Out of Bounds (The Summer Games #2)

  He pulled off onto the gravel drive in front of his house and I knew we only had another minute together.

  I turned and narrowed my eyes on his sharp profile. “You didn’t touch Kira once back there. Why?”

  She dripped sexuality, and if I were a guy, I would have picked her over me ten out of ten times, so why hadn’t Erik?

  A slow-spreading smirk overtook the right side of his mouth as he turned to assess me coolly. “I’ve fucked her before.”

  Ice filled my veins.

  “How many times?”

  “Get out of the truck, Brie.”

  We were right outside the guesthouse. I needed to get out and walk inside, strip off my clothes, and shower off the last thirty minutes. I needed to push the night to the back of my mind and focus on what was most important: Rio. Except, I didn’t get out of the truck. I leaned closer to Erik and got right in his face, so close he couldn’t ignore me.

  “I’m not your plaything. I’m a real person with real feelings and real desires.”

  His dark brow arched. “Are the two exclusive?”

  I reared back, eyes wide. My mouth opened, but no sound came out.

  His smirk spread wider as his gaze raked down my body, unabashed.

  “No, Brie. You’re a little doll.” His hand reached out to push a few stray hairs behind my ear. I tilted into his touch on impulse, like my body was conditioned to respond to him. “You’re so easy to control,” he continued, bending low to whisper against my lips. “If I pushed you back on this seat right now, you’d spread your legs for me.”

  I shook my head “No. I would never let you do that.”

  My words sounded strong in my head, but in the front seat of the car, they came out weak and trembling.

  He laughed and the sound nearly tore my heart in two. “You already have.”

  I scraped my fingers across his hand and flung it away from me.

  “You’re a manipulative pig,” I spat, shoving my door open and stumbling out of the car. “Do me a favor and erase tonight from your memory.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Erik

  The moment Brie stormed off, my confidence was replaced with self-loathing. It was too much, too fast, and I was reminded why she’d been off limits in the first place. I faced the facts: Brie was too young and too naive. She was mine to coach, not to fuck. She’d trusted me and I’d put her in that situation, knowing full well it would end with me touching her—with Kira touching her. I couldn’t help myself. She was too tempting to ignore: her delicate lips, her glistening skin, her face full of longing.

  Jesus, it was wrong.

  If anyone had seen us in the yoga studio, my entire life would change in one clean swipe. The Olympic Committee would pull me from my position as coach, and my critics’ quiet doubts would solidify into public I-told-you-so’s. Parents would condemn my choices, pull their children out of classes at Seattle Flyers, and I’d be left with nothing to show for it—not even Brie. She and I weren’t forever. She was a beautiful little fantasy, the kind that kept you up at night, not the kind that extended into reality.

  I’d coached for ten years and had never once come close to caring for one of my gymnasts the way I felt for Brie. She was under my skin; she’d burrowed there the first time she stepped out of that black SUV and opened her mouth. Maybe if she weren’t so sharp, maybe if her body weren’t so fucking beautiful, maybe if she backed down instead of rising to every challenge I threw her direction it would have been easier to stay away.

  If I could go back in time, I never would have touched her, simple as that. This was the most pivotal moment of my career. I had too much to prove to myself, to the world, and especially to my father.

  While growing up, he had made it very clear that his time and attention were valuable. He’d moved from Sweden to coach women’s gymnastics and was prepared to dedicate his entire life to it. Even before I was born, he was in high demand, coaching the country’s top Olympic hopefuls and building up his training facility in Texas. During the week, my mom and I rarely saw him. On the weekends, he was around even less.

  As soon as I was old enough to enroll, I begged my mom to take me up to the gym for a gymnastics class. It was there in that class that I remembered feeling my father’s love for the very first time. He dosed it out so rarely that when I did feel it, when his gaze was on me, I was blinded by it. At the time, I thought I’d fallen in love with gymnastics, but in reality, it was my father’s praise that had seduced me.

