Page 41 of Built To Perform

I could picture it, too: Adam loudly protesting at being dismissed, resolute in the face of Jefferson’s arguments. There was every possibility that it’d involved jabbing his finger into the wrestler’s brick wall chest.

“This isn’t how I wanted my first night at your place to go,” I admitted.

Jefferson shifted on the mattress. “Move over.”

It was a big bed - suitably behemoth-scale - and yet he still looked huge on it. Sitting up, with his back to the wooden headboard, he let his arm settle around my bare shoulders as I leaned in against him.

“Is this where you tell me I’m a fucking idiot?”

It was meant as a joke, or mostly anyway, but I knew he’d be able to hear the shake in my voice just as well as I did.

When he sighed I could feel it in the shift of his chest.

“There’s a reason everyone told you to stop doing it, lil bro.”

“Because Coach found out.”

“No,” he said, then chuckled. “Well, that too, maybe. But mostly because going to sketchy places on your own, and trusting people who don’t deserve to be trusted, just isn’t a great idea.”

He was right, I couldn’t argue with any of it, and yet...

“I can’t just stay in a bubble. It feels like I spent most of my life that way already.”

“You sacrifice a lot if you want to be the best at something, Eoin. The whole team has.”

I closed my eyes, frustrated. Worried, too - a new layer, on top of the simmering unease that roiled whenever I tried to remember details from the night before - that Jefferson would think my complaints meant I wasn’t as committed as I needed to be.

“I know they have. I know that’s part of it.” I paused, trying to find the right combination of words. Wishing I was as eloquent as Carlos, or as forthright as Adam. “And I wouldn’t change any of it, change anything which brought me to where I am now. You know that, right?”

He looked down at me, grinning at the serious expression I knew would be on my upturned face.

“In bed with me, y’mean?”

I nudged him in the ribs. “On the team, idiot.”

“Oh,” Jefferson said, feigning innocence, “that.”

“I mean, the bed stuff too,” I conceded, and not exactly grudgingly.

He pulled me in closer, and suddenly I was very aware of the fact that I was wearing nothing but a jock strap, and Jefferson in loose sweatpants and a sleeveless shirt. Not even so much in a sexual way - though I knew, despite everything that’d happened and that I was still struggling to process, that my body would instinctively react to his proximity if I allowed it to - as much as a reminder of the intimacy I’d found myself a part of, now.

“I’m not saying you have to live in a bubble, lil bro. What’s important is the ‘on your own’ part. We’re not just a team when we’re in training, or competitions.”

“Or in bed,” I interjected.

He laughed. “Yeah, or in bed. We’re a team, period. It isn’t that you can’t try sketchy, or fun, or exciting things: you just need to make us part of that, so you know you always have backup. Okay?”

A cloudy memory from the previous night drifted into my head.

“Did... did you beat up Harvey? The club manager, I mean.”

Jefferson’s grunt was noncommittal. “I asked him, politely, which room you were in.”

I’d watched him deal with competitors on the mat politely, too. Jefferson had a very genteel way of making sure you went down, and stayed down.

“Thanks, big bro.” I pressed myself in closer to him, enjoying the way his arm tightened around me possessively.

Chapter Twenty