April (20 months since everything changed)
Jeremy has been seriously off since Budapest, and it’s only gotten worse since we got back to the States. He asked to borrow my iPod on the plane ride home from Shanghai, the second World Series stop, and then spent the whole flight curled up against the window, eyes closed and music on. He didn’t move when I wrapped a blanket around him, or when Val made me trade seats so she could lean against him and nap on his shoulder.
I’m sure he’s exhausted. I tried telling him that while we were sitting in the airport waiting to fly back to Ohio, and he rolled his eyes at me and said, “I’m not,” before refusing to speak until it was time to board.
But whatever he says, there’s no way he’s not stressed. I mean, two diving competitions in two weeks, and he has a lot of pressure to live up to after his World Championship win and our synchro National medal. Now there’s two weeks back in the States, another two competitions overseas, finals, graduation, qualifications, and then the Olympics?
Fucking hell, if he’s not tired and stressed, then it’s entirely possible that my boyfriend is a robot.
It’s making him grumpy too.
The day before the Easter weekend, he mentions that he’s going home for three days.
“You just decided this?”
Jeremy shakes his head. “I always do when Easter falls between World Series stops.”
I remember last year, when he vanished and came back smelling like beer. Judging by the grimace on his face, it’s not a pleasant experience for Jeremy to go home for the holiday, but I don’t get the impression that his family is especially religious or anything. Whatever goes on there, he doesn’t ever talk about it.
“You could’ve said something. I can still request the time off work and come home with you if you want?”
“No!” He snaps the word out.
We’re in his apartment, trying to catch up on homework that we fell behind on while we were in Europe. I set my pen down slowly, studying him. “Okay. Just figured you might not want to be alone. Sorry, I didn’t mean to assume.”
Jeremy’s chest is heaving, and his eyes are wide. “You can’t.”
Which confirms what Val told me: Jeremy’s not out to his family, and I’m guessing he probably never will be. Between the beer smell and the immediate, frightened reaction, I wonder if we have something in common when it comes to our families. The difference, though, is that I honestly believe Jeremy loves his family. He goes home to visit them, even though I’ve never seen them call or text.
“Okay. Dude, deep breaths.”
So that’s that. Whatever is going on with Jeremy, it’s way more complex than I can sort out.
And Jeremy is already a complete mess, seeing as how Val flew back to California yesterday.
“Come lay down with me?”
Jeremy’s still fighting to get his breathing back under control after his outburst. “I have to finish this.”
“Yeah, we’ll get back to homework later. But my back and shoulders are sore, and sitting hunched over a textbook isn’t helping. So I want to stretch out for a bit, and it’d be nice to have company?”
It’s a good trick with Jeremy. He wants me to ask for help when I need it, and to communicate more with him—which yeah, is hypocritical when he still won’t open up to me entirely, but I know he’s trying and that’s what counts.
He eventually nods and tosses his pen aside. “All right, just for a little while.”
I spread out on Jeremy’s bed diagonally, which forces him to lie down on top of me and rest his head on my chest. I slow my breathing and feel him match his own inhale-exhale cycle against mine. His fingers curl in my T-shirt, and eventually he closes his eyes.
He falls asleep in minutes.
“Not exhausted, my ass,” I whisper.
In sleep, Jeremy appears different—younger. I can still see the last bits of young adulthood on him when he’s completely relaxed: a hint of softness in his jawline, the faint traces of acne on his forehead. He needs a haircut badly, the pale strands falling into his eyes, and I brush them off his forehead, which apparently tickles and makes him scrunch his nose up in sleep.
I’ve never loved anyone like I do him. Even Aaron, who I love with my entire heart, can’t match this. Jeremy is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. It’s more than just lust; I respect him, and he challenges me to want to push myself harder. He makes me see the world from a different angle, and he’s become the family that I’ve been missing out on for so long.
Whatever is going on with him right now, it has to pass soon.
But, if anything, Jeremy comes back from his long weekend in Chicago even more sullen, more quiet and moody than when he left.
