Ronda checked herself in the full length mirror in her hotel room one last time. Yes, she decided, she was ready to head down to the restaurant for her dinner date with Seth. She was happy with the way she looked in her dark blue dress. However, having looked in the mirror, she now felt strangely unable to look away from her own face in the reflection. The person in the mirror looked nervous again, frightened, even.
"Even the fall from the apron?" Seth had asked her in the hallway earlier in the night, after the match. His voice repeated itself in her head several times as the familiar feeling of nausea began to make its presence known in her stomach. Although he undoubtedly meant well, Seth's keenness to discuss her neck injury in an attempt to help her was having the opposite effect. The neck injury was something she actively tried not to think about, let alone going around talking about it with people. In fact, she never talked about it with anyone. Fear was not an emotion she allowed herself to show anywhere but in privacy, as hard as that was proving to be lately. Without realising that she had been about to do it, she felt the fingers of her left hand touching the small scar on the back of her neck which had been caused by the surgery. It was a habit that she was totally unable to break, and now, as with every other time, it caused the memories of that awful day and the lengthy rehab that had followed her surgery to all come flooding back to her.
"Ronda? Are you okay sweetheart? Come on, up you get." Her mother's face had appeared above her as she lay motionless on the grass, having just made the realisation that she could not feel or move her legs. The older woman had smiled nervously and held out a hand for her to use to help with getting to her feet.
"Mom," Ronda gasped out in panic, "I can't. My legs. I can't move my legs..."
"What?" Her mother asked, her eyes widening in horror.
"I can't feel my legs," Ronda managed to stammer through her fear.
Her mother crouched down beside her, but she knew better than to try to move someone who potentially had a serious neck injury. "Oh God, baby, let me call for help." She took out her phone. Ronda saw her gulp and saw the panic in her eyes intensify. "Uh... there's no service out here. Oh God. I'm going to have to go and try to..."
"Help me mom!" Ronda pleaded, even though she knew that there was nothing that her mother or anyone else could do for her.
Snapping out of the memory, Ronda ran for the bathroom and fell to her knees before dry heaving over the toilet. Realising that on this occasion she was not actually going to be sick, she sank to a sitting position on the floor beside the toilet and buried her face in her hands, letting out a loud scream of anguish and frustration, the volume of it magnified by the tiled walls of the small bathroom.
"Get the hell out of my head," she pleaded with the memories that tortured her so persistently. As usual, the second memory quickly followed the first and paid her a visit. The familiar scene of the doctor's office, with the doctor sitting behind his desk in front of her.
The kind looking old guy glanced at a folder that sat open in front of him on his desk before returning his attention to her with a smile. "Well, Ronda," he said, the warmth in his smile matched in his voice, "I've looked over your scans and I have good news."
"Really?" Ronda asked uneasily.
"Yeah. Honestly, I couldn't have better news. It's taken us a long time to get here, but you've made a full recovery. I'm happy to say that you I can sign you off; you don't need to come back and see me again, and you can return to your uh... activities that you enjoy. Judo, boxing, and even horse riding, if you wish."
The final part of the doctor's sentence had been an attempt at a joke, but they had the opposite effect to that which he intended. "Thank you Doctor," Ronda said and hurried out of the office as fast as she could, ignoring his request for her to wait a moment. As she rushed out of the building to her car, tears stung her eyes because the doctor was wrong; there was no way that she could return to doing any of the things that she loved to do the most.
As she sat on the cold bathroom floor, tears flowed freely down her cheeks. "I can't go on like this," she told the empty room despairingly.
It was then, sitting on that bathroom floor, that Ronda realised she was at a crossroads in her life. She was hundreds of miles from home, alone, in a hotel room bathroom, sitting on the floor, crying her eyes out. There were only two ways to go forward from here: either she had to quit her job with WWE, go back home and find something else to do for a living that didn't involve the memories of her neck injury being brought up constantly, or she had talk to someone and try to get help.
But wasn't talking to people and getting therapy or whatever they called it for weak people? She was sure she was not a weak person. Sitting in some shrink's office and talking through her life like some kind of basket case was not something she could ever imagine being able to do. Hell, there was only one person aside from her family that she had ever let in on the story of how she had gotten injured in the first place, and that was Seth Rollins. Why she had allowed herself to do that on her first date with him was still a mystery to her. The only guess she could make was that it was how genuinely kind, compassionate and trustworthy he had seemed. Maybe if she opened up to Seth he would be able to help her? But then, why would he want to be saddled with her personal baggage?
