Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
ASHER
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Behind his chaotic front, Asher is, privately, bound by routine. His brain seems to require it. When thrown off course, he can’t seem to get his bearings, so much so that productivity plummets to a zero.
So, it goes like this: his alarm rings at seven o’clock, after which he grabs an energy drink and a yogurt, downs his supplements, then goes for a run.
Once he clocks in five miles, he heads to the Performance Center’s gym, where he does sets of overhead presses, dead lifts, and crunches until he reaches flow state.
In the afternoon, he heads home, where Ava leads him through an hour of yoga to decompress before he has a shower and finally rewards himself with a smoothie and an eggs Benedict. While Asher doesn’t believe in religious entities, he is a staunch believer in an all-day breakfast menu.
Now that he’s living on GEW’s touring schedule, he’s forced to modify that routine.
The Performance Center’s gym gets traded for hotel gyms and a shiny new CrossFit membership.
He’ll settle for the closest outlet Google Maps pulls up in whichever city they happen to be passing through.
The comfort and familiarity of his and Ava’s shitty Orlando apartment gets traded for hotels and, occasionally, sleeping in the back of the Outlander.
The rest of his day is mapped out by whatever the company has on the docket for him—press conferences, interviews, house shows.
That modified routine, however, gets punted into hell now that he has a high-stakes match to hyperfixate on.
He spends mornings spiraling down a YouTube rabbit hole, pulling up video after video of Holland and Wilder’s past matches.
The algorithm queues tapings of Holland from when he used to wrestle in Japan, and populates his recommendations with articles and reports detailing Wilder’s time in the indie circuits before getting signed by GEW.
He loses himself in research, studying their move sets and trying to figure out what he has to offer to their ever-changing dynamic.
That plan is put to the test during rehearsals with Holland and Wilder.
Most afternoons it’s just the three of them and an empty, echoing arena.
This is but a small part of what Asher loves so much about this business: there’s never a boring day.
Each opponent is different. Everyone brings their own unique wrestling style to the table.
Is it hard? Absolutely. Wilder flings Asher’s leaner frame into the sun, Holland slips and collides with Asher during a moonsault off the top rope, and Asher grossly overestimates both men’s distance from the ring and lands clumsily on their shoulders when he throws caution to the wind and hurls his body out of the ring—a suicide dive.
His days are filled with bump after bump.
It takes time, but eventually, surely, they begin to move like a well-oiled machine.
After what feels like days of pushing his body to the brink of breaking, he limps back to a hotel room, where Bailey, Alexei, and Thea usually convene.
“My legs have deserted me,” Asher complains after a particularly grueling afternoon of rehearsals.
He collapses on the floor and straps a brace around his left knee, exhaling in relief when he feels its metal plates nudge a loose muscle back into place.
Even after multiple surgeries, his knee has never been the same ever since ripping his ACL clean off the bone.
If he lands too heavily, it buckles. If he twists his foot at an awkward angle, he can feel the ligaments slip out of place.
But the public doesn’t get to see that. No one in the real world gets to witness his need for a brace.
To see how badly every step hurts. The moment the chairman detects any weakness from him, any ounce of liability at all, it’s over.
Noises of comfort arise from the room, and Asher turns to look at Bailey, who is sprawled out on the bed with a pint of ice cream pressed against a swollen elbow. “What’d y’all do this time?”
“I’ve been maimed,” Bailey says miserably. Over by the large glass windows, Alexei uses a pair of tweezers to pluck what looks like a small fragment of glass out of Thea’s foot.
“We just invented the coolest sequence,” Thea says. “A double corkscrew into a shooting star press.”
“In a hotel room?”
“What are you, my mother?”
Bailey pulls a face. “Not that anyone will ever get to see it with the pathetic minute-long matches Kennedy allocates to the women’s division.”
Thea wipes her hands on her pajama bottoms before resting them on her hips. “I’m still mad about the way he canceled our match at last month’s pay-per-view, like, five minutes before we were scheduled to go on air.” A full body shudder rolls through her. “Douchebag McGee gives me the ick.”
“I’ve been maimed for naught,” Bailey whines with a melodramatic hand over her forehead.
