by Joe Satoria
A door opened, revealing a tall buzz cut man in his uniform. “Hey, dude, you finished training with Pedro?”
“Yes, I take it you’re—”
In his approach, I noticed his shoelaces were untied, flopping around by his feet with each step. “Joachim,” he said, holding out a hand—he pulled it back and clenched his stomach. “I was supposed to meet you yesterday, but I—” his cheeks puffed with a belch. “A little sick.”
I stepped back. “Food? Water?”
“Oh, no, no I’m ok.”
My tongue clicked in my mouth. “I mean, are you sick because of the food or the water?” I wanted to know so I could avoid either.
“Ahh, no man,” he said, “we were at the beach, I probably had water in my mouth.”
“Hope you feel better—are you training?”
“Me?” he sucked back, looking around at the gym. “I need to go up to reception, first aid maybe.”
I stepped out of his way as he walked out. The last thing I needed was to get sick—it would be a complete waste of the two weeks. I wasn’t sure how much I believed his sea water theory. I was best avoiding all the meats here anyway.
What I need now was—ah, music.
I found a small stack of CDs, most notably the ‘NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC’ discs, sitting beside a stereo—it appeared to be hooked up to speakers in all corners. It was better than nothing.
Looking to the tracklist on the back of the CD cover; it was mostly the same stuff my girl—ex-girlfriend listened to. Whatever it was, I turned the volume to the max and used the thumping beat of music to keep my thoughts from spiralling.
Building up a sweat on the running machine, I pushed the incline. Another minute, another mile. The t-shirt was wet to my skin when I tore it off, letting the cool sweat drip down my thighs.
The door opened with a gust of heat—letting the cool air-conditioned room breath.
Charity Case stood in the open door, wide eyed and meek. He held his racket limp in his wrist and hugged two water bottles at his chest.
“This yours?” he asked.
Out of breath with sweat stinging at my eyes, I couldn’t speak. I pulled away from the running machine, sucking deep in my heavy chest. My reflection across the wall revealed how red my cheeks had become.
For a moment while running, my mind had been completely clear. I didn’t want to think about the competition, I didn’t want to think about Isabelle, and I certainly didn’t want to think about—
“It was left behind. I figured it must’ve been yours,” he continued, invading my space with his noise, a man I didn’t think could say more than a few words, now stringing together full sentences.
I grabbed it and flicked the lid, immediately squeezing it into my mouth. It filled the satisfying need to be quenched, and I enjoyed every drop of it—even if it had been sitting out in the sun lukewarm.
“Are you ok?” he asked.
He was still there, looking like Bambi on ice. “Yes.”
“You left before we could finish.”
What more did he want, he’d won, it was three games; he won two of them and I wasn’t going to let him get three. I would’ve looked like a joke. I was just unprepared for clay. I was comfortable on hard or grass, you know, prepare myself for the US and Wimbledon—the ones that count. “Well, you won.” He wanted to hear it from me, jeesh.
“It was a friendly game,” he said, “we should’ve played, back and forth, you know, there’s no need to be power handing all those serves. Some players can get away it because they have the game to pull through the rest, but—”
“But what?” I asked, I didn’t know what he implying, but I’d watched enough Andy Roddick matches throughout my childhood, and I’ve even worked with the people he’d worked with in the US.
“You don’t have to be so tight all the time,” he said.
At the mention of tight, my shoulders rolled. I wasn’t tight or knotted, I had full body massages nearly every week, if I had a knot somewhere they would’ve exorcised it like a demon node beneath my skin.
“I’m fine,” I grumbled back. “Thanks for the water.”
“You know, Pedro said we could both learn a lot from each other,” he continued. Oh god, he was a little dog, yapping away, I was doing my best to shoo him but like a little dog, he was watching the hand movements and thinking it meant stay.
“I’d say you had a lot to learn, but I’m mostly here to play and get used to playing on that surface,” I told him. “Anything else you want to tell me?”
“Yes,” he said again, “everyone is paired, and we have to be paired.”
“What do I get out of being paired with the newbie?”
“Newbie?” he scoffed back.
A newbie with the attitude of a player with years beneath his belt, it seemed. “I’ll give you the extra practice during free training hours later,” I told him. “After dinner.”
“And just so you know, I’ve won a lot of local tournaments.”
My upper lip curled. “Everyone gets a medal for participation.”
He mumbled something as he turned.
“What?”
“See you after dinner.”
“West courts.”
Once he was gone, I noticed Pedro’s shadowy figure a few paces away. He shook his head. Waiting as I grabbed at a hand towel to wipe my face down, he entered the gym with a sigh.
“This is where you went?” he asked.
“Well, this is where I am.” I dragged the hand towel beneath my pits. “I needed to clear my head and sweat.”
“Did it work?”
It had until Charity Case appeared. “He told me you paired us together for training.” I swotted the towel around my ankles, collecting the sweat. My feet felt heavy but tread light, stepping forward and back.
Pedro offered a shrug. “We can’t be with you all the days. You have David and Joachim too, but there are eight students, and that is only three trainers, including me.”
“And why did you pair me with him?”