"Shit!" Ronda exclaimed, leaping up from the floor. She did not have a clue how long she had been there. Checking her watch confirmed that she was late for her dinner date, and she was going to have to fix her make up again before she could leave, since it been ruined by her tears.
When the makeup had been applied for the second time, Ronda was once again staring at herself in a mirror. This time there was a look of determination on her face. She was not going to quit WWE; she had never quit from anything before in her life and she damned well was not going to start now.
"Talk to him, you stupid bitch," she growled at the reflection in the mirror.
Sitting alone at a table set for two was possibly one of the most awkward feelings in the world. Seth felt like a total prick looking awkwardly at those who were sitting around him, chatting with their partners, friends or families.
"Can I get you another?" a server asked as he passed by, stopping and gesturing at Seth's empty beer glass. He was tempted to tell the guy not to bother, cut his losses and get out of the restaurant, but he decided to have one more beer and wait a little longer for Ronda to show up. She had been keen on the idea of a dinner date earlier, yet now there was no sign of her. It did not make sense for her to no-show. He had heard of being fashionably late, of course, but this was something else entirely.
His mind began to wander, and he found himself thinking that Ronda Rousey was certainly no ordinary woman. He had looked her up online a few days before and found out that not only was she an Olympic bronze medalist in judo, she was also a fourth dan black belt in the art as well. The reality was that she was likely one of the toughest unarmed women on the planet, and that was one hell of a turn on for him. It was a shame that her incredible talent was being wasted on a career as a referee in WWE. Sure, she was obviously a very good referee, but she could be so much more than that if it was not for her neck injury. Hell, if she was able to compete as one of the divas WWE would have no choice but to put her in the title picture because it would be inconceivable for any of the divas to live with her in the ring. In a real fight, most of the men on the roster would probably struggle to get the better of her.
The server arrived with Seth's second beer, and he began to work on it. Drinking beer was not a regular thing for him, especially since he had joined the WWE, least of all during the week. However, there were sometimes occasions to indulge himself and he had decided that tonight would be one such occasion. He planned to enjoy a steak, the best dessert on the menu and three beers. That was how many it took for him to start to get tipsy these days, embarrassing as that would be to admit to Roman and Dean. Although he was not as impatient as some guys, Ronda's lateness was starting to grate on his nerves, but he remained confident that she was not going to stand him up.
At long last, he saw Ronda enter the restaurant, looking breathtakingly stunning in a dark blue dress. He gave a little wave which assisted her in locating him in the busy restaurant, and she hurried in his direction as he set his half consumed beer down on the table and stood to greet her, being as polite as possible.
"Hey, Seth," she smiled. "I'm sorry I'm so late. I, uh, lost track of the time."
"Hi, Ronda," Seth gave his date a peck on the cheek. "You look great, and it's fine. Have a seat. They have quite a good menu here actually."
They both took their seats opposite each other and Seth watched Ronda open and scan over the menu, thinking that one thing she clearly was not too great at was lying. Her feeble excuse about losing track of time had been just that: a lie. Ronda quickly made a selection and closed her menu.
The server was busy with other tables, given how busy the restaurant was, so Seth struck up a conversation about the city that they were going to be in the next week for Raw and Smackdown. As he talked, he could tell that something was preventing Ronda's attention from being fully focused on what he was saying. It was the kind of conversation that you had when someone was listening to you but also thinking about something else at the same time. He described a restaurant that he, Roman and Dean had happened across the last time they had been in the city, and how nice its location next to a river was for sitting outside and eating.
"We should meet up early on the Monday and grab some lunch there, if you want to I mean," he offered.
"Yeah," Ronda said, a vague smile on her face as her left hand reached up to the back of her neck. The movement looked almost subconscious to Seth, so he chose not let on that he had noticed it, or that he had figured out the reason for Ronda's distracted behaviour and for the fact that she was spending half of the time avoiding looking him in the eyes. Yet again, her neck injury was playing on her mind as it seemed to so often.
As he kept up his end of the conversation, Seth's mind was now as occupied with the injury as Ronda's obviously was. Roman had advised him not to bring up the subject with her again, saying that it would be better to wait for her to do so with him when, or rather if, she decided to. But maybe that was exactly the problem, he considered. Maybe she was one of those people who kept things bottled up inside and did not talk to others about her problems. With something as traumatising as a near paralysing neck injury, that could be a very destructive thing to do. It was all well and good people not wanting to bring up the subject and upset her, but it was not necessarily for the best. But how could he actually bring up the subject sensitively? That was the big problem he had to solve, as he needed her to open up, not shut down.
