The current in the endless pool stopped without warning, and Alex lurched forward, flexed palms slamming the wall. Torso lifting out of the water, he swiped at his eyes and pushed back his hair, not having bothered with a cap or goggles in his haste to forget the scene in the locker room.
It’d taken half a second to realize Mo’s leg was not supposed to be at that angle, and the rest of that second to realize how badly he’d fucked up. Bas hadn’t let him dwell. His best friend had pushed him forward, and with Dane’s help, they’d staunched the bleeding around the protruding bone and arranged Morris more comfortably until the medics arrived. Coach had entered on their heels, disappointment etched in every wrinkle of his weathered face.
Alex had run from that look and from his teammates to the training pool, punishing himself with endless laps. He’d pushed through the body aches from the fight with Dane and tried to blank his mind with the repeated strokes, but it didn’t work. He couldn’t block out what he knew was his fault. Dios mio, is this what Bas had felt like four years ago, thinking he’d let down the team? Except Bas’s relationship drama at the last Olympics had nothing on Alex’s present mistake. They’d lost focus then, versus losing a teammate today. Four years from now, would Alex be blaming himself for lost medals too? He’d been the one who said their goal was medals, as many as they could bring home, and he’d just gone and cost them as many as four. Four events Mo could no longer swim. Because Alex had let his emotions get away from him, had failed to act like a captain. He’d cost the team their senior member and cost a friend and mentor his chance at more medals.
Squatting at the edge of the pool, Coach looked ready to lay into him too. “You want to tell me what happened?”
Alex levered up and landed like a beached seal on the deck, his jellied arms giving out. Years past embarrassment around Coach, he rolled over and dragged himself upright with his core. “You haven’t heard it from the rest of the team already?”
“I want to hear it from you.”
He prodded his torso and face, checking bruises. “I fucked up.”
“Ryan said you were justified.”
“Dane offered Ryan and Jacob drinks in his room. I told him to cut it out.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re the captain.” He shifted back on his haunches. “How’d it turn into a brawl?”
“I was tired of him prancing around like he owns the place and using his sponsorships to get what he wants. I told him as much.”
“What else?”
“Why the fuck does there have to be something else? He acts like a privileged ass. I told him so.” Alex didn’t check his words or tone, the same anger that drove him to blows with Dane breaking through the cloud of guilt.
“This isn’t like you, Cantu,” Coach said, brow furrowed. “There’s more behind that hair-trigger temper lately, and I think it goes back to our conversation earlier this week. I checked your schedule. You’ve picked up more than a few extra office shifts.”
He tried to hold Coach’s stare, to bluff as he’d done the other day, but Coach was onto him. What was the use now? The damage was done. Exhaustion catching up to him, fight bleeding out of him, Alex fell backward onto the deck, wincing as he scrubbed his hands over his tender face. “I’m gone this summer when they need me most at home. I have to bank the extra money so they can hire someone for the farm.”
“I don’t remember there being an issue last Olympics.”
“Mom wasn’t sick then, and Carla’s only around part-time now because she’s in school.” He waved a hand in the soupy air above him. “And I’m not sleeping or eating much with all the Dane shit going on.”
Coach stared down at him. “The Dane shit? You mean more than the press and sponsors?”
“Yeah, there’s more, and it’s not good. We were at the same developmental training camp as teens. Didn’t end well there either.” While Coach knew about his sexual orientation, it wasn’t Alex’s place to out Dane. But he felt it only fair that Coach understood there was a history of bad blood between him and Dane. And that Dane wasn’t the only one at fault in the fight today. “I baited him in the locker room. It was my fault too.”
“How are you going to make this work?”
Alex righted himself again, groaning as a wave of pain rolled from his head down. “Avoid each other as much as possible.”
Coach shook his head. “Impossible with him on your relay team.”
He whipped his head to the side, making the sledgehammer inside it worsen. His rising voice also didn’t help. “What about Ryan? He beat both of us.”
