December (20 months until the Olympics)
How the hell did he do it?
I don’t taste dinner. Andrey glances at me worriedly, probably because I’ve been silent all night, lost in my own thoughts. He likely thinks I’m focusing hard on tomorrow, but really I’m watching Brandon out of the corner of my eye.
Was it him shouting and banging the bed into the wall? Or was it the other guy?
Brandon leans back in his chair with an easy smile. He chimes in when Val or Andrey talk to him, but mostly he stares at me.
Val’s noticed. She’s looking between the two of us with a crease between her brows. I’m not sure what she assumes is going on, but she’s definitely picked up on the weird tension.
Who was the other man?
I want to know the answers. But, equally, I don’t.
By the time I’m back in my own room it’s after nine. I go through my usual nighttime routine: brushing my teeth, setting my clothes out for the morning, stretching. My muscles are too tense for the latter, but I push through, desperate for a distraction.
It doesn’t work. My hand brushes over my dick as I’m changing into boxers to sleep in, and I’m half-hard so fast it leaves me dizzy.
I don’t do this very often. I mean, sometimes in the mornings I’ll wake up hard from a hazy dream, but it’s utilitarian. Just a normal bodily function. Tonight, though, there’s a soundtrack of moans and male voices playing through my mind.
Tonight I lean back against the bed, take myself in my hand, and close my eyes.
It’s rough, almost painful, but that makes it even better; it reminds me that this isn’t right, that I’m giving in to urges I shouldn’t. And when I picture inked bark over tanned skin, and blue eyes dark with arousal, I shoot so hard that I scrape the inside of my cheek raw trying to contain my groans.
After, I’m disgusted. I wash my hand; pull my boxers and T-shirt on with short, angry jerks; and crawl under the covers. I set my alarm and flop down on the pillow, thinking I’ll never manage to relax.
But the tightness in my muscles has melted away, and my body is growing heavy. I’m asleep in minutes.
“You seem different today.”
Val is looking at me curiously, and I turn back to watch the men’s synchro teams on the platform.
“I’m focused on the competition. You should be too.”
A lot of the men diving in the synchro will also be diving individual, so coming in a day early to observe them is good research. Val competes tomorrow in the prelims and semifinals, and I’m the following day, then the finals will be after that if we make it through.
When we make it through.
My scowl does nothing to deter her. “I’m just saying, you’re way more relaxed than you normally are at these events.”
“Pay attention to the divers.”
Val doesn’t bring it up again, but she watches me for the rest of the day.
The three-meter synchro that’s up next doesn’t interest me as much, but I’ve already done a cardio workout this morning and I’m free until later this afternoon, so it’s either stay in my seat and see the springboard event, or go do homework.
I stay. The fact that Brandon comes to join us on Val’s other side doesn’t factor in at all.
But studying Brandon is way more interesting than any of the divers, and Val seems to think the same because she’s cocking her head to the side and staring at him too. Because Brandon, for the first time since he started training with us, is showing interest in a diving competition.
No, I realize. In a diver.
He’s applauding every time one of the teams comes up. They’re not anything special, and I don’t recognize their names from any past competitions, but something about D. Collins and S. Ramirez is getting him excited.
Oh. It doesn’t take me long to connect the dots. I pull out my phone and type a quick message in the notepad, which I flash to Val when Brandon’s focused on the pool.
He had sex with one of them yesterday afternoon.
She shoots me a look identical to the one that I know was on my own face the second I figured it out: disbelief.
I try to keep my attention on the two Florida divers professional when they come up for their fourth dive, but now I’m distracted. I want to know which one of them it is; which of them did Brandon have sex with?
And then I’m disgusted with myself, because I don’t care. I shouldn’t care. I have more important things to worry about than what my training partner gets up to when he has downtime. And I can feel my muscles tensing up all over again.
“I’m gonna head out,” I tell Val, and take off before I can be tempted to stay.
By the end of the competition, though, I’m not tense anymore. I’m not distracted, or upset, or disgusted.
I’m relaxed. Elated.
For years, I’ve been pushing myself to improve. I started training with Andrey, whose coaching showed me exactly how far I can go, and now my hard work has paid off.
The National Championships has three rounds for the individual competitions: a preliminary round, where they whittle down the two-dozen contestants to a more manageable figure, followed by a semifinal that narrows the field down to eight.
I sailed through the first two rounds easily. I didn’t expect otherwise; I knew I was good enough to make it to the finals, and I did so with no problems.
