Level Hands: Bend or Break, Book 4

by Amy Jo Cousins

  A throat cleared loudly in the predawn quiet.

  Pretty damn sure Denny was watching now.

  Stop playing with yourself and find your shoes.

  “Here.” Denny handed him his running shoes, no sign on his face that he’d been busted watching Rafi resettle his dick in his shorts.

  Wondering whether or not Denny was staring at his dick was way more appealing than stressing out over whether or not he was about to make a terrible impression on his new coach by showing up late to the first practice of the year.

  But Denny had brought his bike, so they could both ride, and the road down the river was mostly downhill. Getting back to campus would be irritating for sure, but biking got them there way faster than jogging, and the other members of the team were still milling around outside the boathouse, chest bumping and one-arm hugging teammates they hadn’t seen since last year. He wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been able to go on the pre-semester rowing team trip, obviously. Thank God.

  One less way he’d stand out as the new guy among the crowd.

  “You know, you’re not the only new guy here.” It was almost annoying how easily Denny picked up on his thoughts. “Looks like we got freshman rowers coming out the wazoo this year,” he continued, lifting his chin at a clump of guys standing together, that fresh-out-of-high-school glow still on them.

  Nice try. Doesn’t help, but A plus for effort. Freshmen were supposed to be confused and awkward. Being a transfer student carried a different vibe for Rafi. Like, he might not know how things worked at Carlisle, specifically, but he was expected to have figured out college life in general already, right? Taking part-time classes at the city colleges back home hadn’t prepared him for shit, though.

  “Is there anything we’re supposed to be doing right now?” he finally caved and asked Austin. Not knowing what was expected of him was Rafi’s least favorite headspace to be in.

  “Nah, not until Coach gets here. She likes to make a speech on the first morning.”

  When she arrived, Couch Lawson’s straw-blond hair pulled back in a rough ponytail and her weathered tan face made her a near twin for his rowing coach back home.

  Rafi laughed under his breath. Denny turned a curious look on him.

  “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. It was surprisingly comforting to recognize a woman who’d spent most of her life on the water.

  Which didn’t explain anything, but Denny smiled and bumped him with his shoulder anyway, waving over a couple of the guys standing closest to them.

  They chatted until their coach put her gear bag away in the boathouse and came back outside.

  Coach Lawson gathered their attention with a look. Rafi wasn’t sure how she did it. All he knew was that one moment, he was shooting the shit with a couple of guys Denny had introduced him to—casually, and not like Rafi was some kind of special diversity token, which he should have known Denny wouldn’t do, but he hadn’t been able to banish the fear—and the next moment, everyone was silent and facing the river.

  “Some of you already know how I work. Some of you are new.” Rafi told himself she didn’t stare at him longer than any of the other newbies, who were all in random workout gear instead of the Carlisle kit most of the returning crew wore. “I’m here to win. We will have fun, we will conduct ourselves at all times with absolute good sportsmanship. But I’m here to win. I don’t give a shit about seniority. Or excuses. If you’re one of the eight strongest rowers, you’ll sit in the varsity boat. Everyone else can fight it out for second best. If that means I have eight first years from Tuscaloosa—” She turned to eye a tall, lanky white kid with a goofy grin on his face. “—or Chicago, so be it.”

  And now she was for sure looking at him. But Coach was grinning and he found himself smiling back.

  “Fastest oar gets the seat. So, seniors, be prepared to up your game if you don’t want these kids kicking your ass.”

  Denny elbowed him, and Rafi was pretty sure that smothered laugh was his too. When Rafi turned to look at him, Denny kept his eyes front and center, but Rafi saw him wink, and elbowed him right back.

  Damn straight. They were here for seats in the big boat.

  Coach continued the lecture with a reminder of security at the boathouse—the threats of punishment to anyone who gave out the code to the keypad lock to non-crew friends were dire and imaginative—wiping down workout equipment after they used it, and a particularly strong aside about not leaving their nasty-ass workout gear in their lockers until the janitors could smell it.