  The next day, I pleaded with my mom to take me back for another class, and from then on, I lived at the gym. Every day after school, I joined my father and practiced under his direction. I completed high school by sixteen so I could focus on gymnastics full-time and my father had never been prouder.

  I never became immune to his attention. Over the years, I built walls in my mind to protect myself from the truth, and by seventeen, I was a shell of a person. Living for so long under the pressure of my father had extinguished the native passions I’d had as a boy. I didn’t have a life or personality outside the gym. I didn’t go out; I didn’t have friends. I had no interests outside of gymnastics.

  I was in the gym every single day, working my ass off for a borrowed dream. At the time, I never considered how unhappy I was. Occasionally at night, when I had a moment alone with my thoughts, I’d consider a different life, an easier life, but I would hear echoes of my father’s voice, telling me to persist. Of course I wasn’t happy, I’d told myself. I was training seven days a week. What elite athlete enjoys the long workouts, the tears and sweat and blood?

  Besides, it wasn’t that I was depressed; I’d learned to be nothing, completely numb to the world, not happy or sad or angry. I couldn’t muster a single feeling at all, but I told myself it was okay. My father had enough passion for the both of us. He believed in me; he knew I could achieve greatness if only I kept my nose to the grindstone.

  Six months before the Olympic games, an injury in my shoulder broke through the numbness of my life. It started as acute tendinopathy, but because my daily workouts never gave it a chance to heal, it ballooned into a full-blown chronic condition. I would wake up every day feeling fine, but after warm-ups I began to feel it. Like a distant train chugging toward me on the horizon, the pain built slowly, punctuated by agonizing bursts of the horn until it came upon me in full force. In my apathy, the throbbing became the only thing my mind could focus on. My doctor said the shoulder wouldn’t heal unless I took six weeks off. My father had thrown a fit inside the doctor’s office, even slinging a potted plant across the room when the doctor had asked him to calm down. I didn’t flinch when it shattered against the wall; I just sat there, thinking to myself that I should have been embarrassed, but I couldn’t remember what embarrassment felt like. In my deadened state, I couldn’t bring myself to rage alongside him. It was like hearing an acquaintance’s parent has passed away—I recognized that an objectively sad thing had happened, but it wasn’t my heartbreak to bear.

  My dad reached back and pulled me out of the doctor’s office, shouting about how I couldn’t take six weeks off.

  The following morning, he’d walked into my room with a small bottle of pills.

  “Where’d you get these?” I asked. There was no prescription taped to the side of the blue bottle.

  “Your new doctor,” he lied, closing my fingers around the bottle. “Take one a day, two if you need it.”

  Then he turned and walked out of the room, closing the door to any discussion.

  The tiny pills rattled in the plastic bottle as I dumped one out and stared at it in the palm of my hand. Without hesitation, I swallowed it and leaned down to drink from the tap in my bathroom. I didn’t feel different right away; I laid on my bed with my eyes closed and sometime later, after the high had settled in, I realized I was smiling for the first time in years.

  The next day, I took another one, shielded by my father’s instructions. I needed the pills for my shoulder. As crazy as
he’d seemed that day in the doctor’s office, I couldn’t argue with the results. I was confident in the gym again, no longer tempering my practice to the level of pain. He refilled the bottle a second time and I gladly accepted, but the new supply didn’t last nearly as long as the first.

  I took two to three pills a day during the months leading up to the games. My father never asked questions. He refilled the bottle and dropped it on my nightstand every week. Like a hungry Pavlovian dog, the heavy rattle would make my mouth salivate, and boy was I a well-trained pet.

  I never once considered what I was doing to myself. After all, I wasn’t addicted; I was completing a course of treatment.

  Until the pills betrayed me.

  I had slowly reached the maximum dose per day, and even doubled it after reading sketchy medical forums online, but eventually the tablets became shadows of themselves, offering only memories of their former potency. I didn’t know what had changed about them. I demanded the name of the source from my father, and when he refused and told me to consider reducing the number I was taking, I took things into my own hands.

