Chapter 33
Grizzly
The swimmer's name was Delano Crest. Auden brought him up to me during the first full week they were in the office. It would have been a lie to say I was shocked at their insistence on signing the kid.
In reality, I kind of enjoyed their fervor. Auden presented things with confidence, which they then backed up with facts.
"His times are already competitive at the collegiate level," Auden said, turning their laptop to face me across the desk.
"And I'm not talking competitive in a he's-doing-well-for-his-age way.
I mean he's within fractions of times that win at the Olympic level. His coach reached out to me because their current agency has been sitting on him for two years without moving. Just collecting the retainer and doing nothing more than getting him temp deals when he competes at nationals. I doubt he’s even seeing half of the money he could be. "
I looked at the numbers on the screen. Auden was right. The times were striking. I knew enough about competitive swimming to understand as much. More than that, the trajectory was striking—each season showing improvement at a rate that suggested he hadn't yet found his ceiling.
"Remind me how old he is?" I asked.
"Twenty. A junior. He's got extended family in Bellport, which is part of why the coach thought of us."
"What's his situation off the water?"
Auden sat back. "That's where it gets interesting.
He's queer, he's Black, and he's been told more than once by the previous agency that he needs to be careful about how visible he is with his sexuality before he's established.
Their exact framing was that it might complicate the sponsorship conversations rather than trying to work with people who would support him. "
My gaze lifted from the laptop.
"Yeah," Auden said. "That was my face too."
The thing about the sports sponsorship world was that it had changed considerably over the last several years, particularly in Bellport's orbit. What Delano's former agency was operating on was an outdated playbook, one that treated visibility as a liability rather than a differentiator.
Meridian alone had demonstrated that the market for authentic, openly queer athletes wasn’t only real but actively underserved. There were companies waiting for exactly who Delano Prest appeared to be, and his previous agency had been telling him to make himself smaller in the meantime.
Fuck that.
"Pull the tape?" I asked.
Auden already had it open in another tab. They switched it over, then moved the screen to a position where we could both watch.
Two full race cuts and part of a third before I was satisfied. The kid moved through the water with a type of motion you couldn't coach into a person. You could refine it. You could build the strength around it. But the instinct itself was either there, or it wasn't.
In Delano Crest, it was very much there.
"Set up a call," I told Auden, motioning for them to take the laptop back. "I want to talk to him before we go further. And reach out to the coach to let them know we're interested and pursuing. Maybe it will help our cause."
Auden smiled, though it was more a smirk. They were already typing on their laptop. "I'll get it on the calendar by end of business today. We want to strike while we can."
It was comfortable, working with them. I hadn't known for certain that it would be, even after that first kinda casual lunch and everything that had followed.
Bringing a person into a space I'd built alone was an exercise in trust. Yet Auden had made everything feel like a natural progression rather than a massive change.
They also didn't require me to be more than I was on any given day, which was worth a lot more than I could have expected. Preconceived notions were killer in working relationships.
I was about to pull up my notes on the sponsorship landscape for competitive swimming when my phone rang. I didn't recognize the number immediately. It was a different area code than anything I had saved, but the first three digits landed in my body like muscle memory.
A cold, specific recognition tore through me before I could get ahold of it. I’d already answered before the truth settled over me.
"Grizzly." My mother's voice came through in her familiar clipped tone.
I had not spoken to either of my parents in… longer than I wanted to think about. The last conversation had ended as turbulent as all the others. They were toxic to their core, a fact I only understood after years of therapy.
"Mother," I replied in as neutral a voice as I could muster.
Auden’s head whipped up. They read faces well. I knew this about them from our first meeting, and in the moment, I was aware of them noticing the change in mine without being able to do anything about it.
"Your father and I saw the news." No small talk. She was straight to the point. "We wanted to call before it became any more of a spectacle."
"What news specifically?"
"Don't be obtuse, Grizzly. The photographs. The articles. You and that young man."
