After dinner, the team piled into Jessup's room. Fourteen guys, room for two ... guys on the beds, on the floor, leaning against the wall. Someone had music on their phone, something with too much bass because it hurt my head. Someone else had a bag of Doritos the size of a small child, probably from Costco. The AC was rattling and the room smelled like chlorine and Axe body spray and whatever Jessup had spilled on the carpet earlier, which he said was Gatorade but looked suspicous and didn't smell like electrolytes. Which, I'm sure have a smell?
Liam was on one of the beds, his back against the headboard. I sat next to him. Shoulders touching. Fourteen guys in a room with two beds, everyone crammed together. Proximity, not choice. Another two guys were at the headboard, shoulders also touching; one was half off the bed though. Totally straight, all of us. Just us guys.
Except I'd chosen where I sat. And his arm was warm against mine. And after the warm-down pool and dinner and his knee against mine for an hour, sitting next to him felt like a continuation of something that had started underwater. Ten years later, I still remember thinking that, and my dirty mind also thought "and I really want your swimmers." I mean, I hadn't even really done anything with a guy yet, and that's what I was thinking.
And then my heart stopped. Because Reeves said it and I nearly died.
Reeves was a junior – my year – backstroke, loud in the way guys who aren't quite good enough to be confident are loud. Never really liked him, he seemed too performative. He looked up at us on the bed and said, "You two need a room? Oh wait, you already have one."
Normal laughter. Team laughter. The same joke someone could make about any pair. It meant nothing to Reeves. He was already moving on.
But I stopped breathing. And Liam moved.
An inch. Maybe two. His shoulder pulled away from mine and the air where his warmth had been felt like a wound. I felt the absence the way you feel a tooth that's been pulled. He laughed, late, the sound coming uncomfortably after everyone else's, and then said something deflecting, "Kai snores, he should be paying me" or whatever, and the room moved on. (I don't snore. Really. I dare any of you to come sleep with me and tell me I snore. Oh, wait ...)
But I didn't hear Liam because I heard the blood in my ears. I was performing a face and my ears were ringing and the two inches between us had turned into a wall.
The rest of the night Liam talked to other people. Jessup. Kessler. Reeves, for fuck's sake. Captain normal. He didn't look at me. Not once, even when he was facing me. And I sat on the bed and watched him not look at me. Devastated. I tried to figure out if two inches of distance could actually hurt this much or if I was being insane.
Finally, back in our room. Liam went straight to bed. I went gay to bed, even if I didn't have the thought.
"Night." One word from him. No dark-room voice. No "I keep thinking about."
He turned on his side facing the wall and the silence between us was the wrong kind. Not the warm silence from last night. The cold kind. The kind that has a wall in it.
I lay there and I listened to him breathe and I thought about what scared me. Not that Liam didn't feel it. The warm-down pool, his knee at dinner, every engineered car ride ... that wasn't nothing. I knew that. What scared me was that he could feel it and choose to stop. That a joke from fucking Reeves could make him decide it wasn't worth the risk. That he could weigh what was happening between us against his reputation, against Bri, against being normal, and "normal" could win, which meant I – we – lost. He could just turn toward the wall and switch it off.
That was the worst part. Not that it might be in my head. That it was real and he might decide to pretend it wasn't.
I slept eventually. I must have.
Because at some point I woke up.
Morning. Liam was already up, dressed, scrolling his phone. Team warm-up pants, conference shirt. "Morning. Breakfast in 20." Captain voice. Polite. The daytime settings.
I smiled and the smile was a cover story. We went to breakfast and he sat across from me and I ate scrambled eggs and thought about the taste of nothing (honestly: not hard, those eggs were probably from a powder).
Finals warm-up was at 4 PM. The relay was 7:15. I stretched on the deck and I knew where Liam was every second because my body was a tracking device for him and it didn't have an "off" switch, no matter how much I begged.
Liam found me before the relay. I was behind the blocks, stretching my ankles.
"Kai."
Not "hey." Not "you ready." My name. In the real voice. The one from the warm-down pool.
I looked up.
His face was doing the thing I recognized. Not the captain face. The face from when he'd been kneeling between my legs and looked up. The one he couldn't fake because it came from somewhere he didn't control.
"Let's go sub three-thirty," he said.
