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Chapter Text

Chuck Bartowski didn’t look up as Anna Wu stepped over a pile of empty cheese puffs barrels and gave her charge one disdainful look. Unfortunately for him, it was the most cutting one in her arsenal. “God,” she said. “Letting you move back in with Morgan was a bad idea.”

He continued staring at the ceiling. “You know, there’s a crack that runs along right…there. It kind of looks like the Mississippi.”

Anna’s scowl deepened a fraction. “When was the last time you worked out?”

“I did some lifting. It looks like a gnome, don’t you think?” Chuck lazily lifted an arm—an arm that he knew the length of down to the millimeter, as the announcers loved to make a big deal over that—and pointed at the crack. “Not an angry one, thankfully. And why’s it matter? It’s not like there’s any reason to bother working out.”

“I don’t know about that.” Anna dropped the newspaper she’d brought onto his chest. “Read that and tell me there’s no reason to.”

Chuck sat up and picked up the paper. After a second, his eyes widened, but it was a long beat before he looked up. “Is this real?”

Anna’s scowl vanished as she nodded, a big grin taking its place. “Smith got caught. HGH. You’re on the team!”

Later, they decided it was prudent not to mention to the press that Chuck Bartowski, the most unlikely diver on the planet, had passed out when he first received the news that he would be going to London to compete in the Olympics.

---

“This is so great! We always dreamed this would happen and look at us. Living large, Chuck. Liv. Ing. Large.” Morgan Grimes stretched out each syllable, rolling it through his mouth and pointing his face toward the ceiling like he could feel the sunlight. “You and me, Olympians! Like we always dreamed.”

Chuck didn’t consider walking through LAX living all that large, but he was too busy digging through his bag to make sure he had all of his boarding passes—they hadn’t gotten a direct flight, they were far too small potatoes for that—to argue. “Like you always dreamed. I never had a shot in hell, and you know it.”

“Which is why you’re wearing this?” Morgan tugged at the sleeve of Chuck’s Team USA jacket. “Right. Never had a shot in hell. Uh-huh. Man, this is AWE—” He waved his arms and splashed ! ! ! ! all over. Chuck spluttered as he was showered in fruit-punch flavored energy drink.

“…some,” Morgan said, finishing his thought. His eyes widened. “Whoa, so sorry about that, here, let me—”

“No, Morgan, it’s okay, I’ve got it—”

“No, this stuff stains if you let it set in—”

Morgan wrestled the jacket from Chuck and whisked off with it, leaving the diver standing alone in the LAX airport in nothing but his jeans and a nerdy tee.

“Well, great,” he said. He pulled his cell phone out and sighed at the picture of Anna on the display. He’d taken the picture with one of his underwater cameras so that his coach, then teammate, stood by the poolside, shaking her finger and trying to look serious. “What’s up?”

“Please tell me you’ve at least left the house.”

“Big Mike told Morgan the flight was two hours earlier than it was, which means we’re barely on time for this one. We’re at the airport already. Even made it through security.”

“Where are you? I’m at the gate.”

“We’ll be there in a minute.”

“You’d better be.” Anna hung up, making Chuck shake his head. At least security had been a breeze. He’d received quite a few looks in the line for his windbreaker, and one of the TSA officers had wanted a picture with him when she found out he was competing in diving (“Not very well, probably,” Chuck had said with a rueful smile), but now, without the jacket, he seemed like just any other schmo making his way through LAX. Which was why he was surprised to hear, “Excuse me, would please you sign my cast?” from behind him. He turned.

His confusion cleared. A little girl, whose arm was in a bright purple cast, was beaming up not at him, but at two astonishingly beautiful women behind him, both of them in Team USA jackets. Though the girl had addressed the blonde—who was so pretty, it kind of hurt to look at her—the redhead of the pair stepped forward. “Certainly! How’d you get this, huh?”

Chuck didn’t hear the girl’s reply, other than the word “brother.” He had to smile. How many times had he and Ellie injured each other growing up? Especially in the pool? They’d been lucky there had never been any broken bones.

“And where’s your brother now?” the blonde asked, handing a black marker to her—friend? Teammate? Chuck didn’t recognize either of them, but that wasn’t surprising. He’d barely set foot outside of the pool or the gym since Anna had announced that he’d nabbed the spot on the diving team.

“Over there,” the little girl said, pointing to where a middle-aged woman and a young boy were waiting across the terminal. She hopped in place from excitement, making it hard for the redhead to sign her cast. “My mom says you’re going to win gold again, she can feel it.”

“Well, I hope she’s right.” The blonde glanced over at Chuck, a puzzled look on her face, and Chuck realized he’d been staring, rather idiotically.

“Me too!” The little girl looked at Chuck, barettes swinging in the wind. “Are you going to the ’lympics, too?”

Both the redhead and the blonde gave him amused looks. They were blue-eyed, very trim and fit, and dressed far more glamorously than Chuck. It was also a little unfair that so much hotness could exist in the pair of them, as they each had perfect bone structure.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you going to win the gold, too?”

Chuck bit his tongue before he could say he probably wouldn’t. Instead, he cleared his throat. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s my first time.”

“Oh!” The redhead looked suddenly delighted. “You’re an Olympic vir—”

Whoever the blonde was, she certainly had the reflexes of an Olympian, for she slapped a hand over her teammate’s mouth. “He’s going to win the gold, too,” she told the little girl. “He’s really good.”

Chuck blinked at her, suddenly wondering if he was the only athlete not to receive a dossier on all of the other Team USA members.

“Can you sign my cast, too?” the girl asked him. “Are you a gymnast? My mom says they flip really, really high in the air.”

“I flip higher,” Chuck said as he knelt to sign the cast. “I’m a diver. I jump up from really high in the air and do flips and land in the water.”

“Yeah, otherwise ouch,” the redhead, who’d retrieved use of her mouth from her teammate, said.

“My best friend, Morgan, he’s a gymnast. He does the same thing, but on a trampoline.”

The girl’s eyes widened, and Chuck hoped, if they had a trampoline, that the mom kept a close eye on her daughter in the near future.

The redhead eyed him up and down. “Diver, huh? Does that mean you wear that tiny little Speedo?”

“It’s the uniform,” Chuck said, hoping he hadn’t turned bright red. He handed the marker to the blonde as he rose and smiled at the girl. “There you go. Make sure to cheer us all on, okay?”

“‘Kay. Thanks!” The girl scampered off, leaving Chuck with his fellow Olympians.

“Sorry,” he said. “I really didn’t mean to horn in on your moment.”

The redhead shrugged. “We’re used to it. Now—”

“Chuck!” Morgan came racing out of the bathroom, the mostly clean windbreaker in his hands. “I couldn’t get all of the ! out, but it’s less pink than before, so you shoul—Oh.” He blinked in confusion at Chuck’s new acquaintances. “Hello, ladies.”

“Huh.” The redhead gave Chuck’s windbreaker a look. “You were telling the truth.”

“Why would he lie?” the blonde asked her.

The redhead shrugged as Chuck pulled on the windbreaker. “I’m Chuck Bartowski,” he said. “Diving squad. This is my buddy Morgan Grimes, trampoline wunderkind. I’m sorry I don’t know who you are—I’ve been training so long—”

“It’s all good.” The blonde gave him a smile that made his knees go weak. “I actually knew who you were. Bryce Larkin’s old partner, right? I’m Sarah Walker.”

“No, you’re not,” Chuck said automatically.

“I’m…not?” Sarah laughed, but her expression was once more puzzled.

Chuck abruptly realized what he said and slapped a hand over his own mouth.

“Well, since nobody’s going to introduce me, hi.” The redhead smirked at all of them. “I’m Carina Miller. Though I really am offended you don’t recognize us.” She flexed. “I’ve been on all of the billboards. You really can’t have missed them.”

The names Walker and Miller struck a chord, though he hadn’t paid much attention or even seen the billboards Carina had talked about. Volleyball, Chuck realized. Beach volleyball. He’d heard that Bryce’s girlfriend was an athlete, but he’d been too focused on diving to pay attention. He didn’t know if he would have even connected the girlfriend “Sarah Walker (no profile)” listed on Bryce’s Facebook page with the beach volleyball gold-medalist standing in front of him now. There was certainly no way in hell Sarah Walker should be this downright attractive. If karma were at all fair, she should have been hump-backed with a really obvious mole and possibly a club foot. But it looked like Bryce Larkin’s insane good luck streak was continuing.

“Oh. Right,” he said, shaking Carina’s hand.

“I would never forget a face like yours, milady,” Morgan said, bowing over Carina Miller’s hand and kissing it. Chuck was torn between wanting to give the Picard facepalm or sinking into the floor.

“Thanks, Martin.”

Chuck figured it was probably kinder if he hid his laughter.

“Can I walk you to your gate?” Morgan asked the pair of them.

The teammates exchanged yet another amused look. Hours on the sand courts had obviously led to the ability some athletes developed to read minds. Chuck had had that kind of partnership once. Some days, he missed it.

“Why not?” Carina asked, and threaded her arm through Morgan’s. Morgan, of course, immediately went the color of bone and proceeded to walk stiffly, his face a mask of shock that this could be happening to him. As they walked away from Chuck and Sarah, though, Carina glanced over her shoulder with yet another smirk.

“Relax, she won’t eat him alive,” Sarah said.

“If you’re sure.”

“She gets antsy before big meets. But she won’t actually, you know, hurt him or anything.” Sarah grinned at him and his knees went jittery again. “So you’re the famous Chuck Bartowski.”

