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**Vincent Lane** · **08-01-2015, 03:42 PM** Total Eclipse of the Heart -->

My mother taught me only a handful of things while I was a little girl in Canada. Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for, is something I remember her saying from time to time, while reaching for another bottle. Sometimes, they come true, but not the way you expected them to do.

Now I know she was right. While I watch the ceiling fan over me throw shadows on the wall and listen to my fiancé catch his breath next to me in bed, her words are what my mind keeps drifting back to. Be careful what you wish for.

I spent the last month crying over the comatose, barely alive body of the love of my life, “Loverboy” Vinnie Lane… well, just Vinnie to me. I went about my days with a strong face, because that’s what I’ve always done. The one other thing my mother ever taught me in between passing out and drinking was to never let them see that they hurt you. Ever.

So the makeup stayed on. The tan stayed golden. The roots were bleached. Outside of that hospital room, I stayed impeccable. A dream for other girls to strive for. Inside, though, I was a tumultuous maelstrom of emotion and pain.

Now, though, he’s awake. Alive. He even seems better than before, physically. The doctors couldn’t find a single trace of post-concussive symptoms, nor could they find any other ailments that might prevent him from resuming the life of a main event level professional wrestler.

He simply got up out of bed and was one hundred percent… perfect.

Well, his body was.

“Babe, grab my smokes?”

He shoves his foot against my thigh, not-so-gently suggesting that I hurry up and do what he asks. Here we lie, in a tangled mass of satin sheets, just like a thousand times before. The sweat evaporating from our naked skin, the smell of our passion still lingering in the air.

But something is different.

“Sure.”

I swing my feet out of bed and onto the shag carpeting of our bedroom. As I move around the bed, Vinnie reaches his hand out and slaps my ass, hard. The sting is sudden and crisp, and it makes me yelp in both surprise and pain. Normally, this sort of playful interaction would be followed by him grabbing me in his arms and pulling me back into bed for another raucous round of lovemaking, but this time? He just laughs at the red hand print blossoming on my ass cheek like a puddle of spilled wine.

“Ha! Got you good, baby! Hey… that thing’s got a little extra jiggle in it than what I remember, dude. Have you put on a pound or two?”

Remember he rule, Roxy. Just like Momma told you.

I laugh it off and walk a little quicker out of the bedroom. I get about two steps into the bathroom and barely manage to get the door shut and locked before I collapse forward, catching myself just in time with one hand on either side of the sink, and then the tears come.

My chest and stomach heave as I sob, doing everything I can to keep the volume of my desperate crying to a minimum. Feeling my cheeks burn, I glance up into the vanity mirror and see the face of someone else. A mask of anguish covered with spider webs of melted eyeliner and eye shadow.

Who is he? Who was just inside of me? Vinnie never fucked me that way before. He always loved having me ride on top of him, looking down into his eyes while he played with my body. He loved hovering over me, my legs wrapped snug around his waist or over his shoulders while he watched my body move with his. Never before had he been so rough, so adamant that I remained turned away from him, just an ass in the air for him to fuck like some sort of machine. Never before had he kept his hand tangled in the hair on the back of my head and kept pushing my face deeper into the pillows to the point I actually thought I might suffocate.

When he emptied himself into me and slid off from my back, there was no tenderness or appreciation. He just flopped onto the mattress, breathing heavy, and watched his cock shrink back down to normal while I dried off of him. I was left there with my bare ass sticking up in the air like a piece of exercise equipment, and I saw some of my own face, the painted on self-defense mechanism, staring back at me from the pillowcase where I had apparently cried it off. No, Vinnie, those whimpers weren’t the pleasure that they usually were.

When I finally stopped waiting for a gesture from him and decided to just roll over and hug him, he shoo’d me off, claiming to be too hot in our 72 degree bedroom.

I’m not crazy. I know I was fucked by “Loverboy,” I could see him and I recognized his smell and taste… but Vinnie was nowhere to be seen.

“Babe?”

He’s shouting at me from the bedroom now, I’ve taken much too long in here. Quickly, I grab at the roll of toilet paper and wipe away tears and makeup. I look again into the mirror and remember how to smile the pain away. Then, I exit the bathroom and find the cigarette’s he’s decided he has been smoking for years.

When I get back into the bedroom, a young, surgically perfected and aesthetically impossible centerfold, naked and willing and smiling, he looks right through me. I could have left the tears and the snot and the makeup running down my face, it would have made no difference.

“I’m hungry, dude. What’ve we got to eat?”

I smile at him and tell him I’ll find out, then turn and walk out of the room even more naked than when I walked in. When my bare feet touch the cold tile of the kitchen floor, the sudden wave of actual feeling startles me. I shake it off and reach for the refrigerator door.

My mother taught me everything I ever needed to know.

