Page 74 of The Challenger
“Not good,” he says. “I spent all day on the phone.”
He brings me up to speed on the conversations with the Tennis Integrity Unit, executives from the Cherbourg event, and officials with the Challenger and ATP tours. His round of sixteen, quarterfinal, and semi-final matches had unusual bets placed on their outcomes. Large bets favoring a Chavez loss, large enough to alert the IBIA, the organization that monitors global sports betting activity. The payout on his lost semi-final alone was high five figures. The money remain in safekeeping pending the investigation outcome. None of the matches involved Nathan or Georgie, although Chavez dropped their names and passed on the details I’d shared.
When I ask if they will face any disciplinary action, he says, “If they’re clean, they’re clean. But hopefully, this smartens them up. Cheating destroys sportsmanship. And there is no way my name will be associated with it.”
I pick at the nubby fabric of the armrest, and for the first time, it doesn’t feel like I’m sitting in an electric chair. “Did you mention the stalker to them?”
“I brought it up. But it’s so far removed for them, like a fucking movie. I didn’t push it. And how do we prove anything?”
We. My heart feels like it might burst. “For sure he is part of this, and I’m going to do everything in my power to figure it out. You are not going down. I will never let that happen.”
“You can’t chase this guy, Flynn. He could be dangerous.”
The caring in his voice makes my eyes brim with tears again. “What do I have to lose?”
“Don’t talk like that,” he says, quietly. “Carmen would be bummed if anything happened to you.”
I chew on my lip. “What about you?”
His eyes flicker to the floor, and he breathes hard out his nose as if he’s trying to hold back what he wants to say. Ten seconds passing feels like an hour.
“I love you, Flynn,” he says. “I am not falling in love. I am neck-deep in love quicksand. You are the song on my playlist that I can’t stop listening to. I need you on heavy rotation, every day, for eternity.” He looks up, pain etched on his face. “But if you don’t love me, I can’t do this.”
I wandered around the Westin like a zombie last night while debating what limb I could live without if it was the price of getting another chance with him. I’ve been lied to, told too many lies, and held too much back. Lives have been lost and shattered. To stand here and be allowed to turn things around, to make peace with all the wrong, becomes a physical thing vibrating deep in my throat.
“Can we hug?” I ask.
He crosses the distance between us, approaching me like a wounded animal. When his arms engulf me in a net of forgiveness, relief briefly topples me, coming out as thick, strangled sounds that he soothes away with every stroke on my back.
For several long minutes, we do nothing but hold each other. I feel the quivering deep in his chest.
Eventually, he mumbles into my hair. “Flynn, baby. It’s going to be all right.”
“Is it?”
The words burn like acid in my throat. Chavez pulls back to free my hair from the elastic and fluff it out. He scoops my face into his hands and the tenderness in his eyes is too good to be true. Did he misremember the facts?
“We’ll figure this out, all of it,” he says. “And if we go down, we go down together, all right?"
“I didn’t realize I loved you,” I whisper. “I forgot what it felt like. But I almost walked into the Seine yesterday to stop the hurt, that’s how bad it was.”
He's silent for a long moment, searching my face. Every sweeping glance feels like a lash of fire on my skin. Rougher than sixty grit sandpaper, his voice is barely audible when he says, “Love is worth fighting for when it hurts, Flynn. That’s when you know it’s the real thing.”
His kiss melts away the numbness gathered inside me. We start slow and careful, our defenses gradually slipping away, like my clothes. Chavez strips me bare and forces me to stand naked with my legs splayed, silhouetted by cold moonlight. With the ghost of Hemingway watching, he lowers to his knees and writes his own salacious masterpiece, tongue as his tool and me his blank paper. The rush begins between my thighs, rousing and lewd, and I shudder in the darkness, fisting his hair to steady myself. He owns my soul and my mind, my ability to calculate two plus two. I beg for mercy and then for more until he demolishes me so completely that all that keeps me from collapsing is his arm circling my waist.
And his manhood has bloomed into its own poetic display, but he denies my covetous hand with a gentle slap. Instead, he lifts me into his arms like I weigh nothing, walks us into the bedroom, and lowers me onto the bed like an offering to the gods.
“Don’t move,” he whispers.
Time slows down waiting for him in the darkness. The moment stretches longer than the actual minute it is, and the lifetime of space threatens to swallow me whole. I was so careless with his heart. And with us.
When he returns from the bathroom and sees me trembling, he snuggles into the contour of my body. I can feel his erection, wrapped tight in a condom, throbbing against my thigh.
“If this is too much for you right now,” he says, “we stop.”
“No,” I tell him, staring into the dark pools of his eyes. “This is exactly what I want.”
And without another word, he rolls over and pushes into me. We give in to each other, Chavez crushing me in a deep-space assault of desperate possession. If I am his sky, he is a shooting comet ripping across my darkness, and we leave the known for the unknown, promising each other in frantic hot whispers to always be truthful even if it hurts.
