I woke up first.
Early. The light through the curtains was thin and gray, and the room smelled like hotel and Liam. I was on my side, facing him. I didn't remember turning over in the night, but I must have because I was staring at his face, so calm, peaceful. He was on his stomach, but his head was turned towards me, the sheet was at his waist, and his back was bare. I could see each knob of his spine, and the way his shoulders looked, relaxed, which was so different from when we were in the pool. He looked younger asleep. Less like the captain and more like just a person.
I looked at him for a while. I won't say how long. Long enough to know I was doing it on purpose. Long enough for the room to brighten that amber color of dawn. Long enough that if he'd opened his eyes I would've had no excuse. I memorized things. The mole on his left shoulder blade that I'd never noticed from this close. The way his hair fell across his forehead. The stubble on his jaw that I'd never really looked at because I'd never been this close to his face in daylight in a situation where I could just ... study it.
I made myself breathe. I made myself get up.
In the bathroom I stood at the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was flat on one side, goggle marks on my forehead from yesterday that hadn't faded. I didn't know what I should – or could – be feeling. Something had cracked open last night and I'd let it stay cracked and now, standing in a hotel bathroom at six-something in the morning, I could feel it. The full weight of wanting someone who was sleeping naked on the other side of the wall.
I am so fucked. And not in the way I think I wanted to be.
I thought Liam was doing the same thing from the other direction. He couldn't say it either. So he said it with his hands, with his car keys, with hotel room arrangements and Thursday practices and every excuse he built so we could be alone. I didn't see that then. I was too busy filing. But standing in that bathroom, I could feel the shape of it, even if I couldn't name it yet. He was as scared as I was. He just hid it differently. I hid behind "relay partner." He hid behind doing things for me and calling it captaincy. He hid it behind a girlfriend? Fuck. So many signs all pointing to one thing, but that roadblock forcing me away. Why did he do this to me? Did he mean to? Did he know what he was doing? What did he want?
I brushed my teeth. I went back out. Liam was still asleep. I sat in the desk chair and looked at my phone. I absolutely did not look at his bare back. Or the way the sheet had slipped another inch. Or the curve of his ass where the sheet ended and Liam began.
Fine. I looked. Obviously. I'm not a saint; I'm a gay teenager in a hotel room with a naked guy I've been losing my mind over for months. I looked and I felt guilty and I looked again and the guilt was quieter the second time and by the third time I'd stopped pretending I wasn't going to look because fuck it was the third time I'd looked.
Prelims went well. The warm-down pool was in a separate wing through a set of double doors. Four lanes, lower ceiling, the lights dimmer. It felt private even when it wasn't.
After the session, the team headed for the lobby. Dinner in twenty. Liam looked at me and ased "warm-down?" and I said "yeah" and we walked through the double doors while everyone else left.
The warm-down pool was empty. Just us. Because that was the universe right now. The echo was different here, softer, the ceiling lower and the sound dying faster. The lights hummed; that low electrical buzz you stop hearing after a minute but it's always there until it's shut off, and then you wonder how you didn't hear it. We got in, same lane, and swam easy. A few hundred yards of free, barely kicking. Cooling down. Letting the lactic acid go.
We ended up on the wall at the same end. Arms on the gutter, kicking slowly, faces a couple feet apart. The water was warm. The light from the windows was doing the ripple thing on the ceiling, slow, and moving. I could hear Liam breathing ... slow, and moving.
For a while neither of us talked. Warm-down quiet. You're tired, you're in your head, the water does the work. I'd been spending so much time in my head lately.
Then Liam said, "I keep thinking about after this season."
He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the lane line. His chin on his folded arms.
I didn't say anything.
"Like, what this is without ..." He stopped. Didn't finish. Just left it there. The word "without" pointing at something neither of us was going to name.
"This." "Without." And the thing is, "this" could have meant the relay. The team. Swimming. Senior year. That's what a normal person would assume.
