His eyes moved off, in the past. “SoRhoades didn'tmanage just anyone, but he looked at me as a favor to the coach I adored. Honestly, the chances of me doing anything that would warrant a manager his caliber were slim. It was easy to want to . . . to want to please him. He,ahhhh,” Jack trailed off for a moment. “I don’t know how much you want me to tell you,” he finally said.
“You tell me what feels right, Jack,” I said, letting him know he could tell me as much or little as he wanted.
“What he did, I mean, it’s all public record now, after the trial. I’ve been in therapy about this for years, Perrin. I promise you I am ok. But, I haven’t told anyone about this - I mean, my family knows, but . . ..” Jack’s voice cracked and I could tell this was taking a lot out of him.
“You don’t want anyone to know who you are?” I asked.
“Who I was,” he said. Then, Jack shrugged. “It’s not that I would deny it, if someone asked me, P. I just don’t put it out there. It’s a lot for someone to know about me, especially strangers, if that makes sense. I wasn’t okay with that for a while.”
He looked at me for a moment, a desperate look in his eye. “I had to tell you. If I didn’t . . . it was too much like lying, and I . . ..” Jack broke off at my grounding hand on his throat, looking at me with a watery smile. His rapid breathing started to settle down from where it had accelerated.
I brushed my lips over his, making him chase my lips again, and then rewarding him with what he wanted and my lips on his. He laid his forehead against mine and rested there with my hand still on his neck.He hadtold me his secrets.
It was hard to balance the anger I felt that anyone had touched Jack like that, hurt him in that way, confused him at the age he was just trying to figure out his sexuality. I couldn’t imagine what that had to be like. Coming out was hard enough, but to have someone touch you, violate you, at the same time everything in life was confusing anyway? I couldn’t even imagine. Add to that it was someone who gave you validation for the first time, ever. And being Jack, he had done all of that, gone through all of that, and still brought home Olympic gold. That’s just the kind of guy he was, even as a kid.
“Jack,” I whispered against him, foreheads still pressed together, tears running down my face silently. “How did you survive it, sweetheart? How are you this amazing man, after all that? I would hate the whole goddamn world . . ..”
Jack shook his head against mine.
“I did, for a while - hate the world,” he confessed. “It was dark for a long time, P.”
He took a deep breath and let it go. “I think my injury is what made it all come to some sort of reality. It wasn’t even a race. It was an exhibition. Nothing should have happened, but it did anyway.”
I started to say something, but he reached up a hand to stop me, pulling back a bit with a furrowed brow.
“I’m messing up the timeline. I metmy momsyears before the injury, right after I signed with Rhoades. They had come to Vermont and Maine to get to know the programI had first started skiing in. They were looking to start the one we now have here. They took an interest in me - as part of the ski group, I was still volunteering there when I was training. Anyway, their interest wasn’t like that of other people, they seemed genuine, like they really wanted to make sure I was safe - to look out for me. It was nice later on to have people like that. Rhodes drove a wedge between me and my coach. I felt like I couldn’t trust him since he introduced Rhodes into my life.”
“I told Ellen and Rita about Rhodes, finally. They literally pulledthe storyout of me - piece by piece. I know they suspected long before that,but ittook a while. Then, they encouraged me to say something, not just get away from him. That took even more time.”
He paused and breathed again. I could tell he was trying to concentrate on thetimeline, and that it was a bit jumbled, but I could still make sense of it.
“This is going to sound awful, Perrin. And maybe it’s because skiing was just this incredibly safe space to me and I want to believehetried to take it away. And it’s completely possible that I just didn’t pay attention that morning like I should - I was so distracted those days. I had won the gold, but the stuff with Rhodes . . . part of me wonders if Rhodes . . .” Jack trailed off as if he couldn’t put his thoughts into words.
“You think he caused your injury?” I asked,taking everything Ihadto focus on Jack, and not the incredible anger I felt.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because of the way it played out. I had pulled back from my coach, from everyone actually. I was trying to figure out what to say or if I should tell anything to anyone, if I could trust Ellen and Rita. About six weeks before the accidenthappened I had started to reach out to some other people my age that Rhodes managed. Then suddenly, I was sidelined, with what everyone knew was a career-ender, so any public thing I said could always look like sour grapes.”
“So, if it wasn’t intentional, it wassurelyconvenient,” I supplied and Jack nodded.
Jack took a big breath, sighing in a world-weary way. “People saw him there that day and told me later, which was odd in itself. He didn’t care about skiing - he represented actors and singers and plenty of other athletes across a lot of other sports. In fact, half the time I don’t think he even remembered what sport I competed in. Like I said, he came to my life because of my athletic success, but skiing was my own separate world. He never came to my events, I wasn’t important enough for that. Sometimes he would be at the after-party if he thought he could introduce me to someone. So, maybe it was just some sense of him being there that threw me off my game.”
“But, regardless, it took me a while after that to still feel like I should speak up. What I was the most afraid of was the inevitable backlash against me. I was terrified of how I would come across in the media - some needy, orphaned, queer kid, you know? But, it was my moms who made meunderstand ifhe was doing that to me. . . I probably wasn't the only one. Who knewif other kids weresuffering the same thing? And that tipped me over the edge.”
Jack’s voice sounded stronger as he explained how his moms helped him find Rhodes’ other victims, and file the correct complaints in the correct places, the bonus there was it sparked his interest in law.
He told me how he got the news that he would never ski the way he had before due to his knee. No more Olympics. And he told me how his moms decided they wanted to adopt him and take him to Bear Valley, so they did after he rallied the other people Rhodes had harmed and gave testimony against him. He condensed it all down into neat packages, folding years into paragraphs.
“I just wanted one thing,” Jack said. “I mean, it seemed like a dream, really. I had lost the only possible future I could see for myself when I was injured, but I got this whole new future I never saw coming. I was going to get a family that had more money than God, so they couldn’t care about what I could bring in. They really cared about me, wanted me. And, they lived in a ski valley in Colorado where I could rehab with some of the best doctors in the country. I felt like I won the fucking lottery.”
“What was the thing?”
“I asked that they change my name. No one was going to care to follow a kid in a sport that got highlighted every four years, at best. I was never going to compete again. I could just disappear on the other side of the country, like it was nothing. So, that’s what I did.”
He stopped talking and I knew it was the end of his story, although it really wasn’t. I just held him, as hard as I could, trying to bind him to me in some way. Jack had his head buried in my chest, his arms around me and mine around him.
I didn’t know what it cost him to tell me everything he had shared, but I knew that even after all this time, he paid some kind of price for it.
Feeling his body against mine, I couldn’t help but think of all the times he had offered it up to me, giving and taking pleasure from each other literally every night and most days as well. There was no doubt that he was the best lover I ever had, could ever hope for. I had never met someone I wanted to touch all the time, had tomakemyself literally not touch as much as I wanted to. And, I wasn’t kidding myself, I had never met anyone,anyone, who lit me up and interested me at the same time,to an equallyintense degree.
