

I planned this carefully: three extra days in the city after the conference. No hospital shifts. No erratic sleep patterns and night alarms. No custody schedules. Clarissa is back in Texas with her father, already texting me pictures of the school art project she finished this morning. I made Tom promise to keep Jeanne out of the picture while I'm gone.

The thought of Jeanne tightens my chest, but the city doesn't leave much room for lingering self pity. Manhattan pushes forward constantly, you either step into the current or get swept aside by.

So, I step into it.

The sidewalks bustle with lunchtime energy. Glass storefronts mirror passing strangers and the buildings climb forever. Everything feels alive--louder, brighter, faster than my quiet Texas neighborhood. This is the electricity I remember, the sense that anything might happen if you just keep walking.

I slip my hands into my coat pockets and let the avenue carry me like a current. I follow the tide north until the buildings open into a fairy tale kingdom of light.

Times Square.

I laugh under my breath. It's as impressive as I remember. Giant digital billboards blaze over the crowds in gaudy colors. Tourists stop in the middle of the sidewalk and stare up while irritated New Yorkers move around them. Music from street performers mingles with traffic and voices.

When I was little, this place felt like stepping inside a television. My parents made a game of trying to spot celebrities. My father joked that I was so cute, if I stood still long enough, someone would discover me and put me in a commercial.

Now I stand alone in the middle of it, smiling at the memory.

Clarissa's latest message buzzes in my pocket--probably another photo or a misspelled text I'll never delete. I slip the phone back into my coat. I'll answer in a few minutes. For now, I stay in the moment--just a woman wandering Manhattan with no particular place I have to be.


That freedom feels strange.

I leave Times Square and continue north. Block by block, the noise becomes calmer. Sleek glass towers rise higher and higher; reflections off buildings stretch into the stratosphere.

Billionaires' Row.

I tip my head back, trying to follow the buildings to their peaks. The towers are so tall they fade  into afternoon haze. Somewhere hundreds of feet above the sidewalk, someone's living room overlooks the whole city. I imagine someone drinking coffee in a quiet kitchen while Manhattan roars below like an anthill.

It's another thought that makes me smile.

I've spent most of my adult life on hospital floors and in ICUs, surrounded by beeping machines, monitors, and ventilator circuits flowing life through plastic tubing. It's the familiar, fragile balance of keeping someone alive one careful adjustment at a time.

Standing here now, feeling tiny by the towers and the city's restless energy, I feel something I haven't felt in a long time.

Possibility.

I don't know what to expect from the next few days, but for the first time since the divorce filings, the future doesn't feel like something I brace against. It feels like something I can walk toward.

I keep going, eyes drifting up the glass and steel of Billionaires' Row. The buildings look less like architecture and more like monuments to ambition--or greed.

I'm so busy looking up that I nearly collide with someone coming the other way.

"Oh--sorry!" I say, stepping back.

He steadies his coffee before it spills. For a second, we both wear the polite, distant expressions of strangers in a crowded city.

Then his eyebrows lift.

"Kiva?"

My heart skips in the strangest, disorienting way. "Craig?"

We stare at each other for  moment, both of us laughing softly in disbelief.

Craig looks older--mid thirties instead of eighteen--but the changes are subtle. His hair is shorter, and there are new lines at the corners of his eyes. The confidence is the same. He still has that sharp, observant look from our high school days.

"Well," he says, shaking his head. "I did not expect to run into you here today.


"Neither did I," I say. "What are the odds?"

He glances up at the massive buildings. "Actually, for me, higher here than most places."

"You're still in finance, aren't you?"

He laughs. "You remember that?"

"How could I forget? Your nickname was literally Money Boy."

He groans, smiling. "I hoped that died a quiet death sophomore year."

"Not a chance."

He takes a sip, studying me with curiosity. "So, what brings you here? Last I recall, you were headed to Yale for nursing."

"I did. I'm a critical care nurse in Texas now. I'm here for a conference. I'm giving a talk tomorrow."

"Really? What's the topic?"

"Nursing care of the ECMO patient."

He blinks, processing. "I'm going to pretend I know exactly what that means," he says.

I laugh. "Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. It's a life support device for patients when even a ventilator won't keep them alive.

"Ah," he says, nodding. "That sounds... significantly more important than what I do."

"I doubt that."

"Well," he says with a shrug, "I manage hedge funds. Or technically, I do it for a firm that does. Lots of spreadsheets, lots of numbers, lots of people pretending they know what the market will do tomorrow."

I tilt my head, smiling. "I'm not surprised."

"You're not?"

"No. You always knew how to make a buck. By senior year you were juggling football tickets, reselling sneakers, and tutoring math."

He laughs. "I forgot about the sneakers."

"Money Boy," I say.

"Please stop saying that in public."

We stand there another moment, both a little amazed by the collision of past and present.

"So," he says, "are you here long?"

"A few days. I added time after the conference."

"Well," he says, gesturing down the street, "since fate decided we should crash into each other--would you let me take you to lunch?"

I hesitate. Craig--the boy I dated all through high school, the one I haven't seen since graduation--stands in front of me in the middle of Manhattan.

"Lunch sounds nice," I say.

He smiles and turns. "There's a place a couple blocks from here. Great food, and I promise not to talk about hedge funds the entire time."

"Good," I say, falling into step beside him.

We weave west through the lunchtime crowd to a quiet corner restaurant tucked between two office towers. Inside, a host leads us to a small table near the back. I slip off my coat and sit across from him, still shaking my head.

"I still can't believe I ran into you," I say.

"Manhattan is a big place," he says. "Apparently not big enough."

A server drops menus and a water pitcher. We glance down, but I barely read it. My attention keeps drifting to the man across from me.

"So," Craig says, setting his menu aside, "Texas?"

I nod.

"That's a long way from home."

"It is. But I like it. Slower pace. Warmer winters. People talk to each other in grocery lines."

"New Yorkers do that too," he says.

"Only when they're flipping you the bird," I joke.

He laughs. "And you're really a critical care nurse?"

"Yep. ICU."

"That sounds...intense."

"It can be. But it's meaningful. Some days are hard. When someone walks out who almost didn't...it's worth the effort."

He nods. "That sounds more fulfilling than staring at markets all day."

"You chose that life," I say.

"I did."

"And as I recall--Princeton?"

He raises his eyebrows. "You remember that too?"

"You talked about it constantly senior year."

"You're right," he says, smiling. "I went to Princeton. Economics undergrad, then a master's in finance."

"And now you're on Wall Street."

"Guilty," he says. "Hedge fund manager."

I nod. "Money Boy."

He rubs his forehead. "That name will haunt me forever, won't it?"

"Absolutely."

Our food arrives, and we eat for a few minutes. The conversation centers around the strangeness of the afternoon.

"So," he says, setting his fork down, "are you... married?"

I expected the question, but it still flips my stomach. "No. Soon to be divorced."

"I'm sorry," he says.

"It's okay. It's the right decision. Just... difficult."

He hesitates. "I'm divorced too."

"Really?"

"Two years now. We have two kids."

I smile. "How old?"

"Ten and seven."

"My daughter Clarissa is nine."

His face brightens. "You have a daughter?"

"Best thing in my life. She's with her dad this week."

"I bet she keeps you busy."

"You have no idea."

He leans back, studying me with a quiet expression. "You know, I always wondered what happened to you after graduation."

"You could have looked me up," I say, teasing.

"I probably should have."

I smile, but something in me tightens. Something very uncomfortable hangs between us. I know he feels it. It's something long ago, a wound that healed but never fully forgotten. So far, it remains unspoken. The memories swirl inside my head.

Football games, late night calls, when life once felt certain. And the night we crossed a line. My parents out. A few friends over that turned into too many. Beer on the cushions. Ash burns in the carpet. My parents will be furious. We slip into my room. It's brief, awkward, over too fast. The condom vanishes. My period is late. My future ruined. Terror and shame working together. My parents will disown me. I tell Craig, and he steps back.

"Kiva, we can't see each other anymore," he said then.

We break up before prom. My period comes. Relief doesn't fix the hurt.

Craig drops his eyes to the table now, as if he's about to speak and can't find the words. The unfinished part of us sits there on the table between the water glasses like an invisible weight.

He lifts his glass. "To unexpected reunions."

I touch mine to his. "To New York City."

He invites me to dinner two evenings from now. I say yes. Maybe I want to know more about his life. Maybe I'm still holding on to some small hope for an apology.

We trade phone numbers and part outside. He disappears toward Wall Street. I head back toward my hotel, my awe at the city tempered by the shock of seeing him. Still, I'm fascinated by what might lie ahead. I cross a street, wondering what any of this means. Did fate bring us together for a reason? Did--

"Oomph!"

A shoulder clips mine and spins me sideways.
"Oh my goodness. I am terribly sorry."

The woman steadies me with surprising strength, one gloved hand light on my forearm. She looks to be in her seventies, yet she carries a forceful presence. Silver gray hair is swept into an elegant shape that exposes pearl earrings. A camel cashmere coat fits her like it's made for her.

"No, that's my fault," I say, though I'm not sure it's true.

She smiles. Her face carries its age without apology; the fine lines around her eyes and mouth read as a life fully lived. None of it diminishes her beauty. If anything, it deepens it. She exudes composure. Her voice is low and calm. I feel a sudden, inexplicable affinity.

"For a moment," she says, "I thought you're about to step into traffic."

I laugh, a little embarrassed. "I think this street breaks my brain."

"Yes," she says, smoothing a cuff. "New York can do that."

We part. As she slips back into the current, something glints near the toe of my boot.

A bracelet.

It lies on the concrete with a shimmer of sunlight. Heavy gold links are threaded together. Not costume jewelry. I pick it up and feel its weight in my palm.

"Wait!" I call.

She's already halfway down the block.

What surprises me isn't the distance so much as the speed. She threads through the crowd with fluid certainty, her camel coat swaying as businessmen, delivery workers, and tourists part around her. Nothing in her stride looks rushed, yet she covers ground remarkably fast, like a panther gliding through tall grass.

I tighten my grip on the bracelet and hurry after her.

"Excuse me...sorry...coming through."

I sidestep a family on the sidewalk, nearly level a man staring into his phone, and hop over the legs of a homeless man sleeping on a steamy grate. The woman never looks back. I catch flashes of silver hair. With each glimpse, she's farther ahead.

She slips beneath the awning of a black tower. Above the entrance, brass letters read:

MOLL TOWER

She vanishes inside.

"Hey--wait!"

I lunge and catch the glass door with my palm before it seals. The security man is distracted, talking to man in a three-piece suit. The lobby's quiet feels like a sanctuary compared to the noisy street.

Everything gleams in here. Cream and charcoal marble. Light sparkling from delicate chandeliers. Waterfalls moving over stone pools. The air smells faintly of sandalwood.

At the far end, I spot her moving toward a frosted glass door framed in gold. She opens it with an access card and disappears through it. I hurry and catch the door on the close. A brass plaque reads:

DAVE MOLL MEMORIAL WOMEN'S GYM
PRIVATE
MEMBERS ONLY

I slip through the sideways, the frame pushes on my shoulder. Inside, the warm air and low music is immediately soothing.

It's a gym, though unlike any I've seen. Carpeted floor stretches wall to wall. Recessed amber lights glow overhead. Women in immaculate athletic wear move between state of the art chrome equipment. Attendants carry rolled white towels like offerings of hors d'oeuvres. Where do all these beautiful women come from? Are they all wealthy?

Down a hallway, the silver haired woman waits at an elevator.

"Excuse me," I call.

She turns. Up close, her confidence and composure are even more striking.

"You dropped this," I say, holding out the bracelet.


For the first time, surprise flickers across her face.

"My bracelet!" She touches her bare wrist and laughs. "I wondered why I felt incomplete."

I step closer and place the gold into her hand. Our fingers touch. Her eyes meet mine, and I'm more curious than ever about her backstory.

"You chased me three blocks for this?" she asks.

"I wasn't sure how else to get your attention," I say.

"Well, dear," she says, "most people in Manhattan would sell it by now. Thank you. Bless you."

She smiles. "If you'll excuse me, honey, I must get to work," she says, and turns into the elevator.

She works here?

I turn back toward the lobby, still absorbing the opulence. Who is Dave Moll? Why a women's gym?

"Excuse me," a stern, bespectacled security uniform-clad woman  calls from behind a desk. "This is a private club. Do you have a membership?"


"Uh, no," I answer. I'm only in town for a few days. Do you offer temporary guest memberships? How much does a membership cost?"

"No, we don't," she says matter-of-factly. "Membership is by invitation only."

"Really? Who does the inviting? Who would I need to talk to?"

She looks irritated. "How did you get in here? You're not a fighter, are you? You need to leave now."

"A fighter?" I ask. "This gym is for female fighters? Like boxing? MMA?"

She reaches for my arm. "I'll walk you out," she grumbles.

"Wait," I tell her. "I'm not a professional fighter, but I do have this." I scramble through my hand bag, retrieving my catpin. "Does this count?"

"Is that a catpin?" she asks. "May I see it?"

I hand it over and she examines it as if she were determining the authenticity of an archeological artifact.

"Do you have photo ID?"

I give her my Texas drivers license. She spends several seconds squinting her eyes, alternating between the license and my face.

"Please take a seat and wait here," she instructs. She turns and abruptly leaves with my catpin and license and disappears down the hallway toward the elevator.

She returns a few minutes later. "Someone will be with you shortly."

Thirty minutes have passed and I'm still waiting in a chair near the desk by the entrance. I assume I'm being considered for membership and I'm excited about the prospect of working out in this gym. The equipment looks very contemporary and top of the line. The women here are gorgeous. Are they fighters? I wonder.

Finally, the elderly woman who lost her bracelet returns. She must be heading back out to the street. No, she's heading right toward me.

"Kiva Sheppard?" she asks with a beaming smile while holding out her hand for me to shake.

"Yes," I reply as I stand and take her hand.

"So, you're the woman who returned my bracelet. It's so nice to learn the name with the face."

 "My name is Cynara. Please follow me. The Molls would like to meet you."

"Really," I respond dumbfounded. "The Molls? As in Dave Moll, the name on the door? Do they own Moll Tower? Who are they? Are they approving me for the gym membership?"

"Well, yes," she answers. "You may use the gym. But they wish to speak with you about other matters. Please come this way."

I'm now officially nervous. The family that bears the name of this building wants to speak with me? Cynara can detect my slight unease. We walk to the elevator and she ushers me inside, her hand gently resting on my shoulder. She uses her knuckle, not her finger to press the button for the 78th floor. I notice some moderate arthritis in her hand.

The floor rises and we watch the numbers flash during the ascent: 17, 39, 43. Air from the ceiling vent loosens my hair and I automatically tuck it back. We give each other a silent awkward look. She smiles faintly at me.

At floor 78, the elevator chimes, and the car comes to a standstill. For a few moments, nothing moves. Then the door opens and the 78th floor appears. Cynara takes my hand and we step forward.

The hallway floor is lush carpet and walls are adorned with muted art. The air smells like lemon scented wood polish. "Don't be nervous, Kiva," Cynara tells me. "I think you'll like the Molls."

We reach a pair of tall walnut doors, the kind that imply importance. Cynara gives me another half-smile and presses the bar, causing the doors to swing inward.

The boardroom appears like a stage after the curtain pull. There is a long mahogany table running nearly the length of the room. The far wall is all window overlooking the city far below. A chandelier with its crystal lights dimmed floats over the table.

The walls are lines with framed vaguely familiar still black and white photos of women in bikinis, fighting or wrestling in a carpeted room. In most photos, their bodies are tangled or applying holds; their teeth gritted, their faces expressive of anguish or the joy of inflicting punishment.

My attention, however, is drawn to a large 4 x 3-foot oil paint portrait on the other end of the wall. I feel it more than I see it. For a moment, I wondered if the temperature in the room dropped.

The overall tone of the painting is a murky gray. The brush strokes are indistinct as if the artist deliberately intended to portray the subject in mystery and obscurity. The man in the portrait is in a three-quarter turn position. His hair is black and brushed back. The eyes are deep set and shaded so you could barely see them. The bridge of the nose is straight; the cheekbones are square. The mouth is a thin straight line with no smile or obvious signs of displeasure, as if the man refuses to declare himself as warm or cool.

The suit is nearly black, perhaps mixed with a touch of indigo. The tie is a small knot against a white collar, but even the white seems to have been dirtied with a touch of umber, as if the artist is saying that truth about this man has been filtered. The background is gray and smoky, with a hint of something like a curtain behind him, as if he stepped out of a stage he had built for himself and refused to leave. The frame is dark wood. Beneath it is a brass plaque:

DAVE MOLL
1941 - 2019

At the near end of the table sits a well-dressed, middle-aged man, with mildly graying black hair. His hands are placed on an opened laptop in front of him. When we enter, he rises in a smooth, courteous motion.

Next to the man is a woman who appears to be in her fifties. Her hair is obviously colored dark as it gracefully falls to her shoulder. Her makeup and lipstick are flawless for her skin tone and features. Her charcoal business suit and pumps give her a distinct air of confidence and authority.

Across the table are two elderly women, each dressed with the quaint elegance of Cynara. Their hair is arranged with the same practical grace. One has her glasses folded atop a stack of papers; the other holds a coffee mug resting on a perfectly centered thin cork coaster. They feel familiar to the room, like fixtures who have always belonged here.

"Kiva Sheppard?" the man says, holding out his hand. "Thank you for coming. I'm David Moll Jr."

"And I'm Davidia Moll," the dark-haired woman says. "But you may call me Vi."

"Of course, our father was Dave Moll, who you see here in the portrait," the man says.

 Some ego, I'm thinking - naming a son and daughter after yourself.

"You've already met Cynara," he continues. He points to the two older women. "This is Denise...and this is Molly." We nod and exchange pleasantries.

"Ms. Sheppard, you're probably wondering why we called you here" the man says.

"Is it the gym membership," I ask.

"Well, yes. You will receive an access card to use any time you are in New York. It will also include use of our gym in Los Angeles. But there is more we'd like to discuss with you. Please sit down."
 
Cynara directs me to a chair at the table as she seats herself next to me.

"But before we start, we see you live in Texas. What brings you to the Big Apple?"

"I'm here for a nursing conference," I answer.

"You're a nurse?" he asks with raised eyebrows.

"That is correct."

"Excellent, excellent That's wonderful." I notice each of them nodding enthusiastically, looking at each other with half smirks as if to say, "We just hit the jackpot with this one."

"So, Kiva...may we call you Kiva? While you were waiting at the gym, we had a chance to review some of your fights through the catpin website. You're an excellent striker, still a little green with grappling."

"I'm working on it," I interject.

"Very good...Kiva, we would like to make a proposal."

I look at him intently.

"Are you familiar with the term 'Apartment House Wrestling,'" he asks.

"I've heard of apartment wrestling," I reply. "Isn't that just a slightly milder form of catfight in an apartment or a living room?"

"Well, yes," he answers. "That term gets used widely today, but it was all started by my father over fifty years ago right in this city. You see, Dad didn't just promote apartment wrestling. He invented it. Do you recognize these photos on the wall?" He asks.

"I think I saw them on the internet," I respond. "Didn't they come from some old pro wrestling magazine in the '70s?"

"You are correct," David Moll replies. Sports Review Wrestling covered Dad's matches. "Look up there," he says pointing at the photos on the wall. That's Tiffany vs. Marguerita...over there is Barbara vs. Susan...and that one is Cynara vs. Jenny."

"That's you?" I ask the old woman.

"It sure is, Dear," Cynara smiled.

