I bent my head over the notebook, hoping we could go on pretending everything was alright at least until I could actually make it that way.
Keaton
“Here we are,” Olly said, and I looked around him at the door. It wasn’t a very interesting door.
“We need to ham this up a bit,” I said. “Make it more exciting. Can you maybe do an intro to the camera telling people that we’re about to walk into the locker room?”
“Sure,” Olly nodded. He looked a little nervous, despite how confident he sounded. “Um. What do I say?”
“Something like, this is the locker room for the Crowhill Cove Crows, I’m going to take you on a tour?” I suggested. I had to stifle a smile at the thought of Olly transforming into some charismatic TV presenter. He wasn’t exactly the most talkative person I knew. He tended to speak in the shortest possible sentences, and sometimes all I got out of him was a word or even a grunt.
“Okay,” Olly nodded. He seemed to be steeling himself. I turned the video camera towards him and gave him a nod that it was okay to start. “Hi! Uh, this is our locker room. Where we get changed. Uh, when we play for the Crowhill Cove Crows. So, yeah. Come inside!”
I stopped the recording, creasing up with laughter.
“What?” I looked up to see Olly’s face falling. “That was stupid, wasn’t it? I said it all wrong.”
“No, no,” I said, making a conscious effort to stop laughing. “It was perfect. It was very… you.”
Olly scowled. “No, it wasn’t.”
“It so was,” I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “You sounded so awkward.”
“Shit,” Olly muttered, rubbing a hand over his face. “Let me do it again.”
“Okay, just one more time,” I said. I secretly wanted to keep the original take in the documentary. I needed to keep him on my side, though, and if I refused to let him do it again then he might walk away and not finish the tour with me.
Olly waited until I gave him the thumbs-up and then started. “This is our locker room for the Crowhill Cove Crows. Let’s take a tour inside,” he said, opening the door. He stopped and looked back at me, no doubt to indicate that he had done his part and I needed to stop.
I bit my lip to stop myself from cracking up. That one was even better. It was so flat and stoic, he might have been inviting us to tour a death chamber.
“That’s perfect,” I said. “Okay. Should we go inside?”
“Yeah, let me just check first,” Olly said. He ducked his head inside and glanced around. “Okay. No one’s naked. Come on.”
I followed him with repressed laughter crackling in every line of my body. I knew it was probably for privacy reasons, but I couldn’t help but imagine that he was trying to protect my poor innocent gay eyes from stumbling on some naked football hunk. It wasn’t like he had ever treated me different because I was gay, but something in the air was making me feel almost hysterical. Absolutely everything about this was funny. Maybe it was the fact that I was in Olly’s own environment when I was so used to seeing him in the dorm – and the fact that maybe he wasn’t just a stereotypical jock.
“Uh, right,” Olly said. I quickly put the camera on him again. “So, this is my locker. I keep all my stuff here when it’s not being washed. That way, I can come to practice and get ready quickly.”
“How many hours of practice do you do a week?” I asked, seeing the opportunity to put in some extra information.
“Twenty hours,” he said immediately, although there was something shifty about the answer. Hadn’t I seen him away from the dorms in practice a lot more than that? He was only taking two classes.
“Isn’t it more than that?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said immediately. “I spend some time in the gym training as well. But that’s my own choice. Not everyone does the same.”
Why did I have the feeling that if I went around to the gym on the days he was working out, I would find the whole team there? He was getting shifty about the answer as if he wasn’t supposed to be doing more than that. I decided to let it go. This was only a silly college class documentary. I didn’t want to get him in trouble.
“What else is there in the locker room?” I asked, prompting him to glance around.
“Well, over there we have the showers,” he said, gesturing towards a tiled corridor that headed around a bend at the back of the room. “I guess I shouldn’t take you in there. Just in case.”
“Right,” I laughed.
“And we have the Coach’s office down that way. Plus, we have our gym over here. It’s separate from any gym used by the students here because we need to use it a lot. But we do share it with some of the other teams.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
