IT WAS the middle of the night back in the States by the time I got home. I had a tiny apartment at Cloverton by now, since I’d started working as both a TA and an RA junior year. Stuck on campus most of the summer, working that semester, with a few days left before I had to be back to start again for fall, I headed for my real home—with Mama and Dad, and Devon. I quietly unlocked the door and stepped inside. “Surprise!” Then I nearly had a heart attack.
“Son of a—”
The lights had come on, and I could see the living room decorated with American flags and Olympic rings cut out of construction paper. “Congratulations Reed” was written in huge letters on what looked like half a bedsheet. The second e had once been an a, so I knew Devon had made it. Though the prior year’s World Championships celebration with pizza and sparkling cider at four in the afternoon was way less startling, I still got tears in my eyes, and was glad I’d called ahead with my change of plans.
Devon hugged me first. I didn’t want to let go. “I can’t breathe.” But then I did, before he turned blue.
“Way to go, Aquaman!” Cal threw his arms around me and kissed my cheek.
“Isn’t it past everyone’s bedtime?” I joked.
“It’s worth missing a little sleep,” my mother said. I hugged her more gently but just as long.
My father shook my hand. “You have no idea how proud….” His voice caught. “How proud we are of you. For everything. What you did took a lot of work. What you said took a lot of courage.”
“We saw you on TV,” Devon said.
“And looked for the press conference online,” Mama added.
I didn’t want to talk about that. “I haven’t officially made the team for Rio yet, you know.” I gently flicked one of the colored rings.
“You will,” my mother declared.
“How come you didn’t say you’re gay too?” Devon asked.
Cal snickered.
“I… uh… I’m not sure,” I said truthfully. “I guess because they told me not to.”
“Who did?” Dad asked.
“It’s not important.”
“Well, you supported Mathias,” my mother said. “And your words were quite eloquent.”
Guilt twisted my insides into knots. My parents had no idea what I’d done to Mathias after that. I also wondered if they were disappointed I hadn’t stepped up and proclaimed my homosexuality to the world, or at least to the ten or twelve people, not counting members of the swimmers’ families, who would actually know to look for the press conferences on the Internet. Though their words were all positive, I felt I had let them down somehow. “What I said was more verbal diarrhea than valor.”
“‘Verbal diarrhea,’ huh? So you’ve mentioned there’s this thing called a media coach…?” Dad asked.
“She’s already on it, and you’ve seen how badly I need one.”
PRIZE MONEY came with the wins—a lot of it—despite the various rules about how much an amateur college athlete could earn and from what organization the funds had to technically come.
“It’s complicated,” Coach had told me yet again, “but all on the up-and-up.”
After my first US Championships, I kept checking my bank account online just for fun. I hadn’t seen so many zeros next to my name since Mrs. Smeckler made good on her promise to start writing one a day in her grade book until I brought in that bulletin board picture.
The Christmas following my first victory at Worlds, the front room carpet was littered with a mountain of wrapping paper—the expensive foil kind, with candy-cane stripes and red and green snowflakes. We ate dinner off the china I got for my mom to complete her set that year. I got Julius and Beth a hot tub to set up outside the trailer they rented in a small park, figuring with two kids, they might need and enjoy some quiet time. Shemar’s eyes were as big as the star atop the tree when he saw the size of the box the trombone came in, and though he may have looked a little less excited when he actually tore into it, I told him someone in the family had to carry on the legacy. Devon and I took the four-wheeler I’d bought for him into the woods that afternoon.
Christmas 2014 was the best we’d ever had, at least until my dad sat me down for a serious discussion on Pajama Day.
“It’s too much.” He’d looked into his oatmeal bowl rather than at me. “All of it.”
“Dad… let me. I owe you guys for everything you’ve done.”
“You don’t owe us a thing. The way you’ve turned out is the gift.”
For his real gift, I had wrapped the signed contract for the guys who would come and completely finish off the basement downstairs—the bathroom, especially—a builder, electrician, plumber, and carpenter. I’d figured it could be Dad’s man cave once he retired, since Beth and her family had left it.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate it. I do, but it’s something I want to do myself… with my own two hands and my own money.”
“And this is something I want to—”
“Reed!”
I’d spilled some cocoa when he’d startled me by snapping.
“I said no.”
When my father raised his voice, I knew it was a matter of pride and let it go. “Okay. I’ll call them all tomorrow,” I’d told him.
THOUGH IT was still officially summer, once the party ended and everyone was in bed, as I lay in mine, stroking the footboard post with my foot, my soft dick with my fist, I was already thinking ahead to December. Money I hadn’t even gotten yet was burning a hole in my pocket. I’d definitely be a bit more frugal for Christmas 2015. Everyone would get something—something nice—but since I learned rather quickly that as fast as cash comes, cash goes, I had to be more careful. Once I started paying attention to financial matters, I’d discovered I wasn’t as rich as I’d thought. There were Coach’s fees per my FINA contract, which I happily handed over. I had college loans to repay, and of course, Uncle Sam wanted his cut. What started out as a huge sum after some big wins in 2014 looked rather paltry rather quickly. It made me think again about the sponsors, and how much money had gone out before I’d actually earned a penny. Though I thought it might be a good idea to quit the college team in order to be eligible for every cent of prize money available without restrictions, I definitely wouldn’t be quitting my day jobs as I continued on to Rio, that was for sure.
Just as day began to break, my mother headed off to work before I had even fallen asleep. Dad gave her a kiss I could hear upstairs.