“Loverboy” Vinnie Lane and Roxy Cotton sit on opposite ends of their plush sofa in Malibu. On the large, flat paneled television mounted on the wall in front of them, the first night of XWF Relentless is reaching its conclusion. The battle between Game Girl and Robbie Bourbon is reaching its denouement.

After Bourbon goes down for the final count and the show fades to black, Loverboy snorts and turns to Roxy with a snide grin on his face.

“Huh, you see that? Nobody can ever beat that pixelated freak, man. No one except me, of course. They should have just awarded me the Intercontinental Title when Game Girl won it, since it’s obvious I’m the only one that can beat a 16-bit cartoon character around here.”

“Well, you beat the boy, not the girl. And he did beat your team at War - ”

“War Games didn’t happen. War Games is the next pay per view, and I’ll lead a team of the best and coolest XWF stars over any other garbage they throw at us, trust me. It’ll also be the first pay per view I’ll get to show up to with the Universal Title, keep that in mind as well, dude.”

“You can’t just pretend it didn’t happen…”

The look that Loverboy shoots at his fiancé could melt steel. He eventually looks away, reaching his hand into the front of his heart covered boxer shorts for a comprehensive scratching, but for the time the gaze lasts there is a definite dearth of love and compassion.

Roxy stands up, straightening the hem of her short camisole, and leans over the couch to grab the empty glass tumbler on the table next to Loverboy. As she retrieves the glass and stands back up, he grabs her by the wrist and looks her over, essentially staring straight down the deep neckline of her top.

“I don’t like the bra you’re wearing. It makes your tits look weird.”

“I’m not wearing a bra, Vinnie. You know I almost never do.”

“Yeah, well, I guess maybe your tits just look weird then. Can you get them fixed? How am I supposed to cum on weird looking titties?”

Roxy blinks and pulls away, managing to keep her composure by sheer force of will alone. She tugs the top of her camisole up, sheepishly hiding her cleavage from view as she backs away with the tumbler in hand.

“I think maybe you’ve had enough to drink for the night.”

“What? Don’t be dumb. This is my last night home before flying out to New York City tomorrow. I’m done drinking when I say I’m done drinking, dude. Make it stronger this time, though. Your Long Islands taste like old dishwater.”

“Right. I’ll get you another, then. Anything else?”

“Yeah, I think I’m gonna go take a shit. When I come out of there I want to do a few lines with you, cool?”

“Actually… yeah, that would be a great idea, Vinnie. I got an eight ball yesterday while I was out, I can cut them while you… freshen up.”

“Yeah, but don’t put them on that stupid little mirror. You ever see Wolf of Wall Street? I wanna snort the coke right off of your ass.”

“You… do? That’s crazy, Vinnie.”

“Just get the drink, get the blow, and put it on your ass crack. I’ll only be, like, fifteen minutes tops. Just wait here with your ass up and let me get high, alright? Jesus, stop making everything so complicated. I’ll put a line on my cock and you can get some that way, or I can just fuck it into you.”

“That could kill me.”

“Well, whatever, you can do whatever you want, but I’m getting it my way. So, let’s recap. You. Drink. Coke. Ass. Got it?”

“Yeah. I got it. I got it alright.”

“Cool.”

Loverboy hops off of the couch and struts past Roxy, whose face falls into a scowl as soon as he’s out of eyesight. She walks slowly, like a POW in a death camp, towards the kitchen area as Loverboy bobs and weaves into the bathroom.

Once inside, Loverboy closes the door and lets out a deflating sigh, his lips vibrating like a shrinking balloon. He turns on the tap and splashes water onto his face, bracing himself over the basin and breathing deep.

“I can’t keep this shit up, dude. It’s killing her.”

As the water drips off of his visage, swirling in a tiny eddy down the golden-rimmed drain, Loverboy hangs his head and squeezes his eyes shut, steeling himself against some unseen force of oppression. Then, suddenly, he stands upright and stares into the mirror.

“You hear me, dude? This isn’t fair. I gave you what you wanted but this shouldn’t be a part of it, man. This wasn’t part of the deal.”

In the mirror, Loverboy sees his eyes as they redden, the stress of his situation growing almost too heavy for him to bear. As he stares at himself, the mirror begins to cloud over, then the glass itself seems to grow luminescent and transparent. After a moment of the light from the mirror glass intensifying, Loverboy’s reflection shifts and transforms into someone else.

Someone who led Loverboy through the dreamscape of his coma.

“Hello again, Mister Loverboy. Are you thinking of ways to take back our arrangement? I’m terribly afraid we can’t allow you to do that, I’m afraid.”

“No… dude, I gave you what I had to give. I’m empty. I’m your trophy to put on the center of your mantel. But there’s no reason to hurt Roxy this way. The whole reason I succumbed to what you wanted from me was to protect her, and now you’re making me abuse her every minute of her life. Why?”

