Stick the Landing

by Kate McMurray

  “I’m super gay, Topher. You’re not my first anything. Well, I’ve never made out with a figure skater before, so I guess there is that.”

  “Oh, okay.” Topher’s head spun. So he did the only thing he could think to do, which was kiss Jake again.

  Oh, yeah. He could just imagine how this would progress. Maybe Jake would hoist Topher up on that counter and have his way with him. Topher could already feel his bare skin against the cool marble of the counter. He slid his hands up Jake’s T-shirt, over his skin, and Lord, he had muscles there. Muscles on muscles. He had—

  Someone rattled the door.

  Jake pulled away. “Shit. I really do have to go. My coach got us time at the practice gym first thing in the morning, and I gotta sleep or I’ll be useless. But, um, hold that thought?”

  “I… yeah.” Topher stared at Jake, feeling dazed.

  Jake smiled. “I’m glad I did that. I wasn’t going to, not tonight anyway, but I’m glad I did.”

  “Me too. Good luck at practice.”

  “Thanks. Good luck with… whatever you’re doing tomorrow.”

  Topher laughed. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Jake nodded and undid the lock on the door. Before he could open it, Topher said, “Sweet dreams, darling.”

  Jake winked. “They will be.” Then he walked out, making a big show of explaining to whoever was out there that he’d accidentally hit the lock on the way in. Topher retreated to one of the stalls, hoping to get his heart to stop pounding before he rejoined the public.

  Chapter Eight

  Primetime Broadcast

  Transcript: Men’s Gymnastics Team Final

  HENLEY: THE Americans look good after the first two rotations. Don’t you agree?

  SCHIFFLER: They look great, Al. They vaulted with very few errors. This particular vault from Hayden Croft was nearly perfect. Let’s look at it again.

  O’CONNOR: He gets a ton of height on it. He flies off the vault table.

  SCHIFFLER: Jake Mirakovitch had a good rotation too. This vault was also great. Just a little wobble on the landing, but it still earned him a high score.

  HENLEY: Jake made a bunch of event finals, didn’t he?

  O’CONNOR: Yeah. High bar, P-bars, vault, and floor. Which is not really surprising. Pommel horse and rings are his weaker events.

  HENLEY: But he has the potential to leave this Olympics with six gold medals.

  O’CONNOR: That’s true. The odds are against him, though. I mean, we’ve been covering gymnastics for years together, so you know the most likely thing to happen is that he’ll make a mistake somewhere. He doesn’t often hold up to scrutiny in international competition.

  SCHIFFLER: Still, he’s shown no sign of nerves here today. This was a great parallel bars routine for him.

  O’CONNOR: Yes. He gets great height above the bars, even manages to catch himself gracefully. And this dismount—it’s one of the harder ones in the competition, but he manages to get his body over the bars, he does that perfect layout in the air, and then he just nails it. Perfectly stuck landing.

  HENLEY: It’s worth noting that the Chinese basically took themselves out here. Here’s Chieng on the bars. He looked so great in the qualifiers, and this routine could have easily earned him a high score.

  O’CONNOR: Oh, yeah. He’s the reigning world champion. His work on the P-bars is, well, unparalleled, if you’ll excuse the pun. This should have rocketed the Chinese to the top of the leader board, but then this happened.

  SCHIFFLER: Gymnastics 101. You gotta stick the landing.

  O’CONNOR: This fall is a mandatory deduction. And that’s a hard thing to recover from.

  HENLEY: So let’s take a look at the leader board. It’s currently the Americans in first place, Japan in second, South Korea in third.

  O’CONNOR: This South Korean team is weak on some of the apparatuses, so I think it’s likely that Russia or the Netherlands will overtake them. But I have to say, if the Americans keep performing the way we all know they can, they may be the team to beat.

  HENLEY: But still, they have to keep it up. And it could all unravel here. Third rotation is pommel horse. Their nemesis.

  O’CONNOR: Yeah, this is going to be a tough one….

