Page 42 of Let the Games Begin
“How about you?” she asked gently as she took a sip of her drink. “Are you seeing anyone?”
While he and Valentina stayed friends after the breakup and hung out with each other whenever they were in the same city, they were only just reaching the point in their friendship wherethey talked to each other about their newly separate romantic lives.
“I’m… notseeinganyone,” said Zeke. It was hard to know how to explain Olivia. He rarely talked to his friends about his relationships, but he wanted to tell Valentina about Olivia. About the fact that he hadn’t stopped thinking about her all week and that, ever since they’d swapped numbers, he’d spent hours trying to think of something good to say. He could see them all getting on. But Haruki’s revelation had complicated things, so Zeke bit his tongue and turned the conversation away from himself.
“How about you?” he asked, knowing that the question held more weight when he asked her than when she asked him.
Valentina paused for a moment, and then her face broke out into a smile that told him everything he needed to know. Being happy for her was an easy feeling. If he’d told his twenty-one-year-old self that in two years Valentina would break up with him and that a year later he’d be standing in a bar with her talking about how she was seeing someone new, he wouldn’t have been able to understand it. But that night in Athens, he was just glad to hear that she was happy.
“How did you meet?”
“At a party, it was really… natural. You know when you meet someone and instantly get that sense that they’re going to become a really important part of your life?” Valentina asked. Zeke nodded. He’d felt something very similar when he’d looked at Olivia in the elevator.
“It was like that,” Valentina said, looking at a bracelet on her arm with a smile.
He’d noticed the screensaver on Valentina’s phone earlier in the evening. A photo of Valentina smiling as a girl he didn’t know kissed her on the cheek.
“Her name is Leila. She’s an English teacher from Chicago. She’s met my friends and most of my family, and I really really like her. No, I love her.” She flipped through her phone and showed him photos of them.
“I feel like I’ve spent so much of my life trying to make sure that the rest of the world approves of me, you know? Never saying anything political so I don’t offend people on either side of the spectrum, hearing from a whole committee of advisers before I make even the smallest of business decisions, and getting every single thing I post screened by at least ten people to make sure I don’t become the subject of a social media firestorm.”
Zeke nodded. He did the same thing.
“But I wish I didn’t have to do that with my personal life too. I just want to post a cute picture of me and my girlfriend at my cousin’s wedding without it being a big deal. I don’t want to be an activist or feel like I have to speak on behalf of every single queer athlete in the world. But I know that once that part of me is out there, there’s no going back,” she said, looking burdened.
“It’s special and it’s yours, just yours. You don’t owe the world an explanation or announcement,” he said, trying to be helpful. “And you don’t have to post it if you’re not ready.”
“But I don’t think I’ll ever really be ready, not for all of those opinions. I’m terrified of the headlines and the trolls the pundits are going to fire up and send my way. But the love I have for her outweighs the fear.” She showed Zeke another photo on herphone. It had been taken in low light and you couldn’t see all the details of their faces, but you could see their dresses, their arms intertwined, and the look of love on Valentina’s face as they held each other close.
“When you’re ready,” he said, squeezing her hand.
“When I’m ready,” she agreed, squeezing his back.
35Zeke
EARLY HOURS OF THE MORNING, DAY SIX OF THE 2024 OLYMPICS
“Look at you two, reconciling, planning your future together,” said Haruki, returning with a mojito for Valentina and two icy glasses of water for himself and Zeke. Zeke shook his head, and Valentina dragged them both to the center of the dance floor. Moving their bodies in time to the music amid a group of people they didn’t know, but who were just as happy to be there as they were. The room was dimly lit by brightly colored lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Everyone looked beautiful, the way that people did when their faces were filled with joy. Their bodies appeared golden under the warm lights of the dance floor, and Zeke felt a lightness that he hadn’t experienced in a long time. Zeke was easygoing, but he was far from carefree. There was always something on his mind, whether it was thinking about the past or trying to predict the future. But as they danced that night, all that mattered to him was his friends and the music.
However, something shifted in the air as soon as a stranger came over to ask Haruki for a picture. The bars and clubs they’dbeen to earlier on in the night were boring in the way that clubs that were exclusive with their guest lists were. They’d been surrounded by people who were used to being in the same room as celebrities. And while exclusive places like that were dull, the people who spent their nights there knew what it was like to feel hunted and so they never pulled their cameras out. Cassiopeia, on the other hand, was a small under-the-radar spot filled with normal Athenians. But the thing about partying in normal places was that it was only a matter of time before someone took a photo and caused a scene.
It was Valentina who noticed it first, looking startled as a bunch of new people suddenly walked into the club. Haruki’s face clouded over as he asked a random guy to stop recording a video of him in the middle of the dance floor. Zeke grimaced when a group of people began asking him about what life was like in the Village. The three of them grabbed each other and tried to subtly leave. But they were greeted by a small crowd of photographers who immediately started asking questions and taking photos. So, they ran back into the club and sweet-talked the bartender into letting them use the back door. They fled into the closest alleyway to hide from the paparazzi who had descended on Athens at the start of the summer and were now trying to find them.
It was a long, dark alleyway, lit only by the faint glow of the club’s windows and a distant lamppost on another road. In the dim light, Zeke saw his friends both as they actually were and as how the world saw them. He saw Haruki, the boyish, enthusiastic, endlessly supportive friend. But he could also see him as the heartthrob swimmer whose bare-chested shoots sent the internet into chaos. He saw Valentina as the thoughtful, deeplycompassionate person she was. But he could also see her as the elegant, otherworldly gymnast who graced magazine covers and made onlookers stop in their tracks. He wanted to stay in that moment because he could feel things changing. They were all in their early twenties, but in sports terms they were on their way to retirement. Zeke could feel how close they were getting to not seeing each other every four years in an Olympic Village or at international competitions. He knew they’d stay in touch, but, outside of the world they’d found each other in, it wouldn’t be the same. He tried his best to just soak in the moment.
“We’re going to get in so much trouble,” said Haruki. Valentina tried to call a taxi, but she didn’t have service. Haruki tried to send a text to one of his coaches, but he’d spent so much time recording Valentina’s competition and taking photos of the three of them that his battery was dead. Zeke’s phone was on 4 percent.
Technically, athletes were allowed to leave the Village. But high-profile athletes weren’t supposed to go into the city without one of the official Olympic security guards. The guards weren’t just there to look after them and protect them from overenthusiastic fans, they also came with the kind of authority that stopped the paparazzi from taking photos of them. If they’d left the Village with a guard, the guard would have driven them to wherever they wanted to go in a secure armored vehicle that could pick them up at a moment’s notice and stop them from getting stranded in a random alleyway.
The three of them had got into a lot of trouble when they’d gone out to do karaoke during the Tokyo Games. Not because they weren’t allowed to go out but because the paparazzi had caught them walking out of a club looking incredibly messy justa few days before all three of them were supposed to be taking part in the biggest competitions of their lives. Last time, their late-night adventures ended with them being grounded by their coaches for the rest of the Games. They couldn’t afford to be put on Village house arrest again.
“This could be my last Olympics,” said Valentina quietly.
“Don’t say that,” said Haruki firmly.
“I’m not being pessimistic, I’m being realistic,” said Valentina. “I’m turning twenty-five. By the time the next Olympics happen I’ll be almost twenty-nine, basically geriatric by gymnastics standards.”
“You could still out-jump all those sixteen-year-olds,” said Zeke.
