“Jacob, do you think you can come back from that disastrous medal race yesterday?”
“What went wrong?”
“Can the team still win relay gold?”
Five minutes into their Olympic Media Day panel and Bas was ready to leap across the table and do bodily harm to more than one reporter. If he hadn’t been in this fucking suit, he probably would have already.
Each thinly veiled or not-veiled-at-all accusation flung at Jacob pierced Bas’s chest like an arrow. The press had gone from fawning all over the new talent after opening ceremonies, to crucifying Jacob today. Bas reconsidered the secret-weapon strategy; it had ended up hurting Jacob more than it’d protected him. The pup took each hit with a jolt, growing paler by the question, and the arrows in Bas’s chest continued to twist, ripping apart his insides.
This was his fault, not Jacob’s. He was the reason Jacob had been off yesterday. Not that Jacob had done anything to be ashamed of. He’d had a bad start and swam from behind to take bronze. At nineteen, he’d stood on an Olympic podium. How many of these reporters could say that?
Bas reached for the mic to say as much, but Alex beat him to it.
“Respectfully”—Bas didn’t think Alex needed to give the press that much, but that was why Alex was the captain—“my teammate, at his first Olympics, medaled in his first race. At nineteen, I’d say that’s pretty damn impressive. I have complete confidence in Jacob, in his next race and in the medley relay. Now, let’s move on.”
“Surely, you’ve got other questions for us,” Dane drawled on the other side of Alex, inviting the obvious.
Taking the bait, the reporters shifted focus to Alex and Dane. Jacob, however, leaned forward and reached for a mic.
Bas clasped his knee under the table. “You don’t have to, Pup.”
“Yeah, I kinda do.” His gaze was wary but determined. “Y’all can’t take responsibility for me. I’m the one dragging the team down, and I need to fix it. I can only count on me.”
He pushed Bas’s hand off his knee, and an arrow twisted all the way to Bas’s heart. Jacob knew, the entire story. Someone—Julio, Sean or Kevin, or Alex—had told him. Not that it was a secret. Bas had made a pretty public mess of things four years ago. He should have been the one to tell Jacob, but he’d avoided him, ashamed of himself, for past and present acts, for taking advantage. More than that, if he’d told Jacob and Jacob had forgiven him, asked him to stay despite being a complete jackass, Bas wasn’t certain he could have resisted. And if he didn’t resist, and he made a mess of things again, he’d be the one putting Jacob and the medley relay gold at risk, again.
There was no worry of Jacob asking him to stay now. He knew the truth, saw the real Bas, and the disappointment was reflected in his big green eyes. Eyes that had once looked at Bas with admiration and desire. Not any longer.
“Actually, I’d like to say something.”
Jacob’s amplified voice snapped Bas back to the present.
The pup squared his shoulders and took a giant breath, steeling himself. “Yesterday wasn’t my best performance. These guys—” he gestured left and right “—warned me about the Olympic experience being overwhelming.”
“Gotta second him there,” Dane interjected, and the crowd tittered.
The tension in Jacob’s frame eased a little, and Bas would have hugged Dane if he weren’t two chairs away.
“It got the better of me yesterday,” Jacob said. “For my team, and for myself, I plan to—hope to do better in my next race and in the medley relay. I know how important the medley relay gold is to these guys and the team. I don’t want to let them down.”
Questions broke out, follow-ups on practice times and other races, and Alex and Coach, on the other side of Dane, took over fielding them. Bas wanted to reach for Jacob. A hand on his shoulder—something, anything—to indicate how proud he was of him, that he was confident Jacob would live up to his words, but the way Jacob held himself slightly apart, like he anticipated it, kept Bas from acting on the instinct. One he needed to quash anyway.
Plastering on a smile, Bas checked back into the press conference, answering the few questions directed at him and slipping in encouraging words where warranted. Past the questions about Jacob’s first race, the rest of the panel went fine, nothing like the chaotic Media Day in San Antonio. After it was done, Coach called Jacob over before Bas could get a word in with him. Bas turned to Alex instead, their backs to the mic. “How much does he know?”
“He asked yesterday, before the race, after he got a look at Espo’s ink.”
“Fuck!” He ran a hand over his head, bumping into his top knot. “Julio saw his tat at the party. He’d have recognized the work. Known that I’d inked the pup already.”
“Jacob’s not the only US swimmer with your artwork on his body.”
“I inked him before the meet, Alejandro.”
Dane leaned his head in. “And Bas doesn’t look at any other swimmers the way he looks at Jacob.”
Bas speared him with a deadly glare.
Dane lifted his hands. “Hey, just telling the truth.”
“He’s not lying,” Alex piled on. “Julio would have also seen you two at opening ceremonies. Your . . . concern . . . was obvious.”