"So, let me get this straight," I say. "Your father was a wealthy man who recruited women to fight in bikinis in apartment buildings?"

"They were high-rise penthouses," Moll answers. "And he didn't always recruit them. Sometimes the women came to him."

"Our father was a great man," Vi adds. "He was a man of vision. In many ways, he was far ahead of his time. It was much different in the 1970's. Women fighting was taboo. Even Dad never dreamed female boxing, wrestling and MMA would become mainstream like it is today. You see, Dad was fond of saying, "There is a fighter in every woman."

"And boy was he right!" she continues. "In his day, when female combat was repressed, Dad offered them a way they could follow their natural instincts and go toe-to-toe. He gave them a environment where they could let out their aggression and fury and not worry about being judged and stigmatized.

"Women from all walks of life competed in the apartments. There were models, aspiring actresses, teachers, socialites, hair dressers, secretaries, musicians... just about anyone. Some wanted to test themselves. Others had grudges to settle. Some fought over men. We've had wives vs. mistresses, an heiress against a gypsy; some fought over modeling contracts and film roles, employees fought former bosses, I could go on and on."

"My point," says Vi, "is Dad gave women an opportunity to give expression to what was already there. Women came here very freely and were never coerced."

"Why were the women always in bikinis?" I ask. "Weren't they topless or nude sometimes?"

"That's a very good question," David replies. "You see, Dad recognized the connection between fighting and sensuality and felt it should be explored. Again, he was ahead of his time. Look at the WWE where women wrestlers are almost naked. He knew since ancient times that art depicted the eroticism of the female form locked in a combative struggle. Women fighting has always been mixed with sexuality."

Vi joins in. "People who don't understand say Dad was a sleazy misogynist. That's far from the truth. Dad gave both men and women what they wanted. Let's be honest. Men are turned on by women fighting and many women love the added excitement of male spectators."

"So," I ask, "Has apartment house wrestling been operating since the 1970s."

"Well, not quite," David answered. "By the early '80s, it slowed down considerably. Matches were less frequent. The magazine stopped covering it. Dad's time was taken up by other concerns. Occasionally, he'd arrange a match at the request of two women who wanted to settle it on the carpet or he would sporadically arrange an event."

"It never went away completely," Vi explains. "Over the years, many producers tried to replicate what my father had done. They even called it 'apartment wrestling. But none ever came close to what he created. Imagine two women in bikinis locked in a primal furious struggle in an empty carpeted room in a penthouse suite high above the city in front of rich and powerful elite men. There was never anything like it before or after."

"Dad didn't realize that what he started was historic and iconic," David informs. "Over fifty years later, people still talk about the matches, photos can be found all over the internet, the magazines are now collector's items, and countless production companies and works of art have been inspired by it."

 "Dad was very influential in the finance world and had many powerful contacts. At the height of the '70s, Dad's clients of spectators included corporate leaders, high ranking government officials, foreign presidents, members of royal families, giants in the entertainment world. They'd sit side-by-side in the penthouse watching the ladies battle."

"So, when he passed away," David continues, "we received cards, letters, and emails from people all around the world saying how much apartment house wrestling meant to them. Many begged us to hold regular matches again. Women contacted us asking to compete. People realized that nothing matches the Dave Moll brand of Apartment House Wrestling."

The conversation switches back to Vi. "So, several years ago, David and I decided to resurrect regularly scheduled matches here in this building. The original building no longer exists but we've replicated the apartment rooms. Wrestlers usually wear bikinis. Same loose rules. Most matches end in submission or inability of one wrestler to continue."

"We have updated the operation to the 21st century digital age," she continues. "Our events are held live in front of spectators, but paying clients may watch on a livestream."

"What happened to the elite powerful men?" I ask.

"Well, David answers, "We reached out to Dad's original clients who are still alive and invited them back. But through word of mouth and our current contacts through Moll Enterprises, we now have a large and growing list of clients. We don't mean to be snobby elitists but membership to view the matches both online and live must be approved by us and carries a steep fee. Although the world has changed a lot in fifty years, some of our clients could get into serious trouble with their families, careers, or culture if they were found to be associated with us. So, we place a very high premium on privacy and security. We need to keep our standards for membership high."

"There's been one other major change," Vi adds. "Let's face it. Dad ran a Boy's Club. His clients were entirely male. That's because he was a product of his time. Women's Lib was just getting started. The Equal Rights Amendment was new. Well, today, women are heavily involved in the production of Apartment House Wrestling. We have a Board of Directors with eight members: four men and four women. Cynara, Denise, and Molly were among our original wrestlers. Cynara is our match coordinator and talent recruiter, Denise runs our West Coast branch, and Molly is head of our IT support. And...I'd like to add that a third of our clients are now women and that number is growing."

"So, Kiva," David says with all eyes in the room looking at me. "In addition to the gym membership, we'd like to offer you a spot on our roster of apartment house wrestlers. We know you live in Texas, but whenever you can work it out, you are welcome to come here to compete. Of course, we will pay for your travel expenses.

"Just think," he continues. "You will part of a very rich and storied tradition. You will be part of a linear link with these three great women. You might meet some extremely influential people. But most of all, you will be competing against other women who will test you to your limit. Haven't you ever wondered what it'd be like to ground some woman into the carpet of a high rise so tall that the people on the street looked like tiny specks?"

I wasn't about to tell him that I was once grounded into my own living room carpet for six hours.

"Well...um...OK," I tell him. "This gives me something to think about. It sounds...interesting. I think I might try it."

"Very good," David replies. "Now, we have a special favor to ask of you."

My heart pounds. What favor could they possibly want from me?

"Is there any chance you could fight here in two nights?"

Holy Crap, I was not expecting that? "Saturday night?" I'm thinking, remembering I have a date with Craig.

"Yes," he replies. "You see, one of our wrestlers had an accident and broke her wrist and we need a replacement. We realize this is a lot to ask on short notice."

He explains. "We planned a match between two women: Courtney and Jennifer. Jennifer is a nurse like yourself. These two competed in a bikini wrestling match for a production company. Courtney won the match, though under controversial circumstances. Her husband Bill refused Jennifer a rematch. Two other nurses, both colleagues of Jennifer, challenged Courtney to avenge their friend and colleague. Courtney defeated both of them as well."

"Cynara found out about it. So, we've been trying to get Courtney and Jennifer to settle it once and for all in the apartment. It took a while. Courtney's husband negotiates for her and frankly, he's a pain in the ass. The fight was set for Saturday, but Jennifer is out due to a freak accident while training. Courtney and Bill are here in town, but we don't have an opponent for her."

"When we heard you were a nurse," Vi says, "we thought...perfect!"

"Just think about it," David adds, "The Nurse Killer vs. The Killer Nurse. Imagine how that will sell."

They all smile and nod enthusiastically.

Oh great, I'm thinking. Another nurse stereotype to promote a fight.

"Um...I don't know," I said. "I have plans for Saturday night. I'll need some time to process this."
"We understand," Vi says. "We're giving you temporary access to our website, like our members. It's good for 48 hours. You can view some of our recent matches and look at the profiles of the wrestlers. You will find some information on Courtney. Look, David is right. Her husband is obnoxious and he's been accused of being a distraction to Courtney's opponents. So, he will not be present at the match. He will not be permitted in the building. He will be watching on his temporary livestream."

"We just need your final answer by noon tomorrow," David informs me.

"Fine," I reply.

We all rise and shake hands as Cynara leads me out of the boardroom and back to the elevator. I descend back down the 78 floors. I'm physically and mentally exhausted. I'm too tired for walking and marveling at the city, childhood memories and Craig.

I take a yellow taxi back to my hotel.

Overwhelmed with fatigue, I quickly change and crash into bed. I awake several hours later - 11 p.m. I pour myself a Chardonnay and turn on my lap top and log onto the Apartment House Wrestling website.  Now where is that access code? Here! The website homepage appears with a montage of bikini fighters past and present locked in primal struggles. I begin to watch some of the taped matches.

Melody, an apparently affluent blonde, takes on the Latina Ava, her former housekeeper. In the pre-match interviews, Melody claims Ava was a lazy bum who lied about the amount of work she did and Melody is about to execute justice with a good whooping. Ava counters that Melody was a temperamental mean-spirited bitch who constantly abused her verbally. Melody is bigger, but Ava looks intense.

The fight is wild. Melody, in her gold-colored bikini, comes out aggressively, and uses her size advantage to control Ava on the carpet. The blonde traps her with a body scissors hold but Ava manages to squeeze out of it and escapes using a hair pull. The fight is low on technique and high on release of aggression as both women slap, kick and trade positions. Finally, with both women exhausted, Ava has Melody exhausted in a side headlock. Melody desperately thrashes, using what energy she has left. Ava hooks her leg around Melody's and sends them both crashing to the floor. Ava lands on top of the blonde's chest, pinning her arms to the carpet. Melody squirms and struggles, then goes limp in surrender. As she lies on the carpet, sobbing and her chest heaving, Ava spits, "Consider this my official notice!"

The next match promises to be even more intriguing. Vanessa, a tall thin brown-haired woman with a ponytail stands in a graceful straight posture in her blue bikini. She is a ranger with the National Park Service. Opposite her, Riley is a younger but smaller rough looking unkept brunette woman with an intense expression and black bikini that matches her hair. In the pre-match interviews, Vanessa seems calm and analytical, saying she is there to test herself and step out of her comfort zone. She claims she is accustomed to handling wild animals, especially bobcats, and she is well prepared for Riley. Riley says she grew up in poverty and wants to make a life for herself. She adds Vanessa is standing in her way and will pay the price.

The match starts. Riley lunges furiously with her hands clawing. The park ranger stumbles as Riley shoves her against the wall. The younger woman lands several blows, before slamming Vanessa's head against the dry wall. The taller woman absorbs the assault and manages to grab Riley's wrist and apply a wrist lock.

Vanessa moves away from the wall, taking Riley with her by the wrist. However, Riley twists free, drops and tries to sweep Vanessa's legs. However, the ranger sees it coming and steps out of the way. The next several minutes are cycles of Riley's furious bursts and Vanessa fending off most of the damage. Both women look fatigued and it appears to be a battle of attrition. Vanessa seems to be changing her strategy and is keeping distance from Riley rather than meeting her attacks head-on. As Riley charges again, Vanessa sidesteps, giving her a shove that sends the aggressive woman sprawling on the carpet.

Riley rises, breathing hard, frustration on her face. She launches a final desperate attack aiming for a hair-pull and a takedown. This time, Vanessa catches her in a clinch, wrapping her arms around the neck and head in a well-placed sleeper hold. She slowly, methodically lowers Riley to the carpet with an air of quiet strength, not rage. Riley fights, bucking and twisting like a trapped bobcat, until movement seeps out of her. Vanessa looks like she's speaking softly to her, like she's quieting a wild animal. After a moment, Riley stops moving. Vanessa releases the hold and looks down on her panting, groggy defeated opponent. She graciously, offers her a hand. Slowly, Riley accepts it as Vanessa helps her up. It was a great fight and at least one person at the event shows class.

I look for information on Courtney but I can't find much. She's younger than me at age 25. We're both the same height and weight at 5'7" and 128 lb. She's been described as both a beginner and well-versed in judo. So, which one is it? I see the announcement for the fights on Saturday. There's a notice that the Courtney vs. Jennifer match has been cancelled and further information will be pending. I find a new short video posted under Courtney's account. I click it to see the image of a young thin woman with black hair and an overside hoodie sitting next to a balding middle-aged man.

That must be Bill, I tell myself. He looks at least twice her age. I click the play button.

Oddly, Courtney does no speaking. She sits quietly while Bill rambles.

"Well, it's no surprise that Jennifer chickened out again," he starts. "She even faked an injury this time. Well, I don't blame her. She knows my Courtney will humiliate her again. She keeps sending her nurse buddies to do the job she failed at. And how did that turn out? Those nurses left with their tails between their legs and their dignity in tatters."

I pause the vid. I'm still not sure I want this fight. I know nothing about Courtney or any of her opponents. Were these nurses any good? Perhaps I should just spend a quiet evening with Craig hoping an old gaping wound might heal. But what if it doesn't. I restart the video and listen to Bill's grating voice.

"And now, I hear there's a nurse from Texas here in town and she might want to fight my Courtney. What's her name? Kiva or something like that? Well, if Nurse Kiva knows what's good for her, she'll take the next plane back to Texas and stay the hell out of the Moll building. If she shows up, she'll be next to lie flat on her back with her toes and tits pointing up after Courtney gets done with her. She'll go back to Texas as a tearful little girl, back to her job wiping asses and emptying bedpans, and getting banged by doctors inside the call rooms. Yeah, we know what nurses really get paid to do. When Bill Hughes says something, you can guarantee it."

I try not to get upset, but my blood is boiling by the second.

Tomorrow, I give a talk to a ballroom full of ICU nurses. I read through my notes:

"At the bedside, the nurse manages veno-venous ECMO as a temporary lung replacement, maintaining circuit integrity and gas exchange minute to minute. Verify cannula position and securement (e.g., dual-lumen right IJ or femoral-femoral configuration), monitor pump speed (RPM) and resultant blood flow (L/min), and titrate sweep gas flow and FiO₂ across the oxygenator to target PaO₂/PaCO₂ while minimizing ventilator-induced lung injury with ultraprotective settings. Continuous assessments include pre- and post-oxygenator pressures to track transmembrane pressure (delta-P) for early clot detection, mixed venous saturation trends, hemolysis markers (plasma-free hemoglobin, rising K⁺), and anticoagulation via anti-Xa or aPTT to balance thrombosis versus bleeding risk. Inspect for circuit chatter, tubing kinks, and heat-exchanger performance to maintain normothermia, manage volume status to preserve venous return and prevent suction events, and coordinate gas sampling from the oxygenator pigtails to validate effective CO₂ clearance. During mobilization or imaging, stabilize the circuit, alarms, and cannula sites, keep emergency clamp and hand-crank protocols ready, and collaborate with perfusion and intensivists to adjust parameters in real time--each intervention aimed at sustaining adequate oxygen delivery (DO₂) and carbon dioxide removal while protecting fragile native organ function."

I stare at Bill and Courtney's image on my laptop.

"You motherfuckers!"

Slowly, I grasp my cell phone and hold it face up in the palm of my hand. My fingers begin the text.

"Craig, there's been a change of plans for Saturday night."

To be continued

The story of Courtney and Jennifer appears here:
https://www.freecatfights.com/forums/index.php?topic=120905.0

[peregrine]

Can't wait for part 2!

[MikeHales67]

Love the mash-up!

[Tiberius J.C.]

Wonderful set-up. The awkward, poignant reunion with your old flame. The situation developing with your ex's new woman. And now, stung professional pride - and it's a profession of which you are (rightly) proud. Inordinately proud, but, I repeat, rightly. I've seen the professionalism, kindness and intellectual qualities of nurses close-up in recent years, and I have massive respect for the whole profession. I love nurses. Go get her, Kiva! Make her grovel. Make her cry. Make her recant.

[Tiberius J.C.]

BTW - do any of the older women in the club still fight? I have to ask. That would be something. 

[bigfan877]

Another Great Kiva story,

I realize reading you are a true writer, sadly I write like the play by play announcer and bit color commentary. Though I do wonder if Joining Moll Productions will that be an issue getting into the Valkyrie's Palace back in Texas. I would think those could be two rivals.

[Silent Watcher]

After years of reading the Journal I think I know where this is going. And I absolutely love it 
It's good to have you back Kiva, I hope you teach Courtney a painful lesson about disrespecting the health personnel.

[npom]

Great buildup Kiva. Absolutely love the 1970's apartment house wrestling angle. Really brings me back.

[Rocko23]

Loved this chapter. Such an amazing universe.

[🍷 𝗔𝘀𝗵𝘁𝗼𝗻 𝟳𝗖 🍷]

Awesome stuff here

[Kiva]

Chapter 18: The Woman Who Kept Walking (Part 2 of 2)

Courtney and Bill first appeared in a wrestling story called "Puppet Master." It's not essential you read it first, but it might help give you a deeper appreciation of this chapter. https://www.freecatfights.com/forums/index.php?topic=120905.0


I won't be there to see the shocked look on his face. I won't be there with him at all. When Craig logs on to the livestream, I'll be in Moll Tower. He'll have no idea what he is about to see, but I made him promise to watch. No, I won't see his face. It's better that way.

The taxi repeatedly drifts and breaks in the stuttering Midtown traffic. The driver has been trying to talk to me since Lexington Avenue.

"You visiting New York?"

"Sort of."

"Business or fun?"

Good question. "A little of both."

He gives up on me after that. I'm a terrible conversationalist tonight. He turns up his radio and I go back to the window, watching the city roll past. Pedestrians, vehicles, street vendors, steam from the sidewalks all flow by me. Somewhere out there is the ghost of the girl who visited every year with her family. I wonder what she'd say if she could see me now, riding downtown in sweatpants and a warm-up jacket with a brand-new bikini folded in my gym bag, on my way to fight a woman in a penthouse in front of paying strangers.

She'd probably say what I've been saying to myself for two days: Kiva, what the hell are you doing?

I still don't have a clear answer.

My conference talk went well. Better than well. The room was packed, people asked thoughtful questions, and two nurse managers from Ohio asked if they could use my slides. For fifty minutes, I was the respectable version of me, a professional, composed woman with a laminated name badge. Nobody in that lecture hall would have guessed what was in my hotel room closet, hanging next to my blazer.

And then there was Robin.

She was in the audience. I spotted her in the third row halfway through the talk and nearly lost my place. Afterward, she came up, hugged me like no time had passed, and told me she was proud of me and said I looked great. We only talked for a few minutes. But something about seeing her there settled the nerves in my chest. I can't explain it. But that's Robin. She shows up, says something true whether anyone is ready to hear it or not. Then she said, "Kiva, never apologize for who you are." I can't say she doesn't practice what she preaches. Anyway, I walked out of that hall feeling like I could do anything.

Maybe that's why I did what I did next.

I bought the bikini at a boutique in SoHo. Navy blue. The saleswoman asked if I was going somewhere tropical. "Something like that," I said. She'll never know.

Craig was disappointed when I cancelled our dinner.

"Is everything okay?" he asked.

"Something came up."

I could hear him deciding not to push. That's one of the things I remember about Craig. He knows when to leave a door closed, like when he once closed the door on me. So, I opened a new one for him. Before we hung up, I gave him the access code to the website. The code is still active. Good for tonight only.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Just promise me you'll log on at eight."

"Kiva..."

"Promise me."

He promised.

So, I imagine tonight, at eight o'clock, Craig will pour himself a drink, open his laptop, type in the code, and wait for whatever he thinks I've sent him. He might think it's a lecture, maybe a presentation or a webinar.

Instead, he'll get me. Barefoot on a carpet, in a navy-blue bikini, fighting against a woman named Courtney with the whole city glittering beneath us.

My stomach does a slow roll every time I picture it. I don't know which is stronger - the excitement or the terror. They keep trading places, like two fighters circling. Why did I give him the code? I've asked myself a hundred times already. I think part of me is tired of being two women. The one who cares for critically ill patients and gives conference talks, and the one who fights. Tonight, for one night, one man gets to see both.

God help me.

"Here you go," the driver says. "Moll Tower."

I look up. There it is, rising out of the sidewalk in dark glass and stone. Somewhere up there, high above the taxis and the noise, is a replica of a carpeted apartment from 1975, waiting for two women.

I pay the driver, sling my bag over my shoulder, and step out onto the sidewalk.

Eight o'clock, Craig. Don't be late.