“I don’t know about famous.” Chuck re-shouldered his bag and they headed down the terminal. “Infamous, maybe. And you—you’re Bryce’s girlfriend, right? I guess that’s how you know about me?”

“Ex-girlfriend. We broke up about eight months ago.” Sarah shrugged.

“Oh.” Chuck frowned. “I’m, um, sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you, but I’m not. Bryce had some pictures of the two of you diving around his apartment, which is how I recognized—” Sarah jumped and pulled a cell phone out of her pocket. “Oh, that’s my coach. I’d better go. It was very nice meeting you. Good luck out there!”

“Same to you,” Chuck said after her, but she was already hurrying away to collect Carina.

A few seconds later, Morgan wandered back with a smug look on his face. “Dude,” he said. “I have found the love of my life, man. She is perfection. She is the Mona Lisa, but in a really hot body and she plays with other women in the sand in a bikini just like the gods divined should be. She is Aphrodite, she is Helen, she is Samus and Sarah Conner combined.”

“And she probably thinks she’s way out of your league,” Chuck said, clapping him on the shoulder.

Morgan sighed. “Ain’t that always the way?” he said.

Chuck was positive that that was the last he’d see of Carina Miller and Sarah Walker. With over five hundred US athletes heading to London, the odds were stacked for it. Besides, a third-rate athlete wouldn’t have much chance to mingle with volleyball stars like them. Best to forget the meeting had even happened.

---

Thanks to a lifetime of competing, Chuck knew most of the dive team already, though he wasn’t as familiar with the swim team, who he met at orientation right after he and Morgan landed at Heathrow. He’d discovered back even before the growth spurt that had seemingly killed all of his chances and when he was still competing on the JO level, that there was a rift between divers and the swimmers. Divers complained that swimmers got the better things: more attention, better gear, bigger headlines. And while the feud wouldn’t go away any time in his life, Chuck was too dazed at the fact he’d just shaken the hands of Gabriel Phillips and Marco Cloche, two of the most decorated swimmers on the planet, to care. Nor did he care that he was expected to room with Ryan Moriarty, who’d silvered in Beijing and was expected to do even better in London. At least, Chuck thought as he unpacked his gear in Olympic Village, he wasn’t expected to room with Bryce.

“Did you hear about the cafeteria?” Morgan asked as he came into Chuck’s room without knocking. “I hear it’s completely sick—every kind of food you can think of, just in that room right there. All waiting for me.”

“Don’t you have to watch your diet?”

“Hey, man, my event’s early. And after that, I’m retiring.”

Chuck put the last of his gear away. He hadn’t opened the luggage that had been handed to him by the US Team coordinators when he’d checked in downstairs. His opening ceremony outfit was already in the closet, waiting for him and he wouldn’t need anything else until the next day. “You’re not retiring,” he said.

“You retire, I retire, that was the deal.”

Chuck raised his eyebrows. “Told Big Mike he’ll need to find somebody new to coach yet?”

“I, um, I’m getting around to it, okay?”

Chuck shook his head. “Don’t go through my suitcase,” he said.

“What, you’re leaving? I thought we’d walk around, do some stuff.”

“Anna wants to meet me for some dryland conditioning. I think she wants to wear me out before the opening ceremonies so I actually sleep tonight.”

“Chuck,” Morgan said with as much solemnity as it was possible for him to muster, “your coach is a sadist.”

“Yes, she is. Now get out so that I can change.”

“You do realize you’re going to be on TV in front of millions in a few days wearing nothing but a Speedo, right?”

“So everybody has reminded me,” Chuck said, and pushed Morgan out of the room so that he could change into his gear.

Anna put him through a light session, which surprised him, though he certainly didn’t protest. She’d been brutal in the past couple of weeks; he’d expected it to ramp up in London, as Anna tended to refocus her nerves into concentrated effort to torture him. But instead, she joked and they worked with the trampoline, doing some form-work and somersaulting after warm-ups.

“Don’t expect me to go so easy on you tomorrow,” she said while Chuck went through his cool-down.

He sighed at her.

There wasn’t time to get dinner and a nap in before they were due at the ceremony, so Chuck braved the lines at the cafeteria, loading up from the Greek section—if nothing else, he was going to enjoy the multicultural aspect of dining before he lost horribly—and setting to find a seat alone. He’d brought his iPod.

“Hey! Speedo!”

Who on earth had earned that unfortunate nickname? He hoped that the sad-sack with the unfortunate moniker was at least really skilled at his sport to make up for it. He gave a rueful headshake as he continued on with his tray.

“Yo! Cartowski!”

Startled, Chuck turned just in time to see Carina Miller waving. Sarah Walker, sitting across the table from her, leaned and muttered something to her teammate. “Oh, right,” he heard Carina say. “Bartowski! Speedo! Over here.”

Chuck was tempted to look behind him to see if there was maybe some other Bartowski that could be wandering around, but Carina and Sarah were both looking directly at him. They were dressed in what he assumed were the opening ceremonies wardrobe, for there were blue blazers over the backs of their chairs. Cautious, he wandered over. “Um, hi,” he said. “Speedo?”

“What? You don’t like it? Sit.” Carina shoved out the chair next to Sarah with her foot. “I’m bored and she’s in Serious Mode. Spare me from boredom. Where’s your little friend?”

“No idea.” Chuck, not unaware that he was the recipient of several envious looks, set his tray down next to Sarah’s, which was surprisingly empty. She wasn’t eating, but instead focused on a notebook in front of her.

“Hi,” he said.

“Ignore her,” Carina said. “They put us in Pool D, and that means Austria, which means we’ve got Sarah the Serious.”

“Oh, please,” Sarah said, looking up from the notebook to roll her eyes at her teammate. “Just because I asked you to wait until after the opening ceremony to go after that cyclist. And hi, Chuck.”

“Correction: that really cute cyclist. Did you see his thighs?” Carina directed the last question at Chuck, who choked on his water. “Magnificent. And the cyclists have the best stamina, you know.”

“Erm,” Chuck said.

“Hence,” Sarah said, though she was starting to smile, “why I asked you to wait until after the ceremony.” She looked at Chuck. “Why aren’t you in the outfit yet?”

“Just got back from training.”

“Have you seen the beret yet?” Carina asked. “It’s the best part.”

Sarah, on the other hand, asked, “You’re training already?”

“Damn,” Carina said, “even we get a day off.”

“My coach is a sadist. What’s Pool D? I thought you played volleyball.”

“Twenty-four teams,” Sarah said. “Six pools of four. Top two teams advance from each pool, and two other teams. It’s a little more complicated than that, but…”

“I’m smart, I can handle complex math,” Chuck said, grinning.

“You’d have to be. Stanford, right?” Sarah closed the notebook.

Chuck opened his mouth to answer in the affirmative, but Carina let out a shocked gasp. She was staring not at Chuck or at any of the athletes around them but at the closed notebook. “Oh, my God,” she said in a dead-on imitation of a valley girl. “You got Sarah Walker to close her famous notebook. Speedo, you must be magic. Tell me, how do you do it? Is there, like, some secret you can share?”

“Shut up,” Sarah told her friend, though she was laughing. To Chuck, she said, “Carina likes to pretend that our media profiles are real. She’s the carefree flirt, I’m the serious one.”

“But I am a carefree flirt,” Carina said. “And you are the serious one.”

“Our first match is tomorrow,” Sarah said to Chuck. “And I’m not that serious. Shut up.”

“Against Austria?”

“No, we’ll face them third. We’re up against Bulgaria tomorrow.”

“Are they tough?”

Carina snorted. Sarah shook her head, though Chuck got the feeling she was trying not to laugh. He wanted to sink into his seat a little. “I can’t say no in case they do pull off a miracle and beat us,” Sarah said, sounding apologetic now. “But…”

“Got it. Say no more. How come you didn’t get here sooner if you’re playing tomorrow?”

“We were training down in Baja California.” Sarah glared at Carina. “And somebody forgot to put gas in the car.”

“Once,” Carina said. She looked at Chuck and said, without any prompting whatsoever, “You’re a tall drink of water, aren’t you?”

“Yes, so every commentator, coach, and diver has told me since I was sixteen.” Chuck finished one plate and moved on to the next. Being surrounded by Olympic athletes was the one place in the world where he didn’t feel awkward about his eating habits. “Though they just say too tall. I’ve never had anybody put it like that.”

“I’m special,” Carina said.

“Don’t agree,” Sarah told Chuck. “It’ll go to her head.”

Carina stuck her tongue out at her teammate. “So. Gonna break the stranglehold the Chinese have on the sport, Speedo?”

“I’m just happy to be here,” Chuck said, which was the truth. Well, he was still dazed. Dazed and happy. “I’ll probably finish dead last. Bryce is the one that will end up on the medal stand.”

“Aw, c’mon.” Sarah nudged him with her shoulder and he nearly jumped out of his skin. “This is the Olympics. Anything can happen, right?”

“The too-tall diver with the too-young coach winning the gold would be the very definition of impossible, but who knows?” Chuck managed a self-deprecating smile as a voice came over the speaker, announcing that there were fifteen minutes until the athletes were expected to head for the ceremonies. He checked his watch. “Oh, hell.”

“Go on, we’ll take care of your tray,” Sarah said. Chuck scooped two of the rolls from his tray, gave them both grateful looks, and took off running for the elevator.

