Coach Barnes assigned hotel rooms by relay groups. "You're swimming together, you're sleeping together," he said on the bus on the way to conference, without any awareness of what those words did to me. I sat in my seat, stared out the window, and thought about the emergency exits.
Room 214. One queen bed. I'm not a huge guy, lean, bit tall, but not tall-tall. Liam ... Liam's a swimmer. But filled out. Over six-foot.
I stood in the doorway and looked at the bed. Not two doubles. Not a double and a pull-out. One queen, with a comforter that had the kind of pattern designed to hide stains and a headboard bolted to the wall. Barnes had booked it and Barnes didn't think about these things because why would he, we were teammates, we were relay partners, two guys sharing a bed at an away meet is normal, it happens, teams have budgets because teachers have to be paid and hotels have limited rooms and sometimes you share a bed. Normal.
I put my bag on the side closest to the bathroom, which meant Liam would have the side closer to the window, which meant I would be between him and the door, which meant nothing. It was just where I put my bag.
Liam dropped his bag and looked at the bed and said "Cool" and that was it. "Cool."" One word. Like a queen bed with one pillow per side and approximately three feet of mattress between where his body would be and where mine would be was just a logistical detail. Assuming we each slept on the edge and laid there like mummies. Cool.
"You care which side?" he asked.
"No. Whatever man." I mean, I put my bag there, right? But ... whatever dude. Or man. Perfectly normal bro words to throw around that straight guys do all the time.
"I'll take the window." He unzipped his bag and started pulling out his team suit. I stood there and I cataloged the room. TV bolted to the wall. Desk with a lamp. Window looking out at the parking lot. Bathroom with a door that, I checked, had a functioning lock. Not that he'd barge in on me, or me him, right? The carpet was that color that isn't any color, just screamed hotel. The room smelled like every hotel room, that cleaning product smell that's suppose to be comforting and cover mold but just reminds you how many people have been here before.
Liam changed for warm-ups right there. No announcement. He pulled his hoodie off, then the shirt underneath, and stood there in just his jeans for a second while he grabbed his jammer, and I learned a new thing about myself, which is that I can organize a swim bag with the focus and precision of a neurosurgeon when I need to not look at something.
My goggles went on top of my towel. Then the towel went on top of the goggles. Then I rolled the goggles inside the towel. Then I unrolled them because that was stupid. My bag had never been this organized. It looked like it belonged to someone who had their shit together, which was ironic because I absolutely did not have my shit together. Liam was shirtless three feet away and the window light was catching the contour of his shoulders and the dark hair on his chest that I'd never seen in this light, not in a room where we were alone, and I was rearranging goggles like it was a federal assignment.
He stepped out of his jeans. Speedo. Just a Speedo, in a hotel room, in window light that was warmer than natatorium light, and I could see the line of his hip and the way the suit sat low on his waist and the trail of hair below his navel and I was hard. Obviously. I angled my body toward my bag and prayed. Why was he wearing a Speedo under his jeans? Did he not want to change in front of me? Had he planned this?
"Ready?" he said.
"Yeah. Let me just change."
He didn't leave. Why would he? We changed in front of each other every day. I pulled on my jammer with my back to him and told myself this was no different. It was very, very different, and I was very, very aware my bare ass was catching the light from the lamp and the parking lot in some disgusting yellow. I straightened up when my suit was on.
The meet went well. I dropped a half-second in the 100 free. Liam won his 200 IM heat. The relay qualified first for finals, exchange at 0.08, and when I surfaced Liam grabbed my arm and said "that's what I'm talking about" and his hand was wet and strong and I thought about it for the rest of the session. The touch ... the grip. The specific pressure of each finger. The way his thumb pressed into the inside of my forearm where the skin is thin and you can feel the pulse. The way it might feel pressed into something else.
He'd grabbed my arm and I could feel my own heartbeat through the place he'd touched and that's not something that should happen from a teammate grabbing your arm and I knew that and I didn't care.
