Swimslash, Gravity's Bringing Us Down 1/3
Fic. Written for asouthernthing. Yeah, okay, I've dragged my feet on this long enough. Next time I decide to write something, remind me to actually know how it ends, so I don't have to go back and rewrite the last twenty pages. To be posted in three parts.
Title: Gravity's Bringing Us Down
Summary: In which underwear is stolen, the unspoken Olympic Rule is invoked, and nobody knew Pieter van den Hoogenband even had a brother.
Warning & Disclaimer: This is a work of fantasy. None of the actions portrayed by the people herein are reflective of real life.
Notes: Written for asouthernthing, in the olympic_slash ficathon, who wanted Phelps/van den Hoogenband. Set back at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Title from the Beulah song of the same name.
Part One. Part Two. Part Three.
***
Wednesday, August 25th, 10:24 AM
He came out of sleep like he was rising through water after a turn rather than a start, a continuing action rather than exploding from a standstill. Something had moved; he'd responded. The sunlight had come in through the window and was hitting him square in the face. Michael tried to hide his face in the pillow. There didn't seem to be a pillow. He tried to hide his face against something else, but it made a funny grumbling noise and shifted away. The world was against him. All he wanted to do was go back to sleep, but his bladder had definite ideas about him going elsewhere.
Michael fumbled his way out of the bed. If he kept his eyes closed, it didn't count and he wasn't really awake. He took two steps forward and walked right into a wall. Fuck.
"Fuck."
Squinting, he corrected his path course. Wall. Desk. Armchair. Several articles of clothing strewn on the ground, some of which looked like his, and some that he didn't recognize. More wall. Closed bathroom door on the other side of the room where it should have been. His mind worked on that ponderously, finally concluding that first, he'd slept in the opposite bed that he was used to, and that secondly, he wasn't in his own room, or even another Olympic Village dorm room. He was, in fact, in a strange hotel room he’d never seen before. Huh.
He scratched his balls and realized that he was also naked, something that he probably should have picked up on sooner.
The bathroom door wasn't locked, but someone was already inside. Michael could hear the shower running. It didn't help his raging need to take a leak, and it reminded him that the inside of his mouth felt like a desert, and if he didn't get some water within about ten seconds, he would die.
Someone else was in the bed that Michael had just climbed out of, facedown with nothing visible but a tousled head of short, dark hair and a long expanse of tanned back. It was a very muscular back. Distant warning bells began to go off in Michael's head. The tracksuit jacket draped over the back of the chair was bright orange and blue.
Michael was suddenly a hell of a lot more awake than he had been five seconds ago.
He glanced around the room, looking for his shirt and a more specific clue as to where the hell he was. He didn't see his shirt anywhere. That meant he'd wandered, probably drunk, through various parts of Athens without a shirt, and he'd ended up in someone else's hotel bedroom. Hopefully, everyone else had also been too drunk to notice. There was an empty schnapps bottle on the desk.
Still tip-toeing and checking the other bed over his shoulder every few seconds, Michael crept over to the desk. The ID badge was under the bottle. He lifted the bottle, grabbed the badge, and set the bottle down again. Even the quiet clink of glass against wood seemed incredibly loud, and he wasn't sure if that was his paranoia or if he was still kind of drunk. It was hard to tell.
He knew the name on the badge. He'd already seen it on the scoreboard during the past week. Fuck. He put the badge down.
There was another empty bottle halfway under the room's second empty bed. No glasses. Michael poked further under the bed. He found a pair of gray boxers that he thought were his, a pair of jeans that had to be his because they had his ID badge in the pocket, a plain black shirt that probably wasn't his, a pair of dark blue briefs that definitely weren't his, and three recently used condoms that he had no idea what to think about.
He put the boxers and his jeans on, and after some thought, the shirt as well. He edged back towards the occupied bed, cautiously checking under there. There was a half-full bottle of tequila, a sock, a Pearl Jam CD, a pair of orange and blue track pants, another pair of jeans, a pair of white boxer briefs still tangled inside the jeans, and two more used condoms.
Details were beginning to emerge in his mind, a confused jumble of weirdly vivid memories, like shards from a stained glass window. Some drinks. A bet. More drinks. Going out, weaving his way through the club to the ear-splitting beat of Greek techno. Downing Jaeger bombs; no wonder his brain was shot to shit. Big blank spot. Photos, lots of photos, a constant lightning-flash throb coming at him from all angles until blobs of light danced in front of his eyes and he could barely see. More blank. Laughing. Walking. Stumbling. Schnapps, candy-taste of it in his mouth; drinks like that always fucked him up because the sweetness always made him misjudge how drunk he was. Blank.
The hot, almost too-sweet taste of someone else's mouth, and the backwash of a shared shot. Blank. The room spinning. Panting, taking forever to come, and not sure if he ever did or if he'd been coming the whole time. Blank blank blank. Stickiness, then down and out into sleep, like stepping off a cliff into the ocean and going all the way to the bottom. Blank. Waking up.
It was way too much to think about, so Michael didn't.
Instead, he sat on the floor and tried to ignore the urge to piss. His sandals were next to the bed, set precisely side by side. After a few more minutes, he put them on, and then went back to staring blankly at the wall. He still wanted some water. The inside of his mouth tasted like a swamp, if that was even possible when it also still felt like a desert.
Man. He was definitely still kind of drunk.
There was a wallet lying under the bed. Michael hooked it out with his foot. He flipped it open and glanced briefly at the ID inside, then did a double-take and looked closer, because, whoa. What the hell?
No longer bothering to stay as quiet, Michael got up and went back to the desk to look at the first ID badge again. He squinted at it, then back at the driver's license in the wallet, sure that he was seeing some kind of misprint. He blinked hard. No. What the fuck?
The person in the bed was making sleepy but definite waking-up noises. In the bathroom, the shower turned off.
Michael jumped across the room in three giant steps, reached under the bed, grabbed the white boxer briefs, scrambled to his feet, and fled.
***
Saturday, August 21st, 11:57 PM
It was, surprisingly enough, Ian Crocker's fault.
If Ian hadn't raised the underwear possibility, they would have just ended up with some kind of regular scavenger and/or snipe hunt, Tom and Lenny's last-ditch ploy as team captains for interrupting the all-night binge drinking party, and getting them out into other areas of the Village where they could choke on their own vomit and no longer be Tom or Lenny's problem. It was really the kind of idea that should have come out of Brendan, who had a history for pulling pranks that involved speedos and underwear, or Aaron, who just plain had a history. It would have been a typical Gary Hall Jr. suggestion, except he had passed out and people were drawing on his face with sharpies. Nearly everyone else was too drunk to string coherent sentences together, let alone mastermind international panty raid challenges.
They'd been experimenting with all the different ways they could drink ouzo, and mostly discovering all the different ways they shouldn't drink ouzo, and between that and all the pent-up adrenaline and the bragging and the trashing of other countries, the challenge emerged.
"That's fucked up," Michael said, sprawled on the couch. He struggled to sit upright, and the bottle between his thighs sloshed a little on his pants. He decided he was happier staying horizontal. "Because. I mean. Relays. That would mean you'd have to sleep with four different people."
"You don't have to sleep with anyone," Ian explained patiently. "You just have to get a pair of their underwear. If they won a gold medal."
"Why?" Erik asked.
"Why not?" Ian said, and shrugged. "Be fun. It's like trading the pins. We can put them up on the wall."
"Yeah, but not a challenge," Erik said. "I dunno if you noticed this, but six of the swimming community's gold medals are lying right over there on the couch, hogging the bottle." Michael lazily flipped him off, and licked ouzo off his fingers, sticky-sweet licorice taste all over his tongue.
"So," Erik continued, "what's the payoff for getting six pairs of Michael's underwear? I mean, I want to know what it's worth if I put the effort into it."
"Hey," Michael said, sitting up in a hurry. "No one's getting six pairs of my shorts. I need those for the rest of the week."
"I was thinking it'd just be for the fun of the challenge, but we could all kick in fifty bucks or something." Ian shrugged again. "Winner takes all. And a lot of underwear, if that's your thing. You could probably ebay it, make more than you would just from the pot."
"So, what," Ryan asked. "Whoever gets the most pairs by the end of the week wins? Is that how we’re deciding the winner?"
"I've totally got this," Michael gloated. "I'm gonna own."
"No way," Aaron said. "You can't just produce your own underwear and get points for it. That totally misses the whole point of the contest."
"Who made you the Underwear Nazi?" Michael asked.
"No, he's right," Erik said. "We need to work out, like, a point system. Otherwise it's kind of unfairly weighted. Like, if you're rooming with someone, it's a hell of a lot easier to get a pair of their shorts than it is if you’re trying to get, say, Inge de Bruijn's thong."
"Dude, if you score Inge de Bruijn's thong, you should win the whole thing, game over. I don't care how many pairs of Michael's shorts you come up with." Larsen looked kind of dreamy.
"Okay, ground rules," Ian said, leaning forward. "You can't claim your own underwear. We can either open it up to all the swimming medals, not just gold, or we can let people get multiples off the same person if they won more than one medal."
"Make it both," Aaron said. "I mean, might as well go all the way, right? Gives us a bigger playing field."
"Some are worth more points, which we can figure out in a sec," Ian continued. "Winner is determined by points, not number of pairs. Um. Maybe someone should be writing this down? Tom? Lenny?"
"Dibs not me," Tom said immediately.
"Oh God," Lenny said morosely. "Leonid, Leonid, sidel by ty doma, tochil svoi veretyona."
"Thanks, Lenny," Ian said. "So. Anything else?"
"What about the way you get them? I mean, if you sleep with someone to get them, do you get more points? Because you should. Shouldn't we?" Ryan said.
"How are you gonna prove it?" Klete asked. "Matter of fact, how is any of this gonna get proved? How will we know someone's not just buying extra pairs at one of the stores or pawning their own off and claiming it's, whatever, Ian Thorpe's?"