The keypad by the entrance is discreet, like the kind of thing you'd walk past a hundred times without seeing. I punch in the temporary code from the text. The six digits are good for one hour, like everything in this world seems to be. The glass door releases with a soft click that sounds weirdly welcoming.

Cynara is waiting inside.

"Kiva. Right on time." She takes my hand in both of hers. In the lobby light, she looks less like the old lady who lost her bracelet and more like what she actually is: a woman who has spent fifty years watching other women fight on carpets and knows exactly what she's looking at when she looks at me. "How are the nerves?" she asks.

"Present and accounted for."

"Good. The ones who say they aren't nervous are lying, and liars fight badly."

I'm about to ask her where we're going when something outside catches my eye. Through the lobby glass, at the curb, a black car the size of a small yacht is easing to a stop. The rear door opens before the driver can come around, and a young woman steps out onto the sidewalk.

I see the dark hair, the sundress, the gym bag on her shoulder.

I know her immediately. I've watched her on a screen several times. It's the same thin body and the eyes that kept sliding sideways toward the man outside always the ring. Courtney.

Which makes the man behind the wheel Bill.

He gets out of the car. He's middle aged, nearly bald, and with a tan that costs money. He comes around to her, takes her face in both hands and kisses her. Then he holds her at arm's length and says something, and she nods, and he says it again, and she nods again. Is he her coach, her handler, or her lover? I'm guessing all three. She stands on the sidewalk with her bag while he lowers himself back into the car and pulls into traffic.

"Is that Courtney?" I ask, though I already know.

Cynara glances out. "That's her."

I watch her cross toward the building. She's thinner than she appears in the videos. The sundress hangs off her shoulders like it belonged to a slightly larger woman. She's about an inch taller than me. The nurse in me sees a woman who could stand to gain a little weight. The fighter in me sees an opponent with a reach and leverage advantage. Neither one of us likes what we see, for entirely different reasons.

"Come along, dear." Cynara's hand closes around my arm, light but very much in charge, and she steers me away from the glass. "You two will meet soon enough. There's no gain in it happening in a lobby."

The elevator is paneled in dark wood and it still smells faintly of lemon oil. Cynara presses 78. The button lights, and the floor lifts under us with silence.

Seventy-eight floors. Somewhere below us, Craig is checking his watch.

The doors open onto a hallway with the familiar carpet. We pass a set of double doors standing open, and I get three seconds to view the room beyond. I see a long table dressed in white linen, shrimp on ice, a bartender in a black vest, and men. OK, maybe a few women. It's mostly men in blazers, no ties, drinks in hand, and that low confident laughter that I imagine men with power make when they're somewhere they're not supposed to be and know nothing will ever come of it. A few heads start to turn toward the doorway as we walk past.

Cynara doesn't slow down. I keep up with her pace.

"Clients," she says, with all the nonchalance of a tour guide pointing out street pigeons to city visitors.

At the end of the hall, she opens a door and waves me into a dressing room that is nicer than any hotel room I've ever paid for. Soft light. A vanity lined in small round bulbs. A deep sofa, a private bathroom, white robes on brass hooks, a small refrigerator humming in the corner. Fresh flowers sit on the table. They are lilies, which strikes me as either lovely or ominous, depending on how tonight goes.

"Change into your suit and get yourself settled," Cynara says. "Stretch, breathe, do whatever it is you do. I'll come for you myself when it's time. No one else will bother you." She takes a small card from her pocket and presses it into my hand. A phone number, handwritten. "If you need anything at all -- water, tape, a friendly voice -- you call that. I'll take care of whatever you need."

"Thank you."

She pauses at the door and looks at me for a moment, and something softens through her face.

"You'll do fine, dear," she says. "The apartment house remembers everyone. Make it remember you well."

Then she's gone, and I'm alone with the lilies, the humming refrigerator, and a navy-blue bikini at the bottom of my gym bag... and butterflies.

Alone, I sit on the edge of the sofa and let the quiet settle over me. Somewhere beyond these walls, a bartender is refilling glasses for men whose faces I'll never see.

And that's when it hits me.

This is a global stage.

Every fight I've ever had was local. Private homes. A dance studio. A golf course. A greenhouse. Billy's Sports Bar with its creaky cage, stale beer and cigarette haze. Tonight, the audience is a livestream with paying clients scattered across time zones I can't name. I might be seen in Tokyo. Dubai. London.

I imagine a senator, discreetly logged in from his study. Perhaps there's a movie star in dark glasses on the invisible side of the room. Or Some tech billionaire scheming to buy the viewing rights. Ladies and gentlemen, fighting out of the blue corner, a critical care nurse from Texas.

What would Tom think if he could see this? My ex-husband, who once couldn't handle me fighting at Billy's. I picture his face with that particular Tom expression, equal parts horror and helpless fascination and I almost laugh out loud in the empty room. Funny how times change.

Maybe the man of my dreams is watching tonight. Maybe he's out there right now, pouring a drink, logging in. Maybe I just haven't met him yet.

Focus, Kiva.

I shake the nonsense out of my head, because here is the truth I keep skirting: I don't know much about Courtney. A few videos. A skinny woman in a sundress. She's married to a man old enough to have signed her first-grade permission slips.
 
And one strange email.

It came two days ago, from Jennifer, the nurse who fought Courtney, the one who ended up in that match topless and humiliated. Her message had only three sentences.

She is not what she seems. The shy, timid thing is a costume. Whatever you do, don't let her get into your head.

I've read it a dozen times. I still don't know what to do with it, except believe it.

So, what will be my strategy? Feel her out. Let the first two minutes tell me what the videos couldn't pick up. Austin's voice comes back to me, patient as always.  Panic is the enemy, angles are your friends, never wrestle the stronger woman straight on, make her turn, make her reach. I've improved on the mat. I know I have. The bridges, the escapes, the hip pressure, the leverage - all of it is in my muscle memory now. But striking is still my best weapon, and this is a carpet match, which means sooner or later it goes to the ground, and sooner or later I'll need grappling to win it. Slaps to sting her. Wrestling to finish her.

I stand, and I undress.

The sweatpants, the jacket, my bra and panties are folded on the sofa like I'm undergoing a  physical in the doctor's office. For a moment I'm just a woman standing naked in a lush room seventy-eight floors above Manhattan, which is not a something I ever expected.

The bikini still has its tag on. I twist it off and hold the navy-blue pieces up to the light.

In the full-length vanity mirror, lined with round bulbs, I look at myself. The body of a woman in her thirties who gave birth, works brutal twelve-hour shifts and trains three times a week and has been in fights and grounded into more than one carpet. It's not a girl's body anymore.

Still desirable, I tell the mirror. Men still look. The mirror, diplomatically, does not argue.

I put the bikini on. It fits more than I hoped. I tighten up my ponytail. Then I start loosening up.  Neck rolls, shoulder circles, hips, hamstrings, the little hop-and-shake Austin taught me to burn off the nervous energy. Breathe in, two, three. Out, two, three.

The knock comes right on schedule.

"Five minutes, dear." Cynara slips inside and looks me over, head to toe, with a connoisseur's trained eye. "My, my. If I had that figure in the 70s, Dan Shocket would have written sonnets."

"I'll take it."

"You should." She folds her hands. "Now. The rules, once more, so there's no confusion. No closed fists, kicks, knees, elbows to the face -- open-hand slaps only. Body punches are fine. No biting, no gouging of the eyes. Hair pulling is allowed." She gives a faint smile. "Encouraged, historically."

I nod, rolling my shoulders.

"The room is carpeted, empty, walled in genuine seventies panel -- three walls of it. Where the fourth wall ought to be, there's a clear screen. Plexiglass. Our live guests are seated on the other side, but the lights are arranged so you'll see nothing but your own reflection.  They see you. You don't see them. It's better for everyone that way...You also can't hear them...it's sound proof"

Fighting in front of a dark mirror.  Somewhere behind my own reflection are strangers with drinks. The butterflies return.

"And one more thing," Cynara says, "Mr. Hughes has been banned from the premises. Courtney's husband. He will not be in that room; he will not be behind that screen. You have my word."

She watches me absorb that, then softens again. "Are you ready, dear?"

"I'm ready."

The hallway carpet is soft.  I feel strangely naked walking to a fight in a bikini under the chandelier light. Cynara walks beside me at a processional pace like a ritual, my bare feet next to her heels, neither making a sound at all.

We stop at a plain white door. It looks like it could be a linen closet.

"The fight room is on the other side," Cynara says quietly. "Courtney is already in it."

My heart drops into my ribs.

Cynara takes the handle, opens the door into warm light and waiting carpet, and steps aside.

"Go on in, dear."

The door closes behind me with a click that sounds final.

The room is exactly what Cynara promised and stranger than I imagined. Carpet, wall to wall -- deep light gold shag. Three walls of dark wood paneling, hung with a single nonfunctioning sunburst clock that served only décor purposes. The light is warm. Somewhere in the walls, tiny cameras are hidden.

Where the fourth wall should be, there's the screen.

The screen runs floor to ceiling. The room's light stops dead at its surface, and what reflects back is us. Just two bikini women, barefoot on gold carpet. Behind that reflection, somewhere in the black, are chairs, drinks, and eyes. I can't see a single one of them. I can feel all of them.

And behind one screen somewhere not far, Craig is logging on about now.

Courtney stands near the far wall.

The sundress is gone. She's in a two-piece the color of white with tiny printed strawberries, her dark hair tied into a tight bun that covers her ears, a change in hair style since her videos. My first thought is the same one I had in the lobby.  She's thin. The collarbones are prominent; the ribs are somewhat visible when she breathes. But my second thought is the one that matters, because underneath the thinness there is strong wire. I've seen the videos. I've seen what came out of this woman when Jennifer had her pinned. It was  that sudden animal surge that startled a stronger fighter. The body in front of me is not a frail body.

I instinctively pace like a caged animal.

"Hi," she says.

Her voice is small. Sweet, even. Her eyes come up to mine and then slide away, down to the carpet. It's the shy, timid look of girl in a very feminine swimsuit who'd rather be anywhere else.

Seriously? Is this how apartment wrestlers greet each other? Hi? Where's the snarl? The trash talk? The glaring eyes?

She is not what she seems. Jennifer's email, three sentences, no pleasantries. Don't let her get into your head.

Whatever her game is, I play along. "Hi, Courtney," I say. "I'm Kiva."

"I know." She gives another little smile aimed at the floor. "I watched your fights. You're good."

You've got to be kidding.

"So are you," I reply, almost sarcastically.

"I'm really not," she says softly, and hugs her own elbows, and for a moment she looks so young and so alone in that ceiling light that something maternal in me actually stirs. "But I'll try my best. May the better woman win."

And that's when I catch it. Just for a half-second, as her eyes pass across the dark screen, I see a flicker of calculation, quick as a flash of sunlight reflecting off a school of darting minnows. She's checking her reflection, checking her angle. Perhaps hoping to get a glimpse if the audience is getting the sweet little thing she's giving them.

Then it's gone, and the shy girl is back.

Okay, Jennifer. Message received.

Somewhere above us, a soft chime sounds -- once, twice -- and a woman's recorded voice fills the room.

"Ladies. Take your marks."

Two small circles are woven into the carpet, ten feet apart. I didn't notice them until now. Courtney walks onto hers. I step onto mine, feeling the shag press up between my toes, which feels absurdly soft for what's about to happen on it.

We face each other. Ten feet of light gold carpet lies between us. In the black glass beside us, our reflections face each other too. An audience of shadows and a livestream reaching around the curve of the world, including a hedge fund manager who is just now realizing what he's looking at, watch.

Courtney lifts her eyes to mine and holds them, finally, and does not look away.

The chime sounds a third time.

Neither of us move immediately.

Courtney stands on her mark with her shoulders drawn in, hands half-raised, like a woman warding off a jumpy dog. Her eyes are wide. They seem genuinely wide, as far as I can tell. That's the problem. I can't tell. Jennifer's email sits in my head like as a warning. The shy, timid thing is a costume. But costumes don't usually tremble at the hem, and I'd swear the fingers at the end of those raised hands are trembling.

We begin to circle.

I keep it slow, weight on the balls of my feet, the shag whispering under each step. Courtney circles the opposite way, matching my pace like a mirror that's a half-second late. She looks terrified. In the black screen beside us, our reflections orbit each other, and somewhere behind that glass a room full of shadows leans forward, and somewhere behind a hotel laptop a man named Craig has just stopped breathing.

Feel her out, Kiva. Let the first two minutes tell you what videos don't always tell you.

I close the distance and reach for her, and she doesn't run. We come together in a collar-and-elbow tie-up, my hand on the back of her neck, hers finding mine, our forearms braced. It's as old as wrestling itself. And now the answer to my question arrives. I lean into her, a good honest push meant to move a frightened woman back on her heels.

She doesn't move.

I push again, harder, driving from the hips, and it's like pushing a parked car. The thin arms, the visible collarbones are deceptive. Bodies that look like hers aren't supposed to push back like this.

Okay then.

I stop pushing with my arms and start driving with my legs, the way Austin drilled into me. Strength comes up from the floor, Kiva, not out of the shoulders. I take short choppy steps, my hips low. Now she gives, grudgingly, one bare foot sliding back through the gold shag, then the other, until her shoulders meet the wood paneling with a soft thud that the microphones, wherever they are would enjoy.

I've got her on the wall. Now find the opening.

She wraps up defensively, elbows in, chin down, forearms crossed over her chest in a shell. I work at it, hand-fighting, looking for a wrist, an underhook, anything, and our heads come close together, her dark hair against my cheek, both of us breathing hard through our mouths.

I hear a strange sound.

It's a faint buzz that barely registers with my ear drum. There's a fly in here. No, it's a mosquito. But how? Seventy-eight floors up, in a sealed room built like a museum exhibit, some insect has gotten in and is whirring around our heads. I actually flick my eyes toward the ceiling, half a second, looking for it.

Half a second is what it costs me.

Courtney's shell opens like it was never a shell at all. Her hips swivel, her leg snakes behind my ankle, and the wall I had her pinned against becomes a wall she's pushing off of -- she trips me clean and the floor awaits. I do the only thing I can do, which is refuse to go alone. I keep my grip on her as I fall and take her down with me. We hit the carpet tangled together, the shag swallowing some of the impact.

Chaos ensues. We roll across the gold carpet, grabbing wrists, fighting for underhooks, her hair in my face, my hair in her fist for a moment before she loses it. She's quicker on the ground than standing. I'm scrambling. The room spins. Paneling, sunburst clock, the black screen with two blurred women thrashing across it rotate in succession.

I come out on top.

For one clean second, I have her.  My knees find her hips, my weight settles in, the mount is just a breath away. It's all I need to start turning this into my kind of fight.

Courtney bucks.

A calm, well-timed one. Her hips fire upward just as my weight shifts forward, and her hands find my arm and pull, using my own momentum to her advantage. Suddenly,  there's nothing under my center of gravity but space. I topple past her shoulder, catch myself on my hands, and she's already gone, rolling away like spilled water, coming up to her knees six feet across the carpet.

We face each other on all fours like two cats on a kitchen floor, both breathing hard now, the light is catching the first shine of sweat on her shoulders.

She brushes a few strands of hair out of her face.

And she smiles at me. Now, she's the shy, apologetic girl who can't believe she's here.

But her eyes are calculating again.

Somewhere in the room, the faint mosquito buzzing returns.

We rise up onto our knees at the same time, six feet apart, like two swimmers surfacing.

I take the initiative. Knee-walking in fast, I shoot my right arm for an underhook, looking to drive into her body and put her on her back; another one of Austin's drills. Get the underhook, get your head on the right side, drive.

My head ends up on the wrong side.

Courtney makes me pay for it like she's been waiting for exactly that moment. Her arm loops over my neck and before I can posture out of it, she cinches my head snug against her ribs in a schoolgirl headlock. She forces me to stand, throws her leg in front of mine and throws her hip into me.

The headlock takedown is the oldest move in the world. It works. The room spins before my eyes again until my shoulder blades crash hard into the carpet.

She lands in side control. Chest across mine, headlock still clamped, her legs sprawled wide for base. Textbook kesa-gatame, the judo scarf hold. Her ribs press down on my sternum with every breath, and I get an unwanted nurse's clinical assessment of her body at close range: heart rate high but steady, breathing controlled, none of the flutter of a frightened woman. The trembling hands from the opening circle are gone.

You're never pinned in kesa if you can make space, the memory of Austin's voice tells me. Bridge into her, not away. Get your near arm free, hunt the leg.

I bridge hard into Courtney's body, once, twice, just making her ride the wave. On the second bridge her weight shifts a half-inch forward to compensate. That's all I need. My trapped arm worms free at the elbow, my hand finds the crook of her far knee, and I roll my hips out the back door. Her headlock, now holding nothing but my crown, slips off like a hat.

I scramble to my knees. She scrambles to hers. We collide again.

We go through a sequence more resembling high school wrestlers than catty bikini-clad bitches. She catches me in a front headlock; I peel off the choking arm, twist and come up in an over-under clinch. She attempts to drive into me. I hit a knee-block trip; she rolls through it like a gymnast and comes up facing me. She snatches a wrist and tries to spin to my back; I sit through and turn belly-down before she can get her chicken wing cinched in, and for a moment, we're stacked on our bellies with me on the bottom; both of us breathing like racehorses at the final turn.

We roll together. The carpet burns. Nobody tells you that about gold shag. It looks soft but your skin think's it's asphalt.

I see it. It's the opening Austin and I drilled on a rainy Tuesday. She reaches across her own body to post on my shoulder, arm extended, elbow up.

When a woman gives you her arm like a gift, Kiva, say thank you.

I overhook the extended arm, lock my hands, and sit back, dragging her down and across me, swinging my leg over her face for the armbar. Her elbow comes straight. Her fingers splay. I got it!  I have her spine flat, her wrist against my chest, my hips a single lift away from ending this whole strange evening.

Courtney does something, but I don't I know exactly what . She doesn't try to pull the arm out. She lifts her knees, rolls, bridges, and somehow her wiry but strong body stands. The angle collapses, my legs slide.  She wrenches free and stumbles, shaking out the arm, her chest heaving.

We're both up now, ten feet apart, sweat dripping.

And somewhere between the sounds of our breathing, I hear it.

It's not just buzzing this time. A voice. Faint, tinny, and compressed, like an insect sealed in a can and shaken.

"Atta girl, Courtney."

My eyes snap to the black screen. That's where it must have come from. Where else? Some client on the other side, too loud with his bourbon, close to the glass. That must be it. The dark mirror gives back nothing but two exhausted women.

Courtney doesn't look at the screen at all.

She looks at me, adjusts her hair bun with the arm I nearly broke, and smiles that small apologetic smile, as if to say, "sorry about this, I can't believe any of it either" and starts forward again.

We circle again, both of us wearing the fight now -- hair stuck to our necks, chests heaving, the gold carpet dark with sweat spots like a map of everywhere we've already been.

No more pretending. Whatever Courtney is, she's trained. Somebody built this woman, hold by hold, and dressed her in a cute sundress.

We lock up. Collar and elbow, our slick palms slipping off each other. I drive off my legs. Strength comes up from the floor. Once more she gives ground, backing up grudgingly step by step, until I've run her into the corner where two walls of paneling meet.

I work my forearm up under her jaw and press, forcing her head back, her pale throat exposed in the light. Her hands claw at my wrist. I know I've got her. One more adjustment, one turn of the hips, and--

The buzzing.

Right there by her head. Inches away. And I hear the voice, tinny and sharp:

"Pivot NOW!"

Her hips explode.

