Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
CALEB
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
It was only a matter of time before Caleb fucked up.
It’s been three weeks since the screwjob, two since Asher caused a scene on Friday Night Fight and set up their rematch at July’s Guts and Glory pay-per-view.
That’s three weeks of reporters swarming around hotels from Tennessee to Kentucky, hounding Caleb and Bailey across parking lots, knocking on windows, and shoving microphones and cameras into his face.
“Was it intentional?”
Caleb stumbles as yet another flock of reporters cut into his path. He holds his hands up to shield both his and Bailey’s faces from the sudden onslaught of lights. Bailey fumbles with her car keys, cursing beneath her breath.
“Was there any bribery involved?”
“No comment,” Caleb mutters.
A boom microphone clips his temple, and Caleb just barely manages to pry Bailey's claws off the surly reporter connected to the other end.
When not seething with fury, Bailey sets a limit on his screentime.
Only thirty minutes per day before the doomscrolling sinks its rotting roots into his brain.
Still, he catches her skimming through the news at a gas station outside Evansville, face queasy as she sucks down an iced coffee.
It’s not just the articles that scrutinize his actions down to the nitty gritty.
It’s the podcasters, the so-called expert analysts, who rip his character apart.
The threads and video compilations of every despicable thing he’s done.
As Prichard had predicted, his stock skyrockets like never before.
The landscape shifts, and right smack in the middle of it: Caleb, who can do nothing but bite his tongue and take it.
Because none of it is supposed to be real.
That’s just the character he plays. Except it doesn’t feel that way anymore.
Somewhere along the line, Caleb had started treading a dangerous line between professional and personal.
This, he thinks, is how it feels to finally tip over and plunge headfirst into the unforgiving ice.
Everywhere he goes, he feels like everyone is talking about him when his back is turned. It isn’t hard to guess what they’re saying.
“Did you hear he screwed over the Dragon?”
“How selfish and entitled.”
The locker room continues to be wary around him, and for good reason. He doesn’t blame them. He wouldn’t trust himself either, not with his track record. His one saving grace is Bailey, with her unwavering kindness and faith.
“It’s Kennedy, isn’t it?” she asks during their drive across state lines.
Through the window, a blue sign whizzes by.
The white paint screams, WELCOME TO KENTUCKY.
Bailey’s legs are kicked up on the dashboard, apple-flavored Slurpee in hand, shoes tossed somewhere in the haphazard mountain of bags in the back seat.
She leans over to pull a quesadilla out of a takeout bag, and peels off the foil with her manicured nails. “Or someone else from the board?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Caleb lies. He raises a brow as Bailey slathers on an entire packet of hot sauce. “I can’t decide if I’m impressed or concerned.”
“That’s my goal, baby. Now stop avoiding the question.”
“What if it really was all me?”
“Then you’d be a snobby bastard about it instead of holing up in your room all day like some sickly Victorian child.”
Caleb curls his fingers around the steering wheel. He stares at the road ahead. “He would’ve killed my career.”
“Kennedy?”
Caleb bites his tongue.
“I knew it,” Bailey hisses through a length of gooey cheese. “Why didn’t you tell us? You don’t have to be more of a social pariah than you already are.”
Outside, a very enticing tree rushes past. Caleb bravely resists an intrusive thought to drive into it. Instead, he slams on the brakes, and Bailey’s quesadilla soars. He turns in his seat to regard Bailey, who glares back at him.
“It was my decision. Sure, Prichard handed me the gun, but I pulled the trigger. I didn’t have to do it, but I screwed Ross over anyway.
That means everything the press is writing about me, everything the locker room is saying behind my back—it’s all true.
Because I made that final call. Not the stupid Ice Prince bullshit. Me.”
“What choice did you have?” Bailey counters. “Prichard knows you’re in a vulnerable position and is taking advantage of you. It’s not fair.”
“The world isn’t fair,” Caleb says bitterly. “This industry isn’t fair. You of all people know that better than anyone.”
“Then tell him! Tell Asher.”
“What does it matter?”
Bailey blinks at him like she’s never encountered anyone this obtuse. “Ugh, you men are useless! Zero communication skills.”
Caleb swallows down a sour retort. “What’s done is done. I’ve already disappointed him.”
“When you truly care about someone, you don’t give up on them. The fight’s never finished. You can’t punish yourself in any way that unmakes the past. It’s what comes next that matters. Sometimes the best you can do is try, and that’s enough.”
And Caleb? Caleb can’t put up a damn fight against that.
Two days later, another taping of Friday Night Fight rolls around. Caleb is closing out the show in a main event tag-team match: Asher and Alexei versus him and Apollo Wilder. A match that Maverick Wolff plugs as the mash-up of two rivalries.
It’s a straightforward, standard match with the usual one-fall rules: only one competitor per team is allowed in the ring at any time, and this status as the legal wrestler can only be transferred via tagging a partner in and out.
Two things happen in the lead up to Caleb’s grand fuck-up.
One: an ugly neon orange fan sign in the front row that reads, DON’T FEEL BAD KNIGHT, MY PARENTS REGRET MY BIRTH TOO.
