I wanted Cal.
I wanted him sitting in this chair, holding my good hand. I wanted him telling me it was okay, even if it wasn’t. I wanted to see his face. I wanted to tell him I loved him. I wanted to crawl into his arms and hide from the monster I had become.
But that wasn’t my reality. It would never be my reality. I had ensured that.
“That kid is a fucking beast,” Maverick said, shaking his head in disbelief, unaware that he was twisting the knife in my gut. “He was the lone survivor. He wrestled by himself againstDemolition’sguys for the full hour and continued with the outcome. I’ve never seen a guy in all my years do that.”
I closed my eyes, and the image assaulted me.
Cal. Alone in the ring. Sweating, bleeding, exhausted. Fighting off multiple men. No partner. No Silas.
I had left him.
I had left him in the hotel room emotionally, and I had left him in the ring physically. He had to carry the entire main event on his back because I couldn’t do my job.
Because I was too busy breaking my own heart to focus on the match.
Sixty minutes. He fought for Sixty minutes alone.
I nodded, the sob building in my throat. I tried to stop it, to swallow it down, but I couldn’t. I leaned my head back, the tears flowing freely down my temples into my hair.
Fuck this. Crying was one thing, but crying in front of my dad? That was admitting defeat. That was admitting that I was no better than the legacy I tried to outrun. That all I was ever going to do was add to the destruction.
The door clicked open. Scott was there with a doctor, a middle-aged woman with kind eyes and a clipboard that held my fate. Scott’s gaze locked with mine, and he didn’t hesitate. He ran to the bed, nudging Evan out of the way, and wrapped me into a hug, something Maverick probably hadn’t even considered doing.
I sobbed into Scott’s shoulder. It was all I could do. I clutched the back of his shirt with my good hand, burying my face in the fabric that smelled like stale coffee and airport lounges.
Fuck the doctors. Fuck my body. Fuck wrestling. It was all for nothing. I didn’t rewrite the mistakes. I didn’t make my own legacy.
I didn’t get the guy.
I didn’t get the fucking guy.
They kept me for three days for observation because of the severity of the concussion. During the day, Scott or Maverick would sit with me, distracting me with mindless chatter or silence. But at night, it was just me and the hum of the machines.
I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I fell. Every time I drifted off, I saw Julian Martinez’s face contorted in pain. I saw Cal’s face, cold and shut down, turning away from me.
I lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling tiles, counting the little dots. One, two, three…
Is this it?I wondered.Is this how it ends?
My shoulder throbbed with a persistent, gnawing ache that the pain meds barely touched. But the physical pain was a distraction I welcomed. It was the other pain, the hollow, gaping chest wound where my heart used to be, that was unbearable.
I saw a recap on the TV by a nurse’s station when a nurse made me get up and walk for a few. ESPN. They showed the clip. Not the botch, they cut away from that, but the end.
Cal. Standing on the turnbuckle. Arm raised. Confetti falling around him. He didn’t look happy. He looked possessed. He looked like a king standing on a pile of corpses.
He did it,I thought, leaning against the doorframe, feeling dizzy.He made it. And I’m not there.
I got released from the UWF a few days later. I didn’t even remember what day it was. All I knew was the world felt hollow.
I had a week before my shoulder surgery in Raleigh. My apartment complex in Orlando let me out of my lease without a fight, probably saw the headlines, or maybe Maverick paid them off to avoid a hassle. Without much of a say in the matter, Scott and Maverick booked us flights to Florida to pack my life up and move me back to North Carolina.
The flight was humiliation in its purest form.
I was in a sling, my arm immobilized against my chest. I had dark sunglasses on to hide my eyes from the lights and the people, but it didn’t stop the stares.
People whispered. I saw them nudging each other in the terminal.
