Relay

by Layla Reyne

  Set it aside.

  Like Dane had set him aside.

  The anger and hurt still lingered. So did the attraction and jealousy.

  Set it aside.

  Easier said than done.

  Transitioning out of the paper-thin Colorado Springs air into the chlorinated soup of the US Olympic Training Center’s Natatorium was a learned skill. As a local kid who’d taken swim lessons at USOTC, then as an Olympic trainee and US Olympic Committee employee, Alex was accustomed to the abrupt shift in air density.

  Dane, however, didn’t have a lifetime of practice here, and much to Alex’s satisfaction, he was struggling. Chest heaving, their resident celebrity sat on the upper-most bleacher, closest to the circulation fans, with his eyes shut and his red-gold head lolling against the cement wall.

  Alex savored another victory.

  “Welcome to Colorado Springs and the US Olympic Team,” Coach said, amid claps and cheers from the gathered swimmers. He launched into his welcome spiel, and Alex tuned out, having heard it before.

  So did the other repeat performers on his squad. Mo, a three-time Olympian, tapped away at his phone, occasionally looking up to give the impression of attention. More than could be said for Bas, who drew on a waterproof graphics tablet, probably another tattoo for his personal or professional collection. Ryan, their individual medley ringer and Alex’s backup, watched over his shoulder.

  Only the noobs were listening, including their youngest teammate, Jacob, the nineteen-year-old breaststroke champ. And Dane, who, breathing marginally better, eked open his eyes. Slits of blue-gray mist swept the pool and coaches, trailing down the line to where Alex was standing at the end next to the women’s team captain. A passing glance, then Dane’s icy gaze floated back to Coach.

  Alex’s gut burned. Resisting the urge to curl his hands into fists, he shoved them in his pockets and focused on Hartl. Coaching staff introduced, a round of applause and chants of “U-S-A” broke out, followed by hugs and handshakes, greeting teammates old and new. The coaches let the reunion go on a few minutes longer before the women’s team adjourned and Hartl called the men to order again.

  “All right, lineups.” He rattled off where everyone placed at Trials, then announced the tentative heats for Olympic prelims and finals. When he reached the relay teams, Coach turned the floor over to Alex.

  Stepping forward, Alex started with the four-by-one-hundred freestyle relay, his gaze lighting on each member as he called out their names: “Mo, Kevin, Mike, Dane.”

  “Four-by-two-hundred free,” he continued. “Sean, Kevin, Mike, Dane.” No objections were raised to swapping out Mo, a sprint specialist, for Sean, one of their distance swimmers.

  “Medley relay will be me, Jacob, Bas, and Mo.”

  A smattering of confused whispers rippled through the group, but the man atop the bleachers didn’t speak. Auburn-stubbled jaw locked tight, eyes glaring daggers, Dane dug his too-white teeth into his full lower lip, biting back what was sure to be a torrent of privileged anger.

  And he let it rip, as soon as Hartl left the deck. “Why am I not swimming medley relay? I beat Mo in the hundred-meter free at Trials.”

  Mo extended an arm and middle finger toward his protégé.

  Dane slapped the hand away, gaze unwavering. “Well, Alejandro? Answer the question.”

  Alex prickled at Dane’s use of his full name, accent perfect and dripping with condescension. Quite a contrast from the last time he’d heard Dane use it. Whispered in the dark, his honeyed Southern drawl wrecked by lust. Alex shook off the flash of damning nostalgia. “Because you’re swimming five other events.”

  “I swam as many as eight in college.”

  “Four years ago, and you got injured,” Alex replied. “This is the Olympics. Our goal is medals, as many gold ones as we can bring home. We stand a better chance if you don’t get reinjured and we allocate our resources accordingly.”

  “This isn’t an economics problem.”

  “Well, actually—” Jacob started, before Dane snapped, “Shut it, Pup,” and the rangy first-timer shrank where he sat on the front row, curling in on himself.

  “That’s enough.” Alex drew himself up to his full six and a half feet and reasserted control over the deteriorating situation. “The decision’s made.”

