Randy couldn't sleep.
He wasn't wholly surprised by the development. Functioning on a small amount of sleep was part of the package of being a WWE Superstar. He'd quietly slipped out of bed, leaving his WrestleMania date sleeping, her back turned to him. As silently as he could, he slipped out of the bedroom area at the back of the bus, sliding the door quietly shut behind him before he made his way to the TV area.
Over the course of his career — and his life, if he had to be honest with himself — there were always moments, small windows where Randy could step outside of a situation and see that his life was nothing more than a series of increasingly bad decisions. It never stopped him from committing to those bad decisions, but he was at least aware of the state of things. This felt like one of those situations.
He should have known better than to ask a woman he barely knew to tag along for WrestleMania week. He'd known it was a bad idea when he'd typed out the text message backstage at SmackDown, had known it when he'd given it a quick read over, and he'd especially known it when he'd sent it off. She'd jumped at the chance to go to Philadelphia for a week. Randy didn't know why he felt like he would rather die than have Selena see him going stag at the ceremony, but he supposed pride and ego were very funny things when they worked in tandem.
To his credit, as always, Cody was the first to tell Randy that what he'd opted to do was a bad idea on just about every conceivable front, for every party involved. He'd gently told Randy that it probably wasn't a good idea to bring his friend with benefits to WrestleMania week, to meet everyone's wives and girlfriends. Not because she wasn't welcome, but because there was no telling if she was going to be around long enough to integrate into their crazy world. "You're doing this, but you're telling her you don't want to be serious. You're going to send the girl mixed signals," Cody had advised. Randy had assured Cody that this wasn't the case, that this girl — Amy — understood the assignment, but deep down, Randy couldn't help but wonder if Cody was right.
He could only imagine how insane he'd looked to his colleagues since the video package dropped. Despite his best attempts not to sell his absence or everyone's thoughts on the matter, it turned out that he was quite easy to read in this situation. Cody had him spotted almost immediately, but Cody Rhodes had always been too observant for his own good, dating back to their days in the Legacy faction. Randy had met Amy shortly after his soon-to-be-ex-wife filed for divorce, at a bar not too far from his place. He didn't go as often as he did when he was younger, but that night he'd just wanted out of the house. They'd hooked up that night, and he'd told her then he didn't want anything serious. She'd shrugged it off, nonplussed, and since then, the two of them met when he got off the road and had spare energy to burn. Amy seemed cool enough, but he wasn't interested in being exclusive with anyone. To her credit, she seemed fine with that.
She looked good on his arm, though. He had that going for him in Philadelphia. Even if he had zero interest in making her his girlfriend, he could still admit that. Amy was tall and leggy, with broad shoulders, small breasts, a slim waist, and wide hips. Her chocolate hair was cut trendy and stylish, past her shoulders with layers that framed a long and youthful face.
He sat down in front of the TV but made no move to turn it on. Randy sat in silence, watching everything in the darkness zip by. What was he thinking?
He wasn't. As usual.
Having been around the business of professional wrestling for as long as he had — which was honestly his entire life, given his father and grandfather were wrestlers, too — there was very little that Randy hadn't seen or experienced, in and out of the ring. But there, on his bus, in the dark, Randy had to come to terms with the knowledge that he was nervous to get to Philadelphia. It had been months since he'd felt this kind of anxiety, not since he'd come back to wrestling last November following his fusion, and he knew that Selena Sky Morrissey was the cause of those nerves. He had to remind himself that whatever happened, he'd earned it. If she wanted to slap him, to throw a drink in his face, he'd earned that.
After everything, Selena outright ignoring him and his existence felt like the best case scenario. He honestly didn't want to think about the worst case, but Randy was willing to bet that Shane McMahon was going to be involved somehow. As far back as he could remember, Shane and Selena had been thick as thieves, and he knew that Shane was going to spend the week watching over Selena like a hawk.
He was about halfway through an almost fourteen hour road trip from St. Louis to Philadelphia. He'd hoped Amy would prove to be a decent distraction from current events, but she'd spent almost the whole time with her eyes glued to her phone. It left him with a lot of time to think about every possible scenario, whether he wanted to or not. If Amy had noticed how tense and distracted he was, she'd said nothing about it.
Absent elements and unknown factors were eating him alive, and everyone could see it, but nobody outside of Cody and Shane knew the full story. Selena's radio silence for over a decade had once been a blessing, but he should have known better than to think she'd stay in the shadows forever. It was wrestling, after all. Now, her return made him uneasy. If she'd spent the better part of the last decade blasting Randy and his entire family tree in every shoot interview she could book, he would have at least known what he was about to walk into.
