Circled in Red

The hitch circled in red. Thirty seconds of me on a public feed, Briggs narrating my second beat like he's teaching a clinic. That's how Jules held it up at the gym door this morning, her phone angled at my face, and I stood there longer than I meant to. Not the clip. The red circle. The way someone had paused the slow-mo on exactly the thing I've been trying to unlearn.

My shoulder hitch. The thing that lives in the architecture of me — how a swimmer's body learned to throw. Briggs put a ring around it and handed it to everyone who follows Lou Cassar. I am being studied by a man I haven't even thrown at yet, and the study is public.

By the time Lev's text came through to Danny — Voss's corner knows my check-hook drifts south when I'm pressed — I'd stopped being surprised. I wrote the cadence on the back of a gym receipt. My hand wanted paper, wanted the leak to stop being air. No more bait, I told Danny. The trap holds in here, not on film.

But here's the thing that's been sitting in me since the door: it was never Lev. It was never one guy with a grudge. It's every window in the place. Every parent filming their kid's bout. Every alumni with a phone and a friend in the other camp. The gym itself is the leak. I trained inside walls I thought were mine and the walls have been talking the whole time.