Page 100 of Glorious Ruin
His eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, his face colored with a pink hue that glistened from the trails of his tears. He was watching the brilliant pink-orange sunrise that painted the North Carolina sky, seeming entirely lost in his own skin.
I didn’t say a word. I just walked over to him and sat down, letting the wood creak softly to let him know I was there. We sat in silence as the light changed. Morphing from a warm-toned dawn into a cool blue. Silas didn’t look at me. His gaze remained fixed on the distant pines at the edge of the property. When his voice finally broke the muted scene, it was a quiet, small, cracked, and entirely devastating sound which split the morning air.
“We really need to start thinking about it,” he whispered as his voice trembled.
“Thinking about what, baby?”
“What the hell we’re going to do,” he replied, finally turning his head to look at me. His brown orbs filled with a hopeless sorrow. “If we can’t go back. If Presley wins, and they blacklist us from the UWF permanently, what the hell do we do with our lives?” “If that happens, Si…” I started, my voice surprisingly steady. “I don’t want to go back to the indies. I don’t think I want to go back to the professional wrestling world at all, for that matter.”
Silas blinked, his jaw dropping slightly as he stared at me. “What?”
I met his gaze. “I’m serious. I’ve spent my life bleeding for that canvas. I broke my body, sacrificed my privacy, and gave everything I had to a business that just threw us away like garbage the second we spoke our truth. I’m thirty-two, baby. My knees hurt when it rains, and my back can’t take much more. If the UWF is done with me, I’m done with the ring.” I paused, looking back out at the massive yard, a sudden vision of our future clearing away the remaining bitterness.
“I’d want to just stay home,” I confessed, a soft smile finally breaking across my face. “Right here, on this land. We could really start to talk about it, adoption, I mean. And if we’re done with the road, we could actually do it. We could build our own little family.
“I could stay home, take care of the kids, and manage the house. Feed those freaky dinosaur chickens… I’d want a life so boring, it would be the most perfect thing to exist.”
Silas stared at me, the hollow look in his eyes instantly fracturing and a small but no less brilliant smile broke through his tears. His face lit up with a sudden and desperate kind of hope.
“You’d do that? You’d stay home with me?” he whispered as more tears began to fall.
“In a heartbeat. If that’s what it takes to keep you safe and happy, I’d never look at a pair of wrestling boots again.”
25
DECEMBER — THE REED LAND, NORTH CAROLINA
Now playing: A Nonsense Christmas - Sabrina Carpenter // Forever and Ever, Amen - Randy Travis
Theworldoutsidetheheavy iron gates protecting the Reed family land was still resetting itself, but once we crossed the property line, the air had finally changed.
We’d been home for a few weeks now, and the bone-crushing fear from the suspension had slowly eased up. Corporate’s wheels were still spinning, trying to figure out how to market the “Wrestling Husbands” without losing total control of the narrative. But behind our locked door, the scripts no longer mattered. For the first time in our careers, we had fallen into a rhythm that didn’t involve an arena schedule or a production clock. It was a smoothness that depicted a beautiful, everyday life. And because it was December, that everyday life was wrapped entirely in the Christmas spirit.
This year, since we were home, and because I finally had a house where it was only the man I loved and me, I went unapologetically out of my mind on the decorations. Which, to my soul-deep adoration, Silas happily participated in every single bit of.
It was the first time in my thirty-two years I had decorated a home of my own for the holidays, and I didn’t hold back. We had a towering, nine-foot Fraser fir sitting in the corner of the living room. Its branches were filled with a sea of different ornaments the Reeds had collected over the years. Warm lights traced every baseboard, garlands draped over the mantle, and the front porch was done up like a postcard.
Jayme and Shannon, of course, joined in on the madness. Practically vibrating with excitement when they realized theyfinallyhad someone on the property who loved going all-out just as much as they did. All of us spent three whole days stringing wire and hanging wreaths, laughing as Silas meticulously organized the extension cords by voltage and then length, because his brain couldn't handle the tangled mess.
During the craziness, Silas and I finally managed to take a single, quiet day at home alone.
I sat cross-legged on the living room rug, a roll of thick plaid paper in my lap and a pair of scissors in my hand, trying to read the tiny letters on an instruction card for one of the gifts Silas had bought for Taylor. My eyes watered, my brow furrowing into a deep scowl as the text blurred together into a chaotic mess.
“Cal, just put them on.”
I didn’t look up. “I can read it just fine, Si.”
“You’ve been staring at the same paragraph for four full minutes, and your nose isliterallytouching the cardboard.” Silas’s deeply amused voice rumbled from the other side of the coffee table. He sat on his heels, a roll of tape hooked around his index finger, continuing to give me hell. “Put the glasses on, husband. Stop being stubborn.”
With a long, dramatic groan, I tossed the instruction card onto the floor. I hated to admit it, but since we were sent home, I’ve now noticed how bad my vision has gotten.
Years of head bumps, combined with getting older, had quietly destroyed my eyesight. To my dismay, an impromptu trip to the optometrist last week hadresulted in a pair of sleek, matte-black glasses I supposedly needed to see anything clearly, whether it was up close or far away.
I reached over to the end table, grabbed the case, and slid the glasses onto my face. The entire living room instantly snapped into high-definition focus, and the blurred text on the instruction card became perfectly legible. I cleared my throat, trying to alleviate some of the ridiculousness and self-consciousness that was curling in my chest. But as I looked up, I caught Si’s expression.
He stared at me through the dim light of the room with warmth and captivation in his eyes. He loved the glasses so much that he told me approximately a hundred times how they made me look like the corporate executive I was supposed to be. His words enamoured me, and since it was Christmas and our home smelled of pine and peace, I figured I might as well give him the win for once. I left them on, offering him a small, defensive glare that only made him chuckle.
“You look very handsome,” he murmured, reaching across the table to gently tap the edge of the frames.