She turns like something fired from a spring gun. She fully twists inside my grip, using my own pressure against me. The wall hits my back, her forearms slamming me into the corner I intended for her. That voice wasn't behind the glass. That voice--

Her knee buries itself in my midsection.

Everything short circuits out. My body folds around the point of impact before I've finished having the thought. Can't...breathe... Doubled over, hands on my knees, diaphragm in spasm. My paralyzed diaphragm, it might take thirty seconds, ride it out. The nurse in me gets that far before the first hammer blow lands between my shoulder blades.

Then another. Another. Fists like mallets pound my spine. Each one drives an involuntary grunt out of me. My knees hit the carpet.

This isn't happening. Not like this. Not in front of--

Craig! Craig is watching this!

The thought hits harder than the fists. Somewhere out there, a screen is showing a man I like a woman on her knees getting beaten like a rug, and that woman is me. Shame now mixes with the pain.

Fingers wind into my hair.

"Get up, bitch!"

The voice is nothing like the girl in the sundress. It's guttural and cold coming from somewhere below her collarbones. She's dragging me by the scalp away from the wall, my knees plowing furrows in the shag. I grab her wrist with both hands. Base, Kiva, get to your feet, get your base. I force myself up, half-rising, hair roots screaming. Her grip shifts to my arm.

Her hip drops under mine.

I know what's coming a quarter-second before it comes, but it's not nearly enough to stop it. The room turns over. The floor arrives all at once.

Seventy-eight stories of building come up through that carpet and into my back. The impact scatters me on the floor. For a moment, I hear no sound. My sight is watery. I'm staring at the ceiling. My lungs have forgotten how to breathe.

Get up. Austin's voice again. You're never done on impact. Get up.

Nothing moves yet. Above me, Courtney steps into view and looks down, her head tilted, her breathing relaxed, brushing a few strands of hair from her face with that small apologetic smile.

And my anger opens its eyes.

I get one knee under me. Then the other. The room sways like a ship's cabin, and I'm halfway to standing when Courtney's leg sweeps through both of mine like a scythe.

The carpet again.

Get your bearings. Get your--

Hands close around my ankles.

She drags me. She actually drags me, across the center of the room, and the shag peels my back like a cheese grater. Friction burns from my shoulder blades to waist, my arms trailing over my head, my body plowing a wake through the gold fibers. Somewhere behind the glass, shadows are watching a woman get hauled across a floor like a fallen tree being cleared from a path. That woman is me. That woman is me and I can't--

She drops my ankles at center carpet like a delivery.

"Up," she says sweetly, now in that sundress voice again.

The hair. Again, she finds the hair. My ponytail is gone. Her fingers knot at my scalp and she lifts, and I climb because the alternative is being scalped. The instant my feet are under me her grip changes, her hip finds mine at a different angle this time. It's different throw, some inner thigh sweep I've only ever seen in videos and the world rotates and the floor comes up through my ribs.

She's not trying to win. The thought arrives cold and terrifying. She could have won already. She's exhibiting.

"You're supposed to be good," Courtney says, circling me. Her voice has finished changing. There's nothing timid left in it.  It's flat, amused, cruel, like a cat working a small rodent. "They told me you were good."

I roll to my hands and knees. I think I taste blood in my mouth but I'm not sure. My bikini top has shifted off-center and I can't spare a hand to fix it. Get up. You've been hurt worse. Room 10, the night you worked a code blue for fifty minutes, then stayed on your feet another twelve hours.

She lets me get almost all the way up. That's her game now. She assists with a courteous little haul on my hair, helping me to my feet like a gentleman with a car door.  And the moment I'm weight-bearing, she chops me down again with a takedown I don't even recognize. My legs are stolen out from under me; the ceiling and the floor trade places one more time.

Laughter.

Not from Courtney. It's tinny, faint, laughter through a receiver, through the buzz. Something in my chest drops. Someone is watching this and laughing through her ear.

Fingers hook into my bikini top and haul upward. The fabric slips and gives. I clutch at it with one hand, and I stagger to my feet because she wants me to.  Everything in this room happens now because she wants it to.

Then she takes my hair in both hands and swings me.

The room smears together -- paneling, clock, glass, paneling. My feet cross and stumble, trying to keep tension off my scalp, and she releases at the precise arc that sends me into the plexiglass. I get my palms up just in time. The screen booms as I crash into it.

Before I can push off, she's on my back. My right arm is wrenched up between my shoulder blades into a  vicious hammerlock. Her weight flattens me chest-first into the glass.

Into the mirror.

Her face looms over my shoulder, my own face inches away. My skin is flushed and wet, my hair wild, one eye already puffing,  -- and behind our reflections, nothing but blackness. Chairs full of seated shadows and drinks, eyes in the dark I'll never see.

"Look at her," Courtney announces to the darkness. Her free hand gathers my hair and pulls my head back, presenting my face to the glass like a photograph she's showing around a party. "The famous nurse."

She presses me forward until my nose touches the smooth cold screen, my nearly exposed right breast pressed flattened into the plexiglass.

My breath fogs a little gray circle on the black, and it expands and shrinks with each ragged exhale. Suddenly, I'm the eight years old girl on the train with my nose pressed against the window, watching the dark tunnel walls rush past, believing that somewhere out beyond the black, there was a whole world of lights I'd get to see if the train just kept going.

There's a world of lights behind this glass too. Rich men in the dark, watching my breath fog.

The girl on the train did not come seventy-eight floors up to end here.

Through the buzz, inches from my ear, Courtney's receiver buzzes like a fly on a wire It's the tinny voice again, of a man delighted by what he is seeing.

"Punish her."

Courtney takes me apart in segments. She keeps the standing armlock to bend my wrist toward my forearm until I gasp. She steers me away from the screen and releases my arm just before it breaks. A hip throw I see coming and can't stop, my body too slow now. I'm on the floor again. She lets me rise in a sick game of cat and mouse. A knee to the stomach drops me to my knees again. She lets me rise. An open palm across my face, full arm behind it, my face turns to the side, my hair now too matted to swing much.

Breathe. In, two, three--

I can't get the count. My ribs won't expand right. Somewhere in the last few minutes my bikini top has twisted further, riding wrong, with one strap off my shoulder. My right breast has popped out and there's no moment to fix it. She's turned even my own body into something I can't manage. That's the design. I understand the design even as it works on me. Like a delirious combative patient who lost her control and dignity. Eventually, she'll stop fighting.

Not this patient.

I swing at her. It's slow and she isn't there. Another knee and I hit the floor again.

And through it all, the mosquito rides her ear, delighted and close enough now that I catch whole phrases in the clinches. "Beautiful, baby." A throw. "Make her remember it." A slap across the face. Laughter like a fly trapped in a jar. He's watching through her somehow. Every angle she gives the glass is a camera angle, every taunt is performed for an audience of one plus shadows. She is not a fighter tonight, she is an instrument, and the man playing her is somewhere out there getting exactly what he wants.

The anger keeps growing. It's the only part of me that isn't tired.

"All right, sweetheart," the mosquito says. "End it."

Courtney hauls me up to my knees by the hair one more time. Sets me there like a trophy being positioned for the photograph. Her fingers tighten, pulling my face up toward hers, and she leans in close, breathing easy.

"Aw," she says. "The famous nurse."

SLAP! My head rocks. She pulls it back into place.

"Say goodnight for the cameras."

SLAP! White sparks. She restores the position. She's not even setting up the submission yet. She's savoring. And somewhere under my numb, swelling face, battered body and twisted bikini top, the nurse in me reads her the way I've read a thousand overconfident interns: she has stopped assessing. She thinks the case is closed.

Austin, from a rainy Tuesday: A cocky opponent hands you the opening. Your job is to be alive when it arrives.

So, I die a little.

I let everything go. My shoulders, jaw, and arms flop loose at my sides. My weight sags in her grip until she's holding my whole head up by the hair. Limp. Finished. A woman with nothing left, kneeling in the wreckage of her dignity.

She winds up the next slap with all the caution of someone hitting a heavy bag.

My hand comes up and catches her wrist out of the air.
Her eyes widen. My right hand is already moving, the one weapon nobody prepared her for. The right hand was mine before Austin, before the catpin, before any of this.  A short, turning, whole-hip right hand drives into the meat of her ribs.

The sound it makes is not a slap. It's a deep thud like a door kicked shut.

Courtney folds all at once, jackknifing over the punch. Her grip on my hair spasms loose, and the breath comes out of her with a sound I know from a hundred bedsides.  It's the involuntary gasp of a diaphragm in full distress.

I come up off my knees. My legs manage to hold.

Her hair is still up in that neat little bun, and I take it in my fist and pull. Pins scatter across the gold shag, dark hair tumbles loose around my hand. And now it's my turn, and my arm is not tired anymore.

SLAP! Her head snaps sideways.

"That one's for the carpet," I hear myself say, in a voice I don't fully recognize.

SLAP! The other way.

"That one's for the glass."

She's stumbling, doubled over, one arm pinned across her ribs, the other flailing for my wrist. The mosquito is jabbering something frantic into her ear -- up, angle, circle, GET OUT -- and for the first time all night, Courtney can't hear her master's voice over the ringing of her own skull.

I plant my feet, turn my hips, and hit her with everything the last twenty minutes has been depositing in my account.

The slap catches her flush across the cheek and turns her whole head -- hair whipping, spit flying, her body wheeling a half-step with the force of it.

And something small and flesh-colored leaps out of her ear, arcs through the apartment light, and drops without a sound into the gold shag carpet between us.

We both look at it.

Then we look at each other.

We hit each other at the same moment.

No setup, no circling -- just two women colliding over a piece of plastic the size of a fingernail, and then we're down, rolling across the gold shag in the ugliest scramble of the night. Elbows, knees, handfuls of hair. Nothing clean left in either of us.

But Courtney is fighting two fights, and I'm only fighting one.

I feel the divided attention in her body; the way her weight keeps shifting toward wherever the receiver might have landed, her head turning in little bird-flicks between me and the carpet. She's wrestling me with her arms and searching the floor with her eyes, and Austin's voice arrives calm as a chart note: a divided opponent is a beaten opponent. She just doesn't know it yet.

We break apart. She comes up on her hands and knees, and I come up behind her, and that's when she sees it -- a small flesh-colored crumb half-buried in the shag, three feet away. Her whole body orients toward it like a compass needle. Without that voice in her ear, she's been fighting on memory for ninety seconds, and she needs it back the way some patients need the call button in their hand just to sleep.

She reaches.

Thank you, I say to the extended arm, the exposed back, the gift of her.

I drop onto her from behind and my arms spear under her armpits, hands snaking up, fingers lacing behind her neck. Full nelson. Her spine arches; the reach for the receiver dies mid-air, her hand clawing shut on nothing.

She bucks that dead-lift, rebar strength one more time. But this time I'm not on her back like a passenger, I'm woven into her, and before she can rise, I swing my legs around her waist and hook my ankles together over her navel.

Body scissors. Locked.

Her whole torso is mine now -- neck bent forward by the nelson, ribs and belly crushed inside my thighs -- and there's nowhere for her to go but where I take her. We topple onto our sides on the carpet, spooned together like something almost tender, and I begin to squeeze.

I work both ends at once. My hands press her chin toward her chest, curling her spine forward from the top. My legs cinch tight and pull her hips back, bowing her spine from the bottom. She's bent like a drawn bow, and I am both the string and the archer.

The sound she makes is not from the sundress voice or the cruel voice. It's older than either. It's involuntary.

Her legs kick, churning the shag. Her fingers try to claw at my laced hands, then at the carpet, then at nothing. The nurse in me runs her assessment coolly through the strain: breathing compromised, thoracic flexion, she has maybe a minute of real fight left in that body and she's spending it badly. Every kick costs her air she can't replenish.

My arms shake. My thighs burn. I don't care. Twenty minutes of being dragged, thrown, spun, slapped, and displayed are all flowing down into this one hold, and I hear my own voice, low and even, close to her ear where the mosquito used to live.

"No one's coming through the earpiece, Courtney. It's just us now."

Three feet away, the receiver lies in the gold shag where it fell.

If I listen, under her ragged breathing, under my panting,  I can just make out something tiny and furious buzzing out of it, shouting instructions into the carpet, into the room, into the dark behind the glass.

Nobody's listening anymore.

I squeeze.

Everything I have left goes into the hold -- hands pressing her chin toward her chest, ankles cinched, thighs closing like a slow double door. Her spine bows another degree. From the carpet three feet away, the mosquito is frantic now, tiny and shrill, buzzing out of the fallen receiver like a wasp in a jar:

"Fight, baby! Buck her off! You're stronger than her! FIGHT!"

And Courtney fights. I'll give her that. She bucks and twists, her heels drum the shag, that deceptive strength surging one last time against my hooked ankles. I ride every wave and add a pound of pressure at the crest of each one, the way Austin taught me. Don't match her rhythm. Tax it.

"Stop listening to him," I say into her ear, and squeeze.

Her bucking loses its form. The surges come further apart, weaker, then more desperate, then not desperate enough. Her fingers stop clawing at the air and start fluttering uselessly.

"Don't you DARE quit on me--"

Her hand lifts off the carpet and waves. It looks small and broken. The message is unmistakable.

"I give," she gasps. "I give... I submit... please..."

I hold it three more seconds.

I'm not proud of those three seconds. But I'm not sorry about them either. One for the dragging. One for the glass. One for the shy woman in the sundress who never existed in this room at all.

Then I open everything at once -- arms, legs. And  I roll away.

Courtney spills face-down into the shag, sucking air in long whooping pulls. And the anger, which should be finished now, isn't. It comes up off the floor with me. I swing a leg over and sit down on her back, take a handful of that loose dark hair, and press her face into the gold carpet -- not grinding, just holding, one long clinical beat, the way you hold a bell after ringing it.

This is who she brought here. Remember her.

I stand up over her, my chest heaving, my twisted bikini top hanging off me like the flag of some small defeated country. I cover up my exposed twisted boobs and I finally have a moment to readjust the top. I turn and glare straight into the black glass, at my own wrecked reflection and every invisible drink behind it. You got your show. All of you got your show.

The door opens.

David Moll comes in beaming, hands already applauding, like a man reviewing excellent quarterly numbers. "Magnificent! Magnificent, Kiva!" He crosses the carpet, steps neatly over Courtney as if she were furniture, and takes my wrist. "Ladies and gentlemen -- your winner!"

He raises my hand. And then he walks me.   

A slow, proprietary circuit loop of the room. He's turning me, displaying me, the whole battered bikini-clad  length of me. Along the plexiglass, close enough that my breath could fog it again, He's promenading me past the darkness like an item at an auction. I can't see them. I can feel them. Every shadowed chair, every lifted glass, every set of eyes traveling over my body. The nurse from Texas, catch of the evening.

Movement stirs below me. Courtney, up on her hands and knees, is crawling toward the receiver in the shag, needing that voice back in her ear the way a drowning woman needs a rail.

Something goes red behind my eyes.
   
My foot comes down on her back and drives her flat into the carpet, and I hear -- I swear I hear -- a low sound of appreciation move through the darkness behind the glass.

And that's when I finally, fully understand where I am.

They loved that. They loved all of it. The beating I took, the beating I returned, the stomp, the anger -- it's all inventory. There is no gesture I can make in this room that doesn't feed the room.

So, I feed it, but on my own terms. I look dead into the black glass, cup my breasts through the sweat-soaked navy blue like a magazine girl from the 1970s, give the darkness the slowest, most contemptuous sexy smile I own, and blow them a kiss.

Choke on it, gentlemen.

Moll, delighted beyond words, escorts me to the door.

The hallway is bright and cool and full of applause. Cynara clasps my hands, Vi is kissing my cheek, "Marvelous, dear, absolutely marvelous!" Past their shoulders Denise and Molly slip into the fight room where a thin dark-haired woman is still face-down on gold shag, alone with a buzzing piece of plastic.

Cynara walks me back to the dressing room. The lilies are still there. The refrigerator is still humming.

"Marble shower's through there, dear. Drinks in the cooler -- rehydrate, I mean it, you left a gallon of yourself on that carpet." She squeezes my arm, softer now. "I'll give you your privacy. I'll come back for you shortly."

The door clicks shut, and for the first time in an hour, no one is watching me.

I stand a moment in the quiet, checking myself like an intake assessment: rug-burned back, aching ribs, throbbing scalp, one eye swelling, hands still trembling with spent adrenaline. All of it survivable. All of it earned, though I couldn't tell you in which direction.

My gym bag sits on the sofa where I left it, in what seems ages ago. I dig out my phone.

One text. 8:47 PM. Craig.

OMG!!!!!!!!! Five shocked face emojis follow.
 
I look at it for a long moment. Craig's message is sitting there in my ruined bikini seventy-eight floors above the city.

And then, I start to laugh.

The marble shower is beautiful. I stand under the water and let it run hot. For the first minute, it's mercy. Then the adrenaline subsides, and my body starts submitting its itemized bill. The rug burn across my back is a long stinging territory from shoulder blades to waist that makes me hiss when the spray finds it. The ribs throb deep where her knees struck. Then my scalp, which feels like it's undergone dermabrasion.

The water hits my face and I flinch.

I touch my cheek gently. Swollen on both sides, the left worse. The slaps are surfacing now, blooming under the skin the way they always do an hour later. I've seen it a hundred times on other faces in the ER, women saying "I walked into a door" while I charted the handprint. Tonight the chart is mine. "Patient is a 30-something female presenting with facial edema, contusions, superficial friction burns, and a thoroughly rearranged understanding of her evening."

I lean my forehead against the cool marble and let the water run down my back and try to process any of it.

I fought a woman wearing her husband in her ear.

I was dragged across a carpet by my ankles in front of an audience of shadows.

I stomped a beaten woman while strangers murmured approval behind glass, and then I blew them a kiss.

And somewhere in a hotel room in this same city, my high school boyfriend watched every second of it.

The fake shy girl in the sundress. The steel under the thin arms. "Punish her." The little gray circle of my breath on the black screen, reminding me of the train window from many years ago rushing up out of memory. They don't assemble into anything yet. Maybe they're not supposed to. Some nights you don't chart until morning.

I shut off the water before I fall asleep standing up.

Drying off is its own small challenge. The towel finds every burn.  I take fresh bra and panties from the bag, Redress with the warm-up suit. In the vanity mirror ringed in those soft round bulbs, a woman with a puffy face and wet hair looks back at me. I take out my makeup bag, unzip it, look at her for a long moment.

No.

I zip it back up. Whoever sees this face tonight sees the face. I earned it, let it speak.

My phone has been busy while I was under the water. It's Craig, four more times:

Kiva r u ok???

Please answer me

I don't even know what I just watched. R U hurt?

KIVA???

 I don't answer yet. I don't have the sentence ready, and Craig deserves a sentence, not a shrug.

There's a knock, and Cynara comes in with company. David Moll, glowing like a man whose stock just split, and Vi beside him carrying a small tray as if she were serving appetizers.

"Kiva, my dear," David says, "you have no idea what you did out there tonight. The clients are electrified. The discussion board is lighting up like a pinball machine -- they're calling you the find of the season."

"The Nurse," Vi says, with relish. "They've already named you. It's trending on the members' board."

"And these," David says, gesturing to the tray, "arrived before you were even out of the shower. "Sometimes," he explains, "our clients like to leave gifts for their favorite ladies."

Gifts. Actual gifts, laid out on velvet.  A gold necklace from a Hollywood producer, Vi explains, naming a name even I recognize. A diamond bracelet, from a quarterback whose jersey hangs in half the sports bars in Texas. And an ornate folded card which turns out to contain, as far as I can tell through the flourishes, a sincere offer of marriage from a Saudi prince.

