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“Hold still or it’s gonna look crooked.”
“This is not what I agreed to,” Drew protests. “At all.”
His ass is fully bared. His dignity is on the floor somewhere under Punk’s sneakers.
Punk snorts. He reaches across to slide his fingers in the waist of Drew’s shorts and yanks them down a bit further to give the artist room to work. He ignores Drew’s grunt of indignance.
“Actually, it’s exactly what you agreed to.”
The artist glances between them. He shrugs, shoves his earpods in and pulls on a pair of black gloves. He has instructions from Punk as to the subject matter, whispered to him earlier while Drew strained to hear as he flipped through a portfolio of examples. The absence of a peanut gallery takes Drew’s mortification down a notch. One witness, he can handle.
He doesn’t acknowledge Punk’s existence again until the dull bass of heavy metal is faintly audible and he feels the press of a razor to his ass, one of the few places on his body that never sees the sun.
“I did fucking not.”
“Yeah, you did. Like, literally.” Punk drags a spare rolling chair over in front of the table so he has a front row seat to Drew’s humiliation ritual. He flops down, kicking one ankle over the other. “God, I knew you’d do this.” He digs through a pocket for his phone. Drew braces himself. “And this is why I wanted it on video so you couldn’t try to weasel your way out of it.”
Punk leans forward and shows Drew the screen.
It’s unnecessary. Drew knows what he’s about to see.
A video of himself. His hair tucked under a cap, a self-assured smirk on his face.
He’d been entertained by Punk’s stakes. Rather than requesting to fuck him like a normal person, Punk wanted to brand him for life and risk the same for himself. Punk’s logic circumventing rationality was not something Drew had predicted but he decided in the scheme of things, it didn't make a difference.
He wishes he could travel back in time and insist on the fucking instead. He’d take that any day of the week over his present situation.
He groans when Punk hits play.
“Go on,” Punk of two weeks ago urges. “Hurry up, my battery’s dying.”
“I, Drew Mcintyre, do solemnly swear to acquiesce to the following: if you beat me in the cage match—fair and square—I’ll do it. I’ll get the damn tattoo. You pick it. Anywhere you want. Any size. Hell, I’ll let you draw the bloody thing if it makes you feel clever. There. Happy?”
The camera pans back to Punk. “Yeah. Same as what he said. This agreement is binding, so on, so forth. Whatever.”
The evidence is irrefutable. Damning. If the case went to court, it would be cut and dry. The prosecution would have the easiest paycheck of their careers. He’d be sentenced to life without parole and housed with a cellmate known as Stool Socrates who philosophizes on the toilet and drops pearls of wisdom like “the seat is cold, but so is life.”
“Fine,” Drew grouses. “But I said that under the assumption that I was going to win. Not you.”
Punk grins. “That was stupid, wasn’t it?” He makes to put the phone away again before he thinks better of it. “We should immortalize this. I might need it one day.”
When Drew finds himself in the crosshairs of the phone camera, he throws up a hand to shield his eyes. His exposed ass seems less important than his face. “Don’t you fuckin’ dare, Punk.”
“Or what?” Punk’s thumb hovers over the shutter. “You gonna challenge me again, Drew? ‘Cause that worked out so well for you last time.”
“For fuck’s sake.” Drew groans in exasperation, glaring at Punk through his fingers. “I’m holding up my end of the bargain. Show some goddamn mercy.”
At the time, accepting Punk’s wager was a matter of simple math: Drew is six-foot-five and close to three hundred pounds of solid muscle. In the ring, he is adaptable, resourceful. He’s been mastering his craft for the last ten years while Punk was fusing with a couch in Chicago somewhere, softening and collecting ring rust. Drew is in his prime, the best shape of his life. Mentally, he’s sound—the very occasional lapse in judgment that landed him in situations such as this notwithstanding.
He’d also been goaded by the fact Sheamus had started a betting pool backstage with him as the clear favorite. If his best friend and the rest of the locker room backed him as much as he backed himself, his victory was a done deal.
It was guaranteed in his mind. A certainty, like the rising of the sun or a hall of famer coming out of retirement for the “one more match” that inevitably turns into a six month world tour, a book deal and an episodic podcast.
His win was guaranteed—at least until Punk weaponized a metal toolbox, split Drew’s head open like an overripe melon, and he hemorrhaged all over the canvas like a stuck pig. He ate a pin, dazed and disoriented. Punk walked away the victor, half-dead himself. The chapter was closed.
