Some of this may have happened. Some of it may be fantasy. It happened a decade ago, some details mildly embellished. You can guess which is which, but I'll never tell ... probably. ;)
So. Relay tryouts. Senior year. I was eighteen and a junior, which I know sounds like it doesn't add up, but I started kindergarten late. Whatever. The point is I was trying out for the anchor spot on the 200 medley relay, and the anchor spot was a big deal because it meant you were the fastest freestyler on the team, and I wanted it bad enough that I'd been doing extra sets of 50s after practice for two weeks and not telling anyone.
Coach Barnes ran it like a time trial. Four of us in the water, top time gets the anchor. I touched the wall at 49.8, which was a half-second faster than anyone else, and when I came up gasping and grabbed the gutter I already knew. I could see it on Barnes's face. He didn't smile, but he wrote something on his clipboard, nodded, and for him that basically a standing ovation. Hardass.
I climbed out and stood on the deck,, dripping, and trying not to look like I cared as much as I absolutely cared.
And, that's when Liam came over.
Liam was a drop-dead gorgeous senior. He swam the fly leg on the relay and the 200 IM and he was the kind of swimmer who was really good, but not scholarship good, and I think that bothered him, in like a way he never talked about. He was also ... look, I'm going to describe him, and I need you to understand that at the time I told myself I was just paying attention because we were relay partners. That's what I told myself. I was very committed to that explanation. Honestly? I was full of shit. But I didn't know that yet. Or I did and I wasn't ready to deal with it. I mean, I was pretty sure I was gay, and a teen, on the school swim team surrounded by almost-naked guys all.the.time. It was also ten years ago, so my brain now might've made him extra-perfect.
He was bigger than me. Broader through the chest, thicker in the legs. The kind of build that looked normal in clothes and then in a Speedo it was like, "oh." His hair was dark and when it was wet and cap-flattened it changed his whole face, made it more open somehow. He had these hands. Big, kind of blunt. Always warm. I noticed his hands a lot. For relay purposes. Obviously.
He walked up to me on the deck and said "Nice swim, Kai," and he put his hand on my shoulder.
And left it there.
Not a pat, not a clap-and-release like guys do. His hand just ... it sat on my shoulder. Heavy, warm, and not moving. And I stood there with pool water running down my legs, onto the deck, his hand on my shoulder, and my brain turned off, which never happens. I'm always thinking about splits or sets or what I'm eating for dinner or whatever, and for those few seconds there was just his hand and the weight of it and the warmth of it on my wet skin.
Then someone yelled something about the next heat, and he squeezed once, walked away, and I stood there for another second before I woke up out of whatever he'd done to my brain, and I got back in to warm down.
I spent the rest of practice completely aware of which lane he was in. Not watching. Just ... knowing. The way you know where the lane line is when you're swimming backstroke. Not because you're looking at it, but 'cause if you stop tracking it, you hit it.
After practice, the locker room. The usual. Guys talking, lockers banging, someone's speaker playing something with too much bass. Mine and his lockers were three apart. Close enough that I could smell his body spray when he opened his locker. I honestly don't remember the name, but if I close my eyes and think back to it, I can still smell it. And get a little hard, because that meant I was close enough to him to smell it.
He pulled his jammer down and grabbed a towel and I looked at my phone. Very, very hard. Studied my phone like it had the seed times for conference on it, which it didn't; it had a text from my Mom asking if I wanted chicken or pasta for dinner. I typed "pasta" and then deleted it and typed "chicken" and then deleted that and wrote "whatever" and put my phone down because I couldn't actually think about food or anything else while Liam was three lockers away with his towel slung low and his back to me. He had this vein on his left forearm. I had no business knowing it existed. I knew it existed. You notice stuff like that about your relay partner, right? It's a proximity thing. It doesn't mean anything.
He came back from the shower and got dressed. I'd been dressed for like 4 minutes by then because I am very efficient at changing. That's why I was dressed. Efficiency. Not because anything was poking out.
"Hey," he said, pulling a shirt over his head. "We should work on the exchange. Ours was sloppy at the last meet. If we're gonna go finals at conference we need it under point-one."
"Yeah. Definitely." Normal voice. Good job, Kai.
"After practice. Just us. We need the pool empty so we can do it off the blocks without Barnes running intervals over us."
I gulped and I really hoped I didn't look scared as shit. "Just us."" I don't know why those two words landed different from the rest of the sentence, but they did. "Just us."" Like he'd thought about it. Like, he'd already planned when and where and who, and the who was me.
"Thursday work?" he asked.
"Yeah! Thursday's good."
"Cool." He shut his locker. "Nice swim today, Kai."
He said my name a lot. More than most people. Where someone else would just say "nice swim" or whatever, Liam said my name. I'd noticed that before. For the record, I'd noticed it before that particular Thursday, and it had never meant anything, and I wasn't starting to think it meant something now. Or, then. I was just noting it. Competitively.
I drove home in my Civic that smelled like chlorine and had a towel in the backseat that had been there since October. Ate dinner. My parents had given up yelling at me about keeping the car clean, but they'd given up. Looking back, it's one of those things, you know? Like, they were maybe (probably) right. But what kid listens to their parents about shit like that?
I Did homework. Normal stuff. Checked my phone maybe more than usual but not in a weird way.
At 9:47 PM, a text from Liam.
"thursday after practice"
"bring yr suit"
I stared at it. I had my suit. I always had my suit. It was in my bag, which was in my car, which was in the driveway. Liam knew this. Every swimmer's suit is always in their bag. That's how it works. You don't need to be told to bring your suit to a swim practice. Because I'd already have it from the practice that we'd be doing just before this.
But he sent the text anyway.
I read it four times. Then I put my phone on the nightstand, turned off the light, lied there in the dark, and I thought about his hand on my shoulder and the weight of it and how my brain went quiet.
I told myself it was just the adrenaline from the time trial. Your body does weird things after a race. Everyone knows that.
I told myself that for a while. And then I read the text one more time. I really wanted it to mean something ... extra. But at the same time, I really was afraid it did.
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