Chapter 8 #3
“Are you all right?” Caleb mutters. He makes a show of manhandling Asher onto the top turnbuckle.
A distraction. He tries to move his mouth as little as possible.
His nose is buried in Asher’s hair as he hauls Asher up by his belt.
It smells woodsy and smoky, like cedar and cypress trees around a flame.
Caleb forces himself back to the present.
“Ribs,” Asher grunts out. His head hangs low. “Felt a pop.”
“Do you want to stop?”
Asher shakes his head. Feet still planted on the ropes, he straightens and winces. Lost in the well between Asher’s brows, Caleb is suddenly overcome with a need to call the match and pack him away forever, bubble-wrap him so his ridiculously driven self won’t put his body on the line this way.
Nothing more than a foolish desire.
What he can do, however, is bear the brunt of their next move. His hands find Asher’s belt loops for support, and he pulls Asher off the top rope. The superplex sends both of them hurtling onto a ladder waiting for them below.
In a perfect world, Asher should have landed on the ladder and taken most of the hit. Instead, Caleb recalculates. His back cracks over metal. Asher drags his fingers up Caleb’s wrist and Caleb’s eyes squeeze shut. Flames lick up his spine. It’s fine.
Asher gets to his feet first. He sends Caleb out of the ring, shoulder careening into the ring post with a nasty thud. Then, much to the chagrin of Maverick Wolff, he begins to sweeps the monitors and papers off the announcer table.
Caleb lets himself get rolled onto the table and peeks through semi-closed eyes, watching Asher set up yet another a towering ladder. Twenty feet. Minimum. It teeters, hinges squealing. Asher begins to climb.
In the leadup to their match, Caleb spent hours trying to talk Asher out of this spot, only to be met with a frustratingly mulish expression each time. How incredibly rude of the universe to leave him with a textbook Taurus. The goddamn indecency.
But as Caleb watches Asher continue his ascent, he realizes this: in none of the rehearsals had they accounted for Asher working through an injury. What will a drop of this height do to his potentially cracked ribs?
The second the thought pops into Caleb’s mind, he can’t let it go.
He can’t let it go even as Asher stands atop a ladder and shoots a grin down.
The crowd is a distance away. This one’s for Caleb.
Just for him. He takes it all in for the last time, letting it drip over him like molten sunshine and gold.
Because Asher was never going to win the championship.
Caleb understands that fact, understands the gravity of what he’s about to do to Asher when the move is over and Asher rolls Caleb back into the ring.
At long last, Prichard’s plan will come to fruition.
Caleb can’t control what Prichard asks of him, but he can control this.
He can, at least, protect Asher from what this bump will do to his body.
It’s going to suck.
But not a single part of Caleb is willing to handle any other outcome.
So, when Asher throws himself off a twenty-foot ladder, backflipping through the air, Caleb moves.
He gets his body beneath the point where Asher will land, like a meteorite slamming into earth, and almost imperceptibly catches him.
It’s some 220 pounds hurtling down onto Caleb, and it drives all the air from his lungs. For a second, he blacks out.
When he comes to, the crowd is silent.
Then they go insane, screaming and stomping their feet so hard the arena trembles.
And Asher is shoving Caleb back into the middle of the ring and rolling him up for the three count and . . .
Caleb kicks out, raising his shoulder off the mat.
Asher glances back at him. Confusion pools in his dark brown eyes. He rolls Caleb up again.
Caleb kicks out.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Asher growls when Caleb kicks out for the third time.
Because this is where Asher was, in fact, scripted to win.
It says so right there on the match card pinned to the board backstage: Asher Ross defeats Caleb Knight (c).
But between Prichard and Caleb? Asher was never really going to.
Perhaps in a world where Caleb Knight isn’t a coward.
After all, what better way to make headlines than by screwing someone out of a championship win?
When Asher moves to roll him up again, Caleb counters and wraps a chair back around Asher’s neck. He fits his shin against the steel beneath Asher’s throat, palms pressing down against the back of Asher’s head.
His signature submission hold: locked in.
“I’m sorry,” Caleb whispers and hopes it doesn’t get lost in the jeering crowd.
He can pinpoint the exact moment, down to the millisecond, the realization washes over Asher.
You’ll have to tap out the second I lock it in. It’s meant to preserve the integrity of the hold.
There was something growing between them.
Something tentative and fragile. The vague shape of begrudging respect.
An almost friendship, if Caleb were to cautiously put a name to it, cupped like a fragile butterfly within the palm of his hands.
He sees the moment it crumbles, the second he closes his fist around something delicate: when Asher’s eyes lock with his, widening before they dull and harden, flickering out entirely; when the Fourth of July fireworks fade away, and all that remains is a hazy chemical trail.
A memory of something that will never last, fading fast behind his eyelids.
When Asher taps out, Caleb closes his eyes.