“I love you. Have a nice day.”
“I love you more. Have a better one.”
I’d heard the exchange a million times in my twenty-some years. It made me make a promise to myself right then and there that I would play the media game as best I could if I did well in Rio, to earn even bigger bank and give my parents a vacation, at least, and a whole new life if possible, despite Dad’s stubbornness. I wasn’t a little kid anymore and could raise my voice too. I could be just as strong-willed.
I WAS a little jealous I didn’t have a billion messages from fans, personally known and otherwise, when I checked my Facebook page, the one I rarely posted to. I was the gold medalist, after all. Devon and Cal had promised to set up fan pages all over social media. Maybe before Rio, I would. If not a million, at least a couple dozen or so. I checked TMZ to see if Mathias had made their website. He hadn’t. He wasn’t a twenty-two-time Olympic medalist with a Head & Shoulders ad, a bong party pic, and a DUI arrest, after all.
I put down my basic computer tablet and started to jack off. I wasn’t in the mood, and Devon was snoring. Staring a little while at the ceiling I couldn’t see in the dark, still playing with myself, I wondered which guy I was, the one who’d felt so good blowing Mathias off, or the one my father thought, who’d publicly supported him. I’d been ignoring a WTF subject line since Coach and I had boarded the plane. I went to click on it, but then put that off too. Yes, I was a stubborn man. That much I knew for sure. And Mathias was sometimes inconsiderate. “I’ll be a little late.” Those six syllables would have gone a long way.
After some mindless TV downstairs, I checked TMZ and the Internet ten more times. Mathias’s revelation made a couple of sports sites. I vowed not to read the comments, but long about 8:40 a.m. I gave in and did. That was a mistake. Faggot, cocksucker, fairy, tranny—he was called those words and worse. Snaggletooth albino—that one was about me. Most of the posts were complimentary and supportive, but more than once, Mathias was labeled an embarrassment to the US swim team. I decided to send him a supportive text, but read his first—all three. Not one of them an actual note, as it turned out, just three angry subject lines and one animated show of disappointment.
WTF?
Missed opportunity.
Jerk.
The animated emoji that ended his correspondence wasn’t the naked guy with a boner this time, but rather an annoyed shaking head I found myself mimicking. The fact he still didn’t really apologize for leaving me hanging—or up and hard as it were—while I waited and he basked in the media glow, that pissed me off.
Fuck that shit. Until Mathias realized why I bolted, I refused to give him the satisfaction of a response. Pride had two definitions, the one about feeling accomplished and another—self-respect.
THE CHRISTMAS I’d planned for back in August came and went, complete with cold weather and a cold silence between Mathias and myself. I had an entire week off from everything at the end of the year, since I had gone through with my plan to leave the Cloverton College Cavaliers to concentrate only on my professional career. It was difficult. It made me kind of sad, but in the end, if it meant more revenue coming in, I had to do it.
I spent the daytime hours of New Year’s Eve 2015 with my family and later Devon at the Dover pool. That night I hung with Caryn and Calvin. Cal was renting a double-wide in the same park as Beth and Julius. They were next-door neighbors, in fact, and since Caryn was home from school as well, they were shacking up, as she called it. We started the evening watching Will and Sonny’s gay marriage fall apart on Days of Our Lives, thanks to Will’s infidelity with hunky Asian baseball player Paul. The story played hot and heavy for weeks, complete with sex scenes. Since Caryn had gotten way, way behind, we binge-watched old episodes online, until we got to the part where Sonny left town after Will was murdered by a new set of writers. Murdered—violently so—at the hands of a Price is Right male model turned soap-opera serial killer!
“Fucking homophobic assholes.” Caryn was pissed the show suddenly decimated all things gay, shoving Paul, the only homosexual character left on the canvas, so far on the back burner he pretty much fell behind the stove. “A fictional character put his hands around Will Horton’s throat, but it’s the bigots at the keyboards that committed a hate crime. I’m never watching that show again!” she vowed.
“Maybe they got a lot of flack from the public. Maybe Middle America isn’t ready for so much gay in the afternoon.” I thought about my situation. “Quit waving the rainbow flag!”
“Well, it’s fucking time they get ready!”
When dinnertime rolled around, I discovered two things. One, Cal wasn’t a bad cook, and two, Caryn had never given up on that idea of a threesome. We sat down to slow-cooker pot roast. The meat was tender, the potatoes fluffy, the carrots sweet, and my hostess quite bold. Thirty minutes in, she said, “After we eat, let’s dive into your sister’s hot tub.”
“Sounds good to me.” I knew Julius’s mom had the kids at her house, because Beth and Julius were both working. They didn’t get New Year’s Eve off. Maybe I could help them out with money down the line too.
“No clothing allowed.” Caryn stood right away and started clearing the table, despite the fact I was fixin’ to go back for thirds. One of the side benefits of training so hard was being able to shovel down most foods without guilt or worry.
“It’s frigging cold out there,” I balked.
“It’s above freezing. And the water’s hot,” Caryn countered. “That’s why they call it what they call it.”
I gave in. We went out. Actually, we headed out, but stopped at the sliding glass door in the living room, where my hosts began to strip down. I kept my eyes averted the whole time. Well, I tried to, but Caryn snapped her fingers in my face as if I was a dog. It made her boobs jiggle.
