Hold Me Like a Grudge

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

ASHER

ORLANDO, FLORIDA

“Iwould rather eat my toe, actually.”

That is the first thing Asher says when his trainer, Morgana Bate, asks if he would like to be put in a televised storyline with Caleb Knight.

He pushes through a set of heavy curtains, stumbling at the mention of the familiar name.

The scoff he lets out gets lost in the shriek of the crowd behind him.

There’s the usual post-match ringing in his ears, one that fades into a dull buzz as his still aching legs try to catch up with Bate, who weaves through the backstage bustle of the Performance Center, sidestepping other wrestlers lost in various pre-match rituals.

Some are deep in prayer, hands a flurry of movement as they mumble to themselves; some lose themselves in music, headphones clamped over their ears as they nervously bounce from foot to foot; some pace back and forth, running through their mental scripts for the umpteenth time.

Then there are others, like Big Rob, whose strong fingers are curled in a death grip around a tiny silver clover hanging from his neck, always paralyzed by pre-show jitters despite killing it week after week.

From where they await their cue at gorilla position—right behind the stage curtains—Ava Kiss sends Asher a two-finger salute and an exaggerated grimace.

“Well, saddle up, kid,” Bate calls over her shoulder. Tattoos snake down her neck and wrap around her wrist. Her voice is a little scratchy, like a permanent sore throat, but a thick Southern drawl punches through as she continues. “The big guy up there is drafting you to the main roster.”

Every thought flying through Asher’s noisy brain screeches to a halt. “God?”

“What?” Frowning, Bate spins around and presses a bottle of ice water into the palm of Asher’s hand.

“The big guy. Kennedy Prichard. The man who signs our paychecks?” Brows furrowed, Bate runs a thumb—calloused from both age and decades of brutal matches but with the steady precision befitting that of a veteran like herself—across Asher’s forehead. “Y’good, Ross?”

The touch leaves a dull pain in its wake—the familiar tenderness of a soon-to-be bruise. Something warm trickles down Asher’s temple and seeps past his pursed lip. It tastes faintly like copper.

The memory of the match is hazy and Asher doesn’t fully recall every detail.

Time gets warped when he’s performing for an audience, the blink of an eye from point A to point B.

Gradually, though, the pieces come back to him, the way they always do: Asher springing off the top rope, one arm wrapped around his opponent’s neck.

A tornado DDT, followed by a sudden plummet, his opponent’s hand slipping—a bungled attempt at capitalizing on the momentum to maneuver Asher into landing safely on his back.

Asher careening face-first into the canvas.

Years of training, thankfully, had his hands shooting out on instinct, right in the nick of time.

Broken nose: avoided. He’ll just pop by Medical for a stitch or two later.

Some might find it masochistic, but it still feels absolutely insane to Asher that he gets to do this for a living.

Every day, he walks into the Performance Center and learns to put on a show; flings his body into the air, twisting this way and that; runs endless drills of landing flat on his back with his chin tucked in, hitting the mat arms-first to absorb the impact of every blow until it becomes etched into muscle memory.

At his very core, when Asher closes his eyes, he’s still that seven-year-old boy watching Bate carefully wrap a length of barbed wire around her fist. He remembers the phantom pain shooting through his own knuckles as Bate raked the unforgiving steel across her opponent’s face, leaving a bloodied mess in its wake.

He’s still nine and bouncing off the walls, hollering at the television as Bate wins the Divas Championship and gets officially crowned a Grand Slam champion.

The women’s division was at its relative infancy then, though Asher can’t say much has changed since.

Still, back in those days, women’s wrestling wasn’t seen as anything more than an opportunity for the audience to, at minimum, go for a stretch or, at most, leer at.

Bate, though, had blasted the door off its hinges, barreling in like a comet through the night sky.

She didn’t come to be ogled; she wanted brutality, intensity dialed up to an eleven.

She grabbed a division by the throat and demanded for more.

And now, fourteen years later, Bate is telling him that he’s about to get drafted up to the big leagues of Global Elite Wrestling? That he’s going from performing for a small local Orlando crowd to being plastered across various sports entertainment networks worldwide?

He must be dreaming.

“Sorry, uh . . .” Asher shakes himself back down to earth. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope. And that wasn’t a rhetorical question either. Prichard is putting you in a feud with Caleb Knight.”

