Post by Vhodka Marie on Oct 18, 2020 14:04:22 GMT -5
The mid October night was balmy but underneath was a hint of coolness, a promise of the impending winter to come that floated in on the air. It seemed only fitting to her as she swung down the sidewalk, past the line of fans waiting to be scanned in through security so that they could find a coveted spot inside the darkened venue for the night's special event. Her eyes took in the marquee above the entrance, Vin Black: Live. At least, that was what it was trying to convey but clearly the letters had seen better days by this point. The A itself was nothing more than an upside down V with a piece of duct tape across it, a fitting metaphor for the state her mind was in tonight as she herself felt a bit like that beat up marquee sign.
But tonight wasn’t about her, not that any night really had been in a while. Tonight was about her best friend and his success and she would be there to support him the entire way, no matter what war might be waging on inside her. It was important that she kept a brave face, that he not be distracted from the show or the new album or any of the other hundreds of things that kept his plate full. She took her support of him seriously, as she always had in the years before when they were much younger and much less wise. Well, maybe they hadn’t wisened up all that much. That was part of the reason she was arriving so late tonight instead of prior to the fans filing into the venue. If she had come early during soundcheck he would have known that something was amiss with her mood and it would have distracted him from his show. That would have been unacceptable for her so she had made up an excuse, a reason as to why her arrival would be only moments before he was slated to go on. As she approached the bouncer at the door her hands flew up to present the little lanyard hanging around her neck which announced her as crew for the show. She wasn’t of course, but it made things easier for her to have unfettered access should she need it, so he had sent her the crew badge in advance and told her to use it. Inside the venue bodies were already packed almost wall to wall, smoke hung on the air immediately clinging to her hair and clothes in that way that seems to always happen in places like this. There was an electric hum all around her, excitement at what was to come, at what they had come to see. He wasn’t just a professional wrestler, or a musician, an artist, a photographer… he was all of those things and more and all of them done so effortlessly well.There wasn’t anything in his life he hadn’t tried to do and failed at, each new task came to him as simply as the last had. Life held no challenges for Vincent Wolf, it was a smooth ride in an expensive car, a luxury flight on a private jet, a happy ending every day.
Quite the contrast from her own life that had been marred with misfortune, betrayal and grief. She didn’t have his pedigree or family name having been born poor white trash in a small hillbilly town to unimportant people. Her parents worked hard and they loved her but everything they had was fought for by two folks who hardly even had formal education, her Mother had only learned to read in her early twenties upon finding out she was pregnant with Vhodka and becoming determined that she would be able to read her daughter a bedtime story one day. Her father, Buck, was blue collar as they come, spending his life working in a factory for not much more than minimum wage. They lived in a beat up trailer in the nicest trailer park in town though there were only two and in this instance nice just meant that this one was composed of more families than meth operations. But still, for all that they lacked they were happy. Her parents doted on her in the way that the good ones do, they clipped coupons, scraped by and made sure there was a present or two under the Christmas tree and dinner on the table every night. Sundays were for the lord and chores, weeknights sternly for her studies. Their daughter would be the first in the family to graduate with a high school diploma, that was something that was very important to Buck and Beulah and they made sure that her behind was in a chair with her nose in a book every single school night. As a child she had been quiet, believe it or not. But soon the quiet gave way to a mischievous streak and a tom boy nature that often saw her in more trouble than her mother would have liked. Buck called her Crickett, secretly taking the rap for her when she found trouble around town which was more frequent with every passing year of her life. The years moved on and she began to grow from a rambunctious girl into the makings of a woman, dates were greeted by shotgun at the trailer door and by that point most of the boys from school were too intimidated by her nature to ever think to ask her out anyway. Eighteen was when things had changed, that was when she had met Alexis and some months later the two would meet Damon Riggs. The rest, as they say, was history. As it turned out, Alexis had a passing knowledge of Damon through her brother Bryan and the two of them, Alexis and Vhodka, joined the operation that Damon and Bryan were presently under contract with at the time. That was where Vhodka had first met the man she was here to see tonight, then known only as Vincent Black. She was nineteen years old when they met, he only three years older at twenty two, outcasts who found a common bond, two lost items from the island of misfit toys just looking for people to belong to.