Fucking hell. “How much did you tell him?”
Before Alex could answer, there was a commotion in front of the dais. By Dane’s sudden rigidity, Bas could guess at the cause of the ruckus.
A too-saccharine voice, a more affected version of Dane’s Southern drawl, confirmed it. “Dane, honey, we’d like a word with you.” Kimberly Ellis, in four-figure Chanel Bas recognized from his own mother’s recently expanded closet, looked her camera-ready, home-shopping-queen self. Standing next to her, Reverend Patrick Ellis, “the country’s minister” many called him, was in his standard three-piece getup, a fire-and-brimstone scowl on his face.
Dane wove his fingers together with Alex’s. “I have nothing to say to you.”
The Reverend’s upper lip curled, but Mrs. Ellis stayed the course. “We have some things to work out. You’re still our son.”
“Not by your own words,” Bas said. He’d been in the room when the Ellises had disowned their only child. “Witnesses are a bitch.”
Jacob reappeared at their sides, clamping a hand over the closest table mic. “We’re drawing a crowd. How about we take this someplace private?”
“We don’t need to hear from you,” Patrick clipped.
“These are my teammates, so I’m afraid you do, sir.”
Jacob’s sir and heavier-than-usual Texas accent were a stroke of genius. Polite, respectful, and bridging the gap with the Ellises, even if Bas didn’t think they deserved the consideration. But Alex and Dane also didn’t deserve to have their dirty laundry aired in public, more than it already had been.
“Burrows is right,” Coach said, joining them. “There’s a conference room down the hall we can use.” He held out an arm toward stage left and the exit door.
Descending the steps, Jacob had them wait at the bottom while Dane’s parents passed. Another show of respect. Amidst this chaos, the return of Jacob’s hyperobservance comforted Bas. This was the pup’s game face. Bas needed to get his own head back in the game, the one happening right now, where everything was on the line for Alex and Dane. As they walked behind the Ellises, he pulled out his phone and texted his mother.
Last in, Bas pushed the door to, leaving it slightly cracked. Turning, he caught Jacob’s gaze, those green eyes hard and determined, a protective mode he must have perfected on his father’s behalf. How strong had Jacob had to be? For how long? And how had he juggled that with everything else? Well, he didn’t have to juggle alone in this case. Bas schooled his features similarly, nodded, and they joined the group around the conference table, fighting together for their friends and teammates.
“I thought it was pretty clear last time we spoke that we were through,” Dane said.
“Emotions were running high,” Mrs. Ellis said.
“And they aren’t now?”
The door swung open and Sasha Stewart strode in. Near six feet tall and working the curves the deity gave her, his mother was a riot of color in her rainbow linen suit, with red, white, and blue braids woven into her blond hair. Mrs. Ellis looked positively offended. Bas bit back a proud smile.
“You received the legal paperwork,” she said, blue eyes begging for a fight. “That should address everything.” Bas’s mom had drafted all the documents necessary to move Dane’s assets, including his sponsorships, into a new trust that his parents couldn’t touch. As stressful as this was for Dane, it was a walk in the park for Sasha, having emancipated more than a few young stars from their controlling managers and parents.
“I’m guessing that’s why they’re really here,” Alex said.
“Do I need to read the documents to you, line by line?” Sasha asked. “Or we can call your attorney. Get him on the line too.”
“That was a drastic measure, son,” Mrs. Ellis said, addressing Dane instead.
“To safeguard my—” he lifted his and Alex’s clasped hands “—our future.”
Reverend Ellis’s scowl deepened.
“Dane’s trust isn’t the real problem, is it?” Jacob said. Bas didn’t miss the undercurrent of judgment belying the good-ole-boy accent. Jacob was lulling them into a false sense of security and setting a trap. “You’re standing there, across the table, as far away from Alex and Bas as possible, and you haven’t even tried to hug Dane, your son who you’re supposedly here to reconnect with. Do you think they’ll bite? That their sexuality, your son’s sexuality, somehow endangers you? Or are you just that repulsed by us, for no good reason?”
Their eyes widened, catching on that the nice young Southern boy was also queer. “It’s like you’re all brainwashed,” Mrs. Ellis murmured, while Patrick looked aghast at Coach. “What kind of team are you running here?”
“A winning one,” Hartl replied.
“Full of f—”
“Don’t go there,” Bas growled, as he strained not to launch across a table a second time today. Flexing all his muscles, he cursed and thanked the suit that made his fly swimmer’s mass—the biggest in the room already—seem twice as large.
Patrick quelled, a bit.
“You wasted your time and money coming here,” Dane said. “You still don’t get it. They”—he held his arms out wide—“didn’t change me. You’re the ones who tried to do that. They accepted me. These are my brothers, my team, my family now.” He clasped Alex’s hand again, and Bas slung an arm over Dane’s shoulders from the other side.
