I grabbed a stack of towels from the fitness room—I wasn’t going to call it a gym—and made my way back up to mine and Grant’s room. Grant had fallen asleep in front of the TV. I gathered up the ice bucket and made three trips to the machine in the hallway in order to get enough for all the towels.
The elbow I’d connected to Shawn’s skull was sending some warning signals. But my lower back was definitely in the lead for most painful spot on my body, where his kicks had connected. I stuck two towels, wrapped around ice, in the waistband of a pair of shorts and leaned back on them. I rested my elbow on another, and just placed the remaining one atop my head.
I read quietly until Grant woke up about forty minutes later. Some contemporary fantasy epic that really could’ve used more plot and less description of grass and animals, if you asked me, but it passed the time.
Grant woke up and took a long look at me, squinting. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Disagreement with someone. It’s all settled. Don’t worry about it.”
“You get in a fight with somebody?”
“Yep.”
“You win?”
“Yep.”
“Good.”
“Not really. Was still a waste of time for us both. Pretty dumb all around.”
“Man, that was your problem back in college, too.”
I lifted my eyes from the e-reader app and slid them to Grant. “What?”
“You think too much when you should just, you know, fight.”
“Thinking too much is not a weakness.”
“It is on the mat. You just have to act.”
“I spent enough time on the mat, Grant. That’s one thing I’d prefer not to think about.”
He sat up straighter, frowning, and muttered something noncommittal. He was silent a moment.
“You ever talk to that guy?”
I looked at him again. I wasn’t getting anywhere in my novel. “What guy?”
“You know, the guy…”
“David Rackham.”
“Yeah. Him.”
“I don’t think he’d particularly want to talk to me, Grant.”
“Don’t know unless you try.”
“Some things are destined to remain mysterious.”
“If you say so.”
Grant busied himself with his phone for a while, and I tried to immerse myself in escapism. Then a question occurred to me.
“Hey, when do we get our dinner money?”
“Our what?”
“Dinner money.”
Grant laughed. “You already got it, pal.”
“Thirty bucks a day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”
“You’re getting thirty? Shit, when I went on my first full time tour last year I only got twenty.”
“Usually I get expenses covered when I’m working,” I said. It came out like I was pouting. I didn’t like the sound of it, but there was no taking the words back now.
“Oh yeah? Steakhouses, bar tabs, nice hotel rooms?”
“No,” I said. “More like gas, coffee, the occasional Wawa sub. I’ve expensed drinks and the like, but only because I’d had to go into a bar or restaurant and just sitting there without ordering is the fastest way to draw suspicion.”
“Well, this is as glamorous as this gets,” Grant said, gesturing to the bland room around us. “Get used to it.”
“How’d you wind up here, Grant?”
He shrugged. “There’s no money to be made as a wrestler any other way.”
“Don’t have to be a wrestler.”
“Well, I could go back to my dad’s soybean farm. That pays even less, for harder work. I tried to get a job as a gym teacher and a coach at some high schools back home but I didn’t have the right degree and I wasn’t going back to school for it.”
“What’d you major in?”
“Communications. What was it you were majoring in?”
“Philosophy with a minor in classics.”
“Man, the coaches hated that…”
“Yeah, coaches always hate it when a player is smarter than they are and not afraid to say so.”
“They weren’t all that bad, man.”
I decided to keep my opinion to myself on that. In my entire history of wrestling, from middle school through college, there wasn’t one single coach—not my dad, not anyone else—that I looked back on fondly. They’d made me who I was, sure.
But that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.