Her attention was brought back to the here and now by the dimming of the lights in the venue signaling that the show was about to begin. She had taken up a post on the side of the room, a little ways from the stage and away from the most aggressive and drunk of the fans. She knew the others were likely here somewhere too but probably somewhere more private and surrounded by security. That was something she’d never really felt the need for herself, her star had not risen so high and most people were content to let her be which is something that she appreciated. The crowd erupted in thunderous applause as the man of the night took the stage and peered out over the room which had already been filled to the hilt, sold out, but the moment he stepped up in the bright lights directed at the stage the air was suddenly fuller, heavier, harder to breath. The force of his personality and strength of his sheer will filled up a room faster and more completely than physical bodies ever could, that had always been the way since the first day she ever laid eyes on him. Her heavily lined eyes stayed on his form, guitar in one hand and pint of Guinness in the other, though it might as well have been anything else for as much attention as she paid to it. His voice rumbled over the crowd, thanking them for coming and all the polite things that performers are supposed to say to throngs of adoring fans but the words were only background noise to the things that were going on inside of her. She watched him slide the strap of the guitar over his head as the crowd around her pulsated with energy, he spoke again though the words never permeated the fog of her mind. She merely stood there off to the side, hopefully hidden, letting her eyes take in his form in the warmth of the stage lights and the heat of the bodies around her. They were a long ways from nineteen and twenty two respectively, but as she watched him up there in his element she couldn’t help but think of how kind the years had been to him and how much he still looked like the man who would become the vessel for all of her darkest secrets and fears. It wasn’t that she was hard to get to know, no, that was fairly easy as anyone could likely attest to. Everyone got to know Vhodka, they got to bask in her engry, ride along on her adventures, watch her eyes light up when she hatches a plan that surely would never work but she always seemed to find a way to make reality. But only that form on stage was trusted enough to know the darker things, only he had somehow found the magic path inside the makeshift armor of wit and into not Vhodka but Frannie, the quiet girl who grew up poor but loved and went on to grow into a woman who added an extra letter to an alcohol for a ring name though she didn’t even drink.
“I’m trying to play Wonderwall, shut up.”
The words echoed through the room as the crowd finally quieted down and gave their full attention to what was happening on stage. When he had first shown her the tracklisting for the album she had laughed at the inclusion of this song thinking that surely it was a joke.
“Wonderwall? You’re fucking joking.”
“What?” He had asked her with a slight upturn to the corners of his mouth, his voice bemused. “Why would I do that? I never joke when it comes to Wonderwall.”
She had stared at him then, one eyebrow arched as she tried to decide if he was playing her or not.
“It’s a good song. Stop looking at me like that.”
As much grief as she had given him, it WAS a good song. Everyone likes Wonderwall and if they say they don’t they’re a liar. From her the piece of wall she was presently holding up she watched him strum the guitar, the words rasped out over the room, words that she had heard a million times but never really paid all that much attention to until that very moment. She thought maybe his eyes found her across the room for a brief moment before moving on and away, no doubt to the place where the rest of the friends and family were likely situated though she knew with the stage lights so bright you really can’t make out much of anything past the first few rows. The only thing she did know for certain was that something was wrong with him, something in his demeanor had shifted while he sang. Vhodka couldn’t quite place her finger on what it was but as he worked his way through the song she could tell that something had gone screwy even before he quickly excused himself and shakily made his way off towards the bathrooms. The fans in attendance murmured the usual things about hearing he was a drunk or on drugs, any manner of rumor that had no shred of truth to it. But she knew it was none of those things, something had occurred to him in that moment, what it had been would remain a mystery, probably never mentioned or spoken about unless she decided she was willing to annoy him into telling her. After sometime he reappeared and continued on to finish the set, recovered and collected as if nothing had ever happened but she knew what she had seen as surely as she knew how to spell the word Vhodka.
Her exit was made just prior to the encore, usually she would have stayed to say hello but her mind was ugly tonight which made it for the best that she slunk away before Vincent or any of the rest registered her presence there. Honestly, it was a wonder she had even come at all to begin with. There were so many things that had happened from the time she joined this business, things from time she spent away, things that had occurred now that she’d been back. Each one of those things had taken its toll over the years little by little wearing her down until the point she was at tonight, a great big culmination of scars. The woman was tired, well and truly tired of all of the burdens that she had been carting around for so long. Secret is a soft word, it belongs in a category with words like feather and mist, but secrets themselves are rarely light nor are they anything that could ever pass as soft. Vhodka knew this intimately, after all, she was very good at keeping a secret. People would tell her things, not even things she had anything to do with half the time but just things they needed some other person in this world to know. Her ears would prick up and she would listen, locking the knowledge away deep inside of her never to be revealed again, just an infinite never ending well of other people's bullshit. Of course, that wasn’t to say that she was without her own secrets, oh no, there were even more of those. Her own secrets were heavy and weighed her down more than all of the others combined, she had no one that she could share them with then or now - not even her best friend. So she carried their burden alone, allowing them to pull her down further and further until she came to be in the position she was in tonight, where she could hardly place one foot in front of the other for the weight of knowledge, feelings, events, all of them unshared, pushed down into that deep well inside of her where they just seemed to keep bubbling the fuck up at the worst moments.
