Chapter 47
“Buddy, can you come here?” Danny asks when he hangs up the phone, Sasha’s silence still ringing in his ears.
Buddy’s pulling double duty at the foot of the bed, guarding Danny’s ankle splint while destroying his alligator toy; but at Danny’s request, he ambles over, dropping a mouthful of stuffing in Danny’s lap along the way.
“Thanks, Buddy,” Danny murmurs, his throat tight. “You’re such a good boy.”
He tries to focus on the feel of Buddy’s fur beneath his fingers, the in-and-out of air through his lungs, the distant sounds of his dad mowing the lawn. Anything to delay thinking about what just happened, about the fact that he and Sasha are done for good.
“Danny, what do you want for breakfast?” Diane appears in the doorway, like she has a sixth sense for when Danny needs a hug. “I can make you some—what’s wrong?”
“I just talked to Sasha.” Something’s burning in Danny’s throat, at the corners of his eyes. “It was—it was really bad.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” Diane comes over, looking for a spot on his bed that isn’t covered by throw pillows, Buddy, or his laptop.
Eventually, she moves the laptop over to the nightstand—Danny holds his breath, but she doesn’t seem to notice what’s on the screen—and then she sits down next to him, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “What happened?”
“I basically, like… begged him to tell me he loved me?” Danny’s voice rises like a question, like his brain still can’t believe he did that. “And he didn’t say anything. Like, at all.”
He’s definitely not crying, but Diane hugs him anyway as he sniffles, and Buddy gets in on the action, too, nuzzling his nose into Danny’s armpit. Which maybe isn’t the place Danny would have picked, but whatever, he’ll take it.
“You know,” Diane says after a moment, “the first time I told your father I loved him, he didn’t say it back.”
Danny’s so shocked, he almost forgets about Sasha. “Wait, what? Are you serious?”
“Mmhm. It was right before our one-year anniversary, and I said it to him while we were cooking dinner—and when I tell you he froze, I mean, the man was like a total deer in the headlights. And then he just said, ‘Thank you,’ and kept stirring the pasta.”
“Holy shit.” Danny knows mushy-gushy stuff isn’t his dad’s style, but that’s, like, category-five hurricane bad. (Even if he still thinks it’s better than what Sasha did.) “So what happened?”
“Well, come to find out, he had this whole plan for our anniversary. He was going to take me to the beach for a picnic—with champagne—and he’d written out this speech that he’d been practicing to tell me he loved me.
And then all of a sudden I beat him to it, and the poor man was so thrown off, he had no idea what to say! ”
“No!” Danny groans. “But he told you, though, right?”
“Oh, he did eventually… but it took him until the next morning to figure out he was going to have to ruin the surprise.” Danny groans again, and Diane just shakes her head, smiling like she’s made her peace with it.
“It’s funny now. But”—she looks at Danny, suddenly more serious—“I was very upset when it happened. And it was a sore spot for a long time, even after he apologized. So… I know what it’s like. At least a little.”
Danny stares down at Buddy, his good boy turning into a gold blur. “I just feel so stupid,” he whispers, thinking about Sasha’s silences, all the other ways he’d quietly made it clear where their relationship stood.
Like hesitating whenever Danny asked if he could text more, or call more, always hemming and hawing before reluctantly agreeing.
Like not mentioning Danny to Alina until he had to, until Danny all but laid out a business case for it.
Like never wanting to talk about the future, just shrugging and saying he’d be working at Kirill’s gym when he retired. Looking at Danny as if he couldn’t imagine why Danny would consider having children with another man, as if the idea hadn’t even crossed his mind.
He’d been telling Danny the whole time; Danny just hadn’t been listening.
“You’re not stupid,” Diane says gently. “You wear your heart on your sleeve, and it’s one of the things we love most about you. So don’t go changing that.”
Danny lets out a small, choked laugh—if only Sasha could have loved it, too. “I’ll try not to.”
“Some people aren’t that good at expressing themselves,” Diane muses. “Your father’s gotten better, but when we first started dating it was like pulling teeth trying to get anything emotional out of him. And Sasha seems very similar.”
“Yeah.” Danny can’t help smiling at the comparison, even as his eyes start blurring again. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“Well… is it possible he wasn’t ready to say it back yet?”
“I—” Danny hesitates, hope whispering around him like an ocean breeze.
He remembers how angry—how hurt—Sasha had sounded, demanding to know why Danny had ever thought he wasn’t a part of his life.
And how obvious it had seemed, once Sasha pointed it out, that Danny had gotten it all wrong, fixating on a single comment when Sasha’s actions had told a completely different story.
“He called you today, didn’t he?” Diane asks, and Danny nods. “He heard about your ankle?”
Danny nods again. “Someone showed him a video. I think he got pretty freaked out.”
He can’t imagine what that would have been like, watching Sasha slam into the floor from half a world away and not even being able to react in front of his teammates. Or maybe he doesn’t have to imagine it—he’d heard the panic in Sasha’s voice, the relief when he’d realized Danny was okay.