“Oh, come on.” He smiled. “He is new, and you know, most of the others have had bad experiences with you.”
While true, I had been paired with Nils before, and he made me mad. Mladen, I’d seen a couple times, here and there, mostly at the larger camps, the affordable ones. He was good, but he was unusually tall, and that gave me no end of frustrations because he would do these giraffe extensions.
“I s’pose I could show the newbie some tricks.”
“No,” Pedro answered back with some cheesy smile biting into his face. “He beat you today, maybe you’re the one who should be learning a thing or two from him.”
He left with that.
I had something more to say, I wanted to say I didn’t have anything to learn from him, probably—I mean, Harvey was quiet, he looked like he was always chewing on a thought, biting it back—and maybe that’s what he meant, I should think before speaking, the same thing I’d been told my entire life.
* * *
He was late. It was an hour after dinner and the free training session was supposed to start ten minutes ago. The sun was setting, but the floodlights weren’t on—and so I sat there on the court, throwing and catching tennis balls.
“Sorry,” a loud voice pulled me. He really had found his voice. Waving his racket in the air at me.
Charity Case had grown a pair of balls.
“Ten minutes,” I told him.
“I thought—I thought you were going to be in the dining hall.”
“No, I’ve saved my dinner until after training.” If I had any chance of winning, it wouldn’t be on a full belly.
“Ok.” He tapped his fingers on the plastic racket strings.
“Right,” I said, jumping to my feet as I gave my arms a shake and my shoulders a roll. “Got to be loose.”
“Loose,” he replied and nodded, his gaunt expression staring at me like he was stuck and unable to move. “Um—”
I slapped my ha
nds together. “Let’s do this!” I tapped my racket against the ball on the ground, a single bounce into the air as I caught it. “Your serve or my serve?”
“I’ll go,” he said, nodding to the court. “Hard?”
I knew what he was doing—it’s what I’d said to him. I took my spot in the quadrant, tugging tight shorts around my thighs as I gave into a semi-squat position. “Just serve.”
His frame slithered across the court, bouncing the ball in his hands and wafting the racket, back and forth.
“C’mon!” I slapped my hand against the racket. “Just—”
THWACK.
Like a tongue popping, the ball clipped and clopped, back and forth. I tried to imitate him, extending my arms, pushing out.
POP.
Back to him.
“In!” I shouted. “15, me.”
He smiled and looked back, out of breath; his cheeks rosy in the sunset. “Right.”
“You shouldn’t have eaten so much,” I told him. “You should always wait before you do any sport, you’ll end up injuring yourself.”
“At least we’re not swimming,” he snickered.
“I wouldn’t know, I can’t swim,” I said—oh, no. It came out. “I mean, I can swim, obviously, everyone can swim.”
“It’s ok,” he replied, “not everyone likes swimming.”
“Yes, but everyone can swim.”
“That’s not what you said.”
Was he trying to wind me up? It was working. I inhaled through my nose and close my eyes. “I don’t like to swim, is what I should’ve said, anyway, why does that even matter.”
“My ex was part of team GB”
“The last Olympics?”
He nodded. “Yeah, won silver.”
“How was she?”
“He’s only a year older than me, so 17 at the time.”
He? My face creased. I wasn’t—homophobic, but you could usually tell with those people. I thought Harvey had a thing with Sasha. Now I wasn’t sure what was going on.
“You’re gay?” I asked now it was on the table, I needed to know. Perhaps it was offensive to ask, but I was sharing a room with him and he’d told me his ex was a dude, so what else was I supposed to ask.
He nodded. “Yeah.” He smiled as if it was something everyone know.
“How long—does everyone know?”
He shrugged, grabbing at his water bottle. “Probably.”
“And he was in the Olympics?”
“He broke up with me before that—Will Bentham, he grew up near me, we used to play tennis together, but he was shit.”
“People can usually tell though—with gay people,” I continued, still confused.
“I don’t make a secret of it. I have a rainbow bracelet, and you know, my gay card, didn’t you see it?” He held his empty wrist up at me.
Oh—a joke. “I mean, good for you, I don’t have a problem with it—as long as you—”
“Great, because I didn’t ask if you did.” And now he’d grown balls big enough to stun me to silence. “Right, are you going to serve or—”
“No, no, yes,” I said, grabbing at the ball from my pocket. I gave it a little rub against the racket before a single bounce on the ground.
POP.
He caught it. No surprise.
I hit back, my grip on the racket growing firmer as the power in his shot seemed to have grown—a little kick propping his fire back.
THWACK. POP. THWACK.
We continued until I gave a forehand drop shot, watching as the ball landed over the net and Harvey missed it by a foot.
The floodlights came on with a whirring humph.
7. HARVEY
We played until he told us to stop. I don’t know why I listened to him, because he was so angry at everything—but by the end of it, he’d calmed, he’d perhaps grown tired and through being tired, he was actually playing better.
“Good game,” he said.
“I think that’s the longest I’ve trained in my life,” I told him, it was the longest, not the hardest, I’d endured harder training sessions over weekend camps—but only the ones with the special guests, you know, the chance at being scouted.
“Tomorrow will be harder,” he said.