The fittingly jack o'lantern orange 1970 Mercury Cougar Eliminator glowed under the haze of the street lights as she pulled open the drivers side door and slid onto the black vinyl seat. She shoved her key into the ignition and rolled over the engine before pulling the iPhone out of her back pocket and plugging it into an auxiliary cord. The radio was the one thing that she had upgraded in the car over the years, she could live with the car not coming with factory air but she couldn’t abide local radio stations. In the interest of survival, the upgraded Alpine stereo went in so that she could at least stream music from her phone on long drives. As she switched on the headlights Semisonic came alive through the speakers, Closing Time, to be specific. Driving this late at night always allowed her mind to wander, sometimes it brought about great ideas but more often than not lately she thought too much about things that had happened in the past, where she had gone wrong. Maybe it had been a mistake to come back to this business, to these people. Ten years had seemed like long enough, enough to get over the things that had driven her away in the first place and get her mind back to a better headspace. She could be focused, driven, and professional. Okay, okay, she’d never been professional a day in her life but she could pretend a certain detachment from the happenings around her if she put her mind to it. Well, at least she had told herself she could at the time but it was becoming painstakingly clear that all she had done upon walking back in the door was pick up right where she had left off. And that friends, was not a desirable place for Vhodka to be.
When she was fresh in this profession everything had seemed possible, a hundred million different scenarios all occurred at once simultaneously until she finally decided on a direction in this timeline. The unfortunate bit was that every direction she had ever picked seemed to always end up being the wrong one. She decided to become a professional wrestler to get away from Bent Fork and because that was what Alexis was planning on doing, Alexis had been determined to follow in the steps of her brother Bryan and already knew the ins and outs of the business. This suited Vhodka just fine as she had never turned down a chance for a fight, much to Beulah’s dismay, and it would get her out of the ever shrinking trailer she had lived in since birth. Much like when her parents sat her at the table to study so that she could earn an education she approached wrestling the same way, diving in to learn as much as she possibly could so that she could be the best. If there was a diploma for wrestling knowledge and skill, by god she would have earned it in those early days. It had gone okay for a while, she started to have success and build a little following for herself, people knew her name and bought her merchandise and while Alexis was the big ticket act that went on to world championship reigns it wasn’t for lack of talent that Vhodka had not. You see, Vhodka had made the mistake that many young women make in that early period of their lives… She got involved with boys and as any woman will tell you, that's frequently where the trouble starts. Suddenly, while Alexis was honing her craft and working her way up to the top of the card, Vhodka was distracted and often far too wrapped up in other things that were happening behind the scenes. She had fallen for a boy who was rather shy, though she could tell that he liked her. Her mother had raised her that men like to chase a woman a little so she applied this tactic to the boy, hoping that eventually he would decide she was worth the hunt. Eventually he did but by that point things had gotten rather messy and complicated which made her craft suffer even more. The boy found another girl, one that didn’t seem to require hunting and Vhodka was discarded, not even a used-to-be but a never was. She ended up marrying Alexis’ brother Bryan, which was just one of another series of mistakes. The marriage was tumultuous and volatile, the two not well suited for each other's personality quirks. Whereas Vhodka had always been mostly harmless and playing at crazy her husband at the time suffered from serious mental conditions that caused her to retreat even more into her shell. Many tiny missteps led her down a path that she felt there was no turning back on, the train was rolling down the track now and the breaks had never been installed. Finally, she could take no more so she filed for divorce and quietly started planning her escape.
