He glanced at me, a softness in his eyes I’d never seen before. “They’re the ones who supported the wrestling. My dad, my adopted dad, he bought me my first boots. They gave me a life I didn’t deserve.”
He looked back at the road. “We’re not them, Silas. You aren’t your dad. I’m not mine. We’re the ones who survived them.”
I looked at him, really looked at him. The tattoos, the hardness, the “Deadlock” persona… it was all armor. Just like my “Timeless” perfection was armor. Underneath, we were just two kids who had been forced to grow up too fast, trying to outrun ghosts that shared our blood.
“We survived,” I echoed.
The GPS chirped, signaling we were five minutes from the hotel. The adrenaline of the match was gone, replaced by a bone-deep exhaustion.
“Hey,” Cal said, his thumb brushing over my knuckles. “We did good tonight. Real good.”
“Yeah,” I said, a genuine smile touching my lips for the first time in hours. “We did.”
We pulled into the hotel lot, the engine cutting off into silence. We sat there for a moment, neither of us moving to get out, the heat of his hand still covering mine. My heart was beating fast again, but this time, it wasn’t panic. And for once, I didn’t pull away. I let myself feel the warmth, ignoring the alarm bells ringing in the back of my head telling me this was dangerous.
“I’m wired,” Cal muttered, staring up at the hotel, his leg bouncing again. “I’m never gonna sleep.”
I looked at him, feeling the pull, the gravity that had been drawing us together since the day we met. But my body was screaming for rest.
“I’m crashing,” I admitted, unbuckling my seatbelt. “I think I left my body back in the ring about an hour ago.”
Cal smirked, finally letting go of my hand. The loss of contact felt colder than the air conditioning.
“Go sleep, old man. I’ll be up for a while.”
We grabbed our bags and headed up to the room. I collapsed onto my bed the second we got in, barely kicking off my shoes before the darkness took me. The last thing I heard was the sound of the door clicking shut as Cal slipped back out into the hallway.
6
JANUARY - MIAMI, FLORIDA
Now playing: Dress - Taylor Swift
”Silas…Silas…Silas!”
The voice came with a shove, a physical jolt that tore me out of a sleep so heavy it felt like being drugged. After the adrenaline crash ofMan Overboard, the debut, the pyro, the thirty-five minutes of chaos, the elimination, I had passed out the second my head hit the hotel pillow.
I groaned, a guttural sound of protest buried in the mattress. “Go to sleep,” I growled, rolling onto my stomach and dragging a pillow over my head to block out the world.
“Oh, come on, man. Do something fun with me for once.”
Cal’s voice stopped me. It wasn’t his normal. It wasn’t the low, rasping tone of the man who had just stood back-to-back with me in a ring surrounded by twenty thousand screaming fans. He sounded… young. Eager. There was a lightness to it that I had never heard before, a crack in the armor he wore so tightly.
I rolled back over, squinting against the darkness of the hotel room, and pulled the pillow off my face. I cut him a small glare, my eyes adjusting to the silhouette looming over my bed.
“This better be worth waking me up at,” I glanced at the glowing red numbers on the nightstand, “three in the goddamn morning.”
He nodded, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet. He was wearing a hoodie and shorts, looking less like a main roster superstar and more like a college kid up to no good.
“Throw on some shorts,” he said, a smile breaking across his face, one I’d never seen before. It wasn’t a smirk. It was genuine.
“I went walking around the resort. Found the hotel pool. It’s outdoor, hidden behind the palm trees, and it’s heated.”
I shook my head, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. Granted, Miami in January wasn’t exactly winter, but it damn sure wasn’t warm enough to strip down and jump into water at three in the morning.
“Are you insane?” I hissed, sitting up. “We’re going to fucking freeze. And besides, I don’t have trunks with me. It’s January.”
Cal scoffed, crossing his arms. “The pool is heated, Si. Like, really heated. There’s steam coming off it. I checked the thermostat on the deck. And fuck a suit. Just jump in in your underwear. Or shorts. Who cares?”
