Chapter 5 #2
Cal, usually allergic to authority, took Maverick’s hand with a firm grip. “Appreciate that, sir. Means a lot coming from you.”
“Sir?” Maverick laughed. “Don’t make me feel old. Call me Mav.”
“He’s right,” Scott chimed in, nodding appreciatively at Cal. “You’ve got a heavy hand. Reminds me of the old days before everything got so polished. Good to have you in the mix. Keep my nephew out of trouble, will ya?”
“I’ll try,” Cal smirked, “but he’s the one jumping off top ropes.”
Scott laughed, clapping Cal on the shoulder. “Welcome to the madness, son.”
I glanced at Evan. He was standing slightly off to the side, his arms crossed, a pout forming on his lips that made him look about five years old.
He was used to being the golden boy, the one the veterans fawned over.
Seeing the attention shift to the scary, tattooed guy from Philly clearly wasn’t sitting well with him.
“I had a good match too, you know,” Evan mumbled, kicking at the floor. “I eliminated six guys.”
Maverick winked at him. “We saw, Showstopper. You did good.”
But then he turned right back to Cal. “Seriously, that lariat you throw? Brutal. We need more of that.”
Cal caught Evan’s eye and shot him the smuggest, most shit-eating grin I had ever seen. He was feeding on Evan’s jealousy like a vampire.
Evan huffed, rolling his eyes so hard I thought they’d get stuck. “Whatever. He cheats.”
“It’s not cheating if I’m just stronger than you, Ev,” Cal teased, his voice dripping with satisfaction.
I watched them, my father and uncle treating Cal like the next big thing, Cal soaking it up just to annoy Evan, and Evan acting like a bratty little brother. It was a normal, almost familial scene.
And I felt completely outside of it.
“Well,” Maverick said, checking his watch. “We’ll let you boys get back to it. Sorry you can’t make lunch, Silas. But work comes first. I get it.”
“Yeah,” I said, gripping my bag strap tighter. “Next time.”
“Safe travels,” Scott said.
They walked away, legends in the hallway, leaving us in the wake of their charisma.
“Dude,” Evan whined the second they were out of earshot. “Did you see that? ‘I like your style, kid.’ He never told me he liked my style!”
“Maybe get a better style,” Cal deadpanned, grabbing his gear bag.
“I hate you,” Evan muttered.
“I know,” Cal replied, winking at him.
I felt Cal’s eyes shift to me then. The humor faded from his face instantly.
He hadn’t missed a single beat of the interaction between me and my dad.
He saw the stiffness. He heard the lie about the “training session.” He saw the way I looked at them, not with the love of a son, but with the caution of a survivor.
Cal drove. The Miami highway was a ribbon of light stretching out into the dark, the humidity pressing against the windows of the rental car.
Rain had started to fall, blurring the city lights into streaks of neon.
We were both aching, our bodies cooling down from the physical trauma of the match, but our minds were still racing.
For the first twenty minutes, we just listened to the hum of the tires and the rhythmic thwack-thwack of the windshield wipers.
“Your uncle seems… nice,” Cal said finally, breaking the silence. It wasn’t a question. It was an observation.
I let out a long breath, staring at the dashboard. “Scott is… he tries. He’s the one who apologized. He’s the one who actually put in the work to fix things between us. He got sober for his girls, and he realized he needed to make amends to me, too.”
“And your dad?”
“Maverick tries,” I admitted, the words tasting bitter. “But he doesn’t apologize. He just moves on. He thinks if he acts like the cool, supportive dad now, it erases the past. To him, we’re just… colleagues. Distant siblings who happen to share a last name.”
Cal tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “You don’t look like him. I mean, you have the Reed structure, the light hair, but the jawline… it’s different. Your skin tone.”
I cracked a small, tired smile. “According to Mav, that would be the Puerto Rican half.”
Cal glanced at me, genuine surprise flashing in his eyes. “Get the fuck out. You?”
“My mom,” I explained. “She was Puerto Rican. Met my dad at a show in Raleigh back in the 90s. Whirlwind romance, or whatever you call a three-month bender on the road.”