A decade is a long time. Enough time to figure out who you are as a person, what your hopes and desires are, enough to forget your first love and your terrible marriage. When she decided to come back to the business she felt refocused, energized, ready to once again put her nose in the book and be all that she knew she could be. Then she walked in the door and not even twenty minutes later had forgotten every single thing she had swore would be different this time. If she were in the proper mood it might have been funny to her, but instead of laughing at the idiocy of it all she just felt sad that everyone around her had changed, grown, become normal functioning adults while she was still right back at the beginning all over again. As she threw the car into park she wondered to herself how she had even gotten home, she couldn’t remember the act of driving itself which told her that her mind was not friendly territory tonight. The lights in the chinese restaurant underneath her apartment were dimmed, closed up for the night after serving their last plate of sweet n sour chicken. The stairs to get home seemed daunting enough that she stopped at the base to look up, wondering if Mr. Wu would be concerned if he found her sleeping at the bottom of them in the morning or if he would just chalk it up to another one of her quirks. Don’t be a burden on an old man, she told herself as she willed her body to carry her up the stairs and into her small one bedroom apartment, the same one that she had first acquired when she began in this business. The apartment itself was nothing fancy and it frequently smelled like crab rangoon and egg rolls but it was one of the places in the world that she felt the most safe. A home can be like a person, it can protect you, comfort you, make you feel loved. This apartment did all of those things for her and that was precisely the reason she had paid a handsome sum to have the current tenants move out when she decided to make her presence known again. It also held a certain… sentimentality to her. There were a lot of memories in these walls, a lot of time spent with people she had loved and some of whom she had lost. She could point at any particular corner and tell you what had transpired there years before, like some great big living catalog of memory. There by the window a fan had broken in after climbing the fire escape. In the kitchen Alexis had lit a small fire after sticking a to-go packet of Olive Garden breadsticks in the microwave not realizing the inside was aluminum. Here in the entryway where she stood… no, that was one memory she didn’t want to think about, not tonight. That was the beginning of all the trouble she found herself in at present and it would do no good to think back on it wistfully, not when it had been such a fucking mistake.
The keys were tossed on the side board, her shirt pulled over her head and discarded to the floor along with the lacy black bra underneath. She unbuttoned her pants and slid them down over her thighs and the chunky black boots that she had worn to the show. Thankfully, she had worn bell bottoms tonight so she had the mercy of a few extra minutes before she would need to sit down to unlace the boots. Slowly, with the weight of the world on her shoulders she made her way into the bathroom, leaning over and turning on the water to run a bath then standing in the matching black lace underwear and boots staring in the mirror beside the tub. Who was this person looking back at her? Surely, not Vhodka. No, it couldn’t be. Vhodka never felt beaten down, defeated or second best but the person peering back from the mirror sure as hell did in that moment.
The water was warm, like the hug she could have probably used as she slunk down into the tub until she was up to her chin. Stupid, stupid, stupid. How hard can it be to make the right decisions when you know exactly what needs done? I mean, even she could follow directions, right? So why was she constantly doing the wrong thing, the things that she promised herself she would neer do again. Was it self sabotage? Was she a masochist? Did she just want to hurt? The water covered the top of her head now as she fully submerged herself underneath, listening to the quiet loudness that water has when you go under. It was white noise and white noise was just the thing she needed right now. You have to do better than this, V.
She sat there stewing for what seemed like hours but couldn’t have truly been that long, only long enough for the heat of the water to cool to the side of uncomfortable. The towel she wrapped herself in was soft and large enough to secure tightly so that she could move from the bathroom back out to the sideboard where she had discarded her phone when she entered. The screen lit up and displayed several notifications but one from her agent Sarah Wolf caught her attention more than any of the others.
“Where were you tonight? Expected you to hang out after with us but you didn’t miss much tbh. FYI you’ve been signed up for this, here are the matchups below. Oh and your partner is Vincent.”
The next text message went on to list the teams and matchups for the upcoming Tag Wars 2 event that was rapidly approaching on the show schedule. There it was in electric print, Vincent Black and Vhodka Marie vs Miss Michelle and Sahara. Lithe fingers moved swiftly from the message that Sarah had sent through her inbox to find another text chain further down, tapping out the words “Did you sign us up for this?”. The phone was sat down on the back of the couch as she moved through the apartment to the bedroom, dropping the towel and dressing in a faded Styx t-shirt promoting a tour she hadn’t been alive to attend and a pair of stretchy shorts. The sound of the text chime was muffled against the fabric of the couch and took her by surprise, she had assumed he’d still be celebrating the success of the show and wouldn’t respond until morning at the earliest. Taking the phone in her hands, she read his reply under her breath: “Yes. Should be fun.”
