Fearless (The Solomon Brothers Series Book 3)

by Leslie North

  “What if they ask me something I don’t know? Something I don’t want to talk about?”

  “Be honest. You can never go wrong with honesty. Then turn the question around on them.”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “You couldn’t be more ready if you had built the thing yesterday. Now, come on. We can’t be late, and the traffic this time of day is unreal.”

  Getting Roosevelt to move quickly most days required patience. He was a thinker, sluggish in his adaptations because he was projecting twenty different outcomes in his head and determining his best course of action. He stalled on things like historical context and philosophies of those with differing viewpoints and, well…dressing to impress.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  Maggie was already half out the door. His question stopped her short.

  “What?” she asked, though she had heard him clearly.

  “Why are you helping me like this? Buying me fancy clothes and driving me across town for interviews? What’s in all this for you?”

  It wasn’t a bad question. In fact, it was downright brilliant. Why was she so invested in him and other kids like him, to the exclusion of a profession she always thought she wanted? She couldn’t answer that any more than she could answer the equally-hard question he had posed the previous day: what if all the judges see is my skin color? Roosevelt had a way of doing that—challenging her, trying to catch her at her worst so she could show him her best.

  “Because my parents raised me to believe helping others isn’t just a right, it’s an obligation—freely given in exchange for going through this life.”

  “You’re smart. You could be anywhere, doing anything. But you’re here.” Here, with a hint of distaste.

  The rest was implied. Affleck-Martin was inspired, one of the premier inner city boys’ facilities in the country, but it was still that—a facility. The boys were jaded, with barbed tongues and loose insults against women and whites and anything that represented a system structured against them. Sometimes she wanted to pull them into an embrace or cup their beautiful faces until they made eye contact and believed her when she said they—each and every one of them—were special. But they came to her fractured, sensitized to touch, Roosevelt same as all the rest. She tried to inject everything she had into her words so that maybe they would wrap around him as more than just linguistics.

  “No one,” said Maggie, her voice wavering under the weight of her conviction, “is more deserving of greatness than you. I can’t think of a better reason to be here.”

  His mocha eyes drifted to the evening sunlight spilling in through the dormer windows, trying desperately to hold it all in—emotions, truths, details of a life no child should live. Vessels in the whites of his eyes sprouted pink. His lips tipped at the corners into a shuttering frown.

  “Now…” Maggie said, snatching his suit jacket off his bed. “What say we knock a few university profs on their asses with your idea?”

  She turned away to give him the chance to save face. He sniffed once. She made it outside and to her car before he emerged more composed, the boy with the razor-sharp wit and a gleam in the eye that she was starting to know. Why was she so invested in him to the exclusion of all others? Because somewhere on that nightstand was his story that would drive his passions in the same way her story drove hers.

  Maggie just hoped Roosevelt’s story had a good ending.

  Henry wanted to punch it, alone.

  His favorite time of day—the thirty minutes before the awakening sun was even a blip on the horizon—was sacred. City noise settled like the peaceful hush between radio stations on the ancient transistor radio still in Sol’s office. So much of the gym’s day was filled with energy and anger-driven bass lines and the endless meandering of rap, the resonance of nothingness had become his reset button. The air was chill, damp. He had laced his running shoes against a brick outcropping of the abandoned downstairs market and zipped his hoodie before he realized he wasn’t alone.

  “Run with you?” The kid’s sweatshirt hood and darkness concealed his identity but his voice was unmistakable—articulate, not at all the slushy mumble of most street kids, and vulnerable, so absent the tough-guy bluster.

  Henry thought to ask if his ginger-haired warden knew where he was, but he wanted to raise no doubt in Roosevelt’s mind that he had meant what he said—anytime. He knew the slightest hint of discord could cause a kid on the precipice to bounce. Henry had been no different. Street life was reactive, defensive.

  “Sure, man,” said Henry. “If you think you can keep up.”

  “You’ll be chasing my treads the whole way.”

