Summer Attractions

by Beth Bolden

  Since they’d never had a fight before, Jemma didn’t know how he’d react. She spent the time as the tram pulled up at the Sambódromo to try to formulate an appropriate opening remark, but to her surprise as they walked toward the entrance, he spoke first.

  “Listen,” he said, reaching out to catch her hand in his as she tried to walk faster, “I don’t mean to make you feel like you’re not doing a good job. You’re so dedicated and excited, about everything, and it’s fucking admirable.”

  Jemma glanced up in surprise, but Gabe continued talking, as if he was very determined to get all of it out, like he’d been doing exactly the same as her in the tram, but instead of thinking something snarky to say, he’d been thinking of the best way to tell her she was doing a good job.

  She’d have to be a lot tougher of a person for it not to melt her heart a little.

  “I think you should write about whatever you want to write about, even archery, even if I think it’s boring, because what’s most important is how passionate you are about this. Anyone can write, but not everyone feels the way you do.”

  She gripped his hand tighter. “Thank you.”

  He gave a short bark of laughter. “You can thank me later. After the archery.”

  Flushing, Jemma searched frantically for a way to casually and not at all awkwardly bring up the fact that she was going to be way too busy that night working on her article to possibly do that. Before she could vocalize anything, he leaned over and brushed a kiss to the side of her head and murmured, “I know, not tonight, but when you have a spare moment for a poor, lonely man.”

  Jemma giggled and her heart melted just a little bit more. She could feel it, almost teetering on the brink of serious jeopardy, but there wasn’t much she could do or say to pull back. All that was left was to try to enjoy the dizzying fall.

  Later that night, Jemma and Gabe watched as Kimber won a third gold medal. Her smile wobbled, clearly at the mercy of greater emotions than the moment called for, and yet Jemma felt undeniably certain that it wasn’t the overwhelming happiness that any other athlete might have at winning three gold medals.

  She was going to have to do something. It just remained to be seen what that something was.

  Gabe left Jemma with a spine-melting kiss that ended with her pressed right up against the door to her room, his mouth hot and insistent on hers. They broke apart, her breath coming in short pants.

  “You going to write now?” he asked, as he gazed down at her, his arm braced above her head on the door.

  Jemma’s knees wobbled like her grandmother’s jello salad. “Yes,” she said, her breathlessness betraying how much she’d rather go do something else.

  “When’s your deadline?” he asked, like they weren’t just hanging out in the hallway of the hotel, making out in her doorway.

  “Tomorrow at noon,” she said. Barely twelve hours away. She had notes, she had interview snippets, she had a lot of material, but most of all, she had a burning desire to prove Gabe wrong.

  Kind of like when her school paper editor had said one day in a meeting that nobody would ever be able to do a good feature on Colin O’Connor.

  “You’d better get working on it,” he said, reluctance dripping from his words. Jemma thrilled at it; thrilled at the idea that he didn’t want to let her go into her room alone.

  “I’d . . . you know . . . let you in, and we could hang out, but . . .”

  His eyes flashed a few degrees hotter. “We both know you wouldn’t get anything written at all.”

  “Right,” Jemma said, punctuated by a long shaky exhale.

  “We can meet for lunch tomorrow and you can read it to me,” Gabe said.

  “Deal,” she said, and slid her key card into the door slot before she could change her mind. The door closed behind her, and she leaned back against it again, still not sure her legs would continue to hold her.

  She took a second to gather herself, then pushed away from it, locking away all thoughts of Gabe until a more appropriate time tomorrow when jumping his bones couldn’t possibly interfere with her looming deadline.

  First, she changed into old sweatpants and a tank, threw her hair up in a quick bun, and ordered a ton of strong coffee from room service. By the time it arrived, she was already a few paragraphs in, her foot tapping in time to the music playing through her headphones.

  She could very well have found something else to write about, some other event connected to the Olympics, but in an effort to try to hit some of the less popular events, the archery competition was what she’d chosen. And partly because she was so stubborn and partly because Gabe had thrown down the gauntlet about how boring archery was, she was determined to stick to her original subject.

  It helped a little that Michael Chandler had defied a lot of odds and had wound up in a very respectable fifth place, not quite the bronze medal he’d hoped for but still an excellent showing.

  Jemma wrote about the history of archery, how it had been the sport of the wealthy and the privileged, for hunting and war, and how archery had come into the modern age with Hawkeye in the Avengers and Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and how the characters had made archery cool again.

  Taking a break to stare out the window to the dark streets of Rio below and drink a cup of coffee, Jemma pondered the construction of the article again. Pulling so many different narratives together was a skill, a talent really, because not everyone had the instincts for timing and rhythm and balance in a piece. Jemma had always been good at it, and she’d gotten better with practice. She’d always felt like that particular skill had been part of what had drawn Five Points to her samples. That, of course, and her piece on Colin, which had been, as far as Jemma believed, her best representation to date.

  Of course, that didn’t mean that she was constantly searching for a way to top it; she just hadn’t had much opportunity before.

  Coffee cup empty, Jemma returned to her keyboard, and even though she was jittery with tiredness and caffeine and nerves skittering along her spine, she turned on her most upbeat techno, blasting the bass through her headphones.