“Look at Calvin,” she demanded, as Cal slipped off his Special Olympics sweatshirt, and then a pair of sweatpants. I’d noticed early on he had nothing on beneath them, but seeing his jacked body and beautiful dick all exposed got mine pumping up. When Caryn made me watch as she stripped the rest of the way, I thought it would go flaccid, but it didn’t. I’d seen naked women before, and though I was a hundred percent gay, I could definitely see the beauty in her petite, voluptuous body. Still, I was far more comfortable when we were all in water up to our clavicles. I’d crossed the backyard and got in the Jacuzzi with my undershorts on. Had I known the evening was going to end with us all getting wet, I would have worn some more opaque.
“Will, Sonny, and Paul should have just hit the sheets all together. Then everyone would be happy—except the hate-mongering homophobes who forced the wussy Days show runners to go back fifty years in time and pretend gay people don’t exist.” Caryn was still upset about that.
“Maybe they’ll bring everyone back someday—even Will—from the dead. It is a soap, after all,” I said.
“I won’t hold my breath,” Caryn countered. “Anyway, we showed you ours, Reed, now you show us yours.”
“No one wants to—”
“I do.” Cal’s hand shot up like a nerdy schoolboy’s. “I want to see it.”
“You’ve seen it.”
“I want to suck it.”
“You do?” I asked. “What’s changed?”
“Me. I’m older… more comfortable… I’m living in my truth, as I’ve heard you say. My new-age therapist says it too. I’m bisexual and proud of it. I like boobs and I like dick! I hope to be in love with Caryn for the rest of my life. At the same time, both of us love you enough for me to suck you off without it wrecking that, or messing with my head.”
I had to laugh. “Wow. That’s a lot. And good for you.”
“Bisexuality isn’t any different than anything else, really. If a person is in love, they’re in love with a person, often one gender at a time. If it’s a kinky Christmas three-way, and I’m lucky enough to be in it and everyone else is onboard, well, yeah good for me.”
“You’re single, right?” Caryn asked.
It had been months since I’d literally closed the door on a relationship with Mathias—a Russian hotel elevator door. Yes, I considered myself single, and I told them that.
“Then there’s no reason not to experiment a little, right?” Caryn nodded. Her mind was made up, even if mine wasn’t.
I looked to Cal. His brow went up. “None that I can think of, I guess.” So I raised myself and dropped my shorts.
“Nice. I want it inside me.” Caryn grinned, and I sat right back down. “Fine. I want it inside him.”
“You do that?” I asked Cal.
“Toys.” Caryn answered.
“Never one that big,” Cal said. “I’m not even sure I could, Wats. Doesn’t mean we can’t try.”
“Start by sucking him off, then, Calvin.” Caryn’s hands were underwater, and I’d have sworn she was squirming beneath the surface. When neither Cal nor I made a move, “Okay, shy boys. Come here,” she said. Then she patted the bench on either side of her, making ripples and splashes. “Sit.”
We slid around on the circular seating until the three of us were in a row, Caryn in the middle. I jumped when her hand wrapped around my hard-on.
“Settle. Hmm?”
“What?”
“She’s comparing,” Cal said. Apparently, he was in her other hand. She started stroking both of us; I could tell by the motion on Cal’s side and the feeling in my dick.
“Now that I got you started, it’s your turn, baby.” She stopped and stood, moving across from us, but not before rubbing Cal’s cheek. I had noticed all evening how they randomly touched one another, almost involuntarily, faces, hands, legs under the table. Cal’s hand was on Caryn’s ass a lot while they worked in the kitchen. That was love, I thought.
“Get closer,” she told us. “Do what I was doing.”
I’d done it before. I liked doing it, though I did recall the ambivalence last time, because of my feelings for Mathias. There was no more of that, though. At that moment, I swore I was over him. When Cal’s hand touched my boner, I shivered, and not just because it was cold above the water.
“Nice?” he asked.
“Mmm.”
“I should have done this a long time ago,” Cal said.
“Fuck me.” I was ready.
“Whoa! If you’re going to do that—” Caryn shot up like the malfunctioning animated Santa we had back home, who popped up out of his cardboard chimney way too fast these days. “I want to see it. Let’s go inside. Better lighting.” She climbed out quickly and grabbed her clothes—and also mine and Cal’s. “Come on.” Pausing only a moment to call back impatiently, she ran across the small lot completely nude. The porch light was on, and when she got to the sliding glass door, I could see her quite clearly. Once inside the trailer, she wrapped my unzipped jacket around her. Late December weather could go either way in New York, from minus ten to an almost balmy forty, which was what we had that night. “Hurry up!” she yelled.
“Shh.” Cal stood. “I guess we gotta.” He pulled me up by the hand, and we ran for the house together, giving the neighbors a show if any were at the window, since the trailers were pretty close together.
“How about a towel, babe?” Cal asked once inside.
She reached for the fridge handle and tossed him one for dishes. “Bedroom. We’ll clean up later.”
Cal obeyed. I followed. It was obvious who wore than pants in their relationship, even when no one was. We made it to the bedroom, most of which was taken up by a huge waterbed.
“So, bed or…?”
“Reed’s good with water,” Caryn said. “Hold up, though.” We got bath towels, then. She went for them and came back. “Dry each other off.” We both laughed. She didn’t.
“Yes, ma’am.” Cal started by gently rubbing the towel behind my ear. I wasn’t wet there, but I didn’t say anything. He moved down my shoulders, rib cage, and hips, and I did the same to him. When he reached around to my back, the move pressed our bodies together in front, with my towel between us. I rather regretted that as our dicks came together, grinding through a terry-cloth barrier. Cal started down my back. He cupped my buttocks in the towel as I continued to rub against him. I truly wished I could have seen his face, because he sort of lingered there, and I wondered what he was thinking. He turned me around, like a dance move, so his back was to the bed where he sat. His towel hit the floor, and then he took mine and threw it aside. With one hand on my ass, he brought me toward him.