---

The next day, he traded with another diver for time in the pool, which annoyed Anna to no end, but it left him free to listen to the women’s beach volleyball match while he did his weight training. As promised, Sarah and Carina crushed the Bulgarian team so soundly that by the end, Chuck was almost convinced to cheer for the other team out of sympathy. The media did indeed paint Sarah as the serious one of the two, for—“That’s the first sign of emotion we’ve seen from Ice Queen all game, with that fist-pump. And of course Miller’s going nuts. Has the FIVB come down on her for her behavior at all? Oh, that dance cannot be legal”—she seemed to like rubbing it in against the other team. He let out a laugh and had the others working out beside him giving him strange looks.

Since he couldn’t get platform time until later—his event was after the synchros, which meant that Laszlo and Bryce had first rights—Chuck spent his pool time practicing his entries and layouts on the 1-meter springboard. He’d spotted Bryce at the opening ceremonies, but it had been nothing more than a glance between old teammates. How Bryce felt, Chuck didn’t know, but Chuck had turned away to wave at the crowd with the same sense of burning resentment that always accompanied seeing Bryce at meets. Bryce had even made the stupid beret look good. Everything about that man’s life was completely unfair.

After training, he hit the hot tub before he and Anna were due to review the day’s session. From the stories he’d heard from Bryce—he and Bryce hadn’t qualified for synchro for Beijing, but Bryce had qualified for springboard—a lot of athletes actually relaxed during their time at the games, while others intensified, leading to an interesting atmosphere in the Village. By all appearances, Anna was determined to make him fall into the latter category.

He had no idea what he was doing there.

Every single article written about him had focused on one thing: his height. He was too tall, they said over and over again, as at 6’1”, he was over the implicit six-foot cap on the sport. Based on his height alone, he lacked the ability for the tight control divers needed, no matter that he actually had that control and had proven it multiple times, winning a few silvers and bronzes at JO level and even the one solitary gold when he had been Bryce’s partner at ten-meter synchro.

But Bryce had said that he needed a new partner, and that Chuck should just give up diving entirely, that the reason they weren’t winning more was all on Chuck. It had shaken him. He and Bryce had been partnered off before their first day at Stanford together: they’d been roommates, they’d trained together for three and a half years. At times, each knew what the other was thinking. They communicated without speaking, they anticipated each other, they adjusted when one was having a bad day.

And then Bryce had begun training with Laszlo Mahnovski. The other man was admittedly a head-case and couldn’t dive alone to save his life, but he had an alien ability to perfectly mimic a partner in mid-air. Larkin-Mahnovski had a chance at destroying China’s dominance over the sport, and it was all the media could talk about. They loved Bryce because he was blue-eyed and dark haired and perfectly sculpted, the ideal Olympian. Women swooned, sponsors flung themselves at him. He was a shoo-in to medal in individuals.

As for Bryce’s ex-partner, the media said very little. They loved a good underdog tale, but Chuck knew most of the stories about him laid bets on how long it would take him to crack under the pressure. They brought up his height, his dive coach, his hiatus. Nobody expected him to get a medal. He was lucky that the Buy More had even been willing to sponsor him in the first place. ! ! ! ! had offered, but he just wasn’t that fond of the smell of fish.

“Bartowski, right?” The British accent made him look up; he hadn’t thought anybody outside of his own team knew his name, which was silly. The other divers in his category would have studied him just as hard as he had studied them. Indeed, he recognized Cole Barker of the British team standing at the edge of the hot tub. “Mind if I join you?”

“No, not at all. You can call me Chuck.”

“Cole,” Cole said, shaking his hand as he climbed in. The Brit immediately let out a long sigh of relief. “My coach is a beast, but he seems to have nothing on yours. Rather a bit of a dictator, that one.”

“She was scarier when she was my teammate,” Chuck said, shaking his head. “I almost want the event to be tomorrow instead of in two weeks. I want to get it over with.”

“No kidding. It’s like being at university all over again.”

Given that Chuck had gotten six straight hours of sleep the night before, it was nothing like being at university for him, but he nodded.

“Hey, you’re close with the volleyball girls from the States, yeah? I saw you talking to them in the cafeteria.”

Chuck blinked at him. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly.” After all, one airport meeting and one dinner did not a close friendship make.

“But you know them, right? You can maybe get a bloke an introduction?”

“I, uh—”

“Miller and Walker?” said a voice behind Chuck, and Chuck tensed—which didn’t feel great for his sore legs. He hadn’t even seen Bryce come in. “I wouldn’t even bother, Barker.”

Cole Barker’s friendly smile lessened a notch. “Hey, Larkin,” he said.

“You’d have better luck with Carina than Sarah,” Bryce said, coming over and hopping into the Jacuzzi in that same self-assured way he did everything. “Sarah’s too focused to pay much attention to anybody, even flying squids like you, Barker.”

Cole’s grin brightened. “Bet I can change her mind, Larkin.”

Though he really could have done with a few more minutes in the spa, Chuck abruptly rose to his feet, water streaming off of his legs. “I think I’d better go. Gentlemen.”

“Nice meeting you, Chuck,” Cole called after him. Chuck gave him a wave, didn’t look at Bryce, and left.

---

The Village’s atmosphere was immensely changeable. When Chuck and Morgan had arrived, there had been a sense of madness, as everybody had been scrambling to prepare for the opening ceremonies. Things settled down once the games actually began, but the sense of movement never left. Everywhere he looked, there were athletes, rushing to an event or training or hanging out with others. The lounges, particularly the computer lounge, were overrun with athletes of all colors, shapes, sizes, and languages. It was fascinating to behold.

He made friends easily. That had never been his problem. Even though he was a nerd, he always found people—usually interesting people—willing to hang out with him, at least for a little while. On the first official day of the games, he made friends with a few track stars from Botswana, some of the swimmers from his own team, the entire dive team save for Laszlo and Bryce, a Canadian shot-putter, and two of the Russian gymnasts. He was delighted to find out that one of the British cyclists was just as big of a nerd for Zork as he was, and stayed up until one in the morning discussing the finer points of Romero’s body of work with two of the German rowing crew.

Anna added an hour to his diving practice for that little misdemeanor.

Men’s individual diving was one of the later events, which meant he had plenty of spare time to stress out. In addition, Morgan had to train harder than he did, which left him a lot of time alone. It was during one of these times that Sarah found him.

Anna, as an apology for working him so hard, had given him the afternoon off, which left him with nothing to do. He’d intended to nap, but his roommate had sneaked one of the water polo players into their room, making that a no-go. So instead he wandered, and nearly ran into Sarah Walker coming out of the elevator.

Instead of walking right past him, she gave him a smile. “Chuck! Hey. How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know.” Chuck wiggled a hand. He hadn’t seen her since the opening ceremonies, and never without Carina. She wore jeans and a tank top now, her civilian clothes—unless the rules for beach volleyball had really changed. “Good job against Austria. That dink you made in the second set? Really sweet. Quick thinking on your part.”

“Dink?” Sarah laughed. “Look at you, studying your slang.”

Chuck felt the flush rise. “I—well—the announcer was talking about it, but I didn’t get to see what it was he meant until later, when I actually got to watch the match. But it really was an awesome move. I’m amazed you didn’t spike it into her face after that move Gerscher pulled.”

“I’m not really that fond of beer, or Gerscher, for that matter.”

“What?”

Sarah smiled. “Your event is soon, right?”

“Not really. It’s basically the last day, which means I get to wait forever.” Chuck blew out a breath. He’d managed to forget that fact for at least a couple of minutes, mostly due to Sarah’s presence, but now all of the nerves came rushing back. “My first and last Olympic event. It should be a party.”

“Oh, c’mon. You’re going to win. I told that little girl so at the airport, didn’t I?”

“I guess I can’t make you a liar.” Chuck realized that the grin on his face must look stupid, so he schooled his features into something a little lower on the psycho-maniac scale. “Thank you for the vote of confidence, but I’m trying not to get my hopes up.”

“How come you’re not in the pool?”

“Anna’s making me rest. What are you up to?” He knew there wasn’t a match for a couple of days for Carina and Sarah, as he’d been paying close attention to the game schedules, but admitting that came out a bit on the stalker side.

Sarah immediately took on a mischievous look, her eyes lighting up with amusement. It was nothing at all like Bryce had said in the hot tub, how she was nothing but focus and little else. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes,” Chuck said, though he’d never been that good at it before.

“I’m making a break for it.” Sarah smiled. “Carina’s busy with the British kayakers, so—”

“What, all of them?”

Sarah raised an eyebrow.

“Right,” Chuck said. “Silly question. Where are you going?”

“Out. Into London. If I stay in this Village or with the press or on the court a minute longer, I’m going to scream. You’re not going to tell on me, are you?”

“Never,” Chuck said. “Want some company?”

Sarah gave him a surprised look.

“You’re not the only one who’s going to scream if they have to stay here.”

“Oh. Well in that case, I’d love company,” she said. “Are you going to wear that?”

Chuck looked down at his canvas sneakers, his ancient jeans, and his faded Stanford diving tee. Every penny had been funneled back into training, so it had been ages since he’d bought new clothes, but he didn’t think he looked terrible. “This is as good as it gets, unfortunately.”

“Works for me. Let’s go.”

Chapter Text

“Let me get this straight,” Chuck said, resting his elbows on the table and leveraging his weight to shift around in the booth, “if you spike somebody, you have to buy them a six-pack?”

“Or they buy you one,” Sarah said. “It goes both ways, but basically if you hit somebody in the face, you’re forced to drink with them. Lousy, right?”

“I don’t know, I think that’s a pretty neat rule. Really reinforces camaraderie.”