  “Laundry, people. I know you know how to do it.”

  Laughter swept the dock. The sun was over the trees now, light catching on the ripples in the river. Anticipation was humming in his belly, the smell of the water, mud and rotting green things underneath it all triggering that part of his brain that said, Now, now we fly.

  “Last thing.” The coach’s voice hauled him back from where his heart had spun out over the water. She moved her gaze from one rower to the next, making a point of looking every last one of them in the eye on her way around the loosely gathered semicircle. “When I say good sportsmanship is key, I don’t just mean on the water at heads. This is your team. There will be no trash-talking in our locker room of anything other than your sprint rankings or who killed it in practice. Anyone who can’t handle that is welcome to leave. Now.”

  There were no takers. Rafi eyed the group, wondering how many of them were on board with this speech and how many were rolling their eyes on the inside. The coach could give all the speeches she wanted, but that was surface decoration as far as Rafi was concerned. Maybe the team lived up to that standard even when she wasn’t around, but based on what Vinnie had implied about guys hassling Austin, he doubted it.

  Guess I’ll find out.

  Coach assigned them each to seats in the different boats for practice, assuring everyone that they weren’t permanent assignments. More of a first look at who might fit where. Getting the boats out of the boathouse and into the water was a familiar process, the commands from the coxes almost the same as the ones Rafi was used to.

  Once they were on the water, the sun finally over the horizon, Rafi’s nerves settled. This he knew. These motions had come to him with an ease that made it feel like he’d fallen asleep and was having the best kind of dream. He marveled every time he was on the water that he’d gotten so fucking lucky.

  He tilted his head back and turned his face to the sunshine, oar handle moving smoothly in his outside hand as his inside one feathered and squared the blade through the recovery.

  “Level hands.” Austin snapped out the words and Rafi felt himself steady under his strict instructions, hands moving microscopically until his oar bit cleanly into the water on the drive, deep enough to grab, not so deep that half the oar was buried. Whoever’s stroke had been off, Austin’s command settled them back into a proper rhythm, and the wobble on the boat vanished. They powered through the water steadily, smoothly, the river bank gliding by like the view out the car window speeding down the highway.

  Command after command issued from the little cox perched in the stern of the boat. Rafi was sitting in the number three seat, closer to the prow of the boat, Denny between him and Austin. Rafi didn’t begrudge him the seat that meant Coach thought Denny was a stronger rower. Not much, at least.

  Catch. Drive. Release. Recovery. His brain didn’t need to count off the elements of his stroke anymore, not like when he’d first started, but he still repeated the words mentally, like a Zen chant, as they sweated their way through the workout, pulling hard upstream, taking advantage of the current on the downstream ride back to the boathouse.

  Coach didn’t know him from a rudder post yet. That was okay. He was here and ready to bust his ass. The rowing had brought him to Carlisle, and he was going to kill himself to be the best at it.

  Coach Lawson was the devil riding a stopwatch
.

  Rafi had known practice would be rough. And he had pushed himself hard all summer, grilling Aya at his rowing club back home on the toughest training regimens she could recommend from her own days as a competitive rower.

  But training, even until his muscles ached and he got dizzy, wasn’t the same as the brutal competition for a spot in the team’s boats.

  And before this year, there had only been one varsity and one JV boat.

  The bloodbaths for those seats must have been epic.

  Despite having two varsity boats now, competition was fierce, and even the closest of teammates didn’t flinch at crowing over having beaten out a friend in a sprint. Or making sure Coach Lawson had their times down accurately on that damn clipboard.

  Each day, after an hour or two on the water, the coach observing them in the launch that paced them as they stroked up the river, , they headed back to the boathouse. There, the entire team put in what Rafi was assured would be thousands of hours of erg sprints over his college career.