"Thorpe's got his own damn brand, of course we're gonna know it's his. Anyway. Honor system. That's the way to go." Brendan was waving his hands around a lot. Michael kind of thought it made him look like a muppet. "Are you saying we don't trust each other?"
And then there was a lot of squabbling and numbers getting tossed around, and Michael closed his eyes and zoned out a little while listening to Lenny grumble and scribble. At some point Gary must have woken up, because Michael could dimly hear him bitching about whether or not Ryk Neethling should be worth more than Roland Mark Schoeman, working out whether a gold in a relay was worth more than an individual bronze. The couch was comfortable. Ouzo was terrible, but also awesome. Terribly awesome. Possibly awesomely terrible.
He came back to attention in time to hear Laure Manaudou announced as being worth eighty points, and to narrowly avoid spilling the rest of the bottle on his crotch when Ian poked his thigh.
"You playing, Michael?" Ian asked.
Michael blinked. "Uh, yeah, I guess." He sat up, wondering if he'd missed his own point designation. "So, like, when are we gonna start?"
"How about right now?" Aaron said, and eight different people lunged really fast into Michael's personal space all at once; there was a lot of confused shoving, and about five hands got to third base with him within three seconds. In less than a minute it was all over; Michael flailed and yelled ineffectually, while Klete and Peter held him down, and Ryan stripped off his pants.
"Fuckheads!" Michael yelled while Ryan paraded around triumphantly with Michael's underwear raised over his head, in a blatant disregard for relay teammate loyalty. "You're all going down, assholes! You were in the same fucking relay!"
"Hey, that was a group effort," Aaron said. "By all rights, you gotta split the points three ways."
Michael's only consolation was that they all jumped on Aaron right afterwards, and right after that, Gary figured out he had "i love cock" written all over his face, and the uproar doubled. So, it wasn't all bad.
Michael escaped during the confusion, freeballing it all the way back to his room where he immediately hid the rest of his underwear under Lenny's mattress. It wasn't ideal, but he'd find a better place later.
He needed a plan.
***
Wednesday, August 25th, 1:23 PM
Once he'd taken a cab back to his room on the cruise liner, showered, drank about a gallon of water, and felt a little more human, Michael went looking for Aaron back in the Village, because Aaron was good for big gay freakouts. He'd been around for Michael's first one in Sydney when Michael was flipping out over getting hard every time Ian Thorpe was in the same general vicinity. Aaron blew him, gave him a twenty minute combination lecture-puppet-show featuring three bananas and a hot dog, stuffed a handful of condoms in Michael's pocket, and shoved him in Ian's direction.
He was less help with big gay breakups, because after Melbourne when Michael and Ian's on-again off-again thing went down hard in flames and pissy interview quotes, Aaron's solution was to take him out to clubs, pour alcohol into him, and point out people that he thought looked like Ian. And when that surprisingly didn't help, his next big idea was to keep buying booze for Michael, and then offer to blow him. Which would have been great if Aaron hadn't already bought him a shitload of alcohol and left Michael clutching the toilet bowl and unable to even think about getting it up, which totally killed his self-esteem and left him feeling worse than he had when the night began.
Aaron kind of sucked sometimes.
He found Aaron down in the lounge, stretched out on the couch with his arm over his face. The television was on but muted, which was dumb because it was Rocky II, and the whole point was the music.
"Is there a rule against sleeping with someone and also their siblings?" he asked, flopping down next to Aaron.
"If you touch Hailey I'll kill you," Aaron said conversationally. "Why, what's up?"
"Nothing," Michael said. He fidgeted a little.
"Yeah, whatever," Aaron said. "What's up?"
"I think I might've slept with Pieter van den Hoogenband," Michael said. "Or maybe his brother. I'm not sure." He thought about it, flinched, and then tried to not think about it. "Uh. Maybe both of them."
"Successively or simultaneously?" Aaron asked. "By the way, that's kind of the other end of the spectrum than 'nothing', but okay, I can roll with it."
"I don't know," Michael said.
He was sore and his ass hurt. That might have told him something, except he'd swam a fuckton of races over the last week and he didn't think there was any part of him that wasn't sore, let alone any part that could have established whether or not he'd been part of a gay incestuous orgy. If it counted as an orgy.
"How many people does it take to make an orgy?" he asked, because if there was anyone who'd know, it was Aaron.
"Five and up, I think," Aaron said. "Huh. You know, I didn't know Hoogie even had a brother."
"His name is Robert," Michael offered. "He plays water polo."
That pretty much exhausted Michael's own pool of knowledge, beside the fact that he might or might not be a briefs person. Speaking of which.
"I got his underwear, though." He prodded the plastic bag he'd brought with him. "What's Pieter worth, like, sixty?"
"More. Silver relay, silver and gold individuals, world record." Aaron reached out and looked in the bag. "But if you don't remember which one of them you slept with, how do you know whose underwear you stole? These could be Roger's."
"Robert's."
"Whatever. If it's not Pieter's, it doesn't count. No evidence, no points."
"There's, like, a fifty percent chance that they're his. Anyway, water polo is almost the same as swimming," Michael argued. "It's in a pool. You swim while you do it."
"I call bullshit," Aaron sing-songed at him. "No autograph, no pictures, no video, no witness. No points for Michael!"
"Fuck you," Michael muttered, and slumped. Aaron sucked.
"Cheer up, you must've had some kind of fun. With whichever of them it was. Or both." Aaron gingerly hooked the underwear out of the bag with one finger under the waistband. "I mean, there's a bunch of little van den Hoogenbands to-be in here too."
"What?" Michael said, and then sputtered when Aaron threw the shorts in his face. "Ew, dude, gross!"
"Hey, you fucked at least one of them," Aaron pointed out. "Don't be a prude about some used briefs. Anyway, normally you'd be in violation of the siblings rule, but that's overruled by the Olympics rule since anything goes at the Olympics, as long as it stays there. Like Vegas."
"What's the siblings rule?" Michael asked. He wondered if Aaron was making this up as he went along. It wouldn't be the first time.
"You can sleep with different siblings but not when they're both in the same zipcode. Unless it's twins, because that's okay."
"Why are twins okay?"
"Because it's twins," Aaron said. "Inge has a twin. In fact, that was pretty much why the twins clause was invented."
"Okay." Michael tried to process that. "So, seriously, there's an anything goes at the Olympics rule?"
"That's the unspoken rule."
Michael frowned. "No one told me there was an unspoken rule."
"That's kind of the point of an unspoken rule," Aaron said. "Oh, and you can't get involved with the Hamm twins. They're the exception to the sibling thing and the Olympic thing. Kind of like, opposite the Inge thing."
"You're a ton of help."
Aaron frowned as well. "Wait, which is the part here you're freaking out about? The not knowing which of them it was part, or the fact that they're related part?"
"Both, kind of." Michael scratched his stomach and winced. He had what were either some extremely localized bug bites or a mouthful of hickeys around his tattoo. "Wouldn't. You know. The related thing? Wouldn't that bug you?"
"No, not really," Aaron said promptly. Michael was rethinking asking Aaron for advice on anything. He probably should have remembered that Aaron had some kind of weird thing going with Brendan and Ian that might as well qualify as incest.
"I mean, there's twins porn. That is, like, a not insubstantial niche of the porn market," Aaron continued. "So, as long as everyone's an adult and down with it, it's cool. I mean, I'm not the one related to them, so it wouldn't be my issue. No reason to freak out."
"I think I might be an accessory to a gay incestuous hook-up," Michael said. "There are plenty of reasons to freak out."
Aaron ruffled his hair. "I wouldn't worry too much. This is Greece. Practically the whole culture is built on sodomy and incest."
Michael blinked.
"For example, the creation myth of the Olympian gods deals with the union of the earth and the sky, where the earth gives birth to the sky, which then turns around and knocks the earth up so it can plonk out some Titans. And Zeus banged the hell out of most of his sisters, though his abduction of Ganymede was more like the erastes-eromenos relationship where an older man mentors a younger man so he can come of age."
Michael blinked again.
"You know, in a homosexual kind of way."
"How do you know this shit?" Michael demanded.
"I'm just pretty awesome," Aaron said, very seriously.
***
Sunday, August 22nd, 9:52 PM
Word spread quickly, because the day after the contest had been proposed, all of the women's team knew, and most of them were actively participating. Michael got cornered by Amanda Beard and Kaitlin Sandeno at the vending machines, and had the scariest two minutes of his life trying to escape, way worse than swimming the two hundred free. Hitting girls wasn't cool; Hilary and Whitney would have had his ass for even thinking about it, but holy shit, Amanda was like the fucking Terminator chick from the third movie. She just didn't stop.
Someone had gotten to a computer and printed off the swimming medal results from Yahoo; the sheet was taped to a wall in the lounge. Names that had been fully collected were scribbled out with Lenny's green sharpie; anyone who wanted to mark off a name had to get it verified by Lenny, who seemed resigned to his fate, and was keeping track of who had collected from who. Lenny kept the standings list in the back of his team captain's notebook, and refused to share it, saying he would announce the points standings every night.
Michael had sneaked a look at it earlier. Erik was currently winning, but Aaron was only in second place by three points. Amanda was right behind him by a single point, because she'd sweet-talked Ryk into giving her his underwear, plus all the other pairs of the South African men's four hundred free relay team's shorts. That hadn't been a secret, because they'd all autographed the crotches.
The girls got together and must have discussed further strategy, because suddenly every single American women's medal was off the list, multiples included; they'd all traded back and forth, and snatched the points in one fell swoop. Which sucked, but was also kind of awesome, because suddenly the wall was more interesting; it looked a lot more like a Victoria's Secret display, as opposed to the floor of a grungy college dorm room.
