I wanted to lash out. I wanted to make him feel as bad as I felt right then. Instead….
“Michael, I’m really sorry. All I can do is apologize.”
“What if it’s not enough? This is my life. Our lives. Don’t you think I should’ve been informed?”
“Yes.”
“Would you stop being reasonable about this?” Michael shouted.
Damn, he looked sexy when he was furious. It was totally inappropriate right then, but he really needed to hold me down and punish me.
Reel it in, Remy. I shifted uncomfortably.
Michael glanced down. I pretended not to see it.
“So now what?” Michael pulled his attention back up to my face. At least it was a struggle. Yay for maturity. Damn, it sucked, and not in the fun, tingly way. “Are we still together?”
My eyes pricked, and I shut them against the tears I knew were there. “I want us to be.” I opened them and let the tears run down my cheeks. “But I think the ball’s in your court.”
“So… long distance? How will that work?”
At least he was giving it some thought.
“After this summer, yes. Long distance, I guess.” I sniffled. “Lots of phone calls. Visits when we can.”
I felt him searching my face. “Is this really what you want, Jeremy?”
“You’re what I want, so this?” I took Michael’s hand. “This is what it’ll take to be with you.”
“You’ve never been an easy person to love, Jeremy, but you’ve always been worth it.” Michael was crying, too.
That was it, game over. My own waterworks started in earnest. “You love me?”
“How could you not know this?” Michael glared at me.
“Maybe because you never told me?” Not that I had any kind of ground to stand on. “But I love you, too.”
“You do?” Michael sounded so small, so lost.
“Oh, Michael.” I still held his hand, so I used it to pull him into me. “You have amazed me since the moment we met, but it’s taken me until this year to realize how much I love you.”
After that, we held each other. I think we’d both said what there was to say, at least for now.
Eventually Michael roused from his near slumber in my arms. “So this is it.”
“Looks like it.” I felt incredibly tender toward him.
“Okay, then,” he said softly.
I nodded. “Okay.”
Michael leaned over and kissed me, but chastely, a quick press of his lips against mine. When he left, he didn’t look back.
THE ONLY time I felt as depressed as I did then was after my HIV diagnosis. Not right after, because my denial knew no bounds, but later, in the hospital after reality and I had gone head-to-head and reality won. But after talking about colleges and plans for the future with Michael… yeah, that. I knew I had to do it, but it had sucked, and far worse than I’d thought it would. What else could I do? Part of me wanted to scream “It’s not fair!” but realistically speaking, life wasn’t. The fair happened every year at Cal Expo and featured unicorns farting glitter and rainbows. This grown-up stuff I’d discussed with my grandparents operated by different rules: figure out what you want, figure out its price, pay the price. What I’d wanted and needed was to come clean to Michael, and while I’m not sure I could have predicted the exact price, I’d expected him to be angry, and lo and behold….
I knew Geoff and Laurel would see both my side and Michael’s. Were I to ask Caden and Lance, both would tell me I was an idiot for bringing it up: Lance, an idiot for waiting this long, and Caden, an idiot for telling Michael in the first place. Caden, at least, had ulterior motives but cheerfully confessed them. I learned early in the academic year never to trust Brady with anything personal. With a start, I realized that other than Lodestone, there was no one else close to me to tell. Had I let no one else get close?
It was a sad panda who climbed into his single the next morning. I rowed my pieces with Lodestone dogging me the entire way, and while I gave it my all, Lodestone didn’t look too impressed.
“Way ’nuff.” His barely amplified call through the megaphone sounded more like a grunt. He zoomed up close to me, turning his launch perpendicular to my shell and drifting in like dandelion fluff at the last moment so I could catch him. He reached out and grabbed the earlobe nearest to him, then stuck it. Acting quickly, he captured the welling blood. He had to in order for the lactate tests to mean anything. Highly trained fools like me processed lactic acid so fast that if he waited until we finished everything and put the equipment away, I’d have worked it all out.
