It was a shock to her, when Hunter told her about Shawn.
They'd been friends, she knew. Closer than that, even. Brothers. Practically. But not really. And when he'd seen an opportunity to eclipse him, Hunter had more than taken it.
Honestly, she'd always seen the star power behind Hunter and found that he was much better without the other man.
Still, when rumors began to swirl that the Heartbreak Kid was potentially making a comeback, Stephanie sought out her husband first, to check in on his feelings on the matter. She promised him, as they talked about it in hushed whispers backstage at a show, that all he had to do was say the word.
"And what?" Hunter asked dumbly, still a bit stunned by the general topic. He'd thought that he'd done away with Shawn. Put it all behind him. For the other guy to be sniffing around the company again caused a pit to form in his stomach.
But as Stephanie rubbed his arm sympathetically, he knew she didn't really understand the cold sweat that broke out over his forehead.
He wasn't afraid of Shawn.
He wasn't afraid of anyone.
He was the biggest, baddest, mother fucking asshole around.
No, if Shawn came around for a battle, Hunter would more than take care of him.
Btu if he came for something else…
He wasn't embarrassed by it.
Or ashamed.
He and Shawn were very close.
Very. Close.
Their partnership went beyond the ring. They spent hours together, training gyms, traveling to show, bunking in the same hotel rooms, fuck, sharing women.
Very rock and roll, very how he'd always envisioned the lifestyle.
But then something changed.
He couldn't explain it to someone outside of the business. Or even some of them in it. The connection he and Shawn had...it had become physical more than once.
Intimate, maybe, but Hunter never felt that way about it.
It was different with Shawn.
Than a woman.
They weren't fucking after going on a date or anything.
It was always after training. Long gym sessions. A hard match out in the ring.
They kissed once, in the locker room showers after a show, and Hunter had never had another man though his cock before, but Shawn stroked him off while they made out and they didn't talk about it again.
Not when they left the showers.
Not three days later when they fucked in the hotel room.
There was nothing to talk about.
It felt natural.
They were that close to one another. He talked to Shawn about everything. The company, women, their families.
And when they felt like it, Hunter would let Shawn lube up his asshole and fuck him.
But then things changed.
They felt distant to one another and Hunter saw Shawn had gotten them as far as he possibly could; if he wanted full control of the company, it meant DX needed a new look.
So yes, he betrayed his best friend. His practical brother.
It was the name of the game.
If anything, he was sure that Shawn wouldda done the same, if only he'd thought of it first.
"And," Stephanie was saying as she stroked his bicep and looked at him with twinkling eyes, "if you don't want him around, I'll make sure that doesn't happen. Did you forget who I am?"
They were in a weird period too, he and Steph.
A run of bad luck had put them both on edge. Steph's family was back in the picture, but they'd more or less found an unsteady peace. Shawn showing back up, even removed from all he was to Hunter, could absolutely shatter that. He'd have Vince on higher alert, anyways, which always played poorly for anyone on the man's side.
He was naturally suspicious; with founded reason, he was impossible to be around.
Shaking head some to his wife, Hunter assured her that no matter what happened with Shawn, he'd be okay.
"It's the never ending story around here, babe," he replied simply. "Shit's in the past. If Shawn fucks with us, I'll end him. Don't worry about it."
He wanted to seem more in control then. Didn't wanna be the one comforted. He kissed Steph, deeply, and when they broke apart, the rose tint to her cheeks nearly brought one to his own.
He loved Stephanie.
A lot.
She wasn't perfect. She was shrill, demanding, and a bitch, quite honestly, but he found himself to typically be the more masculine versions of all those things. Loud, aggressive, and an asshole. They both were out for themselves, but had been willing to include the other in that term.
It never left his mind, what he'd done to Shawn.
He wondered at times if Stephanie considered it as well.
If she worried for her own standing, once she no longer brought him benefits.
But after their first year or so of marriage, things had leveled a bit. His commitment to Stephanie grew far beyond the company and when they nestled together each night, he found that he didn't care for what she brought him standings wise, but more so the adoration she held for him.
