Promises

Saturday. Baltimore, Maryland.

The Buick LaSabre rolled into the driveway and sat there. Engine running. Then it didn't. Then nothing, for a long moment, the kind of moment that exists specifically to be dreaded.

The silver door opened.

Coltrane stepped out of the car, moving like a man who'd been asked to carry more than his share. He shut the door behind him and leaned against it, head dropping just slightly, the physical manifestation of a mental inventory he hadn't asked to take but was taking anyway. On the eastern edge of the sky, dawn was starting.

"Fuck," he said, to no one. To everyone. To the specific and unforgiving nature of the last twenty-four hours.

Twenty-four hours that included, and this is not an abbreviated list, driving to Long Island, preparing Jamie for his first match in PRIME, being forced into the ring himself when Jamie twisted his ankle in warm-ups, driving back to Baltimore, and then sitting in a car for hours while Jamie asked questions. So many questions. How did it feel? What went through your mind? Did you feel like yourself out there? Until finally, Coltrane had slowed the car to what could generously be called a roll and told him, very calmly, to get out.

He pushed himself off the car. Stopped. Turned back. Opened the door and reached across to the passenger floor where a folder had been sitting for six hours doing what folders do when they contain things you're not ready to deal with, which is, it turns out, nothing. They just sit there. Waiting.

He looked at it. Shook his head. Said nothing.

The house wasn't much. It was, however, his. He made his way inside of it, climbing the stairs one at a time and with full awareness of each one

The folder went on the foldable table in the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator. Found water. Drank it like a man who'd forgotten water existed.

He lowered the bottle.

"Shit."

He hadn't noticed, until this exact moment, how completely drained his body felt.

"I'd say you look like shit."

He turned around faster than a man that tired had any right to. His sister was sitting there. Had been sitting there. In his house. At an hour that didn't have a polite name.

He stared at her.

"Fucking hell."

Friday. Long Island, New York.

"Fucking hell."

Coltrane walked. He was moving down hallways, past open doors, past the catering table nobody touched, past wardrobe, past the makeup artists who were already breaking down their kits. Moving helped him think. Moving helped him not think, which tonight was the preferable option.

"I said, fucking hell."

He stopped.

The voice had a shape to it. Authority with a little gravel mixed in, the kind that didn't need to raise itself to fill a room. Coltrane turned around slowly and found exactly what he'd expected.

"Killean."

His own voice, even though it was a low gravelly sound, still carried. He crossed the hallway, closed the distance, and they shook hands like two men who'd earned the right to.

"When's the last time I saw you? Toledo?"

"If you say so." Coltrane rolled his shoulders back, working out something that had settled in after the match. "After a while, all the towns stop having names."

"They absolutely do." Killean nodded. "I'll be honest with you, I wasn't expecting to see you in that ring tonight. I thought one of your guys was taking the spot."

"That was the plan. Kid twisted his ankle in warm-ups."

"Fate."

"Something like that."

Killean looked at him for a moment, the way people in this business do when they're assessing, calculating, running numbers they won't say out loud.

"You looked good out there."

"It was Miguel."

"I know who it was. I'm not talking about Miguel." Killean paused. "I'm talking about you. The way you moved. The way you read the room, read the crowd. I've been in this business long enough to know when someone belongs in a ring and when someone belongs in a PRIME ring. Those are two different things, and tonight you were the latter."

"Killean—"

"I know." The hand came up. "You've got the gym in Baltimore. You coach. You closed this chapter, and I respect that, genuinely. But I would be doing both of us a disservice if I walked past you tonight without giving you this."

The manila envelope appeared as if it had always been there, waiting.

"That's not—"

"It is."

Coltrane took it the way a man takes something he's not sure he should want.

"I appreciate it. I just—"

"She liked what she saw." Killean said it simply. "I told her she'd met you before, but she's seen ten thousand wrestlers and it's a blur, which I say not as an insult but as context. What I can tell you is that I vouched for you, and she watched, and she liked what she saw. There's a spot. If you want it."

Coltrane looked down at the envelope.

"I don't know."

