| |
THE NEXT MORNING
Zack’s Bed
***
AARON WOKE UP AS LIGHT was starting to show outside the small, curtained windows that hovered close to street level. He lay still, cocooned in blankets and pressed against Zack’s side, resolved not to move until he had to. Any morning he didn’t have to rush out the door to the rink was a good morning. A day he got to stay in bed, warm and blissfully comfortable, with the person he’d just had some pretty incredible sex with...that was sublime. He eventually fell asleep again, lulled by the sound of rain drumming on the windows and Zack’s quiet breathing.
He was pulled back to consciousness an indeterminate amount of time later by Zack’s voice.
“You’re stealing the blankets,” Zack complained, tugging at the duvet that, somehow, Aaron had completely burritoed himself in.
Aaron mumbled his displeasure at the disturbance and rolled toward the nearest source of warmth, taking his blankets with him.
“Okay, now you’re on top of me and still stole all the blankets. How did you do that?” Zack sounded equal parts dismayed and amused.
“I’m cold,” Aaron mumbled into a bare patch of Zack’s skin that might have been his shoulder.
The warm lump that was Zack shifted, and he wrapped his arms around Aaron’s shoulders. Aaron snuggled further into the embrace. “You’re never cold,” Zack protested.
“Rink cold is different,” Aaron said.
Zack laughed softly. “I don’t think that’s true, but okay.”
Aaron blinked sleep out of his eyes and peered down at Zack. His eyes were very pretty from this close. “Hi.”
“Hi.” Zack brushed a stray bit of hair off Aaron’s face. The touch sent goosebumps sparking down his arms. He was tempted—strongly—to lean down and kiss Zack and continue where they’d left off last night. But the more he woke up, the more nervy and uncertain he felt. Aaron had done enough mornings-after following hookups of varying degrees of wisdom that he had been sure he knew how to handle any variation. But right now, he was at a loss.
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now,” Aaron blurted.
“If you wanted to share the blankets, I wouldn’t mind,” Zack said, evidently amused.
“Ugh.” Aaron protested for the form of it. He shuffled himself around until his head was on Zack’s shoulder and the covers were reasonably distributed over both of them.
“Why ugh?” Zack asked once they were settled again, his arms wrapped comfortably around Aaron.
“This—you—are very pleasant, but....” Aaron squirmed with uncertainty.
“But what?”
“I’ve never done anything like what we did last night. And now I am kind of at a loss.”
“Really?” Zack teased. “You seemed like a natural.”
Aaron shoved at him with a laugh. “Thank you and that’s not what I meant.”
“Fair. Sorry. But that’s not uncommon,” Zack said. His matter-of-factness made some of Aaron’s nerviness dissipate. At least one of them knew what they were doing. “What do you need?”
“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “Which I think is part of the problem? I always know what I need. At least in training. And sex is usually straightforward.”
“But last night wasn’t?” Zack asked.
“Not in the least.” Aaron shook his head.
Zack’s forehead creased. “Did you not like it?”
“No! No no no no. I liked it. I liked it a lot,” Aaron said emphatically.
“Oh, okay. Good then.” Zack sounded relieved. He tightened his arms around Aaron. “I liked it too. in case that wasn’t clear at the time.”
“I just...” Aaron searched for words. “I don’t know what to think about it.”
“If it helps, you don’t have to think anything about it.”
“I know, but.” Aaron floundered for the right words. “I’m a competitive athlete. I like structure. I’m wired to like meeting expectations, or maybe, I’ve wired myself to like meeting expectations. Which is probably why that worked for me the way it did. But you saying there’s nothing I have to do—I get that you’re being generous. But it’s not helping right now.”
Zack narrowed his eyes, evidently considering. When he spoke again, his voice was lower. Warmer, with a hush that promised good things to Aaron if he listened and listened closely.
“Is what you need reassurance?” he asked.
Aaron nodded.
“Easy enough. Especially for you.” Zack drew his nose along the line of Aaron’s jaw, from his mouth to his ear. “You are good. You are very good. Especially for me. Whatever you want me to say—or do—to prove that to you, I am more than happy to oblige. And if you don’t know what that might be....” he trailed off, and pulled back enough to give Aaron a wicked grin.
Aaron shook his head, his eyes wide. He wanted another chance to feel amazing as much as he wanted another chance to not think at all.
“Do you want me to get you off again?” Zack asked.
“Yes,” Aaron said. “But—”
“But? I am many things,” Zack replied, “But definitely a crappy mind-reader.”
“I want to focus on you first,” he said. “Like last night.”
“Ohhhhh,” Zack said, looking beyond delighted. “Then why don’t you come down here,” he said, holding the blankets up for Aaron. “And warm my cock. Just hold it in your perfect mouth.”
Aaron scrambled under the covers into the heat and warmth and musk of being so close to Zack’s body like this.