Fun… I guess that’s one way to put it, she thought. It had been fun once with the excitement, the possibilities, the whole future undecided but every single hope and desire she ever had right there within her reach. But fun had gone out the window with two rings and an I DO, that was when it stopped being fun and just started to hurt. That should have been the end of it, should have been the line that they didn’t cross and for a while it was but the heart is a funny thing and it sure as hell doesn’t give a shit about any metaphorical line. Because for her, it had always been about the heart, about love, ever since that first day she laid eyes on him. He’d followed his heart too; it just hadn’t been in a direction that led him to her.
But tonight wasn’t about her, not that any night really had been in a while. Tonight was about her best friend and his success and she would be there to support him the entire way, no matter what war might be waging on inside her. It was important that she kept a brave face, that he not be distracted from the show or the new album or any of the other hundreds of things that kept his plate full. She took her support of him seriously, as she always had in the years before when they were much younger and much less wise. Well, maybe they hadn’t wisened up all that much. That was part of the reason she was arriving so late tonight instead of prior to the fans filing into the venue. If she had come early during soundcheck he would have known that something was amiss with her mood and it would have distracted him from his show. That would have been unacceptable for her so she had made up an excuse, a reason as to why her arrival would be only moments before he was slated to go on. As she approached the bouncer at the door her hands flew up to present the little lanyard hanging around her neck which announced her as crew for the show. She wasn’t of course, but it made things easier for her to have unfettered access should she need it, so he had sent her the crew badge in advance and told her to use it. Inside the venue bodies were already packed almost wall to wall, smoke hung on the air immediately clinging to her hair and clothes in that way that seems to always happen in places like this. There was an electric hum all around her, excitement at what was to come, at what they had come to see. He wasn’t just a professional wrestler, or a musician, an artist, a photographer… he was all of those things and more and all of them done so effortlessly well.There wasn’t anything in his life he hadn’t tried to do and failed at, each new task came to him as simply as the last had. Life held no challenges for Vincent Wolf, it was a smooth ride in an expensive car, a luxury flight on a private jet, a happy ending every day.
Quite the contrast from her own life that had been marred with misfortune, betrayal and grief. She didn’t have his pedigree or family name having been born poor white trash in a small hillbilly town to unimportant people. Her parents worked hard and they loved her but everything they had was fought for by two folks who hardly even had formal education, her Mother had only learned to read in her early twenties upon finding out she was pregnant with Vhodka and becoming determined that she would be able to read her daughter a bedtime story one day. Her father, Buck, was blue collar as they come, spending his life working in a factory for not much more than minimum wage. They lived in a beat up trailer in the nicest trailer park in town though there were only two and in this instance nice just meant that this one was composed of more families than meth operations. But still, for all that they lacked they were happy. Her parents doted on her in the way that the good ones do, they clipped coupons, scraped by and made sure there was a present or two under the Christmas tree and dinner on the table every night. Sundays were for the lord and chores, weeknights sternly for her studies. Their daughter would be the first in the family to graduate with a high school diploma, that was something that was very important to Buck and Beulah and they made sure that her behind was in a chair with her nose in a book every single school night. As a child she had been quiet, believe it or not. But soon the quiet gave way to a mischievous streak and a tom boy nature that often saw her in more trouble than her mother would have liked. Buck called her Crickett, secretly taking the rap for her when she found trouble around town which was more frequent with every passing year of her life. The years moved on and she began to grow from a rambunctious girl into the makings of a woman, dates were greeted by shotgun at the trailer door and by that point most of the boys from school were too intimidated by her nature to ever think to ask her out anyway. Eighteen was when things had changed, that was when she had met Alexis and some months later the two would meet Damon Riggs. The rest, as they say, was history. As it turned out, Alexis had a passing knowledge of Damon through her brother Bryan and the two of them, Alexis and Vhodka, joined the operation that Damon and Bryan were presently under contract with at the time. That was where Vhodka had first met the man she was here to see tonight, then known only as Vincent Black. She was nineteen years old when they met, he only three years older at twenty two, outcasts who found a common bond, two lost items from the island of misfit toys just looking for people to belong to.
