“Do you want to do it?”
Silence.
“Pere, you have to talk to me. Plain English. No subtext. No heat-of-the-moment confessions.” I closed my eyes, breathed deep a few times because it was a thing my therapist once told me would help self-regulate, and managed a second of clarity. “I want it,” I blurted, because it was true. “It sounds like fun.” Because it did.
“It sounds like a lot of work. Practice all the time. Almost constant travel. We may have to move, depending where we base the team, which impacts our jobs.”
“Yeah, but seriously. A chance to be in the Olympics. And Channing’s been so close he can taste it, so he wouldn’t have asked us if he didn’t think it was still possible with us. The Olympics, babe.”
A smile slowly bloomed on his face. “That’d be pretty cool.”
His phone rang. “Robbie,” he said after a glance at the screen, then answered it. “Hey. You’re on speaker.”
There was a loud whoop through the device. Then: “Are you fucking kidding me? You have to think about it? He said you were thinking about it. Why are you thinking about it?”
“I was supposed to tell you to call him. How?—”
“We stopped at Tim’s for the ride. They showed up and—you have to think about it? I’m quitting my job, like, tomorrow. What’s to think about? Why are you thinking?”
“The fact we both want to sleep with him,” I piped up.
There was a beat of silence. “All the more reason?”
Perry chuckled. “Guy barely skips a beat,” he muttered to me. “What about your roommate?” he asked louder, for Robbie.
“Honestly, what part of he’s straight do you guys not understand?” The sigh he let out was epic. “And maybe this is exactly what I need to move on. To get away from him and just, IDK, get over it.”
“So you want we should uproot our lives to help you get over a crush?” Perry asked.
“Because we totally would,” I added.
Perry gave me a look, and I smacked a kiss on his cheek.
“You guys, though. Seriously. Are we, or are we not, doing this?”
“You don’t need us.” Perry glanced to me.
I shrugged.
“Plus there’s our team,” he went on. “Shaw, and maybe Darby now. What happens to the team if we all take off on them?”
“You think either of them wouldn’t understand?” Robbie asked. “Besides a couple of the kids from the Timmins team are moving down to go to the university and they asked Darby if any of the teams in our club were looking for players. So they can easily pick them up and make a new team. A damn good one too, probably, because I know they didn’t win much this weekend, but that’s because they’re kids and inexperienced, not because they aren’t strong players. Shaw and Darby would be excellent teachers for them.”
Perry was still watching me.
“Did you wake up this morning thinking you’d ever have the chance to be an Olympic athlete?” I asked.
“Obviously not.”
“This is like sports rags to riches, Pere. I was the awkward kid no one ever picked to be on their team. Not gonna lie. I’d love to grin into a TV camera and tell them all to suck it.”
Perry and Robbie both laughed.
“Yeah,” Perry said at last. “I could probably work remotely sometimes.”
“Were you ever really gonna say no?” Robbie asked him.
“I—no? I don’t know. It feels like a huge deal.”
