by David Connor
He was a lot taller, and a lot bigger—more muscular. Then again, so was I. His hair was buzzed shorter than the grass in our front yard in July, and pretty much the same burnt-straw hue, definitely darker than the almost-platinum color it was when I’d first become aware he existed. Mathias’s gray eyes still shone, with exuberance now, not sadness or fear. The four-eyes look was gone, leaving me to wonder if he’d gotten contacts or just took off his glasses to swim.
“Hey.” I waved back like a homecoming queen in a parade float convertible. Can he see me? Duh. He waved first. Of course he can.
“‘Hey’ who?” Cal asked.
“Nobody.” I wanted to walk across the water between us like Jesus, and plant a big kiss on Mathias Webber’s mouth, like Luke kissing Noah on As the World Turns before the show got canceled, or…. Well, I hadn’t seen much gay kissing yet in my life by the year 2011, other than the soap opera pairing on a VCR tape I smuggled out of the living room to watch again and again. I’d seen a little bit of gay sex online, but sex was sex and kissing was sometimes hotter, which made me wonder immediately why I felt the urge to kiss Mathias. Was it the protrusion in his Speedo, his sculpted physique—chilled and pointy nipples, square jaw, perfect nose, and those beautiful eyes—or was it something more?
2
“YOU GOT hairy,” Mathias said.
“You didn’t.” With the next race about to start, smack talk seemed like a good idea as he stood beside me stretching, and I did my best not to stare. “Don’t worry. Some boys just bloom late.”
His loud, dorky chuckle made half a dozen other swimmers look our way. “Shaved it all off to gain more speed, for your information.”
“Ah.” I rubbed my chest hair with one hand, literally petting myself, like I often did the family cat. My other hand, it was in front of my face, as a shield to cover my jacked-up smile. “I don’t need to,” I said from behind it. “I’m fast enough.” My big mouth might have been writing a check my backstroke couldn’t cash.
“Ah.”
“So, prep school?” I asked.
“My dad’s job moved north, so…. AMP is one of the best schools in the state.”
“I bet.” It looked like one of the most expensive too.
“Go, Reed!” Caryn, who’d driven up in her very own car, played cheerleader from over in the stands. Her shout-out scared me half to death. I pretended it hadn’t, smiled her way, and nodded.
“Hey, Caryn.” Mathias waved at her joyfully, and that made his junk jiggle. “She your girlfriend?”
“Best friend,” I said, not really committing to anything else.
“Cool. A formidable pair in and out of competition, as everyone who’s come up against you knows.”
So he remembered the vocabulary bee and fourth grade, despite his hasty exit.
“Still in band?”
“Nuh-uh. If I was, you’d have seen me at All State.”
“Because you’d have made it… without doubt?”
“Damned right. This is it. I wanted to find something that challenged me more. Turns out I’m unbeatable here too.” I sighed at the annoyance of it all, though I also quickly realized it was pretty big talk for my very first meet.
“We’ll see about that,” Mathias countered with a grin.
“Yeah, we will. If you don’t wet your pants.” I regretted the dis immediately. It definitely hit below the belt neither one of us had on. His demeanor immediately changed. The smile left his handsome face, and his body slumped. I wanted so badly to say I was sorry, but the words wouldn’t come. The crackle of the PA system cut into our moment, anyway, and that was fine with me.
“Swimmers, take your blocks in thirty,” some faceless gentleman instructed.
“Guess that’s us.”
“Good luck,” Mathias said. He was so polite.
“Don’t need it.” And I was an asshole.
“Confidence is good.” He untied the string holding up his little tiny red swimsuit and redid it tighter. I tried to glance down inside without seeming to do so. “Good luck, anyway, Reed.”
He was a bigger man than I—in more ways than one. That I knew even before he’d undone his briefs. If he wasn’t lying about his chest, he hadn’t bothered with the hair below the waist. His legs were covered, and I’d managed a peek at the rest of what had been fighting its way out of the top of his waistband and leg holes the entire time. When he raised his arms high over his head, after checking out the baldness there, I gaped at the bulge straight on and up close when I bent at the waist and leaned forward. Yup. He was definitely a bigger man than I, but I stripped off anyway, turned my back, and reached for my ankles again. I had a better ass, and so I showed it to him. When I snuck a peek between my legs, I might have caught him looking at it. The victory when I touched the wall before him would be all the more appealing if he was gay too.
