Love Untouched (Unexpected) (5 page)

He smiled and just as we were about to step inside the elevator, he pulled me into a side hug. “You’re good as you are, Bee. I don’t know about you dating a short dude…Tall, short, brown, black, or white, it doesn’t matter Bee. No guy will ever be good enough for you. You know that, right?” His words conclusive, I nodded against his chest.

Milo was right. No one would ever be “good enough” for me. I didn’t want that, either. I just wanted, wished for, that one guy who was the only one for me, and I was the only one for him.

“I wish to meet you.”

~B.P., age 5, renal disorder

After the first practice swims this morning, I found myself extremely disappointed with my performance. Smith—as I liked to call my coach, Mike Smith—had reiterated that I was in my element; I just needed an extra push. I had the urge to push myself over the deepest end of the pool and not come up for air for at least three minutes.

There was no excuse for not performing to the best of my ability. Never an excuse. My lap time was off by 0.02 seconds. I knew it the moment I surfaced for air and asked Smith. The extra kick at the last turn made the difference.

“Kieran, you’re fine. You’re doing great. Stop overdoing it,” Smith said as I pulled on my goggles annoyingly.

“I could go for another ten laps,” I disagreed. I was not overdoing it. I had to correct my earlier mistakes.

Today was such an odd day. Usually, I had other swimmers swim with me but I guessed that Smith made arrangements so it would just be me today. My swim partners varied, most of them were college kids and junior athletes. It was fun racing against them. I have become closely acquainted with Tom and Joe, members of the Arizona State University Swim Team. They were cool, but it was also nice to have the pool all to myself.

I didn’t like to share it. However, being a swimmer and having to train for the World Championships and Olympics meant training with other athletes who were at their peak performance levels, so I could gauge my record times against their best. I didn’t like to compare myself to anyone. To me, my best is my best. I competed with myself.

It was now four in the afternoon. I had an hour before Milo and his training partners came in for practice. That was another thing that sucked. I was sharing Milo’s training facility.

This was his pool. Mine was in San Francisco. Unfortunately, for me, San Francisco University’s Aquatic Center planned to do some renovations right after the swim meets in Omaha, and it just happened to coincide with my training for the World Championships. Another unfortunate fact was that Arizona has one of the premiere swimming training facilities in the nation. I could have gone back to Santa Monica, where I trained the most during my high school days, but Smith and I had agreed that Arizona’s altitude and excellent resources were better. Smith had a long talk with Milo’s coach, Chuck Trevails, and the rest of the other coaches to schedule our practice times. We could, technically, practice together but Chuck and Smith agreed that it would be best not to, since we compete against each other.

“I need to cut down on the kick time. Maybe my reaction time was off by a millisecond,” I voiced out my analysis to Smith. My head was above the surface and I was pushing water out of my mouth.

He shook his head, “Stone, just do what you’ve been doing. Reaction time’s good. Great, as a matter of fact.” He called me “Stone” when he wanted to tell me to get my head out of my ass. “Come on, come up on deck. Dry land.”

Dry land was an hour of cardio, flexibility, strength, and conditioning exercises. Miles, Smith’s assistant coach, oversaw this part of my training. We were in the first phase, which mainly consisted of running, jumping, and stair-climbing routines. It helped me endure intense swim competitions, and perfect fine muscle development required to perform a variety of swim strokes. The next phase was strength for eight weeks, power training for four, and then tapering off for the last few weeks.

I jumped on deck, stretched for a few minutes, and pulled on the top right side of suit by my hip to straighten it. My sponsor, SwimFit, had improved my suit numerous times. It was a far cry from the ones I wore during my early days in swimming. Before, my suits were stretched out and when I stretched, my ass had a gaping hole after only using them for a few times. Now my suits were hydro-repellent and made of compression fabrics that molded to my body and streamlined my swim. My racing suits, the ones I could only wear during main meets, were even better. They were made of more buoyant, less permeable material. My cap, goggles, and suits were engineered with the latest technology to keep me at optimal hydrodynamic form in the water. They helped me perform at my best by reducing drag and resistance from the water, but I still had to do my job–that is to swim my best, every single time.

“Okay, two more laps and that’s it,” Smith acquiesced. He has been my coach for ten years now. He knew that I was itching to do more laps. I could count on one hand the number of times he relented, and this was one of them, so I pulled on my waterproof headphones and jacked up the volume on Beethoven’s
Zur Namensfeier
overture on my iPod.

I stepped on the block, waited for Smith’s customary headshake, and jumped off.

Off-the-block reaction time.
Excellent
.

The smell of chlorine was the first thing that hit me every time I entered the water. Ocean water smell was always best, but for me, chlorine comes second. It was where I found home. It has been my home since I was five years old. Other kids played with their friends or on the computer. The pool was my toy kingdom. The ocean was my LEGOLAND.

Good turn, Kieran
.

With the loud music still blaring in my ears, I saw Smith’s thumbs up sign as I moved up to take a breath, keeping half of my goggles in the water. The bow wave created by my head as I moved through the water pushed the water away from my mouth and allowed me to take a good breath, slicing through the water while breathing easy.