  I didn’t know how to buy drugs, but I knew 12th and Chicon was a long-rumored drug market in Austin. I drove down in my beat-up truck and looped the street a dozen times, watching the cop cars lingering around, flashing their lights at any loitering pedestrians. The tenth time I looped around the block, I caught sight of two guys in an adjacent alleyway. They were tucked away in the shadows, smoking cigarettes and speaking jocular Spanish. I pulled my car to the side of the road and hopped out just as they turned to assess me.

  They looked like the epitome of thugs: baggy pants, dark tattoos spiraling up their arms, and narrowed, wary eyes. Their skin was dark and leathery from years in the sun and as they watched me approach, I wondered if maybe I’d made the wrong decision.

  “Whatcha looking at pinche gringo?”

  I took a step back and glanced over my shoulder; there wasn’t a cop car in sight. If I needed help, no one would come. I turned back to stare at them and rolled back on my heels, finding I wasn’t really scared of them, but rather of speaking the words I’d come there to say.

  “You here to make a deal or stand there like a pussy?” the guy asked, causing his friend to cackle loudly.

  Was this really how it worked? I’d ask them for drugs and they’d hand them over, like convenience store clerks?

  The moment felt fake, like we were actors on a set rather than real people on the streets of Austin.

  Even as I answered them with a shaky voice—“Oxy”—my eyes scanned my surroundings, waiting for someone to stop and take notice. I had to be sure there were no witnesses. I’d just competed and won gold at Worlds two months earlier. I was slotted for the Olympics and if I got caught buying drugs, my career would be over. More than over, it’d go up in flames.

  “You look like a fucking narc, pretty boy,” the leader said, stepping forward and sizing me up.

  I was tall for my age and built from years of training. I knew I didn’t look seventeen, and this guy didn’t believe me even as I tried to assure him. “I’m just looking to buy oxycodone.”

  He snarled and spit in my face. “Get out of my sight, hombre.”

  His saliva didn’t faze me; I was desperate.

  “Please,” I begged, my voice strained.

  He glanced back at his friend, like Get a load of this guy, and then before I could register his movement, he reared back and punched me in the stomach so hard I keeled over, feeling vomit coat my esophagus.

  “Go get your mommy-high somewhere else, pinche cabron.”

  He reared back again, kicking his foot into the side of my lungs. I hit the concrete with a heavy thud, coughing and sputtering for breath. My palm hit the ground, trying to find balance, and I squeezed my eyes closed, prepared for more destruction.

  Their laughter sliced through the air as they turned and walked away, proud of themselves. I opened my eyes and stared sideways at their feet, opening my mouth and hearing myself wheeze in haggard breaths.

  When they turned the corner, I heard laughter. Loud cackles filled the air around me. I whipped my head around, trying to find the source, and then it slowly sank in: the realization that the sound was coming from me. It was a real, non-pill-induced laugh, followed sharply by acute pain. For so long I’d been numb, wallowing at rock bottom while being told I was reaching the top. I had always been skeptical about people who claimed to have had “eureka” moments, but there on the concrete, my nerves felt as if they were firing at all once. They’d been held back for so long and now that the dam was broken, there was no stopping them. I stayed on the concrete as my body shook with the weight of my emotions.

  Numbness had been comfortable; the ability to feel hurt like hell.

  That day, I’d gone looking for drugs, and maybe I’d found them—by the time I stumbled back to my car, I felt euphoric for the first time in 13 years.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Brie

  After convening for an emergency training summit in Seattle, WA last month, the U.S. women’s gymnastics team and new coach Erik Winter claim they are fully prepared to take the world stage. The team is set to arrive in Rio de Janeiro today, and soon the world will see if these five Olympians can meet or exceed the lofty expectations set by a strong performance at this year’s Worlds.

