Jake rolled off Topher and onto his back. Now he was covered in sweat and lube and cum and whatever goop Topher put in his hair, and he had not a single regret, but he was a little uncomfortable.
Topher let out a happy sigh. “When my limbs resolidify, let’s hop in the shower, eh?”
“It’s like you read my mind.”
Chapter Sixteen
Day 6
JAKE ARRIVED back at the dorm just as Corey was waking up, and he felt tired but refreshed. He certainly hadn’t slept much the night before, but a deep satisfaction had settled into his bones, and he had enough excitement and adrenaline pumping through his system that he was wide-awake.
Valentin insisted on tagging along to the interview at the TBC studios, which Jake thought was a little strange. Chelsea was warming up at the practice gym for her own run at the all-around, and Valentin should have been there. And yet here he was, in a limo with Jake.
The drive to the International Broadcast Center felt surprisingly long. Jake gazed at the Madrid architecture while Valentin fiddled with his phone, probably texting with the coaching staff to find out how Chelsea was doing.
“I know you think I care more about Chelsea,” Valentin said.
“I don’t think that.”
“You do, and I cannot blame you for that. But I want to show you I love my children equally. I would love you if you never won medals.”
Jake sighed. He didn’t want to have this conversation. “I know, Dad.”
Valentin nodded. Then he said, “When I was boy, my father sent me to gym. I train with Soviet system. I live in gym. I love gymnastics, but that was hard. Some days I hated gymnastics. You and Chelsea, you spent so much time in gym as babies, I think gymnastics got in your blood. But I wanted you to have easier training. Gymnastics should be fun, not like army drills. I worry I still have too much Soviet in me.”
Jake stared at his father. Valentin’s accent was heavy, but Jake was so used to it, he understood every word. Yet he still had trouble gleaning the meaning of this little speech. Training had been hard, but no harder than for any other elite gymnast, from what Jake could tell. Jake fingered the ribbon from which the medal hung around his neck. Gymnastics required some innate talent, and it helped if one was short and had a certain build, but at the elite level, the difference between even gold and silver often came down to training. And maybe Jake’s childhood had been challenging, but it had gotten him where he was now. And he planned to give everything he had to gymnastics until his body gave out.
Which would be soon. Then he had early-onset arthritis to look forward to.
But even as he’d spent hours every day on grueling drills, he’d never wanted for anything. He had two loving parents who were financially comfortable. It had never really occurred to him to want something other than a gymnastics career, and his parents had done everything in their power to support that dream.
“I wouldn’t have changed anything,” Jake said.
“No?”
“I love gymnastics too. All I’ve wanted, since I was a little boy, was to win this medal.” Jake lifted it and turned it toward Valentin.
“I am so proud of you, Jakob. The most proud a father could be.”
Jake wasn’t used to this level of praise or emotion from his father, and it made his eyes sting. He wasn’t sure how to process this or what to say. He looked out the window and pressed his hand to his forehead. He didn’t want to cry again, so he swallowed and said, “Thanks.”
“Do you wish sometimes you became skateboarder or runner instead?”
“Skateboarder?” Jake laughed. “No.”
“All right. I worry.”
“I know. Don’t. I’m good.” Jake sighed. “I keep thinking about what I will do when I retire.”
Valentin nodded. “A few years away yet.”
“Maybe.”
“You coach juniors. You’re good with little ones.”
Jake smiled. He appreciated the endorsement, if not the tone in which Valentin delivered it.
When they got to the studio, Jake was on the lookout for Topher, hoping to at least say hello, preferably not with Valentin around. But Jake and Valentin were herded into a greenroom with a few other medal winners from the previous day. Valentin fell into awkward conversation with a fencing coach who had been a fan in the eighties, but she had a hard time understanding him through his accent.
Jake tried to watch the broadcast on a monitor in the corner of the room, but the parade of athletes chatting with, playing games with, or in one case cooking with the hosts of Wake Up, America! wasn’t actually that interesting. They did pull Topher in to help out with the cooking segment—which made sense, given his celebrity cooking show bona fides—so Jake watched that, but once Topher was off-screen, he lost interest again.
He was about to excuse himself to sneak out of the greenroom and “go to the restroom” on the pretense of tracking down Topher when one of the athletes in the room—Jake thought she was a swimmer—said, “Holy shit. Did you all hear this story about the reporter with the gay dating app?”
Jake balked. “What?”
The swimmer was looking at her phone. “Apparently some tabloid reporter installed a bunch of gay dating apps on his phone to find out how many LGBT athletes are hooking up with each other. He wrote a story without naming names, but he gave enough physical description that it’s pretty easy to guess who he’s talking about. Which means he just outed a whole bunch of gay athletes.”
Jake’s heart rate sped up. He glanced at Valentin, who raised an eyebrow. Jake’s hand went to his pocket, where his phone rested. He had a gay hookup app on his phone but hadn’t used it…. Well, he hadn’t hooked up with anyone since he’d been cleared to go back to the gym after last year’s concussion. It had been all Olympic training all the time since then. He’d gotten only a brief respite eight months ago; Valentin gave his gymnasts a couple of weeks off around the winter holidays, but the relatives from Odessa had flown in for that whole time. It had been easier to spend time with his cheek-pinching aunt than to explain his absences. He wasn’t even sure he had any dating apps on his phone anymore.