  Day 3

  JULIA MOSS was a photogenic skier hired by TBC to run around Madrid reporting on the Summer Olympics from a Winter Olympian’s perspective. Like Topher, she was angling to get a commentator job, and with her bubbly personality and pair of gold medals, she seemed like a shoo-in. Topher had been paired with her on Monday with the goal of compiling a report from the stands. The network wanted more of a “casual spectator” point of view in their coverage to help new viewers relate to the sports. There were four events on the agenda: fencing, synchronized diving, gymnastics, and swimming, in that order.

  Fencing had been more fun than Topher had anticipated. For one thing, Julia had coincidentally been a fencer in college and actually knew a little about it, so she was able to explain what the moves were. Otherwise it kind of looked like the two fencers were just poking at each other with long sticks. But as Julia explained the equipment and why the helmets lit up red or green, Topher got really into it. It helped that one of the competitors was a twenty-two-year-old kid from the Bronx with one of those super-inspiring stories—he grew up in poverty, discovered fencing at an after-school program, and had a natural aptitude for it. Topher delighted in cheering for him. Well, and also yelling at the refs when they made a bad call was a great deal of fun.

  “I’ve never even watched fencing before,” Topher told Julia as they took a bus to the next venue. “That was amazing.”

  Julia grinned. “It’s only going to get better. Time for men’s diving.”

  Topher supposed his role here was to pontificate on the merits of judged sports, although diving seemed a lot more straightforward than gymnastics or even figure skating, for that matter. Each diver completed the dive or he didn’t—and it was easy to see when something went wrong. Then the score was multiplied by the difficulty level. Or something like that. It wasn’t Topher’s job to know the rules.

  Julia had a giant smartphone that she used to record their reactions to events. So, while on camera, she said, “Can we talk about all this male flesh on display?”

  “Lord Almighty,” said Topher, playing along. He used a hand to fan himself. “I’m having heart palpitations.”

  He wasn’t exaggerating that much. The divers were all but naked. The American pair, Timothy Swan and Jason Evans, were both really hot, albeit on the small side. Topher generally liked his men a little bulkier. But there was no denying that a pair of handsome men prancing around in only tiny bathing suits, then hurtling off a diving platform before getting out of the water again and hugging a lot, was a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

  “Timmy Swan was the subject of some gossip,” Julia explained when she put her phone away.

  “Oh, yeah. He dated some actor, didn’t he? Came out in a big splashy way. Then they broke up, right?” Enough sports-related gossip had seeped into the media he consumed that he recalled that story now. The story itself didn’t interest Topher as much as watching an out gay diver perform well.

  “I heard the actor was stealing money from him.”

  “Ugh. That’s the worst.” Topher hadn’t heard that rumor, but whatever happened certainly didn’t seem to be fazing Timmy Swan much.

  When the Americans won the bronze medal, Topher and Julia went ballistic cheering.

  Then the bus took them over to gymnastics. They’d missed the first rotation, but they settled into their seats in time to see the second. In truth, Topher had been looking forward to this event all day, and he was a little upset that he wouldn’t able to see the final in its entirety.

  It was difficult to see Jake across the huge expanse of the gym, but Topher’s heart sped up anyway. He touched his lips, remembering the kiss from two nights before. They’d sent volleys of texts to each other in the intervening thirty-six hou
rs, and Topher enjoyed the hell out of flirting with Jake. Maybe nothing would come of it, but Topher felt like there was potential here.

  Now they were in the same room again—or at least the same cavernous sports venue—and Jake probably had no idea Topher was even there.

  Through a couple of rotations, Topher tried to explain what he knew about gymnastics to Julia and her giant phone.

  “I watch just enough gymnastics to know that the pommel horse is basically a mechanical bull,” Julia said as the Americans chalked up in preparation to take their turn.

  “That seems true,” said Topher. “The American gymnasts I’ve spoken to all basically hate this apparatus.”

  “Well, let’s watch some guys fall off the bull, then.”

  But then something amazing happened: the Americans didn’t falter.