Stephanie thought that he was Superman, practically.
When he was sad, she'd stroke his hair and let him nuzzle into her breasts as they slept. When he was happy, they celebrated however he wanted, going out or staying in. Partying or fucking.
They fucked a lot.
Stephanie was far more lewd than he'd initially imagined.
She always seemed so innocent, just poor little Steph, being tormented or kidnapped or whatever sick thing Vince was into that week.
But she wasn't so innocent.
Wasn't poor or little.
Steph was playing a game too, always, and so far had let him onto them. There excessive PDA was important to building up to her father's humiliation. Her new attitude wasn't so new, but rather her doing away with the innocuous one prior. Steph was a manipulator.
She wasn't someone trust.
But he did fully, spilling his guts to her with little prompting nearly every night.
Steph knew all the tricks to get shit out of him.
She just loved his cock, she insisted a lot, when he was huffy or mad at her and, maybe if he just let her give him a kiss? They could make up? And if he just pulled down his pants, she could kiss right here he ached the most.
Please, Hunter, she begged whenever they found.
She just wanted to make him feel good.
He'd never had a woman that was so interested in every portion of his body.
The first time Steph shoved her face in his armpit, after they'd fucked, he thought it was illicit enough, but she bit at his flesh, teeth and tongue tangling in the unkept hair, raking between them even, as she slowly drew back.
She couldn't get enough of him.
She swore it to him.
Nearly every day.
Stephanie truly believed in him. In his abilities. Both in the ring and out. Whenever he was at his lowest, he could always tell her about whatever it was that was bothering him, eating away at his soul, and she'd talk him through it.
But talking to Steph about this…
He'd discussed past relationships with her.
This wasn't a relationship.
At least not in his normal sense.
Shawn had never been his boyfriend.
In fact, he was actively involved with someone for the majority of the time they were fucking.
Both of them had been.
When he said that he loved Stephanie, it wasn't in the same way that he loved Shawn.
He wanted to protect Stephanie.
She was his wife. The future mother of his children. For all her mighty and power, Stephanie liked for him to make over her just as much as he did in the reverse. When she was upset, hysterical or vengeful, at her mother, father, brother, whatever unlucky wrestler crossed her eyesight, or even him, Hunter, Stephanie needed someone to talk her back down.
To remind her not to scorch the entire Earth for something she'd rationalize away soon enough.
Steph was a hot head.
But not an unpredictable one.
Once you got passed her initial aggression, most of the things that really set her up were ones that needed internal reworking. She'd grown up equally getting every single little thing she wanted while also being raised by two of the most obnoxious people Hunter had ever met. When they weren't actively pitting her against one another after spat over money, cheating or both money and cheating, Vince and Linda seemed to take extra care in molding Steph to see their way as the only one.
She struggled encountering and accepting opposing viewpoints.
Steph didn't understand a lot of the other guys in the locker rooms. Why they drank so much, what they were so angry about. Really. What deep down thing they were all running from.
"Not everyone grew up like you," he'd tell her softly at night after she sniffled her last sniffle over whatever disagreement she'd found herself in the middle of that day up at work. Pressing a fingertip to her nose, he pressed down gently. "Princess. Some people fought for what they have and get upset when you threaten to take it away."
But Stephanie had a lot of fight in her too.
She was naturally defiant, self-righteous, and easily the only person he wanted by his side as he wrecked havoc on her father's halls.
He couldn't risk losing her.
So he went to see Shawn.
A few weeks had passed since Stephanie first warned of the man's arrival before he started hanging around locker rooms and gyms again. He'd been rehabbing, building himself back better, out west and kept completely off the radars of anyone in the business.
Reinvention.
That's what it was.
The Shawn Michael's Hunter approached backstage had clear eyes and when Hunter outstretched his hand ins something of the truce, the other man pulled him into a hug. It was tight, how it used to be, and Hunter wanted to pull away, but he didn't.
He couldn't.
