22. PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA #2
My pleasure was building in a way that was becoming entirely unmanageable. Too fast and too sharp. It brought on a blinding white light that exploded behind my eyelids. Si’s muscles clenched around me in a series of violent, rhythmic spasms, and I swear my heart stopped for a second.
“Cal! I-I-I…Fuck.”
His entire body went rigid, and on the next unforgiving and probably bruising thrust, I bottomed out against his prostate. Silas let out a fractured wail as his release shot out in thick ropes, splattering across his chest and abs.
The sight of him breaking detonated my own restraint. I let out a guttural moan against his neck and slammed my hips forward one last time to pour my cum deep inside of him. My orgasm was so explosive, it left my vision spotted with stars and my limbs feeling weightless.
I collapsed forward against his bare chest, my forehead resting in the crook of his neck and my heart hammering a frantic beat against his ribs.
It took a while, but the second my brain semi-cleared from the haze of euphoria, I checked the time on my phone and felt my heart drop into my throat. We had exactly forty minutes before our flight boarded, and here we were, naked, covered in sweat, and twenty minutes from the airport.
“Fuck, Silas! Move your ass!” I thew the duvet off and scrambled out of the bed.
There was no time for a shower, so we used a damp hand towel to quickly wipe up the worst of the sweat and fluids.
It was a blur of motion as we threw our clothes back on and tried to get out the door.
Silas laughed the entire time, his face a bright red as he tried to hop on one foot while pulling his sweats over his sticky thighs.
“I told you we were going to be late!” he scolded lightly, completely out of breath as he ran down the hallway behind me.
“Shut up and run, Reed!” I yelled back through a laugh.
We had to sprint through the terminal, ducking past startled tourists and airport security like madmen. Just as the attendant was preparing to close the door, we burst through the gate. Handing over our boarding passes, we stood there panting like we just finished a fifty-minute Iron Man match.
As we walked down the narrow bridge toward the plane, the sheer absurdity of the few hours finally hit us. We burst into a fit of breathless laughter, leaning against the curved plastic walls of the tunnel just to keep from falling over.
“I can’t believe we just did that.” Silas wiped a tear from his eye as we found our seats in the first-class cabin. “We are thirty and thirty-two years old, and supposed to be professionals. Yet, we almost missed our flight because you wanted to fuck me on an unmade mattress in an empty house.”
“It was an excellent use of our time, and you know it.” I smirked, buckling my seatbelt before reaching across the armrest to take his hand.
When the flight took off, the hum of the jet engines provided a steady, white-noise backdrop to the cabin. Silas leaned his head against the headrest, a soft, content smile on his lips as he looked over at me.
“You know,” he mused, his voice dropping into a playful register. “All this talk about the War Zone match got me thinking. We haven’t actually worked as a formal tag team in almost a decade. Not since the early days.”
I smiled, a wave of nostalgia hitting me. “Nobody could touch us.”
He chuckled, “I loved tagging with you. It was amazing knowing you were always in my corner. But honestly? I much prefer fighting you.”
“Si, I feel like that’s highly frowned upon now that we’re legally married, and the entire world knows we’re sharing a bed.”
Silas shrugged, a boyish pout forming on his lips as he looked at me. “But hitting you with steel chairs was literally the absolute highlight of my career. You sell a chair shot better than anyone in the business. It was so therapeutic.”
“Wow, you dick,” I laughed loudly, leaning across the armrest to shove his shoulder playfully. “I’m glad my concussion history was therapeutic for your emotional growth.”
“You know what I mean.”
We landed in Boston late that evening. The air was crisp, smelling of salt water and car exhaust as the city lights reflected off the dark surface of the harbor.
After checking into the hotel and finding our room, I sent a quick text to Evan and Lena to let them know we had arrived. I hadn’t even finished unpacking my shaving kit before the hotel room door practically came off its hinges with a power kick.
Evan barged in first, wearing a ridiculous Britney Spears T-shirt, followed closely by Lena, who let out a loud squeal the second she saw me. She bypassed Evan, throwing her arms around my waist and burying her face in my chest.
“Dads! You’re finally here!” she cried, holding onto me like I’d been gone for a year instead of a few days.