  Henry chuckled. It wasn’t much, pre-caffeine, but the good-natured challenge had opened up his breathing, made him feel more alive. “Where’re we headed? Your pick.”

  “Sixteenth Street Bridge.”

  The words were barely out of Roosevelt’s mouth before he launched, starting-gun fast. Henry played catch-up for nearly three miles. The absence of much traffic was liberating most days, but the added responsibility of watching Roosevelt’s back kept Henry firmly outside of his deep-thought cage. Not a bad place, he supposed. Just not what he had in mind when he hauled himself off the cot in his office.

  They pounded pavement, trading exhales but not much else. Kid had killer endurance and a runner’s natural motion—aerodynamic placement of the hands, synchronized arm motion, just the right amount of forward lean so that his body weight worked for him, not against him. The vaguely fishy smell of the Allegheny River circled Henry’s nostrils before the yellow girders peeked through the buildings. At the bridge’s southwest pylon, Roosevelt stopped and tagged the historical plaque filled with dates and names associated with the structure’s construction.

  Henry folded in half, hands braced against his thighs, wheezing like a geriatric smoker, his lungs in a what-the-fuck state of alarm. He hadn’t timed their progress, but he guessed they were posting six-minute miles.

  “Walk the length?” suggested Roosevelt.

  A nod was all Henry could manage.

  “There was another bridge here once. Covered, wooden, back when Sixteenth was Mechanics Street. Fire destroyed it in 1919. Guy in charge of rebuilding it went missing. Didn’t find him for three months. Turns out he was robbed and dumped in the Ohio River. They identified him by a tattoo of a truss bridge on his arm. You superstitious, Henry?”

  “Getting there, the longer you tell me this shit while we’re crossing.”

  Roosevelt laughed, a cloud-burst of breath barely visible on the air. “Nah. Point is, this bridge is iconic, man. Look down the way—look at the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge. Useful? Yeah. Something you want to run toward? A destination? Not really. They had it together in 1923. Architects and engineers, working side by side with the Art Commission. They made a statement, a legacy that still hits here nearly a hundred years later.” He tapped his hoodie above his heart. “What’s it like to have a legacy?”

  Henry blinked out of the image of him plunging to his death. He and heights didn’t exactly have a great relationship. “You’re asking me? I wouldn’t know.”

  “What are you talking about—I wouldn’t know? You’re Henry Lorenz, man. Fearless. Always on the offensive, take charge in the cage, never hesitating, control of the match from moment one. Legacy, man.”

  “That why you started coming to me over the summer? That what you think this is—chasing a legacy?”

  “Not for me, no.”

  “Then what is it about?”

  Since they had entered the footpath of the bridge, Roosevelt hadn’t looked anywhere but ahead, up, studying the structure’s lines from all angles. For the first time, Roosevelt looked down. Traffic on the adjacent road quieted. The sun rose. Finally, he said, “See the winged seahorses on the pylons? Inspired by a fountain in Paris called the Four Quarters of the World by the famous sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. Sculptures were too big to be shipped in by rail so two were brought in on th
e river and two by trucks.”

  Henry hadn’t given two fucks about this bridge or any of Pittsburgh’s four hundred other bridges before today. Now he realized it was Roosevelt’s waypost, something he kept in place, in front of him, so he didn’t have to deal with truths.

  “The minute a man chases a legacy, he’s setting himself up for failure. I never wanted to be Henry Lorenz, MMA middleweight champ. I just needed a way out of a bad choice, so I worked hard, did what I was told by someone who cared a lot more about me than I cared about myself. That’s it, man. Nothing fearless about it.”

  “I had an interview yesterday,” said Roosevelt.

  “Yeah?”

  “Miss Kavanaugh drove me to Carnegie Mellon. Bought me a suit and everything.” Roosevelt gave Henry a side-glance. “I looked good.” His good was a drawn-out declaration—goooood.

  Henry laughed. He wondered if Miss Kavanaugh was Roosevelt’s someone who cared a lot more about him than he cared about himself, a teacher maybe. Already he liked her for buying Roosevelt new clothes to boost his self-confidence.