“That’s it,” Zack crooned above him. “Don’t do anything. Just breathe,” he said as he stroked Aaron’s hair. “Let me take my time getting hard. When I want to make use of you I will.”
It was so filthy and hot Aaron thought he would combust on the spot, but he did as he was told, enjoying the heavy weight of Zack in his mouth and the idea that he could be this incredibly good—and be rewarded for it—by doing almost nothing at all.
***
AARON GOT READY TO leave Zack’s apartment reluctantly, and only because he had ice time that afternoon. He felt giddy, tired, and remarkably clear-headed, like he suddenly knew what silence was for the very first time in his life.
“When we do this again,” Zack told him, pressing him back against the door and sucking a bite just below the collar of Aaron’s shirt. “Bring your skating stuff here and save yourself a trip.”
So much for the quiet in his head.
Aaron was dizzy with desire on the drive home. Nothing but years of discipline kept him from turning around and diving right back into Zack’s bed with him. He needed to snap out of it, but he didn’t want to.
Focus, he told himself, twiddling the radio dial to find a suitably high-energy station to get into the right mode. You have work now. Be boy crazy on your own time.
Which was always easier said than done. And Zack seemed to make it particularly difficult.
He unlocked the door to his own apartment to find Charlotte perched on the couch, her computer on her lap and a half-empty smoothie bottle on the coffee table.
“Where have you been?” she demanded as soon as he came in.
“I told you I was going to Zack’s.”
“All night?” She narrowed her eyes at him.
“I mean, demonstrably, yes?”
Charlotte sniffed. “You might have come to your senses and gone to the gym this morning instead. You have ice time at two and an Olympic team to make. He can’t be that good.”
“I can keep my own schedule,” Aaron pointed out. There were ways in which he was a mess, but blow off his obligations, he did not.
“When is he leaving? His article must be nearly done.” Charlotte quite clearly wanted him gone. Which Aaron could accept to some extent as the care of a concerned roommate and a fellow skater who didn’t want the distraction in the rink, but it struck him as a little extreme.
“It is,” Aaron said. “But he’s not. At least for now. He’s staying on to do some work of his own. Or something. I’m not positive he’s sure what.”
Charlotte’s mouth opened in dismay. “In Marie’s basement?”
Aaron dropped down beside her on the couch. “It’s a good basement!”
“The basement is not the point!”
“Okay, what is the point?” he asked, squinting at her. Zack’s presence at TCI had never thrilled Charlotte, but she’d never been this abrasive about him before. “What’s wrong?”
"Has Marie googled him? Have you googled him?" she demanded.
"I read one of the war book reviews, but you know, I’m a little busy here." He squinted at her. “Why?”
"You have questionable taste in men, even more questionable judgment, and no research skills. All the good google stuff is always two or three pages down."
"What did you find?" Aaron asked, curious. "His high school Myspace page or something?"
"No. Not that. Here." Charlotte shoved her laptop at him.
Aaron didn’t have that much time before he needed to get back out the door and to the rink, but he took it with trepidation. What was he about to find? Was Zack not really divorced?
“See?” she said.
Aaron didn’t at first. He squinted, trying to make out the subject of a series of black-and-white photos on the screen. The reflection from the window behind them made it hard, and he reached behind himself with one hand to tug the shade closed.
Ah. Discussing erotica photography with Charlotte wasn’t how he expected his afternoon was going to go.
“That is a very attractive mostly naked man, but—”
Charlotte huffed and yanked the computer back into her lap, gesturing at the screen. “Do ropes count as clothes? I think he’s just naked.”
Aaron didn’t feel prepared to get into that particular philosophical conversation at this particular moment as his brain tried to catch up to why they were having this conversation at all. “But that’s not Zack. What do these have to do with anything?”
He realized the likely answer only as the words flew out of his mouth. Zack had a very nice camera, a photography hobby he was super vague about, and he’d hooked Aaron’s arm over the bedpost and put him on display within moments of their agreeing to have sex. Oh.
Somehow over the screeching of metaphorical brakes in his own head, he heard Charlotte make a noise of disgust that sounded like all the consonants in the English alphabet exhaled in one single breath of supreme annoyance.
“He’s the photographer, Aaron.”
“Of course he is,” he said softly.
Aaron yanked the laptop back from her and did some more squinting at the sun-obscured screen. He was still fascinated, but not just because of how hot the pictures were. Who was the guy in them? A random model? Zack’s ex? They’d had sex last night—and again this morning less than two hours ago. These photos were as intimate as those moments, no matter how artful. He felt adrift again.
Zack’s past didn’t matter, and neither, really did the photos. Certainly, Aaron had no moral objection to them. But he was a public person who hated that reality of the sport. Zack had helped him feel okay and contained in his own skin again, but Zack could, just as easily, ask to expose him like this. Aaron didn’t know how to reconcile that.