Sarah gave him a droll look. “We play in bikinis. The camaraderie was there to start.”

“Point.” Chuck laughed. He didn’t know if Sarah had known of this pub beforehand or if it had just been a lucky find during their wanders all over London. It didn’t matter. If anybody asked him the next day to describe the pub, he would have only been able to describe the way the yellow light had glinted off of Sarah’s hair, or the way the fish and chips had smelled, or how he’d switched drinks with her because she liked his ale better than her cider. He’d even stopped marveling at the fact that Sarah Walker didn’t seem to mind spending time around him and genuinely seemed to be enjoying herself.

“Carina makes it a point to hit every guy we play against. Well, the cute ones,” Sarah said.

“Of course. What’s her deal? Is she really as bad as they say, or just a giant flirt like the media tries to tell everybody?”

Sarah took a long drink of ale. “This is Carina’s second time in the Olympics, and she has vowed that by the end she will have sampled an athlete from every discipline. She’s glad she nabbed some baseball players before they discontinued the event, by the way.”

“Foresight,” Chuck said, toasting her with his cider glass. “For the record, she, uh, she’s got diver marked off that score card, right?”

Sarah laughed. “Why? Too good for my partner?”

“‘Mildly terrified of’ might be a better way to put it.”

“Better be careful in case she decides to delineate between platform and springboard, though.”

“Oh, God. Though I have to say, I’m impressed you know that there’s a difference. Most people don’t.”

“Bryce,” Sarah said by way of explanation, and Chuck’s good mood deflated slightly.

“Yeah,” he said. “That guy. I forgot that you—” Dated him? Went out with him? Were together? “—knew him. It’s not weird for you, is it? Being here with his ex-partner?”

“That might have been a better question to ask before I saved your ass from falling in the Thames three hours ago.”

“Hey,” Chuck said, pointing at her with one of his fries—chips, “it’s not falling. It’s diving.”

“Call it whatever you like, it’s too cold to swim in there right now.”

“It would have been a seven. At the very least. Seven point five, even. Beat that, China.” The cider, as he was on his third glass, was providing a nice cushion against the rest of the world and things like his nerves. In addition, walking around London with Sarah had been fun. He didn’t understand at all why she continued to talk to him, but he wasn’t going to complain. He was going to seize the day, even if the day was completely surreal.

“And no,” Sarah said, “it’s not weird. It actually kind of gives us something in common.”

“Can we find something else in common?” Chuck asked, making a face. “That’s depressing.”

“I was talking about how we’ve both been dumped by Bryce, actually. Which is even more depressing to think about, actually.”

“Wait, get out,” Chuck said. “Bryce dumped you?”

“I don’t see how it’s that shocking,” Sarah said.

“It is, trust me.” Chuck scrubbed his hands through his hair. He was well-aware that if Morgan had been there, he would have happily pointed out that this was one more reason Chuck was better off without Bryce, as Bryce was clearly an idiot. Chuck was about to say so when he saw Sarah glance down, her lips twisting to one side in displeasure. Oh, he realized. This went deeper than he had thought. “Do you—is it okay if I ask why, or is that too nosy?”

“It’s not too nosy,” Sarah said, “since the answer is obvious.”

“It is?”

“Well, yeah. He dumped me because he believed the Persona.”

“The what?” Chuck asked. He’d begun to lean forward. He tried to play it cool by leaning back, but unfortunately the booth was rather small for his frame, so he just looked awkward.

“You’re an athlete, you know all about the Persona.” Sarah gestured at him as though he should understand already before she flagged the waiter down for another round. “You know, the face you put on for the press.”

“Oh, I don’t have to worry about that,” Chuck said. “NBC didn’t even do any advertising about me. It’s like they’re ashamed.”

“Their loss,” Sarah said, and Chuck felt a gush of pure happiness that he was sure made him grin like a fool. “But—look, it’s kind of hard to explain, but beach volleyball, it’s not the most legitimate sport in most people’s eyes.”

“Hey, if anybody understands that, it’s a diver with a trampoliner for a best friend.”

“We’re used to dealing with the scorn. It doesn’t bother Carina, like, at all. She’s like a duck. It slides off of her and she goes and does what she wants. I, on the other hand, developed, I guess you’d call them shields. I was always professional and polite, and people started thinking that was all I was. And eventually that grew into cold and serious, and then, you know. Everybody started calling me the Ice Queen, and it stuck.”

“Even Bryce?” Chuck blinked. “But you’re—you’re awesome! How could anybody who spent more than like a minute with you not see that?”

Sarah didn’t reply. After a second, he realized it was because she’d gone pink. Oh, crap. He’d embarrassed her.

“I didn’t mean it like—I meant it in a non-stalker way, just a sort of ‘you’re a cool person’ way, I promise. I’m not hitting on you. You really are awesome.”

“Thank you.” Sarah took a deep breath, but the waiter arrived with a new round for them both. “But anyway, I dated Bryce after we did that Nike ad together—which you apparently didn’t see, as you don’t believe I’m Sarah Walker.”

“Hey, I believe it now. I looked up your profile and everything.”

“But you’re not stalking me, right?”

“Right,” Chuck said, and figured if he kept saying it, at least one of them might believe him.

“Anyway, when I figured out that he didn’t see anything but the Persona, or didn’t want to, it was...a bad time. He figured out something was up and beat me to the punch.”

“Yeah,” Chuck said. “He does that.”

“He said it was because our schedules were incompatible, and he was kind of right, but it got me thinking that maybe I’m the one that needs to change. I should be a little less serious. Show that I’m having fun some more. I mean, it’s my second Olympics. I should enjoy it, right?”

“You don’t enjoy it?”

“I love it,” Sarah said.

“Then show the press that. It can’t be that hard. I saw a match between Japan and Canada today that distinctly involved hip-bumping and shimmying.”

“But that’s silly.”

“People having fun look silly,” Chuck said. “Didn’t you see the swim team? They did a music video for Call Me Maybe. Sure, it’s ridiculous, but they’re having fun.”

“I don’t know how to look silly,” Sarah said, her voice quieter now.

“Well, here, just do this.” Chuck flailed his arms and tried to shake his chest like he’d seen the Canadians do earlier that day, but unfortunately, his physique and coordination only made him look like he was wiggling to bad disco music.

Sarah stared at him. “And make them think I’m having a seizure?”

“I dare you to do it next match,” Chuck said, grinning at her. It would be worth it if she did, he figured, for the Youtube videos alone. And she was a great deal more coordinated—on the ground, at least—than he was, so she’d look a thousand times better doing so.

“A dare? Isn’t that a little juvenile?”

“Oh, straight to the heart,” Chuck said. Sarah laughed, and out of the corner of his eye, he spotted an old Pac-Man video game machine off to the side. “Tell you what, I’ll play you for it.”

“I’d kick your ass at volleyball.”

“I was thinking video games.” Chuck rose out of the booth and headed for the game.

“Oh, no way. If you’re anything like Bryce, you’re really good at those.” But Sarah followed him anyway.

“I’ll give you a handicap. Which, admittedly, is not something I thought I’d ever say to an Olympic athlete.” Chuck smiled to take the sting out of his words as he set a handful of coins on the game console. “Thankfully, a lifetime of growing up around the corner from the 7-11, combined with a love for Street Fighter, means I’ve got us covered.”

“Oh yeah? Where’s that 7-11 now?”

“Still in Tarzana. What about you?”

“San Diego. Though I guess my 7-11 was the McKinley High gym.” Sarah raised her eyebrows, almost ruefully. “Go Cougars.”

“Well, the beach part of your event makes more sense if you’re from San Diego. Here, I’ll go first and you can watch and see how it’s done. If you can beat my score with the handicap, you don’t have to look silly next match.”

“What handicap?”

Chuck named a number that he felt was more than fair, given that he hadn’t played Pac-Man in years.

“I think this system is skewed in your favor,” Sarah said.

The opening sequence came up, introducing the ghosts and Pac-Man, which made Sarah shake her head. Chuck just grinned and set to beating the first level, which he did without any trouble whatsoever.

“Really skewed in your favor,” Sarah corrected herself after he’d gone through three levels with hardly a blink. When he started the fourth level, though, he felt something brush his arm. Convinced it was nothing, he waved the feeling off—until Sarah did it again. She leaned in to get a better look at the console, rubbing against his arm. The scent of her shampoo was completely distracting. Chuck missed a corner and a few points when she turned to smile at him.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey! Cheating!”

“How is this cheating?”

“Just because your sport is a contact sport doesn’t make Pac-Man one!”

“Oh, so you’re complaining?” Sarah raised her eyebrows at him, and his brain stuttered as it tried to provide an answer. “I thought so. You just died, by the way.”

“Did I—crap, you’re right.” Chuck scowled and tried to concentrate harder. Sarah didn’t make it easy. In that innate way some athletes had of knowing their own power, she leaned back against the console, her hip right against the edge of his hand. She crowded him, deliberately flustering him as she pretended to pay attention to the game.

“And my sport, by the way,” Sarah said, “is not really a contact sport until Carina gets mad enough to go at the other team.”

Chuck laughed—and was promptly creamed by Inky. “Hope she at least buys them a six-pack afterward.”

“See? You’re picking up on the culture. Though you seem to be getting worse at the game.”

“Cheaters never win,” Chuck said, sticking his tongue out at her.

“Sure they do. Just look at the history of the Olympics. Oh, look at that, you lost. My turn.” She hip-checked him away from the console and laughed as he spluttered at her. But instead of putting new coins in, she swept the change up and handed it to Chuck. “I do believe that my handicap means I automatically beat you.”

