Chapter 3 #2
His tattoos only made him look more rigid, a chaotic tapestry of black and grey that seemed to tighten around his muscles.
Intricate designs resembling spiderwebs tangled around his elbows and climbed up his arms, disappearing beneath his shirt collar to lick at his collarbones.
A massive, dark chest piece peeked out whenever he moved, and a faded, jagged No One Like Us in gothic script stretched across his stomach, surrounded by smaller, filler pieces that looked like battle scars.
There were so many of them, but the one I always looked at, the one I couldn’t look away from, was the worn lettering across his knuckles that spelled out DEADLOCK in an old school font.
I asked him about it once. He said it was the first one he ever got, and laughed about how stupid he felt walking around with just his knuckles tattooed at freshly eighteen.
Cal noticed me chugging the coffee in my hands immediately as he approached.
“How many cups is that?” he asked flatly, eyeing the two empty cups sitting next to me on the floor.
The airport was insane today, a chaotic swarm of travelers that made my skin crawl.
I had been sitting alone for a while at the gate, my knee bouncing uncontrollably.
I didn’t really expect to see Cal before we boarded the flight.
I knew we were seated together, but I didn’t expect we’d be waiting together.
I had managed to chug three cups of coffee in the time I had been left unattended, and it still didn’t feel like enough to calm my nerves.
I wasn’t a great flyer, which was ironic, given a huge chunk of the job description involves flying.
“We aren’t even boarded yet,” he added, raising an eyebrow as he took in my jittery state.
“They were small,” I lied, crushing the empty cup in my hand.
“They were not.”
“They were small to me.”
“Those are large cups, Silas. That’s enough caffeine to kill a horse.”
I sighed and rubbed the back of my neck, feeling the jittery buzz under my skin. “I drink even more when I’m nervous, alright?”
He stiffened slightly, only for a second. His gaze sharpened, scanning my face.
“About flying?” he asked.
“About everything,” I muttered, looking away. “It keeps my mind occupied.”
He studied me. There was a quiet intensity in the way he looked at me with those bright hazel eyes, like he was trying to solve a puzzle.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I don’t tell anyone,” I said, leaving out the irrational conclusion my brain had drawn over the fact my stress coffee drinking was running a thin line between being someone with undiagnosed anxiety and being a stress drinker like my dad.
It was a terrifying parallel I refused to look at too closely.
He nodded once, like he was filing it away somewhere private. Then, he dropped into the seat next to me, his shoulder brushing mine. The contact sent a jolt through me that had nothing to do with the caffeine.
I was halfway through pretending to scroll on my phone, doing anything to keep my mind off the fact it felt like we’d been waiting an eternity for our flight to board. I was texting Evan, checking in on his first week at Demolition, desperate for a distraction.
I wasn’t trying to look. I swear I wasn’t.
But the icon burned in my peripheral vision from Cal’s screen next to me. A little black flame inside of a blue circle.
Orbit.
Distance radius. Green online dot. Profile grid.
A gay dating app?
My stomach dropped so fast, I felt like a kid seeing something they knew they weren’t supposed to. It was a physical sensation, a hollow swoop in my gut that left me breathless. It was sheer, unadulterated panic.
Heat crawled up my neck, and I felt it beginning to burn in my face even. My brain short-circuited. Orbit. Cal. Gay. The words tumbled around in my head, crashing into each other.
I stared straight ahead like airport security might arrest me for thinking too loudly.
This doesn’t matter, I told myself fiercely. People can do whatever they want. I didn’t care if Cal was gay. It didn’t make any difference to me. We are partners. Rivals. Coworkers.
I don’t care.
Except my palms were damp and my heartbeat was suddenly the loudest thing in this damn place. Why was my heart racing? Why did the air suddenly feel too thin?
I swallowed, and then risked a glance at Cal.
He was already looking at me.
Not smirking. Not surprised. Just… watching.
His eyes were unreadable, dark pools that seemed to absorb the frantic energy radiating off me. He didn’t look ashamed. He didn’t try to hide the screen. He just held my gaze, challenging me to say something. To ask.
He locked his phone, slid it into his jacket pocket, and didn’t say anything.
He didn’t need to.
I felt it then, a shift. Not in an uncomfortable way. It was simply just there, lingering around us. A door that had been locked was suddenly slightly ajar, and I was terrified of what it meant that I wanted to peek inside.