“No shit,” Cal mused, a smirk tugging at his lips. “Silas Reed. The spicy side of the dynasty. I wouldn’t have guessed. You hide it well under all that brooding angst.”
I laughed, the sound breaking some of the tension.
“I don’t know her. Never met her. I don’t know if she was a wrestler, a fan, or just someone passing through.
She left me at the hospital in Raleigh the day I was born.
Handed me to Maverick and vanished. I don’t even know her name.
Just that she was from San Juan originally and she didn’t want a kid. ”
Cal’s smirk faded. “So Maverick raised you?”
“No,” I said softly. “Maverick was touring. The Reed Brothers were at their peak. He couldn’t handle a baby. So he dropped me off in the middle of fucking nowhere, North Carolina. My grandfather raised me.”
“The grandfather,” Cal noted. “You’ve mentioned the house.”
“It’s not just a house. It’s… isolated. It’s this old farmhouse down by the Black River.
Dirt roads. No neighbors for miles. It’s just wetlands and oak trees.
My grandma died a few years before I was born, so it was just me and this old, hardnosed Southern man who was stuck in his ways.
The closest city is like forty-five minutes away, so I didn’t exactly have friends coming over.
I spent my childhood playing in the woods by myself, waiting for the phone to ring. ”
I looked out the window, watching the palm trees blur by. “My dad and uncle built houses on the land later. But they were never there. And when they were…” I trailed off.
“When they were?” Cal prompted gently.
“They pulled me out of school when I was sixteen,” I confessed. The secret I kept guarded so closely felt heavy on my tongue. “Said it was for ‘experience.’ Homeschooled on the road. But it wasn’t about experience. It was about hiding them.”
“Hiding the using?” Cal asked.
“Yeah. They were spiraling. Pills. Booze. Anything to numb the pain of the bumps. They needed someone to drive the rental cars when they were too wasted. Someone to make sure they woke up for call times. Someone to lie to the promoters and tell them the Reeds were just ‘tired’ and not passed out.” I swallowed the lump in my throat.
“I wasn’t a son. I was a handler. I spent my teenage years dragging my heroes out of bar fights and checking their pulses in hotel rooms.”
The car went silent again, but it wasn’t empty silence. It was the heavy, suffocating weight of shared trauma.
“Is that where the panic attacks come from?” Cal asked. His voice was soft, devoid of judgment.
I closed my eyes. “I guess. Being on the road… it brings it back. The smell of the hotels. The waiting.” I took a shaky breath.
“They got sober, Eventually. But not for me. They got sober when they met their new wives. When they had their new kids. They built these perfect little families, and I’m just…
the remnant. The leftovers from the bad years. ”
“The first time I had a panic attack,” I whispered, staring at my hands, “was in a Red Roof Inn in Memphis. I was seventeen. I went to wake Scott up for a show. He wouldn’t wake up.
He’d overdosed. I had to call 911, had to do CPR until the paramedics came…
I thought he was dead. I thought I was going to be the one to tell my grandfather I let him die. ”
I felt a hand cover mine on the center console. Warm. Rough. Grounding.
“You didn’t let anyone die, Si,” Cal said fiercely.
“I know,” I said. “But the feeling… it never went away. The fear that if I lose control for one second, everything burns down. That’s why I have to be perfect. Because if I slip… I become them. And that’s my worst nightmare. Being the Reed who ruined the legacy.”
I stared at his hand covering mine. I should pull away. I should tell him I’m fine. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
Cal squeezed my hand. He didn’t let go.
“I ran away,” he said suddenly.
I looked at him. “What?”
“When I was fourteen. My mom left when I was ten, that’s when the old man started drinking. By fourteen, he was using me as a punching bag every night. So I packed a bag and I left. I walked in the snow to my best friend April’s house.”
He kept his eyes on the road, his grip on my hand tightening.
“Her family… they were upper middle class. Big house, nice cars. They didn’t have to take me in, but they did.
They had three daughters, April, Heather, and Sarah.
I went from being an only child in a war zone to having three sisters who wanted me to braid their hair and watch cartoons. ”
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.