Her attention was brought back to the here and now by the dimming of the lights in the venue signaling that the show was about to begin. She had taken up a post on the side of the room, a little ways from the stage and away from the most aggressive and drunk of the fans. She knew the others were likely here somewhere too but probably somewhere more private and surrounded by security. That was something she’d never really felt the need for herself, her star had not risen so high and most people were content to let her be which is something that she appreciated. The crowd erupted in thunderous applause as the man of the night took the stage and peered out over the room which had already been filled to the hilt, sold out, but the moment he stepped up in the bright lights directed at the stage the air was suddenly fuller, heavier, harder to breath. The force of his personality and strength of his sheer will filled up a room faster and more completely than physical bodies ever could, that had always been the way since the first day she ever laid eyes on him. Her heavily lined eyes stayed on his form, guitar in one hand and pint of Guinness in the other, though it might as well have been anything else for as much attention as she paid to it. His voice rumbled over the crowd, thanking them for coming and all the polite things that performers are supposed to say to throngs of adoring fans but the words were only background noise to the things that were going on inside of her. She watched him slide the strap of the guitar over his head as the crowd around her pulsated with energy, he spoke again though the words never permeated the fog of her mind. She merely stood there off to the side, hopefully hidden, letting her eyes take in his form in the warmth of the stage lights and the heat of the bodies around her. They were a long ways from nineteen and twenty two respectively, but as she watched him up there in his element she couldn’t help but think of how kind the years had been to him and how much he still looked like the man who would become the vessel for all of her darkest secrets and fears. It wasn’t that she was hard to get to know, no, that was fairly easy as anyone could likely attest to. Everyone got to know Vhodka, they got to bask in her engry, ride along on her adventures, watch her eyes light up when she hatches a plan that surely would never work but she always seemed to find a way to make reality. But only that form on stage was trusted enough to know the darker things, only he had somehow found the magic path inside the makeshift armor of wit and into not Vhodka but Frannie, the quiet girl who grew up poor but loved and went on to grow into a woman who added an extra letter to an alcohol for a ring name though she didn’t even drink.
“I’m trying to play Wonderwall, shut up.”
The words echoed through the room as the crowd finally quieted down and gave their full attention to what was happening on stage. When he had first shown her the tracklisting for the album she had laughed at the inclusion of this song thinking that surely it was a joke.
“Wonderwall? You’re fucking joking.”
“What?” He had asked her with a slight upturn to the corners of his mouth, his voice bemused. “Why would I do that? I never joke when it comes to Wonderwall.”
She had stared at him then, one eyebrow arched as she tried to decide if he was playing her or not.
“It’s a good song. Stop looking at me like that.”
As much grief as she had given him, it WAS a good song. Everyone likes Wonderwall and if they say they don’t they’re a liar. From her the piece of wall she was presently holding up she watched him strum the guitar, the words rasped out over the room, words that she had heard a million times but never really paid all that much attention to until that very moment. She thought maybe his eyes found her across the room for a brief moment before moving on and away, no doubt to the place where the rest of the friends and family were likely situated though she knew with the stage lights so bright you really can’t make out much of anything past the first few rows. The only thing she did know for certain was that something was wrong with him, something in his demeanor had shifted while he sang. Vhodka couldn’t quite place her finger on what it was but as he worked his way through the song she could tell that something had gone screwy even before he quickly excused himself and shakily made his way off towards the bathrooms. The fans in attendance murmured the usual things about hearing he was a drunk or on drugs, any manner of rumor that had no shred of truth to it. But she knew it was none of those things, something had occurred to him in that moment, what it had been would remain a mystery, probably never mentioned or spoken about unless she decided she was willing to annoy him into telling her. After sometime he reappeared and continued on to finish the set, recovered and collected as if nothing had ever happened but she knew what she had seen as surely as she knew how to spell the word Vhodka.
Her exit was made just prior to the encore, usually she would have stayed to say hello but her mind was ugly tonight which made it for the best that she slunk away before Vincent or any of the rest registered her presence there. Honestly, it was a wonder she had even come at all to begin with. There were so many things that had happened from the time she joined this business, things from time she spent away, things that had occurred now that she’d been back. Each one of those things had taken its toll over the years little by little wearing her down until the point she was at tonight, a great big culmination of scars. The woman was tired, well and truly tired of all of the burdens that she had been carting around for so long. Secret is a soft word, it belongs in a category with words like feather and mist, but secrets themselves are rarely light nor are they anything that could ever pass as soft. Vhodka knew this intimately, after all, she was very good at keeping a secret. People would tell her things, not even things she had anything to do with half the time but just things they needed some other person in this world to know. Her ears would prick up and she would listen, locking the knowledge away deep inside of her never to be revealed again, just an infinite never ending well of other people's bullshit. Of course, that wasn’t to say that she was without her own secrets, oh no, there were even more of those. Her own secrets were heavy and weighed her down more than all of the others combined, she had no one that she could share them with then or now - not even her best friend. So she carried their burden alone, allowing them to pull her down further and further until she came to be in the position she was in tonight, where she could hardly place one foot in front of the other for the weight of knowledge, feelings, events, all of them unshared, pushed down into that deep well inside of her where they just seemed to keep bubbling the fuck up at the worst moments.