  After all the discussion of the eleventh hour coaching change, all eyes will likely now focus on Olympic Cinderella Brie Watson. The rookie Watson will expect to face fierce competition in pursuit of gold, but her performance at the upcoming qualifications will—

  “Guys we need to go!” Rosie yelled up the stairs.

  I tossed my phone on my bed like Rosie was standing right behind me, catching me red-handed. I didn’t read articles. I didn’t Google my name or stay up to date with what the media was writing. It was easier to stay free of distractions in a bubble of naiveté, but that morning, I couldn’t help myself. We were trending on Facebook and I’d hovered my finger over the hot link until finally, I’d clicked it. There was already enough pressure building up inside me, so reading sentences about how “all eyes will be on Olympic Cinderella Brie Watson” made my insides churn.

  I wasn’t Cinderella, and just as no fairy godmother was going to magically plop me onto the podium, no prince was going fit me for designer pumps afterward. I was on my own.

  “We have to be at the airport in thirty minutes!” Rosie yelled again, trying to catch our attention.

  “Shit.”

  I turned my attention back to my suitcase on the floor and bent down to try to yank the zipper closed. My stuff had fit in it a month ago, but now that we were leaving for Rio, my belongings had apparently doubled in size.

  “Here,” Molly said, pressing her full weight on top of it so I could zip it quickly. I shot her a thankful smile and pushed to my feet.

  “Do we have everything?” she asked, scanning the room.

  “Did you pack your dildo collection?”

  “Ha ha ha, so funny.”

  “Electric nipple clamps?”

  “Oh my god. You’re officially worse than Lexi.”

  We checked over the room one last time, confirming we weren’t leaving anything behind. The room was small, but my bunk had been cozy, and when I flipped the light switch and walked out, I felt a pang of sadness hit my stomach, almost like I was going to miss the place. Almost.

  Truthfully, I couldn’t wait to get out of Erik’s guesthouse. The last month had been difficult, not only for my head but also for my heart. I wanted to play tough for Erik. I wanted to show him I could be just as cool and indifferent as he was, but my armor was starting to chip.

  It’d been nearly thirty-six hours since we’d fought in his truck on the way back from yoga—not that I was counting. The day before, he’d given us a break from training so we could pack and prepare for Rio. Instead, I’d done a mighty fine job of wallowing in my room, trying to make sense of my life.

  I was about to go
to Rio and compete in the Olympics. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and if I was smart, I’d keep my head down and focus on gymnastics—yet thoughts of Erik consumed me. I couldn’t stop replaying our night in the yoga studio. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him hovering over me, lust smoldering behind his gaze. Every time I brushed my hand across my skin, I pretended it was his hand, claiming me as he had in front of Kira. I knew he’d been moved by the experience. His mouth had been everywhere, blazing across my skin with enough heat that even thirty-six hours later, I still felt burned.

  I’d never done anything like that before—what we’d done with Kira—and just the thought of it heated my blood. Lying there with both of their attention on me, their hands, their mouths, their dark words aimed at me and my pleasure alone—it was enough to drive me insane. Though the night had ripped me from my comfort zone, I’d let myself enjoy it because I knew Erik was there, holding me through it. He’d known I would enjoy it, and I had. I’d felt safe with him there, and yet by the end of the night, the Hyde to his Jekyll had returned. The magic was lost the moment he started his truck, and I was back to being a doll for him to either play with or pack away when I no longer convenienced him.

  “I already have a few party invites nailed down,” Lexi said.

  She’d snatched the window seat on the plane and I’d taken the seat beside her, across the aisle from Molly. Lexi was on her phone, scrolling through Facebook, accepting and declining event invitations. I was busy trying to see into first-class. Erik was up there and every time one of the flight attendants giggled, I tilted my head and tried to see past the curtain.

  “HELLO. Are you listening? Parties.”

  Molly laughed. “We have that gymnastics mixer tonight.”