He drove with his left hand on the wheel, right hand on the console between us. Just resting there. Not doing anything. Just existing in the space between his seat and mine, close enough that if I moved my hand off my thigh it would be right there. Taunting me.
I did not move my hand off my thigh. But I thought about it. I thought about it for the entire drive, and the drive was fifteen minutes, and that's a long time to think about putting your hand next to someone else's hand on a center console in a truck that smells like them.
The radio was on low, something I didn't recognize, but that didn't matter. He had it on a station that played the kind of music that sounds like it was made for driving at night, and I couldn't tell you a single song that played because I wasn't listening to the music. I was listening to him breathe. Which is not a thing you should be able to hear over a truck engine and a radio, but the cab was small and he was right there and I could hear it. Slow and steady. Like driving me north when he lived east was just a thing he was doing and it didn't cost him anything. Part of me wondered about my car still in the lot, but that was not a problem for now.
He talked about Jefferson. The dual meet was in two weeks, and he wanted our relay seeded top three so we'd be in the fast heat. He talked about the other team's anchor, a guy named Weiss who'd gone 49.2 at their last invite. "You're faster," Liam said. "Your turn is better than his. You just need to not go out too hard on the first 25."
"I don't go out too hard." I was trying so hard not to be hard, but talking about hard ...
"You went 23.1 on your first 50 at the time trial. You came back in 26.7. That's a 3.5 sec drop."
He'd memorized my splits. Down to the tenth. And yeah, relay partners pay attention to each other's times, that's part of the job, but knowing my splits and having them ready in a sentence like he'd been thinking about my stroke pacing on his own time ... I sat there and I felt the heat of that the way you feel a sunburn you don't realize you have until you touch it. Ws he really thinking about my stroke, or about my stroke.
"Okay, fair. I'll pace better."
"I'm not trying to coach you." He glanced over. Quick. "You're fast. I'm just saying you could be faster if you held back a little on the front end."
"You sound like Barnes."
"Barnes wishes he had my fly time."
I laughed. It came out too loud in the truck and I caught myself and turned it into a cough, which was worse, and then I just looked out the window because my face was doing something I didn't want him to see. His voice when he said "you're fast" had done something to the inside of my chest that I was not prepared for. Like he'd reached across the console and put his hand on my ribs. He hadn't. But it felt like he had. And almost each sentence had that double meaning and I was trying so hard to figure out if he meant it and was just begging me to pick up on it.
He was quiet for a block. Then: "Bri wants to come to Jefferson but it's like an hour drive and she gets bored at meets."
Bri. His girlfriend. My heart sank, and any bit of hardness was lost.
I'd seen her in the halls. Pretty. Small. Brown hair, always pulled up. She'd come to a couple of home meets and sat in the bleachers with the other girlfriends and I'd watched Liam wave to her after his 200 IM and she'd blown him a kiss and I'd looked away and felt something I was calling irritation. Ten years later I can tell you exactly what I was feeling; at the time, I couldn'tve put a word to it if you'd paid me.
"Yeah, meets are boring if you're not swimming," I said. Like an expert on girlfriends at swim meets. Like a person who had ever had a girlfriend.
And here's the thing. When he mentioned Bri, I felt relief, in part. I identified it very clearly. Relief. Like, good. He has a girlfriend. He's straight. Whatever this is when he puts his hand on my hip or says my name or drives me home for no reason, it's fine. Container sealed.
Except, relief doesn't make your chest tight. Relief doesn't make you want to change the subject so fast you almost talk over someone. I was calling it relief and it felt like swallowing glass and I held onto the word anyway because the alternative was a word I didn't have and wasn't looking for.
Looking back, I know what I was doing. If I named it, it became real, but at that age I didn't have the words. And if it was real, it could end. And the relay, the Thursdays, the rides home, that was the only version of being close to him that was allowed. I wasn't protecting myself from being gay. I was protecting the excuse to be near him. That's a different kind of closet. The kind where you're not hiding what you are, you're hiding what you'd lose if you said it out loud.
