Chapter 38
The argument blows over quickly—Danny isn’t one to hold a grudge, and by the time they’re back in the car, he’s chattering away as usual—but Sasha’s still thinking about it at camp the next morning.
In between high bar rotations, he can’t help glancing over at Danny, wishing he could have convinced him to take his training more seriously.
But Danny doesn’t seem concerned at all.
He’s just bouncing on the trampoline with the little kids, getting them to make different animal noises every time they jump (except for Nicole, who only wants to be a shark).
It’s very cute, Sasha has to admit; and hearing Danny call out “White shark!” just so Nicole can gnash her teeth, he feels his frustration ebbing away despite himself.
“Hey, Coach!” Danny says a few minutes later, right before they’re supposed to switch events. “We’re gonna play dodgeball.”
As soon as the boys hear the word “dodgeball,” it’s “Please, Coach?” and “Can we, Coach?” until Coach Garrett sighs and surrenders. Then they scamper off, crowding under the above-ground pit at the far end of the floor, where Danny’s tossing down a bunch of foam blocks to use as balls.
Sasha watches them, wondering if he’ll ever get used to the fact that they’re allowed to do this during practice.
“Might as well set up the stations for tomorrow,” Coach Garrett says, and Sasha looks at him in surprise—camp doesn’t end for another half hour.
“What about vault?”
Coach Garrett laughs. “I don’t think we’re getting any more work out of them today. Let’s start with bars… unless you want to join them?”
Sasha shakes his head. Danny’s probably going to drag him into it at some point—he almost always does—and once Sasha stops worrying about accidentally hurting a small child, he usually manages to enjoy himself.
But he has a hard time shaking the feeling that he shouldn’t be goofing off at gymnastics, even though it’s obvious that Coach Garrett doesn’t care, and right now he’d rather be safe and help with the stations.
For the next ten minutes, he and Coach Garrett haul mats around the gym.
They’re the only ones not on the floor; all the other campers have joined in on the dodgeball game, and it’s pure pandemonium, foam blocks flying everywhere.
The older boys and girls seem to have an unspoken agreement not to whip their blocks at the little kids, but they’re showing no such mercy towards each other.
Danny’s right there in the thick of it, ducking and weaving and even flipping out of harm’s way (“Too slow, Zack, too slow!”).
He’s clearly having the time of his life—cheering when one of the little kids sneaks up on a teenager and knocks them out; pumping his fist after he wins a stand-off against Sarah, the girls’ coach; laughing a second later as he trips over a foam block.
His smile reminds Sasha of stadium lights, bright enough to outshine the stars.
“I think he’s having more fun than the kids,” Coach Garrett remarks, and that’s when Sasha realizes he’s just been standing there, watching Danny.
“Uh—yes.” He quickly picks up the sting mat he’d let fall slack against his legs. “Sorry, I—”
Coach Garrett waves him off. “You can leave it, I found another one.”
Sasha smooths the sting mat back out on the ground, then bites his lip, remembering the other apology he’s been meaning to make. “I am sorry for yesterday. When I said Danny should go to Olympian training center.”
He still believes that, but walking into the gym today and seeing all those posters of Danny everywhere, it suddenly clicked why Danny had reacted the way he did, like he was betraying Coach Garrett by even mentioning Colorado.
It’s not just personal—it’s business, too.
Because if Danny leaves, then Sunnyside Gymnastics Academy won’t be “HOME OF 2X OLYMPIAN DANNY HARTMAN” anymore.
Which, whatever. Sasha doesn’t see why Danny should have to keep being the face of his childhood gym for the rest of his career. But it matters to Danny, enough that Sasha had overheard him apologizing to Coach Garrett as they left practice yesterday.
“Don’t worry about it,” Coach Garrett replies, just like he’d said to Danny. “I know things are different in Russia.”
Except not as different as Sasha had thought, apparently, and that’s the whole point—but he swallows down the argument. Coach Garrett’s being generous enough, letting Sasha work at Sunnyside on Danny’s word alone, and Sasha doesn’t want to push his luck.