He held out his fist. I bumped it. Our knuckles stayed. One second. Two. Longer than a fist bump. Long enough that it was a bridge. Him saying: "I'm here. Last night was ... I don't know. But I'm here." At least, that's what my brain immediately said it was saying without him saying because *fuck my spiraling.
"Sub three-thirty," I said.
He nodded. Dropped his fist. Walked away. And the container that Reeves had sealed shut cracked open again.
Finals night. Loud. The scoreboard lit up, the crowd in the stands. 200 medley relay, event 14.
Jessup led off backstroke. Liam was second, fly. Kessler breaststroke. Me, anchor, freestyle. Lane 4. Seeded first.
I watched Liam swim the fly.
I know I was supposed to be tracking splits, watching our position, doing the ten things an anchor does while waiting. I wasn't doing any of them. I was watching Liam swim. His whole body moving in a wave, shoulders breaking the surface, arms sweeping forward, lean muscles stretching his skin in ways I wished he'd stretch me. I'd watched him swim fly a hundred times and every reason I'd ever given myself for watching was bullshit ... I knew it now and I didn't care. He was an artist. You spend an entire season constructing reasons to stare at someone and eventually the reasons run out and you're just ... staring.
He touched the wall. His split was 24.8, which meant we were leading. He hauled himself out and stood on the deck dripping and I could feel him watching me. I didn't look up. I didn't need to. I knew exactly where he was.
Kessler dove. Breaststroke. I stepped up on the block. My feet found the grip. I curled my toes over the edge and got into the stance Liam had fixed, the one with the dropped hips. His adjustment. His hand on my hip, weeks ago, just us. I could feel its ghost.
I went.
The exchange was 0.08. I felt it click. Sub-fifty, I knew by the third turn. My body doing what it was built to do and my mind empty the way it gets during a race when everything fires and there's nothing except the next stroke, the next breath, the next wall.
Still, I could somehow hear Liam screaming from the deck. His voice ... my ears somehow picked it out in the crowd, in the deafening silence that my brain imposed on me when I swam.
It wasn't words. Just sound. His voice cutting through the crowd, raw, open, a sound I'd never heard from him. Liam didn't yell. Liam was controlled. And here he was screaming while I swam the last 25. I swear I swam faster because of it.
I touched the wall.
Came up gasping, grabbed the lane line. Didn't look at the scoreboard. Looked at the deck.
Liam was there. Right there, leaning down. He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up, his muscles flexing and stretching his skin again. Halfway out of the water, my chest against his chest, his hands on my back, both of us wet and breathing hard and his face was right there, inches from mine. I wanted to kiss him. Right there, in front of everyone.
I didn't. But I wanted to. And that was the first time I'd let myself think it that clearly.
His arms were around me and mine were around him and I could feel his heartbeat against my chest, or maybe that was mine; I couldn't tell where my body ended and his started. I just felt warmth, and pressure. And I can still close my eyes today and think back to that moment, and remember what it felt like.
His mouth was moving, saying something I couldn't hear over the crowd, and his eyes were on mine. Nothing about this was ambiguous. Nothing.
Then the team was there. Guys jumping in. Kessler cannonballing. Celebration chaos. But under the water, in the mess of legs and arms, Liam's hand found my hip. Deliberate. Specific. His fingers curving around toward my back, the team right there, Jessup two feet away, and Liam's hand on my hip under the surface where nobody could see.
It stayed.
Back at the hotel, all in one room again ... our room. The team was going out. Pizza. Someone said ice cream. Swimmer calories. Liam was on his bed, still in warm-ups.
"I'm tired," he said. To the room. To Jessup, to Kessler. Normal. "Think I'm gonna crash."
Then he looked at me.
The warm-down pool look. The shaving-bench look. The one that came from underneath everything he showed the world.
"You going? Or, are you staying, Kai?"
Captain voice and real voice at the same time. Both registers layered. Anyone listening would hear a senior asking his relay partner a casual question. I heard everything underneath it.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm pretty beat."
The team left. One by one, then in groups. Jessup clapped Liam on the shoulder on the way out. "Rest up, old man." The door closed behind the last person.
The room was quiet.
Liam was sitting on the bed. Our bed. I was standing by the door. And the silence was different from every other silence, because this one was chosen. We'd chosen this. We'd stayed behind on purpose. And whatever was about to happen in this room with one bed and a closed door and no team and no excuse, I was not going to file it. I was not going to build a container.
Whatever this was, I was going to let it be what it was. No spiraling. Just reality. Just the moment.
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