“Oh,” he said again because he didn’t know what else to say. “You should have told me what I was looking for, otherwise I’m gonna look at—”
“I know!” Charlotte gave him a glare illustrative of her done-ness with the entire masculine portion of the species.
Aaron angled the laptop to get a better look. Patterns of ropes and knots danced over skin as surely as shadow and light. They were, truly, beautiful photographs, even if they were also complicating his life immeasurably. The ropes were something he wanted, but now Zack’s camera, idle on a table, felt wildly dangerous.
“He’s good,” he said, because it was true and simpler than the rest of it.
Charlotte’s murder eyes could have rivalled Katie’s at their best. “That’s your reaction!”
“What else am I supposed to say?” Other than Zack is very good at getting people to do what he wants.
Aside from the somersaults his brain was doing—talk about information overload—he couldn’t track Charlotte’s dismay. She was never bothered by displays of the sensual or explicit and was often very vocal about her impatience with puritanical American prudishness.
“You want to make Team USA, and yet you’re sleeping with a journalist who also ties people up and takes pictures of them and puts those pictures on the internet! I don’t know, Aaron, that seems like a bad plan!”
“They’re not pictures of me,” he protested. Though now that Charlotte put it that way, his own concerns had coalesced to a bright, vivid point.
“Are you being dense on purpose?”
“No! I get what you’re saying. I just don’t get why it matters.” That was true. He didn’t want this to be an issue, and he was angry that it already felt like one.
“In an Olympic year, everything matters.”
Charlotte wasn’t wrong. But life at Twin Cities Ice was never as regimented as it was at some of the other training centers. Yes, food and sleep and training regimens were tracked rigorously in ways that were intrusive, exhausting, and not always fun. Unlike a lot of athletes elsewhere, Aaron got to eat dessert once a week, but that was seen as a wild, unorthodox risk. Olympic years were hard. Brutal, even. But Brendan and Katie were constantly telling him that he couldn’t only be a skater, he had to be a person too. Otherwise no one would care about what he did on the ice, not even himself.
But what if everything includes my body feeling something other than constant pain and my heart feeling something other than desperate fear that I won’t pull this off?
If Zack untethered Aaron, he also anchored him again and made him feel like a person in his own skin. Now that he’d had a taste of that, Aaron didn’t want to give it up.
***
THE PROBLEM WITH DISCOVERING the guy he had been crushing on for ages and who he’d finally slept with last night wasn’t just kind of into bondage but was a world-renowned bondage photographer in his spare time was that it was, as far as the facts went, kind of distracting.
He lost complete track of time scrolling through the photos—there were a lot of them, with a variety of models—and arguing with Charlotte about how bad an idea dating Zack was. He ended up grabbing his skating stuff in a rush, bolting to the car, and sticking to the speed limit only because he knew Katie would kill him more for getting a speeding ticket than for being late. He ran into the rink, sparing only a wave for Cal at the front desk, and dropped himself onto the benches closest to the ice as the giant clock ticked over to the top of the hour.
Katie approached as he dug through his bag for his skate guards, still out of breath.
“Are you okay?” she asked, pulling on her own gloves.
“What? Oh, yeah, I’m fine.”
Katie looked unconvinced, but she didn’t press. Aaron was thankful.
“Good,” she said. “Let’s start from the top of your short program, okay?” She brandished the remote for the rink’s sound system. “It’s time to make decisions about jump composition.”
Aaron wondered if Katie somehow knew he’d spent last night with Zack and was testing him on purpose, or if the universe just had the worst sense of humor. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. His run-through was choppy at best. When they moved on to trying out different jumps in different places, he couldn’t land anything, not even his old standby, the triple lutz. His attempt at a quad toe - triple toe combo ended with him sprawled halfway across the ice.
Katie stood there and watched him, the line of her mouth getting thinner every time he fell. Finally, he two-footed a triple sal, wobbled precariously and crashed onto his ass.
“Okay,” she said. “Break time. Before you break yourself.”
At the boards Aaron gulped water, as if that would somehow help him find stability, and pulled off his hoodie so he was just wearing a t-shirt.
“Aaron,” Katie said, looking up from her notebook.
Aaron ran his fingers through his disaster hair in the vain hope he might smooth it down somewhat. “Yes ma’am?”
“Charlotte has talked to you about training at other skating centers, right?”
“Um...some?” Aaron had no idea what this had to do with anything.
“I presume she’s told you all about the rules a lot of coaches have. Not only about how to work out and what to eat but who you can date. When and how you can have sex. With other people or yourself.”
“What makes you think I had sex?” Aaron blurted. His face, unhelpfully, was burning.
A quiver of amusement tugged at the corner of Katie’s mouth. “Did you look in a mirror before you left—wherever you left, this morning?”
