“I’ll always be here to help you,” she said. “No matter what. You know that?”
Lucky looked down between her feet and nodded.
“Hey.” She turned to poke Bonnie in the shoulder. “Don’t you need to get to the gym?”
Bonnie dismissed this with a wave.
“I need to be with you.”
“You can’t watch over me forever, you know.”
“Not forever.” Bonnie grinned. “Just today and tomorrow and the day after that…”
Lucky shook her head.
“I don’t want you to fuck with your life just because I fucked up mine.”
Bonnie glanced over at her.
“You didn’t fuck up. What you’re doing is really brave.”
Lucky made a small noise of disgust.
“Please don’t call me brave. That is the opposite of what I am.”
“You can’t see yourself yet,” said Bonnie. “You will.”
Lucky plucked a blade of grass and twirled it between her fingers.
“My agency dropped me,” she said quietly. “Or I dropped them. I don’t know.”
“What happened?”
Lucky looked down at her hands.
“I just…I don’t want to do it anymore, Bon. This can’t be it, you know? My career, my whole life, reduced to—” She lifted one thin arm and shook it. Bonnie nodded in understanding.
“A body,” Bonnie said. “I get it.”
Lucky rolled the blade of grass into a tiny green ball and flicked it away.
“Is that why you stopped boxing? Did you feel like that?”
Bonnie shook her head. Truthfully, she loved the physicality of what she did. Asking her body to do something nearly impossible and feeling it rise to the task made her feel invincible. She couldn’t imagine spending her life doing anything that wasn’t physical. It was the mental side of the sport that had got to her.
“After Nicky,” she began slowly. “After having my title taken, I just couldn’t see a way forward anymore. And without Pavel…I don’t know how to box without him.”
“Why did you leave Pavel? None of us understood that. He’s, like, the best.”
Bonnie took a deep breath. If she was going to be honest with anyone, it should be Lucky, who had been brave enough to let Bonnie help her this week.
“I started to feel—”
But she couldn’t find the word. A crush felt ridiculous. Feelings was too wishy-washy. Love felt impossible to say. Instead, she fluttered a hand over her chest where her heart was and looked imploringly at Lucky, who gasped.
“For Pavel?”
Bonnie dropped her face in her hands. She was flushed all over. Her cheeks felt like asphalt baking in the sun.
“Wow, I did not see that coming,” said Lucky.
Bonnie glanced up.
“Because he would never…like that? For me?”
Lucky’s expression softened instantly.
“Are you kidding me? He should be so lucky! It’s just…You know what, never mind. I see it, I do. He’s pretty cute. In an I-survived-the-Russian-winter-by-wrestling-bears-and-using-my-own-stores-of-fat-as-sustenance kind of way.”
Bonnie tried to smile, but she was still burning with embarrassment.
“So did you tell him?” asked Lucky. “How you felt?”
Bonnie shook her head. Lucky clicked her teeth and gave her the finger gun.
“A classic cut and run. Nice.”
Bonnie grimaced.