“What’s with you? You were anywhere but in the boat.”
I put my head on my knees. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.”
“Take it in, Remy. Put everything away, and I’ll see you in my office.”
I all but fell into one of the chairs in front of Lodestone’s desk maybe twenty minutes later. Wordlessly, Lodestone handed me a mug of coffee and gave me a few minutes to drink it.
“Okay, Remy, talk to me. What’s going on?”
I snorted. “Well, other than literally falling to my knees with exhaustion after a CalPac practice and splitting one of them open—single-handedly setting off rounds of gay and HIV-panic in the process, I might add—I think Michael and I broke up.”
“Okay, you need to back that up and go into a lot more detail on both, because that made no sense at all.”
I’ll give Lodestone this much credit… he looked horrified, and as I spoke, he shook his head.
“Remy, you loveable idiot! That training plan was always provisional. You were supposed to check in with me after every cycle to let me know how you were feeling physically and emotionally.”
I looked at him dully. “You never told me that.”
“I expected you to read the information I gave you. There was a lot more on that training plan than brightly colored boxes.” He looked at me, his jaw hanging open. “You haven’t read that training plan. It’s March, and you haven’t read the training plan. Jesus fuckcakes, Remy. You’re not eating enough, you’re still working out like you were in January, you’re not even resting at the right times.”
Lodestone looked stunned, and if I weren’t a shuffling zombie whose grades had dropped an entire letter or in some cases two, I’d marvel that I’d finally done it to him. “I can’t believe this. You didn’t read the training plan. I’ve gotta call Pendergast and Ridgewood. Go home, Remy. I don’t want to see you for a few days. I’ll call you. Expect e-mails with a revised training plan. Do nothing but scull lightly and never for longer than forty-five minutes. No weights and no ergs.”
I stood up as I made ready to go.
“Lodestone… I’m sorry.”
He looked stricken. “Oh, Remy.” He stood up and engulfed me in a hug. “Remy, kiddo. No. I’m sorry. You… you’re just oblivious. Like always.”
I rested my head on his shoulder. I noted absently that my head reached farther up his kind-of-massive chest than the last time we had to do this, after Lodestone had to hit my reset button the last time, when Cisco died during my first trip to the Youth Nationals. Lodestone was the only coach I’d walk through fire for, and we both knew it. Apparently I already had. Huh. I felt safe there in his arms, like he’d protect me. It was absolutely nonsexual even though he was so hot he needed Nomex underwear. No, it was more paternal, because we were closer in many ways than I’d ever be with my own father. Somehow he knew, and he rocked me for a moment. Or maybe he’d always known, which was why we’d always been close.
“Go get some sleep,” he said softly. “And call Dr. Kravitz. I want to make sure this hasn’t done anything to your health. It was never supposed to be like this, and a blood test will put my mind at ease on that score, at least.”
THE NEW training plan arrived within a day, and with it a much-improved outlook on almost everything. Everything, that was, but my relationship with Michael. I put a great deal into my training log, but
I left the relationship issues out. Grandma and Grandpa paid for a lot, but that didn’t include a total lack of privacy.
So for all our pretty talk, as March turned into April, Michael and I barely spoke. I escaped into my usual limbo of compartmentalization, only not quite. Memories of Michael pierced that featureless gray and prevented me from truly tuning out and focusing on nothing but training and school, and this made me epically cranky. Nothing worked right, not in the boats, not in the lab, and not in the classroom. Brady resumed his goading, even bringing his football buddies in on it, or trying.
Hard luck for my roommate, the first time some of Brady’s friends from the football team—he’d actually succeeded in making good on that threat—tried to hassle me was also the last time. Why he and they’d waited until the middle of the most challenging training of my life was anyone’s guess, or maybe that’s why Brady had held off until then. Most crimes are crimes of opportunity, after all, so why not wait to strike until I appeared defenseless? Brady knew the toll the stress had exacted, and since my darling roommate hadn’t seen Michael around, I can only assume he figured the worst had happened and made a lucky guess.