"We're good, man," Shawn laughed at him a bit as, breaking apart, he noted the hesitance in the other man's gaze. Keeping his eyes locked on Hunter's, the other man smiled as he insisted, "I needed that time away. I… I wasn't right in the head before. But I'm better now. Different."
He looked it. Felt it. Hunter had never seem him look so genuinely happy. The first few days of his return, as Hunter wrestled internally with the decision to approach the man, if it should be on or off the air, he'd seen Shawn be nothing more than happy to be back.
Their focus was on different things.
Hunter was currently in the gunning for a new title opportunity.
Shawn was just hoping to be able to hack it on the road again without slipping back down.
Folding his arms over his chest, Hunter replied the man's implication of change, "So am I."
"So I've heard." Shawn's eyes fell to the shiny ring that lay over Hunter's ring finger, but his expression didn't change. Even if anything, he snickered some as he ribbed, "Can't believe I didn't make the guest list for the nuptials."
Hunter bit back his own grin, replying, "Was a closed affair."
"Really?" Shawn's eyes were alight and there was no malice in his tone, no hint of deception, as he contended, "You always seemed much more open," before excusing himself and going off to finish getting ready for the show that night.
And Hunter knew then that he had to tell Stephanie.
He'd never seen what happened between he and Shawn as a secret. Something to be used against him. Finding out that the two of them were fucking, if anything, would just make his bashing the other man's skull in look even more sinister. If he could do that to someone he cared that deeply about, what could he do to the rest of them?
But it was something that he didn't want Steph to hear from the wrong person.
Something about Shawn's demeanor worried him that the man might purposely spread shit about him.
Not even the full story.
If Shawn leaked that he'd been one (or more) of the guys in the locker room, Stephanie would lose her shit at Hunter. She'd accuse him of currently doing, no matter how he tried to explain it away to her. They'd had a moment, early in their relationship, where she'd asked him to tell her honestly all the girls in the company he'd fucked and he'd been honest.
It wasn't hard; it wasn't a very long list. Or one at all, really.
She'd given him one in return, about the men, that didn't fully make his skin crawl and things had been left at that.
She'd never asked him again and he never had her.
And though Stephanie hadn't outright asked him which of the guys he'd had relations with, it felt like a lie by omission.
Why lie, he imagined her insisting to him, about something he wasn't hiding?
He waited until they were both back home, off the road for a few days, so he could properly handle any fallout. Hunter treated her to lunch and shopping, which of course tipped Stephanie off that something was up, but she couldn't have ever guessed the words that fell from her husband's mouth.
When they'd gotten home and he'd suggested they take a bubble bath together, she decided she couldn't take the suspense any longer. She'd played coy up very well before, to get all the things she'd wanted, but back home with nearly an entire new wardrobe after dining on the finest of cuisines, she was ready to have her heart broken.
That's what she imagined he was building to, as she finally cornered him in the bedroom as they were setting her shopping bags in the closet to sort through later. He was standing in their walk-in, even offering to do that task for her and, finally, Stephanie's desire to know the truth won out.
"What are you hiding, Hunter?" she asked while backing him into a rack of clothes. He'd had a frightened expression multiple times through the day, but he looked down right terrified then. Not aggressive at all. Defensive. Swallowing, Stephanie found it just as hard to force his gaze as he had with keeping hers. "What did you do?"
"Nothing," he insisted, but all her surrounding clothes felt too tight and he couldn't breath, honest, with the way she was staring at him, somewhere between prematurely hurt and angry, his words no doubt determining which came first.
"Hunter-"
"I didn't, Stephanie." He dug deep within himself to remember that he was the fucking Game; he couldn't be intimidated by her. Trying hard to glare back, he said, "I… I have tell you something, okay? Something…personal."
"Are you okay?" Her voice broke some as it was concern then, clouding her eyes as she reached out for him. "Oh, baby, what-"
"I'm fine," he assured her, but Steph squeezed his arm anyways and the man's eyes slipped closed. Softly, to the darkness, he said, "I… It's Shawn."