  Well, Corey wobbled on one of his elements and Paul’s dismount could have been cleaner. But no one fell. Then Jake got up on the horse.

  Topher held his breath through the entire routine.

  He watched on the Jumbotron so he could actually see what was happening, because his seat in the stands was too far from the floor to see Jake’s movements. Jake’s legs seemed to helicopter over the horse. But on the big screen, there were moments when Topher thought Jake might lose control. He seemed to be hanging on precariously. But he did an impressive series of maneuvers, traveled the whole length of the horse in a handstand, and then dismounted cleanly.

  He’d gotten through it with no major mistakes. And got a big score.

  “Is fifteen and a half good?” Julia asked.

  “Hell yeah.”

  Jordan, the pommel horse expert, flew through his routine and never once looked like he didn’t have complete control over the apparatus.

  Thus the Americans were still in first place going into the fourth rotation.

  They might just pull this off, Topher thought.

  The next rotation took the Americans to the high bar, which was the apparatus closest to where Topher and Julia sat.

  And it was incredible. The three Americans who preceded Jake did well, but Jake got up on that bar and just flew. He bent his body and threw himself around the bar, in the air, as if it were the easiest thing in the world. He did a trick he hadn’t done in the qualifiers, one that was probably incredibly difficult, but Jake did it as easily as he breathed. He didn’t quite stick the dismount, but his small hop would only be a small deduction, hopefully.

  Julia got out her giant phone again and put it in selfie mode. “That Jake Mirakovitch is a dish, isn’t he?” she said as the rotation wrapped up.

  Topher sighed and batted his eyelashes. “He sure is dreamy.”

  “This has been a whole day full of eye candy. And we still have swimming to go.”

  “I may not survive.”

  Julia laughed. “God, this is the best, isn’t it? No stakes for us, except that we want Team USA to win. We get to just relax and watch the sports.”

  Topher was a little irritated that they were dumbing this down so much for the audience, and he wanted the opportunity to talk about athleticism and skills and flips and dismounts, but he couldn’t do much in a thirty-second video, so he said, “It is really fun. I’m learning a lot about these sports too. I almost know the names of some of the gymnastics moves now.”

  Julia laughed. “I almost understand what the scores mean.”

  JAKE WAS tired and worried for his arms as Alexei helped him jump up on the rings. But he mentally rehearsed his new mantra: put everything he had into this. Get the burn back. He pushed himself into an iron cross and counted to five as he held it, though his arms shook through the whole thing.

  It was the last rotation. He had not made any major mistakes. Paul had stepped out of bounds on the floor exercise, which had definitely affected their team total, and in this last rotation, they were basically tied with the Japanese. Those athletes were now on parallel bars, an event they excelled at, so the Americans were going to have to ask a lot of their tired bodies in this last rotation if they wanted the team gold.

  But they could do it. It was in their grasp.

  Jake focused on the task at hand, tightening and loosening his body as he flipped and moved into the next pose. His muscles howled. His whole upper body screamed. But he refused to give up or submit to his body’s weakness. He would not be the reason this team fell off the podium.

  He heard Alexei shouting, “Come on! You do it, Jake! Come on!” from the sidelines.

  He maneuvered into his last pose and tears sprung to his eyes from the effort. No doubt he was pushing himself to his very limits. He counted to five anyway.

  Then he swung around the rings twice and dismounted.

  He landed on his feet, which took all of his effort. He refused to move once his feet connected with the mat, but after a pause, he raised his arms and saluted the judges.

  He wanted to collapse as he jogged to the sideline. He’d been putting in his maximum effort all day. He’d thrown an extra release into his high bar routine, he’d held the handstand longer than he needed to during the pommel horse routine, and he’d put as much power as he had into the floor exercise. He hurt everywhere now and his arms felt like spaghetti, but he’d done it.

  He couldn’t collapse yet. The cameras were still on him.

  Alexei walked over and slapped his back. Viktor did too. “Good job, Jake,” said Alexei. “You did good.”