  With the rhythm pushing her forward, she wrote about Michael Chandler, about his history growing up in Tennessee, shooting arrows at makeshift targets in his backyard, about how his uncle entered him into an archery competition as a teenager on a whim. And he’d won, and continued on winning, until he was the best archer in the United States, and the best chance for them to win an Olympic medal in archery for the first time in twenty years.

  The trickiest part, of course, was continuing the important momentum of the article even after the inevitable revelation that Michael Chandler hadn’t won a medal in Rio.

  Normally, that would take the steam out of any sort of extended setup like the one Jemma was carefully constructing, one narrative block at a time, but she skillfully wiggled around it as best as she could, segueing into an argument about what people considered “real sports.”

  Two cups of coffee later, Jemma finished up with a challenge to teach kids that sports was about more than just who hit who or what the hardest.

  Sitting back, she scrolled through what she’d written, tweaking words here or there, adding in clarifying phrases and deleting anything she considered extraneous.

  Luckily, she’d had it right in her head, and it read just as she’d intended. There wouldn’t be any last minute, frantic rearranging, and she’d even have some time to sleep. She glanced at the clock at the bottom of her laptop screen and sighed. Three a.m.

  There was time for a few hours of sleep before she had to get up and read through it one last time before submitting it to her boss.

  Jemma tugged off her sweatpants and crawled into the bed. She lay in the dark, tired but not tired, anxious, with a bellyful of nerves over what Duncan Snyder might think of the piece. It wasn’t what Nick would have written—but then, she reminded herself, Nick was still in a hospital bed. He wasn’t going to be writing any feature articles any time soon.

>   She’d done the best she could. It just had to be good enough.

  Jemma woke with her alarm buzzing obnoxiously. She rolled over, groaning a bit at the sun streaming in through the window and grabbed her phone, silencing the annoying noise.

  Rolling back to her pillow, she stared up at the ceiling, thinking of the day’s schedule: two hours for additional revisions on the article, shower, conference call with Duncan, line edits, and then just when she’d probably be tearing out her hair, a late lunch . . . not quite a date, but a late lunch something with Gabe.

  She could be okay with a something.

  And then later, they were going to a big night of gymnastics at the Olympic Arena. Jemma had begged Duncan rather unattractively for the tickets, hoping the Americans could make a big splash in the All-Around competition and she could be there to see it.

  With that thought in mind, she dragged her ass out of bed and to the desk, booting up her laptop. First she read through the entire thing, her foot tapping compulsively on the floor as she scrolled through what she’d written. Then she painfully went back line through line and cut every unnecessary word and tightened up the writing as much as she could. By her second pass, two hours later, she kind of hated the piece while still managing to acknowledge it was good.

  How good? Jemma wasn’t sure yet, but she uploaded it to Duncan feeling like she’d done her best.

  A long, hot shower and a room service breakfast later, she was back at her desk, nervously fidgeting as the webcam connection established.

  A second later, Duncan appeared in sharp relief on her screen. “Jemma, you’re looking well.”

  Jemma blushed before she could stop herself. Of course Duncan didn’t know about Gabe.

  “It’s beautiful here,” she said. “How is Nick faring?”

  “Out of the hospital tomorrow,” Duncan said, “and very grateful for your ability to take over in Rio.”

  Personally Jemma didn’t think she’d go that far, but she did hope that he wouldn’t be too disappointed in the body of work she produced while she was here.

  “Your mini blogs are getting great hits,” Duncan said. “Great mix of events and interesting impressions.”

  Jemma nodded. She’d noticed the consistency of the clicks as well, and that had definitely given her a boost of confidence heading into this longer piece.

  “And the archery piece—” Jemma’s stomach clenching as his face remained impassive, “—I think it’s going to be really well received. Great job. I just had a couple of notes.”

  The worst out of the way, a relieved Jemma was happy to write down Duncan’s notes and agree to push through these last small edits before making a final submission.

  By the time Jemma took the elevator downstairs to meet Gabe, she felt a massive weight lifted off her shoulders and also like she could truly take on the world and win. Duncan had not only been pleased with her article, he’d said, “it’s good to know that the impressive potential you showed in the Colin O’Connor profile wasn’t a fluke, Keane.”

  And it wasn’t as if she had truly begun to think it was; it was more along the lines that she hadn’t been given any opportunities to prove otherwise since writing it. After graduation, she’d moved down to LA to work as Nick’s assistant, and with Nick, there weren’t any opportunities. But Jemma had a feeling, if the gleam in Duncan’s eyes was any indication, there’d be a lot more opportunities coming her direction after she returned from Rio.

  Gabe was waiting for her at a table in the hotel café. He rose to his feet as she approached the table, and Jemma couldn’t believe she’d ever found his height or his size intimidating. Yeah, it looked like he could kill a man with his bare hands, but now that she knew him, it was clear the only time that would ever happen was if someone fucked with a person he cared about.

  There was something very reassuring about having Gabe’s brand of loyalty guarding your back and watching your front and sometimes sleeping next to you at night.