Her squeeze turned into a grip and immediately, her eyes darkened.
"I'll get rid of him," she vowed. As his eyes grew and he shook his head, she only insisted up to him, "I'll… Fuck, I'll do something, baby. Okay? What do you think? That he's going to try and get you back? Or-"
"I slept with him, Steph."
Her hand fell from his arm and his world was ending, Hunter knew it was as he said her name and she didn't understand, he realized that, she just needed to let him explain-
"When," she growled as he was the one holding her then, a hand tight on her forearm as he tried to get her to stay with him there, to not run off, do whatever she was about to, it didn't matter.
"I don't fucking know. I guess the last time was, like, '98 or-"
"Hunter, what?"
"I told you," he complained as he looked back on him now in annoyance, "that you don't understand."
"I really fucking don't," she agreed with a growl of her own. "You spend all day being super fucking nice to me to… What? Brag about how you fucked someone a year before I even fucking knew you?"
"I'm not...bragging, Stephanie."
"Then-"
"I…" He let her go, turning from her as he ran a hand through his hair and huffed. "I just…. I was afraid that you'd hear it from someone else and think…"
"Think?" she prompted as he trailed off, but she knew, anyways, and when he wouldn't turn back to her, she reached for his arm and pulled her back to him then. As he stood before her with a dark glare, she only returned it as she asked, "Have you slept with anyone else? Since we were married?" At the slight shake of his head, she insisted, "Then that's all I give a shit about. My god, you had me freaked."
The world was coming back to him then, the air more breathable and they'd been panting, so worked up, and the bath could wait until after he had her bent over the bathroom counter, taking his dick as they both watched the other inn the mirror. Her sobs were heaven and she gave him more than he knew what to do with, when he leaned down to bite into her shoulder and he was with Stephanie.
Always.
"But I was never with him like that anyways," he further explained in their large, circular jetted tub that evening. Everything worth staring at usually was hidden beneath the bubbles, but he found that Steph's eyes, as she tilted her head back to meet his own, were all he wanted to see then anyways. "I'm not…"
"It's okay, baby," she insisted, a hand stroking at his chest as she added, "If you like men too-"
"It's not romantic." There. That was the word he'd been struggling to find for days. As Steph gazed up at him, he insisted, "I wasn't dating Shawn. When we would train together, or were working together out in the ring, it's… God, baby, I can't even explain it." When he saw her expression drop, he was sure to reach out and cradle her chin between his thumb and forefinger, insisting, "It's different than what I feel for you, Stephie, but that doesn't mean it's better. Shawn helped a lot, coming up. We fought together. Bled together. There were times he was the only person in the world I could talk to. When we'd fuck, it wasn't like I was making love to him. He wasn't my...boyfriend or something. It was like bonding. Just to a level other people don't understand yet."
Stephanie considered his words in silence, eyes still down on the bubbly water below, watching as the fluffy white bubbles burst and more took their place.
"Do we ever have sex like that?"
"What?"
Blue eyes returning to his dark, she searched them for a moment before asking, "Do you ever think of our sex as a way to...bond?"
"I… I don't know." Honestly, before Shawn's reappearance, he hadn't considered their interactions as deeply as he had, the past few weeks. In preparing to inform her of all this, he'd done so much numerating on it that he'd come to a lot of conclusions. He'd never needed to consider the relationship he had with his wife so intently. His hand beneath the water stroked absently at her hip as the woman snuggled closer in his lap. Nuzzling his head against hers, he insisted, "But I know that I feel closer to you than I ever have anyone, Stephanie. Ever. This...our marriage…. I'd never do anything to hurt you."
She nodded this in, not sure how much she believed it, but accepting of it in the moment all the same. The man had sweated about telling her about a past relationship.
Though she couldn't say she didn't see he man ever hurting her deeply, cheating, at the moment, felt very far from them.
Slowly, they put night behind them.
Stephanie bristled now, around Shawn, same as she did anyone she thought might steal her husband's favor, but she and the man hardly ever interacted to begin with. While she wouldn't say she disliked him, there were enough people in the locker room to focus on that they rarely had to encounter one another.
