Backdoor action
One minute I’m staring at Will shirtless, being calm as a rock in the recovery ice bath. The next minute, I climb in with him. With clothes, screaming loud enough to wake the maintenance guy up three buildings away.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” His voice turns alarming.
Great question.
Will’s arms wrap around my waist to pull me back down into the ice bath before I launch out, slip and potentially hit my head open on the tiles.
“It’s not me, it’s the ice,” I tell him through my chattering teeth. “Why do you do this to yourself?” I turn half way to look at him.
I don’t particularly question my boyfriend’s intelligence, just his need for suffering in the name of being an athlete.
“Post training muscle recovery." He presses a kiss to my hair. "Why did you come in here with me?”
“You said you were busy.” My teeth officially crash into each other. “And I wasn’t happy about the text. Now we’re spending time together.”
“You’re such an idiot.” He shakes his head, grinning.
There. Forty seconds of hypothermia and I have obtained twelve minutes of my boyfriend.
Of course, I have considered several other methods of achieving this, and unfortunately rejected all of them for being not dramatic enough.
“Stay here for a bit then.” Will pulls me closer against his chest.
“What is Horns Split? I heard you screamed it yesterday.” I adjust myself, wedging between his legs while my body is shaking violently.
“A set.”
“Explain. Because I don’t play basketball and Horns Split sounds erotic.”
“I cringe every time I shout it.” He groans openly.
“You need a new name.” I tilt my head. “Calypso. For a surprise attack.”
He goes quiet for a second, then kisses the back of my neck. “Kraken for backdoor action.”
“… Are you for real?” I bark out a laugh loud enough to echo off the tiles.
“It's a cut.” Nothing in his voice moves at all. “Backdoor cut. It's a real thing.”
“Sure it is."
“It’s in the actual playbook, Maddy.”
I twist around far enough to look at him properly, which is difficult, because I am wedged between my boyfriend's thighs in ice water and he is not helping.
“You are thinking about fucking me in a bathtub full of ice and your face is doing absolutely nothing.” I point at him with a shaking finger. “That’s commitment, Willy…”
“I don't know what you're talking about.” He shifts one knee, which moves me about an inch, entirely on purpose. “Calypso's got to come first, though.”
“… Come first.” I repeat the words.
Will has correctly identified the one location on this campus where he can say that to me with total immunity, because neither of us is physically capable of following through in four-degree water.
“She's the one who calls it,” he says it directly into my ear, in precisely the tone he uses to discuss defensive rotation. “Obviously.”
Madonna, give me strength. I am going to die in this ice bath.
“You can't run Kraken from a seated position, cap.”
My eyes snap to the doorway and I'm out of the water before I've decided to be. Nate takes one long look at my soaking t-shirt before Will hauls me straight back down into the ice.
I scream. It is not a dignified sound. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough to enjoy this.” Nate is leaning on the doorframe with his arms folded and the settled posture of a man who has been comfortable for some time. “You can’t have sex in the ice bath, cap.”
“Maddy wants to try the tub,” he tells Nate flatly.
“Sure.” Nate pushes off the frame. “Taking Calypso to Coach, by the way. Better name than Horns Split.”
“Nate.” I warn him.
“Both of them. I'm taking both of them.” He gives us a delighted smile, entirely pleased with himself, and disappears through the door before I can say another word.
So.
I did not take Will Mercer to be a possessive guy, and he has just returned me to freezing water rather than let his own best friend look at me for four additional seconds.
Noted. Absolutely thinking about that later.
He wraps his arms tighter around me, refusing to let me go, which is an idiot move, because two minutes later I start to sneeze and he starts giving me the captain-worried-scolding face.
The captain-worried-scolding face becomes full yelling by nine that night, when I am shouting at him through a runny nose in the upstairs hallway.
“DJ. Tell your captain he’s being delusional.” I scream to the stairs, hoping it’ll reach some allies downstairs.
“No.” Lizzie answers for DJ. “You chose each other. Resolve it yourselves.”
I growl loudly in defeat because Will is six-foot-four and even when I’m tall, his arms are bigger than my face. I can’t exactly resort to physical combat.
“DJ, turn the television louder. The blondes are fighting.” Lizzie’s voice comes again.
Will yells down. “I’m not blonde.”
His voice is loud but he’s standing in this hallway with me trying to offer me five hundred fucking different solutions.
“You live with one. It spreads.” Nate yells up.