He pulled onto my street. Blue shutters, garage door that doesn't close all the way. He put it in park and the engine idled and I should have said thanks and gotten out. I sat there for like ten seconds longer than was normal.
"Same time Thursday?" he said.
And his voice did something. Same words he'd said before, same sentence, but this time they sounded like he was asking something else. Not a different question. A bigger version of the same question. Like "same time Thursday" meant: will you be there? Will it be us?
Was he playing a game? Or was he trying to figure out something himself?
"Yeah," I said. "Sounds good."
"Cool." He was looking at me. Not glancing. Looking. The porch light was coming through the windshield and hitting one side of his face and his eyes were dark and steady.
"Thanks for the ride."
"Yeah. Anytime, Kai."
My name. Again. Where "anytime" would have been enough, he added my name.
I got out. Closed the door. Walked to my porch and didn't look back. Got inside and went straight to the kitchen and stood at the counter eating leftover chicken with my hands and not tasting it, replaying his voice saying "anytime, Kai" and the way his eyes looked in the porch light. My brother walked through and said "you're being wierd" and I said "I'm eating" and he said "you're eating standing up and staring at the wall" and I told him to fuck off and he did, because he's used to me being wierd after practice.
I should've gone to bed. Or homework. Instead I sat on the couch and watched something on TV and didn't watch it and at 11:07 my phone buzzed.
Liam: "good practice today"
Liam: "your exchange is getting tight"
I read it. Read it again. Typed "thanks man" and deleted it. Typed "we're gonna crush Jefferson" and deleted it. Typed "thanks dude" and sent it and put my phone face-down.
Picked it up. Read "your exchange is getting tight" one more time.
Then I went to my room and lay there in the dark and I did not think about Liam's voice saying "same time Thursday" and I did not think about his hand on the console between us and I did not think about the word "anytime" followed by my name.
That's a lie: I thought about all of it. Every second. And I definitely jerked off, just being honest. To no specific image, just the general feeling of being in that truck and being looked at like that by someone who looked like him. "Hard." "Tight." "Anytime." It took hardly any time to cum, which is how I knew I was in trouble.
The next day was Wednesday. Dry land.
Weight room, an hour, mandatory for varsity. The weight room was this converted storage space next to the natatorium, small and warm, rubber mats on the floor. It smelled different from the pool. No chlorine. Just rubber and iron and sweat, and the sweat smelled different when it wasn't diluted by pool water. Like bodies actually working. I walked in and scanned for Liam the way my phone scans for wifi: automatically, without my permission, locked on the second it found the signal.
He was at the pull-up bar. Sleeveless shirt. I could see the muscles in his back working and the way his shoulders pulled when he went up and the vein on his left forearm stood out and I stood in the doorway and I watched for way too long before I made myself move to the bench press.
Barnes ran it like practice: three-minute intervals, a whistle to switch. I was on the chest press bench, second rotation, and I'd loaded 135 because I was trying to hit a new max, which was stupid, but I was eighteen. Something about 45 bar, and 45 plates on each side seemed like a trifecta goal.
Liam walked over. "I got you," he said, and stood behind the head of the bench.
Here's the thing about spotting someone on chest press. The spotter stands directly above the lifter's head. You're lying on your back, face up, and they're standing over you. Standard gym stuff.
Unless the person standing above you is wearing mesh shorts with nothing underneath. Which, in hindsight ... why? Why would you go commando to dry land? I've thought about this a lot. Like, a lot a lot.
Second rep. I was looking up at the bar, focusing on the push, and my eyes drifted past the bar to Liam's face and then down. His shorts were loose and from my angle on the bench I could see straight up the leg of them. The inside of his thigh. The shadow where the fabric gaped. A head and a shaft. Eyeing me.
I almost dropped 135 pounds on my chest.
The bar stuttered. My arms shook. Liam grabbed it, one hand on each side, and guided it back to the rack. My eyes and nose inside his shorts opening for just a moment and I took in everything. It wasn't my fault!