“Here goes.” Cal licked his lips, his gaze transfixed on my hard cock. “I’ve wanted to do this since that day I shaved all your hair off—I guess before, when we were barely old enough to.”
“It looks all prickly,” Caryn commented. I had let it grow out since August. “Is it?”
“Some,” Cal said.
“Can I feel it?”
“Sure.” She did, and I laughed, because she tickled me.
“All right. Go down on it, baby.”
I closed my eyes, readying myself for Cal’s mouth on the tip, maybe just there, or would he take as much of it as he could until he gagged as I fucked his face? I imagined that—with Cal—and then with Mathias. Nothing happened, though, so I opened one eye. “What?”
“What were you thinking about?” he asked.
“Getting my cock sucked.”
“By who?”
I looked him in the eye. I looked at his dick. I wanted it, but I couldn’t lie. “Sorry.”
“Still? Damn, yo!”
“I don’t think you’ll ever be over that guy,” Caryn said. They knew, even though I hadn’t revealed a name.
“You fuck him?” Cal asked.
“No.”
“That’s the problem.” He smacked my dick gently, as if it was to blame. “You’re still wondering what that would be like more than anything else.”
“He is not.” Caryn got on the bed. “They’re in love.”
“Bang him, dump him, and then come back here. That’s what I say.” Cal scooched up the undulating mattress too.
“They’re in love,” Caryn repeated.
“Then fucking bring him too. You got anything against the number four?” Cal asked her.
I was pretty sure she almost climaxed right then and there. “Get the laptop, Calvin.” He sprang from the bed. “So, Reed,” Caryn asked, “you ever watch a chick masturbate?”
I laughed. “Not in person.”
I crawled in beside Cal once he returned with the computer. Watching him walk away—the roundness and plumpness of his ass was amazing—and was only outdone by his return, as his huge erection swung side to side. We giggled like a bunch of virgin teenagers through a porn video called Three Men and a Lady, at least until the scene where the lady found out she wasn’t the only one banging someone else in the cast. When all four met up in one bed, it was way too hot to be funny. Four scenes later, Cal wiped what was left of my cum off his beautiful flesh and then passed me the washcloth for what I had left of his. “How come that’s okay, but blowjobs aren’t?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t make the rules.”
“Everyone’s are different.” Caryn rolled over and gave me a kiss on the cheek, near my lips, where some of Cal’s essence had been before I finished swiping and licking it off. Cal’s climax had come with hers. It was hot and sweet, and proved they belonged together forever. That was what I told them and they exchanged looks quite noticeably.
“What?” I asked.
“Come here,” Caryn said.
“What? Just tell me.” I didn’t like the shift in mood.
“Come sit between Mommy and Daddy.” Caryn slid over and patted the space beside her. Cal took my hand, and guided me back to the bed, between them this time.
“We have to tell you something,” Cal said.
“And it might upset you.”
“What?” Three times and I still didn’t know.
“You know how you had a four-year plan, how when you started on your journey, back in 2012, you were looking ahead toward going to the Olympics?”
“Yeah.”
“Well….” Cal picked up the story. It was another relay, like when they’d told me how they ended up together, only seemingly not so happy. “Now we have one,” he said.
“With each other?” I asked him.
“Sort of.”
“You’re breaking up?”
“As great as these past few years have been,” Caryn said, “we both agree we might eventually feel like we’re missing out on something if we commit to one person—no matter the gender—so young.”
“Are you bisexual too?”
Caryn answered my question with a question. “Are you crying?”
“No.” She handed me the Kleenex from the nightstand anyway.
“I’m going to California… UCLA,” Caryn said, “to continue premed. By the time I start my residency, we should both be ready for whatever feels right.”
“But four years is so long.”
“How many days until Rio?” she asked.
“208.”
“How many were there when you started, say back that night Coach Keller talked to you and Calvin at your parents’?”
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“Yes, you do,” Cal insisted.
“1,564.”
“I knew you’d know.”
“I can’t do it random… not all the way back. That would make me Rain Man.”
“I was just making a point,” Caryn said, “about how fast 1,300 days or more can go by, and sometimes, no matter how many do, two people never fall out of love.”
It didn’t seem like she was only talking about her and Cal anymore.
“Now you ready for night-night, little buddy?” Cal kissed me on top of my head. “After the ball drops and we do what we did maybe one more time?”
I crossed my arms across my chest. “No.”
“Tantrums mean no dessert.”
“What’d you make?” I asked him.
“Brownies and ice cream.”
“I’m really going to miss Calvin’s cooking,” Caryn said.
“And his ass, I bet.”
“That too. No matter what, Calvin and I will always love each other and—our wittle Reed.”
My smile told only half of what I was feeling. “Okay.” I sighed. They seemed fine, so I figured I had to be too. “I’ll be good—if we can masturbate and eat ice cream at the same time.”
THE MOMENT I hung the 2016 calendar on the kitchen wall in my college apartment a few days later, I put a big red circle on August 5, the opening date for the Rio Games. Before long, the first several landscape pictures were ripped off and everything shifted into high gear as college graduation and then the Olympics were fewer and fewer pages away.