“Hey, kiddo.” I smiled, wrapping my arms around her, a deep sense of grounding warmth settling into my chest. “I told you we’d be here.”
Evan dropped onto the plush hotel sofa, stretching his long legs out over the coffee table without a single care in the world.
“Thank God the Reed-Kincaids have arrived. If I had to spend another hour listening to the developmental kids in catering talk about their star ratings, I was going to throw myself out of a window.”
After a couple hours of unfiltered family chaos, an absurd amount of room service fries, and some traded barbs, the conversation veered from light and breezy to tense.
Lena shifted in her seat, leaning her head against Silas’s shoulder and dabbing her mouth with a napkin. “How are you feeling about this weekend, Si? It’s the first Front Lines you’ve been involved with since you returned to the company.”
Her words were innocent, nothing more than a question from someone who cared about him. But the second the sentence left her mouth, I picked up on the shift in the air.
The pressure in the room dropped instantly, and Silas’s posture went rigid against the cushions of the couch.
The easy smile vanished from his lips, replaced by a sudden, sharp tightness around his eyes.
His fingers, which had been loosely tracing the edge of his water glass, began to twitch against the condensation.
He wasn’t just thinking about a pay-per-view. He was thinking about his last War Zone match. The match from eight years ago where he leapt off a fifteen-foot ladder, crashed through a table, and watched his entire world shatter with his left shoulder.
Silas swallowed hard and cleared his throat, trying his absolute best to answer with a casual ease I knew was entirely fake. “Uh…I’m fine. You know me. Just ready to get in there and get it over with. It’s just another match.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
Evan noticed it, too. His eyes darted from Silas to me with a silent but knowing look of concern passing between us. He was there the night the ambulance doors shut on the first leg of Silas’s career.
Sensing the shift but probably not wanting to comment on it when they saw the look in Si’s eyes, Lena and Evan left shortly after.
The shadow left behind from that trigger lingered in the room.
Silas remained quiet, moving around the suite with a tense energy that made my chest ache.
I didn’t say a word, just walked over to the sofa, sat down, and opened my arms. Silas only had to look at me for a split second before his defense mechanisms collapsed.
He crossed the room, sank into my space, and curled his massive frame into my lap. After he got comfortable with his nose buried into the side of my neck and his arms wrapped around my waist, I pulled a soft blanket over our shoulders.
“I’ve been thinking about last year,” I murmured as we sat in silence. “When you came back during Front Lines. It got me thinking about those years we spent apart. About what we lost.”
Silas shifted slightly, his breath hot against my skin. “What have you been thinking?”
I let out a long, shaky sigh, ready to spill the raw honesty of a Philly kid that finally cut through his armor.
“The night you showed up, I was in a completely unstable headspace. When you walked out on that stage, and the entire arena went into a frenzy, I thought my heart would literally stop beating. I felt a whirlwind of emotions I couldn’t even categorize.
I was so angry, so fucking hurt. The old heartache rushed back so fast, I felt like I was choking.
“But the most confusing part, the one that made me hate myself? All I wanted to do, even while the cameras were rolling and the crowd was screaming, was run to you and throw my arms around your neck. To collapse into your hold and feel your strength around me. And because I couldn’t, I went into total destruction mode. ”
Silas pulled back an inch and looked up at me in the dim light, his eyes wide as he listened intently.
“After the show ended, I went back to my hotel room and completely trashed the place,” I admitted as a soft, embarrassed laugh escaped me.
“I threw furniture, punched walls, and screamed until I was red in the face. All while crying so hard I couldn’t breathe because I didn’t know what to do with the sheer amount of love and hatred fighting inside my chest. I felt so much guilt later, too.
Especially for pinning you against the locker room wall that night.
It made me feel like Ewan. Like the monster who used to trap me in corners, and the comparison made me sick. ”
I reached down, taking his hand and lacing our fingers together.
“I actually got your hotel room number that night. One of the production guys had the master list, and I stole a look at it. I stood in the hallway outside your door for ten solid minutes at two in the morning. I almost knocked, needing to see if you were really real. But I was so terrified of what would happen if I did. I was worried we’d tear each other apart all over again.
That was the first time I was in Philly in nine months, and that night I didn’t sleep a single second because of you. ”