Caleb is mid-powerbomb, about to slam Alexei down onto the mat when the fluorescent lettering catches his eye.
He doesn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or walk out altogether.
In the end, he rolls out of the ring and rips the sign in half.
Two: Asher. When Caleb finally, for the first time since Fyter Fiesta, comes toe-to-toe with Asher in the middle of the ring, he sees with an overwhelming clarity just what he has traded his career for.
Everything feels different. Wrong. Gone is the firecracker shooting through the night sky, the challenging look Asher sends him when he’s flying across the ring.
Instead, Asher moves with a clinical indifference.
He takes punches and deals his own but refuses to meet Caleb’s eye.
It no longer feels fun; the magnetic push and pull between them is now broken.
It’s icky. Unsettling. Caleb wants to shake Asher until that spark reignites, wants to stand under boiling water and scrub himself clean of every awful thing he’s done.
Overall, it’s distracting. He’s distracted.
There is no other excuse for what happens next.
It’s a relatively simple move, one that Caleb can pull off in his sleep: an overhead belly-to-belly suplex. He wraps his arms around Asher’s freshly healed torso and tosses Asher backward over his head.
Except Caleb loses his grip mid-throw. Suspended in the air, still in Caleb’s arms, Asher slips.
As Caleb’s hand shoots out, time slows. The watch around the referee’s wrist tick tick ticks. Caleb’s breath catches in his throat. It doesn’t matter though. It’s too late.
He knows before it even ends—the harm he’s caused. Asher’s body hurtling across the ring. Asher’s skull cracking the against the mat. The collective gasp from the crowd as Asher just lies there, without so much as the twitch of a single finger.
Icy, phantom fingers rake down Caleb’s spine.
“Asher?” Caleb asks. It comes out small, afraid. Lost in the crunch of bones echoing in his head.
“Asher?” Caleb repeats, raising his voice.
He blinks, and he’s sixteen again. On a front porch in Boston, redwood under his feet.
Knuckles rapping on his parents’ door. Nothing but a silence that stretches on for miles.
Fuck kayfabe. Fuck Prichard’s fine. He scrambles across the ring, on his hands and knees.
The scrape of his nails against roughened canvas shoots straights to his ears.
He grabs Asher’s outstretched arm and squeezes his wrist.
Are you okay?
No response.
Caleb crawls forward, ear over Asher’s chest. He feels the slight rise and fall of his breathing, shallow and uneven, but there nonetheless. Still conscious. A small mercy.
“Asher, stay awake.” He squeezes Asher’s wrist again. “Stay awake for me.”
“Knight.”
A faraway, echoey part of Caleb’s brain registers Alexei stepping cautiously into the ring. Alexei slowly extends a shaky hand, like he’s approaching a wild dog. That is all it takes for some feral creature to rear its ugly head.
“Don’t touch him,” Caleb snarls. He hovers protectively over Asher’s limp body, hands wandering uselessly above, too terrified to touch. “Do. Not. Touch. Him.”
What now?
He glances up at the referee. Why isn’t he stopping the match?
“I can’t,” the referee hisses. He taps his earpiece and shakes his head.
But he’s hurt, Caleb mouths.
The referee shrugs helplessly.
Recalculating, Caleb makes a split-second decision.
Okay. Emergency protocol.
Fuck. Caleb mentally slaps himself. Prichard’s voice in his head: Don’t be a little bitch.
Pull it together for two minutes. Caleb exhales and lets his mask slide back on, cool indifference fading to a nasty smirk.
It doesn’t remotely reach his eyes but it will do.
He pulls Asher over and, to the crowd’s displeasure, locks in his submission move again: Asher’s throat wedged between his shin and palm.
Caleb does it as gently as he can, cradling Asher’s head the whole time, careful not to jostle him too much.
Asher’s eyes flutter shut and the referee has no choice but to call the match.
Medics are ringside seconds after the bell rings, a stretcher and neck brace in tow.
They secure Asher to a spinal board and snap the brace on.
The sight of Asher’s unmoving body being wheeled away from Caleb sucks all the air from his lungs.
His vision blurs. He wants to hold tight to Asher and never let him go, wants to yell at Asher, wants to fight him until he opens his eyes.
Instead, he finds himself alone, stranded in the ring with a crowd that boos him so fiercely that his teeth rattle.
It’s too much. He’s too young, too scared, too guilty, too . . .
Fuck.
The second Caleb finally lets himself really acknowledge it is the second he can’t pretend any longer.
There is no turning back. He can’t shove his feelings into a tidy little box and chuck it in the cobwebbed attic of his heart that never lets him do anything stupid.
It’s fucked up that this is happening now, of all times, but that is precisely who is he, isn’t it?
A monster picking wings off butterflies.
He just thought it’d subside. Or that he’d have more time to figure out when this push and pull of a rivalry evolved into a foolish crush and how to hit undo.
Because it is never going to happen, now more than ever.
But there it remains, as relentless and incinerating as the pyrotechnics going off around him and nothing left in Caleb’s mushy, terrified brain to contain it.
He holds it together, clings to his rapidly fragmenting pieces until he steps foot backstage, crossing the threshold, the crowd fading into oblivion. Then he crumbles to the ground.