  “How did you do?”

  Roosevelt shrugged. “Won’t know for a few days. Miss Kavanaugh thinks I have a shot at winning the whole competition. Scholarships, all that stuff. She doesn’t like me coming around the gym, though, so you can’t tell her about this morning.”

  A dawning that had nothing to do with the east horizon shivered up his spine.

  “This Miss Kavanaugh—she a teacher?”

  “Nah. She’s someone in charge at Affleck-Martin—not the big boss lady, but she’s there to watch out for us. Mentor us. Tutor us. That kind of stuff. She jumped me ahead on the wait list so I could have my own room.”

  “Red hair?”

  Roosevelt’s brows furrowed. “How did you know?”

  “Heard of her.” Felt her wrath. Considered the challenge of introducing her lithe body to his brand of sport, up close and personal, one on one, before he realized he’d need a lobotomy to endure her censure. Fuck, the morning was getting sticky.

  They’d reached the midpoint of the bridge’s span. Henry leaned at the rail and looked down to startle his thoughts from a certain redhead taking him down anywhere but a cage mat. Vertigo didn’t work.

  Roosevelt leaned beside him. The kid had good instincts, approached martial arts like the mental game it was, gifted with a low center of gravity and the perfect body type to dominate his weight class. His reflexes were a little sluggish—nothing that couldn’t be trained to lightning fast. There was a reason Roosevelt came to him, and Henry intended to do everything in his power to figure out that reason. Even if it meant enduring the hellfire fury of Miss Cease-and-Desist.

  “Different bridge tomorrow? Same time?”

  Roosevelt opened up the morning with his grin. “You’re on, old man.”

  The verbal jab was all it took. Henry edged out Roosevelt on the final sprint back to the gym, waited until the kid took off for Affleck-Martin, then puked his five-a.m. power bar in the alley.

  Maggie had looked everywhere.

  Well, not the one place she didn’t want to set foot inside again. The thought of darkening the door to Sol’s Gym made her skin crawl. But she had news for Roosevelt—and by the time crunch of it all, news that couldn’t wait. He had less than two weeks to finish his scale model. She had scoured the city to gather every last scrap of material. All she needed was him.

  She fortified herself with a deep breath and entered the building from the street, pleased that she no longer had to contend with cryptic passageways and doors that led to nowhere. This afforded her the chance to be in and out faster than she could recall the exact statistics in the recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s sports article on the direct correlation between mixed martial arts and arrests for violent offenses.

  Inside, however, the gym was thick with people. Gone was the vague, sanitized scent, replaced by the pungent brew of human sweat. A loud, hip-hop beat ducked and cut through the patrons, dropping three curses in the span of time it took her to draw her first reluctant breath. Everywhere, there was movement—spiraling Everlast bags held together with duct tape, speedbags walloped into a steady hum, bodies displaced against mats. Old, young, they were all there. Most shocking of all, she wasn’t the only female in the room. Two remarkably sculpted women squared off inside the octagonal cage at the gym’s epicenter, each chomping on a mouth guard, both bodies low and circulating and stalking, each waiting for the moment to—

  Maggie startled.

  Sweet Miss Manners, the blond took the other one down like a crocodile on a wildebeest.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” said a voice from behind.

  3

  Again, Maggie’s heart grappled to find its rhythm—this time from the familiar and deeply agitating voice mere inches from her ear. She hadn’t realized she had laced her fingertips through the padded cage until her grip prevented her from putting a respectable distance between her and the vermin who ran the gym.

  “Not in the…”

  Least. Decorum sparred with her inability to focus on anything but the astonishing absence of clothes on the man’s body. Tattoos. Padded gloves. Shorts that were not at all the swallowing basketball variety but the shrink-wrap variety, plastered with logos and endorsements that begged the mind to stare and read and oh, God, she was looking there.

  Not a stitch more.

  “No. I find it offensive, actually.”

  An irritating smirk threatened at his lips. “Why?”