The finals were where things got tricky, though. Two of the eight competitors were previous national champions, and one went to the last Olympics, although he didn’t medal. I could tell it was going to be fierce, so I had to step up my game.
People think divers just do whatever dives they want at a competition, but the truth is that we have six dives that we spend all of our time focusing on until they’re perfect, and it’s those six that we do at almost every competition. So I always know going in exactly how I’ll be diving, which dives will be the ones to give me problems.
And for some reason, I felt looser today. Like my muscles were liquid and my body could flow exactly the way I needed it to.
The first dive in my program was an inward three and a half somersaults, piked. I always do this dive first, because it requires spinning so close to the platform that there’s a possibility of hitting your head and slicing it open. If I can get the scariest dive out of the way at the start, the rest aren’t a concern.
After that was my armstand, where I had to perch precariously on the edge of the platform on my hands before pushing off into the air. It reminded me of the first time I saw Brandon dive. But unlike Brandon, I nailed this one.
Every dive I did today was spot-on. My one superstition is to not look at the scoreboard during a competition, but I didn’t need it to know how well I was doing.
In the end, it’s almost anticlimactic. The scores are listed, and I’m easily thirty points ahead of last year’s national champion.
Which . . . makes me this year’s national champion.
Val gives me a hug, and Andrey shakes my hand, smiling widely. Brandon doesn’t wait for permission; he plasters himself against my chest and wraps me up in a congratulatory hug. And I’m so pleased that I don’t even have it in me to glare at him.
I can feel the heat from his body against mine all the way to the podium, and for some reason it’s easy to pick out Brandon’s blue eyes from the crowd of people watching. I try to push him out of my mind, raising my hand to wave at the crowd.
But try as I might to ignore him, it’s almost impossible to do so. I’ve been thinking about him since our first day in the hotel here in Indiana, and I can’t seem to stop. He’s always there, in my space or just out of reach. And now that I’ve heard him with another man . . . now that I’ve thought about it, I can’t seem to separate the Brandon I dive with from the Brandon who whispered, “Congrats, I knew you were the best,” against my ear.
We don’t bother to stay another night; it’s only a few hours back to Ohio, and we’re all tired and ready to sleep in our own beds again. But Val claims the front seat, chatting with Andrey about her own competition, where she placed second, which leaves me in the backseat with Brandon.
Like he knows that I’m thinking about him, Brandon leans over to me in the car on the way home. I’m staring out the window, trying to process the events of the day, but my mind is still spinning like I’m mid-dive, and I can’t focus on anything beyond the way his breath hits the ribbon of the gold medal around my neck.
“I think I get it now.” His words are a whisper, meant only for me.
My breathing hitches, but I focus on his reflection in the window to keep from turning. “Get what?”
“What this means.” His hand snakes out to flick against the medal. I haven’t taken it off since it was placed there, and I won’t until I’m home in my tiny box of an apartment, where I can sort through my emotions in private.
Instead of speaking, I just nod. He’d have had to be blind to miss the eyes that followed our little group as we walked out tonight. The diving world is tiny, especially in the US-only competitions, and Andrey’s a well-known name. When I placed first in my event, and Val got her second-place finish, people started talking. Throwing around the O-word, watching us calculatingly.
They watched Brandon too, trying to figure out how he fits into this puzzle.
“Teach me how to do what you did today.”
He’s in my space, and I can feel the heat radiating off of him. It makes me nervous, dredges up that thing inside me that I want to keep hidden. “No.”
Brandon huffs out a laugh against my cheek. “Fine. I’ll figure it out myself.”
I expect him to move away, but he hooks his chin on my shoulder and watches through the window with me for another minute, even though he has a perfectly good window on his own side of the car. I sit completely still, barely daring to breathe, until he exhales another laugh and finally leaves me alone.
Something curls in my chest, wraps around my lungs and squeezes until I can’t get enough air. I wait until Brandon has fallen asleep against his window before I look over at him. I let myself take him in one last time, his tattoo peeking out from the neck of his T-shirt, his long legs spread in front of him.
I want him. I don’t want much, outside of that Olympic gold, but I want Brandon. And I can’t have him—won’t let myself. I have a gold medal around my neck now, but it’s not the one that really matters.
I won’t risk destroying everything I’ve worked so hard for. I won’t let a pretty pair of eyes ruin this for me.
Brandon is a distraction I can’t afford.