  “Your father watched from practice gym,” Viktor said. “He says he’s proud. Look?” He thrust a cell phone at Jake.

  Indeed, Jake saw a text from Valentin. Tell Jake he flew today. I’m very proud.

  “Oh,” said Jake, surprised by the rare congratulations from his otherwise perpetually stoic father. Jake knew somewhere deep in his soul that his father loved him, but it was an easy thing to forget for a son who constantly let his parents down.

  Viktor pat Jake’s shoulder. “You did not choke.”

  Well, no, he hadn’t, and he was happy for himself but having trouble feeling anything past the pain that was sinking into what felt like every muscle in his body.

  “It’s not over yet,” Jake said, gesturing with his head toward the rings, where Corey currently prepared to mount. But he absorbed the praise from his father. He let it fill his chest and hold him up as he waited for his score.

  A 15.833. He’d take it.

  Corey looked tired too as he launched himself at the rings. But if anyone had it in him to get this done, it was Corey.

  Viktor said, “Japan just finished on bars. If math is right, Corey needs seventeen for us to get gold.”

  Jake’s heart sank. Corey was good, but he was tired, and his arms shook in the iron cross nearly as much as Jake’s had. A single mistake, and it was all over.

  Or it wasn’t, since math was on their side. They’d still medal, which was better than any American men’s team had done in a very long time. But they’d come so close to the gold that Jake had practically considered it his.

  “Use that,” said Alexei, leaning close and speaking in a whisper, in his heavily accented English. “That fire you feel right now, the disappointment? You take your silver tonight, then you take that fire to all-around. You can win it, Jake. You are best all-around gymnast in whole competition. Even Japanese team, they have flaws. It is team of specialists, not all-around gymnasts.”

  Jake nodded, though he felt too tired to absorb that.

  And Corey got it done. He held all the poses he needed to, he stuck the dismount, but he wasn’t perfect, which showed in his score: 16.155. They were just tenths of a point out of first place.

  Still, they’d won a silver medal.

  They’d won a silver medal!

  And Jake could take that success, and the fact that he’d gotten through finals without any major mistakes, without injuring himself, and without doing anything embarrassing, to the all-around final. And then it would be entirely in his hands; he’d no longer be reliant on his teammates for success.

>   A silver medal, his first Olympic medal ever—hell, his first international competition medal ever—was his. All six exhausted teammates came together in a sweaty group hug that involved a lot of grunting and sighing and “Holy shit we did it!” and “Thank God it’s over!”

  Cory reached over and ruffled Jake’s hair on the way out of the hug.

  “We did that,” said Corey.

  “Can you feel your arms?”

  Corey grinned. “Nope. Totally worth it, though.”

  And it was. Jake let out a breath. He had a silver medal. And the gold had been within his reach.

  “I don’t know what you did today,” Alexei said, “but do it again in two days.”

  Jake nodded. Jesus. Was any of this real? “I will.”

  Chapter Nine

  TOPHER WAS wiped out as he returned to his hotel room. He flopped on the bed face-first and just lay there for a long moment. Then his phone buzzed in his pocket, so he had to shift and maneuver under himself to get it.

  Text from Jake: You have a few minutes?

  Topher rolled over and called Jake immediately.

  Jake laughed when he answered. “I meant to text. How much is this call going to cost?”

  “Eh, who cares? The network is paying my cell phone bill while I’m here.”

  “How much will it cost me?”

  “Do you care? I’ll hang up now.”

  “No, I don’t care. It’s nice to hear your voice.” Jake laughed again. “I suppose I can afford it. Before I flew to Madrid, I shot a bunch of commercials. I got asked to do ads for the randomest shit. Not just athletic stuff. I mean, I did an ad for a gymnastics apparel company, but I also did commercials for laundry detergent, a bank, a cell phone company, and one of those companies that sends meal ingredients to your home for you to cook yourself. I also got asked to do an ad for a candy bar, but that felt weird and I turned it down. I hardly ever eat candy during the gymnastics season. Or, well, ever.”