“But me personally,” Coach Garrett says as the dodgeball game goes on, Danny teaming up with Lyndsay and Chelsea to wage war on the campers, “I’d rather have a happy kid than a burned-out elite.
I’ve seen that before, and to me, it’s not worth it.
I don’t care if they never win a competition, hell, I don’t care if they stop at level five—as long as they’re having a good time, and they’re excited to come to practice, I’ll take that any day of the week. ”
Sasha can’t imagine being a gymnastics coach and not caring about his gymnasts’ scores at meets, or their progression in the sport—it feels like being in a math class where the teacher’s telling him two plus two is twenty.
He tries to keep the what the fuck off his face, but he must not have done a good job, because Coach Garrett smiles and changes the subject.
“So, Danny said you guys met at London?”
Sasha nods, distracted by the sight of Danny groaning theatrically as Zack knocks him out.
“He talks about you a lot.”
Coach Garrett says it casually, his eyes still on the game—but Sasha’s pulse picks up the pace, drumming a warning in his veins. Was that just a comment, or was it something more?
“Danny always talks a lot,” he mutters, and Coach Garrett lets out a bark of laughter.
“Yes, he does, God bless him.”
“Hey, Sash!” Danny yells from the floor. “You playing or what?”
“Go ahead,” Coach Garrett says. “I’ll finish up.”
Grateful for the excuse to escape, Sasha meets Danny and the knocked-out campers on the sidelines.
Danny grins at him, and Sasha’s barely had time to smile back before Nicole rushes over.
She’s wearing another one of her shark leotards today: grey with a semicircle of white teeth around her stomach, pink on the inside like a mouth.
“Can you be on my team?” she asks Sasha.
Sasha’s ninety percent certain that there aren’t any teams and it’s every camper for themselves; but Danny winks, and Nicole clasps her hands together, and on second thought he’s not really getting paid enough to crush a five-year-old’s dreams. So when the next game starts, he finds himself grabbing foam blocks and passing them on to Nicole, who screws up her face in concentration before throwing them with all her might…
less than a meter in no one’s direction.
The third time this happens, Nicole wilting in disappointment when she doesn’t hit anyone, Sasha retrieves the block and pulls her aside.
“Look,” he says, showing her the mistake she’s making, keeping her arm too close to her body while she throws.
“You do this. Small throw. But if you do this”—he winds up his arm, drawing it back and then snapping it forward in an arc over his head—“then you have bigger throw.”
Nicole’s mouth turns into a tiny “o” of comprehension.
“Yes? You try.”
Nicole’s next throw goes twice as far as the others, and Sasha smiles when she jumps up and down, all excited; now he just needs to teach her how to actually aim it at someone.
Since the foam block’s already been scooped up by a camper, he glances around and spots one a few paces away.
Sensing movement in his peripheral vision, he lunges forward and grabs the block before the other person can.
“Sorry,” he says, realizing it’s Danny. “For Nicole.”
“No, no, go ahead.”
Danny surrenders with a smirk, and Sasha brings the block to Nicole.
“Remember, big throw,” he tells her, demonstrating the arm movement again.
“And this time, you want to hit someone, yes? It is easier if you try to hit here.” He gestures at his torso, a nice large target for her to work with. “Okay?”
“Okay!”
As Nicole starts scouting for potential victims, Sasha glances up and sees Danny still standing there, watching him with a goofy grin and completely ignoring the dodgeball game around them.
“What?” Sasha asks, but Danny just shakes his head, his grin getting even wider. He looks like a lunatic, so why is Sasha smiling back?
While they’re both distracted, Nicole throws her foam block at Danny, hitting him square in the chest.
“I did it!” she squeals in delight.
*
“You hugged her,” Danny says for at least the third time on the drive back to his house.
“She hugged me,” Sasha repeats, because that’s what happened.
Nicole hugged him, and he didn’t know what to do, so he awkwardly patted her shoulders.
Then she raced off to tell her mother that she’d knocked Coach Danny out at dodgeball and she’d never knocked anyone out before and could they go get ice cream now, please?
“Yeah, but like… you hugged her back.” Danny must have pulled a muscle from all that smiling earlier; his face seems to be stuck in a permanent grin. “You’re really good with her.”
