Forever Never

Chapter Seven | Life and Boxing

Leroy

When I agreed to joining Axe in the gym to work out earlier this morning I was not expecting her to cook my ass so easily in a sparring session. Seeing her act as if that punching bag was her biggest opp earlier should've been my warning to be the one that punches and kicks instead of the one that gets kicked and punched. I was careful not to move the boxing mitts out of the way when she punched because that meant getting clipped in the face instead of the mitt.

"You training for a UFC match or what?" I puffed as I took another kick to my side where I wore the kick mitts.

"Nope." she huffed and dodged my swiping arm so routinely and cleanly. "Just life. Which is essentially. the same thing," she added between inhales and exhales of breaths. I couldn't argue with that.

I worked out in the gym sometimes because I enjoyed it and it helped clear my head. And even then I mostly did light work. But Axe was a different breed in here. I almost didn't even recognise her as my baby sis.

"By the way. Been meaning to ask. Is there a particular reason you ain't been talking to our folks that much?" I asked and she locked eyes with me for a fleeting moment.

"Got nothing to talk about." she shrugged and kicked me again. I was starting to take this personal because what was up with all that power behind them?

The answer to my question lied in my ways in the scar on her left temple. It was my fault it existed to begin with and at the time she obtained it I was genuinely so scared that my irresponsible ass caused her permanent brain damage which I luckily didn't. She was rushed to the hospital by our neighbour after she fell from the kitchen table and hit her head on its edge. There was blood, my god was there blood and she had to get stitches. My parents were so indescribably outraged and never let me hear the end of it. I was twelve when I was left to babysit her that day but it was still not an excuse to take my eyes off her and certainly didn't help with the immense guilt I felt for allowing her to get hurt on my trusted watch.

Throughout her life Axe was always cared for, provided for, and she never had to take responsibility like I was being the oldest. She was the baby of the family for a long time and that only made her feel like one, sheltered, found it difficult to do anything on her own which I imagine only made her feel useless; a burden. So when she got that independence and freedom that came with adulthood, naturally she grasped it and understandably didn't wanna look back to a time and place she felt anything but that. That day thankfully didn't change the fact that it was always her and I against the world.

"Alright. What about Ty then?" I went on and she paused for a brief moment.

"What about her?"

I lowered my arms, finally getting to rest them as they began feeling sore. "Why you not talking to her?" I asked again.

"It's not about her. This about that asshole Tim here to ruin her life yet again and it just hurts me that she won't see that," she sighed.

In some ways I understood her frustration. Trying to get someone you cared about away from an inevitably destructive situation they tried to desperately grip onto was hard, exhausting and kind of heartbreaking.

"Look I get you got your reservations about that fella and in some ways might translate over to her, but one thing you can't do is push her away like you're doing right now. The last thing you want is to leave her isolated with him having no one else to turn to." I told her.

She exhaled big and seemed to be on the same page as me. "Yeah I know." she ran her gloved hand down her face. Her eyes darted up to my face again. "Since when did you become an expert in all things Ty anyway?"

I shrugged. "I like talking to her." I replied truthfully. Thinking about her brought on a smile I was relieved Axe didn't see because her back was turned to me as she went to pick up her towel and waterbottle.

She handed me her phone once she was facing me again. "Film me. About to do this ad for a sponsor," she said and I did as she asked, holding her phone up as it recorded.

I watched her as she drank the protein shake out of a different bottle that had a label on it, which I assumed was the sponsor, and said a bunch of things about it. "You get paid good for this stuff?" I asked and she nodded. "And how much of it is a lie?"

"Sometimes. But it's lies that pay the bills," she replied as she was editing the short clip I filmed before posting it on her story. Once again I couldn't argue with that. "But I try to do my research and stay away from the really problematic ones tho, like BetterHelp for example."

She hung her bag on her shoulder and we walked out of the gym together. I was genuinely impressed by the empire she'd managed to build over the last few years. But sometimes I worried she might be chasing something unattainable. I had seen countless times how life in the public eye absolutely drowned and sank people and would hate to lose my sister to the internet.

By the time I came back home the post-mortem meeting I'd scheduled for today with my team was nearing. I sat in front of the laptop, waiting for the rest to trickle into the zoom meeting. Regardless if a business failed or succeeded a post-mortem was a must. It was a way to find out where you were as a team, what worked and what didn't. A mark in the sand almost.

The biggest factors into our failures were definitely lack of funding and a lack of market for majority of the books we sold. The rest of my team agreed moving forward they needed to sell books "people actually wanted to buy" when there was in fact a huge market for them, we just weren't targeting it.

It was clear moving forward I needed to find people who shared my vision and investors that wanted to actually invest and back us instead of holding us back.