The way she said that young man was a compression of a great many things. I had spent enough years studying my mother's disapproval to understand the layers packed into three words. The age gap. Paxton's profession. The publicity of it. Underneath all of it was the simple fact that he was a man.
My parents had known I was gay since I was in college. Knowing had not produced acceptance so much as a sustained, low-level campaign of disappointment.
"The articles are not a spectacle," I argued. "They're a normal part of Paxton's career."
"Your involvement in his career," my pops’s voice appeared, which meant I was on speakerphone, "is one thing. What we're seeing reported goes considerably beyond professional standards. You're being discussed as a couple."
"We are a couple."
The silence that followed would have felt victorious if I hadn’t known what was waiting on the other side of it.
"Grizzly! You have worked very hard to build a credible reputation despite being destined for more. All of that is at risk when you allow yourself to become tabloid fodder."
"I'm not tabloid fodder. I'm a person in a relationship. What does it matter?"
My mother gasped. "At your age—"
"My age is not the relevant factor here." The tightening in my chest had started, the old contraction that happened when I was in their proximity, physical or otherwise. "Paxton and I are together. That is not going to change because it made headlines from some pissed-off reporter."
"We're not asking you to end the relationship." My father interjected. "We're asking you to exercise some discretion. Surely that's not an outrageous request."
"It is when discretion means hiding."
Another silence.
"You've always been dramatic about this," my mother said.
And there it was. The word that had been applied to me since childhood whenever I expressed something they didn't want to accommodate. Dramatic.
My breathing picked up. My hands shook. My stomach lurched.
"Grizzly! We are trying to have a reasonable—"
"I'd like you to stop."
The voice wasn’t mine, yet it was obviously meant as a reply to my mother..
I turned to find Auden standing, one hand held out toward me. I gave them the phone.
"Hello," Auden said into the phone. Their voice was pleasant, though I didn’t expect them to befriend my parents.
"My name is Auden Keyes. I'm Grizzly's business partner.
I'm going to need you both to understand something clearly.
What you just said to your son—and I did hear it, thank you for that—is not something that gets to continue.
Not on a call to his place of work, not anywhere.
He has built an extraordinary business here.
The clients who work with him trust him because of who he is, not despite it.
The relationship you just dismissed is one of the best things in his life.
And your son is one of the best people I have had the privilege of working alongside.
If either of you would like to have a productive conversation with your son at some point in the future, that would be between you and him.
But that conversation won't start the way this one did.
I hope that's clear. Have a good afternoon. "
They ended the call, leaving the office silent aside from my heavy breaths and the buzzing in my ears.
I was not going to cry in the office. I was not going to cry in the office. I was NOT going to cry in the office.
Auden set my phone on the desk. "Come here," they said, without any ceremony, and opened their arms.
I didn’t hesitate to move over to them. Auden was smaller than me, as most people were. It didn't matter. They held onto me like they were worried I’d float away while patting my back gently.
"You're okay," they said. "That was awful, and you handled it. Now you're okay."
I nodded, which was probably unhelpful, but it was all I had at the moment. The door beside us opened as we were standing there.
"I heard—" Moseley stopped. He took in the scene quickly, then his expression shifted. He didn't ask what happened. He didn't fill the room with noise. He just crossed to us, put himself on my other side, and wrapped himself around me too.
When this day started, I didn’t picture an Auden-Moseley sandwich happening. Honestly, I could have never guessed it would ever happen.
"Do you want me to call Paxton?" Moseley asked.
I hadn't even gotten that far in my own head. But the minute Moseley said the name, every part of me reached out to scream an affirmative answer.
"Yes, please.”
Daddy arrived in what felt like a blink.
He came through the door like the building was on fire or something. I watched as he scanned the space until his eyes landed on me lying on the couch, Moseley still nearby, and Auden in the chair across from me with a cup of water they had insisted I drink.