“By cheating.”

“You never specified rules. But we’d better get back. The kayakers aren’t going to keep Carina occupied for much longer.”

“Oh, fine,” Chuck said as he pocketed the change. “I still think you should do the dance next match, though.”

“I’ll consider it,” Sarah said, but he figured she’d do no such thing, not that he blamed her.

---

The next day, he had an envelope with his name written on the outside waiting for him at the front desk. Inside were two tickets to the beach volleyball match between the US and Latvia, set for that evening. There was a brief note accompanying them:

“Since I cheated. — Sarah. PS: Sorry for the late notice.”

Confused about why she would apologize, Chuck glanced at the time on the tickets and swore. If he hurried, he could get a quick session in at the gym. He’d apologize to Anna later, he told himself, and dialed his phone to call Morgan. “Hey, buddy, got any plans tonight?”

---

It was chilly at the Palace Horse Guards, which explained why both teams had gone not with the regular bikini uniform but with the long shirts and pants that were, Chuck admitted, still nicely form-fitting. Morgan arrived before he did, as he’d picked up his ticket from Chuck earlier that day. “Man, you should’ve seen the last pair,” he said as Chuck settled in, clutching an Olympic-sized drink and marveling how close to the sand they were. “All legs. Legs up to their ears. And the bodies of goddesses. It was amazing.”

“I thought you were going to study this match for artistic purposes,” Chuck said.

“The female figure has never been used in art before?”

“Point. How’s your mom?”

“She’s resting after her flight. I swear, she’s more nervous about tomorrow than I am.” Morgan continued to stare down at the court. Chuck understood perfectly. He himself hadn’t taken his eyes off of Sarah yet. She was on the court, talking to Carina. The latter laughed and did a dance from foot to foot. The former’s expression never changed. She’d donned the visor and sports glasses that were part of her look, her blond hair twisted back into a single braid.

With a startled flash of insight, Chuck realized she was antsy. He didn’t know how he knew, but his hunch told him that this particular “shield,” as Sarah called it, was one designed to hide nerves. When Carina did another butt-wiggling dance, Sarah gave her partner a tiny shove. In the press box below and to the left of his seat, cameras clicked away. More fuel to add to the allegations of Sarah being Ice Queen Walker? Chuck was still frowning at them when Morgan elbowed him. “Dude. Dude!”

“What?” Chuck asked, startled. His friend had been training since the age of four for gymnastics. He was more than a little strong.

“Look!” Morgan pointed at the sand.

Chuck obeyed, and barely had the presence of mind to wave back; Sarah and Carina were waving at the pair of them in the stands. Sarah had a tiny smile on her face. On anybody else, it would have been polite. On the face of the Ice Queen, the press probably figured it was a declaration of unending joy, as the camera clicking increased tenfold—and some of the lenses pointed in Chuck’s direction.

Morgan needed no prompting to strike a pose in his Team USA windbreaker. The minute the cameras turned the other way, though, he tugged the sleeve of Chuck’s jacket. “I knew she was the woman of my dreams, Chuck. I knew it.”

“Er, yeah,” Chuck said, squirming in his seat.

“We must have made quite an impression at the airport if they remember us,” Morgan said, frowning. “I know I’m amazing and Carina Miller’s the one for me, but usually other people need some convincing. So I must have been really charming at the airport and I’ve been wracking my brains, Chuck, but I don’t think that’s the case. I mean, I’m no slouch, and you’re a handsome devil, but front row seats? I don’t think we got these because I’m so suave.”

“We got them because Sarah cheated at Pac-Man,” Chuck finally said, and had another front row seat, this time to watch his friend work through the seven stages of confusion.

“Chuck, literally nothing in that sentence makes any sense, unless—oh, my God! You’ve been seeing Sarah Walker on the sly, you dog! How long has this been going on?”

“I ran into her the other night,” Chuck said, casting a nervous look around. On the sand court, the four players were limbering up, jumping in place. “We sneaked out of the Village. I’d hardly call that seeing her on the sly.”

“I think you’re lying,” Morgan said as the Italians were announced to rousing cheers from the crowd. “That’s why you’ve been so weird lately! It’s not nerves. It’s because you’re—”

“For the United States: Carina Miller and Sarah Walker!”

On the announcer’s call, the crowd went nuts, surging to its feet. Despite Sarah’s talk about being the Ice Queen, it was obvious to see that they were the sweetheart favorites.

“—dating Sarah Walker!” Morgan finished, and three or four people around them turned to look.

“Shut up, will you!” Chuck dragged his friend down to sit. “I’m not dating Sarah Walker. She’s way out of my league, and I highly doubt she’s interested—”

“Yeah, tell me that when we’re not sitting in front-row seats she gave us.”

“She’s just being nice,” Chuck said.

“Chuck, Ice Queen Walker just smiled at you.”

“Don’t call her that.”

“Fine. But why the hell didn’t you tell me you’d seen her again?”

“Because you’ve got enough on your plate. Now, can you shut up? The national anthem’s starting, and I want to be as patriotic as I can before I lose the honor of representing the US by doing a belly-flop from the platform.”

“Oh, fine,” Morgan said, but his eyes promised loads of questions when both anthems ended.

Thankfully, before Morgan could get into too many probing details—with a few questions about Carina intermingled, of course—the Italians had the first serve and Morgan was too fascinated by bikini-clad women to secure answers to all-important questions like, “Does she smell as good as she looks? Because she looks like she smells of wintergreen, my friend.”

It really was a battle. Watching it on the monitor while he did his weight training or listening to it while on the trampoline was nothing to seeing it live, tracking the ball as it soared through the air, listening to the crowd boo and scream. Most of all, the movement got him. Seeing it from the first row as opposed to on a monitor, even an HD one, showed him just how much frenetic energy there was. Sarah, he’d learned, played in the back half of her side of the court, as the defender, leaving the slightly-taller Carina to play the part of the blocker. Not that having set positions seemed to matter, or so it seemed to Chuck. The second the ball smacked the palm of the server, all four of the women on the court began moving, and didn’t stop. It was like a dance and only they knew the steps. In addition, they always seemed to know precisely where the ball was going to go. Just when Chuck thought, no, that’s impossible, nobody could have predicted that shot, Sarah would be right there, diving in for a dig, letting Carina set it for her, and spiking it hard into the sand.

They always seemed to know where the other player was without communicating at all, too, which was spooky. The Italians chattered; Sarah and Carina remained eerily quiet, only speaking occasionally and between points. With every point lost or gained they slapped palms, first the left, then the right, then a smack to their own hip. It seemed like such an ingrained action that Chuck wondered if they even noticed that they did it anymore. He figured they probably didn’t.

The first set was tenser than he’d expected. He’d kept an eye on the other teams as much as he could, so he knew that Carina and Sarah were favored to win, but the Italians put up a fight, making Sarah and Carina go to war for every point they earned. The announcer seemed to focus on how young they all were—twenty-one and twenty-two compared to twenty-five and twenty-six—but that didn’t seem to detract from what looked to Chuck like high quality volleyball. Because Sarah was the shorter of the duo, the other team seemed to delight in serving to her. Chuck figured out early that this was because beach volleyball’s three-hit rule (dig, set, spike) meant she’d have the dig, Carina would have the set, and Sarah would have to spike it, making her both play forward from her preferred position and taking the strike position away from the more lethal Carina.

Sarah proved that she didn’t care by helping Carina win the first set for their team at 21-18. When they headed to their bench, she was breathing a little hard, but then so were all of the others. She glanced into the crowd as she headed for the sideline, and wiggled her eyebrows.

“Oh, my God,” Morgan said, gasping. “Did she just do the Bartowski eyebrow dance? She totally did!”

“The Bartowski what?” Chuck asked.

Morgan gave him a pained look. “That’s the look you totally use when you’re hitting on someone, dude.”

“What?”

But before Morgan could answer, Chuck’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out, surprised to see the Los Angeles area code and not Anna’s London-based number. “Ellie? Hey! What’s up?”

“Chuck, are you at a volleyball game right now?”

“Wh-what?” Chuck plugged his other ear to hear better. “How do you know that?”

“I’m watching the Miller-Walker game and the commentators are wondering who the mystery guy in the audience Sarah Walker keeps waving to is, and I swear, it looks just like you. He’s even got the same shirt with that blue phone box that you have. Chuck, is that you?”

Just then, the emcee put on LMFAO, which made Morgan groan and Ellie squeal. The noise of the crowd became unmistakable. “Oh, my God! The mystery guy is you! Chuck, they’re talking about you on TV.”

“Wh-what? And did you somehow miss Morgan? He’s right next to me.”

“They’re not showing Morgan, they’re showing you. Oh, you just answered your phone. Holy crap, this is freaky. Are you dating Sarah—oh, they cut away, it’s a commercial break now—how long have you been dating Sarah Walker, Chuck? What have you been doing in London? Wait, no, don’t answer that, my bill’s going to be huge if I don’t hang up. Get on Skype later and call me! I want details!”

“Uh, I will. Love you, bye!”

He lowered the phone and very, very slowly turned to look toward the press box. Indeed, there were not one but three cameras pointed his way.

“Uh, Morgan,” he said.

Morgan was too busy doing the Party Rock Anthem Dance to stop. “Yeah, Chuck?”

“You might want to stop that.”

“Why?”

“Because.” Chuck nudged his head as subtly as he could at the cameras.