I stand there in my warm-up suit with my swollen face, holding a proposal from royalty, and think: Tom, you should see me now.

"There's a small gathering upstairs," David continues smoothly. "Very select. Several of the gentlemen would love to meet you in person."

"No." It comes out faster than I intended. I soften it slightly. "Thank you. I need to go home and rest. It's been..." I gesture vaguely at my own face. "A night."

"Of course, of course. But Kiva -- when are you next in New York? We'd like to book you again. The demand will be extraordinary."

"I honestly have no idea."

"Well." He takes my hand in both of his, with the performative warmth of a man who closes deals for a living. "Keep in touch. Please. You have friends in this building now."

Vi kisses my cheek, the less swollen one, with a nurse's aim of her own and Cynara squeezes my arm, and then they're gone. I'm alone with a tray of treasure and a humming refrigerator.

I pack. Sweaty bikini rolled in the towel. Hand wraps. The necklace, the bracelet, and the marriage proposal go into the gym bag between my flip-flops and my toiletry kit and makeup bag, which is the correct place for all of it. Somewhere over the Atlantic, a prince will recover.

Then I sit on the sofa, take a long pull from a bottle of electrolyte water, and finally answer Craig.

I'm fine. Sore, but fine. I promise.

The reply comes back in eleven seconds.

Where r u?

Moll Tower, I respond.

Three dots. Then:

I'm on my way. Do not move

I look at that for a moment -- do not move, from a man who two hours ago thought I was sending him a webinar. My battered face attempts a smile and mostly manages it.

I'll be waiting by the curb

I zip the bag, sling it over my good shoulder, and take one last look around the lush little room.

The elevator carries me down alone, seventy-eight floors of soft light and lemon oil again, and somewhere around the fortieth floor it occurs to me that the last time I rode it, I was a different woman. Not better or worse. Just one who hadn't done this experience that yet.

The lobby is empty except for the night man, who nods at me with the complete incuriosity of someone paid to notice nothing. The glass door releases me onto the sidewalk, and the city takes me back into its ecosystem of  horns, steam, sirens, and eight million people who have no idea what happens on the seventy-eighth floor of Moll Tower.

I stand at the curb with my gym bag on my good shoulder, a swollen-faced woman in a warm-up suit with gold and diamond jewelry and a marriage proposal zipped in next to her wet bikini. I wait.

He isn't long.

A car noses out of the traffic and pulls to the curb, and Craig is out of it barely before it's fully in park. He moves around the hood, moving fast, and then stops short three feet from me. I watch his eyes do the inventory. The puffy cheek. The eye. The wet hair. The way I'm standing a little curled around my ribs.

"Oh my God," he says quietly. Not the text version. The real one.

"I know," I say. "You should see the other girl."

He doesn't laugh. He takes the bag off my shoulder like it's made of glass, opens the passenger door, and helps me down into the seat with two hands. His touch is careful, deliberate, and completely unnecessary, and I let him do it anyway, because there is a version of being handled that heals more than it insults, and after tonight I can tell the difference.

He pulls into traffic. His hands are correct on the wheel, ten and two, which from Craig probably means he's rattled.

"The Plaza," I tell him. "That's where I'm staying."

"Okay," he says. And then, at the first red light: "Are you okay?"

"I'm okay."

Two blocks. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"Craig."

"I'm sorry. It's just--"He starts three different sentences and abandons all of them like bad parking spots. The silence in the car gets thick. Outside, Manhattan pours past the windows.

Finally, at a light somewhere in the Fifties, he exhales and just says it.

"I don't know how to talk about what I watched tonight. I've been sitting in that hotel room for an hour trying to figure out what I even --. I'm having trouble expressing myself. Which is not usually a problem for me."

"No," I agree. "It isn't."

"Can we go somewhere and talk? Not the hotel lobby. Somewhere actual."

"Yes," I say. "Okay."

He nods, visibly relieved to have a next step. "What do you need? Right now. What can I do?"

"A pharmacy, if you see one," I reply. I could use Ibuprofen. And Aquaphor cream. The carpet took some skin off my back."

His head turns. "Your back--" He catches himself, faces the road again, breathes. "I have both. At my place. I live like four minutes from here. You could come up. Take the ibuprofen, deal with your back, talk. That's all I'm -- I mean...Let me help you."

The light turns green. He doesn't move until I answer, and someone behind us leans on their horn, and he still doesn't move.

I look out the windshield at the avenue running north. His apartment. Ten o'clock. Me, aching, stiff and throbbing. I know exactly what this kind of tired does to my judgment. I know where four minutes away can lead, and I know I don't know whether I want it to. I know that not knowing hasn't stopped me once tonight.

Something came up, I told him two days ago. I at least owe him an explanation.

"Okay," I say. "I can stay fifteen minutes."

He pulls through the intersection, and neither of us says anything else. The silence in the car is a completely different silence than it was ten blocks ago.

His building's elevator is paneled in steel instead of dark wood, and it smells like nothing at all. We ride up in a silence that is no longer shock, but not yet anything else.

My second elevator of the evening, I think. The first one carried me up to a fight. I glance at Craig, who is studying the floor numbers, and I wonder, with a flutter in my stomach, whether this one is carrying me up to a different kind of physical contest altogether. Different rules. Same elevated risk of someone getting pinned.

Behave, Kiva.

The doors open. He leads me down a quiet hall, keys in, and the lights come up on the kind of apartment fit for a successful Wall Street investor. Floor-to-ceiling windows reveal the city lights laid out before it. The furniture looks professionally chosen. The art was clearly bought from galleries.

And yet, it is still unmistakably, a man's apartment. One enormous television. A single lonely decorative pillow, no plants.

"Sit, please," he says as he points me to the sofa. What can I get you? I have a decent white open, or there's a red, or--"

"White's fine."

He pours two glasses, hands me mine, and settles into the chair across from the sofa -- across, I notice, not beside.  He takes a breath like a man about to plunge into icy water.

"Okay," he says. "I think I'm over the initial shock. Mostly. Can we talk about what I watched tonight?"

So, I tell him.

I tell him about the catpin. About the semi-hidden world, the website, the challenges, the private matches in living rooms and garages and remote parts off of hiking trails. I tell him about Billy's, about women with day jobs and minivans and mortgages who meet on mats and carpets and settle things with their bodies instead of their mouths.

"But you're so--" He searches. "Normal. You're the kindest person I know. You take care of dying people for a living. That's all you ever wanted to do."

"So do half the women in that world. Nurses, teachers, accountants, soccer moms. You'd be amazed." I turn the wine glass by its stem. "Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud, Craig. Women are competitive. All of us. It's in the wiring. Most women fight their whole lives. They just do it with gossip and exclusion and sabotage and smiles. Backbiting at the office. Freezing another mother out of the group chat. Twenty-year campaigns of little cruelties." I shrug, and my ribs remind me not to. "The women in the catpin world are just honest about it. Thirty minutes on a carpet, somebody wins, somebody loses, and you know exactly where you stand. It's cleaner than what happens in most break rooms. I've worked in those break rooms. Trust me."

He's quiet for a long moment, swirling his wine, actually thinking about it -- which is more than most men would do.

"In a strange way," he says slowly, "that's starting to make sense. Which worries me." He laughs a little. "I'm going to need time to process it. Possibly a support group."

"There's a website for that too."

"Don't." And then his laugh becomes a real one, and he points at me. "Oh my God. Wait. Junior year. The parking lot. Donna Kowalski."

"Oh no."

"You had her by the collar against the bus! Over what? Oh yeah, didn't she say something about your brother?"

"Yes, and she said something about my shoes," I say matter-of-factly, "and nothing happened, because Mr. Turner came out."

"You were shaking. I remember thinking, note to self, never make this girl mad." He shakes his head, grinning at the adolescent memory. "I should have known then. The signs were all there."

And just like that the room warms up. We fall back through the years together. We laugh at the homecoming dance where his car died and my father had to rescue us, wearing pajamas and slippers, and didn't speak one word the whole drive. We recall the time we snuck in to see a terrible slasher film and started making out ten minutes into it. The manager flashed a light on us and told us to watch the movie or leave. The wine goes down easy. My face aches when I laugh, and I keep laughing anyway.

"Remember when you won me that giant stuffed bear at the carnival," I ask him.

"Yeah," he replies. "I spent forty dollars trying."

"The bear probably cost three bucks."

"It was worth every penny."

I smile. "I kept it until I got married."

His eyes widen, "You did?"

I nod. "It sat on my dresser for years."

Then his glass stops halfway to his mouth, and he sets it down, and I watch the mood change in his shoulders before it reaches his face.

"Kiva. There's something I need to say."

"Okay."

"I've needed to say it for about twenty years, and if I don't do it tonight I never will." He stares at his hands. He starts, stops and starts again. "Senior year. When you were late, and we thought...when we thought you were pregnant. And I broke up with you." His jaw tightens. "I panicked and I ran. You were terrified and alone and I made it about me. It was selfish and it was cruel, and I've thought about it more times than you'd believe. I was seventeen and stupid -- and I'm not offering that as an excuse, because there isn't one. I'm just telling you why." He finally looks up. "I'm sorry. I know it's a lifetime late. But will you accept it anyway?"

The room is very quiet. Somewhere below us, the city goes on glittering.

"Craig." I wait until he's really looking at me. "I got over that a long time ago. Years. I promise you, I haven't been carrying it." I feel something small and old unlock in my chest even as I say it. "But I'm glad you said it. It closes a door that was standing open a crack. So...yes. Accepted. Fully."

He exhales like a man setting down luggage. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

"Besides," I add, "as tonight demonstrated, if I'd really wanted satisfaction, I know where to get it."

"That's not funny."

"It's a little funny."

"It's a little funny," he concedes, and refills our glasses.

After that, the evening loosens entirely. The stories get worse and better. And inevitably, because all roads in our shared history lead there, we arrive at The Party. My parents away for the weekend. The word spreading through three high schools. Bobby Kessler's boots through the screen door, the lamp that never got explained, my mother's face upon discovering cigarette burns in the carpet, the beer-soaked furniture, and my grounding that stretched across two lunar cycles.

"Your father looked at me at graduation," Craig says, "like I personally burned that carpet."

"You were an accessory."

"I was upstairs--" He stops. Half a second too late.

The word hangs there. Upstairs. We both know what was upstairs. Two seventeen-year-olds with a locked door, four fumbling hands, one criminally overconfident boy, and the single most catastrophic debut in the history of romance,  an encounter that ended in confusion, an apology, a frantic and unsuccessful search of the bedding, and several days of sheer terror.

Craig's face has gone faintly pink.

"We don't have to--" he begins.

"You lost it," I say.

"There was no manual--"

"You lost it, Craig. We looked for twenty minutes. I stripped that bed like a crime scene."

"I have spent decades not thinking about this," he says, covering his eyes with one hand, laughing helplessly. "It remains the single most embarrassing night of my life."

And this is the moment. I know it's the moment because my heart has picked up the exact rhythm it had on the walk down that carpeted hallway tonight, bare feet on soft shag, everything about to change.

I reach down into the gym bag beside the sofa -- past the wet towel, past a diamond bracelet, past a prince, and come up with a small foil square, which I hold up between two fingers like a badge.

Craig's hand comes off his eyes. He stares.

"You--" His voice actually cracks. He clears it. "You found it? You've kept it all these years?"

"No," I say, sweetly, watching him do the math. "I bought this one yesterday. Little pharmacy in SoHo." I let one beat pass. "Right after the bikini."

I watch his gears in motion-- yesterday. Before the fight. Before any of this. She planned -- and his expression moves through shock and disbelief and arrives somewhere that makes the whole battered length of me feel warm.

The room has gone very still. He looks at me and I look at him, and neither of us is seventeen, and in a way, both of us are. And the city glimmers away below the windows minding its own business.

"Moneyboy," I say, "I think we have an unfinished transaction to complete."

-----------------------------------------------

I wake at five thirty a.m. exactly, the way I always do. The body of a career nurse does not respect weekends, holidays, or personal milestones.

For a moment I don't know where I am. Then the room comes together around me. Gray dawn light seeps through tall windows, the gentle quiet, the warm rise and fall under my cheek. My head is on Craig's chest. His heartbeat is slow and even beneath my ear, sixty-two beats a minute.

I do my morning inventory. Ribs: worse than yesterday. Back: a roadmap of stings. Face: tight, puffy, tender to the pillow. Scalp: it hurts. Everything hurts.

In this moment, I feel content.

I lie still and think about the night, especially the second half of it, the better half. A smile spreads across my sore face. I didn't know what to expect when I walked into this apartment. It turns out Craig is a very proficient lover. Proficient is actually the wrong word; proficient is what we call competent nurses. Craig was masterful. Every note, in the right order, at the right tempo, with the patience of a man who understood that an evening with a woman is a long piece of music and not a sprint to the coda.

I almost laugh out loud into his chest. He's come a long way from the terrified seventeen-year-old fumbling in my parents' guest bed like a boy trying to defuse a bomb in the dark. But then, I shouldn't be surprised. This is Craig. The boy who turned a paper route into a portfolio. Craig has never in his life met a skill he didn't drill until he owned it. Apparently that work ethic generalized.

But it's the other thing that stays with me, something rarer than technique. He was attentive. Thoughtful. He made the whole night about me -- my sore body, my pace, my pleasure -- checking in without breaking the spell, careful with the rug burns, unhurried, generous. I think that is an uncommon trait in a man. Uncommon enough that many women my age learn to stop expecting it, and then don't quite know where to put themselves when it shows up anyway.

Outside the tall windows, the work day is waking up. And lying there in Manhattan's half-light, clarity arrives, the way it sometimes does at the end of a long shift, all at once and unexpectedly.

The little girl on the train with nose pressed to the glass, believing in the world of lights beyond the dark. The professional at the podium with her laminated badge and her respectful applause. The fighter on the gold carpet, dragged and thrown and displayed -- and rising and winning anyway. The woman in this bed.

I've spent years treating them as if I'm managing separate patients in different rooms, worrying what would happen if they ever met.

They were never separate. They were all the same woman the whole time. None of them needs to be hidden from the others anymore. None of them needs to be hidden from anyone.

Craig stirs under me, his arm tightening around my shoulders in his sleep, careful even now of my back.

I close my eyes.

I slide out from under his arm at half past six, and Craig sleeps on for exactly as long as it takes me to find my clothes.

"You're leaving?" he says from the pillows.

"I have to. My things are at the Plaza, and my flight's this afternoon." I pull the warm-up jacket over my shoulders, wincing where the fabric crosses the burns. "Texas needs its nurses back."

"Breakfast first. There's a café next door. It has excellent -- " he searches the ceiling -- "everything. It has excellent everything. You should try it."

"Sold."

The café is small and warm and smells like a lovely fresh bakery. We take a table by the window and have the kind of breakfast people have when the important conversations are already behind them. Our talk is quiet and easy. The coffee is refilled twice; his knee presses against mine under the table like a teenager's. The waitress looks at my swollen face, then at Craig, then back at me with an arched eyebrow, and I want to tell her, honey, you should see the other girl, but some jokes you keep for yourself.

Over the last of the coffee, he turns his cup in its saucer.

"When are you coming back to New York?"

"I don't know yet."

"Would you ever think about..." He stops, reworks the sentence. "Moving back east? Ever? Hypothetically?"

I look at him for a long moment.  I note his silver temples and the hope he's trying to seem casual.

"I can't answer that right now," I say gently. "That's not a no. It's just the truth."

He nods, takes it like a man, and pays the check before I can reach for it. Outside on the sidewalk he jingles his keys.

"I'll drive you to the Plaza."

"No. I'd rather walk."

"Walk? Kiva, you can barely... it's twenty blocks. You got thrown around a penthouse last night."

"I know," I say. "I was there. I'll walk."

Something in my voice settles it. He puts the keys away, and then his hands come up carefully to my face, finding the unswollen places. He kisses me, long and measured, on a Manhattan sidewalk at eight in the morning while the delivery trucks grind past.

"Text me when you land," he says.

"I will. Goodbye, Moneyboy."

And then I'm walking.

The city takes me back with the same indifference. My body feels every block -- the ribs, the back, every receipt from the seventy-eighth floor. I walk anyway, because the aching is just asking questions, and the walking brings the resolutions I need.

It was nice to visit the past. I spent two days in it. The talk, Robin in the third row, the gold carpet, Craig's hands. But there's a reason it's called visiting. The past is a fine place to stop; it's a bad place to live.

Apartment House Wrestling can put women on its board and clients in its livestream and call itself reborn, but I know what's on the other side of that black glass. All the modernizing in the world doesn't change what the room is for. It's still rich men secretly watching women rip each other's hair and bikinis as they beat the hell out of each other. It always was. The carpet remembers everyone, Cynara said. Let it remember me as the one who left.

And Craig? I'm glad for the time I shared with him. I have no regrets sleeping with him. We celebrated our past instead of burying it. Old wounds got healed at last; a twenty-year-old embarrassment finally got its redemption. But a relationship? He has his Wall Street, I have my Texas, and it is far too early to know what I actually feel underneath the wine and the adrenaline and the gratitude. Some things you don't diagnose on the first night. Like a good nurse, you watch, and you wait, and you let the labs come back.

What I know is this: the girl on the train, the woman at the podium, the fighter on the carpet all walked out of that tower on the same two feet. Whatever comes next, they'll face it together.

A yellow taxi slows at the curb beside me, the window slides down.

"Need a ride, lady?

I smile at him -- puffy face, aching ribs, gym bag full of diamonds and a damp bikini -- and shake my head.

"No, thanks," I tell him. "I'll walk."

[Kiva]

Chapter 18: The Woman Who Kept Walking (Part 2 of 2)

Courtney and Bill first appeared in a wrestling story called "Puppet Master." It's not essential you read it first, but it might help give you a deeper appreciation of this chapter. https://www.freecatfights.com/forums/index.php?topic=120905.0


I won't be there to see the shocked look on his face. I won't be there with him at all. When Craig logs on to the livestream, I'll be in Moll Tower. He'll have no idea what he is about to see, but I made him promise to watch. No, I won't see his face. It's better that way.

The taxi repeatedly drifts and breaks in the stuttering Midtown traffic. The driver has been trying to talk to me since Lexington Avenue.

"You visiting New York?"

"Sort of."

"Business or fun?"

Good question. "A little of both."

He gives up on me after that. I'm a terrible conversationalist tonight. He turns up his radio and I go back to the window, watching the city roll past. Pedestrians, vehicles, street vendors, steam from the sidewalks all flow by me. Somewhere out there is the ghost of the girl who visited every year with her family. I wonder what she'd say if she could see me now, riding downtown in sweatpants and a warm-up jacket with a brand-new bikini folded in my gym bag, on my way to fight a woman in a penthouse in front of paying strangers.

She'd probably say what I've been saying to myself for two days: Kiva, what the hell are you doing?

I still don't have a clear answer.

My conference talk went well. Better than well. The room was packed, people asked thoughtful questions, and two nurse managers from Ohio asked if they could use my slides. For fifty minutes, I was the respectable version of me, a professional, composed woman with a laminated name badge. Nobody in that lecture hall would have guessed what was in my hotel room closet, hanging next to my blazer.

And then there was Robin.

She was in the audience. I spotted her in the third row halfway through the talk and nearly lost my place. Afterward, she came up, hugged me like no time had passed, and told me she was proud of me and said I looked great. We only talked for a few minutes. But something about seeing her there settled the nerves in my chest. I can't explain it. But that's Robin. She shows up, says something true whether anyone is ready to hear it or not. Then she said, "Kiva, never apologize for who you are." I can't say she doesn't practice what she preaches. Anyway, I walked out of that hall feeling like I could do anything.