It wasn't safe to walk anywhere without checking to see who was lurking behind the next corner, or at least having a really good belt on. There was a brief period of time where everyone was going around commando to prevent run-by sneak attacks, but that stopped after the fifth public de-pantsing and Lenny screaming at the whole team in Russian for, like, an hour.
There were still a lot of ambushes, though, and alliances were being constantly made and broken. From the way Ian, Aaron, and Brendan were usually all huddled together, hissing urgently back and forth, Michael almost felt sorry for whatever was going to happen to Kosuke Kitajima. The poor bastard wasn't even going to know what hit him.
"I'm gonna go move in and live on one of the cruise ships," Michael told Lenny, while hiding in the room and playing Madden. It was a brief hour of free time, snatched in between getting interviewed for something and getting ready for the next thing. "Sports Illustrated said they'd pay. I swear to God, if I have to toss Ryan out of here one more time, that's totally it."
"Mm," Lenny said. Onscreen, Lenny's safety viciously took Michael's fullback down in a move that would have probably been fatal in real life. Michael suspected Lenny hadn't killed anyone on the team yet because he was funneling all his stress over the repeated public nudity into video game violence.
"I'm losing," he said. "It sucks." Michael figured it was safe to whine a little as long as Lenny still had the controller in his hands.
"Mm," Lenny said. He sacked Michael's quarterback again. "Yes, you are."
"No, I mean with the underwear thing." Michael button-mashed frantically for a few seconds. "It's not fair. I have to keep going to shit, and, you know, doing stuff and talking to people, and I don't have the time to work on it the way the others do. I was at the tennis clubs when Erik bagged Kirsty Coventry."
"I feel very badly that you are attending lavish sponsorship events and establishing your career and making hundreds of thousands of dollars," Lenny told him gravely, without looking at him. "It is a heavy burden for you, I know."
"You suck more than Aaron," Michael muttered. "And I don't have any underwear because everyone keeps fucking stealing it. I mean, that means they're probably in here touching your stuff, too."
"I gave most of my underwear to Peter," Lenny said.
"Dude," Michael said, horribly appalled.
"Carlisle," Lenny clarified. "Not Vanderkaay."
"That's kind of creepy," Michael said dubiously. "That's. I mean. I think that's above and beyond the call of duty for an agent."
"That's what makes him a good agent," Lenny said. He was finally smiling a little, though it could have been due to the fact he was whipping Michael's ass twenty-seven to three in the game. Michael was never using the fucking Skins again.
Those weren't really the points he needed to be worrying about, though. He was somewhere around seventh or eighth in the standings, and that was mostly because he'd had two pairs of leftover IT briefs back from when he and Ian were still screwing in the shower after races. He'd brought them to Athens, intending to trade for his black hoodie that Ian had swiped at Barcelona and never given back. Sticky-fingered bastard.
Lenny had also given him a pair of boxers after Michael begged him nonstop and promised all sorts of things he wasn't sure he could actually deliver for the upcoming Disney tour, like not playing his music out loud, and first dibs on the X-Box, and IHop stops on demand. Lenny had occasional bacon fixations.
The scoring system was totally convoluted anyway, a haphazard jumble of point designations that were worked out on based on medal type, number of medals, past medals, whether it was for an individual or a relay, whether there was a world record involved, procurement method, and nationality. And, in some specific cases, breast size.
Then there was the Inge clause. There'd been unanimous agreement that if anyone did manage to score just a single pair off Inge, the contest was over, wham, and whoever did it would be crowned winner by default.
With all the American women off the table, he was screwed because there just weren't that many easier options for him. Michael kept running the numbers through his head and watching Lenny toss his players around in extreme pixilated violence, until Lenny finally said, "We need to get ready for the Speedo party," and turned off the game.
"I just don't want to lose," Michael said, standing up.
Lenny smiled at him, and tapped his shoulder lightly. "Gol' na vydumku khitra."
"Whatever the fuck that means," Michael muttered, and sighed.
Speedo party. Grant would be there. Maybe Michael could appeal to him, remind him about what a good time they'd had training together on the Gold Coast. Inge would be there, too. Maybe he could pull off an upset.
Maybe pigs would fly.
***
Wednesday, August 25th, 10:47 PM
Michael spent the rest of day alternately giving interviews, freaking out in quiet corners, hiding from anyone wearing blue and orange, and barely refraining from punching Aaron, who kept sneaking up behind him and quoting lines from Goldmember.
"I vant everyone to have an Amsterdam good time," Aaron said lowly, and blew into Michael's ear.
"I will totally kill you and dump your body in the ocean," Michael threatened as calmly as he could, still trying to get his heart rate under control. "I can do it. Matt Lauer will lend me his boat."
"I love gooooooold," Aaron crooned, and then collapsed laughing.
Michael gave up holding himself back and punched Aaron; unfortunately, Aaron was so loose-limbed and helpless with laughter that it was like punching Jell-O. Ian walked in just as Michael was just looking around for something to throw at Aaron, but there actually wasn't too much to work with, except for things like his iPod that he didn't want to break, and things that would probably really hurt Aaron if they connected, and things that he couldn't actually lift.
Ian looked at Aaron, followed Michael's line of gaze, and frowned. "Are you thinking of trying to kill Aaron with the couch?"
"No," Michael lied.
"Because, you know, please don't," Ian said, and walked over. He toed Aaron carefully with his foot. "What's going on?"
"Aaron's being a jerk," Michael said.
Aaron looked up at him. "There are only two things I can't stand in this world," he said. "People who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch."
"Michael hates Aaron, and Aaron hates the Dutch," Ian said. "Okay. I guess that isn't the weirdest thing I've heard today."
"You look very toit. Yesh, toit like a toiger. Yesh, yesh, yesh," Aaron said. He looked at Ian, paused, squinted, and switched back to his normal voice. "Hey. Wait. What are you wearing?"
"Clothes," Ian said, in the careful tones of someone who was used to dealing with unpredictable people. "I wear them sometimes. When I'm not swimming. I know this is strange for you, being from California and all, but in Maine it is occasionally cold, and we get into the habit."
"You had a black Speedo shirt on before."
"Yeah, Aaron," Ian said kindly. "And sometimes I even wear different clothes. You can buy new ones in a store, or people give them to you. I switch off. It's really cool, give it a shot one of these days."
"Speaking of switching off," Aaron said. "Michael has a funny story he really wants to tell you."
"No, I really don’t," Michael said, and immediately broke for the door, but Aaron lunged and grabbed him around the waist. He kept going anyway and dragged Aaron along for a few feet, who was doing his best to be a deadweight anchor. "Fucking off, Peirsol!"
"Uh." Ian stared at both of them, and took a step back. "Wow, I probably don't want to know, but where is this going?"
"Michael possibly slept with Pieter, and possibly Pieter's brother, possibly at the same time," Aaron announced, as at the same time Michael said, "Nowhere, seriously, leggo."
"You slept with Peter?" Ian looked horribly appalled. "Why would you do that? He's your agent. He's my agent!"
"Jesus, fuck!" Michael shouted and sat down, partially on top of Aaron. "No. Not Carlisle. Van den Hoogenband. That Pieter."
"Pieter van den Hoogenband has a brother here?" Ian frowned. "I didn't know that."
"Yeah," Michael muttered, "there's a lot of that going around."
"He does water polo," Aaron added, a little muffled. "Whatcha got there?"
"More points for me," Ian said, as he pulled the green sharpie out of his pocket and scribbled on the wall sheet. He surveyed the wall critically. "There any more push-pins?"
Aaron waved his hand as Michael scrambled to his feet. "Take a couple off Hall's pair, no one needs that many pins for a piece of cloth that small."
Ian nodded. For the first time, Michael realized Ian had something rolled up under his arm, a wad of black cloth that, when Ian shook it out, was a pair of boxers. He held them up at arm's length, peering at the wall. "What do you think?" he asked, "top right corner by Rosolino's, or down by Natalie's towards the middle?"
"Depends on if you want contrast or balance," Aaron said. He pulled himself up on the couch. "Me, I go by instinct."
"You're a sensitive artist, I know," Ian said. "Hey, give me a hand?" He handed Michael a couple pushpins, and then reached up to stretch the boxers against the wall. "Okay, pin 'em in place."
Michael shrugged and started shoving pins in at random. He tried to pull at the waistband to see the brand, but Ian made an impatient noise. "C'mon, my arms are killing me," he said, and Michael snorted and stabbed the last pin into the crotch.
"Whose are those, anyway?" he asked. "How'd you get 'em?"
"I'm not giving away any secrets. That's bad tactics." Ian frowned. "Seriously, Pieter and Pieter's brother?"
"Whatever, I'll find out who you got from Lenny." Michael made another attempt at edging for the doorway, but Ian was blocking his path and Aaron was grinning again, so he let himself be towed back to the couch and trapped for what was sure to be a horribly uncomfortable discussion. Fuck.
"So, uh, did you get his underwear?" Ian asked instead, which, okay, was kind of not what Michael expected him to ask, but then again, all of this was Ian's fault in the first place.
"Yes," Michael said. "Maybe."
"No," Aaron said. "He doesn't remember, so there's no proof."
"Fucker, shut up."
Ian shrugged. "Aaron's right. Unless Lenny okayed it."
"Lenny wanted to know if I used protection," Michael said shortly. And frankly, the less about that scarring conversation, the better.
"It's not just you, he asks everyone that," Ian said absently. "Seriously, how can you not remember which one of them it was? Because, I mean, if you were that drunk, then how the hell did you get it up in the first place? More than once, even?"
"They do look a lot alike. I checked online," Aaron said helpfully. "If you remember sucking more than one dick, that probably means you slept with both of them."
Honestly, it was mostly the condoms that made Michael about ninety percent sure he'd pulled a double. He could go pretty far on tapering and adrenaline and Gatorade, and maybe there was something to the whole Flying Dutchman nickname, but five condoms were five condoms and those were just the ones he'd found under the bed.