Morgan glanced over, brow furrowing, until it finally clicked. “No way! That’s awesome! Hey, check it out.” Without any warning, he ripped open his Team USA windbreaker, showing the glowing circle logo in the middle of his chest. “Yes, that’s right, folks. I am Iron Man!”

Chuck only avoided facepalming at that because he knew he was now on international television.

The women jogged onto the sand, Carina and Sarah once again focused, and play resumed, but through the entire second set, Chuck felt the cameras on him. It felt like Anna’s glare after he’d spent all night playing video games instead of resting before a big practice. He tried to avoid thinking about it by focusing on the match, which Sarah and Carina made it easier to do. Whatever they’d said to each other on the break seemed to have worked: they pulled forward with an early lead. Though the Italians volleyed hard to try and catch up, it never worked. Chuck and Morgan continuously jumped to their feet and cheered, shouting whenever Carina or Sarah—but especially Sarah—made a point.

The Americans took the second set, 21-12. The instant the ball skidded into the sand, just missing the outstretched arms of Darcetti by two feet, Carina leapt into the air, fists clenched. She landed and started the Carina Miller Victory Dance, which of course involved pelvic thrusting, another fist pump, and tackling Sarah. Past history indicated that Sarah would smile a little bit before politely trotting over to shake hands with the other team.

Today, however, as Carina jumped into the air, Sarah looked into the audience and did such a perfect imitation of the dance move Chuck had done in the pub that Chuck’s mind went happily and completely blank. She tossed him a salute and then raced to hug a stunned Carina.

Chuck and Morgan stood there in completely shocked silence. For Chuck, the roaring in his head had nothing to do with the crowd but with pure and total—he couldn’t even describe the feeling.

“Uh, Chuck,” Morgan said. “I think Sarah Walker’s hitting on you.”

“I, ah, I…” Chuck said, as that was all the syllables he could seem to produce.

“Also, you might want to wipe up the drool before everybody and his brother sees it on the internet later.”

“Oh, right.” Chuck quickly ducked, hoping to avoid even more media attention. But Sarah didn’t make things easy. The minute she and Carina had shaken hands with the referees, the line judges, the aides, and once more with the other team, who looked thoroughly dejected, she took off running toward the stands. Chuck only had time to blink before she made a huge leap—and he was enveloped in a sweaty, sandy hug.

He might have heard the shutters click, but this time, he wasn’t sure. That may have just been his brain breaking. Sarah was hugging him. Sarah had leaped into the stands and had thrown her arms around him like they were old friends, and this was the most natural thing in the world. “Hi!” she said, laughing. “Sorry about the sand.”

“It—it’s okay. What—what was that for?”

“I wanted to.” She flashed him a hugely bright smile, gave Morgan a kiss on the cheek (“From Carina.”) and hopped down, heading off.

The cameras didn’t miss a second of the dazed expression on the face of one Charles I. Bartowski, whom the media had managed to identify in the second set as the men’s diving upset.

Chapter Text

Chuck whistled as he left the locker room and headed out to the training pool. He hadn’t slept much—Ellie had kept him up late, wanting to know all about what he was doing in London, or, as Awesome had put it, who he was doing in London—but that hardly seemed to matter. He finally understood the term “Cloud nine,” and he was definitely on said cloud. He had Matt and Kim’s AM/FM Sound playing on his iPod and he was eager to work on his inward dives, which was not something he could say he’d ever felt before.

Morgan might be Iron Man, but Chuck felt like he was the one that could take on the world.

The second he hit the training pool, however, reality crashed into Matt and Kim. Anna was waiting for him poolside with all of their gear set up: the cameras, the sensors, the underwater camera he would have to climb in and rig before he began diving. There were four men waiting with her, one of them holding a camera. Another held a boom pole.

“Hey,” he said, eying them warily. “What’s, ah, what’s going on?”

“Chuck, this is Matt Miller. He’s producing a segment for NBC,” Anna said, gesturing to the slightly nerdy-looking guy standing next to her. “Matt, my diver, Chuck.”

“Nice to meet you. Do we need to clear out so you can have the pool?” Chuck asked, shaking his hand.

“Chuck.” Anna cleared her throat. “The segment’s on you.”

“What?”

“We didn’t have time before the games to get some footage of you in practice,” Matt said. “We’ve gotten some of the tapes from the NCAA, but NBC likes to run pieces on the athletes, really get the audience interested in them as people. And with everything going on, people would definitely be interested in you.”

“Why?” Chuck asked before he could stop himself.

“Because you’ll be wearing the red, white, and blue, of course.” Matt’s smile came easily.

“The very tiny red, white, and blue,” said the guy with the boom pole, and the other men laughed. “But hey, more power to you. I’m Ed. That’s Buzz.” He gestured at the man with the camera. “And you recognize Casey.”

“John Casey?” Chuck asked, startled.

The man grunted.

“You’re a legend! I have always wanted to meet you! This is such an honor,” Chuck said. He knew that John Casey was giving him a look people commonly reserved for road-kill, but he didn’t care. All through his life, he’d clung to the idea that if John Casey could win silver at the Olympics, then maybe he had a chance. After all, John Casey had nearly an inch on him. The diver’s build had thickened since he’d traded diving for marksmanship, but Chuck was still completely ashamed that he hadn’t recognized the man on sight. “So, so pleased to meet you.”

Casey shook his hand. “Likewise,” he said in a neutral voice, and stepped back to give the other three a look. “Are we going to do this, or what? I’ve got to get to the shooting range.”

“Okay,” Matt said. “So if you’ll—”

“Could we have a moment?” Anna asked, giving them all a sugary smile that Chuck personally knew spelled bad news for him. She grabbed Chuck’s arm and hauled him back toward the locker room. “Hi. When were you going to tell me you had a girlfriend?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Chuck said.

Anna merely pulled out a newspaper. There was a picture, albeit a small one, of Sarah hugging him at the match. The picture’s caption identified both him and Morgan.

“Oh,” he said.

“‘Oh’ is right. Were you going to tell me about it?”

“We’re friends, as far as I know. She was excited to see me.”

“Whatever it is, it got you quite a bit of publicity.” Anna handed him another paper, this one with a front-page picture of Morgan baring the Iron Man logo to the world. “And for him, too. If I’d known that was what it was going to take, I’d have hooked you up with the gymnastics team a long time ago!”

“Can we pick a different sport, one that possibly doesn’t make me a pedophile?”

Anna grabbed the towel around his neck and yanked, pulling him down to her level. “Look,” she said, leaning in close, “I don’t care if this profile is secretly all about Sarah Walker, getting eyes on you is going to get you sponsors. Getting sponsors is going to get us better equipment. Better equipment helps you win more. So be calm, be confident, give them exactly what they want. Try not to talk about Bryce, don’t stutter, and remember to keep your toes pointed.”

“I want to work on the inward dive today,” Chuck said.

Anna blinked. “Now there’s something I never thought I’d hear you say. Damn, this bitch is good for you. Let’s go put big smiles on and convince them we’re going to win gold.”

“Which will never happen,” Chuck said.

Anna gave him The Look.

“You’re right. What was I thinking?” Chuck said immediately. “Of course we’re going to win gold. We’re going to do so great, we’ll win two golds because in an unprecedented move, the committee will decide there really needs to be one for coaches, too.”

“That’s more like it. Try not to drool over John Casey. The man makes misanthropes look friendly.”

“Yeah, and he has a gun,” Chuck said, and followed his coach out to where the crew waited.

---

“So, when did you start diving?”

Chuck wanted to squirm, but he knew that cameras picked up every little tic. They were also completely unforgiving. There was, after all, a Youtube video floating around of the argument he and Bryce had had after the meet at UC Irvine, the one that had led to their partnership disbanding. But the lights they had on him in the interview lounge felt so hot, and even though they’d powdered his face to avoid him getting too shiny, he felt as though he was about to sweat through the team shirt they’d given him before the interview.

He glanced at the camera, remembered that he wasn’t supposed to do that, and looked sheepishly at the interviewer sitting across from him. “I’m sorry, I’m not very good at this.”

“No need to apologize.” The interviewer had introduced herself, but he couldn’t remember her name. She was blonde and pretty, coiffed perfectly, while he felt like a giant in itchy clothing. “Just take a deep breath, Chuck. Try and relax and forget the camera’s there.”

That was rather impossible since it felt like a big eyeball, glaring right at him. And there were at least ten people standing around watching him, too, with headsets around their necks and bored looks on their faces.

Chuck nodded, gamely. “Okay. I’m ready.”

“Good. Now, tell me, how did you get started diving?”

“Well, my best friend, Morgan—that’s Morgan Grimes, he’s in London, too—he got started doing gymnastics really young. It’s impressive, actually. The man really excels at trampoline. When we were kids, I’d jump on there with him and try to do whatever he was doing. When I wasn’t fooling around with him, I was in the pool with my sister—Ellie, that’s, ah, Ellie Bartowski. She’s a doctor now, a neurologist, and she’s the best brain doctor on the planet, bar none. Hi, Ellie.” He waved at the camera.

“Your sister means a lot to you?” the interviewer, whom he now remembered was named Janice, asked.

He blinked, a little startled at the question. “Well, yeah,” he said. “She’s a couple years older than me, and I used to try and race her, but she was fast—still is. I switched to diving because I learned that a lot of divers spend time on the trampoline, which meant I had an excuse to hang out with Morgan, and I never looked back. But my sister, she’s the racer, and she’s the one that kind of raised me because our parents, they were never really there.”