But he said "this" the way he'd said it in the weight room on the mat. Like it had a capital letter. Like "This" was a noun, and he'd just watched me look up his shorts leg without any underwear despite however long ago that was. The thing between us – space, water, clothing ... anything. And "without" meant what happens when the relay is over. No exchange. No Thursdays. No drive home. No excuse.
I hung on the wall and kicked slowly and felt my calf brush his under the water.
I didn't pull away. He didn't pull away. Our legs were moving in the warm-down kick and his calf pressed against mine and it stayed. Skin on skin, under the surface, where anyone who looked would think it was refraction. Both smooth. Both shaved. The contact was light but I could feel every bit. The warmth of him through the water. The steady pressure that said, "this isn't accidental."
Liam turned his head and looked at me.
I looked back.
For maybe thirty seconds neither of us said anything. Neither of us looked away. Our legs were touching under the water and the pool was empty and I thought: "this is it." "This." This is the thing. Whatever this has been all season, all the touches and the rides and the dark room and the pauses, it's this. Him looking at me in a pool where no one else can see and not pretending it's something else.
I'm telling you this ten years later and I can still feel it. The water. His leg. His eyes. That's how I know it was real.
We stared. Not staring; we looked. There's this musical, Into the Woods. And this song in it, the baker's wife sings. All about moments – good ones, bad ones, but just life being made of moments. And if you can share just some of those good moments with someone, it's all worth it.
Liam and I ... I felt like we were in one of those moments. I still feel it.
And then the double doors opened and Jessup stuck his head in. "Coach wants everyone back. Bus is leaving."
Liam broke the moment, our This. "Yeah. Coming." Captain voice. He pushed off the wall and swam to the ladder. Got out. I watched water run off his back. I got out after him. We didn't say anything.
But it happened. Our moment. And both of us knew it.
Team dinner. Restaurant, long table, the whole team. Barnes at one end going over the finals schedule. I ended up next to Liam. He sat down first and I sat in the empty chair next to him and under the table his knee touched mine.
He didn't move it.
I didn't move mine.
Jessup was telling some story about a kid in lane 7 who false-started twice. Everyone was laughing. Liam was laughing, the public laugh, the captain laugh, slightly deeper than his normal one and more controlled. He said something back that made the table crack up. He was performing. He was good at it, even if he didn't know it.
But under the table his knee was pressed against mine and it hadn't moved for fifteen minutes. The heat of it was going straight through my warm-ups into my skin and I sat there with a plate of pasta I wasn't eating and I thought: I could live in this. This pocket of silence inside the noise. His knee against mine while the whole team talks around us and nobody sees.
The waitress brought more bread. Someone knocked over a water glass. Kessler was eating like he hadn't seen food in a week. Normal team dinner. Normal everything. And under the table Liam's knee was against mine and his hand was on his own thigh, close enough that his pinky was almost touching my leg, and I watched his hand not move and my hand not move and the two inches between his pinky and my thigh were the most charged two inches in the state.
The thing about that dinner is that I knew. Not guessed, not hoped, not rationalized. Knew. His calf in the pool was not accidental. His knee at dinner was not accidental. It couldn't be. The way he'd said "this" and not finished his sentence was not accidental. Whatever I'd been telling myself all season about relay partners and team stuff and proximity, it was bullshit and I knew it was bullshit and the bullshit was over. Completley, totally over.
He felt it too. He had to. It was the only possible explanation, but that was the part I couldn't file, couldn't rationalize, couldn't explain away. He felt it too. The warm-down pool had said it. His eyes had said it. His leg against mine in a crowded restaurant while the whole team sat around us and he laughed at Jessup's stories and performed normal and kept his knee against mine like it was the most important thing he was doing all night.
I ate my pasta eventually. It was fine. I didn't taste it. I was too busy feeling his body heat through two layers of nylon and thinking about what was going to happen when we went back to our room. Our room with one bed. Where he sleeps naked. Where last night he said my name in the dark and didn't finish his sentence.
Whatever it was, I wasn't going to file it. Well ... I know me better than that. I filed it under "moments."
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