2. Chapter 1 Carter
A ugust 2023
“This place is a mess.”
I glance over at Bryce and try not to wince. His eyes scan every aspect of the building we’re standing in, and I know what he’s thinking. What the hell did Carter rope me into? But I also know he sees it; the same way I saw it the first time I stepped in here. There is potential.
We can make this place into something great. We can give other young, hopeful swimmers the same opportunities we had growing up. Neither one of us is vain; we both know we wouldn’t be anywhere without the coaches we had along the way.
“There is no way we’ll get this up and running before the Olympics.” Bryce steps closer to peer down into the pool, which is currently a mess of rotting wood and chipped concrete. He wrinkles his nose. “And what is that smell?”
I shrug, but am still desperate to have him on my side for this. “This place was cheap, man. They were eager to sell.”
“Yeah, I can see why,” he comments, moving to head upstairs toward the locker rooms and offices.
I trail after him like a lost puppy. “We know what a pool like this needs, Bryce. It’s going to take a lot of work, but we can do this.”
He turns to look at me for the first time since stepping inside the building, a pinched look on his face. My heart is thrumming in my chest, beating so rapidly I feel a slight shortness of breath. What if I’d made a huge mistake? Buying this place, dragging him into it, him bringing Josie into it, and knowing it’ll all be on them until after the Olympics. I’m a certifiable jerk.
“Obviously we can do it, man.” Just like that, all the tension deflates from me like a balloon. I wonder if he can hear whatever sound it’s making. “I have no idea how we’re going to do it, how long it’s going to take, or how much it’s going to cost, but we can do this.”
I fight the urge to pump my fist in the air I like I did when we were kids. I settle for a grin. “You haven’t seen the outside pool yet.”
His eyebrow arches. “After this, I’m a little afraid to see it.”
I shrug, owning up to overselling the pool when I first pitched the idea to him. “It’s not nearly as bad as this. It should be up and running soon. You might be able to offer some private coaching or even tryouts before long, which will help the cost of everything.”
“Can you even swim outdoors in Columbia during the winter?”
That is another question I don’t know the answer to. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been too busy to focus on all the things I didn’t think through with this decision, but now that I’m standing in this mess of a building with Bryce, I’m freaking out a bit.
“Oh, look!” Bryce’s voice drags me from my anxious thoughts. He’s leaning into the open doorway of one of the small offices. “It looks like we have at least one usable room.”
Before I can jump into all the reasons this place is great, even though it’s literally falling apart in places, Bryce grins at me. He’s joking. I marginally relax. “I’m glad you’ll have somewhere to sit down, dude. That was the top of my priority list when I went looking for a pool to buy.”
“Did you tour more than one?”
“Nope,” I replied, stuffing my hands further in the pocket of my sweatshirt. “I think Josie would call it serendipitous or something like that.”
He chuckles. “And then Mia would declare that to be bullshit. Nothing happens for a reason.”
“Or everything does.”
Neither one of us says anything else as we move through the rest of the building. Taking a couple of moments to absorb it all. It’s more overwhelming to be walking through it this time. I haven’t been here since the first time, but now I feel like I’m seeing it with a whole new set of eyes. This isn’t someone else’s potential mess, it’s my mess—our mess—and I’m leaving Bryce to be the one who mostly deals with it.
I was shocked, but elated, when he told me he had taken my advice to heart and Josie was coming with him. Despite my anticipation to get things moving on the pool, I gave them a chance to breathe. They’d both uprooted their lives—Josie for the first time—and moved out here to do this with me. The least I could do was give them a few of weeks to get settled before I sprung how bad things were on them.
Our focus turned to getting Bryce on all the necessary paperwork. Then, before I knew it, I was headed to Budapest for World Championships while they hung back and figured out their lives in Columbia. Now, here we are, with Worlds behind us, and a huge mess in front of us.
“Okay, you weren’t wrong.” Bryce is walking the deck along the outside pool, the last thing we need to see. “This isn’t nearly as bad as the rest of it.”
The bleachers probably needed to be replaced for safety reasons. The pool would need to be repainted and minor repairs made. We’d need new starting blocks, but otherwise, it wasn’t in too bad of shape. “I think it’d be great to host meets out here.”
There’s a glint in Bryce’s eyes as he looks around. I can tell he’s imagining it like I’d done. “Yeah, it’d be cool if we could get some pro meets out here.”
“Now who’s getting ahead of themselves?” I taunt, earning a laugh from my best friend. “You ready to get out of here?”
He takes one more look around the pool before nodding. “Yeah, let’s grab lunch.”
W e settle on Brick Tavern, a local bar and restaurant known for their burgers, according to Bryce, at least. Apparently, this place came to the rescue for him and Josie when they first moved here and found themselves too exhausted from unpacking to cook.
Honestly, I wasn’t hard to please when it came to food. As long as someone else was making it—because I can’t cook to save my life—I’m good.
Brick Tavern is a modern place with an industrial vibe, all dark wood and metal accents. TVs showing various sports hang throughout the place, but the volume is low and the music fades into the background, making it more suitable for a lunch crowd. There are even university students studying with empty plates at the corners of their books.