Not like he was going to give out details like that to Ian and Aaron, though.
Michael rested his chin on one fist. "I've kind of been trying not to think about it too much."
"There's your first problem right there," Aaron said. "You gotta man up and concentrate really hard on your memories of van den Hoogenband genitalia, because otherwise I don't see the two hundred free being much fun for you after this. Did you pitch or catch?"
"You don't remember any, like, details?" Ian scratched his neck, and then gestured towards his crotch. "Not even anything, you know... intimate?"
"Even if I do, I mean. What the hell do I even do with that?" Michael flailed his hands around a little. "Like, do I try to seduce them both again to see who it compares to?"
Aaron perked up. "You remember seducing them both?"
"No, Jesus, I didn't go to the Sports Illustrated party planning on any of this! I figured Pieter could maybe get me into Inge's room, and instead I wake up and it's all Dutch incest, and there are apparently unspoken rules about that and shit!"
"Is it incest if they're just having sex with a common third?" Ian frowned. "I think that's just being really good at sharing."
"Maybe it was some kind of family bonding activity," Aaron suggested.
Michael thought he might be having another breakdown. This would be the fourth of the day, so far. He took a couple deep breaths and tried to think of Eminem lyrics, and not of all the weird places on his body where he kept finding hickeys.
"Hey Mike," Aaron said suddenly, "I talked to Ian, you know, Thorpe, not you Ian, during the Access Hollywood interview at the party last night, and he wants his underwear back."
"No way," Michael said automatically, "he's got my hoodie. And he's been an asshole about pretty much, you know, everything."
"He feels bad about that," Ian said. "I heard. You should talk to him, and clear the air."
"Heard where?" Michael asked, studying the area on the wall where he'd pinned Ian's IT underwear, both pairs together like the world's weirdest butterfly. He should have pinned them up in his bedroom, but there was pinning Ian Crocker's picture up, and then there was pinning Ian Thorpe's underwear up, and the media had already gone nuts over the former. Michael had some maybe-kind-of stalking issues; he acknowledged that to himself but hell if he had to add any more fuel to the fire.
Ian waved his hand. "Wherever. I mean, he might know what Pieter's… looks like."
"He still likes Pieter better," Michael muttered. "He'll probably just laugh."
"Would you like a shmoke und a pancake?"
"I would like you," Michael said grimly, "to shut up and never talk again. Also, your accent sucks."
"Well, then there ish no pleashing you," Aaron said. "Anyway, you could drink some more."
"Drinking got me into this." Michael turned his head and glared. "And Crocker."
"I really think your sluttish tendencies towards your competitors got you into this," Aaron said thoughtfully.
Michael punched Aaron again. There was a long silence, minus Aaron grumbling.
"This is what happens," Ian announced to the ceiling, "when the entire aquatic sports world is made up of two-beer queers."
"It’s the chlorine,” Aaron said. “It does something to your brain. If it helps, I think there’re still some straight guys in the marathon swim.”
Michael put his head back against the couch and sighed.
***
Monday, August 23nd, 1:17 AM
En Plo had strings of tiny twinkly lights everywhere, wound along the railings and looped back and forth across the ceiling, everywhere from the dance floors and balconies and down into the waterfront where the water made the reflections shimmer like thousands of little coins thrown out in handfuls. It was like walking through the sky, surrounded by stars.
It was great, except his ex was totally cockblocking him. What made it worse was that Ian wasn't even doing it deliberately. Probably.
The club itself was closed off to the media, so he'd had to wade through a crowd of camera flashes and people shouting random questions at him in a variety of accents, just to get inside. Lenny towed him along like a steadfast Russian tugboat, which was weirdly comforting, and occasionally made him stop for a picture; they made better time than if they'd just tried to push all the way through.
"Be good," Lenny said sternly as soon as they got inside. He bought Michael a beer, slapped him on the back, and abandoned him to go talk to Jenny Thompson.
Michael had zeroed in on Grant as soon as he'd gotten his drink. Unfortunately, Ian was also over there and he wasn't sure if he wanted to take Ian on outside the medal stand without someone else there who could pick up Michael's slack whenever Ian inevitably fired off one of his stupidly articulate not-precisely-an-insult-but-still comments. Normally Grant would have been fine for that; usually he didn't put up with Ian's shit either, but they were laughing together and Michael wasn't willing to risk it.
Ideally, Michael would have hauled over Lenny or Tom, who looked out for him most of the time or Klete, who had his own agenda against Ian for the four hundred free, and knew how to brawl. Or, hell, Amanda, who could probably put Ian on the run just by raising her eyebrows and smiling. But then he'd owe her a favor and that was kind of terrifying to contemplate.
Anyway, Ian and Grant and a couple of the other Australian team members had been doing some sort of elaborate and insanely complicated drinking game in the corner that looked like a combination of body shots and setting things on fire, and Michael figured he should wait until that calmed down. Nicholas Sprenger already had a singed eyebrow.
Michael settled back against the bar, drank his beer, and kept an eye out for anyone else on his shortlist for the evening.
Two hours later, Grant was nowhere to be found, and Inge had had an impenetrable crowd of people six-deep around her at all times, and Ryan had talked Michael into trying the same thing the Australians had been doing, only with further modifications involving tequila worms because Ryan was crazy. And drunk. And crazy.
"You're, like, on fire," Michael told him, batting at his shirt.
"Yeah, we rocked this place," Ryan said.
"No, really, dude," Michael insisted, and Ryan said, "Oh fuck, you're right, hang on," so Michael dumped a beer on Ryan and put him out before Lenny could come over and cut them off from the bar like he had threatened to earlier.
"That was my beer," Ryan complained.
"Yeah, you're all welcome and all that." Michael drew a smiley face in the spilled liquid on the tabletop. He looked around the room. "This is Speedo, but there's, like, people from all the other companies here too."
"And MTV. It's a lovefest, dude." Ryan slapped both hands down on the table. "You know, we should totally be doing karaoke. We should start a band. You and me and. And Speedo."
Michael was simultaneously confused and intrigued by the logic of how Ryan got to that idea, enough that he didn't even protest when Ryan stole the last three swallows of Michael's drink. "Ian plays the guitar," he finally offered. "The good Ian. Not the other Ian."
Ryan's eyes got all round and he looked like he'd had the mother of all epiphanies. "He can be, like, the guitarist with mystique," he said and got to his feet, only swaying a little. "C'mon, we have to go find him. Like, now."
Michael trailed after Ryan while Ryan went looking for Ian, sipping his new drink and keeping an eye out for Grant. He didn't see him anywhere. He was concentrating so hard on looking, that he walked right into someone else and only barely kept from spilling his drink everywhere.
"Sorry," he said automatically, and then registered that it was Pieter van den Hoogenband. "Uh. Hi."
Pieter gave him a polite smile. "Hello," he said. He had very white teeth. Michael figured if Pieter ever stopped swimming, he could probably advertise toothpaste. And his mouth was kind of… mouthy. Full. Red. Though that might have just been the contrast of his teeth, all of which showed when he smiled.
He didn't realize he was staring until Pieter cocked his head slightly. "Are you well?" he said, with a slight questioning tone on the end of it.
"Uh," Michael said blankly.
"I am a golden god!" Ryan yelled, from somewhere across the room, and possibly on a balcony. Shit.
"I have to go now," Michael said, and smiled again, nervously. "Uh. Bye. Um, congratulations. Again."
"Thank you," Pieter said, sounding a little bemused. "You also. Goodbye."
Halfway across the room, Michael realized that he'd just thrown away a perfect opportunity to talk to someone who might be able to get him within Inge-range, or to go after Pieter's underwear. Except he'd never had a good read on Pieter, and Pieter didn't give much away to be read. He didn't even know where to begin; Pieter was a blank wall. With, apparently, really nice teeth.
In the meantime, there were other more pressing things. Ryan wasn't actually up on the balcony railing, but he had one leg up and it looked like he was thinking about it, or possibly deciding whether or not he needed to vomit.
"Down, dude," he told Ryan, and tugged; Ryan obligingly toppled down against Michael, putting them both in a heap against the wall. It was surprisingly comfortable, even though Ryan was heavy as fuck, and smelled like sweat and beer and singed cloth. His hair got into Michael's mouth, and he spat it out. "Pah."
"I can't find Ian," Ryan said sadly. "Our Speedo band is gonna suck."
"S'all right, man." Michael thought about getting up, but what the fuck did it matter; Grant wasn't around, and Inge was untouchable, and Pieter was weird, and he was supposed to be doing something with Matt Lauer in a couple of hours. He yawned. Sleep suddenly seemed like a good idea. "We've got. Like. Options."
"Yeah. S'cool. No band." Ryan yawned as well, contagious. "No Ian. Other Ian. We can design underwear. Instead of stealing it."
"Nnngh," Michael muttered, unwilling to think about Ian any more. Though, hey. He poked Ryan's side, fingers lingering on the waistband of his pants. "Are you…?"
"Free and easy," Ryan said with distinct pride. "Ha."
Damn. Well, it had been worth a shot.
Ryan gave off approximately as much heat as a small furnace, and his head weighed like a bowling ball on Michael's stomach. The hair helped cushion it, though. He needed a haircut, or to do something with the whole mess of curls. Michael had let Jamie cut his hair, back at trials. He missed Jamie. Pieter's hair curled when it got long, but it never looked messy. He probably used product, or some other super-expensive Dutch thing, made out of. Tulips. Or something.
The rest of the party bled out in a comfortable haze of music and lights, so many twinkling lights. Michael watched the lights and petted Ryan's hair a little until Lenny came looking for him, and loaded him into a cab that would take him off to his new room at the cruise liner.
He staggered to bed, fell asleep, and didn't wake up until Hilary came pounding on his door, yelling "Rise and shine, kiddo!"