The fittingly jack o'lantern orange 1970 Mercury Cougar Eliminator glowed under the haze of the street lights as she pulled open the drivers side door and slid onto the black vinyl seat. She shoved her key into the ignition and rolled over the engine before pulling the iPhone out of her back pocket and plugging it into an auxiliary cord. The radio was the one thing that she had upgraded in the car over the years, she could live with the car not coming with factory air but she couldn’t abide local radio stations. In the interest of survival, the upgraded Alpine stereo went in so that she could at least stream music from her phone on long drives. As she switched on the headlights Semisonic came alive through the speakers, Closing Time, to be specific. Driving this late at night always allowed her mind to wander, sometimes it brought about great ideas but more often than not lately she thought too much about things that had happened in the past, where she had gone wrong. Maybe it had been a mistake to come back to this business, to these people. Ten years had seemed like long enough, enough to get over the things that had driven her away in the first place and get her mind back to a better headspace. She could be focused, driven, and professional. Okay, okay, she’d never been professional a day in her life but she could pretend a certain detachment from the happenings around her if she put her mind to it. Well, at least she had told herself she could at the time but it was becoming painstakingly clear that all she had done upon walking back in the door was pick up right where she had left off. And that friends, was not a desirable place for Vhodka to be.
When she was fresh in this profession everything had seemed possible, a hundred million different scenarios all occurred at once simultaneously until she finally decided on a direction in this timeline. The unfortunate bit was that every direction she had ever picked seemed to always end up being the wrong one. She decided to become a professional wrestler to get away from Bent Fork and because that was what Alexis was planning on doing, Alexis had been determined to follow in the steps of her brother Bryan and already knew the ins and outs of the business. This suited Vhodka just fine as she had never turned down a chance for a fight, much to Beulah’s dismay, and it would get her out of the ever shrinking trailer she had lived in since birth. Much like when her parents sat her at the table to study so that she could earn an education she approached wrestling the same way, diving in to learn as much as she possibly could so that she could be the best. If there was a diploma for wrestling knowledge and skill, by god she would have earned it in those early days. It had gone okay for a while, she started to have success and build a little following for herself, people knew her name and bought her merchandise and while Alexis was the big ticket act that went on to world championship reigns it wasn’t for lack of talent that Vhodka had not. You see, Vhodka had made the mistake that many young women make in that early period of their lives… She got involved with boys and as any woman will tell you, that's frequently where the trouble starts. Suddenly, while Alexis was honing her craft and working her way up to the top of the card, Vhodka was distracted and often far too wrapped up in other things that were happening behind the scenes. She had fallen for a boy who was rather shy, though she could tell that he liked her. Her mother had raised her that men like to chase a woman a little so she applied this tactic to the boy, hoping that eventually he would decide she was worth the hunt. Eventually he did but by that point things had gotten rather messy and complicated which made her craft suffer even more. The boy found another girl, one that didn’t seem to require hunting and Vhodka was discarded, not even a used-to-be but a never was. She ended up marrying Alexis’ brother Bryan, which was just one of another series of mistakes. The marriage was tumultuous and volatile, the two not well suited for each other's personality quirks. Whereas Vhodka had always been mostly harmless and playing at crazy her husband at the time suffered from serious mental conditions that caused her to retreat even more into her shell. Many tiny missteps led her down a path that she felt there was no turning back on, the train was rolling down the track now and the breaks had never been installed. Finally, she could take no more so she filed for divorce and quietly started planning her escape.