Ronda had just asked Seth a question. He had not answered right away, which caused her to stop looking down at her fingers which she was nervously playing with and instead look across at her date. Their eyes met and she saw in them that he knew what was going on her head. She supposed that the way she was acting had hardly made a secret of it. Those deep brown eyes told her that Seth knew that she was dwelling on her neck injury again, and that she had not been honest with him about it. Remembering what she had told herself back in her room, she opened her mouth to talk but Seth beat her to it.
"You don't have to keep it all bottled up inside," he said gently, with such compassion in his voice that it instantly made her feel like bursting into tears, something that had been very foreign to her before the injury, but not so since. "It's eating you alive, I can tell. If you don't want to talk to me, let me get the number of a therapist for you. I won't go to Hunter. I'll do it on the quiet, I promise. Let me help you."
"Sorry for the wait sir, ma'am. What can I get for you?" The server had finally decided to show up with the worst possible timing. Feeling very frustrated Seth allowed Ronda to order first and then ordered for himself. The server left and an awkward silence descended on the table.
Looking down at her hands once more, Ronda finally mumbled, "I'm not going to a therapist, Seth. That's just... It's just not me."
"Okay," Seth agreed easily, knowing that this was a very delicate moment. He needed to apply no pressure. "So talk to your parents, or a friend, or me, or Stephanie. Yeah, I bet Stephanie would be a good option."
Looking across the table he saw that Ronda had gone very pale and looked like she might be about to be sick. He was about to get up and walk around the table to escort her to the bathroom when she spoke. "I need to get drunk. Very drunk. Then I'll talk to you. We'll go up to my room and talk... If you really mean it?"
At that moment Seth barely considered that his prospects for having sex with Ronda that night had long since disappeared, despite just receiving an invitation to her room. All he cared about was that she was willing to talk to him. For whatever reason, he was the one she wanted to trust. "Of course I mean it," he assured her. "I mean, I'm not a professional and I've never had a serious injury, knock on wood." He knocked on the table leg which drew a little smile from Ronda as he continued, "But I'll listen. You can tell me as much or as little as you like. Honestly, I'd say let it all out, but that's your choice. Either way, I'll say nothing to anyone about whatever you say to me."
He already suspected that when Ronda finally broke through her own defenses, she would not be able to stop herself talking. That would be a good thing. Rather than sex, there was almost certainly going to be a lot of heartache and tears. It was what Ronda obviously needed desperately, and that mattered more to him than sex. Sex could come another time; at the right time.
The conversation gradually started to flow more easily throughout the meal, as a direct result of the red wine that Ronda was putting away at a considerable pace. Getting drunk was certainly not going to be a problem for her. When they were done, Seth paid for everything and, as agreed, they headed for Ronda's room. The closer they got to the room, the more tension Seth could feel radiating from her.
They entered the room and Ronda sat on the bed, with Seth opposite her in a comfortable chair. Seth thought that she looked like she was close to being sick. For that reason, he gently took her hand and tried to give her a reassuring smile, feeling completely out of his depth - not realising what a great job he was actually doing.
"There's nothing to be afraid of here," he encouraged her. "We're just talking."
Scrunching her eyes closed tightly, Ronda falteringly started to speak. As Seth had expected, it was like pulling the cork on a bottle of champagne which had been vigorously shaken before hand. Her words were soon tumbling out almost faster than he could understand them. Several times he had to gently urge her to slow down or repeat herself when her voice became too lost in her tears for him to understand, but in less than half an hour she had told him everything.
By that point, he was sitting beside her with his arms wrapped tightly around her as she cried into his chest, soaking his shirt with her tears and clinging to him just as tightly as he was holding her. The idea that Dean had inadvertently given to him earlier in the evening returned to him and he decided that he had to go through with it.
"Please stop crying," he said gently, stroking the top of her head. "It's okay, Ronda, you're not hurt any more and you're not going to be hurt again. Your injury was a freak accident, and it's not going to happen again. I'll be honest, I already suspected some of what you've told me. I've been thinking about it, and I've got an idea that I think will help you. If you'll trust me, we can do it tomorrow morning before we have to be at the arena for Smackdown."
"I trust you," Ronda whispered.