  “Who died and made you captain?” Dane challenged.

  Mo reached over and swatted the back of his head. “The rest of the team, jackass.”

  “I didn’t get a vote.”

  “Yes, you did,” Bas said, not looking up from his tablet. “You couldn’t be bothered to reply.”

  “Among those who voted, it was unanimous,” Alex said, drawing Dane’s deadly glare off the back of Bas’s head. “Does anyone want to change theirs now? Throw in with Dane instead?” No one raised a hand or gave the slightest indication of wavering support. “So that’s that.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Jacob chimed in a pirate accent, breaking the suffocating tension. Everyone laughed, except Dane, who slouched back against the wall in ill-tempered defeat.

  “All right, then.” Alex crossed to the starting block where he’d left the folder of training schedules. He passed stacks down the rows.

  “Paper, Cap?” Mo’s pitiful eyes shifted between the printed schedule and his phone.

  Alex was beginning to think he was surgically attached to the latter. Then again, his wife was eight months pregnant with twins.

  “Electronic copies will be emailed later today.”

  Mo sighed dramatically and tossed his paper schedule in the air, right into Dane’s face.

  Alex grinned. “Take the rest of the day off, and get adjusted to the time zone and altitude. Tomorrow we get started. We’ve got a week before domestic training moves to San Antonio. Let’s make the most of it.”

  “Yes, let’s,” Ryan called from behind him.

  Turning, Alex wondered when and why the team jokester had snuck behind him, until a blast of water from a pool hose nailed him in the chest. Sputtering, he batted uselessly at the spray of water. His other teammates piled on, grabbed more hoses, and chaos erupted.

  When the impromptu water fight finally ended, all of them were drenched and smiling, and the paper schedules were ruined. Alex didn’t care, his insides warmed by the first flickers of team camaraderie. This was his favorite part of competing in the Olympics, why he sacrificed sleep, his body, and precious time with his family for hours in the pool. He glanced around at each of his teammates, counting himself lucky to swim with such gifted athletes.

  But the most gifted of all, Alex noticed with a passing chill, was nowhere to be seen.

  Dane threw the paper schedule down on the desk in his private room and bolted for the attached bathroom, crashing to his knees on the hard tile floor and clutching the sides of the toilet bowl. By now it was only dry heaves, his stomach long emptied of its meager contents. Between the press interviews before he had left Charlotte, a layover in New York for a GQ photoshoot and ESPN interview, and the overwhelming anxiety at seeing Alex again, he’d subsisted on airplane peanuts alone the past twenty-four hours. Once he’d arrived in Colorado, the altitude had gone to war with his stomach, and he’d had to ask the driver to pull over twice on the way here, making him late. His insides were apparently still set to expel, whether or not there was anything left in him. Only his injured pride was more miserable. Alex had banned him from the medley relay, from the freestyle anchor spot he deserved.

  Dane had told him at Trials that he wanted it. He should have known from Alex’s response then that he wasn’t going to get it.

  And the heck of it was, as much as he deserved that spot, Dane couldn’t deny he also deserved Alex’s retribution.

  Memories filtered unbidden through his mind.

  Dancing in the dark with Alex, smiling, as he hummed Van Morrison in Alex’s ear, changing that one crucial word.

  Chapped lips pressing together.

  Pruned fingers gliding over sharp angles and sin
king into hidden places.

  Lanky limbs entwined, hard bodies grinding together.

  Short, ragged breaths and muffled cries of release.

  Alex’s stricken face when Dane’s parents and cheerleader girlfriend had arrived in a stretch limo on the last day of developmental training to take him home.

  Dane heaved again.

  He didn’t move from his spot on the cool floor, curled around the toilet, too tall to stretch out and too exhausted to crawl to the bed, until a knock sounded on his door some time later.

  He lifted his head and shouted hoarsely, “It’s unlocked.”

  The door opened and closed, plastic bags crinkled, and the savory smell of takeout ramen wafted into the room. Dane’s stomach cramped but failed to force his body upright. Heavy footfalls approached, and his mentor’s deep chuckle rumbled above him.