So logically he knew that the reporter wouldn’t have seen Jake’s profile in his search—and Jake’s phone had been such madness since he’d won the all-around that he’d hardly looked at it because the sheer number of texts and social media tags had been too much to deal with—and yet he still worried he was logged in and active. He wanted to disable the app right then, but not with everyone in the room staring at him.
He cleared his throat. “That’s awful.”
“I’m not sure what this article is supposed to prove,” the swimmer said. “Some athletes are gay.”
Valentin coughed.
Jake sank into the sofa he’d been sitting on. He fingered his medal. He’d been pretty cavalier with Topher, hadn’t he? That little video Topher had made was up on the various TBC social media accounts now. Topher had called it plausible deniability—they’d been together at the America House the previous night because they’d been recording the video, not discussing how to sneak out to hook up—but what if someone had spotted them together and made an assumption? What if someone saw him at the hotel last night? As far as Jake knew, no one in the media knew he was gay, and although he had no problem with people knowing, being in a foreign country with a huge international group of people, some of whom were from countries that didn’t exactly smile on homosexuality….
Also, if Jake came out, he wanted it to be on his own terms. He didn’t want to get outed by some dickhead journalist who thought he had the right to announce it. Jake’s sexuality had no relevance to his gymnastics.
Suddenly he felt itchy and unsafe, uncomfortable in the greenroom, where the temperature felt like it had just spiked.
A PA stuck his head in the door and said, “Mirakovitch, you’re up in ten. Come with me.”
Valentin trailed Jake as he followed the PA out to the set. They were deposited in a littl
e area right off set that had a coffee urn and some cups, so Jake poured himself a cup while he waited for the signal to go on set. He felt so jittery now that it was a real challenge to hold the cup still and not pour coffee everywhere.
“Do we have little time?” Valentin asked quietly. “I want to have word with my son before he goes in front of camera.”
The PA shrugged. “Sure. You can talk in the hallway. You have about five minutes. No longer or we have to change the show schedule.”
“Da. Come, Jakob.”
So Jake followed his father into the hallway.
Valentin looked around, probably noting that no one was there. “Your mother said you have someone you like,” he said.
Jake balked. Of course his mother had said something. Lana was a loving mother but a terrible gossip, and there were no secrets between her and her husband. “I… yes, but—”
“Do not be foolish. You heard what woman said in greenroom. Anything can wait until home.”
“But Dad—”
Valentin held up his hand. “You stay safe. You win event medals. Do not do anything rash or irresponsible.”
“Right. Of course.”
“Don’t take tone like that with me either.”
In Russian, Jake said, “You have to let me have a personal life.”
In rapid Russian, Valentin replied, “That’s not what this is about. You can date whoever you like. Do I care if you’re gay? No, I do not. But if there is a reporter lurking around the Olympic Village trying to make trouble, you cannot let him make it for you. Not now.”
Jake sighed. In English, he said, “I won’t.”
Valentin frowned. “I want you be safe.”
And Jake softened a little, because although this irritated him, he understood that this was Valentin’s attempt to be a caring father. “Yes. I know.”
“Da. Go to your interview.”
TOPHER WALKED out of his meeting with Joanna and down the hall to the studio. They’d spent part of the morning recutting the phone footage Topher had gotten the day before to do a package to air on TV that was basically meant to show how much fun he’d been having in Madrid. His assignment for the day was to go with a couple of athletes who had finished their Olympic run to the Market of San Miguel for a goofy segment about shopping. Topher wasn’t that excited about it, but he could be a team player.
He heard voices around the corner, so he paused to listen. It was Jake talking to someone with a thick Russian accent, probably his father.
“Do not be foolish,” said the Russian man. “You heard what woman said in greenroom. Anything can wait until home.”
“But Dad—”
“You stay safe. You win event medals. Do not do anything rash or irresponsible.”
“Right. Of course.”
“Don’t take tone like that with me either.”
Then they spoke in Russian. Jake speaking in Russian was incredibly sexy… although that wasn’t the point right now. Topher had picked up enough Russian over his years in figure skating that he understood words here and there, but they were speaking so fast, Topher couldn’t quite decipher it.
Topher didn’t have a chance to intervene, because a PA ran past him and grabbed Jake before taking off down the hallway toward the interview set.
Topher glanced at his watch. He didn’t have to be anywhere for another hour. He could stick around to watch Jake do the interview.
He snuck onto the side of the set, still out of Jake’s vision, and watched as one of the hosts asked Jake a series of softball questions about how it felt to win. Jake had clearly undergone some media training and answered each question with aplomb, or with a canned answer about how he didn’t care about the medal as much as putting in his best possible performance.
The interview was brief, just a segment between commercial breaks on the morning show, and when the director indicated they were breaking for commercial, Jake let out a sigh and got up off the prop sofa.
Topher snagged him on his way back to the greenroom.