Tossing a final shard of glass into the trash, Alexei picks up a brochure lying on the bedside table. “Dinner for my angry munchkins?”
“The receptionist told me there’s a decent Korean barbecue place down the street,” Asher says. “It’s probably not too crowded now.”
Thea scrunches up her nose. “He was nice to you? He scuttled away from me. Scuttled.”
“It’s your ‘Don’t breathe in my vicinity or I’ll stab you’ vibe.”
Thea winds up a middle finger in Alexei’s direction.
“Oh, sick!” Bailey jerks up into a sitting position, her hair brushing across her shoulders. She waves her phone in their faces. “I got us tickets to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We should be able to squeeze in a visit before tomorrow’s show.”
“And we’re going to dramatically sprint up the Rocky steps?”
“Obviously.”
Things are easy with them, honest and stripped bare in a way that the outside world doesn’t get to see. In the eyes of the public, they’re shiny stars, but in here, they’re just them. Wonderfully normal, terribly codependent people. One constant in a whirlwind industry.
“I feel like an anxious chihuahua whenever I’m separated from you guys for too long,” Thea says from her usual spot: lying on a couch with her feet swung up over its back rest.
But Asher is only human. Sometimes he has doubts.
Sometimes, when he finds him and his eminent backaches Tetrised into the back of the Outlander for the fifth night in a row listening to Alexei and Thea bicker their way through a Dairy Queen drive through, ice pack pressed against an inflamed knee, he wonders why he does this.
Why he puts up with a career that leaves his body battered and bruised. He’s twenty-three with perhaps fifteen more years left in the tank before his accumulation of injuries force him into an early retirement. Twenty if he’s lucky.
Why choose a career that leaves him with an empty childhood bedroom and no proper home? He wonders what he’s traded a regular, safe nine-to-five job for, what he misses his mom and dad for.
On a Tuesday night, he sits behind the steering wheel, drumming his fingers on the console while Alexei snores gently in the passenger seat. He cranes his neck around to check on Thea, satisfied when he spots her curled up in the back, fast asleep with a duffel bag tucked beneath her head.
When the traffic refuses to budge, he digs out his phone, pulls up the Find My app, and watches two circular display pictures bumble around each other on the tiny screen: his parents at home in Los Angeles.
In the silence that stretches far and wide, only punctured by impatient honks, he thinks about all the time he doesn’t get to spend with them.
The afternoons he could have spent slurping down his mother’s Hokkien noodles, evenings he could have spent sprawled out beside her in front of the television while his dad critiques Survivor strategies.
They are Singaporeans. Complaining about virtually anything and everything is in their blood.
Yet never once have his parents given Asher any grief about all they’ve given up so he can chase this dream.
How they work themselves down to the bone so Asher can soar.
All they ask in return is for Asher to visit them a little more often.
Which, as much as Asher would love to, isn’t as easy as it seems. Time he spends away from GEW or the Performance Center is time that could be spent perfecting his craft.
On the cusp of the dream of a lifetime, the pressure is at an all-time high.
It’s even harder as a person of color. He’s expected to be perfect, to never step out of the box that others have drawn for him.
If he isn’t, he risks getting his torch snuffed.
It’s do or die. This business is a fickle one with zero room for error, for any indication that he is, at his core, a fallible human being.
Restless, he picks at a scab on his palm and winces when the skin splits open again.
Nameless and faceless in a sea of other cars, he stews in a catastrophic mix of needs and wants, of yearns and fears.
He thinks of the silhouette of home, the hole in his heart in the shape of everything he’s given up. He thinks and he aches.
“You okay, dragon boy?” Alexei asks. He yawns and stretches, then blinks sleepily at Asher.
Asher sniffs and clears his throat. “Yeah. Go back to sleep.” He runs a knuckle across his lower lash line, hating how it comes away wet. “I’ve got this.”
Traffic starts to move half an hour later, and almost unconsciously, as the trio fly along the freeway and golden street lamps rush by, Asher thinks of being seventeen again.
He thinks of the vicarious joy he felt when a blue-eyed boy not too much older than him raised a glittering belt, victorious.
He remembers feeling invincible and, later, chasing that feeling.