After the tournament, Carter had realized he was up to his eyeballs in gym applicants and that his dirty little hole in the wall filled with testosterone and sweat had turned into a gold mine overnight. Moreover, guys were climbing over themselves to get managed by Carter; after seeing what he'd done for Heath, they all wanted a piece. Carter decided he wanted to pursue management fulltime, seeing the earning potential as absolutely insane. Currently, he was managing three or four up-and-coming MMA talents in the Pittsburgh tri-state area, and from the small and medium sized fights they were participating in, they were winning them all and Carter's cuts were getting bigger and bigger. He invested a lot of it back into the gym, purchasing a newer, bigger place to accommodate their rapidly growing clientele and offering late hours on the weekends and even opening on Sundays. The change in hours gave their three hundred twenty-seven clients the ability to space out when they came to work out, and Heath was even booking appointments for private lessons and training sessions.
They were making money hand over fist and since Carter had decided to pursue management full-time, he decided to remain owner of the gym and keep the name "Carter's Gym" but had hired and elevated Heath to both partner and general manager. Heath made a good living off of it, and was still competing himself. Since his first fight after Ultimate Warrior, he remained undefeated and was earning additional, good money from that. He had endorsement deals thrown at him from every direction but he always turned them down. Connor and John, along with Carter and Rex and all the guys at the gym called him fucking nuts for doing it, but he wasn't into all that shit. Additionally, every week some reporter was calling him up for an interview. He didn't even know where half these asshole got his number, but it had gotten bad enough that he'd had to change his phone number twice. Interviews were simply out of the question.
As he glanced down at his phone, looking over his most recent endorsement deal offer in amazement, he wondered if maybe he might reconsider his position on that, though. He rubbed his chin, looking down at the offer from TapouT Clothing. Maybe he'd wait to make a decision definitively one way or another. At least until after he won his next big tournament.
He flicked off the lights and headed home for the night.
***
Heath walked into his apartment, amazed still that he had one at all, and relished in the feeling of coming and arriving at home. He tossed down his gym bag and keys and inhaled a deep, clarifying breath through his nose.
His apartment was a study in stark minimalism. He often joked about how John's house lacked a woman's touch (originally meant to be a stinging, sarcastic jab, but it evolved into a running joke somehow) but his was even worse. Heath kept it as neat as possible, due mostly to his old habits leftover from the military that had come roaring to the forefront. He made his bed every morning, he folded his T-shirts exactly the way he had whenever he packed his rucksack, and he even scrubbed his counters and sinks with an old toothbrush. He supposed he could be worse; he could be a slob. But between his military training—Marine training, at that—and growing up with his mother, he knew that cleanliness and neatness were definitely next to Godliness and sanity.
His apartment lacked personal touches like pictures and decorations on the wall. He wasn't particularly sentimental although he kept a picture of his mother on the wooden side table next to his front door. He also kept a framed picture of himself and his best friend, Joaquin, from when they were deployed together in Iraq, taken a few months before the incident. In front of both photographs, he had placed a small glass votive candle which he lit on occasion. The only other real bits of decoration were a few scrawled crayon drawings in bright colors, per his nieces' artistry, depicting happy, smiling people holding hands, animals, rainbows and trees, attached to his refrigerator with a couple of magnets. All had "To Uncle Heath" scrawled across the tops in big, childish handwriting and were signed either "Lucy" or "Maggie" and were punctuated with hearts and stars.
He went to the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water, wrenching off the top and draining it before tossing the empty bottle into his recycling container as he studied their most recent efforts at artistic creation, smiling to himself. He shuffled down the hall to his bedroom, stripping off his shirt and yawning deeply as he went and dropped into bed, weariness settling deep into his bones as he lay back. Though his body begged for rest, his mind still whirled.
After the success of Ultimate Warrior—and Heath considered his loss a success—and things began to change with the gym and Carter, and he started running the gym, the first thing he did was to move out of John's house. He loved his father, and even was starting to like him a little bit, but at thirty, he needed his own place. John's house was only meant to be a temporary holdover anyway until he got his shit together. He just happened to get his shit together sooner than he anticipated.