A signal chirped. It was time to take our positions. I shook my head to clear away everything but the next thirty-some seconds, and wondered if Mathias was swimming right next to me. So much for a clear head. It felt like one of those dreams where you show up for finals even though you haven’t been to class all year, or one where you showed up to school in just your underwear! As I pulled up the tiniest bit of blue Lycra and spandex and worried about my half wood, that part felt pretty accurate.
Don’t you dare!
I longed for a nice, loose pair of boxers right then, though I swore I was reacting to all the skin, hair, muscles, and nipples around me, not just Mathias Webber’s. God! I wanted to touch him—his hairless body and his hairy dick. His skin looked soft and tan, probably from a booth or a bed. Though maybe he’d spent the summer somewhere luxurious and tropical where rich people got to sunbathe naked. Our suits sat so low, I ruled that out pretty quickly. He definitely had tan lines. And you know what? His ass wasn’t bad after all.
Stop looking at it!
Despite the fact I’d been called the N-word several times in my seventeen years, I thought I looked a little pasty beside Mathias’s golden glow. With my plethora of fur and bright pink nipples, it looked like I’d gotten two chewed-up wads of Bazooka bubble gum stuck in a black mohair sweater. Mathias’s nipples were caramel colored. Knowing the head of my dick was also the hue of Pepto-Bismol, I had to wonder if his stick-shift knob matched the headlights too.
Knock it off, moron.
I wouldn’t be the first guy to pop a woody at a swim meet, but I didn’t want to give my archnemesis the satisfaction of doing it within six and a half inches of his seven or eight—maybe nine, for all I knew.
The backstroke started in the water. I paced in a very small circle as we waited for the signal to get in—paced and yanked at my crotch. Everybody else was doing the same, so there was no awkwardness about it whatsoever. Sure enough, guess who paced and yanked right beside me. I refused to look at him. And he refused to look at me, which I noticed when we looked at each other.
“Swimmers to your starting positions.”
I worked the fingers on my right hand for the perfect grasp as they wrapped around the rungs on the front of the slanted diving block up on the decking. Mathias seemed more concerned with his left. Both hands were needed on the metal grips, but I always paid more attention to my dominant one.
Is he a southpaw? That’s sexy. I imagined Mathias jacking off with his left hand.
“Swimmers take your mark.”
I’ve seen him write. Why can’t I remember? Because it was back in elementary school, you damned fool!
Mathias pressed his feet to the wall, curled himself into a ball, and then rested his chest atop his thighs. I watched his ass bob up and down a few times, until it finally dawned on me mine should be doing the same. Close enough to smell the chlorine in the water, I held myself still, as not to risk a false-start call. I put Mathias out of mind. Then again, the fact I thought that probably meant I hadn’t.
The signal sounded—an air horn—and I pushed myself up and outward with all my might, using mostly my leg
s. My back arched. I made a mental note to watch the tape Coach always made to see how pretty Mathias probably looked flying backward in much the same way. Shit! After dolphin-kicking to start, I then stroked as hard and forcefully as I could in order to gain momentum, my arms back over my head like boat propellers. The almost forty seconds the race took felt like forever as my arms and legs started to burn almost immediately. It was practically nothing in reality, of course, and the whole thing was over just like that.
Had I touched the wall first? It felt like I had. I was far too jazzed to notice if he had touched right after, or if someone else had come in second. The scoreboard revealed all with one glance.
“Yes!” I pumped my fist. I had broken my at-home record, coming in quicker than my best practice time.
Fuck! So had he—and also my new one. I no longer had to wonder who’d touched second. I had. The leaderboard said so.
