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“Scary,” I whispered.
“Big man hits ball,” she whispered back in a caveman voice.
“I am so glad I’m not playing water polo against that man.”
She laughed. “I think he’d pick you up and launch you into the net.”
The Olympic Village had plenty of kiosks with maps and orientation guides wearing bright orange jumpsuits offering directions, but it still took me upward of an hour to find the compound where Tori and I would be staying. I should have stuck with the swim team entourage. I hadn’t fully processed how huge the area would be, with over thirty buildings containing thousands of condos plus parks and bike paths and shops everywhere. Chase and I had discussed meeting up that night. Now I wondered if I’d manage to make it to his physical therapy session tomorrow morning, even if I started finding my way over to it right then.
Tori was not there when I arrived, as expected. I did manage to get through to her via text. She responded quickly.
Tori: YOU MUST COME HERE NOW
A slurry of emojis followed, including a barfing face, and then a photo of what looked like blurred lights in a dark club and maybe a few faces. But no address.
Chase checked in as well, wanting to make sure I arrived safely, wanting to see me.
Chase: Want me to send a car to pick you up and bring you over to my place?
I paused, my fingers hovering over the keys. Should I? The answer was yes, of course, yes. And so that’s exactly what I did, letting a car whisk me away to the sweet house he and a few of his teammates were renting just outside the fray of the Olympic Village. The mood was celebratory, in a stone cold sober kind of a way, and no one seemed to bat an eye when I walked in and Chase greeted me with a full-body hug and a deep kiss.
Chase and I and a bunch of the group with and on the U.S. Swim team spent the whole next day together, starry-eyed, walking around, getting familiar with the new setting. I got to be with Chase when he first walked in and saw the pool where they’d be competing. At this point, we didn’t care anymore. We held hands, tight, walking into the Olympics Aquatics Stadium.
“There it is!” I fairly jumped up and down with excitement. The arena was huge, set up to hold around 15,000 spectators. They’d all be watching the swimmers in those 10 lanes, but really most eyes would be on Chase, in the middle of the pool, pushing ahead.
He gazed down at it, nodded his head, and gave me a slow smile. “That’s where it’s all going to happen.”
I had no idea where he found his cool, calm confidence. I personally felt like throwing up and I wasn’t even the one going to compete.
It was a good thing he knew how to deal with the spotlight, because he sure was in it. At six foot three, with his face on the cover of every magazine smart enough to put him on it, everyone recognized Chase everywhere we went. After the pool, we made the mistake of trying to grab lunch at a café nearby. We didn’t even get up to the front of the line before he was swarmed with admirers, people asking for photos and autographs.
After that, he joined his team for meals, accepting it as a necessity for the games. No private, romantic tête-à-tête dinners for us at a quiet little table in the corner, at least not while we were in Rio for the next week. But after, he assured me, after we’d have all the time together in the world.
The night before the opening ceremony, he had a meeting with his team, of course, and Tori had plans with the Italian soccer team, of course again. This time, I did meet her out at the nightclub where she apparently was keeping office hours. It seemed to be the only way in which I could manage to talk to her. She hadn’t been responding to my texts. I almost felt like she was avoiding me. I texted Chase the address and hoped he’d be able to join us later.
“There she fucking is!” Tori shrieked from across the bar when I walked in. “I wondered if you’d even made it to Rio!”
“Hey, sorry,” apologies came tumbling out of my mouth, though she was as much to blame as me for our missing each other. Sure, I’d been spending most of my time with Chase and his team, but it wasn’t as if she’d been sitting back in the condo waiting for me. The couple of times I’d stopped back there to grab clothes and toiletries, she’d been nowhere to be seen.
“Drink!” I had shots thrust in front of me, guys giving me hugs, arms pulling me out onto the dance floor. When in Rome! I joined them, sidestepping the majority of the hard drinks but bringing it on the dance floor. Oh my, those Italian men with their dark good looks and the way they moved their hips! Such rhythm!
One of them started hitting on me, telling me I was bellissima and claiming to not believe me that I wasn’t there to compete in the games, I was so fit and perfect. He was fun to dance with, so I didn’t mind, and after the first couple of refusals he stopped trying to get me drunk. Until I made the ultimate mistake.
“So what position do you play on the soccer team?” I asked, trying to be polite.
He and several of his teammates heard my ultimate party foul. They all erupted in a roar. “Football! Not soccer! Drink!”
A shot appeared out of thin air, big and fat and looking suspiciously like tequila. Until an even larger hand dropped in from above and snatched it away.
“If the lady doesn’t want to drink, you’re not going to make her.”
Chase. A smile broke across my face. My hero.
“But you do know you can’t call it soccer outside the U.S.,” he whispered to me, wrapping me in his arms.
“I know! I’ll never make that mistake again.”
“Now, do I have to beat anyone up?” he asked, his finger under my chin as we started to sway to the music. “I saw one of those soccer players hitting on you pretty hard.”
“Oh, Leo’s harmless.”
“First name basis, are we?”
“Not like that,” I assured him.
“Chase the Ace!” Tori swooped in, snaking her arms around my man.
“Tori?” Chase mouthed her name as he looked at me. I nodded. My crazy friend, drunk as a skunk.
“I hear you two have been getting to know each other!” she sang out, waggling her finger between us. “Naughty, naughty! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do! Which means you can do a whole hell of a lot!” She burst out into gales of laughter, making her way over to the bar again and a circle of gorgeous, attentive Italian men. Chase and I stayed a bit longer, then made our escape. Chase called a car and we headed back to the house he was renting.
Sitting together in the back seat, he stretched his arm out behind me. “So that’s your best friend?”
“Since we were nine,” I confirmed. “She’s crazy, I know, but she’s a lot of fun. And she’s been a really good friend to me, always there when things go horribly, tragically wrong with men.”
“Men who weren’t me. That was the problem.”
“Obviously,” I agreed, but I continued on the earlier subject. “I know you probably don’t get it. Tori and I are really different.”
“Oh no, I do get it,” he insisted. “The friends you make when you’re younger, they’re in.” He peaked his fingers together as if forming the roof of a house. “You get real tight when you go through stuff as a kid.”
“Right?” I was the first person to admit, Tori was off her rocker, but all those nights we’d stayed up sharing secrets, the good stuff and the bad, our fears and dreams, it went deep. Plus, neither of us had a sister, so I guessed we’d become that for each other. You didn’t cut out a sister.
“I’ve got friends…” He shook his head. “Thankfully, you’ll be meeting Liam later this week. He’s the one I can take out in public.” He cracked himself up. “Ian might bite your head off. He’s a cranky son-of-a-bitch. And Jax, well, he’d probably try to talk you out of your panties.”
“It wouldn’t work,” I reassured him.