“Because he was rested and because IM is his event. He’s your backup, not Mo’s. You know as well as I do that Dane’s our best freestyle anchor and our best shot at relay gold.”
Hope circling the drain, Alex clutched desperately for any excuse. “But he’s in five other events already.”
“He can swim one more.” Coach stood. “I’m overruling you, Cantu. I want gold for medley relay this time, not silver. Now, back to my original question, can you make this work?”
Alex pushed to his feet. “I guess I don’t have a choice.”
“Good. Mo’s asking for you.”
“He’s in medical?”
“For about another hour.” Coach clapped him on the back. “Don’t make me sorry for nominating you as captain.”
“I won’t, sir.” The last thing Alex wanted to do was let Coach down.
More than he already had.
Alex rode the elevator up to USOTC’s medical facility. While not a full treatment center, it had everything needed for emergency triage. An injured athlete could be treated, stabilized, then moved to the appropriate hospital or care facility to be seen by a specialist. The elevator doors slid open, and Alex stepped out. Halfway down the hallway, Dane sat in a row of blue plastic chairs, elbows to his knees, head hanging in his hands.
Alex knew the position well, having spent more than a few hours like that outside the chemo treatment room, waiting on his mom. He cleared his throat, making his presence known.
Dane dropped his hands and turned his discolored face to him, looking roughed up and utterly devastated. Alex’s first instinct, despite his lingering pain and anger, was to run to him. To take Dane in his arms and chase away that ravaged look. As the oldest of four kids, Alex was a de facto third parent. Care and protection came naturally, and with Dane, his first love who would always hold a piece of his heart, those instincts were amplified, despite their rocky past.
He’d seen Dane like this once before—the night before summer training camp had ended. Alex had returned to their room and found Dane huddled on the end of his twin bed—shoulders slumped, chest heaving, face blotchy and wet with tears. Alex hadn’t understood or cared why he was upset. He’d just gone to Dane, and they’d spent their last night together lost in kisses and tangled bodies. The next day, Dane had turned his back on him, and Alex had been too hurt and furious to put it together then. The truth had later sunk in, but the rejection still stung.
That remembered burn, and the lingering aches from their fight, throttled down Alex’s instincts. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and approached slowly. “How is he?”
“Tibia’s broken in two places. Muscle damage too, though they won’t know the full extent of it until he’s seen by a specialist.”
“Shit.” Alex collapsed into the chair next to him.
And Dane shot out of his, as if he couldn’t stand to sit next to him. But then he began to pace the width of the hallway, cracking his knuckles, nervous habits of his that Alex had forgotten. “He still won’t get his gold,” Dane said. “All he’s ever done is look out for me, and I just knocked him out of the Olympics and robbed him of the one thing he doesn’t have yet.”
“He has gold medals, Dane. A cabinet full of them.”
Dane stopped in front of him, arms hanging at his sides in resignation. “But not a medley relay gold.” Eyes more gray than blue under the fluorescent lights, they swirled like heavy storm clouds, blame and misery churning.
Weak, wanting to help, Alex looked away. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Go from being a total asshole—”
“I believe the term you used was ‘privileged ass.’”
Alex startled at the curse, even if it was a quote from him. He’d been too riled up to be surprised earlier, but now that things were calmer, the rarity gave him pause. As far as Alex knew, Dane only cursed during sex, when he forgot to be a famous preacher’s son and let himself feel and say anything. Fuck me, please and fuck yeah had been his favorite phrases that lost summer, growled in a sex-roughened drawl.
“You were saying?” Dane prompted, jerking Alex out of his memories.
Rewinding the conversation, he picked up where he’d left off. “How do you go from being a privileged ass who was ready to fight Mo for the relay spot, to this guy?”
Dane sat back down, angled toward him. “This guy?”
“One who cares so deeply about other people.”
“Problem is,” Dane said, holding his gaze, “I don’t know how to put the people I care about first when they should be.” It was clear in his stormy eyes and gravelly voice that he wasn’t only talking about Morris.