Until three weeks later when Punk came to collect his winnings. Drew folded like a losing hand because whatever else he is, he is a man of his word.
Punk is assessing whether he wants to compound the embarrassment. He fiddles with the camera settings, pinches the screen and zooms in on Drew’s scowling face.
He eyes Punk. “Do I have to say fuckin’ please?”
“Close enough.” Punk lays the phone on a nearby table. He jams both hands into his back pockets, rocks the chair back and forwards.
Drew folds his arms. His chin sinks down until it rests on them. The vinyl padding under him is adhered to the front of his thighs and the underside of his arms, hot and slick with his sweat.
He does have one remaining question that does not yet have an adequately heterosexual explanation. “Why my ass?”
Punk shrugs, loose and amused. “Seemed like a waste not to.”
“A waste of ass?” Drew says flatly.
“Crude,” Punk comments. “But you could put it that way, yeah.”
The flaw in Punk’s logic is one Drew would have capitalized on himself without hesitation.
His eyes narrow. “You could have put it on my forehead if you wanted.”
He would have availed himself of the sea before he complied with any such directive—bet or no bet.
Punk lifts his eyebrows. “Now you’re complaining that nobody’s gonna see it? You’re hard to please.”
Drew sneers. “How do you know nobody sees my ass?”
A beat as the implication sinks in.
Punk shifts. Drew buries his face in the sanctuary of his forearms.
The needle takes its first, stinging bite of his skin. It’s comparatively mild to any of the injuries he’s had in his career but it’s a new, novel kind of pain, akin to someone dragging their sharp nails through a patch of tender sunburned skin. Punk has suffered through hours of it, maybe days. Drew wonders if Punk is a masochist or just dedicated to polluting his body with graffiti. He’s an oversharer about his opinions on every topic from the mating rituals of deep sea anglerfish to the history of vending machines in Chicago, so why would broadcasting his atrocious taste in art be any different?
“My point is,” Drew says, “you had your chance to really make me suffer, but you didn’t.”
Punk’s grin is back. “And you could have ripped my head off with your bare hands when it came time to pay the piper but you didn’t. You just yelled at me and got in my car. So.”
Drew glowers at him. “So you’re telling me you’d be doing the same if I’d won? Rolling over?”
Punk taps his left bicep, bared by the sleeveless shirt he’s wearing. “I already have some I regret. Who gives a shit about one more? I care less about what other people think than you do.”
It feels like Punk slapped him—first across one cheek, then the other. But it’s more, too.
Punk’s exposed the heart of him, torn a hole in the fabric that weaves his being together.
He feels seen.
But it’s Punk. So Drew will take that to the grave along with the fact he’d rather have Punk ass-up on a moth-eaten rollaway bed in a dingy Travelodge room than lying ass-up on a tattoo artist’s table in an upscale parlor in downtown Tampa with aircon so frigid his balls have crawled back inside his body cavity.
He makes a point of avoiding Punk’s gaze, scoffing. “Leave the armchair psychology to Seth before you hurt yourself.”
He tenses as the needle drills over a less fleshy area.
Punk scoots his chair closer. “You want me to hold your hand?”
“Get that away from me before I bite it off,” Drew says through clenched teeth.
They lapse into silence.
Punk watches him. The artist hums to himself, using his thumb to spread Drew’s cheek this way and that as he works. Drew fights not to reach back instinctively and tug his shorts up. That little grin tugging at the corners of Punk’s mouth hangs around like an unwelcome swarm of gnats.
It’s a little under ten minutes before the artist pops his earbuds out.
“All done.”
He disposes of the needle carefully and wipes a paper towel with antiseptic solution across the skin.
Drew heaves a sigh. “Let’s see it, then.”
The artist spreads a thin layer of Aquaphor over it and fixes a square of cling wrap to the site with clear tape bordering the edges.
Drew wonders what horror awaits him.
Stick figure Punk stomping stick figure Drew’s head into mincemeat. Best in the world in Comic Sans. Punk’s logo and the date of the match. QR code that links to Punk’s media scrum clusterfuck.
The artist holds a mirror up when Drew tries to twist and see for himself and fails. He’s built for power, not flexibility. He strains to read it for a second but even backwards, he instantly recognizes the words. The letters are tiny but clear, bold-fonted.
MADE IN CHICAGO
He swings back to Punk. “If we have another match, you’re fucked.”
“Yeah, yeah.”