For the first time this year, I spend four nights straight in my own dorm, because he won’t talk to me, won’t look at me outside of practice. For a moment, I wonder if the Jeremy I first met eighteen months ago is back. Do I need to brace for a return of the self-hatred, the narrowed eyes and cruel words?
But as the days go by, I realize that Jeremy isn’t reverting to those old behaviors.
After a full week of being ignored and brushed aside, I finally tackle Jeremy. Literally.
Andrey is working on the last few details for when we leave on the next leg of the World Series in a few days, and he’s left us in the mat room to do our synchro dryland training alone. Jeremy’s counting, “One, two, three,” before each jump are the first words he’s spoken to me in two days.
“Jeremy,” I say, when we’re standing on the edge of the mat, about to practice a backward flip.
He ignores me. “Ready?”
“No.”
I get a side-eyed glance, but Jeremy just presses his lips into a thin line and counts us down.
He jumps. I don’t.
The second he lands, confusion clear on his face because I’m not standing on the mat beside him, I take a step forward and push him backward. He’s still a bit off-balance from the flip, and he goes down easily, back thumping into the thick mat.
I follow behind the movement, swinging a leg over him and sitting heavily on his stomach. When he tries to shove me off, I grab one hand, then the other, and pin them against my thighs, on either side of his body.
“Jeremy,” I try again, “talk to me.”
“Get off of me.”
I’m reading his body language carefully, ready to move the second I think he genuinely wants me to. But right now he just looks and sounds grumpy, a twenty-two-year-old man throwing a temper tantrum.
“Nope.” I lean forward, shifting my weight so I’m not crushing him, and stare him straight in the eyes. “What the hell is going on with you?”
“Nothing.” Jeremy meets my gaze, which is the only reason I see the glimmer of fear in his expression.
“What has you spooked so badly, Jer?”
He jerks beneath me, though it doesn’t seem like a bid to escape. “Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Brandon, get off. Someone’s going to come in.”
Doubtful. It’s late evening on a Friday, which means any student who isn’t us is out enjoying the start of the weekend. I grip his wrists a bit tighter, making sure not to press in and leave marks, but firmly enough to ground him, to make sure he knows I’m here.
“Talk. To. Me.”
Jeremy tenses, and I wonder for a second if he’s going to explode beneath me, a live wire that’s about to shock me because I got too close.
Then the fight leaves him all at once, and he sinks back into the mat limply.
“Isaac has a new girlfriend.”
The words are English, but they may as well be Greek. “Okay?”
“My brother,” Jeremy clarifies. “He’s dating some new woman. She’s actually really nice, so I have no idea what she sees in Isaac, but she seems happy with him.”
I’m still not connecting the dots.
“She’s a former swimmer, though she stopped competing after college. But she asked what I’m studying here, and I could see Isaac narrowing his eyes, like he was telling me not to tell her what I did, but I said it anyways. That, y’know, I’m a diver. And she got excited about it.”
There is an entire dimension of this conversation that I can’t even begin to grasp. “That’s a bad thing? That your brother’s girlfriend is excited because you dive?”
Jeremy nods tiredly. “Isaac hates that I dive. They all do, I mean. It’s . . . a sport for fairies and women, right? Like swimming. It’s not a real sport.”
Clearly his brothers have no idea what goes into diving or swimming.
“So suddenly his girlfriend—her name is Clara—she’s asking me questions and pulling up articles on her phone. Like, the picture of us from the Chicago Tribune last year.”
I have that picture taped to the wall of my dorm. Me and Jeremy, side by side on the platform, arms outstretched and fingers just a hair away from touching. I think the day he handed it to me was a turning point in our relationship, like it finally occurred to him that we could stand side by side and the rest of the world wouldn’t immediately know that we were gay.
“So Isaac has to pretend to be supportive of my diving, and that means Nick and Dad can’t say anything, because Clara is hanging out with Isaac constantly and Isaac is over at Dad’s place a lot. And I can tell they’re all pissed about it, and Nick keeps rolling his eyes and talking about how he has to pretend to care about some ‘dumb faggy sport’ just so Isaac can get laid.”