“Why?” Aaron glanced down at himself. “Ah. I see.” Dotted across the upper part of his chest were numerous hickeys and other bruises. He could only imagine how many more were on his throat and jaw that he couldn’t see.
Katie continued as if he hadn’t interrupted. “Here, you will notice, we have no such rules. Because we are coaches, and we are here to help you, and we want you to have satisfying lives both on and off the ice. Right?”
“Right.” Aaron resisted the urge to pull his hoodie back on.
“To be clear, you can do whatever you want. In your own time. As long as it does not leave you splattered across my ice.”
“Er.” Aaron said. His face was on fire. He was fairly sure his hair was blushing.
“Whatever you did last night, restrain yourself in the future, okay? At least until after the Olympics.”
Aaron was sure his face did a thing at the word restrain. “The problem isn’t what I did last night,” he said before he could stop himself. Discretion was probably the better part of valor here, but he just couldn’t help himself.
“It’s not?” Katie looked wary.
“I mean yes, I hooked up with Zack, and you’re probably right that’s not a distraction I need but Charlotte got mad when I didn’t come home last night and googled him and showed me this morning and apparently he’s like, this really big bondage photographer and—” Aaron ran out of air and had to gulp some down. “Now I’m freaking out about a lot of things?
Katie took a deep breath. In for four seconds, hold for four seconds, out for eight seconds. Aaron recognized it because it was a breathing pattern she’d made all of them learn for regulating anxiety and stress. He bit his lip; she was trying not to kill someone.
“Skates off,” Katie said, slinging an arm around his shoulders and guiding him toward the door to the ice. “Let’s see if the yoga studio is free.”
***
THE YOGA STUDIO WAS one of the little rooms in the warren that made up the rink complex. It had probably been a conference room in a former life. Aaron appreciated the choice, because it meant he could sit on the floor, fold his chest to his knees, and make no eye contact whatsoever.
“What do you need?” Katie asked him. The fact that she was echoing what Zack had asked him a few hours ago didn’t help his equilibrium.
“Self-control and the ability to google?” he mumbled.
“Self-control isn’t your biggest problem, and we all could have googled. Do the pictures bother you?”
“No,” Aaron told his knees. “Not really. And I guess I don’t mind that I didn’t know. Everybody has hobbies. It’s just...distracting.”
“I can see why it might be, yes.”
“Also, I think I really like him,” Aaron confessed. “No matter what ridiculous thing I do or say, he just nods like it’s as unsurprising and miraculous as the sun rising and setting.”
Katie was silent for a moment.
Aaron hoped she wasn’t going to do the must-not-commit-murder breathing thing again. “I know I sound ridiculous. I know I’ve known him for all of five minutes. I know I always do this. But this is different. I promise.”
“You don’t sound ridiculous,” Katie said, her voice gentle now. “You sound like someone who wants to be seen. Now, do you want my opinion about this as your coach or as your friend?”
Aaron looked up at her. That was a choice he did not want to make. “I’ll take whatever’s useful.”
“All right. Everyone will make you think they can get to an Olympics by being absolutely regimented about every single aspect of their life at every second of every day. And I am here to tell you that is not possible. No matter how regimented you are, the fact that you’re human will come out somewhere. For Brendan and I it was the screaming matches and the panic. For you, maybe it’s how you’re always looking for love. Or maybe it’s this one particular guy. It is, of course, also possible that you just need a hobby. I don’t know, and I don’t care. My only job is to help you find what you need and make sure you don’t blow up your life in the process.”
“But you don’t like Zack. Or don’t trust him, or something. You didn’t want him at the farm.”
Katie shook her head. “I don’t have any feelings about him one way or the other. He was supposed to be useful and then...you were you.”
“Sorry about that.”
“We both know you’re not sorry, but Aaron, listen to me. I don’t care about the photos or whatever. I really don’t. I think the world is wildly fucked up for the ways it judges people. But it does judge people. If you want to have a boyfriend who’s a war reporter and bondage photographer...” Katie trailed off and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Why is this happening to me?” she muttered to herself. “Look...don’t let him take any photos of you, and if you’re just in it for the sex, find someone else. This will all be funny after the Olympics. But not right now.”
Aaron stared at the faded pattern on the carpet, absorbing that. He felt strangely light, a burden he hadn’t known was there lifted off his shoulders. He didn’t need his coach’s permission or approval to date whoever he wanted to date—or fuck whoever he wanted to fuck. Like Katie had said, TCI wasn’t that kind of training center. But still. Knowing that being with Zack wasn’t going to be an issue was a relief.
“Do you think I’m going to get there?” he asked. “To Almaty.”
Katie looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “You’re still looking for something, probably in the wrong places. But if you find it? Yeah. Then you’ll get there.”