Maybe that's why I did what I did next.

I bought the bikini at a boutique in SoHo. Navy blue. The saleswoman asked if I was going somewhere tropical. "Something like that," I said. She'll never know.

Craig was disappointed when I cancelled our dinner.

"Is everything okay?" he asked.

"Something came up."

I could hear him deciding not to push. That's one of the things I remember about Craig. He knows when to leave a door closed, like when he once closed the door on me. So, I opened a new one for him. Before we hung up, I gave him the access code to the website. The code is still active. Good for tonight only.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Just promise me you'll log on at eight."

"Kiva..."

"Promise me."

He promised.

So, I imagine tonight, at eight o'clock, Craig will pour himself a drink, open his laptop, type in the code, and wait for whatever he thinks I've sent him. He might think it's a lecture, maybe a presentation or a webinar.

Instead, he'll get me. Barefoot on a carpet, in a navy-blue bikini, fighting against a woman named Courtney with the whole city glittering beneath us.

My stomach does a slow roll every time I picture it. I don't know which is stronger - the excitement or the terror. They keep trading places, like two fighters circling. Why did I give him the code? I've asked myself a hundred times already. I think part of me is tired of being two women. The one who cares for critically ill patients and gives conference talks, and the one who fights. Tonight, for one night, one man gets to see both.

God help me.

"Here you go," the driver says. "Moll Tower."

I look up. There it is, rising out of the sidewalk in dark glass and stone. Somewhere up there, high above the taxis and the noise, is a replica of a carpeted apartment from 1975, waiting for two women.

I pay the driver, sling my bag over my shoulder, and step out onto the sidewalk.

Eight o'clock, Craig. Don't be late.

The keypad by the entrance is discreet, like the kind of thing you'd walk past a hundred times without seeing. I punch in the temporary code from the text. The six digits are good for one hour, like everything in this world seems to be. The glass door releases with a soft click that sounds weirdly welcoming.

Cynara is waiting inside.

"Kiva. Right on time." She takes my hand in both of hers. In the lobby light, she looks less like the old lady who lost her bracelet and more like what she actually is: a woman who has spent fifty years watching other women fight on carpets and knows exactly what she's looking at when she looks at me. "How are the nerves?" she asks.

"Present and accounted for."

"Good. The ones who say they aren't nervous are lying, and liars fight badly."

I'm about to ask her where we're going when something outside catches my eye. Through the lobby glass, at the curb, a black car the size of a small yacht is easing to a stop. The rear door opens before the driver can come around, and a young woman steps out onto the sidewalk.

I see the dark hair, the sundress, the gym bag on her shoulder.

I know her immediately. I've watched her on a screen several times. It's the same thin body and the eyes that kept sliding sideways toward the man outside always the ring. Courtney.

Which makes the man behind the wheel Bill.

He gets out of the car. He's middle aged, nearly bald, and with a tan that costs money. He comes around to her, takes her face in both hands and kisses her. Then he holds her at arm's length and says something, and she nods, and he says it again, and she nods again. Is he her coach, her handler, or her lover? I'm guessing all three. She stands on the sidewalk with her bag while he lowers himself back into the car and pulls into traffic.

"Is that Courtney?" I ask, though I already know.

Cynara glances out. "That's her."

I watch her cross toward the building. She's thinner than she appears in the videos. The sundress hangs off her shoulders like it belonged to a slightly larger woman. She's about an inch taller than me. The nurse in me sees a woman who could stand to gain a little weight. The fighter in me sees an opponent with a reach and leverage advantage. Neither one of us likes what we see, for entirely different reasons.

"Come along, dear." Cynara's hand closes around my arm, light but very much in charge, and she steers me away from the glass. "You two will meet soon enough. There's no gain in it happening in a lobby."

The elevator is paneled in dark wood and it still smells faintly of lemon oil. Cynara presses 78. The button lights, and the floor lifts under us with silence.

Seventy-eight floors. Somewhere below us, Craig is checking his watch.

The doors open onto a hallway with the familiar carpet. We pass a set of double doors standing open, and I get three seconds to view the room beyond. I see a long table dressed in white linen, shrimp on ice, a bartender in a black vest, and men. OK, maybe a few women. It's mostly men in blazers, no ties, drinks in hand, and that low confident laughter that I imagine men with power make when they're somewhere they're not supposed to be and know nothing will ever come of it. A few heads start to turn toward the doorway as we walk past.

Cynara doesn't slow down. I keep up with her pace.

"Clients," she says, with all the nonchalance of a tour guide pointing out street pigeons to city visitors.

At the end of the hall, she opens a door and waves me into a dressing room that is nicer than any hotel room I've ever paid for. Soft light. A vanity lined in small round bulbs. A deep sofa, a private bathroom, white robes on brass hooks, a small refrigerator humming in the corner. Fresh flowers sit on the table. They are lilies, which strikes me as either lovely or ominous, depending on how tonight goes.

"Change into your suit and get yourself settled," Cynara says. "Stretch, breathe, do whatever it is you do. I'll come for you myself when it's time. No one else will bother you." She takes a small card from her pocket and presses it into my hand. A phone number, handwritten. "If you need anything at all -- water, tape, a friendly voice -- you call that. I'll take care of whatever you need."

"Thank you."

She pauses at the door and looks at me for a moment, and something softens through her face.

"You'll do fine, dear," she says. "The apartment house remembers everyone. Make it remember you well."

Then she's gone, and I'm alone with the lilies, the humming refrigerator, and a navy-blue bikini at the bottom of my gym bag... and butterflies.

Alone, I sit on the edge of the sofa and let the quiet settle over me. Somewhere beyond these walls, a bartender is refilling glasses for men whose faces I'll never see.

And that's when it hits me.

This is a global stage.

Every fight I've ever had was local. Private homes. A dance studio. A golf course. A greenhouse. Billy's Sports Bar with its creaky cage, stale beer and cigarette haze. Tonight, the audience is a livestream with paying clients scattered across time zones I can't name. I might be seen in Tokyo. Dubai. London.

I imagine a senator, discreetly logged in from his study. Perhaps there's a movie star in dark glasses on the invisible side of the room. Or Some tech billionaire scheming to buy the viewing rights. Ladies and gentlemen, fighting out of the blue corner, a critical care nurse from Texas.

What would Tom think if he could see this? My ex-husband, who once couldn't handle me fighting at Billy's. I picture his face with that particular Tom expression, equal parts horror and helpless fascination and I almost laugh out loud in the empty room. Funny how times change.

Maybe the man of my dreams is watching tonight. Maybe he's out there right now, pouring a drink, logging in. Maybe I just haven't met him yet.

Focus, Kiva.

I shake the nonsense out of my head, because here is the truth I keep skirting: I don't know much about Courtney. A few videos. A skinny woman in a sundress. She's married to a man old enough to have signed her first-grade permission slips.
 
And one strange email.

It came two days ago, from Jennifer, the nurse who fought Courtney, the one who ended up in that match topless and humiliated. Her message had only three sentences.

She is not what she seems. The shy, timid thing is a costume. Whatever you do, don't let her get into your head.

I've read it a dozen times. I still don't know what to do with it, except believe it.

So, what will be my strategy? Feel her out. Let the first two minutes tell me what the videos couldn't pick up. Austin's voice comes back to me, patient as always.  Panic is the enemy, angles are your friends, never wrestle the stronger woman straight on, make her turn, make her reach. I've improved on the mat. I know I have. The bridges, the escapes, the hip pressure, the leverage - all of it is in my muscle memory now. But striking is still my best weapon, and this is a carpet match, which means sooner or later it goes to the ground, and sooner or later I'll need grappling to win it. Slaps to sting her. Wrestling to finish her.

I stand, and I undress.

The sweatpants, the jacket, my bra and panties are folded on the sofa like I'm undergoing a  physical in the doctor's office. For a moment I'm just a woman standing naked in a lush room seventy-eight floors above Manhattan, which is not a something I ever expected.

The bikini still has its tag on. I twist it off and hold the navy-blue pieces up to the light.

In the full-length vanity mirror, lined with round bulbs, I look at myself. The body of a woman in her thirties who gave birth, works brutal twelve-hour shifts and trains three times a week and has been in fights and grounded into more than one carpet. It's not a girl's body anymore.

Still desirable, I tell the mirror. Men still look. The mirror, diplomatically, does not argue.

I put the bikini on. It fits more than I hoped. I tighten up my ponytail. Then I start loosening up.  Neck rolls, shoulder circles, hips, hamstrings, the little hop-and-shake Austin taught me to burn off the nervous energy. Breathe in, two, three. Out, two, three.

The knock comes right on schedule.

"Five minutes, dear." Cynara slips inside and looks me over, head to toe, with a connoisseur's trained eye. "My, my. If I had that figure in the 70s, Dan Shocket would have written sonnets."

"I'll take it."

"You should." She folds her hands. "Now. The rules, once more, so there's no confusion. No closed fists, kicks, knees, elbows to the face -- open-hand slaps only. Body punches are fine. No biting, no gouging of the eyes. Hair pulling is allowed." She gives a faint smile. "Encouraged, historically."

I nod, rolling my shoulders.

"The room is carpeted, empty, walled in genuine seventies panel -- three walls of it. Where the fourth wall ought to be, there's a clear screen. Plexiglass. Our live guests are seated on the other side, but the lights are arranged so you'll see nothing but your own reflection.  They see you. You don't see them. It's better for everyone that way...You also can't hear them...it's sound proof"

Fighting in front of a dark mirror.  Somewhere behind my own reflection are strangers with drinks. The butterflies return.

"And one more thing," Cynara says, "Mr. Hughes has been banned from the premises. Courtney's husband. He will not be in that room; he will not be behind that screen. You have my word."

She watches me absorb that, then softens again. "Are you ready, dear?"

"I'm ready."

The hallway carpet is soft.  I feel strangely naked walking to a fight in a bikini under the chandelier light. Cynara walks beside me at a processional pace like a ritual, my bare feet next to her heels, neither making a sound at all.

We stop at a plain white door. It looks like it could be a linen closet.

"The fight room is on the other side," Cynara says quietly. "Courtney is already in it."

My heart drops into my ribs.

Cynara takes the handle, opens the door into warm light and waiting carpet, and steps aside.

"Go on in, dear."

The door closes behind me with a click that sounds final.

The room is exactly what Cynara promised and stranger than I imagined. Carpet, wall to wall -- deep light gold shag. Three walls of dark wood paneling, hung with a single nonfunctioning sunburst clock that served only décor purposes. The light is warm. Somewhere in the walls, tiny cameras are hidden.

Where the fourth wall should be, there's the screen.

The screen runs floor to ceiling. The room's light stops dead at its surface, and what reflects back is us. Just two bikini women, barefoot on gold carpet. Behind that reflection, somewhere in the black, are chairs, drinks, and eyes. I can't see a single one of them. I can feel all of them.

And behind one screen somewhere not far, Craig is logging on about now.

Courtney stands near the far wall.

The sundress is gone. She's in a two-piece the color of white with tiny printed strawberries, her dark hair tied into a tight bun that covers her ears, a change in hair style since her videos. My first thought is the same one I had in the lobby.  She's thin. The collarbones are prominent; the ribs are somewhat visible when she breathes. But my second thought is the one that matters, because underneath the thinness there is strong wire. I've seen the videos. I've seen what came out of this woman when Jennifer had her pinned. It was  that sudden animal surge that startled a stronger fighter. The body in front of me is not a frail body.

I instinctively pace like a caged animal.

"Hi," she says.

Her voice is small. Sweet, even. Her eyes come up to mine and then slide away, down to the carpet. It's the shy, timid look of girl in a very feminine swimsuit who'd rather be anywhere else.

Seriously? Is this how apartment wrestlers greet each other? Hi? Where's the snarl? The trash talk? The glaring eyes?

She is not what she seems. Jennifer's email, three sentences, no pleasantries. Don't let her get into your head.

Whatever her game is, I play along. "Hi, Courtney," I say. "I'm Kiva."

"I know." She gives another little smile aimed at the floor. "I watched your fights. You're good."

You've got to be kidding.

"So are you," I reply, almost sarcastically.

"I'm really not," she says softly, and hugs her own elbows, and for a moment she looks so young and so alone in that ceiling light that something maternal in me actually stirs. "But I'll try my best. May the better woman win."

And that's when I catch it. Just for a half-second, as her eyes pass across the dark screen, I see a flicker of calculation, quick as a flash of sunlight reflecting off a school of darting minnows. She's checking her reflection, checking her angle. Perhaps hoping to get a glimpse if the audience is getting the sweet little thing she's giving them.

Then it's gone, and the shy girl is back.

Okay, Jennifer. Message received.

Somewhere above us, a soft chime sounds -- once, twice -- and a woman's recorded voice fills the room.

"Ladies. Take your marks."

Two small circles are woven into the carpet, ten feet apart. I didn't notice them until now. Courtney walks onto hers. I step onto mine, feeling the shag press up between my toes, which feels absurdly soft for what's about to happen on it.

We face each other. Ten feet of light gold carpet lies between us. In the black glass beside us, our reflections face each other too. An audience of shadows and a livestream reaching around the curve of the world, including a hedge fund manager who is just now realizing what he's looking at, watch.

Courtney lifts her eyes to mine and holds them, finally, and does not look away.

The chime sounds a third time.

Neither of us move immediately.

Courtney stands on her mark with her shoulders drawn in, hands half-raised, like a woman warding off a jumpy dog. Her eyes are wide. They seem genuinely wide, as far as I can tell. That's the problem. I can't tell. Jennifer's email sits in my head like as a warning. The shy, timid thing is a costume. But costumes don't usually tremble at the hem, and I'd swear the fingers at the end of those raised hands are trembling.

We begin to circle.

I keep it slow, weight on the balls of my feet, the shag whispering under each step. Courtney circles the opposite way, matching my pace like a mirror that's a half-second late. She looks terrified. In the black screen beside us, our reflections orbit each other, and somewhere behind that glass a room full of shadows leans forward, and somewhere behind a hotel laptop a man named Craig has just stopped breathing.

Feel her out, Kiva. Let the first two minutes tell you what videos don't always tell you.

I close the distance and reach for her, and she doesn't run. We come together in a collar-and-elbow tie-up, my hand on the back of her neck, hers finding mine, our forearms braced. It's as old as wrestling itself. And now the answer to my question arrives. I lean into her, a good honest push meant to move a frightened woman back on her heels.

She doesn't move.

I push again, harder, driving from the hips, and it's like pushing a parked car. The thin arms, the visible collarbones are deceptive. Bodies that look like hers aren't supposed to push back like this.

Okay then.

I stop pushing with my arms and start driving with my legs, the way Austin drilled into me. Strength comes up from the floor, Kiva, not out of the shoulders. I take short choppy steps, my hips low. Now she gives, grudgingly, one bare foot sliding back through the gold shag, then the other, until her shoulders meet the wood paneling with a soft thud that the microphones, wherever they are would enjoy.

I've got her on the wall. Now find the opening.

She wraps up defensively, elbows in, chin down, forearms crossed over her chest in a shell. I work at it, hand-fighting, looking for a wrist, an underhook, anything, and our heads come close together, her dark hair against my cheek, both of us breathing hard through our mouths.

I hear a strange sound.

It's a faint buzz that barely registers with my ear drum. There's a fly in here. No, it's a mosquito. But how? Seventy-eight floors up, in a sealed room built like a museum exhibit, some insect has gotten in and is whirring around our heads. I actually flick my eyes toward the ceiling, half a second, looking for it.

Half a second is what it costs me.

Courtney's shell opens like it was never a shell at all. Her hips swivel, her leg snakes behind my ankle, and the wall I had her pinned against becomes a wall she's pushing off of -- she trips me clean and the floor awaits. I do the only thing I can do, which is refuse to go alone. I keep my grip on her as I fall and take her down with me. We hit the carpet tangled together, the shag swallowing some of the impact.

Chaos ensues. We roll across the gold carpet, grabbing wrists, fighting for underhooks, her hair in my face, my hair in her fist for a moment before she loses it. She's quicker on the ground than standing. I'm scrambling. The room spins. Paneling, sunburst clock, the black screen with two blurred women thrashing across it rotate in succession.

I come out on top.

For one clean second, I have her.  My knees find her hips, my weight settles in, the mount is just a breath away. It's all I need to start turning this into my kind of fight.

Courtney bucks.

A calm, well-timed one. Her hips fire upward just as my weight shifts forward, and her hands find my arm and pull, using my own momentum to her advantage. Suddenly,  there's nothing under my center of gravity but space. I topple past her shoulder, catch myself on my hands, and she's already gone, rolling away like spilled water, coming up to her knees six feet across the carpet.

We face each other on all fours like two cats on a kitchen floor, both breathing hard now, the light is catching the first shine of sweat on her shoulders.

She brushes a few strands of hair out of her face.

And she smiles at me. Now, she's the shy, apologetic girl who can't believe she's here.

But her eyes are calculating again.

Somewhere in the room, the faint mosquito buzzing returns.

We rise up onto our knees at the same time, six feet apart, like two swimmers surfacing.

I take the initiative. Knee-walking in fast, I shoot my right arm for an underhook, looking to drive into her body and put her on her back; another one of Austin's drills. Get the underhook, get your head on the right side, drive.

My head ends up on the wrong side.

Courtney makes me pay for it like she's been waiting for exactly that moment. Her arm loops over my neck and before I can posture out of it, she cinches my head snug against her ribs in a schoolgirl headlock. She forces me to stand, throws her leg in front of mine and throws her hip into me.

The headlock takedown is the oldest move in the world. It works. The room spins before my eyes again until my shoulder blades crash hard into the carpet.

She lands in side control. Chest across mine, headlock still clamped, her legs sprawled wide for base. Textbook kesa-gatame, the judo scarf hold. Her ribs press down on my sternum with every breath, and I get an unwanted nurse's clinical assessment of her body at close range: heart rate high but steady, breathing controlled, none of the flutter of a frightened woman. The trembling hands from the opening circle are gone.

You're never pinned in kesa if you can make space, the memory of Austin's voice tells me. Bridge into her, not away. Get your near arm free, hunt the leg.

I bridge hard into Courtney's body, once, twice, just making her ride the wave. On the second bridge her weight shifts a half-inch forward to compensate. That's all I need. My trapped arm worms free at the elbow, my hand finds the crook of her far knee, and I roll my hips out the back door. Her headlock, now holding nothing but my crown, slips off like a hat.

I scramble to my knees. She scrambles to hers. We collide again.

We go through a sequence more resembling high school wrestlers than catty bikini-clad bitches. She catches me in a front headlock; I peel off the choking arm, twist and come up in an over-under clinch. She attempts to drive into me. I hit a knee-block trip; she rolls through it like a gymnast and comes up facing me. She snatches a wrist and tries to spin to my back; I sit through and turn belly-down before she can get her chicken wing cinched in, and for a moment, we're stacked on our bellies with me on the bottom; both of us breathing like racehorses at the final turn.

We roll together. The carpet burns. Nobody tells you that about gold shag. It looks soft but your skin think's it's asphalt.

I see it. It's the opening Austin and I drilled on a rainy Tuesday. She reaches across her own body to post on my shoulder, arm extended, elbow up.

When a woman gives you her arm like a gift, Kiva, say thank you.

I overhook the extended arm, lock my hands, and sit back, dragging her down and across me, swinging my leg over her face for the armbar. Her elbow comes straight. Her fingers splay. I got it!  I have her spine flat, her wrist against my chest, my hips a single lift away from ending this whole strange evening.