Michael had to spend practically the whole day with Matt Lauer touring the Gulf, which consisted of water and more water; he also had to pose for another billion pictures and do a corny staged race, but he got to steer a yacht, and hey, that was something.
***
Part two to follow.
Title: Gravity's Bringing Us Down
Summary: In which underwear is stolen, the unspoken Olympic Rule is invoked, and nobody knew Pieter van den Hoogenband even had a brother.
Warning & Disclaimer: This is a work of fantasy. None of the actions portrayed by the people herein are reflective of real life.
Notes: Written for asouthernthing, in the olympic_slash ficathon, who wanted Phelps/van den Hoogenband. Set back at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Title from the Beulah song of the same name.
Part One. Part Two. Part Three.
***
Wednesday, August 25th, 10:24 AM
He came out of sleep like he was rising through water after a turn rather than a start, a continuing action rather than exploding from a standstill. Something had moved; he'd responded. The sunlight had come in through the window and was hitting him square in the face. Michael tried to hide his face in the pillow. There didn't seem to be a pillow. He tried to hide his face against something else, but it made a funny grumbling noise and shifted away. The world was against him. All he wanted to do was go back to sleep, but his bladder had definite ideas about him going elsewhere.
Michael fumbled his way out of the bed. If he kept his eyes closed, it didn't count and he wasn't really awake. He took two steps forward and walked right into a wall. Fuck.
"Fuck."
Squinting, he corrected his path course. Wall. Desk. Armchair. Several articles of clothing strewn on the ground, some of which looked like his, and some that he didn't recognize. More wall. Closed bathroom door on the other side of the room where it should have been. His mind worked on that ponderously, finally concluding that first, he'd slept in the opposite bed that he was used to, and that secondly, he wasn't in his own room, or even another Olympic Village dorm room. He was, in fact, in a strange hotel room he’d never seen before. Huh.
He scratched his balls and realized that he was also naked, something that he probably should have picked up on sooner.
The bathroom door wasn't locked, but someone was already inside. Michael could hear the shower running. It didn't help his raging need to take a leak, and it reminded him that the inside of his mouth felt like a desert, and if he didn't get some water within about ten seconds, he would die.
Someone else was in the bed that Michael had just climbed out of, facedown with nothing visible but a tousled head of short, dark hair and a long expanse of tanned back. It was a very muscular back. Distant warning bells began to go off in Michael's head. The tracksuit jacket draped over the back of the chair was bright orange and blue.
Michael was suddenly a hell of a lot more awake than he had been five seconds ago.
He glanced around the room, looking for his shirt and a more specific clue as to where the hell he was. He didn't see his shirt anywhere. That meant he'd wandered, probably drunk, through various parts of Athens without a shirt, and he'd ended up in someone else's hotel bedroom. Hopefully, everyone else had also been too drunk to notice. There was an empty schnapps bottle on the desk.
Still tip-toeing and checking the other bed over his shoulder every few seconds, Michael crept over to the desk. The ID badge was under the bottle. He lifted the bottle, grabbed the badge, and set the bottle down again. Even the quiet clink of glass against wood seemed incredibly loud, and he wasn't sure if that was his paranoia or if he was still kind of drunk. It was hard to tell.
He knew the name on the badge. He'd already seen it on the scoreboard during the past week. Fuck. He put the badge down.
There was another empty bottle halfway under the room's second empty bed. No glasses. Michael poked further under the bed. He found a pair of gray boxers that he thought were his, a pair of jeans that had to be his because they had his ID badge in the pocket, a plain black shirt that probably wasn't his, a pair of dark blue briefs that definitely weren't his, and three recently used condoms that he had no idea what to think about.
He put the boxers and his jeans on, and after some thought, the shirt as well. He edged back towards the occupied bed, cautiously checking under there. There was a half-full bottle of tequila, a sock, a Pearl Jam CD, a pair of orange and blue track pants, another pair of jeans, a pair of white boxer briefs still tangled inside the jeans, and two more used condoms.
Details were beginning to emerge in his mind, a confused jumble of weirdly vivid memories, like shards from a stained glass window. Some drinks. A bet. More drinks. Going out, weaving his way through the club to the ear-splitting beat of Greek techno. Downing Jaeger bombs; no wonder his brain was shot to shit. Big blank spot. Photos, lots of photos, a constant lightning-flash throb coming at him from all angles until blobs of light danced in front of his eyes and he could barely see. More blank. Laughing. Walking. Stumbling. Schnapps, candy-taste of it in his mouth; drinks like that always fucked him up because the sweetness always made him misjudge how drunk he was. Blank.
The hot, almost too-sweet taste of someone else's mouth, and the backwash of a shared shot. Blank. The room spinning. Panting, taking forever to come, and not sure if he ever did or if he'd been coming the whole time. Blank blank blank. Stickiness, then down and out into sleep, like stepping off a cliff into the ocean and going all the way to the bottom. Blank. Waking up.
It was way too much to think about, so Michael didn't.
Instead, he sat on the floor and tried to ignore the urge to piss. His sandals were next to the bed, set precisely side by side. After a few more minutes, he put them on, and then went back to staring blankly at the wall. He still wanted some water. The inside of his mouth tasted like a swamp, if that was even possible when it also still felt like a desert.
Man. He was definitely still kind of drunk.
There was a wallet lying under the bed. Michael hooked it out with his foot. He flipped it open and glanced briefly at the ID inside, then did a double-take and looked closer, because, whoa. What the hell?
No longer bothering to stay as quiet, Michael got up and went back to the desk to look at the first ID badge again. He squinted at it, then back at the driver's license in the wallet, sure that he was seeing some kind of misprint. He blinked hard. No. What the fuck?
The person in the bed was making sleepy but definite waking-up noises. In the bathroom, the shower turned off.
Michael jumped across the room in three giant steps, reached under the bed, grabbed the white boxer briefs, scrambled to his feet, and fled.
***
Saturday, August 21st, 11:57 PM
It was, surprisingly enough, Ian Crocker's fault.
If Ian hadn't raised the underwear possibility, they would have just ended up with some kind of regular scavenger and/or snipe hunt, Tom and Lenny's last-ditch ploy as team captains for interrupting the all-night binge drinking party, and getting them out into other areas of the Village where they could choke on their own vomit and no longer be Tom or Lenny's problem. It was really the kind of idea that should have come out of Brendan, who had a history for pulling pranks that involved speedos and underwear, or Aaron, who just plain had a history. It would have been a typical Gary Hall Jr. suggestion, except he had passed out and people were drawing on his face with sharpies. Nearly everyone else was too drunk to string coherent sentences together, let alone mastermind international panty raid challenges.
They'd been experimenting with all the different ways they could drink ouzo, and mostly discovering all the different ways they shouldn't drink ouzo, and between that and all the pent-up adrenaline and the bragging and the trashing of other countries, the challenge emerged.
"That's fucked up," Michael said, sprawled on the couch. He struggled to sit upright, and the bottle between his thighs sloshed a little on his pants. He decided he was happier staying horizontal. "Because. I mean. Relays. That would mean you'd have to sleep with four different people."
"You don't have to sleep with anyone," Ian explained patiently. "You just have to get a pair of their underwear. If they won a gold medal."
"Why?" Erik asked.
"Why not?" Ian said, and shrugged. "Be fun. It's like trading the pins. We can put them up on the wall."
"Yeah, but not a challenge," Erik said. "I dunno if you noticed this, but six of the swimming community's gold medals are lying right over there on the couch, hogging the bottle." Michael lazily flipped him off, and licked ouzo off his fingers, sticky-sweet licorice taste all over his tongue.
"So," Erik continued, "what's the payoff for getting six pairs of Michael's underwear? I mean, I want to know what it's worth if I put the effort into it."
"Hey," Michael said, sitting up in a hurry. "No one's getting six pairs of my shorts. I need those for the rest of the week."
"I was thinking it'd just be for the fun of the challenge, but we could all kick in fifty bucks or something." Ian shrugged again. "Winner takes all. And a lot of underwear, if that's your thing. You could probably ebay it, make more than you would just from the pot."
"So, what," Ryan asked. "Whoever gets the most pairs by the end of the week wins? Is that how we’re deciding the winner?"
"I've totally got this," Michael gloated. "I'm gonna own."
"No way," Aaron said. "You can't just produce your own underwear and get points for it. That totally misses the whole point of the contest."
"Who made you the Underwear Nazi?" Michael asked.
"No, he's right," Erik said. "We need to work out, like, a point system. Otherwise it's kind of unfairly weighted. Like, if you're rooming with someone, it's a hell of a lot easier to get a pair of their shorts than it is if you’re trying to get, say, Inge de Bruijn's thong."
"Dude, if you score Inge de Bruijn's thong, you should win the whole thing, game over. I don't care how many pairs of Michael's shorts you come up with." Larsen looked kind of dreamy.
"Okay, ground rules," Ian said, leaning forward. "You can't claim your own underwear. We can either open it up to all the swimming medals, not just gold, or we can let people get multiples off the same person if they won more than one medal."
"Make it both," Aaron said. "I mean, might as well go all the way, right? Gives us a bigger playing field."
"Some are worth more points, which we can figure out in a sec," Ian continued. "Winner is determined by points, not number of pairs. Um. Maybe someone should be writing this down? Tom? Lenny?"
"Dibs not me," Tom said immediately.
"Oh God," Lenny said morosely. "Leonid, Leonid, sidel by ty doma, tochil svoi veretyona."
"Thanks, Lenny," Ian said. "So. Anything else?"
"What about the way you get them? I mean, if you sleep with someone to get them, do you get more points? Because you should. Shouldn't we?" Ryan said.
"How are you gonna prove it?" Klete asked. "Matter of fact, how is any of this gonna get proved? How will we know someone's not just buying extra pairs at one of the stores or pawning their own off and claiming it's, whatever, Ian Thorpe's?"