Sasha’s not sure a two-minute throwing lesson and a bunch of shitty shark drawings count as being “really good” with someone, but Danny keeps going before he can point that out.
“And you’ve been killing it with the boys’ team, too. Like, Zack’s Tsuk is so much better now, it’s insane.”
Sasha shrugs, though he’s secretly pleased that Danny’s noticed, especially after all the blocking drills he and Zack worked on last week.
It’s nice to feel like he’s making a difference, even if it’s only temporary—who knows if Zack’s going to keep up the drills when he’s gone, or if any of the boys will point their toes without him standing there and reminding them.
He’ll probably never find out, not unless Danny happens to mention it on a call.
“Do you want kids?” Danny blurts out.
For a second, Sasha wonders if he misheard him, because that’s not the kind of shit you just say at a traffic light. But Danny looks completely serious, his eyes fixed on Sasha instead of the road.
Sasha drops his gaze, staring at the callouses on his palms. “I don’t know,” he says, though that’s not quite true—he thinks he would, if circumstances were different.
But what he wants and what he can have aren’t the same things, and he’s annoyed that Danny’s acting like the first is all that matters when really, it’s the second.
He’d never given it much thought, growing up.
Sometimes Alina or one of his aunts and uncles would make cryptic comments like “When you have children, you’ll understand,” so he’d always assumed children were inevitable, like jobs and marriage.
Even once he started noticing other boys in ways he knew he needed to keep to himself, it had taken him a lot longer to realize what he’d be sacrificing to have a family.
And that’s when it became easier to just stop imagining his future after gymnastics.
He doesn’t have to ask if Danny wants children, because Danny’s already talked about putting his kids in gymnastics basically as soon as they exist. Sasha can picture it: Danny holding hands with a little brown-haired boy, calling him “buddy” and helping him down the balance beam, cheering him on every wobbling step of the way.
Locking eyes with someone across the room, then smiling and bending down to whisper, “Let’s wave to Mommy, okay? ”
Maybe, if Sasha’s lucky, he’ll get to see a video of it online.
“I think you’d be a really good dad,” Danny says, nudging him over the center console.
What’s left of Sasha’s patience snaps like a broken bone. “It doesn’t matter,” he retorts, and then, since Danny looks taken aback and apparently needs it spelled out for him, he adds, “If I want children, I have to find some woman and marry her.”
He’ll probably have to do that anyway, because sooner or later people are going to start asking why he hasn’t settled down yet, what’s wrong with him, why can’t he meet a nice girl.
He figures he’ll be safe as long as he’s doing gymnastics—too busy training, too busy traveling—but once he retires, he won’t have those excuses anymore.
And he can’t risk people filling in the blanks on their own.
“I mean… you could always, like, adopt,” Danny says, and Sasha snorts.
Maybe a single woman could get away with adopting a child by herself, but he’s never even heard of a man doing it.
“Or there’s, like… surr… surrogation? Like, if someone else in your family has the baby?
Or, like, a friend? That’s legal here. For gay people. ”
Great. Fucking great. As if Sasha needs a reminder that he doesn’t have those rights in Russia and likely never will.
“I’d be down for that,” Danny says. “Adoption or surrog… uh… whatever.”
Sasha stares at him, genuinely wondering if one of little kids kicked Danny in the head while he was spotting them earlier. “Why? You like women. You don’t need this.”
“Well—” Now Danny looks thrown off. “I mean… if I was with the right guy…”
Sasha can’t believe what he’s hearing. He knows it’s different in America, knows Danny could actually marry another man if he wanted to, but why?
At best, he’d be making it harder for himself to have children, and at worst, he’d be putting a target on his back if the law ever changed.
Why risk it all when he could have it so fucking easy?
Jesus, Sasha wouldn’t even look at other men if he had the luxury of being attracted to women.
Of course, then he wouldn’t be here with Danny, either.
He tries not to think about that part too much.
“Okay.” Danny suddenly leans over and turns on the radio, not looking at Sasha. “You know what, just—never mind.”