Courtney does something, but I don't I know exactly what . She doesn't try to pull the arm out. She lifts her knees, rolls, bridges, and somehow her wiry but strong body stands. The angle collapses, my legs slide.  She wrenches free and stumbles, shaking out the arm, her chest heaving.

We're both up now, ten feet apart, sweat dripping.

And somewhere between the sounds of our breathing, I hear it.

It's not just buzzing this time. A voice. Faint, tinny, and compressed, like an insect sealed in a can and shaken.

"Atta girl, Courtney."

My eyes snap to the black screen. That's where it must have come from. Where else? Some client on the other side, too loud with his bourbon, close to the glass. That must be it. The dark mirror gives back nothing but two exhausted women.

Courtney doesn't look at the screen at all.

She looks at me, adjusts her hair bun with the arm I nearly broke, and smiles that small apologetic smile, as if to say, "sorry about this, I can't believe any of it either" and starts forward again.

We circle again, both of us wearing the fight now -- hair stuck to our necks, chests heaving, the gold carpet dark with sweat spots like a map of everywhere we've already been.

No more pretending. Whatever Courtney is, she's trained. Somebody built this woman, hold by hold, and dressed her in a cute sundress.

We lock up. Collar and elbow, our slick palms slipping off each other. I drive off my legs. Strength comes up from the floor. Once more she gives ground, backing up grudgingly step by step, until I've run her into the corner where two walls of paneling meet.

I work my forearm up under her jaw and press, forcing her head back, her pale throat exposed in the light. Her hands claw at my wrist. I know I've got her. One more adjustment, one turn of the hips, and--

The buzzing.

Right there by her head. Inches away. And I hear the voice, tinny and sharp:

"Pivot NOW!"

Her hips explode.

She turns like something fired from a spring gun. She fully twists inside my grip, using my own pressure against me. The wall hits my back, her forearms slamming me into the corner I intended for her. That voice wasn't behind the glass. That voice--

Her knee buries itself in my midsection.

Everything short circuits out. My body folds around the point of impact before I've finished having the thought. Can't...breathe... Doubled over, hands on my knees, diaphragm in spasm. My paralyzed diaphragm, it might take thirty seconds, ride it out. The nurse in me gets that far before the first hammer blow lands between my shoulder blades.

Then another. Another. Fists like mallets pound my spine. Each one drives an involuntary grunt out of me. My knees hit the carpet.

This isn't happening. Not like this. Not in front of--

Craig! Craig is watching this!

The thought hits harder than the fists. Somewhere out there, a screen is showing a man I like a woman on her knees getting beaten like a rug, and that woman is me. Shame now mixes with the pain.

Fingers wind into my hair.

"Get up, bitch!"

The voice is nothing like the girl in the sundress. It's guttural and cold coming from somewhere below her collarbones. She's dragging me by the scalp away from the wall, my knees plowing furrows in the shag. I grab her wrist with both hands. Base, Kiva, get to your feet, get your base. I force myself up, half-rising, hair roots screaming. Her grip shifts to my arm.

Her hip drops under mine.

I know what's coming a quarter-second before it comes, but it's not nearly enough to stop it. The room turns over. The floor arrives all at once.

Seventy-eight stories of building come up through that carpet and into my back. The impact scatters me on the floor. For a moment, I hear no sound. My sight is watery. I'm staring at the ceiling. My lungs have forgotten how to breathe.

Get up. Austin's voice again. You're never done on impact. Get up.

Nothing moves yet. Above me, Courtney steps into view and looks down, her head tilted, her breathing relaxed, brushing a few strands of hair from her face with that small apologetic smile.

And my anger opens its eyes.

I get one knee under me. Then the other. The room sways like a ship's cabin, and I'm halfway to standing when Courtney's leg sweeps through both of mine like a scythe.

The carpet again.

Get your bearings. Get your--

Hands close around my ankles.

She drags me. She actually drags me, across the center of the room, and the shag peels my back like a cheese grater. Friction burns from my shoulder blades to waist, my arms trailing over my head, my body plowing a wake through the gold fibers. Somewhere behind the glass, shadows are watching a woman get hauled across a floor like a fallen tree being cleared from a path. That woman is me. That woman is me and I can't--

She drops my ankles at center carpet like a delivery.

"Up," she says sweetly, now in that sundress voice again.

The hair. Again, she finds the hair. My ponytail is gone. Her fingers knot at my scalp and she lifts, and I climb because the alternative is being scalped. The instant my feet are under me her grip changes, her hip finds mine at a different angle this time. It's different throw, some inner thigh sweep I've only ever seen in videos and the world rotates and the floor comes up through my ribs.

She's not trying to win. The thought arrives cold and terrifying. She could have won already. She's exhibiting.

"You're supposed to be good," Courtney says, circling me. Her voice has finished changing. There's nothing timid left in it.  It's flat, amused, cruel, like a cat working a small rodent. "They told me you were good."

I roll to my hands and knees. I think I taste blood in my mouth but I'm not sure. My bikini top has shifted off-center and I can't spare a hand to fix it. Get up. You've been hurt worse. Room 10, the night you worked a code blue for fifty minutes, then stayed on your feet another twelve hours.

She lets me get almost all the way up. That's her game now. She assists with a courteous little haul on my hair, helping me to my feet like a gentleman with a car door.  And the moment I'm weight-bearing, she chops me down again with a takedown I don't even recognize. My legs are stolen out from under me; the ceiling and the floor trade places one more time.

Laughter.

Not from Courtney. It's tinny, faint, laughter through a receiver, through the buzz. Something in my chest drops. Someone is watching this and laughing through her ear.

Fingers hook into my bikini top and haul upward. The fabric slips and gives. I clutch at it with one hand, and I stagger to my feet because she wants me to.  Everything in this room happens now because she wants it to.

Then she takes my hair in both hands and swings me.

The room smears together -- paneling, clock, glass, paneling. My feet cross and stumble, trying to keep tension off my scalp, and she releases at the precise arc that sends me into the plexiglass. I get my palms up just in time. The screen booms as I crash into it.

Before I can push off, she's on my back. My right arm is wrenched up between my shoulder blades into a  vicious hammerlock. Her weight flattens me chest-first into the glass.

Into the mirror.

Her face looms over my shoulder, my own face inches away. My skin is flushed and wet, my hair wild, one eye already puffing,  -- and behind our reflections, nothing but blackness. Chairs full of seated shadows and drinks, eyes in the dark I'll never see.

"Look at her," Courtney announces to the darkness. Her free hand gathers my hair and pulls my head back, presenting my face to the glass like a photograph she's showing around a party. "The famous nurse."

She presses me forward until my nose touches the smooth cold screen, my nearly exposed right breast pressed flattened into the plexiglass.

My breath fogs a little gray circle on the black, and it expands and shrinks with each ragged exhale. Suddenly, I'm the eight years old girl on the train with my nose pressed against the window, watching the dark tunnel walls rush past, believing that somewhere out beyond the black, there was a whole world of lights I'd get to see if the train just kept going.

There's a world of lights behind this glass too. Rich men in the dark, watching my breath fog.

The girl on the train did not come seventy-eight floors up to end here.

Through the buzz, inches from my ear, Courtney's receiver buzzes like a fly on a wire It's the tinny voice again, of a man delighted by what he is seeing.

"Punish her."

Courtney takes me apart in segments. She keeps the standing armlock to bend my wrist toward my forearm until I gasp. She steers me away from the screen and releases my arm just before it breaks. A hip throw I see coming and can't stop, my body too slow now. I'm on the floor again. She lets me rise in a sick game of cat and mouse. A knee to the stomach drops me to my knees again. She lets me rise. An open palm across my face, full arm behind it, my face turns to the side, my hair now too matted to swing much.

Breathe. In, two, three--

I can't get the count. My ribs won't expand right. Somewhere in the last few minutes my bikini top has twisted further, riding wrong, with one strap off my shoulder. My right breast has popped out and there's no moment to fix it. She's turned even my own body into something I can't manage. That's the design. I understand the design even as it works on me. Like a delirious combative patient who lost her control and dignity. Eventually, she'll stop fighting.

Not this patient.

I swing at her. It's slow and she isn't there. Another knee and I hit the floor again.

And through it all, the mosquito rides her ear, delighted and close enough now that I catch whole phrases in the clinches. "Beautiful, baby." A throw. "Make her remember it." A slap across the face. Laughter like a fly trapped in a jar. He's watching through her somehow. Every angle she gives the glass is a camera angle, every taunt is performed for an audience of one plus shadows. She is not a fighter tonight, she is an instrument, and the man playing her is somewhere out there getting exactly what he wants.

The anger keeps growing. It's the only part of me that isn't tired.

"All right, sweetheart," the mosquito says. "End it."

Courtney hauls me up to my knees by the hair one more time. Sets me there like a trophy being positioned for the photograph. Her fingers tighten, pulling my face up toward hers, and she leans in close, breathing easy.

"Aw," she says. "The famous nurse."

SLAP! My head rocks. She pulls it back into place.

"Say goodnight for the cameras."

SLAP! White sparks. She restores the position. She's not even setting up the submission yet. She's savoring. And somewhere under my numb, swelling face, battered body and twisted bikini top, the nurse in me reads her the way I've read a thousand overconfident interns: she has stopped assessing. She thinks the case is closed.

Austin, from a rainy Tuesday: A cocky opponent hands you the opening. Your job is to be alive when it arrives.

So, I die a little.

I let everything go. My shoulders, jaw, and arms flop loose at my sides. My weight sags in her grip until she's holding my whole head up by the hair. Limp. Finished. A woman with nothing left, kneeling in the wreckage of her dignity.

She winds up the next slap with all the caution of someone hitting a heavy bag.

My hand comes up and catches her wrist out of the air.
Her eyes widen. My right hand is already moving, the one weapon nobody prepared her for. The right hand was mine before Austin, before the catpin, before any of this.  A short, turning, whole-hip right hand drives into the meat of her ribs.

The sound it makes is not a slap. It's a deep thud like a door kicked shut.

Courtney folds all at once, jackknifing over the punch. Her grip on my hair spasms loose, and the breath comes out of her with a sound I know from a hundred bedsides.  It's the involuntary gasp of a diaphragm in full distress.

I come up off my knees. My legs manage to hold.

Her hair is still up in that neat little bun, and I take it in my fist and pull. Pins scatter across the gold shag, dark hair tumbles loose around my hand. And now it's my turn, and my arm is not tired anymore.

SLAP! Her head snaps sideways.

"That one's for the carpet," I hear myself say, in a voice I don't fully recognize.

SLAP! The other way.

"That one's for the glass."

She's stumbling, doubled over, one arm pinned across her ribs, the other flailing for my wrist. The mosquito is jabbering something frantic into her ear -- up, angle, circle, GET OUT -- and for the first time all night, Courtney can't hear her master's voice over the ringing of her own skull.

I plant my feet, turn my hips, and hit her with everything the last twenty minutes has been depositing in my account.

The slap catches her flush across the cheek and turns her whole head -- hair whipping, spit flying, her body wheeling a half-step with the force of it.

And something small and flesh-colored leaps out of her ear, arcs through the apartment light, and drops without a sound into the gold shag carpet between us.

We both look at it.

Then we look at each other.

We hit each other at the same moment.

No setup, no circling -- just two women colliding over a piece of plastic the size of a fingernail, and then we're down, rolling across the gold shag in the ugliest scramble of the night. Elbows, knees, handfuls of hair. Nothing clean left in either of us.

But Courtney is fighting two fights, and I'm only fighting one.

I feel the divided attention in her body; the way her weight keeps shifting toward wherever the receiver might have landed, her head turning in little bird-flicks between me and the carpet. She's wrestling me with her arms and searching the floor with her eyes, and Austin's voice arrives calm as a chart note: a divided opponent is a beaten opponent. She just doesn't know it yet.

We break apart. She comes up on her hands and knees, and I come up behind her, and that's when she sees it -- a small flesh-colored crumb half-buried in the shag, three feet away. Her whole body orients toward it like a compass needle. Without that voice in her ear, she's been fighting on memory for ninety seconds, and she needs it back the way some patients need the call button in their hand just to sleep.

She reaches.

Thank you, I say to the extended arm, the exposed back, the gift of her.

I drop onto her from behind and my arms spear under her armpits, hands snaking up, fingers lacing behind her neck. Full nelson. Her spine arches; the reach for the receiver dies mid-air, her hand clawing shut on nothing.

She bucks that dead-lift, rebar strength one more time. But this time I'm not on her back like a passenger, I'm woven into her, and before she can rise, I swing my legs around her waist and hook my ankles together over her navel.

Body scissors. Locked.

Her whole torso is mine now -- neck bent forward by the nelson, ribs and belly crushed inside my thighs -- and there's nowhere for her to go but where I take her. We topple onto our sides on the carpet, spooned together like something almost tender, and I begin to squeeze.

I work both ends at once. My hands press her chin toward her chest, curling her spine forward from the top. My legs cinch tight and pull her hips back, bowing her spine from the bottom. She's bent like a drawn bow, and I am both the string and the archer.

The sound she makes is not from the sundress voice or the cruel voice. It's older than either. It's involuntary.

Her legs kick, churning the shag. Her fingers try to claw at my laced hands, then at the carpet, then at nothing. The nurse in me runs her assessment coolly through the strain: breathing compromised, thoracic flexion, she has maybe a minute of real fight left in that body and she's spending it badly. Every kick costs her air she can't replenish.

My arms shake. My thighs burn. I don't care. Twenty minutes of being dragged, thrown, spun, slapped, and displayed are all flowing down into this one hold, and I hear my own voice, low and even, close to her ear where the mosquito used to live.

"No one's coming through the earpiece, Courtney. It's just us now."

Three feet away, the receiver lies in the gold shag where it fell.

If I listen, under her ragged breathing, under my panting,  I can just make out something tiny and furious buzzing out of it, shouting instructions into the carpet, into the room, into the dark behind the glass.

Nobody's listening anymore.

I squeeze.

Everything I have left goes into the hold -- hands pressing her chin toward her chest, ankles cinched, thighs closing like a slow double door. Her spine bows another degree. From the carpet three feet away, the mosquito is frantic now, tiny and shrill, buzzing out of the fallen receiver like a wasp in a jar:

"Fight, baby! Buck her off! You're stronger than her! FIGHT!"

And Courtney fights. I'll give her that. She bucks and twists, her heels drum the shag, that deceptive strength surging one last time against my hooked ankles. I ride every wave and add a pound of pressure at the crest of each one, the way Austin taught me. Don't match her rhythm. Tax it.

"Stop listening to him," I say into her ear, and squeeze.

Her bucking loses its form. The surges come further apart, weaker, then more desperate, then not desperate enough. Her fingers stop clawing at the air and start fluttering uselessly.

"Don't you DARE quit on me--"

Her hand lifts off the carpet and waves. It looks small and broken. The message is unmistakable.

"I give," she gasps. "I give... I submit... please..."

I hold it three more seconds.

I'm not proud of those three seconds. But I'm not sorry about them either. One for the dragging. One for the glass. One for the shy woman in the sundress who never existed in this room at all.

Then I open everything at once -- arms, legs. And  I roll away.

Courtney spills face-down into the shag, sucking air in long whooping pulls. And the anger, which should be finished now, isn't. It comes up off the floor with me. I swing a leg over and sit down on her back, take a handful of that loose dark hair, and press her face into the gold carpet -- not grinding, just holding, one long clinical beat, the way you hold a bell after ringing it.

This is who she brought here. Remember her.

I stand up over her, my chest heaving, my twisted bikini top hanging off me like the flag of some small defeated country. I cover up my exposed twisted boobs and I finally have a moment to readjust the top. I turn and glare straight into the black glass, at my own wrecked reflection and every invisible drink behind it. You got your show. All of you got your show.

The door opens.

David Moll comes in beaming, hands already applauding, like a man reviewing excellent quarterly numbers. "Magnificent! Magnificent, Kiva!" He crosses the carpet, steps neatly over Courtney as if she were furniture, and takes my wrist. "Ladies and gentlemen -- your winner!"

He raises my hand. And then he walks me.   

A slow, proprietary circuit loop of the room. He's turning me, displaying me, the whole battered bikini-clad  length of me. Along the plexiglass, close enough that my breath could fog it again, He's promenading me past the darkness like an item at an auction. I can't see them. I can feel them. Every shadowed chair, every lifted glass, every set of eyes traveling over my body. The nurse from Texas, catch of the evening.

Movement stirs below me. Courtney, up on her hands and knees, is crawling toward the receiver in the shag, needing that voice back in her ear the way a drowning woman needs a rail.

Something goes red behind my eyes.
   
My foot comes down on her back and drives her flat into the carpet, and I hear -- I swear I hear -- a low sound of appreciation move through the darkness behind the glass.

And that's when I finally, fully understand where I am.

They loved that. They loved all of it. The beating I took, the beating I returned, the stomp, the anger -- it's all inventory. There is no gesture I can make in this room that doesn't feed the room.

So, I feed it, but on my own terms. I look dead into the black glass, cup my breasts through the sweat-soaked navy blue like a magazine girl from the 1970s, give the darkness the slowest, most contemptuous sexy smile I own, and blow them a kiss.

Choke on it, gentlemen.

Moll, delighted beyond words, escorts me to the door.

The hallway is bright and cool and full of applause. Cynara clasps my hands, Vi is kissing my cheek, "Marvelous, dear, absolutely marvelous!" Past their shoulders Denise and Molly slip into the fight room where a thin dark-haired woman is still face-down on gold shag, alone with a buzzing piece of plastic.

Cynara walks me back to the dressing room. The lilies are still there. The refrigerator is still humming.

"Marble shower's through there, dear. Drinks in the cooler -- rehydrate, I mean it, you left a gallon of yourself on that carpet." She squeezes my arm, softer now. "I'll give you your privacy. I'll come back for you shortly."

The door clicks shut, and for the first time in an hour, no one is watching me.

I stand a moment in the quiet, checking myself like an intake assessment: rug-burned back, aching ribs, throbbing scalp, one eye swelling, hands still trembling with spent adrenaline. All of it survivable. All of it earned, though I couldn't tell you in which direction.

My gym bag sits on the sofa where I left it, in what seems ages ago. I dig out my phone.

One text. 8:47 PM. Craig.

OMG!!!!!!!!! Five shocked face emojis follow.
 
I look at it for a long moment. Craig's message is sitting there in my ruined bikini seventy-eight floors above the city.

And then, I start to laugh.

The marble shower is beautiful. I stand under the water and let it run hot. For the first minute, it's mercy. Then the adrenaline subsides, and my body starts submitting its itemized bill. The rug burn across my back is a long stinging territory from shoulder blades to waist that makes me hiss when the spray finds it. The ribs throb deep where her knees struck. Then my scalp, which feels like it's undergone dermabrasion.

The water hits my face and I flinch.

I touch my cheek gently. Swollen on both sides, the left worse. The slaps are surfacing now, blooming under the skin the way they always do an hour later. I've seen it a hundred times on other faces in the ER, women saying "I walked into a door" while I charted the handprint. Tonight the chart is mine. "Patient is a 30-something female presenting with facial edema, contusions, superficial friction burns, and a thoroughly rearranged understanding of her evening."

I lean my forehead against the cool marble and let the water run down my back and try to process any of it.

I fought a woman wearing her husband in her ear.

I was dragged across a carpet by my ankles in front of an audience of shadows.

I stomped a beaten woman while strangers murmured approval behind glass, and then I blew them a kiss.