"Thorpe's got his own damn brand, of course we're gonna know it's his. Anyway. Honor system. That's the way to go." Brendan was waving his hands around a lot. Michael kind of thought it made him look like a muppet. "Are you saying we don't trust each other?"
And then there was a lot of squabbling and numbers getting tossed around, and Michael closed his eyes and zoned out a little while listening to Lenny grumble and scribble. At some point Gary must have woken up, because Michael could dimly hear him bitching about whether or not Ryk Neethling should be worth more than Roland Mark Schoeman, working out whether a gold in a relay was worth more than an individual bronze. The couch was comfortable. Ouzo was terrible, but also awesome. Terribly awesome. Possibly awesomely terrible.
He came back to attention in time to hear Laure Manaudou announced as being worth eighty points, and to narrowly avoid spilling the rest of the bottle on his crotch when Ian poked his thigh.
"You playing, Michael?" Ian asked.
Michael blinked. "Uh, yeah, I guess." He sat up, wondering if he'd missed his own point designation. "So, like, when are we gonna start?"
"How about right now?" Aaron said, and eight different people lunged really fast into Michael's personal space all at once; there was a lot of confused shoving, and about five hands got to third base with him within three seconds. In less than a minute it was all over; Michael flailed and yelled ineffectually, while Klete and Peter held him down, and Ryan stripped off his pants.
"Fuckheads!" Michael yelled while Ryan paraded around triumphantly with Michael's underwear raised over his head, in a blatant disregard for relay teammate loyalty. "You're all going down, assholes! You were in the same fucking relay!"
"Hey, that was a group effort," Aaron said. "By all rights, you gotta split the points three ways."
Michael's only consolation was that they all jumped on Aaron right afterwards, and right after that, Gary figured out he had "i love cock" written all over his face, and the uproar doubled. So, it wasn't all bad.
Michael escaped during the confusion, freeballing it all the way back to his room where he immediately hid the rest of his underwear under Lenny's mattress. It wasn't ideal, but he'd find a better place later.
He needed a plan.
***
Wednesday, August 25th, 1:23 PM
Once he'd taken a cab back to his room on the cruise liner, showered, drank about a gallon of water, and felt a little more human, Michael went looking for Aaron back in the Village, because Aaron was good for big gay freakouts. He'd been around for Michael's first one in Sydney when Michael was flipping out over getting hard every time Ian Thorpe was in the same general vicinity. Aaron blew him, gave him a twenty minute combination lecture-puppet-show featuring three bananas and a hot dog, stuffed a handful of condoms in Michael's pocket, and shoved him in Ian's direction.
He was less help with big gay breakups, because after Melbourne when Michael and Ian's on-again off-again thing went down hard in flames and pissy interview quotes, Aaron's solution was to take him out to clubs, pour alcohol into him, and point out people that he thought looked like Ian. And when that surprisingly didn't help, his next big idea was to keep buying booze for Michael, and then offer to blow him. Which would have been great if Aaron hadn't already bought him a shitload of alcohol and left Michael clutching the toilet bowl and unable to even think about getting it up, which totally killed his self-esteem and left him feeling worse than he had when the night began.
Aaron kind of sucked sometimes.
He found Aaron down in the lounge, stretched out on the couch with his arm over his face. The television was on but muted, which was dumb because it was Rocky II, and the whole point was the music.
"Is there a rule against sleeping with someone and also their siblings?" he asked, flopping down next to Aaron.
"If you touch Hailey I'll kill you," Aaron said conversationally. "Why, what's up?"
"Nothing," Michael said. He fidgeted a little.
"Yeah, whatever," Aaron said. "What's up?"
"I think I might've slept with Pieter van den Hoogenband," Michael said. "Or maybe his brother. I'm not sure." He thought about it, flinched, and then tried to not think about it. "Uh. Maybe both of them."
"Successively or simultaneously?" Aaron asked. "By the way, that's kind of the other end of the spectrum than 'nothing', but okay, I can roll with it."
"I don't know," Michael said.
He was sore and his ass hurt. That might have told him something, except he'd swam a fuckton of races over the last week and he didn't think there was any part of him that wasn't sore, let alone any part that could have established whether or not he'd been part of a gay incestuous orgy. If it counted as an orgy.
"How many people does it take to make an orgy?" he asked, because if there was anyone who'd know, it was Aaron.
"Five and up, I think," Aaron said. "Huh. You know, I didn't know Hoogie even had a brother."
"His name is Robert," Michael offered. "He plays water polo."
That pretty much exhausted Michael's own pool of knowledge, beside the fact that he might or might not be a briefs person. Speaking of which.
"I got his underwear, though." He prodded the plastic bag he'd brought with him. "What's Pieter worth, like, sixty?"
"More. Silver relay, silver and gold individuals, world record." Aaron reached out and looked in the bag. "But if you don't remember which one of them you slept with, how do you know whose underwear you stole? These could be Roger's."
"Robert's."
"Whatever. If it's not Pieter's, it doesn't count. No evidence, no points."
"There's, like, a fifty percent chance that they're his. Anyway, water polo is almost the same as swimming," Michael argued. "It's in a pool. You swim while you do it."
"I call bullshit," Aaron sing-songed at him. "No autograph, no pictures, no video, no witness. No points for Michael!"
"Fuck you," Michael muttered, and slumped. Aaron sucked.
"Cheer up, you must've had some kind of fun. With whichever of them it was. Or both." Aaron gingerly hooked the underwear out of the bag with one finger under the waistband. "I mean, there's a bunch of little van den Hoogenbands to-be in here too."
"What?" Michael said, and then sputtered when Aaron threw the shorts in his face. "Ew, dude, gross!"
"Hey, you fucked at least one of them," Aaron pointed out. "Don't be a prude about some used briefs. Anyway, normally you'd be in violation of the siblings rule, but that's overruled by the Olympics rule since anything goes at the Olympics, as long as it stays there. Like Vegas."
"What's the siblings rule?" Michael asked. He wondered if Aaron was making this up as he went along. It wouldn't be the first time.
"You can sleep with different siblings but not when they're both in the same zipcode. Unless it's twins, because that's okay."
"Why are twins okay?"
"Because it's twins," Aaron said. "Inge has a twin. In fact, that was pretty much why the twins clause was invented."
"Okay." Michael tried to process that. "So, seriously, there's an anything goes at the Olympics rule?"
"That's the unspoken rule."
Michael frowned. "No one told me there was an unspoken rule."
"That's kind of the point of an unspoken rule," Aaron said. "Oh, and you can't get involved with the Hamm twins. They're the exception to the sibling thing and the Olympic thing. Kind of like, opposite the Inge thing."
"You're a ton of help."
Aaron frowned as well. "Wait, which is the part here you're freaking out about? The not knowing which of them it was part, or the fact that they're related part?"
"Both, kind of." Michael scratched his stomach and winced. He had what were either some extremely localized bug bites or a mouthful of hickeys around his tattoo. "Wouldn't. You know. The related thing? Wouldn't that bug you?"
"No, not really," Aaron said promptly. Michael was rethinking asking Aaron for advice on anything. He probably should have remembered that Aaron had some kind of weird thing going with Brendan and Ian that might as well qualify as incest.
"I mean, there's twins porn. That is, like, a not insubstantial niche of the porn market," Aaron continued. "So, as long as everyone's an adult and down with it, it's cool. I mean, I'm not the one related to them, so it wouldn't be my issue. No reason to freak out."
"I think I might be an accessory to a gay incestuous hook-up," Michael said. "There are plenty of reasons to freak out."
Aaron ruffled his hair. "I wouldn't worry too much. This is Greece. Practically the whole culture is built on sodomy and incest."
Michael blinked.
"For example, the creation myth of the Olympian gods deals with the union of the earth and the sky, where the earth gives birth to the sky, which then turns around and knocks the earth up so it can plonk out some Titans. And Zeus banged the hell out of most of his sisters, though his abduction of Ganymede was more like the erastes-eromenos relationship where an older man mentors a younger man so he can come of age."
Michael blinked again.
"You know, in a homosexual kind of way."
"How do you know this shit?" Michael demanded.
"I'm just pretty awesome," Aaron said, very seriously.
***
Sunday, August 22nd, 9:52 PM
Word spread quickly, because the day after the contest had been proposed, all of the women's team knew, and most of them were actively participating. Michael got cornered by Amanda Beard and Kaitlin Sandeno at the vending machines, and had the scariest two minutes of his life trying to escape, way worse than swimming the two hundred free. Hitting girls wasn't cool; Hilary and Whitney would have had his ass for even thinking about it, but holy shit, Amanda was like the fucking Terminator chick from the third movie. She just didn't stop.
Someone had gotten to a computer and printed off the swimming medal results from Yahoo; the sheet was taped to a wall in the lounge. Names that had been fully collected were scribbled out with Lenny's green sharpie; anyone who wanted to mark off a name had to get it verified by Lenny, who seemed resigned to his fate, and was keeping track of who had collected from who. Lenny kept the standings list in the back of his team captain's notebook, and refused to share it, saying he would announce the points standings every night.
Michael had sneaked a look at it earlier. Erik was currently winning, but Aaron was only in second place by three points. Amanda was right behind him by a single point, because she'd sweet-talked Ryk into giving her his underwear, plus all the other pairs of the South African men's four hundred free relay team's shorts. That hadn't been a secret, because they'd all autographed the crotches.
The girls got together and must have discussed further strategy, because suddenly every single American women's medal was off the list, multiples included; they'd all traded back and forth, and snatched the points in one fell swoop. Which sucked, but was also kind of awesome, because suddenly the wall was more interesting; it looked a lot more like a Victoria's Secret display, as opposed to the floor of a grungy college dorm room.
It wasn't safe to walk anywhere without checking to see who was lurking behind the next corner, or at least having a really good belt on. There was a brief period of time where everyone was going around commando to prevent run-by sneak attacks, but that stopped after the fifth public de-pantsing and Lenny screaming at the whole team in Russian for, like, an hour.
