Chapter 84: Pike Peak Fitness! [FIXED!]
The gym was called Pike Peak Fitness and Darren had walked past it twice before confirming the name matched what Liam had been complaining about across multiple conversations.
He pushed through the door.
The space was exactly what he expected from Liam’s descriptions — functional, purposeful, the kind of gym that had no interest in aesthetics beyond what the work required. The equipment were worn out and the people using it were serious and the ambient noise was the clean with no phone propped up in sight.
Heads turned naturally.
They didn’t turn around quickly, it was simply an involuntary adjustment that happens with Darren’s physical presence.
He was 6"3 of consistent conditioning — not the sculpted vanity of someone who trained for appearance, but the dense, load-bearing build of a man whose body had been tested in contexts most gym members hadn’t considered.
He scanned the floor and found Mike immediately.
He was hard to miss. The man was working with a client on the cable station, demonstrating something with the efficiency of someone for whom movement had long since become an involuntary action.
Darren watched him for a moment, then it landed.
Mike looked up as their eyes met across the gym floor.
Mike said something brief to his client, set down what he was holding, and walked toward the exit causally because he knew this required his full attention and was going to give it that.
Darren followed him after Mike gestured for him to do so.
They stood on the pavement in the mid-afternoon air and looked at each other for a moment because most people were unaware that their history predated the current conversation by a significant distance.
"Darren." Mike looked him over with the clinical eye of someone reading a physical report. "It has been a long time." He paused. "You look like shit."
"Good to see you too, Mike."
"I am serious. You look tired."
"I am tired." Darren shrugged. "Working on it though."
Mike nodded once, accepting that answer without pushing further.
"I need to ask you something," Darren said. "Your contacts. The ones you had on the circuit — promoters, managers, the regional people. You still have them?"
Mike studied him. "I do."
"Are they still active?"
"Most of them. Some moved up, some moved sideways." He tilted his head slightly. "Why are you asking me this, Darren?"
"Because I’m thinking about coming back."
The silence that followed was the considered silence of a man processing why a man would suddenly appear out of the blue for this but this also wasn’t the first time Darren had done something like this.
"Fighting? Are you sure?" Mike said.
"Yes, I am," Darren responded right away.
"MMA or boxing?"
Darren looked at him evenly. "Both."
Mike’s expression shifted by a degree. "Both?"
"Both."
"You are still undecided?"
"I am, just don’t want to put my eggs in a single basket."
Mike was quiet for a moment, arms crossed, looking at Darren the way he probably looked at a barbell he was deciding how to load. "You kept your conditioning."
"Enough of it."
"How long since your last bout?"
"Fourteen months. Underground circuit, not sanctioned." Darren said it without apology. "I know the rules of the professional game. That was always the goal before the money ran out."
Mike processed this without judgment. The underground circuit wasn’t something most people in the professional sphere acknowledged openly, but it was a known quantity and what it produced in terms of practical experience was real regardless of the venue.
"I can make calls," Mike said. "It won’t be instant. There’s conditioning work that needs to happen first, proper assessment, getting you in front of the right people." He looked at him directly. "This is serious or it isn’t. Which is it?"
"I’m serious, Mikey."
"Then come back tomorrow. Early. We will talk properly."
Darren nodded.
A thought crossed his mind and he looked at Mike with a different kind of attention. "You’ve been working with someone recently. A lawyer. Blonde, blue eyes, complains constantly."
Mike’s expression moved into something that was the closest it got to delight. "Liam!" Mike said with delight.
"That’s the one," Darren said with a faint smile on his face because he could tell Mike was having a field day with him.
"You know him?" Mike asked Darren.
"He’s my brother," Darren informed Mike but of course, Mike knew they weren’t biological brothers for obvious reasons.
Mike laughed out loud without a care in the world, it was a good thing they were outside the building.
"He is terrible," Mike said with genuine fondness. "The worst I have seen in my entire life!" Mike was fighting through his laughter.
"Yup, that is definitely Liam," Darren chuckled.
Mike shook his head before revealing the most important part of the this conversation and the reason why Liam was one of his favorite clients to work "But he comes back. Every time. That’s something."
Darren smiled despite himself. "Yeah. That’s him."
Mike looked at him with open appreciation. "Come back tomorrow," he said again. "We will talk about everything."
"Take it easy on Liam," Darren said, turning to go.
"I will consider it," Mike said, "if you take his place in the session."
"Nice try bozo." Darren raised a hand without turning around and walked back toward the entrance.
He kept on walking and was two steps into the parking lot when the collision happened.
He felt it before he processed it — a shoulder-level impact, something dropping, the sound of a bag hitting the floor. He stopped immediately and looked down.
A woman was crouching to collect the contents that had spilled from her gym bag — water bottle rolling, earphones tangled, a small towel displaced from where it had been folded.
"My bad." Darren crouched alongside her, already reaching for the water bottle. He picked it up and handed it back, then collected the earphones and passed those too.
"I wasn’t watching where I was going."
"It’s okay." She looked up to take the items.
They were briefly at the same level.
Darren registered her face briefly but it didn’t linger for more than a few seconds as she wasn’t someone he would otherwise give a double take.
"Sorry again," he said.
"No problem." She smiled briefly.
He walked past her without so much as a second glance.
Sophia watched him go.
She stood with her bag reassembled on her shoulder and looked at him for a moment a few seconds after he had walked behind her.
She turned toward the gym floor.
"Hmm," she said to herself, quietly.
Then she put her earphones in and went to find a treadmill.
-
Sophia settled into her treadmill with the focused ease of someone who had done this enough times that the first five minutes required no conscious engagement. Earphones in, pace set, and her focus to the max as she could feel it in her glutes.
She found her rhythm quickly.
Her mind drifted the way it did during cardio — not blank exactly, but loosely focused as she had preoccupied it with a few things. She thought about Mateo’s face when the delivery arrived. The way he’d gone completely still for a few seconds before the composure cracked entirely and the sixteen year old underneath the armour surfaced without permission.
She thought about Liam as well, how could she not? She let it sit for a moment and then moved it along because she had forty minutes of cardio to get through and Liam occupied enough of her mental real estate when she was standing still.
She increased her pace and focused on her breathing to last longer.
The gym floor was moderately busy for this hour. The usual faces occupied the usual stations — the woman who always did deadlifts in the corner with the focused quiet of someone with nothing to prove, the two men at the cable station who communicated entirely in nods.
She noticed him briefly redirect toward the entrance at one point — something or someone pulling his attention — but she was mid-interval and her focus returned to the mirror and her own reflection and the pace she was trying to maintain was slowly being disrupted as fatigue was slowly kicking in.
By the time her interval finished and her pace dropped, Mike was already back on the floor with a client, notebook open, and encouraging the individual to push themselves past their limits.
She cooled down and thought nothing more of it as her body was entering a rest state.
The man from the collision drifted through her mind once, briefly.
The familiarity nagged at her. She’d seen him somewhere before — not here, somewhere with different context, different surroundings. The feeling wasn’t strong enough to chase because there was a chance she was mistaken.
After all, it was something she was guilty of in the past, misidentifying someone.
Some people just had faces that registered as familiar without reason.
She pulled her earphones out, towelled off, and headed for the exit.