And somewhere in a hotel room in this same city, my high school boyfriend watched every second of it.

The fake shy girl in the sundress. The steel under the thin arms. "Punish her." The little gray circle of my breath on the black screen, reminding me of the train window from many years ago rushing up out of memory. They don't assemble into anything yet. Maybe they're not supposed to. Some nights you don't chart until morning.

I shut off the water before I fall asleep standing up.

Drying off is its own small challenge. The towel finds every burn.  I take fresh bra and panties from the bag, Redress with the warm-up suit. In the vanity mirror ringed in those soft round bulbs, a woman with a puffy face and wet hair looks back at me. I take out my makeup bag, unzip it, look at her for a long moment.

No.

I zip it back up. Whoever sees this face tonight sees the face. I earned it, let it speak.

My phone has been busy while I was under the water. It's Craig, four more times:

Kiva r u ok???

Please answer me

I don't even know what I just watched. R U hurt?

KIVA???

 I don't answer yet. I don't have the sentence ready, and Craig deserves a sentence, not a shrug.

There's a knock, and Cynara comes in with company. David Moll, glowing like a man whose stock just split, and Vi beside him carrying a small tray as if she were serving appetizers.

"Kiva, my dear," David says, "you have no idea what you did out there tonight. The clients are electrified. The discussion board is lighting up like a pinball machine -- they're calling you the find of the season."

"The Nurse," Vi says, with relish. "They've already named you. It's trending on the members' board."

"And these," David says, gesturing to the tray, "arrived before you were even out of the shower. "Sometimes," he explains, "our clients like to leave gifts for their favorite ladies."

Gifts. Actual gifts, laid out on velvet.  A gold necklace from a Hollywood producer, Vi explains, naming a name even I recognize. A diamond bracelet, from a quarterback whose jersey hangs in half the sports bars in Texas. And an ornate folded card which turns out to contain, as far as I can tell through the flourishes, a sincere offer of marriage from a Saudi prince.

I stand there in my warm-up suit with my swollen face, holding a proposal from royalty, and think: Tom, you should see me now.

"There's a small gathering upstairs," David continues smoothly. "Very select. Several of the gentlemen would love to meet you in person."

"No." It comes out faster than I intended. I soften it slightly. "Thank you. I need to go home and rest. It's been..." I gesture vaguely at my own face. "A night."

"Of course, of course. But Kiva -- when are you next in New York? We'd like to book you again. The demand will be extraordinary."

"I honestly have no idea."

"Well." He takes my hand in both of his, with the performative warmth of a man who closes deals for a living. "Keep in touch. Please. You have friends in this building now."

Vi kisses my cheek, the less swollen one, with a nurse's aim of her own and Cynara squeezes my arm, and then they're gone. I'm alone with a tray of treasure and a humming refrigerator.

I pack. Sweaty bikini rolled in the towel. Hand wraps. The necklace, the bracelet, and the marriage proposal go into the gym bag between my flip-flops and my toiletry kit and makeup bag, which is the correct place for all of it. Somewhere over the Atlantic, a prince will recover.

Then I sit on the sofa, take a long pull from a bottle of electrolyte water, and finally answer Craig.

I'm fine. Sore, but fine. I promise.

The reply comes back in eleven seconds.

Where r u?

Moll Tower, I respond.

Three dots. Then:

I'm on my way. Do not move

I look at that for a moment -- do not move, from a man who two hours ago thought I was sending him a webinar. My battered face attempts a smile and mostly manages it.

I'll be waiting by the curb

I zip the bag, sling it over my good shoulder, and take one last look around the lush little room.

The elevator carries me down alone, seventy-eight floors of soft light and lemon oil again, and somewhere around the fortieth floor it occurs to me that the last time I rode it, I was a different woman. Not better or worse. Just one who hadn't done this experience that yet.

The lobby is empty except for the night man, who nods at me with the complete incuriosity of someone paid to notice nothing. The glass door releases me onto the sidewalk, and the city takes me back into its ecosystem of  horns, steam, sirens, and eight million people who have no idea what happens on the seventy-eighth floor of Moll Tower.

I stand at the curb with my gym bag on my good shoulder, a swollen-faced woman in a warm-up suit with gold and diamond jewelry and a marriage proposal zipped in next to her wet bikini. I wait.

He isn't long.

A car noses out of the traffic and pulls to the curb, and Craig is out of it barely before it's fully in park. He moves around the hood, moving fast, and then stops short three feet from me. I watch his eyes do the inventory. The puffy cheek. The eye. The wet hair. The way I'm standing a little curled around my ribs.

"Oh my God," he says quietly. Not the text version. The real one.

"I know," I say. "You should see the other girl."

He doesn't laugh. He takes the bag off my shoulder like it's made of glass, opens the passenger door, and helps me down into the seat with two hands. His touch is careful, deliberate, and completely unnecessary, and I let him do it anyway, because there is a version of being handled that heals more than it insults, and after tonight I can tell the difference.

He pulls into traffic. His hands are correct on the wheel, ten and two, which from Craig probably means he's rattled.

"The Plaza," I tell him. "That's where I'm staying."

"Okay," he says. And then, at the first red light: "Are you okay?"

"I'm okay."

Two blocks. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"Craig."

"I'm sorry. It's just--"He starts three different sentences and abandons all of them like bad parking spots. The silence in the car gets thick. Outside, Manhattan pours past the windows.

Finally, at a light somewhere in the Fifties, he exhales and just says it.

"I don't know how to talk about what I watched tonight. I've been sitting in that hotel room for an hour trying to figure out what I even --. I'm having trouble expressing myself. Which is not usually a problem for me."

"No," I agree. "It isn't."

"Can we go somewhere and talk? Not the hotel lobby. Somewhere actual."

"Yes," I say. "Okay."

He nods, visibly relieved to have a next step. "What do you need? Right now. What can I do?"

"A pharmacy, if you see one," I reply. I could use Ibuprofen. And Aquaphor cream. The carpet took some skin off my back."

His head turns. "Your back--" He catches himself, faces the road again, breathes. "I have both. At my place. I live like four minutes from here. You could come up. Take the ibuprofen, deal with your back, talk. That's all I'm -- I mean...Let me help you."

The light turns green. He doesn't move until I answer, and someone behind us leans on their horn, and he still doesn't move.

I look out the windshield at the avenue running north. His apartment. Ten o'clock. Me, aching, stiff and throbbing. I know exactly what this kind of tired does to my judgment. I know where four minutes away can lead, and I know I don't know whether I want it to. I know that not knowing hasn't stopped me once tonight.

Something came up, I told him two days ago. I at least owe him an explanation.

"Okay," I say. "I can stay fifteen minutes."

He pulls through the intersection, and neither of us says anything else. The silence in the car is a completely different silence than it was ten blocks ago.

His building's elevator is paneled in steel instead of dark wood, and it smells like nothing at all. We ride up in a silence that is no longer shock, but not yet anything else.

My second elevator of the evening, I think. The first one carried me up to a fight. I glance at Craig, who is studying the floor numbers, and I wonder, with a flutter in my stomach, whether this one is carrying me up to a different kind of physical contest altogether. Different rules. Same elevated risk of someone getting pinned.

Behave, Kiva.

The doors open. He leads me down a quiet hall, keys in, and the lights come up on the kind of apartment fit for a successful Wall Street investor. Floor-to-ceiling windows reveal the city lights laid out before it. The furniture looks professionally chosen. The art was clearly bought from galleries.

And yet, it is still unmistakably, a man's apartment. One enormous television. A single lonely decorative pillow, no plants.

"Sit, please," he says as he points me to the sofa. What can I get you? I have a decent white open, or there's a red, or--"

"White's fine."

He pours two glasses, hands me mine, and settles into the chair across from the sofa -- across, I notice, not beside.  He takes a breath like a man about to plunge into icy water.

"Okay," he says. "I think I'm over the initial shock. Mostly. Can we talk about what I watched tonight?"

So, I tell him.

I tell him about the catpin. About the semi-hidden world, the website, the challenges, the private matches in living rooms and garages and remote parts off of hiking trails. I tell him about Billy's, about women with day jobs and minivans and mortgages who meet on mats and carpets and settle things with their bodies instead of their mouths.

"But you're so--" He searches. "Normal. You're the kindest person I know. You take care of dying people for a living. That's all you ever wanted to do."

"So do half the women in that world. Nurses, teachers, accountants, soccer moms. You'd be amazed." I turn the wine glass by its stem. "Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud, Craig. Women are competitive. All of us. It's in the wiring. Most women fight their whole lives. They just do it with gossip and exclusion and sabotage and smiles. Backbiting at the office. Freezing another mother out of the group chat. Twenty-year campaigns of little cruelties." I shrug, and my ribs remind me not to. "The women in the catpin world are just honest about it. Thirty minutes on a carpet, somebody wins, somebody loses, and you know exactly where you stand. It's cleaner than what happens in most break rooms. I've worked in those break rooms. Trust me."

He's quiet for a long moment, swirling his wine, actually thinking about it -- which is more than most men would do.

"In a strange way," he says slowly, "that's starting to make sense. Which worries me." He laughs a little. "I'm going to need time to process it. Possibly a support group."

"There's a website for that too."

"Don't." And then his laugh becomes a real one, and he points at me. "Oh my God. Wait. Junior year. The parking lot. Donna Kowalski."

"Oh no."

"You had her by the collar against the bus! Over what? Oh yeah, didn't she say something about your brother?"

"Yes, and she said something about my shoes," I say matter-of-factly, "and nothing happened, because Mr. Turner came out."

"You were shaking. I remember thinking, note to self, never make this girl mad." He shakes his head, grinning at the adolescent memory. "I should have known then. The signs were all there."

And just like that the room warms up. We fall back through the years together. We laugh at the homecoming dance where his car died and my father had to rescue us, wearing pajamas and slippers, and didn't speak one word the whole drive. We recall the time we snuck in to see a terrible slasher film and started making out ten minutes into it. The manager flashed a light on us and told us to watch the movie or leave. The wine goes down easy. My face aches when I laugh, and I keep laughing anyway.

"Remember when you won me that giant stuffed bear at the carnival," I ask him.

"Yeah," he replies. "I spent forty dollars trying."

"The bear probably cost three bucks."

"It was worth every penny."

I smile. "I kept it until I got married."

His eyes widen, "You did?"

I nod. "It sat on my dresser for years."

Then his glass stops halfway to his mouth, and he sets it down, and I watch the mood change in his shoulders before it reaches his face.

"Kiva. There's something I need to say."

"Okay."

"I've needed to say it for about twenty years, and if I don't do it tonight I never will." He stares at his hands. He starts, stops and starts again. "Senior year. When you were late, and we thought...when we thought you were pregnant. And I broke up with you." His jaw tightens. "I panicked and I ran. You were terrified and alone and I made it about me. It was selfish and it was cruel, and I've thought about it more times than you'd believe. I was seventeen and stupid -- and I'm not offering that as an excuse, because there isn't one. I'm just telling you why." He finally looks up. "I'm sorry. I know it's a lifetime late. But will you accept it anyway?"

The room is very quiet. Somewhere below us, the city goes on glittering.

"Craig." I wait until he's really looking at me. "I got over that a long time ago. Years. I promise you, I haven't been carrying it." I feel something small and old unlock in my chest even as I say it. "But I'm glad you said it. It closes a door that was standing open a crack. So...yes. Accepted. Fully."

He exhales like a man setting down luggage. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

"Besides," I add, "as tonight demonstrated, if I'd really wanted satisfaction, I know where to get it."

"That's not funny."

"It's a little funny."

"It's a little funny," he concedes, and refills our glasses.

After that, the evening loosens entirely. The stories get worse and better. And inevitably, because all roads in our shared history lead there, we arrive at The Party. My parents away for the weekend. The word spreading through three high schools. Bobby Kessler's boots through the screen door, the lamp that never got explained, my mother's face upon discovering cigarette burns in the carpet, the beer-soaked furniture, and my grounding that stretched across two lunar cycles.

"Your father looked at me at graduation," Craig says, "like I personally burned that carpet."

"You were an accessory."

"I was upstairs--" He stops. Half a second too late.

The word hangs there. Upstairs. We both know what was upstairs. Two seventeen-year-olds with a locked door, four fumbling hands, one criminally overconfident boy, and the single most catastrophic debut in the history of romance,  an encounter that ended in confusion, an apology, a frantic and unsuccessful search of the bedding, and several days of sheer terror.

Craig's face has gone faintly pink.

"We don't have to--" he begins.

"You lost it," I say.

"There was no manual--"

"You lost it, Craig. We looked for twenty minutes. I stripped that bed like a crime scene."

"I have spent decades not thinking about this," he says, covering his eyes with one hand, laughing helplessly. "It remains the single most embarrassing night of my life."

And this is the moment. I know it's the moment because my heart has picked up the exact rhythm it had on the walk down that carpeted hallway tonight, bare feet on soft shag, everything about to change.

I reach down into the gym bag beside the sofa -- past the wet towel, past a diamond bracelet, past a prince, and come up with a small foil square, which I hold up between two fingers like a badge.

Craig's hand comes off his eyes. He stares.

"You--" His voice actually cracks. He clears it. "You found it? You've kept it all these years?"

"No," I say, sweetly, watching him do the math. "I bought this one yesterday. Little pharmacy in SoHo." I let one beat pass. "Right after the bikini."

I watch his gears in motion-- yesterday. Before the fight. Before any of this. She planned -- and his expression moves through shock and disbelief and arrives somewhere that makes the whole battered length of me feel warm.

The room has gone very still. He looks at me and I look at him, and neither of us is seventeen, and in a way, both of us are. And the city glimmers away below the windows minding its own business.

"Moneyboy," I say, "I think we have an unfinished transaction to complete."

-----------------------------------------------

I wake at five thirty a.m. exactly, the way I always do. The body of a career nurse does not respect weekends, holidays, or personal milestones.

For a moment I don't know where I am. Then the room comes together around me. Gray dawn light seeps through tall windows, the gentle quiet, the warm rise and fall under my cheek. My head is on Craig's chest. His heartbeat is slow and even beneath my ear, sixty-two beats a minute.

I do my morning inventory. Ribs: worse than yesterday. Back: a roadmap of stings. Face: tight, puffy, tender to the pillow. Scalp: it hurts. Everything hurts.

In this moment, I feel content.

I lie still and think about the night, especially the second half of it, the better half. A smile spreads across my sore face. I didn't know what to expect when I walked into this apartment. It turns out Craig is a very proficient lover. Proficient is actually the wrong word; proficient is what we call competent nurses. Craig was masterful. Every note, in the right order, at the right tempo, with the patience of a man who understood that an evening with a woman is a long piece of music and not a sprint to the coda.

I almost laugh out loud into his chest. He's come a long way from the terrified seventeen-year-old fumbling in my parents' guest bed like a boy trying to defuse a bomb in the dark. But then, I shouldn't be surprised. This is Craig. The boy who turned a paper route into a portfolio. Craig has never in his life met a skill he didn't drill until he owned it. Apparently that work ethic generalized.

But it's the other thing that stays with me, something rarer than technique. He was attentive. Thoughtful. He made the whole night about me -- my sore body, my pace, my pleasure -- checking in without breaking the spell, careful with the rug burns, unhurried, generous. I think that is an uncommon trait in a man. Uncommon enough that many women my age learn to stop expecting it, and then don't quite know where to put themselves when it shows up anyway.

Outside the tall windows, the work day is waking up. And lying there in Manhattan's half-light, clarity arrives, the way it sometimes does at the end of a long shift, all at once and unexpectedly.

The little girl on the train with nose pressed to the glass, believing in the world of lights beyond the dark. The professional at the podium with her laminated badge and her respectful applause. The fighter on the gold carpet, dragged and thrown and displayed -- and rising and winning anyway. The woman in this bed.

I've spent years treating them as if I'm managing separate patients in different rooms, worrying what would happen if they ever met.

They were never separate. They were all the same woman the whole time. None of them needs to be hidden from the others anymore. None of them needs to be hidden from anyone.

Craig stirs under me, his arm tightening around my shoulders in his sleep, careful even now of my back.

I close my eyes.

I slide out from under his arm at half past six, and Craig sleeps on for exactly as long as it takes me to find my clothes.

"You're leaving?" he says from the pillows.

"I have to. My things are at the Plaza, and my flight's this afternoon." I pull the warm-up jacket over my shoulders, wincing where the fabric crosses the burns. "Texas needs its nurses back."

"Breakfast first. There's a café next door. It has excellent -- " he searches the ceiling -- "everything. It has excellent everything. You should try it."

"Sold."

The café is small and warm and smells like a lovely fresh bakery. We take a table by the window and have the kind of breakfast people have when the important conversations are already behind them. Our talk is quiet and easy. The coffee is refilled twice; his knee presses against mine under the table like a teenager's. The waitress looks at my swollen face, then at Craig, then back at me with an arched eyebrow, and I want to tell her, honey, you should see the other girl, but some jokes you keep for yourself.

Over the last of the coffee, he turns his cup in its saucer.

"When are you coming back to New York?"

"I don't know yet."

"Would you ever think about..." He stops, reworks the sentence. "Moving back east? Ever? Hypothetically?"

I look at him for a long moment.  I note his silver temples and the hope he's trying to seem casual.

"I can't answer that right now," I say gently. "That's not a no. It's just the truth."

He nods, takes it like a man, and pays the check before I can reach for it. Outside on the sidewalk he jingles his keys.

"I'll drive you to the Plaza."

"No. I'd rather walk."

"Walk? Kiva, you can barely... it's twenty blocks. You got thrown around a penthouse last night."

"I know," I say. "I was there. I'll walk."

Something in my voice settles it. He puts the keys away, and then his hands come up carefully to my face, finding the unswollen places. He kisses me, long and measured, on a Manhattan sidewalk at eight in the morning while the delivery trucks grind past.

"Text me when you land," he says.

"I will. Goodbye, Moneyboy."

And then I'm walking.

The city takes me back with the same indifference. My body feels every block -- the ribs, the back, every receipt from the seventy-eighth floor. I walk anyway, because the aching is just asking questions, and the walking brings the resolutions I need.

It was nice to visit the past. I spent two days in it. The talk, Robin in the third row, the gold carpet, Craig's hands. But there's a reason it's called visiting. The past is a fine place to stop; it's a bad place to live.

Apartment House Wrestling can put women on its board and clients in its livestream and call itself reborn, but I know what's on the other side of that black glass. All the modernizing in the world doesn't change what the room is for. It's still rich men secretly watching women rip each other's hair and bikinis as they beat the hell out of each other. It always was. The carpet remembers everyone, Cynara said. Let it remember me as the one who left.

And Craig? I'm glad for the time I shared with him. I have no regrets sleeping with him. We celebrated our past instead of burying it. Old wounds got healed at last; a twenty-year-old embarrassment finally got its redemption. But a relationship? He has his Wall Street, I have my Texas, and it is far too early to know what I actually feel underneath the wine and the adrenaline and the gratitude. Some things you don't diagnose on the first night. Like a good nurse, you watch, and you wait, and you let the labs come back.

What I know is this: the girl on the train, the woman at the podium, the fighter on the carpet all walked out of that tower on the same two feet. Whatever comes next, they'll face it together.

A yellow taxi slows at the curb beside me, the window slides down.

"Need a ride, lady?

I smile at him -- puffy face, aching ribs, gym bag full of diamonds and a damp bikini -- and shake my head.

"No, thanks," I tell him. "I'll walk."

[MikeHales67]

Lovely, sweet story. Is it dusty in here? I seem to have something in my eye.

[MikeHales67]