Jacob’s fingers nudged and tangled with his, and if not for that too-tight suit, Bas was sure his heart would’ve beaten right out of his chest. It was a show of solidarity for Dane—and Bas didn’t let his gaze stray, maintaining the same—but that touch meant everything. More than it should.
“Sign the papers,” Sasha said. “So Dane and Alex can move on with their lives.”
“We won’t let this happen,” Patrick said. “There are places—”
“Over my dead body.” The violence in Alex’s voice could have slain armies.
Bas saw the return fire on the tip of Reverend Ellis’s tongue. He should let him make it, but he didn’t want Alex or Dane to suffer that. Lowering his arm, he dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He tossed it on the table, screen up, recorder showing. “Go ahead, say it. I’m sure threats of that sort will be more than enough to get a restraining order on top of the divestiture. Your golden goose is gone. Hope you saved some of that TV money for retirement.”
Bas’s mother smiled over at him. “Nice work, son.”
Jacob fired the final shot, polite yet no less deadly. “I think we’re done here. Please go and leave my friends alone. We’ve got all we need here.” His fingers tightened around Bas’s, and Bas squeezed back, thumb sweeping his knuckles.
In the face of their united front, the Ellises tucked their tails and retreated, mumbling huffed goodbyes and meaningless take cares on their way out.
“You good?” Coach asked, eyeing Dane. “I need to go make sure they don’t cause a scene out there.”
“We got it here,” Bas said, as Dane added, “Appreciate it, Coach. And thanks, Ms. Stewart.”
“Of course.” She patted Bas’s shoulder, then headed for the door behind Hartl. “I’m going to see if I can get them to sign those papers.”
Once the door swung closed, Dane rotated and rested back against the table, hands covering his face. Jacob untangled from Bas and went to Dane, and Bas turned his attention to a still-trembling Alex.
He’d known the mention of conversion camps would set Alex off. At SC, they’d counseled kids who’d survived those inhumane programs. And survived was the right word. Now, that was brainwashing, and it was a long, hard road back from it. Alex reacted predictably, justifiably, when the man he loved was threatened with torture. If someone had threatened Jacob with that . . . Bas banished the thought, and the next instant, the implication he’d just drawn.
He focused on Alex instead, rubbing a hand over his friend’s shoulders. “Cálmate, cálmate,” he murmured.
Dane dropped his hands. “I’m sorry they got in the middle again.”
“At least they waited until after the presser,” Bas said. “Without a scene this time, relatively.”
“Thank you,” Dane said, glancing up at Jacob. “For diverting that.”
Jacob shrugged. “Seemed best for everyone.”
Dane nodded. “You did good, Pup. Thanks.”
“So did you, Ellis,” Bas said. “How’s that backbone feel?”
“Good,” he said with a small smile. Pushing off the table, he crossed to Alex and pulled him into his arms. Only then did Alex finally start to relax, shoulders lowering from his ears and jaw unclenching. “Easier knowing all of you have it,” Dane said over his boyfriend’s head. “Thank you.”
Bas’s eyes locked with Jacob’s. “It’s what family does.”
Only athletes, trainers, and coaches were permitted in Olympic Village, yet somehow Bas’s mother had finagled her way inside and claimed one of the picnic tables by the pond. She sat, one leg crossed over the other, sipping from a coffee cup and looking supremely satisfied with herself.
Shucking his jacket and rolling up his sleeves, Bas straddled the bench across the table from her. “How did you get in here?”
She glanced at him over the top of her designer shades. “I have my ways.”
“You sweet-talked Coach, didn’t you?”
She shrugged, feigning innocence, and pushed the coffee cup across the table to him. “I sweet-talk people for a living.”
“Oh,” Bas said. “Is that what you call what you just did to the Ellises?”
“No, that’s what I call justice.”
Bas tilted the cup toward her. “I’ll drink to that.” He took a sip—Turkish black, his and her favorite. “So they signed the papers?”
She pushed her shades up onto her head and ruffled her dyed bangs. “Their lawyer is ‘reviewing them.’” The last was said with air quotes and a roll of her blue eyes, the same as Bas’s. “They’ll sign them. And Dane knows not to sign any new contracts until they do. I also have connections to several of Kimberly Ellis’s sponsors, so if she holds those papers hostage much longer, I’ll return the favor. She’ll have nothing to sell on that precious show of hers except those creepy-as-fuck porcelain figurines.”
Bas reached across the table, grasping his wonderful mother’s hand. “I’m glad you’re here, Mom.”
She curled her fingers around his, then withdrew her hand to gesture at their surroundings. “I missed all this last time. Wasn’t about to miss it again.”