There were still a lot of ambushes, though, and alliances were being constantly made and broken. From the way Ian, Aaron, and Brendan were usually all huddled together, hissing urgently back and forth, Michael almost felt sorry for whatever was going to happen to Kosuke Kitajima. The poor bastard wasn't even going to know what hit him.
"I'm gonna go move in and live on one of the cruise ships," Michael told Lenny, while hiding in the room and playing Madden. It was a brief hour of free time, snatched in between getting interviewed for something and getting ready for the next thing. "Sports Illustrated said they'd pay. I swear to God, if I have to toss Ryan out of here one more time, that's totally it."
"Mm," Lenny said. Onscreen, Lenny's safety viciously took Michael's fullback down in a move that would have probably been fatal in real life. Michael suspected Lenny hadn't killed anyone on the team yet because he was funneling all his stress over the repeated public nudity into video game violence.
"I'm losing," he said. "It sucks." Michael figured it was safe to whine a little as long as Lenny still had the controller in his hands.
"Mm," Lenny said. He sacked Michael's quarterback again. "Yes, you are."
"No, I mean with the underwear thing." Michael button-mashed frantically for a few seconds. "It's not fair. I have to keep going to shit, and, you know, doing stuff and talking to people, and I don't have the time to work on it the way the others do. I was at the tennis clubs when Erik bagged Kirsty Coventry."
"I feel very badly that you are attending lavish sponsorship events and establishing your career and making hundreds of thousands of dollars," Lenny told him gravely, without looking at him. "It is a heavy burden for you, I know."
"You suck more than Aaron," Michael muttered. "And I don't have any underwear because everyone keeps fucking stealing it. I mean, that means they're probably in here touching your stuff, too."
"I gave most of my underwear to Peter," Lenny said.
"Dude," Michael said, horribly appalled.
"Carlisle," Lenny clarified. "Not Vanderkaay."
"That's kind of creepy," Michael said dubiously. "That's. I mean. I think that's above and beyond the call of duty for an agent."
"That's what makes him a good agent," Lenny said. He was finally smiling a little, though it could have been due to the fact he was whipping Michael's ass twenty-seven to three in the game. Michael was never using the fucking Skins again.
Those weren't really the points he needed to be worrying about, though. He was somewhere around seventh or eighth in the standings, and that was mostly because he'd had two pairs of leftover IT briefs back from when he and Ian were still screwing in the shower after races. He'd brought them to Athens, intending to trade for his black hoodie that Ian had swiped at Barcelona and never given back. Sticky-fingered bastard.
Lenny had also given him a pair of boxers after Michael begged him nonstop and promised all sorts of things he wasn't sure he could actually deliver for the upcoming Disney tour, like not playing his music out loud, and first dibs on the X-Box, and IHop stops on demand. Lenny had occasional bacon fixations.
The scoring system was totally convoluted anyway, a haphazard jumble of point designations that were worked out on based on medal type, number of medals, past medals, whether it was for an individual or a relay, whether there was a world record involved, procurement method, and nationality. And, in some specific cases, breast size.
Then there was the Inge clause. There'd been unanimous agreement that if anyone did manage to score just a single pair off Inge, the contest was over, wham, and whoever did it would be crowned winner by default.
With all the American women off the table, he was screwed because there just weren't that many easier options for him. Michael kept running the numbers through his head and watching Lenny toss his players around in extreme pixilated violence, until Lenny finally said, "We need to get ready for the Speedo party," and turned off the game.
"I just don't want to lose," Michael said, standing up.
Lenny smiled at him, and tapped his shoulder lightly. "Gol' na vydumku khitra."
"Whatever the fuck that means," Michael muttered, and sighed.
Speedo party. Grant would be there. Maybe Michael could appeal to him, remind him about what a good time they'd had training together on the Gold Coast. Inge would be there, too. Maybe he could pull off an upset.
Maybe pigs would fly.
***
Wednesday, August 25th, 10:47 PM
Michael spent the rest of day alternately giving interviews, freaking out in quiet corners, hiding from anyone wearing blue and orange, and barely refraining from punching Aaron, who kept sneaking up behind him and quoting lines from Goldmember.
"I vant everyone to have an Amsterdam good time," Aaron said lowly, and blew into Michael's ear.
"I will totally kill you and dump your body in the ocean," Michael threatened as calmly as he could, still trying to get his heart rate under control. "I can do it. Matt Lauer will lend me his boat."
"I love gooooooold," Aaron crooned, and then collapsed laughing.
Michael gave up holding himself back and punched Aaron; unfortunately, Aaron was so loose-limbed and helpless with laughter that it was like punching Jell-O. Ian walked in just as Michael was just looking around for something to throw at Aaron, but there actually wasn't too much to work with, except for things like his iPod that he didn't want to break, and things that would probably really hurt Aaron if they connected, and things that he couldn't actually lift.
Ian looked at Aaron, followed Michael's line of gaze, and frowned. "Are you thinking of trying to kill Aaron with the couch?"
"No," Michael lied.
"Because, you know, please don't," Ian said, and walked over. He toed Aaron carefully with his foot. "What's going on?"
"Aaron's being a jerk," Michael said.
Aaron looked up at him. "There are only two things I can't stand in this world," he said. "People who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch."
"Michael hates Aaron, and Aaron hates the Dutch," Ian said. "Okay. I guess that isn't the weirdest thing I've heard today."
"You look very toit. Yesh, toit like a toiger. Yesh, yesh, yesh," Aaron said. He looked at Ian, paused, squinted, and switched back to his normal voice. "Hey. Wait. What are you wearing?"
"Clothes," Ian said, in the careful tones of someone who was used to dealing with unpredictable people. "I wear them sometimes. When I'm not swimming. I know this is strange for you, being from California and all, but in Maine it is occasionally cold, and we get into the habit."
"You had a black Speedo shirt on before."
"Yeah, Aaron," Ian said kindly. "And sometimes I even wear different clothes. You can buy new ones in a store, or people give them to you. I switch off. It's really cool, give it a shot one of these days."
"Speaking of switching off," Aaron said. "Michael has a funny story he really wants to tell you."
"No, I really don’t," Michael said, and immediately broke for the door, but Aaron lunged and grabbed him around the waist. He kept going anyway and dragged Aaron along for a few feet, who was doing his best to be a deadweight anchor. "Fucking off, Peirsol!"
"Uh." Ian stared at both of them, and took a step back. "Wow, I probably don't want to know, but where is this going?"
"Michael possibly slept with Pieter, and possibly Pieter's brother, possibly at the same time," Aaron announced, as at the same time Michael said, "Nowhere, seriously, leggo."
"You slept with Peter?" Ian looked horribly appalled. "Why would you do that? He's your agent. He's my agent!"
"Jesus, fuck!" Michael shouted and sat down, partially on top of Aaron. "No. Not Carlisle. Van den Hoogenband. That Pieter."
"Pieter van den Hoogenband has a brother here?" Ian frowned. "I didn't know that."
"Yeah," Michael muttered, "there's a lot of that going around."
"He does water polo," Aaron added, a little muffled. "Whatcha got there?"
"More points for me," Ian said, as he pulled the green sharpie out of his pocket and scribbled on the wall sheet. He surveyed the wall critically. "There any more push-pins?"
Aaron waved his hand as Michael scrambled to his feet. "Take a couple off Hall's pair, no one needs that many pins for a piece of cloth that small."
Ian nodded. For the first time, Michael realized Ian had something rolled up under his arm, a wad of black cloth that, when Ian shook it out, was a pair of boxers. He held them up at arm's length, peering at the wall. "What do you think?" he asked, "top right corner by Rosolino's, or down by Natalie's towards the middle?"
"Depends on if you want contrast or balance," Aaron said. He pulled himself up on the couch. "Me, I go by instinct."
"You're a sensitive artist, I know," Ian said. "Hey, give me a hand?" He handed Michael a couple pushpins, and then reached up to stretch the boxers against the wall. "Okay, pin 'em in place."
Michael shrugged and started shoving pins in at random. He tried to pull at the waistband to see the brand, but Ian made an impatient noise. "C'mon, my arms are killing me," he said, and Michael snorted and stabbed the last pin into the crotch.
"Whose are those, anyway?" he asked. "How'd you get 'em?"
"I'm not giving away any secrets. That's bad tactics." Ian frowned. "Seriously, Pieter and Pieter's brother?"
"Whatever, I'll find out who you got from Lenny." Michael made another attempt at edging for the doorway, but Ian was blocking his path and Aaron was grinning again, so he let himself be towed back to the couch and trapped for what was sure to be a horribly uncomfortable discussion. Fuck.
"So, uh, did you get his underwear?" Ian asked instead, which, okay, was kind of not what Michael expected him to ask, but then again, all of this was Ian's fault in the first place.
"Yes," Michael said. "Maybe."
"No," Aaron said. "He doesn't remember, so there's no proof."
"Fucker, shut up."
Ian shrugged. "Aaron's right. Unless Lenny okayed it."
"Lenny wanted to know if I used protection," Michael said shortly. And frankly, the less about that scarring conversation, the better.
"It's not just you, he asks everyone that," Ian said absently. "Seriously, how can you not remember which one of them it was? Because, I mean, if you were that drunk, then how the hell did you get it up in the first place? More than once, even?"
"They do look a lot alike. I checked online," Aaron said helpfully. "If you remember sucking more than one dick, that probably means you slept with both of them."
Honestly, it was mostly the condoms that made Michael about ninety percent sure he'd pulled a double. He could go pretty far on tapering and adrenaline and Gatorade, and maybe there was something to the whole Flying Dutchman nickname, but five condoms were five condoms and those were just the ones he'd found under the bed.
Not like he was going to give out details like that to Ian and Aaron, though.
Michael rested his chin on one fist. "I've kind of been trying not to think about it too much."