Janice’s eyebrows rose. It felt a little fake, but Chuck didn’t want to comment. The next few questions he expected: whenever he disclosed that his parents hadn’t really been present, people tended to ask what had happened, how it had felt growing up with an older sister as a guardian, how he’d gotten over it. He’d grown accustomed to dodging those questions and generally didn’t bring it up to start. Laying it all bare on national TV felt singularly dishonest, so he was relieved when Janice decided to move on. Or he was relieved until she asked about Bryce, who he should have known would be the next subject.

“So you went to Stanford on a full ride for diving,” Janice said.

“I did, yes. I studied engineering.”

“You got the scholarship as an individual diver, correct?”

“Yeah, I guess so. There wasn’t anybody in my school that could keep up with me enough for me to do synchro.”

“Yet Coach Graham chose to have you compete solely at synchronized ten-meter with Bryce Larkin, who’s also here at the London Games.”

Chuck took a deep breath. “Yeah, Bryce is around,” he said. “And yes, it’s true that the two of us dove together for three years. I didn’t compete in individuals during that time.”

“People called it an unorthodox partnership, at the time.”

“Because I’m so tall?” Chuck asked. “I guess so.” Bryce had certainly found it unorthodox.

“There was talk of the pair of you trying for Beijing, wasn’t there?”

“There was, but our coach at the time thought we were a little young,” Chuck said. “He wanted us to have a little more experience together before we did anything crazy like try for the Olympics. We always had our eye on London, though.”

“Until your rather publicized split in your senior year of college, that is. Can you talk a little bit about that? Tell us what happened? Was it your coach’s decision?”

“It was decided mutually,” Chuck said, and that was one of the worst lies he had ever told. “Bryce is better matched with Laszlo Mahnovski. Laszlo’s famous for needing a partner to mimic. Which, I guess, is kind of why I’m in the ten meter individuals and he isn’t. The man is insanely good. Bryce is, too. Almost superhuman, the both of them.”

“So there were no hard feelings after the split?”

“I wish Bryce the best,” Chuck said, another lie.

“Was it also a mutual decision that you didn’t compete after the split?”

“I chose to focus on my studies. I kept in shape, though. My teammate at the time—she’s my coach now—Anna, she was very insistent that I keep up with the diet, the lifestyle, all of that.” All of it was complete bunk: Anna had pestered him, but Chuck had let the entire life fall to the wayside while he’d fallen into a pit of depression and homework. At least his grades had been the best they’d ever been at Stanford that final semester.

“And now, here you are, in London. There’s been some criticism that you lack experience in competing at this level. Can you address that?”

Chuck hesitated. “There are a lot of really talented divers at this level. You can’t deny that. So I consider it a great honor to even get to swim in the same pool they do. I’m looking forward to seeing what everybody brings to the platform.”

“Sources tell me you got to meet one of your idols today. John Casey, who medaled in ‘88 at just nineteen years of age, dropped by the pool to give you some tips. What was that like?”

A little frightening, Chuck thought. Casey clearly hadn’t wanted to be there. “He’s, you know, he’s been such a big role model for me as a diver because he’s tall,” he said, choosing to ignore that the man had talked in nothing but grunts and there hadn’t been a single tip to be found, save maybe “Don’t hit your head on the platform, moron,” which Chuck didn’t consider all that helpful a tip. He took a deep breath. “I’m sure by now all of the reporters are talking about how tall I am. There’s an implicit cap at six feet for diving, which makes sense. It’s harder the taller you get to make those tight, controlled dives the judges love, plus there’s that fear that you’re going to smack yourself silly on the platform. I’m almost six-two, which is really unheard of for an Olympic diver, apart from John Casey.”

“Then how do you do it?”

“Oh, me? I’m a freak of nature.” Chuck grinned. “I love being in the air so much that I think I just ignore the laws of physics the way John Casey did. It’s great. I feel like Superman.”

“I’m sure you do. Now, I want to talk about your coach.”

“Anna? Another chapter in my unorthodox life, I guess. After I took that time off, she was the first one to shove me back into the pool. Literally.”

“She’s—”

“Really young?” Chuck laughed. “Don’t let her physical age fool you. She’s like a forty-year-old in a twenty-four-year-old’s body. Her dad was Ken Wu, who took gold in ‘84, which tells you a lot. Anna learned, like, everything she knew from him, and she’s really good with technology, too, so it’s like a double-threat. Then you add her temper, and it’s a triple-threat. But I really couldn’t have a better coach. Like me, she’s really excited to be here. She swears I’m going to win gold. I think maybe she’s a little crazy, but it’s nice that she has faith.”

“I have to say, Chuck, even if you don’t win that gold, you’ve already broken a record at these games. You got beach volleyball player Sarah Walker to smile not once, but twice in the same match. She’s not known for her shows of emotion. Tell me, are you two...”

“Dating?” Chuck asked, shifting in his seat. The lights suddenly felt about ten times hotter. If he hadn’t sweated through the shirt before, it was unavoidable now. “No, no, nothing like that. We’re just friends.”

“Uh-huh.” Janice leaned in with an “It’s okay, you can tell us” smile.

“No, we really are just friends. And we’re both, you know, here, representing our country, wearing the red, white, and blue. The stripes, you could say. So it’s really nice to relax for a night, go to a game, cheer her on. I don’t know how they do it, actually. Beach volleyball is all kinds of crazy. With me, it’s one dive and I get to rest, but they’re moving around, one of them’s setting, the other’s spiking, and they’re on the ground and right back on their feet for so much of the game. Plus, all that sand. I imagine it’s hard to get out of...” Chuck abruptly realized what he was saying and flushed bright red. “Um, places.”

Thankfully, those in the room laughed, and Janice gave him a big smile.

“Sarah Walker’s nickname with the press is Ice Queen, but with you we saw the first signs of, well, goofiness. Care to explain that?”

“I don’t get the nickname, myself. I know she’s focused, but you have to be. It’s the freaking Olympics. People didn’t get here by sitting on the couch and watching the Simpsons, though man, I wish I could do that more often. I could so medal in couch potato in a heartbeat.”

The room laughed again and some of the awkward tension pulling his shoulders taut eased. He took a breath and made himself shrug. “So she’s focused. So what? I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. The thing is, she’s also fun. She’s kind and friendly, and Carina, that’s her partner, she’s great, too. I only just met them in the airport on the way out here, so you know, not an expert or anything, but they seem like remarkable women.”

“You weren’t acquainted before? After all, Sarah was romantically linked to your ex-partner up to six months ago,” Janice said.

Chuck wanted to correct her that it was eight months, but he stopped himself in time. Play it cool, Anna had said. “Cool,” he said. “Cool, cool. I don’t see Bryce much anymore.”

“So it wasn’t a Bartowski-Walker-Larkin love triangle?”

“I...no, not really. I mean, I don’t know what happened between them, but I guess part of me wants to say that it’s Bryce’s loss because hey, he is the competition. But, you know, he’s very focused, which makes sense. He’s rated like, what, third in the world right now?”

“So diving is more important than Sarah Walker?”

“Oh, hell no,” Chuck said before he could stop himself. When Janice’s eyes widened almost gleefully, he realized exactly what he had said. “I just meant he was probably busy. I haven’t talked to Sarah about why they broke up or anything because it’s not my business. But I—you know, we train so hard to get where we are. Our lives get put on hold, our families have to deal with us being gone a lot because. I understand where that would get in the way of a relationship, and I wouldn’t presume to know anything. For all I know, Sarah’s schedule is worse than—you know what, is it hot in here? I feel like it’s hot in here. Can we, uh, can we turn the AC up? Summers in London, am I right?”

“It feels perfectly cool to me,” Janice said.

“Of course it does.”

“You’re not worried that the same pressures might get in the way between you and Sarah Walker, the lifestyles of two Olympians? After all, you and Miss Walker both train year-round in Los Angeles. Are you sure you can’t work something out?”

“Sarah and I are just friends,” Chuck said. “Really. That’s all it is. She’s a lot more affectionate than the press gives her credit for, which explains the hug she gave me that you’re getting at.”

“Touché,” Janice said, laughing. “Okay, okay, since you’re blushing, I’ll stop asking you about the fetching Miss Walker.”

Twenty minutes later, Janice unlatched her claws and set him free. Chuck fled from the media room and the NBC PR department, though he sensed that was a relationship he was going to have to accept for the rest of the games. Flying under the radar had been nice while it lasted, but it looked like that phase was over. He was due to dive for a chance at an Olympic medal soon, and thanks to the fact that Sarah Walker had smiled at him, a bigger piece of the world would now be paying attention when he did.

He headed to Morgan’s preliminary trampoline meet with a bigger ball of dread than usual in his stomach.

---

“And a nearly flawless routine from Xiang!”

“Oh, damn,” Bolognia Grimes said as the Chinese gymnast threw his arms out in triumph. “I was hoping he’d land on his head. Not to hurt himself or anything, and my baby doesn’t need him to, but, well, he looks smug. Don’t you think he looks smug?”

“Very smug,” Chuck said, as he’d learned early on to simply agree with anything Bolognia said during a meet. The woman adored her son, but she’d never understood trampoline, which meant it was usually up to Chuck, and occasionally Anna, to explain what was going on. “He did some traveling, so it’s not as perfect of a routine as everybody thinks. See how long they’re taking to give the scores? They’re debating. Probably about that triple in the middle there, I don’t think his legs were that straight.”

Bolognia beamed at him. “You’re a good boy, Charles,” she said, patting his knee. “How is he?”

