They reach the last bit of choreography, the crescendo of the match. In the past five minutes, Steve has had his breakaway jacket ripped off him, his tie used to choke him. Chelsea hasn’t had her clothes ripped, but she did get thrown from the ropes once, a terrifying and exhilarating sensation that left her pleased when the crowd winced on her behalf, even if it didn’t hurt that much thanks to the bouncy ring floor.
Steve is there now, on his hands and knees, rocking back and forth after a slam, and Chelsea laboriously and exaggeratedly climbs the ropes in the corner of the ring until she’s balanced on the post. The first time she tried this, her cowboy boots were too slick, and she fell back onto the mats, so they had to get out sandpaper and really add some grit. Now she’s secure, powerful, and knows every atom of the post and how to stand. Down below, Steve wiggles into position, feigning pain, preparing for her to leap.
Mouth open in a silent scream, Chelsea pushes off like she’s flying and slams down on Steve’s back, pinning him down.
“Okay?” she whispers, her lips hidden by her hair.
“Okay,” he answers. “But ready for some Gatorade.”
Pauley’s hand slams the ring three times, and Harlan Payne calls out, “Winner: Florida Woman!”
The crowd boos and hisses and screams and chants, and Pauley pries her up, and Chelsea stands and staggers for a moment as if she’s just waking up. She shelters her eyes from the spotlights and looks around in confusion, then glares down at Steve as if in understanding. She nods like she’s just starting to hear a great bass line thumping, plants a boot on Steve’s back, and pumps a fist into the air. Her fight song starts playing again, and the crowd goes insane.
Whether they love her or hate her, they feel it in their bones.
But then she notices something in the crowd—people turned the wrong way, people talking worriedly and shouting. Where she saw the woman earlier, a body is thrashing, and then someone is screaming. The crowd catches on and turns in a big ripple to watch the new show. The woman in the crowd is lashing out, fighting—silently.
Chelsea can see it from here, even if no one else does.
She’s got the Violence.
That woman—she must’ve taken a note from Chelsea’s book and peppered up, even though Harlan assured them there would be TSA-level pat-downs at the door.
The man she’s attacking is in a camo hat and black T-shirt, hands up as she tries to rip him apart, and the rest of the crowd is backing away from them, running for the doors, freaking out. The hired security guys stationed around the walls are struggling upstream to reach the fight, but they’re just too far away to do any good while everyone else is stampeding against them.
Chelsea looks down at Steve. “Come on. We’ve got to dogpile her.”
She doesn’t wait to see if he nods or agrees, just slips through the ropes and runs for that spot in the crowd where bodies are clearing out. When she gets to the woman, she grabs her by the waist and yanks back with all her might, tossing the woman like she’s been taught to do and launching her onto the floor, scattering chairs. Before the woman can get to her feet, Chelsea flips her over and pins her down. They weigh about the same, and if someone doesn’t get on her back soon, she’s going to be in the fight of her life.
As the woman bucks underneath her, it occurs to her that she’s not sure which would be worse—getting wounded without money or insurance in today’s world or losing her job because of the bad press from this woman’s desperate choice. Harlan’s number one rule is Don’t Touch the Audience, and she’s breaking it, bigtime.
But she has to. There’s no other way.
“Come on!” she shouts, holding the woman down, searching frantically for the nearest face. “Help me hold her!”
The first person she sees is the man the woman was attacking, his face scratched up and his ear hanging by a string of skin. Judging by his open mouth, he’s in shock, and he just shakes his head as he backs away, turns, and runs.
“Piece of shit coward!” Chelsea screams at his back.
But then something heavy lands on her back, the heaviest damn thing in the world, crushing her.
“Keep on it,” Harlan Payne says near her ear. “We’ll get ’er back down.”
Another slam as someone else lands on Harlan, and then someone else. It’s crushing the air out of Chelsea’s lungs, making her ribs creak.
She goes still for a moment, remembering what TJ told her one day during practice: No matter where you are, no matter how little space you have, you can find one breath.
There, crushed, in the dark, smelling a strange woman’s cheap shampoo mixed with the scent of blood and Harlan’s expensive cologne, Chelsea finds the space she needs to draw a breath. And then another one. She never understood the calm of the storm until now, until the Violence came and made everything a storm.
She knows the woman isn’t there, her brain not connected to her body, but she also knows how hard it must be to draw a breath with this much weight on her back.
“It’s okay,” Chelsea whispers. “You’re not alone. It’s going to be okay.”
Despite the fact that she can feel Harlan breathing on her neck, hear someone else sigh over that, part of her feels like she and this woman are alone together in the world, just them pressed against the ground like Atlas holding up the sky.
“What? What is this? Help!”
The woman underneath her starts crying as soon as the words are out of her mouth, and Chelsea feels her body go slack and limp.
“We’re good,” she says in Harlan’s general direction, and he repeats it.
The weight lifts off her, bit by bit, until air dances over her back. It’s not cool air, but she’s finally free. Instead of standing, Chelsea goes to hands and knees beside the woman, whose face is still masked by her long black hair.
“Hey, you okay?” Chelsea says, real low. “Do you know what happened?”
“Is he dead? Did I do it?”
The woman’s voice is a horrified rasp, and Chelsea can’t tell if she’s more scared that she killed the man or that she didn’t.
“You messed him up, but he was alive when he ran out of here like a goddamn coward,” Chelsea whispers back.
“Goddamn.” It comes out soft and vulnerable and sad.
“You don’t have to go back to him,” Chelsea says, glad her hair is likewise hiding her face.
“I—we got kids.”
A big, warm hand lands on Chelsea’s shoulder, and she looks up and sees Harlan Payne crouched over her. He nods as if to say, Let me do this, and Chelsea returns the nod and stands and backs away.
Harlan kneeling is as big as a grizzly bear, but even in his posh silver suit, he does it. So low that Chelsea can barely hear it, in a voice with a heavy southern accent, he says, “Good try, but that shitbird got away. You can stay with us if you want. We got work to do, food and beds, decent pay. And we don’t mind if you’ve got the sickness.”
The woman’s body, still facedown on the floor, shudders with a big sob.
“We got kids,” she repeats, as if she’s begging.