Four years ago, she’d been in the middle of one of her firm’s biggest cases. She’d needed to stay, and Bas hadn’t thought twice about backing her decision. A divorcee who’d lost her house and half her pension to an adulterous husband, Sasha Stewart had battled depression while raising him on a legal secretary’s shoestring budget, putting all her spare change to swim and art lessons. Once he’d been old enough to get jobs sweeping floors at the local tattoo parlor and lifeguarding at the pool where he trained, she’d gone to night school, earned a law degree, then landed a job at one of LA’s best firms. She’d been on the cusp of winning a career-making case, one for a mom-in-need, much like she had been. She’d needed that case more than he’d needed her at his meet. In retrospect, Bas was glad she hadn’t been there to witness him acting like an idiot.
He was glad to have her at this one, though, her schedule more flexible now, thanks to an army of associates. “Perks of being a partner?” he said.
She winked, stealing back the coffee cup. “One of the few.” When she lowered it, Bas didn’t like the devious look in her eyes one bit. “So . . .” She tapped the plastic coffee lid with her long acrylic nails, painted with an eagle and the Olympic rings. “You want to tell me about that other sweet Southern boy you couldn’t keep your eyes off of?”
“It’s not like that,” he said automatically. He hoped that would be the end of it.
It wasn’t. “He couldn’t keep his eyes off you either. He’s queer, yeah?”
He stripped out of his suit coat and unknotted his tie. “Yeah, bi, like me.”
“Thought I caught that. So why’s it ‘not like that,’ then?”
When he didn’t answer, she reached out and grabbed the end of his tie, flicking it up into his face with a motherly, “Sebastian.”
Sometimes it sucked to have a legal shark as his mother. And as his other best friend. He could never lie to her. Maybe if she had been here last time, some things, like the mess he’d made with Julio, would have gone differently. Maybe he should talk to her about Jacob, now that she was.
He propped an elbow on the table, chin in his hand. “He’s too good for me.”
She flitted her hand with a pssh added for effect. “You’re always too hard on yourself.” One of the things he loved best about his mom was that she’d never pressured him to be anything. She accepted him for who he was. Full stop. But she also had a motherly blind spot.
“No, Mom, really. Jacob’s smart, selfless, talented, beautiful, and hyperobservant.”
“That’ll work for you in bed.”
He covered his face with his hand, groaning.
She rapped his knuckles with her nails. “Hey, if you can’t talk to your mother about these things . . .”
He peeked through his fingers. “I don’t think most people talk to their mother about these things.”
She waved at her hair and suit, then over at his dreads and tattoos. “We’re not most people. And if Jacob’s as good as you say, snatch him up. You already let Alex get away.”
Not that he’d ever wanted Alex that way, no matter how much she’d wanted his best friend as a son-in-law. But it was the sentence before that got to the heart of the matter.
“That’s just it, Mom. Jacob deserves commitment. He’s been left behind before, and I can’t do that to him. I don’t want to hurt anyone the way Dad hurt you.”
The thought of Jacob crying on the shower floor like his mother, water long gone cold, tore at his insides. The thought that maybe it had already been that bad for Jacob, at his hand or someone else’s, made him want to hurl.
“I swore off marriage and commitment the day Dad left. I was a fool to give it a try with Julio, and I don’t want to do that to someone else.”
“What makes you think you would?”
He held up a hand, ticking off the offenders. “Dad, Granddad, Great-granddad, me, if we wanna talk about the way I broke things off with Julio.”
“That was you being a stupid punk kid. You’re allowed to make mistakes. That’s how we learn.”
“Is that why you never married again?”
She shook her head. “I never married again because no one was good enough for you. And for my own reasons. I was raised to believe I had to marry and depend on a man. That didn’t go too good, obviously. So after the divorce, once I got past the worst of the depression, I vowed to stand on my own two feet before I’d ever consider marrying again. I got to the top of the mountain, on my own, and I like it here. I needed to do that, for me.”
“And now?”
Her eyes got that devious glint about them again. “I like sweet-talking that Coach of yours.”
He laughed out loud, the thought hilarious, yet not without merit.
But his mother, ever the lawyer, still had to deliver her closing statement. “That’s me, Bas, but you, my child, are not cut out for being single forever. You’re an artist, you see beauty everywhere, and you need inspiration, especially love. You work a job where you’re around people all the time.” She sat the empty cup aside and covered his hands. “Don’t you want to make your own art, your own life, with inspiration by your side every day? With someone you think is beautiful, inside and out?”
It was a convincing argument. Jacob was all those things, and Bas would like nothing more than to have that kind of beauty in his life every day, but in keeping it there, he feared he’d wreck the very thing he wanted most.