I smacked the water. I said “fuck” out loud, just barely, so as not to suffer some sort of poor sportsmanship penalty. Okay, Reed. You got four more chances to win. Four more to trounce him. Maybe. I was competing in the 100-meter freestyle, the 100-meter butterfly, and two team events: a medley doing the backstroke, which meant I went first; and a freestyle relay, which I would anchor. Was Mathias in any of those races? I didn’t know. Some of my fellow Sharks checked out the matchups ahead of time to see who they’d be paired against. I hadn’t bothered. It was my first nonlocal competition. I wouldn’t have recognized a single name. At least I hadn’t expected to.
A short break followed each race, a short break that lasted way too long, in my opinion. Olympic swimming played out over days on TV. Community swim meets played out in an hour or so. Scholastic competition would take a good chunk of a Saturday morning and part of the afternoon.
“Best time yet,” Coach Keller said.
“Not good enough,” I grumbled, pulling my wedgie from my crack.
“You’re competing against the clock,” Coach countered, offering a pat.
“Yeah, right.” I wouldn’t have felt nearly as bad if they were going to hang the gold medal around the fucking clock’s neck. They weren’t. It was going to be resting on Mathias’s baby-smooth chest. Maybe if I had shaved mine….
Few of us bothered putting our sweatpants back on between pool duels. It was warm enough in the venue not to worry about our muscles tightening, and once you exposed the size of your Speedo bulge, well, you couldn’t take it back, so what was the point? As I bent to rub my leg muscles, Mathias’s crotch passed my face.
“Nice race.”
“You too.” I kept my head down, then turned my back, forcing him to move on. The last thing I wanted to do was chat with Mathias Webber the entire time we waited for the next race to start. I shut out everyone, going through half the soundtrack of Oliver in my head until the announcer finally called for us.
“Hundred-meter participants to the pool.”
I wandered over. So did he. We stopped on opposite ends this time. Would less proximity make a difference?
“Get your head in the game,” Coach Keller said.
I wondered how he knew it wasn’t. Then I started humming that fucking song from High School Musical. Ugh!
“Your hundred meter is weak. You lose your rhythm partway through, Reed.”
“Is this the time to remind me of that?”
“The perfect time, because I don’t know why. I don’t know how to fix it. You have to, Reed. You hear me? You swim longer and shorter better. Hundred meter is your downfall.”
“Not today,” I said resolutely.
“Prove it to me.” Coach massaged my shoulders.
“I will.” I looked at Mathias.
I beat my best time by almost half a second, but better than that, I somehow beat Mathias too. “Guess all I needed was the right competition,” I said to Coach Keller.
“I should get that Webber kid to come train with you every day.” He slapped my wet back, which stung like a bitch, but damn, it felt good.
“Congratulations,” Mathias said as he passed. I’m pretty sure it was Mathias. The parts covered in a tiny bit of figure-hugging silky red fabric looked like him. I never made it up to his face or got to say thank you.
My victory in butterfly was a bit less fulfilling, because you-know-who didn’t participate. So far, my day was fixin’ to end with two golds and a silver. Since Mathias swam breaststroke—the event I sat out—and won it, so was his. Son of a bitch!
I had a nice lead after the start of the medley relay, but the Pirates chipped away at it little by little to take the victory in the end. Once again, we came in second. We came in second, also known as last, because there were only two teams participating at this stage of statewide competition, and second place was first loser.
“We got the next one,” Cal said to me.
Cal placed mostly in the middle of the pack. No individual medals would be going home with him, but he was helpful in the team events. He always put in a ton of effort and tried his hardest. “I’ve been told all my life black guys don’t swim,” he’d said on the very first day. “I plan on proving that theory wrong.” He’d almost beaten Mathias in the breaststroke. At least that’s what I’d told him, though deep down Cal knew a few seconds wasn’t quite “almost” when it came to swimming.
“If I’d have gotten a better kick off the wall to start back, I’d have kicked his flat, stuck-up ass.”
“For sure.”
That wasn’t true. Not really. None of it was. Unless Cal would have sprung off the wall like a ricocheting bullet, there was no way in hell he could have caught up to Mathias’s lead. Plus, I’d already declared Mathias’s ass not bad.
