Page 83 of Split Decision

I look at him. The man who won tonight has been living in a hotel room for nearly six months and is standing in a corridor with fight night still on him, asking me to tell him what I came to say.

"I don't know yet, Luke," I say. The part of me that loves him and the part of me that protects myself still haven’t reached a truce. My uncertainty isn’t a pause—it’s the ground giving way under my feet.

He looks at me for a long moment.

"I've been waiting three weeks for you to call me back," he says. "I left a message. I said I'd be here."

"I know you did."

"Then what do I have to do?" He says it without heat, which is almost worse. "Tell me what the answer looks like, and I'll do it. I'll do whatever it takes, baby."

It's the wrong thing to say. He knows it the instant it's out—I can see the realization light on his face. Not because it isn't true. Becausewhatever it takesis not the specific thing. You can't solve the thing he did with effort and compliance. That's not what I need from him.

"Luke," I say. "That's not how this works."

"Then tell me how it works." And there it is—the edge he couldn't fully keep out. Not anger. Frustration. The specific frustration of a man who has been holding himself together for weeks, waiting for information about his own life. "Because I've been in this hotel for going on six months trying to understand what I need to do, and every time I think I've gotten there, you move somewhere else, and I can't?—"

He stops.

Breathes.

"I'm sorry," he says. "That's not fair."

"Maybe not," I say. "But it's true."

We look at each other in the corridor.

"I can't give you the answer tonight," I say. "I'm sorry. I know that's not what you need. But I came because I needed to see you, and now I've seen you, I don’t trust myself to say anything more than that.”

He looks at the floor. "Okay."

"Luke."

He looks up.

"You were magnificent tonight," I say. "That's also true."

His jaw works. Not quite a smile. Not anything I have a name for.

I find Travis. We leave.

LUKE

She leaves.

I stand in the corridor for a minute after she's gone, Travis's hand briefly at her back as they disappear through the service exit, and I think about the half step back. The way my hand came up on instinct, and she moved away from it without a word.

I've been so focused on the thing I did wrong—the arrangement, the sixty days, the decision I made without her—that I missed something.

She said, “I don't know yet.”

Not, “It's over.“

Not, “I’ve decided.“

Three weeks of silence, and she comes to Vegas to watch the fight on the night that is the culmination of everything I've worked toward for the last several years.

What she says is, “I don't know yet.”