After, back in the room ... both tired. Liam showered first. I sat on the bed, our bed, the one bed, and I listened to the water through the bathroom door and I stared at the wall. The wall was beige. Very interesting wall. I studied the wall the way I'd studied grout in the locker room showers, because walls and grout were safe and the sound of Liam showering on the other side of a door that may or may not be locked was not.
He came out in shorts. No shirt; why would he? Toweling his hair. Water still sitting in his collarbones, and I could smell the hotel soap and underneath it just him, whatever his body smelled like after a meet, chlorine and clean sweat and something else that was just ... Liam that I could not let my body react to. I showered. The bathroom was full of steam and his smell was in the steam and I stood under the water and I didn't do anything, I just stood there, but my body was very aware of the situation. One bed. Both of us. All night. I turned the water to cold for the last thirty seconds and it didn't help. I had to do something about it. He'd never know what went down the drain, or what I thought about while doing it. That was my secret forever ... and now you know it.
I came out. He was lying on the bed. Our bed. On top of the comforter, shirtless, watching something on TV. He looked up.
"Hey. So I should tell you, I sleep naked. I run hot. Is that gonna be weird?"
Oh.
My.
Fucking.
God.
Was this still my shower fantasy. No, the hotel was still the hotel.
He said it like he was telling me what time breakfast was: Casual. Informational. Like "I sleep naked" was the same category of disclosure as "I snore" or "I need the fan on."
"No," I said. "That's fine." What else could I say?
I said "that's fine" to the information that Liam was going to be naked in a bed next to me for the entire night. In a queen bed. With maybe three feet of mattress between us, depending on which way I was facing and how hard I got. That's fine.
I sat on the bed. Our side arrangement meant I was between him and the TV because this was a shitty hotel room with the TV on one side of the bed and not at the foot of the bed. He shifted to see around me and his knee bumped mine and stayed. Just his bare knee against my sweatpanted knee, and the contact sent a line of heat straight up my thigh, and I didn't move. He didn't move. We watched TV with our knees touching and I didn't absorb a single frame of whatever was on because every neuron I had was dedicated to the three square inches of contact between his knee and mine.
At some point he said "I need to shave. Conference regs."
"Yeah. Me too."
Shaving down. I should explain for people who weren't swimmers. Before a championship meet, you shave everything, arms, legs, chest. Drag reduction. You take off the body hair and the dead skin and theoretically you move faster through the water. Does it actually work? I've read studies both ways. Doesn't matter. Every competitive swimmer does it, like some people throw salt over their shoulder for luck. You shave down and you put on your racing suit and you feel different. Faster. Sharper.
Liam got the Barbasol out of his bag and a razor and looked at me. "You want me to do your legs? It's easier with two people."
Teams do this. Guys shave each other's legs. I'd been doing it since club team at fifteen. There is nothing unusual about this. Nothing unusual about a guy who was going to sleep naked a few feet from me doing this.
"Yeah. Sure."
I sat on the edge of the bed. He knelt in front of me. On the floor. Between my legs. With a razor and a can of Barbasol and I knew, I knew before he started, that this was going to be different from every other shave-down I'd ever had.
He shook the can. The foam was cold on my calf, towel soft underneat hmy feet. His hand was warm underneath it, holding my leg steady, his thumb on my shin, the familiar smell wafting. He started at the ankle and worked up in long, slow strokes. Careful. His eyes were on my leg, on the razor, on the line where foam met skin. He wasn't looking at my face. The room was quiet. The TV was still on but muted somehow, I don't remember who muted it, or my ears were just not focused anymore; the only sounds were the razor and his breathing and my heartbeat, which I could hear in my ears like a drum.
His hand moved to the back of my knee. I flinched.
"Ticklish?" he said.
"Shut up."
He laughed. Quiet. The one that was just breath through his nose and the corner of his mouth going up. The one I didn't have a file for.
He moved to my thigh.