They'd been a high-profile couple. There was a chance WWE cameras would want to film some kind of reunion between them. The thought of that scared the bejesus out of him, but not nearly as much as what she could say about him with a live microphone in front of her face and millions watching around the world.
Or maybe, just like her Hall of Fame package, the loudest words she'd speak of him were none at all.
Randy knew he shouldn't care about the situation. He'd told people around him that he didn't, but he knew nobody believed it. Randy and Selena had split so long ago that she felt like an alternate timeline, like some other life. If it were anybody else, he wouldn't have cared, if he had to be honest. Making enemies in the wrestling business was an inevitability, and he'd made plenty over his twenty-plus year career, man and woman alike.
Since the press release, she'd consumed his thoughts. Time and experience made him understand and accept that while things weren't rosy between them at the end, mostly because of her bond with Shane, she'd still deserved better than what he'd done to her.
Once again, he found himself thinking backwards, this time to a spring night in 2004. Even after so long, he could remember everything about that night, from the weather to the location to what they had been wearing. He could see it vividly inside his head, like a movie.
Back then, despite being there for under two years, he'd already had a reputation for a myriad of different things. He was seen by his peers as a playboy, a menace, a youthful idiot, and a moody bastard. Selena saw him as all of these things. Thanks to the lineage of his family, he'd walked into WWE with the weight of the world on his broad shoulders. Back then he hadn't been sure he could measure up, but Triple H and Evolution had taken him under their wing, proclaiming that they could see his greatness.
For the first while, he loved being in Evolution. He'd known Ric since he was little, since his father ran in a rowdy crowd with Roddy Piper and Ric. He'd heard plenty of wild stories growing up, and once he'd entered the business, quickly found himself with several, all of them involving Ric. Evolution had been a boys club, and that was fine by Randy, but then Dave had to go and fall head over heels for Rio.
Randy didn't know how Rio had discovered his infatuation for Selena back then, but she had. When she began hanging around with Evolution, Randy had quickly decided that he didn't like her, and he knew that Rio could feel that frostiness. Dave had talked to him about it, and had even brushed off Randy's concerns about her. Rio was a beautiful woman, but she had the darkest soul and blackest heart of any woman he'd ever met, and that covered his three ex-wives.
For the first few months she'd spent with Evolution, she'd tried to extend some kind of olive branch to Randy. She'd tried to win his friendship and favor by divulging all the secrets she'd held for Selena, secrets he knew she'd be mortified over. The things she told him would have put a target on her back if the other guys had found out. While he'd appreciated that intel, it only made him dislike her more.
One of the secrets Rio had spilled was that Selena was untouched and innocent in every way. She'd never even been kissed, she'd told him with a roll of her eyes. The revelation had stunned Randy. Rio had derisively informed him that she was married to wrestling. She had no time to spare for anyone or anything else.
That spring night in 2004 had been an unmitigated disaster. A few weeks had passed since Rio had turned her back on Selena and joined Evolution full-time. The war between Evolution and the blue brand was beginning to heat up. A brawl had broken out in the ring, and somehow, in the chaos, Selena had gotten hurt, and it had inadvertently been Randy's fault. In the aftermath, he'd gone outside to have a cigarette, clear his head, and get away from the rest of the group. He'd expected to have some time by himself, but in a weird twist of fate, Selena just so happened to be out there, too, also looking to clear her head after everything that had transpired.
That night, underneath a black and starless sky, Randy Orton had been her first kiss.
He always remembered that night vividly, not because of the kiss, but because it was the first time since he'd come onto the WWE roster that he'd ever dropped his guard completely and allowed himself to be vulnerable with someone. Selena radiated kindness, and as he'd come to know her, he'd learned she was empathetic to her own detriment sometimes. He knew others would have dismissed him, but that night, he'd seen that his words hadn't totally fallen on deaf ears. Selena hadn't fully believed what he was telling her, and she'd told him so, but she hadn't totally dismissed him. No matter how angry or exhausted she was by him, Selena never dismissed him.
He knew their encounter that night caused her a lot of headaches, but it did nothing to keep either of them away from each other. As the power struggle between Evolution and SmackDown got more heated and violent, Selena became more hostile and suspicious of him, but for whatever reason, she could never turn him away. She'd rejected his advances plenty of times, had even tried dating someone else, but once they were caught in each other's webs, there was no getting out.
In those days, he didn't want to leave. If things had played out the way he'd wanted them to, he would have put a ring on her finger, but marriage wasn't something she'd ever been interested in back then.
He reached for his phone with a sigh, his free hand rubbing at his face. He was exhausted, but he couldn't sleep. As Philadelphia and WrestleMania drew closer, Randy couldn't help but feel like his bus was driving him right to the end of the world.