As I jetted down the lane at the Cloverton pool, no one on either side of me, I called up my mantra and favorite mental imagery to get me to the wall. Out of breath, I looked up at Coach Keller. The guy showed a lot of wrinkles when he smiled. The bigger the grin, the more lines appeared. His face was a fucking roadmap.
“You did it. Reed! You did it!” He jumped into the pool with me, fully dressed.
“Dude!”
“You fucking did it six times now!” He sort of hugged me. It was more like a body slam into concrete. “It’s no fluke. You can beat him.”
What I had done was best the fastest times in the sport, the ones my top contender had put up at his latest official event after some time away. We’d never gone head-to-head. He’d been banned from the 2015 World Championships because of his out-of-water antics, and though I hadn’t topped his best numbers while there or at Winter Nationals before that, I’d gotten faster in the time since.
“What if he’s improved too?”
“I’m sure we’d have heard if he had. And he might. For now, you’re on top. What’s different? You fucking Webber?”
“No. Still not speaking to him, actually.”
“Then that’s what works. Keep it up.”
It didn’t work for long. By the time March came off the calendar, I was starting to think 1:54.73 was a fluke for individual medley, or that Coach Keller’s stopwatch had been jacked up. When April came off, I crumpled it up and tossed it toward the trash, missed—six times total—then chucked it across the room and kicked the fucking wastebasket after it. I kept my times low, but not as low as what I’d reached that day, certainly not as low as my mood. Something was off.
The media specialist had become an official member of “Team Watson” somewhere around the waning days of winter. What exactly she’d been doing for me, I had no idea. When I finally met her face-to-face sometime after Easter, she criticized me for my timid voice again and mentioned how my teeth were distracting.
“That’s a good thing. Though it might not hurt you to hit a tanning bed now and again. I’ve never seen such a white man of color.” Had she not been told I was adopted? “Your mantra for all interviews should be ‘It only matters what happens in the water.’” A test followed. She asked me about my sexual orientation, and when I started to answer, cut me off with “I don’t want to know. You should make yourself attractive to both sexes. Swimming has its token gay boy now. You certainly can’t compete with Mathias Whatever His Name Is there.”
“His last name’s Webber. And I compete with him all the time—and kick his ass.”
“Not when it comes to his looks.”
Ouch.
“At the same time, it’s not like you’re ugly.”
“Good to know.”
“It would be better if you were darker… or lighter…. People might not know what to call you.”
I came up with several things to call her. She was pushing all the wrong buttons.
“With some work, you could look like the third Hemsworth brother,” Media Lady said, “with nappy hair, of course.”
It had sprouted in as short black corkscrews on my head and not much different on my body. “Um… there’s already three Hemsworth brothers,” I told her.
“I’ll include the real third one when he does something worthy.”
Her name was Claudia—not Claw-dia, like on the end of a cat’s paw, but Cloud-ia, like in the sky. She’d told me that when I’d said it wrong. She mentioned my eyes every few minutes and told me no less than eleven more times not to bring up the word gay. Paid by the hour I presumed, she seemed to figure she may as well hang around awhile, even if it meant repeating herself. Her diamonds and designer skirt looked awfully out of place in a small locker room office that smelled of metal from a huge desk, a couple of chairs, and a filing cabinet. The aroma of the shower room down the hall also wafted in now and again. Though I preferred it to her perfume, she probably didn’t. We must have been paying her big bucks to make it worth her while to smell it.
“Let the men drool over you, but let’s not disappoint the ladies. There isn’t much going on for a while between now and summer. We’ll have to keep your name in the news, though, so people don’t forget who you’re gunning for.”
“How?”
“That’s for me to worry about.”
“You just swim,” Coach Keller said.
“So if asked about my sexuality, I should lie?” I went back to that a lot, as it was one of several things I obsessed about when not in the water.
“If you screw men—and don’t tell me if you do—then pretty much, yes. Like I said, that market has been cornered, and don’t fool yourself. America may have voted a black man and soon a woman into the presidency, but the ones who didn’t vote that way and some who did are not ready for a gay Olympic swimming champ. For every homo beating off to your ex-training partner in his Speedo, there are a dozen people disgusted. Some of those people might matter to your future, so just stay out of that end of the pool.”
I hardly thought about Mathias at all anymore, except when I couldn’t stop. His occasional calls, texts, and e-mails had finally slowed to nothing. I’d ignored them all, waiting for a two-word subject line that never came—“I’m sorry.” Claudia was spot-on with her take on Mathias. He’d become quite the gay icon since revealing his sexuality back in August. I’d stumbled across no less than a dozen Tumblr pages dedicated to him. While I’d failed at a threesome, I’d beat off to photographic proof of him taking part in a gay orgy with Sonny, Will, and Paul from Days of Our Lives, and Brad, Lucas, and Felix from General Hospital. Sure, it was on GayFakeFuck.com, but it was still pretty hot, and proved Mathias was already famous enough to be fake-fucking soap opera characters no longer fucking on screen. It seemed 2016 was not only an election year, a leap year, and an Olympic year, it was also the year soap operas took a step backward, getting rid of or not showing prominent gay couples and characters once featured regularly. General Hospital had all but abandoned a Brucas romance as well—Brucas being the couple name given to the on-air gay pair early on.
Cloud-ia was also right about the negativity. If I went looking, hateful comments about Mathias weren’t hard at all to find.
Keep the fags out of the pool.
Russia has it right, no homos at The Games.
Maybe he’ll get AIDS like the last one.