"There's your first problem right there," Aaron said. "You gotta man up and concentrate really hard on your memories of van den Hoogenband genitalia, because otherwise I don't see the two hundred free being much fun for you after this. Did you pitch or catch?"
"You don't remember any, like, details?" Ian scratched his neck, and then gestured towards his crotch. "Not even anything, you know... intimate?"
"Even if I do, I mean. What the hell do I even do with that?" Michael flailed his hands around a little. "Like, do I try to seduce them both again to see who it compares to?"
Aaron perked up. "You remember seducing them both?"
"No, Jesus, I didn't go to the Sports Illustrated party planning on any of this! I figured Pieter could maybe get me into Inge's room, and instead I wake up and it's all Dutch incest, and there are apparently unspoken rules about that and shit!"
"Is it incest if they're just having sex with a common third?" Ian frowned. "I think that's just being really good at sharing."
"Maybe it was some kind of family bonding activity," Aaron suggested.
Michael thought he might be having another breakdown. This would be the fourth of the day, so far. He took a couple deep breaths and tried to think of Eminem lyrics, and not of all the weird places on his body where he kept finding hickeys.
"Hey Mike," Aaron said suddenly, "I talked to Ian, you know, Thorpe, not you Ian, during the Access Hollywood interview at the party last night, and he wants his underwear back."
"No way," Michael said automatically, "he's got my hoodie. And he's been an asshole about pretty much, you know, everything."
"He feels bad about that," Ian said. "I heard. You should talk to him, and clear the air."
"Heard where?" Michael asked, studying the area on the wall where he'd pinned Ian's IT underwear, both pairs together like the world's weirdest butterfly. He should have pinned them up in his bedroom, but there was pinning Ian Crocker's picture up, and then there was pinning Ian Thorpe's underwear up, and the media had already gone nuts over the former. Michael had some maybe-kind-of stalking issues; he acknowledged that to himself but hell if he had to add any more fuel to the fire.
Ian waved his hand. "Wherever. I mean, he might know what Pieter's… looks like."
"He still likes Pieter better," Michael muttered. "He'll probably just laugh."
"Would you like a shmoke und a pancake?"
"I would like you," Michael said grimly, "to shut up and never talk again. Also, your accent sucks."
"Well, then there ish no pleashing you," Aaron said. "Anyway, you could drink some more."
"Drinking got me into this." Michael turned his head and glared. "And Crocker."
"I really think your sluttish tendencies towards your competitors got you into this," Aaron said thoughtfully.
Michael punched Aaron again. There was a long silence, minus Aaron grumbling.
"This is what happens," Ian announced to the ceiling, "when the entire aquatic sports world is made up of two-beer queers."
"It’s the chlorine,” Aaron said. “It does something to your brain. If it helps, I think there’re still some straight guys in the marathon swim.”
Michael put his head back against the couch and sighed.
***
Monday, August 23nd, 1:17 AM
En Plo had strings of tiny twinkly lights everywhere, wound along the railings and looped back and forth across the ceiling, everywhere from the dance floors and balconies and down into the waterfront where the water made the reflections shimmer like thousands of little coins thrown out in handfuls. It was like walking through the sky, surrounded by stars.
It was great, except his ex was totally cockblocking him. What made it worse was that Ian wasn't even doing it deliberately. Probably.
The club itself was closed off to the media, so he'd had to wade through a crowd of camera flashes and people shouting random questions at him in a variety of accents, just to get inside. Lenny towed him along like a steadfast Russian tugboat, which was weirdly comforting, and occasionally made him stop for a picture; they made better time than if they'd just tried to push all the way through.
"Be good," Lenny said sternly as soon as they got inside. He bought Michael a beer, slapped him on the back, and abandoned him to go talk to Jenny Thompson.
Michael had zeroed in on Grant as soon as he'd gotten his drink. Unfortunately, Ian was also over there and he wasn't sure if he wanted to take Ian on outside the medal stand without someone else there who could pick up Michael's slack whenever Ian inevitably fired off one of his stupidly articulate not-precisely-an-insult-but-still comments. Normally Grant would have been fine for that; usually he didn't put up with Ian's shit either, but they were laughing together and Michael wasn't willing to risk it.
Ideally, Michael would have hauled over Lenny or Tom, who looked out for him most of the time or Klete, who had his own agenda against Ian for the four hundred free, and knew how to brawl. Or, hell, Amanda, who could probably put Ian on the run just by raising her eyebrows and smiling. But then he'd owe her a favor and that was kind of terrifying to contemplate.
Anyway, Ian and Grant and a couple of the other Australian team members had been doing some sort of elaborate and insanely complicated drinking game in the corner that looked like a combination of body shots and setting things on fire, and Michael figured he should wait until that calmed down. Nicholas Sprenger already had a singed eyebrow.
Michael settled back against the bar, drank his beer, and kept an eye out for anyone else on his shortlist for the evening.
Two hours later, Grant was nowhere to be found, and Inge had had an impenetrable crowd of people six-deep around her at all times, and Ryan had talked Michael into trying the same thing the Australians had been doing, only with further modifications involving tequila worms because Ryan was crazy. And drunk. And crazy.
"You're, like, on fire," Michael told him, batting at his shirt.
"Yeah, we rocked this place," Ryan said.
"No, really, dude," Michael insisted, and Ryan said, "Oh fuck, you're right, hang on," so Michael dumped a beer on Ryan and put him out before Lenny could come over and cut them off from the bar like he had threatened to earlier.
"That was my beer," Ryan complained.
"Yeah, you're all welcome and all that." Michael drew a smiley face in the spilled liquid on the tabletop. He looked around the room. "This is Speedo, but there's, like, people from all the other companies here too."
"And MTV. It's a lovefest, dude." Ryan slapped both hands down on the table. "You know, we should totally be doing karaoke. We should start a band. You and me and. And Speedo."
Michael was simultaneously confused and intrigued by the logic of how Ryan got to that idea, enough that he didn't even protest when Ryan stole the last three swallows of Michael's drink. "Ian plays the guitar," he finally offered. "The good Ian. Not the other Ian."
Ryan's eyes got all round and he looked like he'd had the mother of all epiphanies. "He can be, like, the guitarist with mystique," he said and got to his feet, only swaying a little. "C'mon, we have to go find him. Like, now."
Michael trailed after Ryan while Ryan went looking for Ian, sipping his new drink and keeping an eye out for Grant. He didn't see him anywhere. He was concentrating so hard on looking, that he walked right into someone else and only barely kept from spilling his drink everywhere.
"Sorry," he said automatically, and then registered that it was Pieter van den Hoogenband. "Uh. Hi."
Pieter gave him a polite smile. "Hello," he said. He had very white teeth. Michael figured if Pieter ever stopped swimming, he could probably advertise toothpaste. And his mouth was kind of… mouthy. Full. Red. Though that might have just been the contrast of his teeth, all of which showed when he smiled.
He didn't realize he was staring until Pieter cocked his head slightly. "Are you well?" he said, with a slight questioning tone on the end of it.
"Uh," Michael said blankly.
"I am a golden god!" Ryan yelled, from somewhere across the room, and possibly on a balcony. Shit.
"I have to go now," Michael said, and smiled again, nervously. "Uh. Bye. Um, congratulations. Again."
"Thank you," Pieter said, sounding a little bemused. "You also. Goodbye."
Halfway across the room, Michael realized that he'd just thrown away a perfect opportunity to talk to someone who might be able to get him within Inge-range, or to go after Pieter's underwear. Except he'd never had a good read on Pieter, and Pieter didn't give much away to be read. He didn't even know where to begin; Pieter was a blank wall. With, apparently, really nice teeth.
In the meantime, there were other more pressing things. Ryan wasn't actually up on the balcony railing, but he had one leg up and it looked like he was thinking about it, or possibly deciding whether or not he needed to vomit.
"Down, dude," he told Ryan, and tugged; Ryan obligingly toppled down against Michael, putting them both in a heap against the wall. It was surprisingly comfortable, even though Ryan was heavy as fuck, and smelled like sweat and beer and singed cloth. His hair got into Michael's mouth, and he spat it out. "Pah."
"I can't find Ian," Ryan said sadly. "Our Speedo band is gonna suck."
"S'all right, man." Michael thought about getting up, but what the fuck did it matter; Grant wasn't around, and Inge was untouchable, and Pieter was weird, and he was supposed to be doing something with Matt Lauer in a couple of hours. He yawned. Sleep suddenly seemed like a good idea. "We've got. Like. Options."
"Yeah. S'cool. No band." Ryan yawned as well, contagious. "No Ian. Other Ian. We can design underwear. Instead of stealing it."
"Nnngh," Michael muttered, unwilling to think about Ian any more. Though, hey. He poked Ryan's side, fingers lingering on the waistband of his pants. "Are you…?"
"Free and easy," Ryan said with distinct pride. "Ha."
Damn. Well, it had been worth a shot.
Ryan gave off approximately as much heat as a small furnace, and his head weighed like a bowling ball on Michael's stomach. The hair helped cushion it, though. He needed a haircut, or to do something with the whole mess of curls. Michael had let Jamie cut his hair, back at trials. He missed Jamie. Pieter's hair curled when it got long, but it never looked messy. He probably used product, or some other super-expensive Dutch thing, made out of. Tulips. Or something.
The rest of the party bled out in a comfortable haze of music and lights, so many twinkling lights. Michael watched the lights and petted Ryan's hair a little until Lenny came looking for him, and loaded him into a cab that would take him off to his new room at the cruise liner.
He staggered to bed, fell asleep, and didn't wake up until Hilary came pounding on his door, yelling "Rise and shine, kiddo!"
Michael had to spend practically the whole day with Matt Lauer touring the Gulf, which consisted of water and more water; he also had to pose for another billion pictures and do a corny staged race, but he got to steer a yacht, and hey, that was something.
***
Part two to follow.