He was right. Tomorrow would probably be much worse. That’s when the one-on-one training sessions started and for all I knew, that was going to put me through my paces much harder than playing a couple matches with Jordan until he tired out.
As we walked back through the compound, making our way to the dormitories, I was stuck in the thought of wondering how much sleep I’d be able to get and whether or not I’d even find myself being able to physically wake in the morning.
“What are you studying?” he asked, pulling my thoughts off course.
“Studying?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “I saw the book. I know it’s not a tennis book, I’ve read most of the big biographies and that’s none that I’ve seen before.”
“Oh, yeah—” I also had to factor in time to cram some studying, thank you for the reminder. I’d forgot during everything that as well as training, I had to get ready for the inevitable exam re-sit.
“So, you going to university? Waste a time for a tennis player.”
I nodded back. “If this doesn’t work out, I’ll have to do something.” I’d tried to go pro at sixteen, it was a huge dream, really, I wanted everyone to be so wowed by me as a player, but at sixteen, I was just like every other teen dreaming about being the exception and having their career take off—no, I knew that only happened to those who were scouted and rich. Not me.
Jordan sucked on his teeth, pulling me back from where I was falling in the pit of my own thoughts. I turned to him pulling at his t-shirt, it clung to him like a second skin—like earlier, and in the pit of my stomach, I felt punched to see the sweat glisten on his skin in the dull light.
“I mean, going pro is my dream,” I continued, trying to say anything to keep my eyes from him, “if I don’t, I’ll need something else.”
“I think a couple more training sessions together and I’ll be unstoppable, just need to find my footing,” he said, stuffing the end of his soggy wet t-shirt into the waistband of his short.
“I—I don’t think we could do it again this late,” I said.
He paused me, turning as we reached the doorway into the dormitory building. “What do you mean?”
My eyes darted from the space between his eyes, to the bulge in his shorts as they’d been pulled a little tighter from where the tennis balls stuffed in both pockets revealed a prominent dick print. “No,” my throat snapped back dryly.
“Why not? Can’t handle it?”
Looking at it, I wasn’t sure. “I—I can handle it.” My racket slipping from my wet hands. “I can, but we should also do—” I shuffled forward, trying to do anything to get his cock out of my eyeline, “—other things.” My ass cheeks clenched sending a throb to my dick. “Yeah.” My voice cracked as I covered the front of my shorts with the racket.
“Like weights and cardio.”
I nodded back. “Yeah, super important.”
His smirking face looked back at me. I was too tired to be feeling this way about him—the lust monster growing its horn inside my pants. “Right, you’re on, switching it up.” He turned to the doors, heading inside.
I let out a deep sigh, my arms sinking on the tension in my shoulders. I couldn’t continue to hold it, I felt like I would go crazy. I was going crazy for even looking at him like that—maybe it was sleep deprivation, but whatever it was, its warm invite wasn’t leaving.
In the dorm room, Jordan was already grabbing at his things. “Hope there’s still hot water,” he said. “You coming?”
Was he inviting me to join him in the shower—no, no he wasn’t, stop thinking like that, but I couldn’t, it was on the tip of my brain. I wanted to know and if I had the guts, I might have even joked about it and asked him if that’s what he was doing.
“
Yeah, I’ll grab my things.”
He paused by the door, his towel over his arm and in the light of the room, his body was tanned and sweaty, glistening in it. “You didn’t bring your own towel?”
“No, I—brought one bag.”
He scoffed back. “Right, forgot.” He looked over my things, the same look he’d given me the first day, and again now. “Charity case, right.”
Whatever I was feeling—it vanished with a gut punch.
A sensation of anger waved through me this time, from the lust of wanting to pin him down or—him pin me, to now wanting to drive a knife through his skull—you know, so the headlines could be ‘Charity Case Kills Trust Fund Boy’.
He left and I took a seat on my bed.
On the bedside table, my phone had been faced flat—my dad and aunt had texted, I wanted to lay back and read their words, but I knew I was stinking up the room just by being here.
I kicked off my trainers and socks off.
Freeing to have my feet out of the tight trainers, triple tied in a knotted bow, but it was the best way to make sure they didn’t come loose when I was playing—and I’d been playing a lot today.
In the shower room, Jordan was already in one of the cubicles. He was mumbling to himself beneath the sound of the shower splashing.
I took a seat on the bench and began undressing. The relief of being out of the sweaty clothes—with my hands clenched at the waistband, I pulled my shorts and briefs, both soaked in perspiration. My entire body ran cold.
“Wow,” Jordan chuckled from the stall as his door flung open, bashing the stone divider.
Immediately, my hands flinched to the towel I’d grabbed from the linen closet near the shower room. I opened it up around my body. “What?” I turned away in the direction of the empty stall opposite.
“What are you applying? Factor fifty?”
“What?”
“Your ass is the whitest thing I’ve seen, and they boil chicken breasts here,” he chuckled.
I turned briefly to reach for my wash bag, and there he was, standing proud at the door of his cubicle with a single hand cupped around his cock and balls. What was he doing? He was covering himself, he obviously wanted me to look—oh, no, I yanked at the wash bag and stepped inside the cubicle before my mind went back into—