It had me wondering if the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling in 2015 scared the haters out of the closet in forces strong enough to change things on daytime TV. Soap opera characters can’t be gay. Politicians can’t be gay. Swimmers can’t be gay. I didn’t want to be part of that cultural regression.
“I won’t lie,” I said.
“Then play coy. No one is going to ask unless you give them reason.”
“In other words, butch it up?”
“Reed.” Coach Keller tried to shush me.
“Yes,” Cloud-ia said. “We’ll circulate some pictures of you with women. Do you know any?”
“I have a sister.”
“Reed.”
“And anytime Mathias Webber comes up, something like ‘he’s a good swimmer’ will suffice. Give short, simple answers.”
I wanted to call her Clown-ia. “You just spent forty-five minutes telling me how to make my answers longer.” It wasn’t as if reporters were knocking down my door. Hell, I’d scoured fifty gay blogs before I came across a picture of myself half-naked and dripping wet, and that was in the background in one of Mathias’s. I guess my celebrity status was expected to rise. Maybe I’d at least get fake-fucked soon, seeing as I still wasn’t getting fucked for real.
“Which is it?” I asked. “Long or short? Make up my mind.”
“Reed.” Coach Keller offered another one-syllable scolding.
“The best thing to do would be to veer the conversation in another direction. That may be a little advanced, but by the time you get to Rio, perhaps we can train you better.”
“Train me? What am I, a fucking circus elephant?”
“Reed!”
I could definitely give Mathias a run for his bratty money when I put my mind to it. I missed my family that day. I’d rarely gotten home once my final semester had started, and hadn’t been there overnight since New Year’s, when I’d seen my first vagina up close and personal. Plus, I’d had one hell of a long day after a freshman started a fire in his dorm. Once that had been dealt with, I’d spent hours rewriting an entire paper for Sociology.
“Your views cannot be this shallow,” the professor had scrawled across the top of the draft I’d turned in. A piss-poor couple hours of sleep had followed, and my fuse was short. I tried to decide after my snarky outburst whether my father would be disappointed in my disrespect or proud of me for calling bullshit when I saw it. Either way, Cloud-ia smiled.
“Your cockiness adds to your appeal. Maybe you can be a rebel heartthrob. I wonder if we should fix the tooth.”
“That’s it.” I stood, but Coach shoved me right back down.
We somehow managed to squeeze one more person into the room when a rather robust older man with ten hairs plastered to the top of his scalp with some sort of gel showed up. He was introduced to me as Mick Albert, my new sports agent, and all I could think of when I looked at him was “Show me the money!” I imagined the pool filled with it instead of water, and Mick and Cloud-ia were dipping in with huge buckets.
“How much does he make?” I asked Coach Keller.
“Depends on what you make,” Albert answered. “I’m expecting it’ll be a lot.”
“Don’t pressure him.” Coach Keller started massaging my shoulders.
“Ow.”
He stopped.
“Do I even need an agent yet? I’m not famous.”
“You’re going to be,” Cloud-ia said.
“Video of you topping the golden boy’s times has gone viral,” Coach told me.
“Huh?”
“Somehow the footage got out.” Mick winked. I shuddered. “People are talking about you, expecting you to win big. You do well at the Olympic trials—”
“Oh. He will,” Coach said.
“We are going to get you a commercial.” My agent needed dental work too.
“The swimming always comes first,” Coach Keller reminded me.
But I lit right up for the first time all day. “I had this idea, right? My brother’s a Special Olympian. He’s going to a national meet this year—swimming, just like me. I thought it would be cool if we could maybe do some sort of campaign together. You think you can arrange something like that?”
Wide Tie and High Heels exchanged glances. “We’re not sure that’s the sort of image we’re looking to put out there,” Albert said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m imagining you more advertising high-end menswear or maybe cologne. Luxury products,” Mick Albert said. “Your unique look… your brand of unsophisticated, unconventional beauty, the incongruent aspect of you and something couture and upscale, that’s the goal.”
I stared at him stunned. Then turned toward the mirror in the office and wondered if he was calling me ugly, despite Clown-ia’s claim that I wasn’t. “My brother,” I began, refocusing on Agent Albert, “works his ass off every day—with a smile on his face—to do schoolwork, his chores, and then he gives everything he has left in the pool.”
“Reed.”
I ignored my coach’s reproach. “But what? You think his alleged disability would turn consumers off?” I stood again, refusing this time to be forced back to my seat. “By the way, he’s all the way black. No one ever mistakes him for anything else. Just putting that out there in case it’s a problem for the McMuffin- or Whopper-buying public, because I’m telling you this: you really think you can make some money off me? Find someone interested in the kind of ad I want to do, or there won’t be any commercials at all.” The folding metal chair clanged against the desk when I kicked it. “I hate this stuff, Coach. I’m going home.”
“Home where? Your day’s not over,” he shot back.
“Maybe the whole thing is over.” I had never defied him before, unless I counted almost having sex. “Maybe I quit.”
I slammed out the door, got in my used 2008 Ford Focus, and drove all the way to Dover, close to a hundred miles in almost two hours. My phone rang a dozen times. I ignored it. Once or twice, I thought Coach Keller was behind me in his truck. He wasn’t.
The first thing I did when I got in the door back home was hug my mother. My dad was at work. Otherwise, I would have hugged him too.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “We didn’t expect to see you.”
“I quit,” I said.
“Reed….” She said it as if I had just claimed the sky was neon orange or some such silly thing.
“I mean it. If I can’t be myself, what’s the point?”
“Who says you can’t be yourself?”