"That's a fair answer. That's the answer I told her you'd probably give me, because you gave that same answer to four or five other people at various points in your career." Killean let that land, then: "This door opened for a reason. A kid rolls his ankle in warm-ups, you step in, and here we are. Are you going to keep walking past open doors?"

Coltrane had nothing for that.

The silence stretched out between them, comfortable and uncomfortable in equal measure.

"Two weeks," Killean said. "New York City. They're putting you across from Ria Lockhart. If you don't want it, tell us soon and we'll find someone. But I hope you'll be there." He paused. "It could be something worth watching."

Coltrane turned the envelope over in his hands. "Let me sleep on it."

"That's all I'm asking." Killean put a hand briefly on his shoulder. "You get home safe."

And then Sirrajin was gone. Down the hall, around the corner, back into the machinery of it all. Coltrane stood alone under fluorescent lights with a manila envelope and no good explanation for how any of this had happened.

Now.

Coltrane stood in his kitchen for a moment, wondering how long Madison had been waiting for him to show up.

"I gave you that key for emergencies."

"This is an emergency."

"Define emergency."

"I couldn't sleep."

"That's insomnia, Madison. That's a medical condition. There's ambien for that. That's not an emergency. An emergency is a fire. An emergency is a flood. An emergency is a call from the State Department at two in the morning telling you that something has gone catastrophically wrong in a country you've never heard of. You not being able to sleep is—"

"I turned on the television."

"Great. Good. Television. Fantastic invention. Thomas Edison, or possibly someone else, I'm not going to commit to that right now, gave us television. Use it. Enjoy it."

"First off, do you know there is nothing good on television anymore? I'd watch the fifth season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, but that's not out yet, and did you see that Taylor Frankie Paul is talking trash about people in the Miami and the way they walk."

"I get that those are all words, but I couldn't begin to tell you what the fuck any of it means."

"I mean, I have time right now. I could throw it on Hulu and we could binge it."

"Madison, I'm begging you on all things that are good in this world to get to your fucking point." The last words exploded from his throat like a growl.

"I'm flipping the channels and I landed on the ACE Network. So I figured I would turn it on and see Jamie's match."

He stopped.

"And I saw you, Cole. In the ring. Competing."

A beat. Two.

"I do recall that happening."

"Would you like to walk me through how?"

"No."

"Humor me and walk me through it anyway."

"Jamie twisted his ankle. He was out. It was either me or nobody and this stagehand, who clearly is your twin, was standing there looking at me like I had personally engineered the ankle injury as some kind of elaborate—"

"You should've picked nobody."

The words landed hard. She knew it the second they left her mouth. He stood there and nodded, very slowly, like he was confirming something he'd already suspected.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That was—I'm sorry."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine, it was a terrible thing to say, and I said it because I was scared and when I'm scared I say the worst possible version of whatever I'm thinking." She moved toward him. "Is this a thing now? Are you back? Because there was a reason you left, Cole, there was a very specific, very real reason you walked away from that ring, and I need you to tell me that one bad night and a manila folder on your kitchen counter isn't enough to—" She stopped. Looked at the folder. "There's a contract in there."

"I haven't signed it."

"Are you going to?"

He looked at the folder. Then at her. Then at some middle distance between the two that didn't actually contain anything.

"On the drive home I was sure I wasn't going to." He said it like he was reporting news from a country he'd recently left. "Jamie was in the car and he was making his case, the way Jamie does, and I was certain, completely, totally certain, that the answer was no."

"And now?"

"And now you're here, and you look like that, and I want to tell you the answer is still no."

"But?"

"But there's something." He pressed a fist lightly against his sternum. "Right here. Saying something I don't particularly want to hear."

Madison held his gaze for a long moment. Then she crossed the kitchen and leaned into him, and he wrapped his arms around her without either of them making a production of it.

"Let's not make this a habit," she said into his shoulder.

"Wouldn't dream of it."

She pulled back. Straightened her jacket. Resumed being Madison.

"Have you talked to your mother? Alex?"

He shook his head.

"Cole."

"I know."

