Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
CALEB
HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA
Things change after the night spent at Asher’s old Performance Center. It’s the worst thing that happens to Caleb.
For the first time in well over half a decade, he’s excited again.
He starts a notebook. An honest-to-God fucking notebook.
Fills it with sketched-out diagrams for new moves he wants to try.
Texts them to Asher, who had punched his number into Caleb’s phone before whispering goodbye and sneaking off through the hotel lobby, for input.
This development is new, a begrudging truce they seem to have landed on.
Caleb no longer finds himself dragging his feet to the gym or dreading rehearsals.
It feels like shrugging off the dust and coming out of a haze.
“What the hell does this mean?” Asher asks when Caleb ducks into the ring.
Caleb squints through the glare from Asher’s phone screen at a picture of a sketch he apparently sent at three in the morning, with zero context or elaboration.
They are in the middle of a still empty Von Braun Center warming up before an untelevized house show. Around them, the tech crew chugs away, hard at work.
Later, when Caleb catches Asher midair, swinging him around before locking his arms tight behind his back, they decipher Caleb’s shitty half-awake stick-figure drawing as transitioning a shooting star press into an octopus hold.
For as far back as Caleb can remember, he’s only had himself to rely on.
He’s nursed himself back to health from dozens of colds, taken himself to the emergency room to set a broken arm and then limped back home.
This is the way it has always been: with gritted teeth, chin tucked in, one foot put in front of the other.
Across the ring, Asher looks at him, cheeks flushed, hair mussed.
Strands of red cascade over his eyes, lustrous even beneath the artificial lighting.
Gearing up for round two, he opens and closes his palm, the same hand that reached out to Caleb.
Never had Caleb accounted for Asher Ross to have the fucking nerve to storm into his life and offer him the one thing he never felt worthy of: kindness.
It cracks him wide open. Every need, every desire he spent his whole life pretending he could live without: unstoppered. He doesn’t know what to do with that. What he can do, however, is be better. Time for accountability. No more excuses. He just hopes it isn’t too late.
So, stop one on Caleb’s apology tour: groveling to Bailey for forgiveness.
Still early in the morning, the pool is mostly unoccupied. Malik does laps in the deep end and pays no attention when Caleb walks by. Elm trees shoot up into the sky, which is a cornflower blue for miles. A jazzy soundtrack pours out of the poolside speakers.
He finds Bailey sitting at a table beneath a large umbrella, a pink book in one hand and a dubious green-brown smoothie in the other.
“Hey,” he says, awkwardly perching on the edge of an empty Adirondack chair. He slides a breakfast burrito across the table. A peace offering. “I was, uh, wondering if that carpooling offer still stands?”
Bailey glances over her cat-eye sunglasses at him. “What changed your mind?”
Malik paddles past them. His strong arms create powerful waves that crest and crash back down, not unlike the way Caleb’s stomach feels: sloshy and a little bit queasy.
“I know I’m a jerk on TV but”—he picks at his knuckle where a gash is beginning to scab over—“I don’t want that gimmick to take over my whole life.
I can’t—” Horrifically, his voice cracks right down the middle and fractures.
His fingers dig into the meat of his palm.
He takes a steadying breath and tries again.
“For the longest time, I told myself that if I let others in, let them really know what’s going on inside my beating heart, that’d only make me vulnerable.
That’s why I hid behind this . . . this stupid gimmick. But it’s more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hiding behind that gimmick allowed me to distance myself from every unforgivable thing I’ve done. Everything Prichard made me do.”
In the muted morning light, Bailey’s face transforms. Her eyes slice to something razor sharp before they soften. “Is that why you mangled your opponent’s hand?”
Caleb stares at his feet. “Prichard threatened to obliterate my career, and I just . . . I was young and money was tight. I shouldn’t even be telling you this.”
“Caleb, that’s not okay.”
“Yeah, I know it was awful of me, and—”
Bailey cuts him off. “No, I meant that Prichard took advantage of you. He capitalized on your youth and vulnerability and turned you into his puppet. This isn’t your fault.”
“Maybe not entirely, but it still is,” Caleb insists.
“I could’ve said no. I could’ve walked away at any point.
Found some other way of making a living.