The apparition laughs and backs away, revealing a serene landscape of a city park behind him. The vision turns and walks toward a park bench, sitting and crossing his legs, then producing a small brown paper bag to feed pigeons with.

“Oh, my friend, how tiny your mind is sometimes. You think you are the big game of our endless hunt? What makes you believe you deserve to be ‘on the center’ of any mantel? We have held the essence of emperors, kings, saints, popes, madmen, and messiahs. You are merely a piece of a puzzle, nothing more.”

“You seem pretty focused on me for someone who doesn’t matter that much, dude.”

“If you knew the scope of our work, Mister Loverboy, you’d see that the time and attention I give to you is as a drop of water in an ocean. You are but a mote of dust on a breeze to us, my friend. A tool to build greater things. If you fulfill your role and acquire the acclaim and widespread recognition that comes along with a Universal Championship… you will open doors to others for us to acquire. That is your sole purpose. Do you understand?”

The specter resumes feeding pigeons, his bag of seed seemingly bottomless. As the flock of birds increases around his ankles, he begins to stomp them, one by one, into bloody puddles of feathered gore.

“Now, you may be asking yourself, why do we care what becomes of your pretty little plaything, Miss Cotton? Well, Mister Loverboy, I must admit that one is a bit of my own inclination for… pleasures of your flesh. You see, although you are something as insignificant as a fly on a rotting carcass to us, even we at times have moments of weakness. Lapses in judgment, perhaps. Your little angel, Roxy, pleased me when I visited her, and I simply have not been able to let the taste of her leave my mouth, so to speak. And so, I decided to take her from you.”

“That wasn’t the deal!”

Loverboy shouts at the glass, pounding his fist against the porcelain of the sink and glaring with the intensity of supernova. The mirror shakes in its frame, but the man on the bench merely smiles again and continues to feed, then murder, the pigeons at his feet.

The madman’s laughter grows in intensity, echoing through the Malibu bathroom. Then, from outside the view of the mirror glass, Roxy herself walks to the bench in her customary attire – tight fitting purple mini dress, six inch spike stiletto heels, face and hair impeccably made up. She walks over to the bench and seductively slithers onto the man’s lap, smiling broadly as she settles her bottom onto him.

“What the fuck? No! Roxy, stop it! What are you doing?”

“Oh, Mister Loverboy… please do get used the sight of your lovely plaything and I together as one. This is the inevitable future, and the end result of your lifelong need to put yourself and your desires at the forefront of your actions. You reap precisely what you sow, my friend. You should have seen this coming.”

Loverboy rears his hand back and shatters the glass of the mirror, cutting his palm deeply and sending spatters of blood and slivers of reflective, broken glass throughout the bathroom.

The sound of the mad spirit’s laughter echoes and fades away as the broken mirror ceases to glow, leaving only the harried, frenzied “Loverboy” Vinnie Lane as he stares into the remnants of mirror still within the frame.

Looking down at his hand, Loverboy grabs a towel from the nearby rack and wraps it around, which quickly soaks through with his crimson blood. Anxious and panicked, Loverboy flings open the bathroom door and steps back into the living area of the apartment.

“Roxy! Roxy, we need to talk, baby… I need you.”

But Roxy Cotton is not on the couch with an ass covered with cocaine, as he had told her to be. Instead, she stands at the door of the apartment fully dressed, just as he had seen her in the bathroom vision – and she has two medium-sized overnight bags with her.

“Roxy, wait… what are you doing? Where are you going? It’s late…”

“I don’t know, Vinnie. I don’t. But I can’t stay here. Not right now. Something’s wrong.”

“Baby, wait… I can explain. Please, just talk to me. I mean it, I didn’t mean the things I said…”

“I… I don’t know if I believe you, Vinnie. I’m sorry. I need some time. Please. We’ll talk again soon, after the show.”

“But baby, please… I need you! I’m nothing without you! Please!”

“Vinnie… I’m sorry. This can’t about what you need anymore. Not now, anyway. I’m sorry. Good luck on Sunday night. I’ll be watching, and I’ll always be cheering for you, you know that.”

“But Roxy… I love you…”

“I love you too. But that doesn’t matter now.”

“Baby…”

“Goodbye, Vinnie.”

And as quickly as the mirror shattered, Roxy is out the door and gone.

“This is it.

Relentless, 2015. Of course it comes back to this.

Last August, I was just getting my feet wet in the XWF. I only had a couple of thrown together tag team matches, and each of them had low level talent across the ring from me. Guys like a halfway out the door Bobby Zi and an ever-absent Shelby Cobra and Fandango. When the booking for Relentless was announced, I was presented with a nearly insurmountable task.