“My media lady, Cloud-ia. That’s her name…. Cloud… dia, like she’s some sort of frigging weather phenomena. ‘El Niño will bring warmer temps and cloud-ia over the entire nation.’ Don’t laugh at me!” I said when my mother did.
“It was funny. You’re funny.”
“Tell them that. They think I don’t look good or talk good.”
“Reed!” Devon ran down the stairs and threw his hefty weight against me, pushing me back against the fridge door. “Why are you home?”
“I….” I couldn’t say it. “I needed a break.”
“Not me. I’m working hard.”
“I know you are. I’m so proud.” I kissed his forehead. “I’m fixin’ to get right back at it tomorrow.”
“Did Mathias come?”
He asked me that every damned time, even though I’d told him over and over Mathias and I were not a couple—even friends anymore—and never would be. It may have been part of the disability. Once my brother got a certain notion in his head, there was no changing it. “No. He didn’t.”
Devon grunted, then pouted.
“Someday there will be someone else,” I told him. “Just not Mathias. Let’s go look at your medals.” He’d won a couple more since I’d last been home.
“Why are you here again?”
“Because.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Stop saying what Dad says.” I poked him and he laughed.
A couple hours later, I finally called Coach Keller. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told him. “I’ll leave here before four.”
“Leave when you need to. Get a good night’s sleep. Take the whole weekend. We can miss a day.”
“We can?”
“There’s no point in training if your head is somewhere else.”
It was. “I’ll be back tomorrow.” I called off work too. There was no sense in screwing any of that up, and then I took a long nap. I stumbled down the stairs a few minutes too late for dinner to find Dad with his head in the fridge. Apparently he’d gotten up from the table not quite full, or maybe he’d worked downstairs hard enough to be hungry again. I’d heard him clanging around in the basement a little while, different tones, like metal and porcelain.
“You get it put in?” I asked.
He turned. “Set into place. No water to it yet.”
“Thanks again for not making me take it back.”
Dad pulled out a plate wrapped in foil. “Hey, it’s not every day you get a toilet for Christmas—wrapped, no less.”
“Dev helped.”
“Helped me too. He’s looking forward to living down there.” Dad set down the plate and went for bread and ketchup. “He likes working with his hands. He’s good at it too—all of it. Best painter in the family.”
I had an ocean fog flashback.
“I hope we can find the right school for him after graduation… if he makes graduation… in case there’s something else he likes he doesn’t even know about yet.” Dad looked tired.
“Cloverton has a precollege Special Ed department for high school juniors and seniors,” I told him. “Maybe we could get Dev tested. There’s a fee, of course, but maybe I can… get a discount, or something… help out… if you’ll let me.”
My father was noncommittal with his silence.
“What’d I miss?” I asked, trying to see what was on the plate.
He uncovered it with a crinkly metallic magician’s flourish. “Meatloaf.”
“Mmm. Is it cold yet?”
“Perfect temperature for a sandwich.”
We sat down. Dad made mine, then handed it over on a paper towel. I took a huge bite. “Oh my God!” I took another, before I’d swallowed the first.
“Your mother wanted to wake you up. I told her a sandwich later would do.” Dad made himself one and then broke half off. “Here.”
“You sure?”
“It’s not a doughnut. You can have it, right?” He pushed the plate over with the rest of the delectable brown rectangle glazed in bright red ketchup. “The rest?”
“Thanks.”
“I saw a certain swimmer on YouTube sitting down to fourteen pancakes, a dozen eggs, and a whole package of bacon.”
“Uh-huh. Was there potatoes?”
“Baked. We saved you three.” He got up and put them in the microwave for me. No one had done anything for me in, like, forever. It was good to be home, I thought, as I took a bite of sandwich and chased it with a hunk of meatloaf I’d chomped like an apple.
“So… you’ll be seeing Mathias at the team qualifier in a few weeks.”
“Dad….” What was his excuse, I wondered.
“What? Don’t talk with my mouth full?”
I said nothing.
“Ohhh. Mathias.”
“We haven’t been together since freshman year. That was a lifetime ago. I don’t get why everyone thinks he’s the one.”
“We haven’t met anyone else, and his name does come up a lot when we talk.”
“It does?”
Dad shrugged. “In almost every conversation.”
I wondered if that was true.
“Is it possible a part of you still hopes it might work out? Even a tiny part?” He squinted and illustrated with his thumb and pointer finger.
Something accepted as factual. You must tell this at all times.
“I don’t know.” It was exasperating as hell. “I don’t want to.” It hurt me a little to say that. “Okay. Sometimes I do want to. And sometimes I think I still do. There. I said it. That’s the truth. But what’s fantasy and what’s real, you know? He’s jerked me around way too many times, Dad.” I told him all of it, from Mathias wanting to be with other people to cure his loneliness, all the way up to when he stood me up in Russia, just as we were finally about to get back together. “If I’m so important to him, why did he let something else get in the way of us reconciling?”
“Your mother and I broke up a hundred times before it finally stuck.”
“For real?”
“I told you that.”
“Not a hundred times.”
“Over just about the same timeframe as you and Mathias.” Dad brought over the potatoes, sat, and then popped right back up to fetch a plastic pitcher of sweet tea.
“Over what?”
“Stuff that seemed important one day and not so important the next.”
“Be specific.”
