Chapter 1 #3
It’s unnerving, Danny echoing Kirill like this, both of them acting as if it’s only a matter of time.
But Sasha can’t imagine beating Danny from Glasgow, competing on a sprained ankle and still qualifying for the all-around final—let alone Danny from the American Cup, a god in the arena.
And it’s not like Danny’s going to be sitting around after Rio, either; he’ll be upgrading his routines, too, same as Sasha and Kirill.
What’s even more confusing is that Danny doesn’t seem at all bothered by the idea of Sasha beating him. Is he just pretending? Or would he actually, genuinely be okay with it? Sasha can’t tell, and either way, he has no idea how to respond, so he changes the subject instead.
“You know what is funny? Kirill told me to do your skill.”
“Really?” Danny sounds both surprised and hopeful. “Did he try it?”
Great. Now Sasha has to say no and feel bad about it. “I don’t think this is good skill for him,” he adds quickly. “His scissors are only okay.”
Danny laughs, then coughs. “Yeah. Well, he’s a little shorter, too, so it’d probably be harder for him. Plus he’s got insane arms. I bet they’d, like, literally get in his way.”
Hearing Danny compliment Kirill—who’s never shown him anything but contempt—makes Sasha swallow, shame sliding down his throat.
“Why are you so nice with him?” he blurts out, feeling even worse when he thinks about practice today, Kirill complaining about Danny and Sasha doing nothing to stop it. “He is not nice with you.”
“Well, he’s your best friend,” Danny says, like it’s simple as that. “Besides, I kinda get the vibe that, like…” He trails off, the other end of the line going unusually quiet before his voice comes back. “Never mind.”
“What?” Sasha asks, wary.
“I don’t know. It’s just, like, after what you said about the trainers, I feel like Kirill has a lot of issues with people and it’s not just me.”
Danny’s words hit a little too close to the mark, and Sasha hesitates, biting the inside of his cheek as he tries to think of a reply.
He wants to defend Kirill, but he can’t explain that his friend’s moods are almost always because of his parents—even today, he doubts Kirill would have lost his temper with Igor if it hadn’t been the week after winter break, the longest stretch of the year that he ever spends at home.
“Sorry,” Danny apologizes a few seconds later, when Sasha still hasn’t said anything. “I’m not trying to, like, criticize or anything. Honestly, I like him a lot more now that I know you guys aren’t hooking up. Cause that was stressing me out, not gonna lie.”
Sasha shakes his head. It feels wrong even thinking about Kirill like that—he still can’t believe Danny had been so worried over an arm massage. “Kirill likes girls,” he reminds Danny for at least the third time since Glasgow. “Blonde girls. You see his Instagram.”
“Yeah, yeah… hey, he could like guys, too!”
Sasha doesn’t take the bait; he knows Danny’s only saying that for argument’s sake. “So you have skill with your name,” he says instead, returning the conversation to the Hartman.
“Oh, yeah,” Danny replies, like he’d forgotten about achieving one of the biggest accomplishments in gymnastics.
“It’s funny, I was, like, so excited when it happened, I made my coach get an extra copy of the Code of Points just so I could show it to everyone, and then all my friends outside the gym were like, ‘Uh… what’s the pommel horse again?
Is that the same thing as the vault?’ So, yeah, I got over it real quick. ”
Sasha starts laughing, because he knows exactly how that feels. A month ago, when he’d told his mother he’d finally gotten the Cassina, she’d congratulated him and then said, “Sasha, I’m sorry, dear, which one was that?” (He’d already explained it to her. Three times.)
“Are these friends who saw you take picture today?” he asks, curious.
“Yeah, my high school buddies. Patty and Jess and…” Danny rattles off a list of names; he has more friends from high school than Sasha’s ever had in his entire life.
“We all brought our dogs to the dog beach this afternoon…” Another list follows, this time for the dogs: what breed they are, how cute they are, whether or not they get along with Buddy and Luna.
While Danny’s talking, Sasha turns off the lamp and burrows further into the blankets, adjusting his headphones so he can hear Danny better.
He’d originally started using them because he was nervous about Danny’s voice coming through the speaker on his phone—the walls in the dorms are paper-thin—but now he just likes having Danny in his ears. (He will never, ever tell Danny this.)
“…and you should have seen the dogs when we were doing the photoshoot, like, they all thought it was playtime so they kept trying to come into the water with me…”
Sasha smiles—Danny must have loved that. “Did your friends ask? Why you are taking picture?”
“No, I guess I got on this Buzzfeed list of, like, best athlete ‘thirst traps’? Which, like, I don’t really know what that means, but I got a bunch of followers because of it, and my friends all think it’s hilarious. So, yeah, they were basically just making fun of me the whole time.”
Clearly, Danny didn’t mind the teasing, but Sasha still cringes.
He’d felt ridiculous enough when he was alone in front of the mirror; trying to find a good angle with other people watching him sounds like an actual nightmare.
Especially with that kind of photo, Danny kneeling in the surf, thighs spread like an invitation.