"That's going to go worse than this."

"I'm aware of that, yes."

"Okay." She picked up her bag. "Okay." She said it again like she was trying to convince herself the conversation was finished. "Want me to go with you?"

"To my mother? So she can have a reminder of the best and worst night of her life? No, I'm good. Go home, Madison."

She was already halfway to the door.

"Just remember, Cole, of the promises you made." She then opened the door and shut it behind her, leaving him with his thoughts.

Of which there were too many.

Monday. Baltimore, Maryland.

Coltrane hadn't slept. Hadn't even tried, really. He'd gotten in the car somewhere around one, told himself he was just going to drive, and forty minutes later found himself in the parking lot of the gym like it was the only place gravity would allow him to land. His father's gym. His gym now. The only place on earth where the noise stopped.

That had been an hour ago. Maybe more.

He moved from the bench to the floor and back again, a circuit of punishment that had no finish line because he hadn't decided on one yet. The sweat had soaked through everything. His shirt, his shorts, the mat beneath him. He registered the burn in his shoulders, the scream in his knees, the sting behind his eyes, and he leaned into all of it. This was the only equation he'd ever fully understood. Input equals output. You put in the pain, you get out the result. His father had taught him that.

The smell hit first, the way it always did. Sweat and rubber and something underneath that he didn't have a clean word for. He'd been fourteen the first time his father brought him in here and the smell had been the same then, and somewhere in his nervous system the two things had gotten permanently wired together, that smell and the feeling of being exactly where he was supposed to be. The problem was the other thing that had gotten wired in alongside it. The thing that made the nights after a match feel like falling from a very great height with nothing to land on.

He'd found ways to slow the falling.

Coltrane stacked four mats against the wall and was launching himself to the top of them, legs firing, Run the Jewels in his ears loud enough to drown out everything, when he felt the hand on his shoulder.

He spun. Right arm up. A strike that would have ended the conversation before it started.

Daniel.

Twenty-one years old. Been coming to the gym for a few months now. Not the enemy.

"I tried calling out to you," Daniel said. "You were locked in."

Coltrane lowered his arm, pulled the headphones down around his neck, and walked to the weights to find his water bottle. He took a long drink before he turned around. "You startled me."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"It's three in the morning, Daniel."

"I was driving by and saw the lights—"

"You were driving by." Coltrane set the water bottle down. "At three in the morning. You were driving by." He let the sentence sit there a moment. "Did you fight with Tiffany?"

"Something like that."

"Something like that." His eyes moved across the younger man's face with the efficiency of someone who'd seen every version of this story before. "You're not—"

"No. No, nothing like that. I mean, that's what she thought. I'm trying, Cole. I'm genuinely trying to be who she needs me to be. I just—" He stopped. Looked at his hands. "I want to be out with my boys. I want to hit the club. I know how that sounds. I know exactly how that sounds. But it's what I want, and I don't know what to do with wanting it."

Coltrane crossed the floor. "You have a child on the way."

"I know."

"I need you to understand what that means. It doesn't mean you stop feeling what you feel. It doesn't mean the impulse disappears. It means you've made a commitment to two people who cannot afford for you to break it. To Tiffany and to a person who doesn't exist yet outside of her, a person who is going to come into this world with exactly one father, and that father is going to be you." He tapped two fingers against Daniel's chest. "You don't get to walk away from that. You understand me?"

"Yeah. Yeah, Cole. I hear you."

"Don't beat yourself up." His hand moved from Daniel's chest to his shoulder, and his grip went soft. "This life is hard. This life will take every single thing you have and ask you for more, and it will specifically find the moments when you are least equipped to give it. That's not cruelty. That's just the arrangement." He held Daniel's gaze. "You didn't ask for this. I understand that. But you made a promise to Tiffany. And the only thing a promise is worth is whether or not you keep it when keeping it is inconvenient."

Daniel nodded slowly. "How did you do it?"

"There's no formula. There's no system. You have to want it more than you want the alternative. You have to be willing to be selfless in the precise moment that every cell in your body is voting for selfishness. And then you have to get up the next day and do it again." He stepped back. "That's it. That's the whole thing."

