Hot Shots
By Michael P. Thomas
Published by JMS Books LLC
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Copyright 2018 Michael P. Thomas
ISBN 9781634865623
Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published in the United States of America.
* * * *
Hot Shots
By Michael P Thomas
When I say that I had always yearned to be an Olympian, what I mean of course is that I am ass-over-teakettle nuts about jocks, and my life’s primary ambition has long been to fuck as many Olympic athletes as possible. The first time I ever clapped eyes on Michael Phelps’ extraordinary body in nothing but a Speedo, I knew that world-class athletes were my sexual destiny, and I set my sights on the Olympics at an early age. The shortest distance between two points being a straight line, I figured bunking up in a dorm full of them would provide me the easiest possible access to the Hottest Guys in the World.
A foolproof plan, you’ll agree, save for one detail: I was nowhere near a World Class Athlete. In any sport. Certainly not swimming, which—a bed full of broad-backed Aquamen being my primary target—I naturally tried first. I was fit enough, and at six foot three I would eventually grow flippers for feet, but I never had the shoulders, and why does everybody act like swimming pools all go dry at ten o’clock in the morning? If I have to roll out of bed while the neighborhood rooster is still sawing logs and get shirtless and wet before the damn sun comes up, I am unlikely to excel at any pursuit. Swimmers are hot-bods, to be sure, but I figured I’d have better access to them in the Olympic Village cafeteria than in the pool, anyway, so I hung my Speedos out to dry after one unremarkable summer-club season.
Wrestling was no more of a success story. It occurred to me that if my objective was physical proximity to jocks, a sport that required me to intertwine with them during the course of competition might be the ticket. I cut an encouragingly sexy figure in the singlet, but I was still growing like kudzu—taller this week than last, skinnier tomorrow than yesterday—and I couldn’t muster the coordination to do much more than hump every boy they put underneath me. Which suited me fine, but didn’t jive with the sporting objectives of most of the rest of the team, and my season was cut short when I came in my singlet during a particularly frictional exhibition match against the star of the all-boys Catholic high school from across town.
Like a slew of blond Californians before me, I turned to volleyball, for which I lacked the vertical leap; then to table tennis, for which I lacked the focus, to say nothing of the speed. Boxing busted my nose, rowing was hard, and rhythmic gymnastics, for which I had a sparkling flare, turned out to be only for girls. I shot my archery instructor in the leg during our first (and last) practice, and my taekwondo instructor laughed out loud when he overheard me use the words “me,” “Olympics,” and “taekwondo” together in a sentence. I briefly entertained a foray into Winter sports—an ass-lover like me could do a lot worse than a speed skater, after all—but my ankle snapped like a twig my very first time in ice skates, and as I spun across the mall skating rink, sequined five- and six-year-olds effortlessly dodging my tumbling, bladed limbs, my dreams of snow-flaked Olympic glory died along with the damage deposit on the rented skates that the paramedics had to cut off of my ballooning foot.
And then, as often does in stories like mine, a funny thing happened. I was laid up with what had come to be known as my “ice dancing injury,” flipping half-heartedly through a badminton supply catalog, wondering if I could get my parents to spring for an Olympic-quality horse for my next birthday, when my mother hove into the room, locked in a struggle with an upright vacuum cleaner.
“How’s your ankle?” she shouted over the clatter.
“It hurts,” I pouted.
After a prolonged tussle against the root beer shag, she yanked the cord from the wall, and the vacuum cleaner sputtered, clattered, and eventually stilled. The smoldering metal monstrosity had been my mother’s first purchase, from a door-to-door salesman, when she’d come to this country to be with my father, and she persisted in using it “in his memory,” never mind that he wasn’t dead, but had rather run off to Florida—with, of all things, a door-to-door saleswoman. “C’est la même chose,” she insisted; same difference. Because it weighed twice what she did and spread more dirt than it sucked, my mother always needed to rest for a considerable spell after an outing with her favorite household appliance, and she sagged dramatically into the recliner that faced the couch across which I was splayed.
“What are you doing?” she asked, jerking her chin towards the catalog.
“Plotting my triumphant return,” I told her.
“To badminton?”
I shrugged. “Unless you want to buy me a horse.”
“I wish you’d go back to swimming,” she said. “There was very little equipment to buy.”
“There was also very little sleep,” I reminded her.
She rolled her eyes. “This again. My son the athlete—will do anything at all to get to the Olympics. As long as he doesn’t have to get out of bed.”
“I’m just saying, the Olympics are on TV all day—there must be a sport that competes in the afternoon.”
“It’s a question of dedication,” she declared. “You must be willing to get up at four in the morning for your sport, whether you need to or not. Nobody ever got to the Olympics by sleeping in.” And then, from out of nowhere, “Ask your cousin Marcel.”
“I have a cousin Marcel?”
“Mmm,” she affirmed, a lazy French yes. “Your auntie Francine’s oldest, from her first marriage.”
“Francine had a ‘first marriage’?”