  “I thought this might happen.”

  “I haven’t felt this bad since—”

  “Squaw Valley,” Mo finished for him, and Dane groaned, recalling their disastrous spring break in the Sierra Nevadas.

  “You spent all week just like this.” Mo knelt beside him and wrapped his big hands around Dane’s shoulders. “All right. Up, you big baby.” He hefted him up to seated.

  Dane breathed deep and rested back against the wall, careful not to hit his head on the towel rack. “I can’t help that my body rejects higher altitudes.”

  “We’re here for a week. Your body’s gonna have to get over it. Put that big brain of yours to use and get the rest of you in line.”

  “You gonna tell your wife that when she’s pushing out your evil spawn? Spawns? What’s the plural of spawn?”

  “Spawn, and hell no, I ain’t gonna tell her that. I’m not suicidal.”

  Dane couldn’t help but laugh. Morris Mayfair may have been a towering black man, but his pint-sized, high school civics teacher wife put the fear of God in everyone, especially her husband.

  “There he is,” Mo said with an answering smile. “Think you can stand?”

  Dane accepted the offered hand and used Mo and the towel rack to lever himself up. Halfway to standing, the metal bar gave, tearing from the wall. “Shoot!” He scrabbled for purchase against the glossy-painted wall as Mo shouldered the rest of his weight.

  “There you go . . .” Mo clicked his tongue against his teeth, playfully chiding. “Breaking the fancy suite.”

  “I didn’t ask for it,” Dane grumbled back. They hobbled out of the bathroom and into his “performance suite.” He wondered if his parents or his publicist had paid for his lodging in the exclusive private room, versus the dorm-style doubles where most of the athletes bunked.

  Mo dumped him on the end of the king-sized bed. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. You could be stuck with a horrible snorer.”

  “Who’s the unfortunate victim?”

  “The pup.”

  Poor Jacob. Dane felt doubly bad for snapping at him earlier. To be the new kid and be stuck with the Slumbering-Morris freight train. He’d kept a box of earplugs on him whenever traveling or rooming with his mentor. He made a mental note to check his bag for spares—a peace offering, if Jacob needed them. “I don’t know how Vanessa does it.”

  “Her dad snores. Her mom breeds pugs. We have two of the runts,” Mo said as he unpacked the bag of food. “Nessa’s immune to it.” He held out paper-wrapped chopsticks and a quart-sized container of ramen. “Think you can stomach this?”

  Noodles, broth, protein. Everything Dane needed, even if his stomach protested. “Have to, if I’m getting in the pool tomorrow morning.”

  Mo grabbed his own quart, opened his chopsticks, and dug in, bypassing the desk chair for the desktop. “You slipped out of the meeting awfully fast.”

  Dane cut his eyes to the bathroom. “Did you miss the part where I was curled around the toilet? I could have sworn you were just there.”

  “Silly me, I thought it had more to do with Cap.”

  “Look, no disrespect—”

  Mo waved his chopsticks in the air, cutting him off. “You’re the better, faster freestyler. Everyone knows that.”

  “Then why?”

  Shoving in a mouthful of noodles, Mo chewed and swallowed. “Alex earned his spot as captain. He earned the right to make that call.”

  “But—”

  “You can’t deny you’ll be a disruption on his relay.”

  “It’s been ten years.”

  Mo glanced up, his gaze sharp and assessing, something he’d picked up from Nessa. “He loved you, and you turned your back on him. Not because you didn’t want him, but because someone told you to. You’re still turning your back—on who you are, and by doing so, on him.”

  Dane stared into his container of soup, wishing he could somehow dive inside and avoid the world. “Can we not have this conversation? It’s all I can do to stomach these noodles as it is.” There was no room left in his stomach, all the space taken up by a boulder-sized knot.

  “All I’m saying is, Alex’s decision is understandable. Because of your history, and because he’s right about the possibility of injury. I might be getting old, but I’m still the second-fastest freestyler in the world. That was my world record you broke at Trials, and I was right behind you. We can win the medley relay without you.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “Life’s not fair. Alex knows that better than most. Time for you to learn.”