We flew to Cincinnati in silence, our arms pressing against each other on the shared armrest. Every time the plane banked, I was hyperaware of his heat, of the Orbit icon sitting in his pocket just inches from my leg.
The dark match the next night was a blur of lights and noise. The arena was three times the size of the PC, cavernous and loud. Even though it was a “dark” match, the crowd was huge.
We were tagged up against a veteran team, two guys who had been on the main roster for a decade. They were big, slow, and hit like trucks.
We wrestled like nothing was wrong. We hit our spots. We held our own. Since we were partners, we weren’t fighting each other, so there were no grapples between us, no skin-on-skin contact. But that almost made it worse.
I stood on the apron, gripping the tag rope, watching Cal work.
He moved with that violent grace of his, hitting the ropes, leveling one of the vets with a clothesline that echoed through the arena. He was sweating, his chest heaving, his hair wild.
And every time I looked at him, I didn’t see Deadlock. I saw that little blue icon.
Orbit. Orbit. Orbit.
It flashed in my mind like a glitch in the matrix.
Cal reached out for the tag. I slapped his hand, hard, professional, and vaulted over the top rope. I went into autopilot. Dropkick. Kipup. Arm drag. “Timeless” Silas Reed was in control of his body, but his mind was somewhere else entirely.
I tagged Cal back in. I watched him hit the LockOut spear for the win. The crowd popped, a decent reaction for two guys they didn’t know.
We had our hands raised. We did what we knew we both were capable of. But my breathing and mind never quite went back to normal.
Cal drove us to our hotel that night. Which meant I was in the passenger seat, and god, I was thankful for it, because I’m not sure I could manage another glance at Orbit on his screen and in the confines of a fucking car with no way out.
Being in the passenger seat had its perks sometimes, like right now.
I started rummaging through my bag in the backseat. It held napkins, wet wipes, gum, and ibuprofen, my survival kit.
The backseat was loaded up when we hit a gas station as soon as we left the arena.
I had bought extra water bottles, Cal’s specific protein bars (the chocolate peanut butter ones he pretended not to like but always ate), electrolyte packets, and the most important thing that I brought along from home: a blanket, folded carefully in the backseat.
“You running a minimart back there?” Cal asked, glancing in the rearview mirror.
“I plan for hunger and emotional collapse at all times,” I muttered, tossing a wrapper into a trash bag I’d also brought. “Plus, you get hangry.”
He snorted as I handed him a protein bar. I knew he would ask for one within the next ten minutes anyway.
“You’re turning me into you,” he muttered as he pulled his gas station iced coffee from the cup holder.
“You’re drinking cold coffee now,” I teased, trying to force normalcy back into the air.
He groaned. “Don’t.”
“You used to mock me for it.”
“I still mock you.”
“You’re literally drinking the same thing as me.”
“…It’s growing on me.”
The city lights blurred past us in a late-night haze.
It always felt like living in another world when we left the venues at night.
Everything felt silent, sometimes even my mind did.
The hum of the tires on the pavement was usually soothing, but tonight, the silence felt heavy. Loaded with things we weren’t saying.
I pulled out my phone to text Evan again.
First dark match down. We didn’t die. The crowd was loud.
It was a lifeline to the world I understood, the world before blue icons and confusing heat.
“So, how’s the boyfriend doing?”
My spine locked and my jaw tensed so hard my teeth clicked. The phone nearly slipped from my hand.
“What?”
“Relax,” Cal smirked, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. “Conversation. How’s Evan liking Demolition?”
“Seriously?” I glared at him. Was he doing this on purpose? Was this a test? Was he trying to see if I would mention Orbit?
“Mmh.”
“Fine. He said it’s not as bad as we all think.”
He nodded, his gaze shifting to me.
And then it lingered.
Just a beat too long.
His eyes traced the line of my jaw, dropped to my throat, then back up to my eyes. It wasn’t the way a friend looks at a friend. It wasn’t the way a rival looks at an opponent. It was heavy. Dark. Calculating.
And this time, I knew it wasn’t in my head.
It was just enough to haunt me.
I didn’t move. I forgot to breathe, unable to trust my own damn pulse. My hands gripped the fabric of my jeans until my knuckles turned white.
Orbit. The icon flashed in my mind again. The lingering look. The “boyfriend” comment.
The pieces were all there, staring me in the face. But I shoved them down. I barricaded the door. Because if I acknowledged what I think is happening, if I acknowledged that he was looking, and worse, that I liked it…
What in the actual fuck was happening?