I suppose I was relatively slender for my size. It’s not that Lodestone’s training plan made me bulk up; quite the opposite, in fact. I’d actually lost body fat, and extra muscle was nothing but more weight to haul down a racecourse. Actually, given my screw-up with the training plan, I’d probably lost muscle mass, too, and with my luck, the lean muscle I needed for crew. So Brady’s football jocks? I must’ve looked like easy pickings. Oh well, I’d held them off in high school; I knew I could deal with them in college.
“Look into these cold, dead eyes. Do I look like I care?” I stared until one or two started squirming. “I’m overtrained, my grades are dropping like a rock, and my boyfriend’s not speaking to me. What do you think you can possibly say or do that will bother me? And before any of you says ‘fag,’ remember that this is CalPac, and I’ll have your asses in front of student judicial before the g comes out.”
“Whoa, dude. No need to get personal,” one of them said.
“Then think before you decide to be Brady’s bully boy. Ooh, it’s alliterative. Can you spell ‘alliterative’?” Jeez, I was being a dick, but with the bit between my teeth, there was no help for it. Rather, I didn’t feel like stopping.
“Probably not. We’re here to play football, and it’s a safe school.”
I frowned. “Way to take the wind out of my sails.”
“I know.” Grinning, the player who spoke up said, “Right bastard, aren’t I?”
“Now you sound like a rugby player.” Seriously, what was going on here?
He shrugged. “It’s something to do in the off-season.”
“Don’t make friends with him, Scott,” Brady said from where he sat on his bed, “he bites.”
Scott looked me up and down. “Maybe I like that. So if this boyfriend of yours makes the radio silence permanent, look me up.”
“Dude! What did I just say?” Brady threw down the book he’d been pretending to read.
Scott started pushing his fellow players out of the room. “Like you ever had a chance, Brady.”
I frowned. This wasn’t suave. I didn’t want this Scott person. I wanted Michael. “You’ll have to get in line. There seems to be a rower at UC Davis who’s interested, but I won’t give him the time of day, either.”
“Wait, what?” Scott demanded, but it was too late. I shut the door after them all.
I closed my eyes and shook my head to clear the hooey, but it didn’t seem to work. When I opened my eyes, Brady still sat on his bed, glaring at me as fiercely as ever, and Michael still refused to return my calls.
Chapter 24
IT ALL came tumbling out in San Diego at the Crew Classic. The big spring regatta put me and Michael in close quarters, like rats in a coffee can, and the fact that we shared a coach certainly didn’t help matters. No, this wouldn’t be at all awkward, particularly since I refused to leave San Diego without resolving this. The thing that only Lodestone understood about me and the Crew Classic was that it didn’t matter. Sure, CalPac thought it was a huge deal, and yes, I’d pull on that oar for them, but for my training goals? We were two-thirds of the way through Lodestone’s training plan, two-thirds of the way to the U23 selection camp. This? This was a rest week in one of the periodization cycles. Lodestone planned it that way so he could devote his energy to Cap City’s junior crew and its gentlemen’s crew, as the varsity boys called themselves.
Me, I had plenty of time and energy to devote to righting things with Michael. I’d flown down on Wednesday evening, two days before the regatta, for no reason other than to distract Geoff and maybe to bust his roommate’s chops. I mean, if the shy and skittish little forest creature wasn’t going to come out, I might as well be über gay in front of him. That I wore that beat-up “I’m Not Gay But $20 is $20” tee shirt when I met him on Thursday was entirely coincidental. I’d once used it to irritate Michael, so it should work on Geoff’s roommate, Craig, every bit as well.
“You’re terrible.” Laurel struggled not to burst out laughing when she met me, Geoff, and Craig after whatever lecture she had. We picked up her roommate, Olive, and took off for a campus restaurant they swore campus food services hadn’t gotten its hooks into.