“I wish I was as good as you, Wats.”
Whenever I hung around Cal, I regretted being kept back a year in school. Maybe we could have been friends there too, and maybe—just maybe—that would have led to something more than friendship. I’d been deemed “unsociable” in kindergarten, though, and therefore not ready for first grade. Had Caryn ratted me out when I’d yanked the swing out from under her during my second try, I might have been held back again. The upshot was this—though I’d be turning eighteen in April, just like Cal two months later, he’d be graduating that same year and I’d have another one ahead of me. Of course, had I stayed on track, I might never have met Caryn, so there was also that to consider. I might never have met Mathias either. How I felt about that was less clear at the moment.
“We’ll get ’em this time,” Cal said as we stretched for the final relay.
“We gotta kick their asses,” I told him, grabbing for his wrist. “I really want to win this one.”
Mathias was yukking it up with his school chums. Even without the fancy dress of prep school uniforms, he and his teammates looked like pretentious Ivy Leaguers. Mathias was far more gregarious now that he was older. He’d certainly changed. I was likely projecting when it came to the pretentious part, looking for something loathsome to stoke the fires of competitiveness and build up the rivalry, but the terrified boy who’d peed his pants when forced into being the center of attention was apparently gone.
“Swimmers to the pool for the final relay.”
When I stretched my arm up and across, over my head, Cal surprised me by tickling the fur underneath. I giggled like Caryn had while looking at Anthony Weiner’s wiener back in May of that year. “Knock it off.” I shoved him a little harder than I’d planned. The intimacy of the act had surprised me, and though I hadn’t altogether hated his touch, it had crossed some sort of line between jock play and homoeroticism.
Homoeroticism…. I loved that word. It was one of my favorites. I could spell it too, and use it in a sentence. “The homoeroticism between Edward and Jacob in Eclipse gave me a boner in the movie theater last summer. H-o-m-o-e-r-o-t-i-c-i-s-m. Homoeroticism.” Mrs. Smeckler would have been proud—or maybe not. What person my age couldn’t spell homoeroticism? And what had Cal been thinking?
We headed over toward the edge of
the pool and lined up in the order in which we would swim. Everyone was performing their favorite stroke, which was why they called it freestyle. The backstroke wasn’t anyone’s favorite, so no one would be doing that. I took my place at the end of the blue line. When I glanced to my left, there was the red anchor, none other than Mathias Webber. We’d be going head-to-head again.
Cal started things off well for us. Our lead was short, but we had one. When the next guy, Shawn McLaughlin, flung himself into the water like a kitten pouncing on its sibling’s head, the huge splash not only wet the decking on the side of the pool, but also Joslyn, our next in line. She splashed in the puddle with one bare foot as she awaited Shawn’s return. Was her head in the game, or was she channeling Gene Kelly from Singin’ in the Rain? Wherever she had been, she flung herself over Shawn’s head so far when he returned she got out way ahead of the next Team Red dude.
Our girls were pretty damned good. I’d been awfully sexist about having females on the team, but our school wasn’t big enough to sustain two separate ones. Even on their best day, I couldn’t have imagined Joss and Trish keeping up with the other guys’ worst swimmers. They held their own, though. In the earlier medley, they hadn’t given up much. Though Trish had lost our lead, Joss had made it back up. Guy, well, he was the one who’d lost it again, to a boy with cheeks the same crimson shade as his tiny briefs. If that hadn’t happened, maybe Cal could have won it for us against Prissy Pants Webber. This time, making up lost time was all up to me.
Trish was about to jump in. The red Pirates were ahead, but the lead was not insurmountable. I knew if Joss could touch the side no more than a second after Butt Crack—who’d been given the moniker due to a roundness of ass no Speedo could fully contain—I could pull ahead of Mathias.
It hadn’t worked out quite the way it did in my head. Fuck life! It rarely does. Mathias was half a body length ahead by the time I sprang off the flooring outside the pool. I stroked like mad. I kicked like a frigging Rockette, turning my head side to side, wishing I could actually see where I was and how far behind.