Eventually, this city will be my home, or I hope it will anyway. Right now, I feel like a visitor who didn’t do enough research before picking a destination.
“We should come up with some sort of plan,” he says.
It doesn’t surprise me that Bryce immediately gets down to business as soon as we placed our orders and we each have a draft beer in front of us. He has always been the kind of guy who liked to know the objective, the one who kept me steady and focused when my excitement got ahead of me.
If he’d been there when I first saw the pool, we would have had this plan in place before we even made an offer on the building.
I nod, fiddling with my beer. “And we obviously can’t do any of the repairs ourselves. We’ll have to hire someone to come in, do a design, and orchestrate the rebuild or remodel—whatever it’s called.”
“I’m sure we can find a company to do everything. It’ll mostly be Josie and I handling it. How soon do you want to have it up and running after the Games?”
“Within a couple of months. The timeline won’t matter if I don’t make the team, though.” Bryce presses his lips together, a sure sign he wants to yell at me. “My times were shit at Worlds. You know it’s true.”
“They were not shit. You walked away with three medals.”
“Only one of which was gold,” I shoot back. We’ve been doing this most of our lives, building each other up while we tear ourselves down. It’s a game we are rather good at by now. “I’m not promised a spot on the team, and you know it.”
“I also know you’ll be training your ass off for the next several months, Carter. That’s why I’m here, because you bought this thing, and it’s going to be great, but you can’t deal with it right now. So do what you need to do and trust me to do the rest.”
My brow arches. “I cannot ask you to do that.”
“You’re not asking me, dude.” He sighs. “I’m not even offering. We’re business partners, and this is what business partners do. They step up when the other one can’t take something on. Do you really think I moved here thinking you’d be available every day to make decisions? No way. You’ll be here when it counts and, in the meantime, go finish your shit.”
Finish my shit.
That’s what I’m doing. I’m on the last leg of a career I dedicated my entire life to, worked day in and day out for. I won’t even be thirty until this July, but I was already facing the r-word. Retirement. It’s something every swimmer expects, to be retired far younger than any of our non-swimmer friends, but the meaning is different for us.
Retirement, to me, feels like I’m saying goodbye to my life’s work. It’s not the end of hard work, more the shift to something I haven’t allowed myself to think about yet. I know it’s time. I considered retiring when Bryce did, but I felt like I still had more things to accomplish. Things I’m not sure I’ll be able to see through now that they’re staring me down. Less than one year until Trials, and it feels like the ticking of a bomb.
“Does it ever get easier, man?”
Bryce looks up from his phone, brows furrowed in confusion. I don’t say anything. I don’t need to. A second later, he’s setting his phone down on the table and giving me his full attention. “I don’t know if easier is the right word, but it’s not as daunting, I guess.”
I almost tease him about his word choice. I’ve never heard him use the word “daunting” before. Maybe living with a writer is helping with his vocabulary.
“I didn’t deal with it the same way you did, though,” he argues. “I didn’t pick an Olympic year and decide that was when I’d be done. Maybe I did initially, but I had an injury I couldn’t bounce back from, and I just knew it was time.”
“But how?” I stress. “What if I’m not ready to say goodbye? What if I should have said goodbye years ago?”
“Well, it’s too late to change the past,” he replies. “You can change the future. You haven’t made it officially known you’re planning to retire. If you get out there and decide you want to go for another year, or two, or three, then you do it. It’s your life, dude.”
“I bought a pool,” I pointed out.
“And signed your best friend on as a co-owner.” He waves me off. “If you decide to keep going, then I’ll find another washed-up swimmer who can help me coach. My phone is full of numbers, Carter. Stop worrying about the what-ifs. I’ve got your back.”
I know it’s true, but that knowledge isn’t necessarily going to be enough to make me believe there’s nothing to worry about. I’d never felt so untethered from my life before, and it was freaking me out. All of Bryce’s advice came from a genuine place of care, because he can’t tell me how to live my life, but I find myself wishing someone would tell me what to do.
Being an adult sucks.
The server arriving with our food prevents me from continuing down the spiral I was rapidly heading toward. Despite knowing Bryce would be more than willing to listen and offer advice, I felt like I’d laid enough on him now. I was set to go back to Georgia tomorrow morning, already hitting the grind in preparation for the Olympic year just months away. For now, I just want to hang out with Bryce.
T rue to his word, Bryce is handling it.
A week after our walkthrough at the pool, I have an email waiting for me after a weight training session with the subject line: Josie says we can’t use power tools. Laughing to myself, I open the email and scan the list of companies that will manage everything from design to overseeing the construction process. He also added several notes about the general length of time we could expect to spend on this and a general budget.
The projected budget—from his research—nearly made my eyes bug out of my head. I knew it’d be expensive, but damn. I’m going to have to win several gold medals to pay for this.
He requests I scan through the companies and let him know which ones to start calling. He’d handle all the initial interactions, he informs me, and then we’ll get together to go over the quotes and make our decision as a team.
The weight lifts off my shoulders at the realization I’m not alone in this. Bryce was serious that day in the bar—he can handle it. He wants to handle it. He’ll take care of everything in Columbia, and I’ll stay back in Georgia, trying to make my last team.
I can figure out the rest of my life later.