“Mmm.” Again.
“And what would cher Cousin Marcel know about setting your alarm for the Olympics?” I asked, missing the connection.
“He’s been to the Olympics,” she said, leaving her duh! unsaid but well understood.
“What, you mean like as a spectator?”
“No.”
“You mean he’s been to the Olympics?”
She nodded. “A few times. He went to Atlanta. And Sydney, I think.”
I sat bolt upright on the couch. “I have a cousin who’s been to the Olympics, and you’re just telling me this now?” I cried.
“Have I never told you this before?”
“You never even told me about Marcel before!”
“Well, that’s pretty much Marcel in a nutshell: he went to the Olympics. He was Luxembourg’s first medal in like fifty years.”
“He medaled?”
“Mmm. Bronze medal,” she said. “He might actually have two of them.”
“In what sport?”
&
nbsp; “He’s a shooter.”
“What is that, like a position in field hockey or something?”
“No, a shooter.” She pointed her finger at me and cocked her thumb. “Pow, pow,” she said.
“Shooting’s a sport?” I asked.
She shrugged. “In Luxembourg it is.”
And just like that, my plan fell into my lap from the sky, fully formed and only an e-mail away. I felt like a jackass; I had never even considered the Luxembourg angle. It had been made clear to all observers that I had neither the drive nor the talent to rise to the top of the highest-funded Olympic program in the world, but I had a Luxembourgish passport—somewhere—and I was immediately and fully confident that I could be a star in what had to be a tiny program. I hadn’t been to my mother’s speck of a country in ten years, and I had never lived there, but I whipped out an e-mail to my long-lost bosom cousin professing a love for shooting that would not be denied, and when his gracious invitation to come and train with him appeared in my inbox, my bags were already packed. I was still on my ice dancing crutches when I hobbled onto what was literally the very next flight to Luxembourg.
* * * *
Findel Airport in Luxembourg is not exactly the beating heart of European air travel. As befits a tiny country, it is a tiny airport, its tarmac scattered with tiny airplanes from nearby European capitals, alongside which my connecting flight from Amsterdam pulled up at around seven o’clock on a Tuesday evening. I hobbled into the tiny arrivals hall, where Marcel was easy enough to spot in the mob of like, eleven people, the other ten of whom huddled together in thawbs and abayas, anxious to greet someone who was not me.
My mother and I had spent much of the drive to LAX trying to determine if I had ever met Marcel. When we were kids, my mom had taken us to Luxembourg every summer, but as my older sisters got into high school, their interest in spending summers away from their friends waned sharply, and by the time I was a teenager, we’d quit going altogether.
“He came to California, I remember once, when he was a teenager,” my mom told me. “But he’s much older than you are, I doubt you’d remember.”
“Much older” stuck in my head for some reason, and on the flight over I had decided to keep my eyes peeled for a rotund grey-haired man in a beret and a windbreaker, probably carrying a small dog. He was actually wearing a sporty windbreaker, but that was the beginning and end of any similarities Marcel bore to my vision of him; suffice it to say that if I had ever met this cousin of mine, I would not have forgotten it.
“Much older” made him about thirty-five, and time had handled Marcel with exquisite kid gloves. Impossibly insouciant, he was the kind of accidental handsome that takes art directors and make-up artists hours to replicate in magazine ads. A light scarf hung from his neck like maybe he didn’t know it was there; his sunglasses raked his chestnut bangs away from his angular face so that his overgrown hair framed it like a shimmering mane; his hips were just this side of wide, seemingly designed to fill this particular pair of charcoal jeans, and his tummy was unselfconsciously flat under a snug, muted sweater. Long story short, he was breathtaking, and he seemed neither to know nor to care.
He stepped up, one long leg before the other, and offered me a long, strong hand. “You must be Bolton.”
I grimaced. “Unfortunately, yes,” I said, slipping my hand into his, a stone wrapped in silk.
“Unfortunately?”
“Please call me Bo.”
He grinned. “I understand,” he said. “Beau.” His mouth emphasized the similarity to the French word for “handsome,” so when he said with a wink, “It suits you,” like that would be our little secret, my stomach flopped. I was at once ecstatic at the proposition of living in the same house as this man for the foreseeable future, and deeply distraught that he was a blood relative.
“Where’s your stuff?” he asked me, casting a glance at my luggage.
“This is it here,” I said, shouldering my backpack and preparing to wheel my little blue suitcase into my new life.
“I mean your shooting stuff.”
My what? “Oh, like my gun?”
“For example.”
“Um…I’m kind of between guns at the moment,” I hedged. “I was hoping maybe you’d have one I could borrow.”
“I see,” he said. “What do you usually shoot?”
“Um…pigeons?”
Marcel was nonplussed, but only for a moment. He took the handle of my rolling suitcase and turned to lead the way to the airport’s tiny car park. “Well, there’s no rush,” he said, pointing to my crutches. “What happened?”