"Whoa. You good?"
"Yeah." My voice sounded normal. I was proud of that. "Lost my grip."
I did not lose my grip. What I lost was every coherent thought in my head, because Liam was standing over me in mesh shorts with nothing underneath and I could see up them and my brain just left. Filed a missing persons report on itself. And something else was very much not missing (very nice genes), which is why I did not sit up imediately.
Next set. I stared at the ceiling. Fourteen tiles between the bench and the vent. I thought about my splits from Jefferson. 23.1 on the first 50. 26.7 on the back half. Pace better, Liam had said. I thought about pacing. I thought about the number 23.1. I thought about literally anything that wasn't just a few inches above my face.
I looked again.
I know. I fucking know. But he shifted his weight from his left foot to his right and the shorts moved and the gap got wider and I looked and this time I saw even more. The crease where his thigh met his hip. The hair. I felt my whole body respond, not just the obvious part but everywhere, this full-body flush that started in my stomach and went out in every direction, and I gripped the bar harder because my hands were shaking.
I racked it two reps early. "I'm done."
"You had two more in you," Liam said.
"No I didn't."
I got up and walked to the pull-up bar on the other side of the room and hung there with my back to him and my face burning. I did pull-ups. I did a lot of pull-ups. More than I'd ever done, because I needed my arms to hurt more than the rest of me was hurting, and by "hurting" I mean I was so hard it was genuinely painful and I was wearing compression shorts under my sweats and thanking god for that specific decision.
Then we switched.
Liam on the bench. Me standing over him. And as he lay back and gripped the bar and looked up at me, I realized: this is what he was seeing. My face, from below. For two full sets, he'd been standing over me, looking down; if I could see up his shorts from that angle then he could see my face. He could see where my eyes went. He could see exactly what I was looking at.
And he hadn't moved. Hadn't stepped back. Hadn't adjusted his shorts. He'd stood there, directly above me, and let me look.
That thought hit me so hard I almost missed his first rep. I counted out loud, "one, two, three," giving my mouth a job so the rest of me could shut the fuck up, and I stood there spotting him and my hands were hovering near the bar and I could feel his breath on my forearms every time he pushed up and every rep was a fresh reminder that he was right there, below me, and he'd been right there above me, and neither of us had moved away from any of it.
After, the team filtered out. I should have gone with them. I stayed. Liam was on a mat in the corner, stretching his shoulder. Arm across his chest, pulling with the other hand.
I filled my water bottle. Drank it. Filled it again. I'd had enough water to fill a lane.
"Shoulder still tight?" I asked.
"Yeah. It's been bugging me for weeks." He switched arms. Then, still looking at the mat: "I'm gonna miss this."
Not "the team." Not "swimming." "This." The word sat there in the weight room between us and I watched it sit there and I did not ask what it meant.
"Yeah. Me too."
He looked up at me. Not the quick glance from the truck. Not the coach look from the blocks. He looked at me the way you look at something you're trying to memorize. Or maybe I wanted to see that. Maybe he was just stretching his neck.
But he held it. Three, four seconds of eye contact across a weight room floor, and his face was doing something honest, something that didn't have the captain mask on it, and I felt it land in my chest like a stone dropping into still water.
I drove home. Windows cracked even though it was cold because I needed air. And the thing I kept coming back to wasn't the shorts, although yeah, that too, I'm not going to lie. It was the fact that he could see my face the entire time. He knew where I was looking. And he didn't move.
I'd crossed a line today. Not a physical one. I'd crossed the line where I could pretend this was normal chill-guy-friends doing bro things. I could pretend the truck ride was normal, and the texts were normal, and the hand on my hip was normal. But I couldn't pretend that looking up a guy's shorts while he spotted me and getting hard enough to crack concrete was normal. That wasn't something you do with your relay partner. That was something else.
And the worst part, or the best part, I honestly still don't know which: he'd let me. He'd stood there and let me look and then he'd said "I'm gonna miss this" and looked at me like I was something worth remembering.
That's not nothing. Right?
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