  “Because…” What the hell was the matter with her? She couldn’t formulate a cogent argument—the lack of quality oxygen in the place the most likely cause. “Because I’m sure these women have other gifts. Taking each other down like common thugs contributes nothing to society.”

  “Why does it always have to be about others?” He placed a gloved hand at his sweaty forehead and leaned it against the cage, close enough to be intimate, far enough that she mourned for his moment at her ear. His voice was inquisitive, almost velvet, such a strong contradiction to the stammering rhymes pulsing around them. “What if, for just these three minutes, they get off on answering to no one, not pretending to be someone they’re not, digging deep and finding that reservoir of adrenaline most of us never reach unless we’re in danger? What if the rest of their fourteen-hundred-minute day is spent putting everyone else first, but for these three minutes, they recapture who they were before they became girlfriends or wives or mothers? Is that so wrong, Miss Kavanaugh?”

  Maggie’s mind circled back on her earlier visit. Had she given her name?

  The brunette wildebeest bounded to her feet, spit her mouth piece into her glove, and did a celebratory chest slam into her opponent.

  “They’re best friends,” said Henry. “Have been since grade school. Always watching out for each other, challenging each other. One is a bulldog attorney who spends half her workweek on pro bono cases. The other’s a firefighter who comes in here to stay in shape.”

  The blond called out, “Thanks, Henry,” as she exited the cage.

  He nodded, one of those Cro-Magnon head gestures that required no words, maybe a grunt.

  “Henry—is that your name?”

  “So I’m told.”

  “Listen, Henry. Clearly we stand on opposite sides of a very—very—large chasm of thought as it relates to your sport—and I do use the term sport loosely, as sport implies an endeavor that amuses not appalls. And I certainly don’t begrudge a woman’s hard-fought right to engage in any activity she chooses, specifically those predisposed to a man, but please don’t stand there in your tight drawers lecturing me on the merits of one person beating the shit out of another for nothing more than pleasure.”

  “Dropping curses between your Ivy League words only makes me want to get you more riled up, Miss Kavanaugh.”

  Ugh. She could not contain her eye roll. The man was infuriatingly base. “I’m looking for Roosevelt.”

  “You told me to send him home. Go home
and crack a book instead of someone’s face. That about right?”

  “Doesn’t mean you respected my wishes.”

  “Doesn’t mean I didn’t.”

  A woman in a spandex sports bra and boy shorts sidled up beside Henry, nearly engulfing his thigh. Her assets pressed against his sculpted obliques. She was pin-up gorgeous and looked like she had never seen the bottom of a Ben & Jerry’s carton.

  “See you there tonight?” she said to Henry.

  Henry’s stare penetrated Maggie’s gaze, even as he knocked off a vague, “Maybe,” in response.

  The woman drifted away. Henry’s eye lock remained.

  “Let me help you with this one,” he said, as if he had already read her mind regarding the list of wrongs the ring bunny had added to her argument. “The amount of scandalous flesh on display here objectifies women. And boys entering the delicate stage of sexual maturity should not be subjected to…how would Miss Kavanaugh phrase it…”

  “Boobs.”

  He rattled off a maddening tsk-tsk. “There you go again with those dirty words. I think you’re trying to get me excited.”

  She cinched him inside a sarcastic smile. “Shouldn’t be too hard. Even apes fling poo when they’re trying—and failing—to impress a female. Tell Roosevelt I’m looking for him. I know he’s here.”

  Maggie aimed for the door.

  “I’ll make you a deal, Kavanaugh.”

  Don’t turn around. Don’t turn around.

  “Land a punch on me and you can have Roosevelt every day after school. No pushback.”

  Gah. Maggie turned. “I’m not going to hit you.”

  “Then you must care more about that whole non-violence agenda you have going on than Roosevelt. He just lip service? A token to make yourself feel better at night?”

  Maggie’s gut twisted. Her neck and cheeks broiled as if she’d gone nine rounds.

  “Just keeping it real,” he added.