Record scratch. Freeze-frame.

Oh.

That is absolutely not a dream.

“The Ice Prince?” Asher says. “Why him?” He darts around a rack of in-ring gear as he chases after his trainer. He’s not complaining. He’s simply . . . asking in an aggrieved tone.

“Whining is for babies,” Bate shoots back.

She pauses briefly to correct a new trainee on how to safely throw a punch—thumb outside the fist and between the index and middle finger—even though most of what they do in the ring is acting.

“Do you have any idea how many people here would kill for this opportunity?”

Jesus. Of course a dream come true would come with a catch. A nasty, lip-curling, blue-eyed, spawn of Satan catch.

But Asher’s worked years to get here. Each day, he has put his body on the line, thrown caution to the wind and leaped off the top rope for the sliver of a shot at getting his name out there.

He’s grit his teeth through torn muscles, dislocations, and broken bones for the sake of five-second clips floating through the internet that prove to the big leagues that maybe, just maybe, they should take a chance on him.

Even though Asher would rather bash his skull against a brick wall than be in the general vicinity as Caleb Knight, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. How could he say no?

Asher rolls his eyes. “Ugh. I hate when you’re right. So, how are we going to ruin Caleb’s life?”

“You,” Bate corrects, “are going to cut the best promo of your life, live on next week’s episode of Friday Night Fight in Connecticut.

As you know, this tends to be scripted by Creative, but Prichard wants to try something new—something to keep Knight on his toes before his gimmick starts to get even staler.

That’s where you come in. You’re fresh blood. ”

“What about you?”

For the briefest moment, Bate’s shoulders curl inward. “I . . . I can’t go with you,” she says quietly. “There’s no space for me there.”

In the clench of Bate’s fist and nothingness that stretches far and wide, Asher understands. It’s the same now as it was then: her presence would make waves, and Management hates to rock the boat.

As quickly as she hunches over, Bate straightens her back, raises a chin, and turns to look Asher in the eye.

“This is where I leave you. You’re ready.

” She pauses when Calyx limps past, and Asher follows her gaze down to the ice pack still taped to Calyx’s shoulder after a botched attempt at diving through the ropes of the squared circle earlier that day.

The curly haired girl shoots Bate a sheepish smile, who returns her a look that is eerily similar to the time Asher’s mom chased him around the dining table with a slipper in hand after she caught him trying to land a diving elbow onto the neighbor’s son.

Bate’s exhale is audible. “Besides, this is my circus, and these, unfortunately, are my monkeys.”

Asher presses his lips together and tries to blink away the warmth in his eyes. “Right.”

There is a beat of silence before Bate clears her throat and cups the back of Asher’s head. “I’m gonna miss ya, kid,” she admits gruffly, ruffling Asher’s hair.

So, for the last time, Asher takes it all in.

The familiarity of the Performance Center’s ring, the way its top turnbuckles have come slightly loose from wear and tear, leaving a flaky gray residue on his palms. The way the steel stairs groan and creak when stepped on at an angle.

The feeling of flying as he and Ava practice and perfect the execution of shooting star presses and hurricanranas, contorting their bodies, throwing middle fingers up in the face of gravity.

The dim hallways he’s sprinted through, witness to his friends and their backstage antics, the taste of laughter still on his tongue.

He looks up at Bate, trying to commit the laugh lines around her eyes to memory. He wonders what it’s like to smile enough to have permanent marks on your face from it.

Asher had to sacrifice a great deal to be here today: his home, his family, his body. Fragments of himself he’s given up for his shot at a legacy. Each time he begins to think there’s nothing more that can possibly get ripped away, the industry proves him wrong. This time, it’s Bate.

Bate is many things: a myth, a legend, a superstar during the nineties who, after retirement, took Asher under her wing and taught him everything he knows. The internet calls her “mommy,” which she balks at, but she’s more of a cool wine aunt. Someone who took a job and turned it into a dream.

“Thank you,” Asher tells her. There is a tremble in his hands, a lump in his throat he tries and fails to swallow past. A long road stretches ahead, the vulnerability of having either nothing or everything at his feet.

It’s a lot of pressure, but his dreams won’t stand a chance of coming true if he doesn’t take that leap. “For everything.”