Spencer escaped out of the dark bar into the bright sun. The climber table at the cafeteria was mostly empty, occupied only by a pair of strangers talking in French about what Spencer thought might be sword fighting and a man big enough to be a power lifter who was downing food with dutiful determination. Spencer didn’t try to make conversation with any of them. Instead he picked up his spinach wrap with one hand and his banana with the other and headed to the beach to see if he could find better company.
He heard the climbers before he saw them. They were being noisy by Japanese standards, clustered around something he couldn’t make out at first. Then Flynn rose up from the middle of it all, his naked torso visible from the waist up, wobbling like he was trying to hold a particularly difficult yoga pose. He took a few steps, then went over in a windmill of arms.
A collective groan went up from the crowd as Spencer rushed forward, but when he got to Flynn, he found him on his feet dusting off the seat of his shorts. Laughing, of course. Always laughing.
“You okay?” Spencer asked anyway.
“You made it!” Flynn bounced over to him and gave him a hug that was hot and damp and so perfect Spencer wanted to live in it. He eased Flynn away. Flynn wasn’t out, a thing he seemed to have forgotten.
“You should be more careful of your ankle,” he chided, meaning also that he should be more careful of what he let show.
“It’s fine. Much as I like having you fuss over me, it’s not bothering me anymore.”
“Well, you could’ve cracked your head open too.” He resisted the urge to run his fingers through the floppy curls on top of that head.
“Come try it.”
“Try the thing you almost cracked your head open doing?” But he didn’t resist when Flynn tugged him over to the two-inch wide flat strip of webbing strung between two trees. They got there just in time to see Liv come off. She landed on one foot and threw her hands up in the air like a gymnast completing a vault. Flynn released his hand to applaud.
“I made it twice across and back,” she told Spencer in French, leaning against him to put her shoes on. “Are you going to try?”
“Maybe.”
Shino was up there now, doing a squat on one leg with the other held perfectly straight out in front of him, not wobbling at all. He returned to a standing position, then folded forward at the waist, raising his other leg behind him in Warrior Three.
“Showoff,” someone hooted. Shino calmly turned one of his hands up into a middle finger salute.
Upbeat music played from out on the sand where Janco and Kurt were throwing a frisbee back and forth. Beneath one of the other trees, Mika and Klara were playing hacky sack with a couple of Japanese guys Spencer didn’t recognize. Everyone was having fun, enjoying what a rest day ought to be, and the weather had been custom-made for it. If Shino, who was a favorite for gold, could mess around on a slackline the day before the prelims, why couldn’t he?
“Give it a go,” Flynn said when Shino dismounted with an acrobatic back flip.
“Oui, Spencer. We want to see how your style is,” Liv chimed in.
His style, as it turned out, wasn’t good. Whatever illusion he might have had of being carelessly good at slacklining was shattered the moment he stepped onto the webbing. It shot out from under him, launching him onto the grass beneath it. He managed to land on his feet, but gracelessly.
“Maybe start from the end instead of the middle,” Flynn suggested.
Yeah, good plan. By holding onto the tree, he was able to stand up and maintain his footing, though the slackline swung in wide arcs beneath him.
“How the hell do you do this?” It was like trying to ride a bucking bronco while standing on its back. He should’ve taken his shoes off so he could wrap his toes around the webbing like claws.
“Is all practice,” Liv said with a laugh.
“You have to stay calm,” Flynn said, just as unhelpfully. Spencer would show him calm. “Here. Take my hand.”
Not giving a fuck what anyone thought, Spencer took Flynn’s hand on one side and Shino’s on the other. Between the two of them, he managed to walk the entire length of the slackline. When he reached the tree on the other side, he hugged it like it was his mother.
He turned around to face the way he’d come and stepped forward with slightly more confidence, holding onto only Flynn this time and lightening his grasp as he went. Calm. Right. He got it. The more he wobbled, the more the slackline wobbled; the steadier he was, the steadier it was. “I’ve got this,” he said, waving Flynn off as he made the next turn.
“I knew you’d be a natural.” Flynn moved away to lean against a tree trunk, momentarily drawing Spencer’s focus in his direction. His rangy body looked perfectly at ease, decked out in floral board shorts and not much else, his lean chest bare, his muscles only hinted at, a loop of black cord suspending a dark blue stone around his neck. He was as at-home on this beach as he was high on a cliff face.
Spencer shook himself out of the trance Flynn’s lazy rest-day eyes had cast over him and returned his attention to the webbing. Fifteen feet to the other tree. Ten steps. Focus out in front, steady as she goes, one foot in front of the other, easy like a sidewalk.
“Spencer!” If the volume of the voice screaming his name weren’t enough to throw him off, the fact that it was Pierre’s voice was. Spencer jolted, the webbing twanged, and he went flying, only to find himself caught snugly in Flynn’s arms.
“Nice dismount,” Flynn joked as he set him onto his feet.
Pierre yanked him away from Flynn by the shoulder. “What the hell were you doing?”
“Slacklining.” As if that weren’t obvious. Pierre was a climber. He’d surely slacklined himself.
“On the day before the preliminaries?”
Spencer gestured to indicate all the other climbers, only to find that they’d mostly drifted off, finding something better to do than rubberneck at the scene playing out in front of them. Only Flynn remained at his side.
“It’s not like slacklining takes arm strength,” he said in his defense.
“You could’ve hurt yourself.” Pierre had a point, a point which only a few minutes ago Spencer had been making to Flynn. They’d put a lot of work into getting here. So they could compete, not so they could play on the beach like college kids on spring break.
Spencer felt like a kid though—like a kid being dragged home by the ear for being naughty. He made some quick goodbyes to save face, avoiding Flynn entirely, then followed Pierre back to Olympic Village where he spent the rest of the day watching videos before being sent to bed early to get a good night’s sleep.
As if he could sleep.
Tomorrow was the biggest day of his life, and Pierre had stuffed him so full of advice his head swam. Were the other climbers still on the beach? Maybe having a bonfire or skinny dipping in the waves? The thought of Flynn naked in the ocean, moonlight sparkling off the dewdrops of water running over his silvery skin, wasn’t helping Spencer get to sleep, that was for sure.
He rolled onto his stomach and punched his pillow, wishing Roddy would come bumbling in, wishing for anything except to be lying there waiting for tomorrow like a kid on Christmas Eve. If Roddy came in, he’d tell Spencer to find Flynn and get his rocks off, put himself to sleep with sex. But Pierre had made his feelings about Flynn pretty clear. No fraternizing with the enemy until the competition was over.