Jealous Sam

Chapter 64 - Jealous Sam

Claire sat quietly in the chair, the glass of water forgotten on the desk beside her. Her breathing had finally steadied, though her fingers remained tightly folded in her lap. Mia stayed beside her on the bed while Mike stood near the desk, waiting for her to speak.

After a long silence, Claire finally lifted her head.

“It started after you fought Clark.”

Mike's expression changed at the mention of her brother, but he said nothing.

Claire looked down at her hands. “Sam was furious that night. Not just angry because Clark lost. He couldn't understand how it happened. You were supposed to lose that fight. Everyone around Clark had made sure of it. They had paid the referee, and there was metal hidden inside Clark's glove. Sam knew about it, I knew about it, Clark knew about it. Everyone who was involved thought the fight was already decided before either of you stepped into the ring.”

She swallowed, her voice becoming quieter. “And then you knocked him out anyway.”

Mike remained silent.

“I remember Sam watching the fight. I had never seen him like that before. He wasn't disappointed. He was furious. He kept saying that Clark had no right to lose, not after everything they had done to make sure he won. He blamed Clark at first, but after a while he started blaming everyone. The referee. The people around him. The judges. Even me.”

Claire rubbed her thumb over her knuckles.

“He kept asking me how you could have known something was wrong. He thought you must have known about the metal in the glove. He couldn't accept that you had simply been better that night. Every explanation was easier for him than admitting that Clark had been beaten.”

She paused, taking a slow breath. “That was when Sam started changing.”

The first time he grabbed her had been during an argument about Clark. He had been drinking and kept talking about the fight, replaying the knockout in his head as though watching it again might somehow change the result. Claire had tried to calm him down, but when she told him that Clark had simply been beaten, Sam had grabbed her arm hard enough to leave bruises.

He apologized afterward and she believed him but it happened again.

The arguments became more frequent, and Clark's loss became something Sam carried everywhere with him. Whenever Mike's name came up, his mood changed. He would become bitter and restless, sometimes drinking until he could barely speak properly. Claire learned to avoid mentioning Mike around him, even though that became almost impossible.

Then came last week. Claire's eyes moved toward Mike.

“You remember what happened.”

Mike nodded. She took another breath.

“That new boxer knocked Sam down. Everyone thought he was going to finish you too for stepping in. I remember seeing him coming at Sam, and I thought...” Her voice faltered. “I thought I was about to watch Sam get seriously hurt.”

She wiped beneath her good eye.“Then he came after me.”

“You got between us before he could hit me. You didn't even hesitate and knocked him out with one shot.”

Claire shook her head slowly. “Sam saw all of it.”

The room became quiet.

“He didn't say anything afterward and that's what scared me. He just lying flat there watching you. Everyone else was talking about how incredible it was, but Sam didn't look impressed. He looked... destroyed.”

Claire looked down.

“He kept asking himself how you could do it. How you put him on the floor with one punch. He couldn't understand how you kept doing things that he believed he should have been able to do.”

Her voice tightened.

“Sam is a great boxer, Mike. You know that better than anyone. He has been fighting at a higher level than most people ever reach. He's is on the national team and an Olympic contender. He has the money, the training, the connections, everything. He has never been someone who needed to look at you and feel like he was beneath you.”

She looked directly at Mike. “But after that night, he started thinking he was.”

Mike said nothing.

Claire continued, “He couldn't get that moment out of his head and kept talking about it. About how that boxer had knocked him down, and how you had ended the fight with one punch. He kept saying it didn't make sense.”

Her fingers began trembling again.

“He started drinking more. Every time he saw a replay of your fight in his mind, he became angry. He kept asking me why you could do those things and he couldn't. I told him it had nothing to do with him. I told him you were just fighting your own fight, but he didn't hear me.”

Claire looked away.

“He wasn't angry at you because he wanted your career to end. He was angry because he couldn't accept what he was seeing. In his head, he was supposed to be the better fighter than you. He had built his entire life around being the best. And every time something happened that proved otherwise, he took it out on me.”

Mia reached for Claire's hand.

Claire squeezed it tightly.

“Last night he came home drunk. He had been watching your recent fight. He kept talking about you. I tried to leave the room, but he wouldn't let me, I told him he needed to stop blaming everyone else for what was happening.”

She touched the bruised side of her face. “He asked me whether I thought you were better than him.”

Mike's eyes remained fixed on her.

“I told him the truth.” Claire's voice dropped.

“I told him that if he was angry because he thought you were better, then he needed to deal with that himself. I told him you hadn't done anything to him.”

A tear slipped down her cheek. “And then he hit me.”

Mia's arm tightened around her.

“He kept asking me how you could be better than him. He kept saying that it wasn't supposed to be like this. That Clark was supposed to beat you and you were supposed to stay down last week. He couldn't accept any of it.”

Claire closed her eyes. “He wasn't fighting with me anymore. He was fighting with everything that had happened in his head.”

Mia kept one hand moving slowly up and down Claire's back while Mike stood near the desk, trying to make sense of what he'd just heard. He believed Claire about the beating. The bruises made that impossible to question. But the reason behind it didn't sit right with him.

Sam had betrayed him, and Mike would never forget that. He had been Mike's best friend long before everything with Claire had fallen apart. But jealousy? That sounded nothing like him.

Sam had been the bigger boxer, a national-team fighter and an Olympic contender. He came from a wealthy family, had his own reputation, and had never needed to measure his worth against Mike's. If Sam lost a fight, he blamed himself. That was the man Mike remembered. He had never been someone who looked for another person to blame.

So the idea that Clark losing to Mike, or Mike dropping the new boxer with one punch, had somehow made Sam feel inferior enough to beat Claire didn't make sense.

Something was missing.

Mia finally looked over Claire's head at him. “Let her stay here for a little while. She'll be safer until she's calm. Later, you can take her to her parents. You two are from the same town, aren't you?”

Mike nodded. He glanced at Claire, then at Mia. “I'll give you both some space. I'll be downstairs if you need me.”

He opened the door and stepped into the hallway, closing it quietly behind him. For a moment he stood there, staring at the floor.

Sam and Claire had betrayed him. Those were facts Mike had already learned to live with.

But this? He couldn't believe Sam had simply become jealous of him.

Mike knew Sam too well for that.

He walked downstairs and stepped into the morning air, still trying to figure out what he was missing.

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