Jeremy’s still staring into my eyes, but I can tell that he’s a week behind and hundreds of miles away, his gaze vacant as the words spill out. I loosen my hands on his wrists, rub my thumbs over his fluttering pulse while he continues.
“And when I left, Clara promised to keep following my competitions. Which means Isaac will know. Which means Dad will know.”
I swallow. “They don’t know about your victories? Your World Championship gold?”
Jeremy shakes his head slightly. “I don’t tell them. Not about the little victories. They don’t— It doesn’t matter to them. I’m a diver in a gay sport, where we jump off things in our underwear and probably take it up the ass in the locker rooms after.”
He sounds like he’s quoting something—someone. My heart sinks; if this is what Jeremy has grown up with, has heard since he started diving as a kid, it’s no surprise that he climbed into the closet as soon as he was old enough to understand his own desires, and closed the door firmly behind him. If he was faced with that casual homophobia every time he came home from a dive meet, I’m surprised he still dives at all, to be honest.
And the way Jeremy talks about his Nationals and World wins . . . “little victories,” like they’re not even important, makes my heart break.
“Oh, babe. What you’ve accomplished so far is huge. It’s . . . You’re the best in the entire world, Jer. There’s nothing little about that.”
Jeremy just closes his eyes and exhales.
I let go of his hands completely, and stretch out on top of him, pushing us both into the mat. He’s uncomfortable with public displays of affection, so I give him only one small kiss, then roll off of him and sit up.
I freeze when I see Andrey standing in the door.
A glance at Jeremy shows that his eyes are still closed and he’s lying flat, clearly not ready to move yet. I don’t know how long Andrey’s been standing behind me, watching us, but his face is calm. If he didn’t already know about me and Jeremy being a couple, he definitely does now.
He nods at me and vanishes before Jeremy sucks in a deep breath and heaves himself up.
“I think we should get out of here.”
It’s a sign of how tired he must be that he just nods. We probably have fifteen or twenty minutes left on our practice today, but he’s emotionally spent and I have a crazy intense need to cuddle with him for a few hours.
In addition to that: I need to process what he’s told me. In the last few minutes, I’ve learned more about his family than I have in the last twenty months. There’s almost certainly more to know, but I doubt I’m going to get anything else out of him about the subject tonight.
Suddenly I miss Val, because she knew about this. She had to. And I need someone to talk to about it, but she’s on the other side of the country in sunny California, getting ready to move on to the next chapter of her life.
We both stand up in silence, do our cool-down stretches. Jeremy isn’t ignoring me anymore, which is a small improvement, but he keeps his eyes cast on the floor and focuses on his movements and nothing else.
We shower and change, and the silence feels companionable for a change. I brush up against Jeremy at the lockers after we’re both dressed, and he leans into the touch briefly, almost imperceptibly, before moving away to lace his shoes up.
Daylight savings has kicked in, so the evenings are starting to get longer again. The sky is still faintly blue on the horizon as we walk across campus, and it’s automatic for me to follow Jeremy to his apartment. He doesn’t say anything about it, so I don’t either, and hope he won’t turn me away at the door.
He doesn’t.
Instead, the second the door closes behind me, he wraps his arms around my chest and clings to me, breathing steadily.
“Jeremy. Babe, let’s move inside.”
He doesn’t budge.
“I just want their respect.”
I barely hear his words, but they sound . . . defeated.
How do you even respond to that? I hug him back instead of speaking, hugging him tightly, maybe a bit desperately. This is why Aaron says not to fall for the skeletons. Whatever put them in the closet is more than I can comprehend, more than I’m capable of fixing on my own. They have to want to come out. Jeremy has to want that, and he doesn’t. Maybe he never will. But until he makes that choice for himself, there’s nothing I can do to help him, except to make sure he knows I’m here for him.
I clutch him tighter, and breathe with him.