Page 92 of Glorious Ruin
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 firstFront Linesyou’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 duringFront 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 ifyou 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.”
Silas’s lower lip trembled, his eyes shimmering with tears.
Confessions continued to tear out of my chest, each one compounding onto the last until they were ready to choke me. “During those seven years apart, there were so many moments where I considered reaching out. I almost asked Evan if you got a new number a hundred times. The night your grandfather died, when we were doing a loop through the Carolinas and Ev was supposed to come visit you. He was hammered. I was the one who listened to the voicemail you left him. The second I heard it, I got in a rental car and just started driving. Evan told me how to get to the land. I drove for hours. Si, I was more than halfway there, and I ended up turning around. I slammed on the brakes and went back because I wasn’t sure I could face you, and I didn’t think you wanted to see me.”
Silas let out a choked sob, burying his face in my neck. He held onto me so tight I could feel each individual beat of his heart.
“I wanted to see you. God, Cal. I wanted to see you every single day,” he cried softly into my skin.
“I need to tell you something, too,” he whispered as he pulled back from me and wiped at his eyes. His voice was shaky, like he was holding onto a heavy shame. “During our years apart, there was a time when the memory of you became too much for me to carry. The silence in those woods was suffocating, and I was so desperate to stop the aching in my chest. I wanted to prove to myself that I could be normal, so I tried to completely erase the thought of you. I had myself convinced I could do what she wanted, be what she wanted, and I could build the life my dad wanted for me.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, a tear tracking through the stubble on his jaw.
“But every time I looked at Amanda, or she touched me, all I could hear in my head were the final words you said to me on the night I left. Your voice screamingthat I could hide in the woods, marry a woman and have a million kids, but I would never be able to forget you. And you were right, I couldn’t. It was all a lie.” He inhaled a shaky breath as his hands started to tremble. “The night I finally broke it off with her, I did something I’ve never told anyone. I was so disgusted with myself and broken over knowing I’d wastedyearstrying to run from the truth, that I drove to a liquor store. I grabbed a bottle of bourbon and drank nearly the whole thing. For the first time in my entire life, I got completely and utterly hammered.”
I went completely rigid against the sofa cushions as a sudden, sharp wave of uneasiness flooded my gut, and my protective instincts flared up.
Both Silas and I were strictly and fiercely straight-edge. We built our entire lives around being sober due to the trauma from our biological fathers who were unhinged alcoholics. Hearing that Silas, the same man who wouldn’t even take a Tylenol unless he absolutely had to, had gotten drunk made my stomach turn.