Two more laps. This was nothing. It just had to be better than the previous laps. I knew I should believe Smith when he said I was doing fine. I was fine. But fine was not my goal.

Greatness was. Always was. Always will be.

I viewed my life in eight lanes. Eight lanes of surging adrenaline. A race to the finish line. The one with the first touch wins. The one with the last touch loses.

After completing two laps of breaststroke, I felt a pain in my left shoulder. I must have pulled my rotator cuff again. I powered through my strokes, felt another twinge of pain, but kept going. Lenny, my physio, would have to loosen me up later, but I was fine. I finished the swim and sat on the edge of the pool before dry land.

“Kieran, I saw your shoulders tighten up. Is your left shoulder bugging you again?” Smith would not have missed that tiny pause, stall, in my swim. That was why he was my coach.

I nodded, wringing my head with a small towel to dry off a bit. “A little. I felt it tighten as I was completing the stroke.”

His face slowly turned to a frown. “You should have it looked at again. Schedule an appointment with our medical team right away. I won’t have you practice while you’re hurting.”

I walked towards the locker, choosing to let his words fly. “Yeah I will.”

“Stone, look at me.” His voice was stern, employing a father figure stance. He was my second father. With all the time that my actual father spent away from his own children when I was young because of his job, Smith was actually a real version of a father to me.

I looked at his short, stocky stature. He always wore the same thing—blue shirt and brown khakis. His wife, Marjorie, had once joked that she stockpiled on the shirts whenever Costco had a sale.

“I will schedule an appointment with Dr. Freehand, ok?” He was not going to let me get to Miles for dry land without securing a promise from me. From the look on his face, he was ready to call the team physician right then.

I reassured him, “I’m fine.”

He gave me a long look. “If you don’t call him by tomorrow, and I see anything when you do weights, I will personally deliver him to your doorstep.”

I nodded. “Fine. I’ll catch up with Lenny, see if physio can loosen it up and relieve it, but I will call the doctor.”

Smith had a date tonight with his wife. He was skipping his normal routine of watching over my dry land exercises with Miles. He had to pick her up from the airport since she was coming in from San Francisco, their home base.

“Ok. Tomorrow, Kirk’s coming over to make some changes on your weight training. I think this will benefit you greatly on your breaststroke.” Kirk Levitz, a strength and conditioning coach for the world’s best swimmers, became a friend of Smith when I competed at the Sarasota Pan-Am Championships. He was coming over tomorrow as a special favor to Smith.

Breaststroke was my weakness, if I had any. In my mind, it was my best stroke because I constantly wanted to improve on it. Leif Sturgen, Milo’s buddy of German descent but represented USA Swimming since he became a U.S. Citizen four years ago, was the master of the breaststroke. He only had that reign for a short time because I would soon be master of it.

All in good time, Kieran.

I nodded at Smith and walked towards the locker room. I had enough time to dry off, check with Lenny, and then Miles.

I stepped inside the locker room and heard voices.
Great
. Milo’s swim buddies were inside the room. I walked straight to my locker, nodding at Leif, and Darnell Baker, an African-American swimmer that specialized in the 50-meter freestyle.

Leif’s green eyes smiled. “Wazzup, Stone? How was practice?” He was actually friendly. He sensed that there was a lingering animosity between Milo and I, but he was civil with me.

I replied, “Ok, same old.”

Darnell chuckled. “Same old means you were burning through your laps, Stone.” I had seen him at many swim meets and he was a force to be reckoned with in the short relays.

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“Guess what,
fucker
?” Milo had entered the room. He was still in his usual street clothes, blue dress shirt and black pants. His green eyes hinted at anger, laced with a truckload of menace.

I didn’t say anything. No use responding to his bullshit.

“Hey, relax, buddy, we got practice.” Leif was trying to diffuse the situation, which would probably turn out to be another locker room incident like the one in Omaha, if Milo continued with his taunting.

I usually didn’t shower until I was done for the day but I decided to take a quick one just to relax. I opened my locker, took out my clothes, and walked into the shower stalls. It was a habit of mine to bring my clothes to the shower so I could change right away. That, and I got tired of pranksters in college who thought spraying itchy powder on my clothes was a great prank. Duncan was the mastermind of that one and I was the beneficiary of lifelong memories of the traumatic experience that had me itching all over my body for days. I learned my lesson.

I heard the guys shuffle and leave the room. As the cold water sloshed over my body, I put my hands against the wall. I couldn’t hold the position with my left shoulder for long so I leaned against the wall with my right shoulder, pushing against it. Dang, did I sprain it again? Physio better be able to fix it. I needed my body functioning at its prime at all times.

The water relaxed me. My thoughts drifted to the scene in the locker room a few minutes earlier. Milo’s hatred for me was not only evident in his demeanor. It practically radiated from him, blasted through the ceramic walls, and warped the plastic lockers with its intensity. Milo has been in the swimming circuit for as long as I have. We were never friends. We were okay with each other. We used to say hi, and since we often competed as part of the relay, we talked as swimmers. But that all changed eight months ago. Eight months ago when Dia happened. I pushed the thought out of my head. I turned off the shower, dried off, and walked outside the door to finish my training for the day.