"That makes sense." Daniel looked around the gym, at the weights and the mats and the ring in the center of the room. "What brought you here tonight?"

Coltrane picked up his water bottle again. Looked at it for a moment.

"Trying to figure out whether what I thought was selflessness was actually selfishness."

Wednesday. Baltimore, Maryland.

Morning came the way it always does Indifferent, unhurried, completely unconcerned with the lives it interrupts. Sunrise. Cars. The corner store. Kids rushing to school like the bell is a countdown to something catastrophic. Coltrane leaned against the brick wall and watched all of it like a man who'd forgotten he was allowed to be part of it.

Across the street, a girl, thirteen, blue backpack, braids she keeps brushing out of her face, was laughing with a group of friends. Full, uninhibited laughing. The kind you stop doing somewhere around sixteen and spend the rest of your life trying to get back.

Cole couldn't hear the joke. Didn't matter. A bus pulled up. She stepped on. Gone.

"She was bummed you didn't come see her last weekend."

He didn't have to turn around. That voice had been finding him since they were seventeen years old. He looked over his shoulder anyway, because some things you want to see.

Blonde hair. The face that goes with it.

"Alex—"

"She was bummed," she said again, not unkindly. "I'm just putting that on record."

"I appreciate you keeping her on my weekend. I am genuinely, sincerely—"

"Don't."

"—sorry—"

"Cole. Don't. She understood. I understood." She stepped up beside him. "Though I have to tell you, watching you walk into that ring instead of Jamie was not how either of us expected to spend a Friday night."

"It was a last-minute change. I didn't know ahead of time."

"I'm not surprised."

A beat. The kind that has weight.

"Are you going to do it again?"

"They offered me a contract."

"Are you going to do it again?"

He exhaled. "I don't know."

"Cole." She turned to face him fully now, arms crossed, not out of anger but out of the need to hold herself together while she said the thing she'd been holding for a long time. "I never wanted you to make that promise."

"Alex—"

"I'm talking." She said it gently, but she said it. "You were drinking every night. You were somewhere else even when you were in the room. Always on the road, competing. We had a one-year-old and I couldn't reach you. And you thought, I know you thought, that you were doing the right thing. Giving something up. Making a sacrifice. And the not drinking? The not popping pills at two in the morning? Those were good things. Those were genuinely good things. But the ring, Cole,  I never asked you to walk away from the ring. That was you. That was all you."

He looked at the ground. "I didn't know another way."

"And now?"

He looked up. "I think I do."

The smile came slow, the way her smiles always did,  like she was trying not to give it to him but couldn't help it. She never could.

"Good," she said. "Because that man in the ring last Friday? That is you. That is the actual, unedited version of you. Except maybe when you're with Josie. Those might be tied."

He nodded. And for just a second, before the nod settled into something that looked like gratitude, there was something else in his face. She saw it. He watched her see it. Neither of them said anything about it, because some things you leave alone if you want to keep moving forward, and they had both gotten very good at moving forward.

She held out her hand. He took it.

"Thank you, Alex."

"I know." She waved it off. "I'm extraordinary. You don't have to keep telling me."

He laughed, really laughed, and pulled her in, and she let him, resting her head against his shoulder with her eyes closed. And for a moment the city kept moving around them but they didn't, and it was fifteen years ago, and they were in the hallway of Jefferson High trying to figure out if two people who loved each other could figure out everything else, and the answer, as it turned out, was almost.

Almost, and not quite, and that had to be enough.

"I have to go," she said quietly, into his shoulder.

"Yeah."

"Work."

"I know."

She pulled back. Looked at him for a second longer than she needed to.

"This weekend?"

"I'll bring the pizza," he said.

"I'll get it."

"You always say that."

"I always mean it." She turned and walked away and he watched her go the way he always did. Like a man with regrets about something that still cost him every single time.

He stood there another moment. Then he turned, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his phone. He found Jamie's contact. His thumb moved before he'd fully decided to let it.

Pull some tape on Ria Lockhart. We've got some work to do.