  That was when the stopwatch action got brutal. By the time practice was over on Friday morning, Rafi was dripping with sweat, although he took a peculiar kind of pride in not having puked in his first week. More than one of the freshmen had. He headed to the locker room, too worn out to make an effort to go with one of the guys he knew, so he ended up by himself, finding an open cubicle after grabbing a scratchy clean towel off the shelf by the shower entrance. One of the older guys from the team followed him into the room and took the shower to his right.

  Pretty speeches about locker room trash talk aside, Rafi had always known that if he was going to get harassed for anything at an East Coast liberal arts college, it would probably take place when he was half-naked with a scratchy towel wrapped around his waist.

  He’d simply assumed it would be the gay thing he’d have to address first.

  He barely had time to crank the water on and hang up his towel before a tiny plastic bottle came skidding across the tile trench that ran along the length of the wall. A voice to his right called out.

  “Yo, Fidel. Grab that conditioner I dropped, will ya?”

  He sighed. Making it through the whole week without a confrontation had always been pipe dream.

  “Dude. It’s gotta be right by your feet. Don’t leave me hanging. This shit here turns my hair to straw.” Which was weirdly metrosexual, but the hand that snaked over the top of the partition between them wasn’t fooling around when it snapped its fingers at him to hurry up.

  Oh hell no. He was not jumping for the white boy acting like he needed a busboy in a fancy restaurant.

  “Try it again without the Fidel,” he snapped, pumping gel from the wall-mounted holder into his hand and soaping up his pits and then skimming down to give his dick and balls a soaping. Postpractice showers were going to be damn short if he had to deal with this crap.

  “What?” Swear to God, if this dude poked his head over the shower partition to stare at Rafi, he was not going to be responsible for what happened.

  “Don’t call me Fidel.” He bit the words out. Don’t like was an understatement.

  “It’s a nickname, dude. Chill.”

  Seriously. People who weren’t from the islands didn’t know shit about history. Admittedly, he’d learned about Cuba in defense against people’s never-ending need to call anyone with the last name Castro—which was like Smith in some countries—by some version of Fidel or the benevolent dictator.

  Rafi sighed. And picked up the conditioner.

  Wagging the tiny bottle over the partition between the showers got him a “Thanks.” A pissy, like he didn’t really mean it thanks, but maybe Rafi was imagining things.

  Yeah, right.

  And he knew it was stupid not to let it go, but the hell with it. He wasn’t here to make friends. Not with assholes at least.

  “It’s the name of a repressive dictator who enforced justice with firing squads and forced labor for decades.” Which wasn’t exactly the full story, but he figured he’d better stick with the easy-to-remember details if he wanted to impress this lug nut with the need to drop that nickname in a hurry.

  “Hey, whatever keeps ’em from the boats, right?”

  Which pissed him off so much he spent the rest of his abbreviated shower reciting a fucking lecture about Cuban history. The Wikipedia version, at least, which was pretty much all he knew himself, but he doubted anything more in-depth was needed. Especially since the guy was probably already planning how to kick his ass. He twisted the shower taps off and hoped to get dressed and out of there before his shower buddy finished.

  Back at his locker, Denny strolled up, workout bag over his shoulder, right as Rafi started drying off. The team captain, a pale, redheaded guy named Ted, was getting dressed a few lockers down from where Rafi had stashed his stuff.

  “Hey Fidel, nice stroke.” And Rafi knew Ted was kidding, even as he faked jerking off in front of his crotch, but he couldn’t believe he was gonna have to do back-to-back lectures on this one. Maybe nobody gave a shit that he was gay, but they sure did need some sensitivity training on talking to Afro-fucking-Latinos.

  “Whoa. Don’t go there.” The meathead from the shower pushed past him. Denny leaned against the end of the row of lockers, eyes sharp. Rafi hoped he wasn’t thinking of jumping to his defense, because that was the last thing he needed. “Dork’s got a history lesson like a Ken Burns documentary in his pocket, just waiting to go off.”