  Indignation seared through him. “You don’t think I know that?”

  Mo bowed his head and sighed, deep and weary. Dane knew that sound, all too well. Lecture coming his way in five, four, three . . . Mo hopped off the desk, capped his soup and stood in front of Dane, staring him down with his mentor-face on. “Get your shit together. Be prepared for Alex to ride you, harder than the rest of us, which you’ll soon learn is pretty fucking hard.”

  Deflated, Dane set his half-eaten noodles aside and folded his hands in his lap, cracking his knuckles. “What if I can’t?”

  “Can’t is not an option. You brought your computer?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. You get frustrated, you don’t take it out on Cap. You hack something instead. Take your frustrations out on someone who deserves it. Do not go after Alex, or you won’t be on the team at all. We may not need you on medley relay, but we do need you.”

  “Gee, thanks, old man,” he said, rolling his eyes and earning another slap upside the head for it.

  “What the fuck am I going to do with you?”

  Dane rubbed the spot where he’d been hit. “Give me a concussion, apparently.”

  Mo pointed to the soup he’d left on the desk. “Eat that one too.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  Mo moved to whack him again, but Dane dodged, the contents of his stomach sloshing in a way that made him double over and groan.

  Mo settled for sympathetic hair ruffling. “You feel up to it, some of us are going out later tonight. I’ll swing by and check on you then.”

  The door clicked shut behind him, and Dane stood slowly, waiting for his insides to settle before making another move. Steadier, he retrieved his computer bag from the closet, pulled out his laptop, and set it up on the desk, plugging it in and powering it on.

  He waded through the layers of encryption he’d installed on his personal files; the folder he was looking for was the very reason he’d started hacking. He’d wanted to protect the one precious thing he’d returned home with from developmental camp. At sixteen, finding a way to hide, and keep, that lifeline to his real self had seemed like the only thing he could do to rebel. As he became more skilled, his rebellion evolved too. From behind his hacker tag of LBKnight16, he skimmed funds from his parents’ accounts each month—just enough they wouldn’t notice—and anonymously donated them to LGBTQ charities.

  And he had his own personal ways of rebelling every day too, including this one.

  He located the folder labeled Knights, after the mascot of the college in Laurinburg where their ca
mp had been held, and double-clicked. Pictures filled his screen. In the foreground, his favorite, a selfie of him and Alex, a decade younger, embracing and gazing at each other with every bit of desire he still felt for his captain.

  Dawn was just beginning to brighten the horizon when Alex’s alarm went off the next morning. He slapped the clock radio quiet, plunging the morning back into silence, and stared unseeing out the window at the open plains east of Pueblo. After a night spent tossing and turning, he wished he could lock his bedroom door and call in sick. But that wasn’t an option. He was the team captain, and today was their first practice.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Yesterday could have gone worse. Dane aside, the team was already gelling. They had three and a half weeks until Madrid. Plenty of time to renew bonds with returning members and form new ones with the rooks. Plenty of time to get their starts sharp and their relay exchanges down.

  As long as everyone got in line.

  Coach was depending on him. And Alex was depending on Mo to wrangle Dane. But who was going to wrangle Alex, if his buried anger at Dane—or the even deeper buried desire—got the better of him? It was going to be a daily exercise in self-restraint not to wipe that thousand-dollar smile off Dane’s face, one way or the other.

  An exercise he wasn’t physically or mentally prepared for, already stretched too thin. School was out for the summer, so substitute teaching was off his plate, but then so was another source of income. To make up for it, he was working overtime at USOC, banking every spare cent so his family could hire extra farm help while he was in Madrid. When he wasn’t in the office, he was in the pool or gym training, or making the long drive back and forth from Pueblo. He’d been offered on-campus housing with the rest of the athletes, but Pueblo was closer to the family farm in Vineland. At least traffic was light at six in the morning and ten at night, just him in his beat-up Ford Ranger and the long-haul semis making the drive up and down I-25.

  The silent morning didn’t last but another minute, his sister double-tapping his bedroom door. “¡Levantate, levantate!”