Three of the greatest champions in the history of the XWF against myself and two partners I’d never even met. Two partners I had no idea if I could trust, or would even be there at the time the bell rang. I did the only thing I knew how to do, and I took the weight of the challenge head-on, right on my shoulders. I carried Zoey Ryback and Clean Lucena and I shocked the wrestling world by taking down Theo Pryce, Azrael Erebus, and even the great Sebastian Duke, who lie on the canvas while I pinned him, one, two, three.

The first championship of my XWF career. The now mostly defunct Trios Title. No one knew then who I was, what I was capable of. Not a single member of the XWF roster or administration gave me a shot in hell of overcoming the odds given to me that night, but overcome them I did, and continued to do for the next year. I overcame the odds at Relentless. I overcame them again when I formed the Underground and sent Miranda Tigris out of the company for good. And again at Turning Point, when I defeated Justin Sane, the new golden boy in the XWF, along with TJ Wallace and Iris Oppenheimer to earn my spot as a number one contender to the Universal Championship. I overcame the odds to win the Madness Stampede and become a dominant Hart Champion, winning a series of grueling matches that would cripple most men.

The thing is, that same night that started my rise to the top, Relentless in August of 2014, also introduced the XWF to a new menace. A man who rolled in like fog beneath the door, soon to usurp the focus of the entire company. Doctor Louis D’Ville, the one man I have not been able to overcome. He showed up to Relentless and stole the spotlight immediately. He built his Asylum, using my own friends as well as enemies against me the entire time. He was unstoppable. He IS unstoppable. His meteoric climb to the Universal Title was unfettered by any setbacks. He simply never stopped moving up and forward. And now, here we are again. XWF Relentless. Doctor D’Ville and his untarnished Universal Championship legacy against the man who is destined to break the chain.

Doc, we don’t need to go over the past encounters we’ve shared. There’s nothing there for us any longer. You were stronger. You were BETTER than I was. On Madness last year. At Bad Medicine just a few weeks back. You have proven time and time again that you can defeat “Loverboy” Vinnie Lane, and I have never proven that I can do the same to you.

The odds are, of course, in your favor.

You’ve beaten two men at once before. You’ve beaten former champions before. You’ve won everything there is to win. By god, you’re the fucking KING of the XWF, and no one has even attempted to take that away from you. You very well might be the king for another year if it comes up. There’s no reason to believe you won’t. But Doc… I need to make it exceptionally clear to you right now, because I believe this will be our last conversation before we see each other in the ring on Sunday night. You need to understand, that you will walk out of Relentless as the king, but you will not leave as the champion.

The thing, I think, that stopped me before was exactly what I just described to you all in my little bio there. I thrive when the chips are down and the odds are against me, dude. When we met on the last full throttle edition of Madness, we were on even footing. Some might have even said I had the upper hand, since I was already a multiple champion by that point. I had help from my second, Diesel, at ringside. I had the home field advantage on Madness and a hot crowd that was pulling for me every second of the way. But I lost. Then at Bad Medicine… well, come on. That pay per view may as well have been named the Loverboy Show. The entire main event was geared towards me. My match type. My specialty inside a cell, where I’d never been defeated before. The story was written JUST for me, man… the rise to the top, the scrappy underdog against the unbeatable god-champion. All it needed was the heroic ending where the good guy rides off into the sunset leaving the bad guy face down in the dust. But again, I lost, didn’t I?

I’m going to shock you right now, Doc, because I am going to say something that you would never expect in a thousand years. I’m going to thank you. Thank you, Doctor D’Ville, for setting my feet back on the ground and reminding me where my strength is. Thank you for setting me straight and pointing me back in the direction I needed to be in. Thank you for changing the odds back into your favor.

So here we are. Here I am. A two time loser to the most dominant champion this company has ever seen. The most unstoppable juggernaut of evil. The king, the god of the asylum, the champion of the universe.

You.

Only this time, no one thinks I have a chance. Just like Relentless last year. Just like Turning Point. Just like the Stampede. The odds are against me. I have no chance.

But I am going to win.

That’s all I wanted to say to you, Doc. There’s nothing more that needs to be told, honestly. No insults, no empty words to try and get into your head and under your skin. It wouldn’t work anyway, after all. There’s only one simple fact that needs to be repeated, because it is the one truth, the one narrative of Relentless 2015.

“Loverboy” Vinnie Lane is going to win. “Loverboy” Vinnie Lane is going to beat Doctor Louis D’Ville.

“Loverboy” Vinnie Lane is going to be the champion of the XWF.

That’ the end of the story. I’ll see you Sunday night, on the last page of our book together, Louis. I hope you are ready and I hope that you are, as always, looking as forward to our encounter as I am.

I can’t wait.

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