  “But what are we going to call him? I’m not sure what the protocol is for skipping such an obvious nickname.” Ted talked more like a professor than a dudebro, and was grinning instead of scowling like the other guy. “What do you think, Castro?”

  “What’s wrong with Rafi?” he snapped. He’d meant to ratchet it down a notch, because he didn’t need to let himself be provoked. Execution on that point was always the challenge.

  “Dude. Everybody gets a nickname.” His shower buddy dropped his towel after drying off and started putting his clothes back on. “And not for nothing, but you’re probably gonna wish you’d gone with Fidel. Just saying. These assholes called me Booger for a year before I got ’em to call me Boomer.”

  Okay, that was funny. And Rafi always liked dudes who could make jokes at their own expense. Maybe this guy wasn’t awful.

  “Nobody calls you Boomer,” the redhead broke in dryly.

  “I’m just saying,” Booger/Boomer insisted. “You might want to stick with Fidel.”

  “Doubtful.” As in, no fucking way. But he tried to say it not snotty, because if he could find a way to get along with this guy, that was probably a good idea.

  “Your call. You hang out with the pole smokers, right?” Booger/Boomer might not have nailed down his nickname, but he could mime a blowjob like nobody’s business. Aaaaand so much for both the not being hassled because he was gay and the potential getting along thing. Just when Rafi was starting to like the guy. Great.

  “What the fuck?” Rafi didn’t turn his head an inch in Denny’s direction, not sure if he was protecting Denny or himself.

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell. Yadda yadda yadda.” The guy shot a pointed look at Denny, who straightened up from his slouch. “I’m just saying. Things can get way worse.”

  “Is that a threat?” Because seriously? He’d dealt with this shit in high school, and he was going to be pissed if he had to spend another chunk of his life dealing with other people’s crappy ignorance.

  Before the jackass had a chance to open his mouth, Ted intervened. “Knock it off, Booger.”

  All the muscles in Rafi’s body tensed. He didn’t really think he was about to get in a fight in the middle of the boathouse locker room, but he didn’t think he wasn’t either. After some tense looks between the other two guys, Rafi’s new not-BFF flipped the Ted the bird, called him an asshole and dropped the hostility.

  Great. Be
st buddies again. He liked it better when the team captain was on his side and Booger was clearly being a total shit.

  The asshole headed out with a high five for Ted and a cone of invisibility focused on Rafi and Denny. Rafi waited until the guy left to drop his head in his hands and groan at what he’d started. Why couldn’t he have passed the fucking conditioner and kept his mouth shut?

  Rafi turned to his locker to finish getting dressed in silence, feeling Denny’s gaze on him but ignoring it for now. He wasn’t having any kind of personal conversation in this place.

  “You know, an argument could be made that Castro equalized living standards for the average Cuban, not to mention vastly improved the standards of medical care for the country as a whole.”

  Rafi jerked his head up, nearly clocking himself unconscious on the locker door.

  Ted grinned at him and sat on the skinny bench in between the rows of lockers to lace his shoes. “Of course, that doesn’t take into account the havoc he wreaked upon the agricultural sector, where production is still down from prerevolution levels.”

  Okay, so maybe some nonislanders did know shit.

  “Yeah, Booger has an inflated idea of my knowledge base,” Rafi had to admit, before he said something stupid that made it obvious.

  “Are you Cubano?” The guy even had the pronunciation down pat.

  “No. Dominican.”

  “Cool. I did a paper last year on the instability of the electric industry in the DR and how it’s limiting economic growth.” His captain gave a little smile and shrugged. “Interesting stuff.”

  He’d been too young to pay attention to much on his last visit. “If you say so.”

  “Econ major. Independent minor in Central American studies. Senior.” The guy held out his hand. Rafi shook it. “Ted Weaver. Welcome to the team.”

  “Thanks. Rafael Castro.”

  “I know who you are,” Ted said with a smile, which only made Rafi wonder how much he’d been gossiped about before he’d arrived.

  “Well, nice to meet you,” Rafi said awkwardly.