  “How’d it go?” he asked, leaning in and brushing one of his hands across the small of her back as she sat down. “I mean, I see from your smile that it went great, but tell me anyway.”

  She blushed, but she couldn’t quite regret her lack of poker face. “Good. Great, actually,” Jemma admitted, reaching for the glass of iced tea he’d clearly ordered for her and taking a sip. “Duncan was happy.”

  “Not an easy thing, from what I’ve heard,” Gabe said and she could hear the effort he made to keep his voice casual, but they both knew it wasn’t casual.

  A silence stretched out between them. “I heard Nick’s going to be released tomorrow. I’m glad he’s better, I’m glad he’s recovered, but I won’t pretend I’m not glad I got this opportunity,” she said softly. “Because with Nick in charge, it could have been years.”

  Gabe shook his head ruefully. “Not years. Nick’s problem is his insistence on holding his cards too close to his chest. He actually wanted you to come to Rio with him.”

  Jemma nearly choked on her ice tea. “What?”

  “He asked Duncan if he could take you with him. Divide the load up a bit. Give you a chance to dust off your writing skills and shine a bit more. He knows how good you are.”

  “And Duncan said no.” Jemma didn’t even need to ask to know how that request had turned out.

  Gabe nodded.

  “Why didn’t he tell me?” Jemma questioned, even though she already knew the reason. Like Gabe said, Nick played things close to his chest. He wasn’t good at letting anyone in, especially when it came to big decisions. Thus why she’d been grasping at what to write while she was here. He’d never bothered to share.

  “I told him he should,” Gabe said. “I think he was actually waiting until after it was over. I don’t think he wanted you to be too disappointed.”

  It was a lot kinder of an explanation, and if it was true, it revealed a much more humane side to Nick than she’d ever witnessed. Of course he might not want her to be sitting at home, supporting him and helping him while he was in Rio, all the time knowing it could have been her opportunity too.

  “I talked to him today,” Gabe continued. “They finally gave him his cell phone and his laptop back.”

  “Oh god,” Jemma sighed. “He should be focusing on healing, not working.”

  Gabe shrugged and Jemma understood. Working was a form of healing, at least for Nick.

  “He read your story too,” Gabe said and Jemma’s pulse accelerated a little. “He thought it was really good. Wasn’t a bit surprised.”

  It felt good to hear him say that, even if it wasn’t a hundred percent accurate.

  “You going to let me read it early?” Gabe continued. “I hear you completely disregarded my advice and wrote about Michael Chandler anyway.”

  Jemma couldn't help the smug smile she shot him, and would’ve had to be blind to miss the slow, lazy grin he gave her in response. “Oh, I did.”

  He laughed. “Of course you did. What you don’t see is that you’re practically a clone of Nick. Ambitious and stubborn and hopelessly sure of what you think is true.”

  “Did you want to read it or not?” Jemma asked, raising an eyebrow. She opened the file on her phone and slid it across the table.

  Gabe glanced down and began to read out loud. Jemma flushed, busying her hands with the napkin. It was hard to hear her words being read out loud, but she forced herself to relax, to enjoy the cadence of his deep voice as he told Michael’s story.

  Ten minutes later, he looked up and she couldn’t help another smug smile.

  “Told you it wouldn’t be boring,” she said.

  Another thing she liked about Gabe: he wasn’t afraid to change his mind. And when he did, there wasn’t any ridiculous male posturing. He didn’t see it as any slight to his manhood if she was right and he was wrong. He just admitted it, teased her a little, and they moved on.

  It was more than nice; it was downright refreshing.

  “You were right,” he admitted, wi
th another teasing smile hovering around the edges of his mouth. “It definitely wasn’t boring. Would’ve been better if Michael had actually won a medal, though.”

  “Unfortunately,” Jemma said primly, “that is something I have no control over. I write reality the way it is, not as anybody might wish it to be.”

  Gabe leaned back in his chair, a twin smugness blooming on his own face. “And you said you didn’t write stories,” he said.

  The feature went live at midnight. After the gymnastics meet, Jemma and Gabe held a mini-celebration—she’d called it that anyway—in honor of the US women winning the silver All-Around medal. The celebration had consisted mostly of a dodgy bottle of champagne bribed from the bar and a lot of naked skin.

  Afterwards, Jemma lay in bed, her body partially draped over his, and briefly considered rousing and finding her phone so she could check the stats and comments on it, but a sated sleep threatened to overtake her, and suddenly knowing the reaction right now had less appeal.

  She’d see it all in the morning, she’d thought as she drifted off, her fingers going lax on Gabe’s bicep. She already heard his measured breathing and knew he’d fallen asleep himself. It was only a moment before she joined him.

  The next morning, Jemma didn’t even think of checking her email because after they’d woke up, she’d flipped on the TV to find Kimber giving another interview.

  Her heart had stuttered then raced as Kimber’s voice barely raised above a monotone and the look of sheer misery in her eyes was clear even through the low quality TV screen. She should’ve been on top of the world, thrilled with her success at the Games so far, but every ounce of joy seemed to have been extinguished.

  Jemma clenched the remote in her hand and tried to calm her breathing.