“Then change that,” Alex urged.
As awful as Mo’s injury was, if it was the thing that woke Dane up, that shattered the self-centered shell his egomaniacal parents had built around him, then maybe some good would come out of it.
“I can’t.”
Or he could continue to live in his gilded cage, always too afraid to make a stand against those who’d locked him inside. Were the perks really worth it?
Disheartened, Alex tore his gaze away and stared at the bland white wall across the hallway. “‘I can’t’ is what privileged asses use as an excuse.”
“Cantu, that you?” Mo called from inside the room.
“I’ll be there in a sec,” he shouted over his shoulder into the room, then turned back to Dane. “You’re on the relay team.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank Coach. I lobbied for Ryan.”
Ignoring Dane’s sharp inhale, Alex stood and entered Mo’s room. And inhaled sharply himself. Mo’s leg was wrapped in a full temporary cast, held aloft in a sling, and he was hooked up to at least half a dozen monitors and IVs. Painkillers, if Alex had to guess, judging by the glassy look in his eyes.
“Fuck, Mo, I don’t know what to say. Sorry doesn’t seem enough.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. Dane’s the one that took me down. Heavy motherfucker.” He waved a hand dismissively, and Alex thought it weird to see without a phone in it. The device was on the bedside table, and Mo hadn’t even glanced at it.
“Yoo-hoo, Cantu, where’d you go?”
He was zoning out again; he needed sleep. He sat on the edge of the chair next to the bed. “You’re injured because I baited him.”
Mo’s eyes cut to the door and back. “You baited him again just now.”
“What can I say? He brings out the worst in me.”
Mo’s gaze sharpened. “And you bring out the best in him.” Not so drugged, nor so clueless to his and Dane’s history, after all.
Alex relaxed back into the chair, arms hanging loosely over the armrests. “I don’t know about that.”
“Trust me, you do.” Mo lowered his voice. “Don’t let up. That boy’s come-to-Jesus moment is long overdue.”
Alex chuckled at the ironic choice of words.
“I’ve been waiting to use that line for years.” Mo smiled, satisfied. “I’ve tried to get through to him, Alex, but I’m thinking it’s got to be you.”
“How are you even smiling right now?” His eyes made another sweep of the traction setup, and he winced in sympathetic pain. “You seem surprisingly okay with all this.”
“Hospital tonight, then they fly me out to DC tomorrow for surgery. I’m going home, two months ahead of schedule.”
Ah, home, and Mo had a lot of good to get back to. “Nessa’s happy?”
He smiled wider. “Thrilled doesn’t begin to cover it.”
But was that enough? “Your shot at the gold, though? We fucked that up for you.”
“You’re young still—”
“Only four years younger than you.”
Mo talked over him. “You’ll realize soon enough that medals aren’t everything.” He held up a hand, forestalling Alex’s objection. “Yes, you know better than most already, after the scares with your mom, but you still get tunnel vision sometimes. But do you know what I see down my tunnel? My twins, two baby girls coming into this world soon, and I’ll get to be there for the birth this time.” Excitement lit his eyes, a stark contrast to the anxiety-stricken guilt Alex remembered from four years ago when Nessa had gone into labor as they marched in the opening ceremonies.
“You’ll be teetering around the delivery room on crutches.”
Mo swiped the phone off the bedside table, brandishing it. “Better than following along on this damn thing.”
“I was beginning to think you were surgically attached to it.”
“I’m attached to my wife.” He laid the phone on his chest, atop his heart. Alex longed for a love like that someday. “I get to see her, tomorrow. And I get to help her take care of our new babies, even if I’m a little wobbly.”
Smiling, Alex stood and placed a hand on his teammate’s shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I really am sorry, Mo. More than I can say.”
Morris covered his hand. “I know you are, Cap. But not nearly as sorry as he is.” He jutted his chin toward the door, toward where Dane was sitting in the hallway. “For everything.”