A decade is a long time. Enough time to figure out who you are as a person, what your hopes and desires are, enough to forget your first love and your terrible marriage. When she decided to come back to the business she felt refocused, energized, ready to once again put her nose in the book and be all that she knew she could be. Then she walked in the door and not even twenty minutes later had forgotten every single thing she had swore would be different this time. If she were in the proper mood it might have been funny to her, but instead of laughing at the idiocy of it all she just felt sad that everyone around her had changed, grown, become normal functioning adults while she was still right back at the beginning all over again. As she threw the car into park she wondered to herself how she had even gotten home, she couldn’t remember the act of driving itself which told her that her mind was not friendly territory tonight. The lights in the chinese restaurant underneath her apartment were dimmed, closed up for the night after serving their last plate of sweet n sour chicken. The stairs to get home seemed daunting enough that she stopped at the base to look up, wondering if Mr. Wu would be concerned if he found her sleeping at the bottom of them in the morning or if he would just chalk it up to another one of her quirks. Don’t be a burden on an old man, she told herself as she willed her body to carry her up the stairs and into her small one bedroom apartment, the same one that she had first acquired when she began in this business. The apartment itself was nothing fancy and it frequently smelled like crab rangoon and egg rolls but it was one of the places in the world that she felt the most safe. A home can be like a person, it can protect you, comfort you, make you feel loved. This apartment did all of those things for her and that was precisely the reason she had paid a handsome sum to have the current tenants move out when she decided to make her presence known again. It also held a certain… sentimentality to her. There were a lot of memories in these walls, a lot of time spent with people she had loved and some of whom she had lost. She could point at any particular corner and tell you what had transpired there years before, like some great big living catalog of memory. There by the window a fan had broken in after climbing the fire escape. In the kitchen Alexis had lit a small fire after sticking a to-go packet of Olive Garden breadsticks in the microwave not realizing the inside was aluminum. Here in the entryway where she stood… no, that was one memory she didn’t want to think about, not tonight. That was the beginning of all the trouble she found herself in at present and it would do no good to think back on it wistfully, not when it had been such a fucking mistake.
The keys were tossed on the side board, her shirt pulled over her head and discarded to the floor along with the lacy black bra underneath. She unbuttoned her pants and slid them down over her thighs and the chunky black boots that she had worn to the show. Thankfully, she had worn bell bottoms tonight so she had the mercy of a few extra minutes before she would need to sit down to unlace the boots. Slowly, with the weight of the world on her shoulders she made her way into the bathroom, leaning over and turning on the water to run a bath then standing in the matching black lace underwear and boots staring in the mirror beside the tub. Who was this person looking back at her? Surely, not Vhodka. No, it couldn’t be. Vhodka never felt beaten down, defeated or second best but the person peering back from the mirror sure as hell did in that moment.
The water was warm, like the hug she could have probably used as she slunk down into the tub until she was up to her chin. Stupid, stupid, stupid. How hard can it be to make the right decisions when you know exactly what needs done? I mean, even she could follow directions, right? So why was she constantly doing the wrong thing, the things that she promised herself she would neer do again. Was it self sabotage? Was she a masochist? Did she just want to hurt? The water covered the top of her head now as she fully submerged herself underneath, listening to the quiet loudness that water has when you go under. It was white noise and white noise was just the thing she needed right now. You have to do better than this, V.
She sat there stewing for what seemed like hours but couldn’t have truly been that long, only long enough for the heat of the water to cool to the side of uncomfortable. The towel she wrapped herself in was soft and large enough to secure tightly so that she could move from the bathroom back out to the sideboard where she had discarded her phone when she entered. The screen lit up and displayed several notifications but one from her agent Sarah Wolf caught her attention more than any of the others.
“Where were you tonight? Expected you to hang out after with us but you didn’t miss much tbh. FYI you’ve been signed up for this, here are the matchups below. Oh and your partner is Vincent.”
The next text message went on to list the teams and matchups for the upcoming Tag Wars 2 event that was rapidly approaching on the show schedule. There it was in electric print, Vincent Black and Vhodka Marie vs Miss Michelle and Sahara. Lithe fingers moved swiftly from the message that Sarah had sent through her inbox to find another text chain further down, tapping out the words “Did you sign us up for this?”. The phone was sat down on the back of the couch as she moved through the apartment to the bedroom, dropping the towel and dressing in a faded Styx t-shirt promoting a tour she hadn’t been alive to attend and a pair of stretchy shorts. The sound of the text chime was muffled against the fabric of the couch and took her by surprise, she had assumed he’d still be celebrating the success of the show and wouldn’t respond until morning at the earliest. Taking the phone in her hands, she read his reply under her breath: “Yes. Should be fun.”
Fun… I guess that’s one way to put it, she thought. It had been fun once with the excitement, the possibilities, the whole future undecided but every single hope and desire she ever had right there within her reach. But fun had gone out the window with two rings and an I DO, that was when it stopped being fun and just started to hurt. That should have been the end of it, should have been the line that they didn’t cross and for a while it was but the heart is a funny thing and it sure as hell doesn’t give a shit about any metaphorical line. Because for her, it had always been about the heart, about love, ever since that first day she laid eyes on him. He’d followed his heart too; it just hadn’t been in a direction that led him to her.