“Oh, this? It’s nothing,” I said. After a beat, I hurried to add, “It’s an old ice skating injury.” The gun conversation didn’t appear to have gone as smoothly as it could have, and I hoped that a reference to a sport—any sport—would make me sound suitably Olympian.
“Is it quite serious?”
“Well, it’s healing nicely,” I assured him. “I should only be on the crutches for another few days.”
He came alongside a BMW the color of blue smoke and gave my shoulder a hearty whack as its trunk whispered open. “Good,” he declared. “Then we’ll get started.”
The Luxembourg that I remembered from growing up was essentially the European Mesa Verde—shops and dwellings perched on the side of a canyon, the floor of which was crisscrossed by buses, trams, and excessively serious people in overcoats. But Marcel lived far outside the city on what amounted to a ranch, in a modest, modern home on the edge of an undulating blanket of green. Almost all of the living space was on one parquet floor, his bedroom separated from what was to be mine by a small, sparkling cubby containing the shower. The toilet was across the hall, and the sun-soaked kitchen took up fully half of the square footage. Through the kitchen and down a narrow, Escher-esque staircase, Marcel’s leather-laden office opened onto the verdant acres of what he adorably called “the garden.”
The office was a monument to Marcel’s career and to shooting in general. The walls were covered in plaques and posters from Championships on every continent; every flat surface was jammed with photos of Marcel in protective eyewear either blasting away at something, or shaking hands with an official, an opponent, or, in one instance, the Grand Duchess Maria Teresa who, judging by the gleam in her eye under what appeared to be a veil-trimmed sombrero, was able to appreciate more about Marcel than just his skill on the range. Pride of Place was reserved for two bronze medals, which hung from blue ribbons on either side of a lavishly framed print of the Sydney Opera House being bombarded by fireworks. He had competed in Atlanta and Athens, too, but had brought home Luxembourg’s biggest medal haul in a single Games in 2000, and it was the shrine to this achievement that would, after a couple of weeks, get me into trouble.
I tried to keep my own medal podium fantasies to a minimum. I wouldn’t know the Luxembourg national anthem if Marcel whistled it into my ear, for one thing, and, thanks to my crutches, I had yet to even handle a gun, much less shoot my way to Olympic glory with one. I figured if I didn’t shoot my eye out, we’d come out ahead. All I needed, I reminded myself, was a spot on the team, a plane ticket to London, and a crack at the fellas—someone had to come in last, and I didn’t care if it was me. But the burnished medals were so handsome, seeming to reflect the glow of the fireworks, I found myself easily entranced. It was a universally recognized accomplishment, an Olympic medal, and the knowledge that casual, flare-haired Marcel possessed such a high level of skill and acumen stirred something in me.
In fact, the combination of my proximity to two bronze rounds carved with five interlocking rings and to the person who had earned them gave me a rather insistent hard-on, and, after two heroic weeks of ignoring its aching demands for attention, I found myself alone with it in Marcel’s office. The gleaming medals, the photographs of Marcel so handsome and competent, the smell of him that lingered on the leather chairI was halfway to climax before I even realized I was stroking myself, and I was just
beginning to wriggle out of my jeans when I heard Marcel come down the stairs, calling, “Beau?”
“I’m in here,” I called back, like a dope. There was nowhere else at the bottom of the stairs to be, and the crack in my voice made it plain that I was up to no good.
Marcel came around the corner at the same second I re-zipped my jeans. “So…” he started, glancing once—then, eyes wide, a second time—at my bulging fly. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, nothing,” I replied, ever-so-casually. “Just admiring your office. These medals are so cool.”
“Thanks,” he said. “So…” this time he directed his gaze, and mine, to my foot. “You’re feeling better, I see.”
Shit! I frantically raked the room with my eyes for my crutches, reaching out for their protection, coming up empty.
“They’re in your room,” he said. “I’m glad—I thought you seemed to be getting better.”
And I was glad that he didn’t accuse me outright of faking it, which I had been doing for the last three or four days. My ankle was completely healed, which made the crutches more of a hassle than anything else, but I knew they were keeping me off the shooting range, so I’d continued to drag them around with me. I had waxed rhapsodically about my passion for shooting in my e-mail, but had not been able to carry on a conversation about it for three seconds, and the longer I put him off, the greater my fear grew that he would drive me straight from the shooting range to the airport when he discovered I couldn’t tell a rifle from a referee. My lust for his skills had driven me from my room with nary a second thought for props, and now I stood before him, still hard as a rock, exposed in more ways than one.
“Yes, well…” I stammered. “It took me a day or two to be sure, but yes,” I made a great show of putting my weight on my right leg, “I do seem to be all better.” Remember why you’re here, a small voice instructed me. “We can hit the range any day now.” I grudgingly added, with all the enthusiasm I could fake.
Marcel’s fervor was all too genuine. “I was thinking the same thing,” he said, striding to the door to the garden. “Come on,” he invited, fairly yanking it open, “Let’s go!”
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