“Thank you,” he says, wanting Danny to know his efforts were appreciated. “It was very good picture.”
“Oh, yeah? You liked it?”
Sasha’s getting hard again thinking about it. “Mmhm.”
“What’d you like about it?” Danny asks, making Sasha blush in the dark.
This isn’t the first time Danny’s said something like this, low and suggestive, sliding under Sasha’s skin; but he never knows how to respond, because even if he could find the right words in English, he’d be too embarrassed to say them aloud.
“Everything,” he settles on, which is true enough.
“That good, huh?” He can practically hear Danny grinning. “You gonna think about it in the shower tonight?”
Sasha could set himself on fire and it wouldn’t burn as much as this, on his cheeks, in his stomach, between his legs. “No.”
“No?”
“I am in bed,” Sasha mutters, only realizing a second later that this was a mistake, that Danny’s going to assume he meant something he didn’t. Because he’s not. Not yet, anyway. Hoping to distract Danny, he asks, “Where are you?”
Danny laughs, like he knows exactly what Sasha’s doing. “I’m in the living room. But my parents aren’t home, so…” He lets that hang there for a moment, and Sasha holds his breath. Then he asks, “What are you wearing?”
Sasha swallows, squeezes his eyes shut. He once had an entire stack of flashcards for words like t-shirt and pants and socks, and now his brain is refusing to cooperate and he can’t remember any of them. “Clothing,” he finally says, cringing.
“Like sweatpants?”
Right. That. “Yes.”
“I bet they look so good on you.”
Sasha doesn’t know how he can want this and not want this, his hand slipping into his trunks while the rest of him squirms in embarrassment. “What are you wearing?” he asks, desperately trying to shift Danny’s attention.
“Well, I was wearing my bathing suit, but…” There’s a rustling sound, fabric slipping on the other side of the phone. “Not anymore.”
It’s suddenly boiling under the covers, Sasha’s hand sweating around his cock.
He’s pretty sure this is phone sex, or about to be, and he has no idea what he’s going to do if Danny wants him to talk dirty in English; he cringes at the thought of Danny waiting while he tries to look up words on his translation app.
“It’d be really sexy if you were touching yourself right now,” Danny murmurs in his ear.
That’s it, that’s fucking it, there’s no way Sasha can go through with this.
He’s too tongue-tied to talk, too mortified by how easily Danny guessed what he was doing; now he just wants to hang up and get himself off.
But the only thing more embarrassing than being bad at phone sex would be wimping out on phone sex, and he already couldn’t post a selfie…
In a wild, desperate attempt at saving face, he decides fuck it and opens Instagram.
“Sash?” he hears Danny ask as he uploads the photo, his hands shaking. “You there?”
No time for a caption, and he can’t think of one anyway, so he presses the post button—fuck—and brings the phone back to his ear. “I put picture on Instagram,” he announces breathlessly. “Goodnight.”
“Wait, what?”
Sasha hangs up.
Danny calls back immediately, but Sasha doesn’t answer. Instead, he refreshes his Instagram page, biting down on the insides of his cheeks as he waits for Danny’s reaction.
Danny asked for this, he reminds himself. Danny “literally” asked for this.
The phone rings, then rings again.
Danny: Are you serious right now??
Danny: You’re not gonna pick up are you
Danny: Sasha??
Danny: Fuck
Danny: You’re so hot
Danny: I wanna do so many things to you
Danny: You don’t even know
Danny: Okay just leave me hanging!!
Danny: I know you’re reading this and not responding
Danny:
Danny: Goodnight I hate you
By the time the notifications stop, Sasha’s shaking with laughter, a hand pressed over his mouth as he tries to keep quiet.
Tomorrow, he’ll text Danny back; and at some point, he’ll have to delete a couple of these messages, the ones that are too dangerous to have on his phone.
But right now, he wants to savor Danny’s reaction a little longer.
Maybe the selfie wasn’t so bad, after all.
When he goes back to Instagram to look at it, he’s surprised to discover that he’s already gotten a handful of likes: from Danny, obviously, but also from a couple of people he doesn’t even know, plus Kirill and Ilya.
Kirill must have just tapped the like button, because a few seconds later, he comments with a line of fire emojis, which someone else likes immediately.
On a hunch, Sasha taps to see who it was—and then he smiles, because it’s Danny. Of course it’s Danny. And maybe Sasha should say something to him about interacting with Kirill over social media… but after all of Kirill’s comments today, it can wait.
He’s about to lock his phone when he gets a new text message: Kirill’s sent him a screenshot of his Instagram notifications, the like from Danny at the top of the list.
Kirill: What the fuck?
Sasha laughs so hard he actually cries, his pillowcase damp against his cheek by the time he calms down.
Eventually, though, he puts his phone away and leans over the bed, groping beneath the mattress for an old grip bag.
Extracting a small jar of petroleum jelly from its hiding place under an empty bottle of honey, he pops the lid, retreats under the covers, and closes his eyes, thinking about Danny shirtless in the sea.