Craig and his poor wounded sentiments had taken one look at me and lost the power of speech. He turned bright red and stayed that way for the rest of lunch my first day in La Jolla. He eventually responded to my attempts to draw him out, but usually in short sentences. I could only blame myself.
Olive nodded slowly. “So you’re Remy. I’ve heard about you.”
“And you’re Olive. I love that you both have botanical names. Someone in the housing office has a sense of humor.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
“You’re welcome, Blunder Woman.”
I liked her instantly. I could tell she’d give as good as she got and wouldn’t put up with my crap, which in all honesty constituted nothing more than boundary pushing.
Olive reached out, and I bent my arm so she could take it. “I’m keeping him.”
“Okay, am I the only one who’s suddenly nervous?” Geoff said.
“No,” Laurel and Craig said together.
Olive and I grinned like we’d known each other for years. Oh, we would have so much fun together, I could already tell, and based on her maniacal grin, she thought so, too.
“Let’s get them fed,” Geoff said. “Maybe if they’re in a food coma, the rest of us will stand a fighting chance.”
After we’d eaten, Craig excused himself to use the bathroom, and I followed him. Yes, that’s the sort of thing that gives a boy a bad reputation, but since mine seemed to be rock bottom these days, what did it matter?
“Wait… what’re you doing here?” Craig asked when he noticed me at the urinal next to him.
“It’s a bathroom, doll face. I should hope I don’t need to explain its function to you, a college student.”
Someone in one of the stalls snickered. Maybe I should’ve been quieter.
“Asshole!” Craig hissed.
Okay, so this was turning out not to be one of my better ideas. “If you wanted to tap it, all you had to do was ask. I shaved and everything.”
More laughter.
I was done, but I guess I was making Craig pee shy or something. He looked tormented.
“Why’re you doing this to me?” He looked so sad. I felt terrible, but how much worse was it to live in a prison of your own devising? I still remembered.
I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Because it’s okay, it really is. No one will judge you, least of all anyone sitting at that table out there. Least of all me. Talk to Geoff, okay? Talk to someone.”
Then I gently wiped a tear away with my thumb, because Craig started to cry.
I got out of there as quickly as I could. Craig took a few minutes to rejoin us, and I covered for h
im. It was the least I could do. I’d originally planned to bunk with Geoff, but after that I figured a hotel would be a better bet. I’d made a grown man cry—not one of my more suave moments—and I owed him some space.
The five of us spent another hour or so together, but the four of them had classes at various points throughout the afternoon, and I didn’t need them to entertain me. We made plans to meet for dinner later, and then I shifted for myself. I knew my way around the city and I’d rented a car, and if nothing else, the UCSD campus was easily one of the most beautiful in the ten-campus system. The Geisel Library—as in, Dr. Seuss—appeared to defy gravity, and I could’ve looked at it for hours. I eventually ended up at the Fashion Valley Mall, because why not? San Diego’s climate was warmer than Sacramento’s, and I’d once scored a stadium-length wool coat in charcoal gray for a song, because who needed that in San Diego? This time I found a pair of leather pants at the Nordstrom Rack. They fitted my ass like a glove, too.
Friday morning was mine. I studied and read, since I couldn’t afford to let my grades slide any more. Sure, crew was the reason, but I was still on a scholarship, and keeping my grades up was imperative. Besides, the Geisel Library was every bit as fun inside as outside. Geoff, Laurel, and Olive knew I’d be busy starting in the afternoon but also knew I’d welcome them with open—if perhaps sweaty—arms all weekend. I’d told Craig he could come by any time he wanted, but I knew the score. I’d likely never see him again and had only myself to blame. Still, I hoped he would at least consider my words. He’d ultimately be happier if he did.
After lunch it was regatta ritual time. It was also time to hunt my alleged boyfriend down. I’d allowed this foolishness to go on long enough. I wanted to rant and scream and call him names, maybe kick a little dust in his face. After all, wasn’t that what he’d been doing to me? It certainly appeared one of us was going to have to be the bigger man, however.
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air Page 24