Instead, I chose to be selfish. Selfish and cowardly.
Prichard may be the mastermind, but I’m equally to blame.
But I don’t want to be like him. I can’t.
I won’t have it. I have a long way to go and a whole lot to make up for, but I thought it could start here.
With you.” He swallows before he quietly adds, “Because you were kind to me even when I didn’t deserve it. ”
Even when I wasn’t kind to myself.
“Okay.”
Caleb blinks. “Okay, what?”
“Look, I know it’s been a hot minute since you had someone to travel with, or someone to keep you entertained while doing boring shit like laundry, but I’d love to be that for you. I wanna be your person.”
“Oh. I had mentally prepared to do more begging.”
Bailey barks out a laugh that ends in a snort. “You can if you want to, but I, very respectfully, only care for women on their knees in front of me.”
Gray matter is about to start leaking out of Caleb’s ears. “This whole time?”
“I tell ya, we’re like wolves. Wrestling is so fucking gay. It’s basically drag.”
Two hours later, after checking out of the hotel, Caleb finds himself standing next to a silver Prius watching Bailey reconfigure her car seats to free up space for his additional luggage.
Which brings him to stop two: the rest of the roster.
He finds them at a CrossFit outlet the next city over.
“If you lock your core during the suplex, it’ll hurt your back less when you toss Montez over your shoulder,” Caleb says.
Silence falls over the gym.
Five pairs of dubious eyes turn to Caleb.
Crickets.
Caleb fights the urge to scowl back at everyone.
It’s so easy to say you’re going to change, but it’s even easier to fall back into the comfort of old ways.
He’s burned so many bridges that the road back home seems impossible.
But he wants to try. So instead of running away to start a new life in the North Pole, he climbs into the squared circle and meets Alexei in the middle of the ring.
“Hi.” He resists the impulse to do something mortifying, like wave.
Genuinely why is it so hard being a normal human?
He should have been a frog. “I know I haven’t been the easiest person to work with, but I wanted to apologize.
For being a dick and—” Caleb gestures weakly at everything about himself.
“It might not seem that way, but I do respect you guys and the work you do. And it’s understandable if you don’t believe me, but I . . . I just wanted you all to know.”
Caleb is about to step out of the ring when someone clears their throat.
“Do you swear you’re not here to spy on Prichard’s behalf?”
It’s Thea. She squints up at him with narrowed eyes from where she squats on the floor, crouched mid-burpee.
“I’m not. I promise.”
“Then why the sudden conscience?”
Caleb raises his head, finally finding the courage to look around the gym.
His gaze lands on Asher by the pull-up bars next to a window.
He looks good in the midday sun, dressed down in a shirt with its sleeves cut off.
A pair of athletic shorts that have seen better days clings to his hips.
Asher is already looking back at him with a familiar shit-eating grin plastered across his face.
“Because”—Caleb squeezes his eyes shut before he continues—“someone reminded me why I love this business. I realize there are problems with the company and don’t want to be another bullet point on that list.”
He looks back up at Asher and swears he sees something move behind his eyes, like the way it shines when he’s all fired up in the middle of a ring but new. Different.
Caleb doesn’t allow himself to hope.
As he’s about to leave, a Russian accent booms across the gym. “Show me suplex,” Alexei says. He stretches an arm out toward Caleb. “Come on.”
And just like that, Caleb melts into the group.
They invite him on dim sum and boba runs, save him a seat at Catering, and badger him onto the stage during karaoke nights.
Bailey gets her hands on a hot glue gun and a bag of sequins from a thrift store, Thea starts tripling her cake-in-a-mug recipe into a cake-in-the-biggest-bowl-she-can-acquire recipe, and they spend late nights circled up in various arenas and stadiums putting together their gear for Fyter Fiesta: Alexei and Thea, Malik and Montez, Bailey, Asher, an occasional handful of other wrestlers, and Caleb.
“Just one,” Bailey wheedles after a show. She brandishes a hair bedazzler like a weapon in her left hand. “Do it for the bit.”
Caleb sniffs. “I am a professional.”
“Boo,” Asher bellows from down the hall. Across his fringe, a line of diamonds glint under the harsh backstage light. “Professional buzzkill.”