“Oh!” Jake looked startled. “I kind of expected I’d see you here, but I wasn’t sure.”
“Listen, can we talk for a minute?”
“My father is probably waiting for me in the greenroom.”
“I know, just… okay, so, I was here earlier and overheard you and your father talking, and I wanted to… apologize, I guess? I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“You didn’t.”
“But your father said—”
“I know.” Jake lowered his voice. “He doesn’t know about us. Did you hear this story about the reporter who put a bunch of gay dating apps on his phone and started outing athletes in the Olympic Village? Well, not outing them, since he didn’t name names, but anyone with a brain can tell who he’s talking about from the context and….”
“I read the story this morning.”
“Oh.”
And Topher had been just as worked up about it as Jake seemed to be. He was frustrated by the fact that it had been so easy for some reporter to learn so much about the athletes in the Village, and Topher was kind of glad he’d disabled all his apps after playing show-and-tell with Natalie the other night. Sometimes it was easier to just remove everything from his phone because he tended to get harassed. Some gay guys could be incredible assholes when confronted with a photo of a man wearing lipstick and a feather boa. But Topher didn’t figure in this story; as a member of the press, he wasn’t allowed in the Athlete Village, and he wasn’t in danger from this asshole reporter since he was already out publicly. But he’d been that terrified athlete not wanting anything to distract from his Olympic dream.
Which was why he said, “I read the story. I’ll stay away from you if you need me to.”
Jake glanced back down the hall toward the greenroom. “No, I…. That is, my father is only looking out for me. He doesn’t want anything bad to happen. I just need to get in there and win medals and all that. He… means well. I don’t… I don’t want you to stay away.”
Topher smiled at that. “Right.” But Topher had been to two Olympics while he was still in the closet, and the second time he’d been dating an ice dancer from Canada who was never going to win a medal but was sweet as pie all the same. And they’d worked so hard to keep that relationship quiet that it had been rather stressful. That hadn’t been the reason Topher had choked at the Games—stress, pressure, his legs turning to jelly at the wrong moment, those had all been factors—but he still knew what it was like to be worried about the wrong thing getting out to the press.
Topher lowered his voice. “I was thinking with my dick, not my brain. I think you are so fucking sexy, and I want to spend all of my time feeling you up. And I kept thinking, if I could just get you alone….” He took a deep breath. “Last night was amazing, but you definitely should spend most of your time focusing on your sport. You need to give everything, one hundred percent, to your next competition. I believe you are the best gymnast in the world, and I need you to prove it, for yourself, if nothing else.”
Jake let out a breath. “I just… I mean, first of all I find you insanely attractive too, and I want to be with you, and if you think that most of what’s been going on in my mind since last night is not a complicated mathematical equation that will get us alone together again, well, you’d be mistaken.” Jake rubbed his forehead. “But on the other hand, now I’m terrified we’re going to get caught together, and I can imagine the media circus. Chelsea posted one dumb photo of herself and some swimmer she met the other day, and now there are whole stories on the internet about how they’re dating, and I don’t think Chelsea can even remember his name.”
“I get it, Jake. I was you once, you know.”
“I do know. It’s one of the things I like about you.”
The event finals were tomorrow. Topher could wait that long. “Tell you what. I don’t want anything to jeopardize your chances at the event finals. So let’s not make any plans to see each other until the competit
ion is over. But after that, all bets are off. Sound good?”
Jake appeared to think that over. “I… sure. That’s probably a good idea.”
Topher smiled. “I know it’s—”
Mr. Mirakovitch stuck his head out of the greenroom. “Jakob!” he whisper-shouted.
Jake said something in Russian, then turned back to Topher. “Sorry. That’s my cue.”
And Topher had to be okay with not seeing Jake for the next forty-eight hours. It was for the best. He knew that. “Good luck with the event finals. Win all the gold medals.”
Jake grinned. “I will certainly try.”
Once Jake was gone, Topher turned his attention back to the real task at hand, which was doing everything in his power to get his commentary gig. He was about to take a second look at his itinerary for the day when Joanna appeared as if from nowhere.
She pulled out a tablet and showed him the playback from a segment he’d recorded the day before. His hair looked a little flat, but some things were beyond his control. He didn’t love how nasal he sounded in the recordings, but he couldn’t do much about that either.
“This looks good,” Joanna concluded when the video finished. “It’ll air during the primetime broadcast tonight.”
“Thanks again for that opportunity.”
“It adds good color to the broadcast. Viewers love the whole package. They want to see the sports, but a lot of viewers aren’t regular fans or only tune in to watch every four years. This will keep them hooked. Your segments have actually been getting a lot of positive feedback.”
“Yeah?” Topher was glad to hear that. Natalie had mentioned that she’d seen a lot of social media posts praising TBC for hiring him because he was a fresh voice in the broadcast. In an effort to impress Joanna, he said, “I’ve gotten a ton of social media response. Not all of it positive, of course, but I think some of it is resonating in a good way.”
“Oh, definitely. Most of it.”
Something about Joanna’s tone made Topher’s heart sank. “What is it?”
Stick the Landing Page 17