“I don’t know. I’d lose track of time working on the car and be late picking her up after work. I’d lose track of time working on the car and forget to go to work. She had a good point there.” I saw my father as the most responsible man on the planet, so I found what he was saying really hard to believe. “I was always forgetting something.” Dad took half of one of my three potatoes. “I wasn’t baked yet, your mother would say. Luckily, she gave me time to finish.” Dad’s enjoyable chewing noises were comical. “Let me throw this out there. You remember when you won the school spelling bee in fifth grade?”
“And then tanked in the first round at the regional round? M-i-s-c-h-i-e-v-i-o-u-s. Mischiev-I-ous. I still say either spelling is allowed. Yeah. Vaguely.”
“Okay. Forget spelling. The wounds are too fresh.” He smiled a ketchup-y grin. “When you first started swimming, you were good, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you better now?”
“Yeah.”
“Because…?”
“Because I practiced.”
“Worked at it, might you say?”
“You forgot the glasses.”
“Your legs broke? I brought the tea.”
I laughed, then went to the cupboard.
“Relationships are like swimming,” Dad said.
“Relationships are like swimming?”
“Or basement bathrooms. Relationships are like basement bathrooms—they take a lot of work sometimes, but they’re worth it in the end.” He pointed at me with what was left of his sandwich. “You won’t see that on a refrigerator magnet.”
I poured him some tea and offered a hug.
“Does Mathias even know why you’ve been mad all this time?”
“He should,” I said. “And if he doesn’t, he’s had over six months to ask.”
“How long have you had to tell him?”
I shoved in the last corner of bread, meatloaf, and ketchup so I could answer with my mouth stuffed with food, just like he’d asked it. We were uncouth, manly men in deep discussion. “Six months.” I rolled my eyes.
“What a stubborn jerk he is not to even ask in all that time.” Dad shook his head.
“I get it.”
“When I was angry with you, did you always know why?”
“Mostly leaves, best I can recall.” The word reminded me of the first time I’d felt like I had to kiss someone—just had to—in a romantic way. I hadn’t, of course, but I’d wanted to. All those years later, the leaf Devon had sent to remind me of that day and Mathias was still in a frame in my apartment. I’d pressed it in wax paper and then ironed it, like we’d learned back in elementary school art class. It had hung quite prominently on the wall in my dorm for a while but was now in with some books on a shelf. It had become way too hard to look at it every day. “I wouldn’t even know how to start the conversation now.”
“I might go with hello.”
I held up my glass for a toast. “To the man with all the answers.”
Dad clinked me. “Eh. I watch a lot of movies. What I’ve learned from them and just living over many, many years on this earth is that pride is a tricky thing. The most valuable thing a man can do is stand up strong for what’s really important no matter what. The most foolish thing he can do is let pigheadedness distract him with what’s not. Some things are worth compromise, sacrifice, and humility, Reed. Some things can only be accomplished without a lick of any of them. The mature man can figure out the difference.”
“Wow.”
“I think Robert Redford said that in The Natural. Or maybe I just made it up.”
I smiled. “Maybe neither one of us are baked yet.”
“Stay off drugs.”
Dad shushed me when I laughed so loud it echoed off the fridge.
“You’ll wake your mother.” He finished his sandwich. “So, you’ll call him?”
“We’ll see.”
He shook his head.
“Hey. Obstinacy runs in the family. I still owe you a gift from Christmas before this past one. If I’d have known you’d be happy with the toilet last year, this year I could have gotten the sink.”
My father reached across for my hand. “Be happy. Then I’ll have all I ever wanted.”
IT WAS the middle of the night when I left for upstate, 1:58 a.m. according to the clock on the dashboard, or 2:01 a.m. according to the one on my phone. I really needed to synch the two. Three seconds was forever in my sport. The car had been running awhile, but I could see my breath as I stared at what I had typed. The month of May, just like December, could go either way in New York too.
Hello.
I’d hugged Devon good-bye at one. I must have slept myself out with my long nap, and since I was awake, I figured I might as well head north.
“I’ll see you soon,” I’d said.
“I have a banquet this Saturday.”
“I’ll be there.”
“You promise?”
“Absolutely. T-r-u-t-h.”
I was surprised no one else was up. One of my parents was always awake that time of the morning, readying to head off to work. I wondered if they finally had a day off together. I smiled at the notion.
Hello.
Still, I just looked at it as I sat in the cold car waiting for it to get warmer so I could drive off. I’d now told several people I still had feelings for Mathias. The one person I hadn’t told was him. I wondered if he’d already moved on. I googled his name at least once a day. There was always something new. Swimmer Mathias Webber to appear on the cover of three LGBTQ magazines. While my people were telling me not to wave the rainbow flag, his were encouraging him to pose wearing nothing but. His cover for The Advocate was precisely that. There he stood, a red, white, and blue ribbon around his neck, the gold medal attached to it between his teeth—team gold, unless it was fake—with multicolored striped silk covering only what was necessary below the waist. The headline read Everybody Out of the Pool!
The irony was rich. “Everybody but me,” I said to my own gold medal hanging from the rearview mirror.
I found a picture of Mathias and Elton John a couple swipes later. They weren’t fucking, and it wasn’t fake. Look out, Tom Daley! A new Speedo-clad Olympian has designs on your superstardom. Elton had been playing in Arizona, and Mathias had apparently gotten to go backstage.
Money or fame? my snippy side had to ask. There was a third person there—a man with his arm around Mathias’s shoulder. I felt a pang of jealousy and hopelessness as I stared at the picture, then back at the word Hello. At precisely 2:17 a.m., or maybe 2:20 a.m., I took a deep breath, and sent the text.