“Hm.” Diane raises her eyebrows at him. “Sounds like someone who still has feelings for you.”
Danny doesn’t know what to think. Sasha might have called as soon as he saw the video, and he’d even admitted that he missed Danny, but he hadn’t called or texted for a whole month before that.
And at some point—maybe the ninth or tenth time Danny had considered breaking down and picking up the phone first—he’d realized that he was always the one reaching out.
Always the one asking for more. Always the one fighting for their relationship.
It made him feel like shit. And after today, hearing nothing but silence when he’d practically begged Sasha to tell him they had a future together…
He can’t keep doing this alone anymore.
“It’s not gonna work,” he mumbles, trying to shrug; his shoulders do a weird little twitch instead. “He just… doesn’t want the same thing.”
“I’m sorry, honey.” Diane still looks skeptical, but after a long hug, she lets it go. “Why don’t I make you some breakfast. You want an omelet? Just the egg whites?”
“Yeah, thanks,” Danny says automatically.
Once his mom leaves, it occurs to him that he doesn’t have to follow his diet anymore, since he’s not going to be training again for a while; but even the thought of egg yolks and ice cream isn’t as exciting as it should have been.
With Sasha gone for good, his gymnastics season cut short, and nothing but a fuckton of physical therapy in his future…
maybe someone else would be able to find a silver lining, but right now, all he’s seeing are clouds.
Well, that’s not totally true. He’s got Buddy, at least, and his parents, and his friends. Patty and the boys are coming over in a few hours; Em, Jess, and Mal are dropping by in the afternoon; and Matt’s already promised to bring his Nintendo and the new Zelda game when he flies out next week.
hang in there bro, he’d texted Danny late last night. shit sucks but its gonna get better.
Trying not to think about how much shit really sucks right now, Danny starts going through the rest of his messages.
He’s been answering as many of them as he can, but it’s a lot: family, friends, gym buddies, a ton of numbers he doesn’t recognize, even his dentist and Buddy and Luna’s groomer.
Everyone keeps trying to cheer him up, telling him he’ll be back on the floor in no time, winning medals again just like he used to.
Gotta injoy it untill u teak it back frm me next yr, Noah had replied, with laughing and crying emojis, when Danny congratulated him on winning the national title.
The more of those messages Danny reads, the more they weigh down on him, slowly pressing all the air out of his lungs.
As he scrolls and scrolls, rubbing at his chest, he can’t help remembering how he’d felt yesterday, in that time-frozen moment after falling—lying on his back and staring up at the arena ceiling, knowing that his season was over, knowing that he wasn’t going to finish out the competition.
He’d felt relieved.
Because no one was expecting him to win that fifth national title anymore.
Even though he’d come back to his senses a few seconds later, reality sinking in as the trainers swarmed around him, it still scares the shit out of him that he’d had that thought at all.
Ever. Like, what the fuck? He’d gotten a season-ending injury—one that might hurt his chances at Tokyo, depending on how it heals—and he’d actually been relieved? What was wrong with him?
Danny choking AGAIN news at 11!!! he’d read on Instagram after the first night of competition, a results post from USA Gymnastics flooded with comments critiquing his high bar and pommels. USAG come and collect your HEADCASE!!
Okay, I love Danny, but this is honestly painful to watch, someone else wrote on Reddit. He does this every single time! Maybe he just needs to retire…
You are lazy, Sasha had said on the beach, his face twisted in the shadows. Everything is easy for you here, so you never want to work. This is why you never win medals at Worlds. And this is why you failed at Rio.
Danny swallows, then shoves the memory away.
Maybe Sasha’s right—maybe they’re all right—but that ends now.
He doesn’t know what happened in Rio, or in Nanning and Antwerp before that, and it doesn’t matter.
No more excuses, no more pity parties, no more what-ifs; that’s in the past, and he’s looking straight ahead, three years down the line to Tokyo.
It’s a long road in front of him, but he knows exactly what he needs to do.
First, he’s going to post an injury update for his fans, promising them that he’s not done yet.
Then he’ll have surgery tomorrow, grit his teeth through a couple more weeks of not putting any weight on his leg, and start physical therapy as soon as the doctor signs off on it.
He’ll get back in shape. Back in the gym.
Eyes on the prize, drills and skills until he’s ready for routines—and not his old routines, either.
New ones. Better ones. Because China and Japan won’t be waiting around for him to catch up, and Russia and Great Britain aren’t going to slow down, either.
Danny knows he has more to give to Team USA, and even though he’ll be sitting out the World Championships in October, he’s determined to be leading the pack again in 2018.
And the harder he pushes himself, the easier it’ll be to move on from Sasha.
“Right, Buddy?”
Buddy’s too busy demolishing his alligator to look up, but Danny’s counting him as a yes.
He pulls his laptop from the nightstand, waiting a beat for the screen to flicker back to life. As Buddy rips off the alligator’s head, Danny takes a deep breath, then starts rereading the residency application for the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.