God. Will has always been composed, caring and the voice of reason in our relationship. But right now? I want to strangle him alive and pull his hair out. Possibly to implant my own hair on him so he could at least see things a little from my perspective.
When does a guy grow up enough to understand that a girl doesn’t need solutions?
I want him to stop talking and tell me I’m right, proceed with telling me I’m pretty and buying me chocolate. But I’m not gonna tell him.
He should already know it.
URGH. I’m so furious I can feel the heat fuming through the top of my head, which also means I want him to pin me against the wall and fuck me stupid.
I don’t even know what we’re fighting about anymore. It’s definitely not jealousy. Will goes dangerously and sexily calm when he’s jealous. Is it my messy room? Is it that I’ve been leaving makeup on his desk and start going back and forth all morning just to grab stuff. No. Not the car again.
“Maddy. You’re not listening to me.” His feet plant on the floor board.
“Huh? What? You’re not listening to me.” I snap back.
“I said no fucking way you could go to a shoot that is fucking forty minutes drive away, then go straight to dinner with your friends and head to the club for a birthday party. You’ll crash. Not car. Just tired-crash.”
Oh. That’s what we’re fighting about?
He sounds right though, and I still don’t know how we got here.
“I can do it. I have a car.” If I can’t fight him physically, I’ll get louder. “If you don’t want to come to the birthday dinner, then fine, don’t come.”
His hands wipe down his face again and he doesn’t lower his voice. “You said you want me there.”
“No I don’t. Yes I do. You have an away game. And you’ll be so tired anyways.” I’m so focused on his lips and his jawline. Did his chest get firmer? I’m so angry at him but I also want him to kiss me stupid. God damnit.
And because apparently he could read my mind, he walks closer to me and cups my cheek on his palm. I lean into his touch before I could stop myself.
My voice softens. “You don’t have to go to the club. You’ll be dead tired. You’re going up against Brown. Besides—”
“Hell no.” Will cuts me off with a kiss. “You’re not going clubbing alone.” He murmurs in between kisses and presses his lips firmer against mine.
See? He can read ten bodies moving at once on a basketball court. How hard can one girlfriend be?
He wins. And I get the kiss.
Although he has technically won a night at a club he does not want to attend, after an away game with Brown, on legs that will probably be dead by ten.
Will should know by now that I’m never wrong.
Why fight it?
I open my mouth and kiss all my anger away, and if anybody downstairs asks, we handled it like adults.
————
I text Will an image of my topless rower while waiting for him to get changed into the last outfit of today’s shoot.
And a proper text, because I’m in a relationship.
Maddy: professional opinion
It’s been going well for the recovery clinic. The client has no idea what’s going on with the shoot but they like the angles so far and how glistening my athlete looks.
My guy is happy. So I am beyond happy.
His reply comes almost immediately.
Will: on what
Maddy: the light
Maddy: n would u go here seeing this?
Will: sure
Maddy: yeah?
Will: how long is he going to be shirtless for
Maddy: he’s recovering
Will: from what
Maddy: rowing
Will: he’s smiling too much
Maddy: he's getting his pictures taken
Will: too shiny
Maddy: is that still professional opinion?
Will: no
I’m still grinning at the screen when my athlete finally appears. We finish off the shoot because the clinic has only closed for lunch for one hour.
One hour.
Barely enough time to do anything properly, let alone something involving lighting, angles and another human being, but apparently we enjoy suffering. So we push through because we’re professionals.
“Maddy?”
I’m still looking down, ticking off the last few shots on my list when I hear her voice.
Leila.
My head rises slowly, meeting her eyes. “What are you doing here?”
She looks almost as surprised to see me as I am to see her. “My boyfriend’s coming to this clinic. I’m dropping something off for him.”
“Boyfriend?” I ask carelessly, already moving towards my athlete to tell him we’ve got everything we need.
Better, actually. The client is happy, I’m beyond happy that we’ve somehow wrapped only ten minutes over schedule, and my crew is already packing up behind us.
I run through the final shot list with the client. She already starts greeting her two clients coming in for their appointments.
“Maddy, can we have coffee?” Leila is besides me again.
“Do you know Maddy?” My client makes a reluctant small talk.
“Yeah. We went to high school together.” Leila answers with the fact.
Here’s another fact. She fucked my ex when we were still together. Multiple times. Then listened to me ramble about what I should get him for graduation.
So whether her current boyfriend is my ex or some new boy she found charming at Princeton is information I can comfortably die without.