I'm going to be honest because I think that's the point of this, whatever this is. When his hand moved from my calf to my thigh, I stopped being a person with a filing system. His hand was on my inner thigh, holding the skin taut so the razor could work, his fingers spread wide, his thumb on the inside, and I could feel every bit of contact. The air on the newly bare skin. The cold of the foam. The warmth of his palm through the cold. I wasn't thinking. That's not me being poetic; I literally was not thinking. And I was getting hard, which, given the situation, was a crisis. I was in shorts with no underwear (why would I wear underwear under shorts to bed?), sitting on a bed, and Liam's hand was on my inner thigh and my dick was doing what you'd expect it to do. I shifted my weight and I prayed and I stared at the ceiling and I thought about seed times and free splits and the number 23.1 and my great-aunt's chin hairs that sometimes collected food and none of it helped because his hand was right there and it was warm and it wasn't moving.
Then he paused.
His hand was on my inner thigh, above my knee. Not moving. The razor was in his other hand, not touching skin. He was just holding my thigh. And the room was silent.
He looked up.
I looked down.
His face was right there. Close. Closer than the truck, closer than the pool deck, closer than the blocks. He was kneeling between my legs and his hand was on my inner thigh and he looked up at me and I looked down at him and I don't know what moved between us. Something that didn't need the filing system because it existed before the filing system was built.
I don't know how long it lasted because my brain was just off.
"You're good," he said. And his voice was different. Lower. Like it had dropped into a register he didn't use on the pool deck or in the locker room or anywhere public. A private voice. A voice for hotel rooms and the space between two people who are pretending they don't know what's happening.
He stood up. He finished his own legs in the bathroom. And the trail of hairs that went into his pants that he was not wearing to bed. I sat on the bed and I needed to sit there because my legs were fine, my legs worked fine, I just needed a minute. Or ten.
Later. Lights off. We were in bed. The one bed. He was on his side, facing the window. I was on my back, staring at the ceiling. The parking lot light came through the curtains and I could see the shape of him. The rise of his shoulder. The dip of his waist. The bare skin of his back.
He wasn't wearing anything. He'd told me he wouldn't be and I'd said "that's fine" and now I was lying next to a naked Liam in a queen bed in a hotel room and my whole body was vibrating. Not visibly. Internally. Like every cell was tuned to the same frequency and the frequency was his body heat radiating across the three feet of sheet between us.
I could feel his warmth. Not touching. Just the heat. The way you feel a campfire from across a room. He was that warm. He'd always been warm, I'd known that from every accidental contact, every hand on my shoulder, every arm brush on the bench. But this was concentrated. This was his whole body, bare, putting off heat into the shared space of a bed I was also in. He just ... ran hot. In so many ways.
"Hey," he said. Not the captain voice. The dark-room voice.
"Yeah."
"Good swim today."
"You too."
He was quiet for a while. I listened to him breathe. The same slow, steady breathing I'd tracked in the truck but closer now, so much closer; I could hear the sound change when he swallowed. I could hear the sheet shift when he moved his legs.
"Kai," he said.
"What."
"Nothing. Just ..." He didn't finish. Just my name and then silence and then his breathing again and I lay there and I thought about the now two feet of mattress between my body and his and how it might as well have been two miles or two inches because the distance wasn't the point. Like we were quantum entangled or something like that and the fucking uncertainty principle was toying with me in ways I couldn't describe. I'm guessing you know what I mean ... why else would you be reading this?
The point was that he was there. Naked. In a bed with me. And he'd said my name into the dark for no reason and then not finished his sentence and I was going to think about that for the next ten years, minimum. Because that's where we are today: ten years later.
I didn't sleep. Not for a long time. I lay there and I listened to him breathe and I felt his warmth and I did not move closer and I did not move away and I thought about the pause during shaving. His hand on my thigh. The look. "You're good." And I didn't file any of it. I let it sit in my chest where it landed, heavy and warm and real, and I didn't tell myself it was nothing.
Because I don't think it was nothing. And I was done pretending that I did. I was done pretending then, actually. I just didn't know how to stop.
If you enjoyed this story, consider supporting the author on Substack.
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