Until one night when Shawn was jumped after a successful match against Scotty 2 Hotty found him on the receiving end of a beat down by Too Cool. Only having been back a month or two, Shawn didn't have many people willing to save his ass and, just as he was about to catch the Stink Face from Rikishi, it felt like there was no chance of escape.
But then, suddenly, Hunter came running down the ramp, sledge hammer in hand, and fuck them all three up with it, bashing it into Sexay's head and breaking the wood over Scotty's chest. The commotion had been enough for Shawn to weasel his way out of the ring's corner, jumping up to catch Rikishi off guard with a boot to the chin just as Hunter pedigreed Scotty into the ground and the crowd loved it.
Hunter hadn't felt them behind him in a long ass time.
Definitely not so fully.
They faced one another, Hunter and Shawn did as the other men rolled from the ring, and the sledgehammer was between them. Ready for either to pick it up and defend themselves-
Or attack the other.
But when the tension burst, it was became the pair embraced, fully, and watching from behind the curtain, Stephanie felt something burn in her deepest depths, but it would take the rest of the night, avoiding Hunter and anyone, really, before she was able to understand what it meant.
Hunter was freaking out in their hotel room, pacing about and waiting for her arrival. In his mind, he and Stephanie had last spoken on a good note, her acknowledging she didn't have much to do that night on the show and intended to linger about in the wings. His match was a singles and, besides escorting him out, she'd actually been pretty well-mannered.
Then, as he was cleaning off in his private dressing room after the match, he'd seen from the tiny CRT TV that was suspended in the corner, Shawn being cornered and he just…
Reacted.
He couldn't find Steph backstage after.
He tried. Honest. Even when Shawn laughed, patting him on the back as they ducked together back through the curtain, all Hunter wanted to do was find his wife. Explain to her. Again. Before she made assumptions.
Steph was good at those.
He turned down Shawn and even some of the others when he got multiple offers to hang out after the show that night. They were on the west coast, so it had been an early one, but there was no way in hell he was doing anything before speaking with her.
So he went back to the hotel, when it was obvious she was gone, to wait.
He was sitting on the end of the bed, twiddling his thumbs as the clock radio on the nightstand played a local rock station, when Stephanie finally made her return. He wanted to gripe at her, knew he would in any other circumstance, because if there was one thing Hunter didn't do, it was chase after someone.
Not in that way at least.
All he'd done was save his former friend from noxious gas.
If anything, he deserved high praise. A medal of honor.
He was thinking up other ways to make Steph laugh as her face held no such joy, but he couldn't force himself into that tone and, as she only came closer, the man could merely gulp.
Without saying a word, Stephanie slipped her shoes off and approached the bed, keeping even gaze with Hunter the entire time. Her name was on his tongue, nervous and unsure as she approached, and when Steph stuck out her hand, she saw him wince.
He thought she'd slap him.
It hurt her to know he thought that.
Her hand gripped his shoulder as Stephanie straddled the man's waist and Hunter, confused, but not an idiot, knew better than resist. She worked her hips over his, through his jeans and her panties as he hiked up her skirt, but it was when Hunter gasped that she truly seized her opportunity. Their mouths were so close that when her lips met his, she'd hardly had to move at all. Her free hand balled the faded band tee he wore in her fists as she broke for air.
Ducking her head, Steph's mouth was right by his ear, her breath hot and bringing a low moan from the man beneath her as she whispered, "You can fuck Shawn."
He didn't understand. Especially not as the hand on his shoulder shoved him down.
Stephanie leaned over the man further then, to his other ear. Breath hot, she insisted into that one, "But I get to watch."
You guys wanna do a short story?
This was actually one of my first ideas for higher rated Steph/Trips stuff, but it felt too big to tackle first up. I'm not sure how many chapters this will end up being, it's not going to be plot heavy and it exists purely in a timeline of it's own making. Quad shit never happens, no divorce or anything. Just something fun.