Chuck craned his neck to get a look. Morgan, wearing blue pants and a white top that marked him as the US’s only entry, was sitting on one of the folding chairs. His socks were blindingly white. Big Mike, his coach and stepdad, was kneeling in front of him, talking to him. Morgan nodded, his throat working.

“Nervous, but he’s doing okay,” Chuck said. “The next jumper’s pretty good, but not as good as Morgan.”

“Of course not,” Bolognia said, but she clutched Chuck’s hand through the routine.

The North Greenwich Arena, bedecked in what Morgan called a “lovely shade of rose,” was packed, which surprised Chuck. Morgan usually competed in gyms without proper safety equipment, so it was strange to see his best friend in the middle of the blue and pink arena, surrounded by officials and all of the newest safety gear. There were sixteen trampoliners competing for eight spots. The finals would take place in a few hours. Chuck and Bolognia had tickets for both, just in case, which was a good thing with the full stadium. In spite of that, though, the two seats to Chuck’s right were completely empty.

The Canadian jumper finished his routine on a strong note, but the fact that his time in flight wasn’t all that great made Chuck cheer inwardly. He noted the scores on the app on his phone he’d developed for Morgan, and waited for the next jumper.

Halfway through that routine, somebody dropped into the seat next to Chuck. He was too busy staring intently at the jumper from Belarus to pay any attention until the end, when that same person cleared her throat, and he looked over. He jumped.

“Hiya, Chuckie,” Carina said. “Sorry we’re late. Have we missed it?”

“N-no,” Chuck said. “He’s after the next guy. What—what are you doing here?”

“We’re here for Martin.” Carina looked beyond Chuck. “You must be his mom. I’m Carina.”

“Please, call me Bolognia. You are friends with my son?”

“Team USA believes in cross-athletic interest and promotion. US Beach Volleyball, here to support trampoline,” Carina said with a completely straight face.

Bolognia’s face lit up as the scores for the Belarus jumper came up and Chuck hurriedly scrambled to update the app. “Oh! You are from the volleyball team that’s going to win gold.”

“Yes, and I’m the cute one,” Carina said. “We asked, and they got us tickets to come watch.”

“Wait,” Chuck said, turning abruptly to Carina. “You said ‘we.’ Where’s Sarah?”

“Relax, Speedo, your girlfriend just went to the bathroom.”

“No, I’m right here,” Sarah said, appearing behind Carina.

Chuck stood. He had no idea why; one second he was sitting, the next he was on his feet. All three of the women gave him surprised looks, but all he could seem to do was stutter. “Hi.”

“Hey, Chuck,” Sarah said, giving him a smile.

Finally, Bolognia took pity on Chuck and half-rose to reach around him and shake Sarah’s hand. “Hello. I’m Morgan’s mom—you can call me Bolognia. I recognize you from TV, and it’s great that Morgan has so many friends other than Chuck here.”

“It’s so nice to meet you,” Sarah said. “Going, uh, to sit down there, Chuck?”

“Right.” Abruptly, he sat, so hard that he nearly missed the seat and his teeth clicked inside his head. “Hi. How are you? That match last night looked like a lot of fun.”

“Check it,” Carina said, and pulled up the hem of her shirt. A bruise spread its ugly, purple away across her hip. “Sarah has the sharpest elbows. Isn’t it great?”

“For the last time,” Sarah said, sounding like she had her teeth clenched, “you should have let me know you were going for that dig.”

“Oh, my,” Bolognia said, blinking at the bruise.

“Hold it, hold it, this is Volkoff. He’s Morgan’s major competition.” Chuck held up a hand as Alexei Volkoff, Jr. jumped onto the trampoline. Of course Volkoff pulled off a flawless routine, turning his leonine face to the crowd at the end of his routine with a huge grin. Chuck swore under his breath as the scores came back in record time. “I hate that guy.”

“Uh, so what are they judging, exactly?” Sarah asked as Volkoff took his bow.

“Three scores,” Chuck said, and kept an eye on Morgan, who was doing his pre-routine pacing, as he explained that the athletes were judged for the difficulty of their routines and the execution. They’d added time of flight as a factor into the overall score, which was a nifty addition, though it did mean he’d had to recalibrate the app he’d created. “This is the easier routine, theoretically, but they tally the scores at the end of the event and the top eight go on.”

“Okay,” Sarah said, and Bolognia shushed them. Morgan climbed onto the trampoline and walked to the center ‘X.’ He lifted his arms, presenting to the judges.

“C’mon, buddy,” Chuck said as nerves coiled in his belly. “You can do this.”

Bolognia grabbed Chuck’s hand. Morgan took another deep breath and began to jump. He’d have to jump a few times to get enough height and velocity. For a second, Chuck was worried that he was about to take an extra bounce, but Morgan sprang into his first twist. Chuck had seen the routine so many times that he knew it by heart, but that hardly mattered. He didn’t breathe as Morgan flipped through the air, socked feet landing on the trampoline.

“He’s nailing his landings,” he said.

Bolognia made the sign of the cross in reply.

“Oh, the judges liked that,” Carina said, making Chuck look over at her. “What? They did.”

Morgan made his final twist and landed, doing the tiny hop trampoliners did to stop their bouncing. In practice, Morgan usually bounced off of the trampoline, but that would have docked him serious points. He climbed down and Big Mike slapped him on the back, which made Chuck wince in sympathy; the ex-gymnast had a fist like a meat hammer.

“How’d he do?” Sarah asked, leaning around Carina. “He did well, right? The crowd seemed to really like it.”

Chuck checked his app. “With these judges, and from what I saw, he’ll get 52, easy. His difficulty score was a little lower than, say, Volkoff’s, but his execution was pretty good. I don’t know about his T-score, though.”

“I don’t envy you the whole waiting for your score thing. With us, it’s bam, point. We kind of know right away,” Carina said.

“But we’re also not thirty feet up in the air,” Sarah said.

“Speak for yourself. You saw the vertical I was getting yesterday.”

“Uh-huh,” Sarah said, and Morgan’s scores ran across the marquee. Chuck put these into his app and let out a whoop. In the athlete’s area, Morgan did a fist-pump. Chuck mirrored the move from the stands.

“He’s in third place,” Chuck said. “That’s good. That’s really, really good. Yeah, buddy!” Morgan must have heard, for he gave a little bow to their section—and did a double-take, obviously at seeing Sarah and Carina.

“Good to know you’re not the only one that does that,” Carina said to Chuck. “So what now?”

“Three competitors left for the first round. After that, we start praying for people to land on their heads,” Chuck said.

“But not to hurt themselves,” Bolognia said, casting a glance at the ceiling as though she expected to be judged at any second.

Carina and Sarah laughed. “We can do that,” Sarah said.

---

The Russian anthem poured over the stadium, reverberating off of every flat surface so that it swelled and surrounded everybody watching the medal ceremony. The air was one of solemnity as the flags were raised. Three flags, Chuck thought. Three athletes. Three medals. One gold. One anthem.

Whose anthem would play after he donned his uniform and made the climb up those steps to the top of the platform?

A couple rows away, some of the Russian congregation began to sing. Chuck had to admit that the Russian anthem was a rather inspiring one. He wasn’t sure if it was quite meant to be belted at the top of one’s lungs, but he certainly didn’t blame the Russians as the red, white, and blue bold striped flag led the crawling ascension toward the ceiling. Alexei Volkoff, Jr. had won the gold medal, sweeping the rest of the competition off of its feet.

But right next to that red, white, and blue flag was another. The blue was a little darker, but the red and white stripes were unmistakable. And they were the reason that Bolognia Grimes had tears in her eyes.

On the medalist podium, Morgan stood with the winner’s bouquet in one hand, the other reverently holding his silver medal. It made Chuck remember that night they had sat on the floor of the Grimes apartment, watching in awe as Alexander Moskalenko had spun and flipped his way to the first Olympic gold in trampolining. When the Russian anthem had played back then, Morgan had looked solemnly over at Chuck and had said, “That’s going to be me someday.”

“You bet it is,” Chuck had said.

And here they were, in London. His friend had won a silver medal. His friend had become an Olympic medalist. His best friend, who had been the skinny Mexican kid from southern California who just liked the trampoline, had gone on to take the first medal for the Americans in the sport ever.

When Volkoff stepped back, inviting Morgan and Xiang to climb onto the dais so that they could get a group shot, Carina put her fingers to her lips and let out a wolf-whistle that made the people in front of them turn to give her dirty looks. She laughed. Sarah shrugged and mimicked her friend, with Chuck following suit before Bolognia gave him a rib-cracking hug. Cameras turned to capture the US athletes raucously supporting their teammate, but Chuck didn’t care.

Morgan had done it.

---

Hours later, the euphoria had faded. After Morgan had been dragged from interview to interview, Big Mike had insisting on taking them out for dinner after the event. Though Sarah and Carina had been invited, they’d bowed out, saying that they really needed to study the scout tapes for their next match. Chuck had headed out with his second family and thoroughly enjoyed the postmortem where they discussed Morgan’s routines in exhausting detail. It made him grateful Sarah and Carina hadn’t come along, as he and Morgan could talk about that for hours, but the women would probably have been bored. Even when Big Mike and Bolognia had gone back to their hotel room, Chuck and Morgan stayed at the bar, Chuck drinking tonic, while Morgan played with his medal in a state of shock.

Morgan had gone to crash because they’d lined up interviews for him the next day. Chuck, however, had wandered around Olympic Village until he’d gotten a call from Anna: Bryce and Laszlo had taken the silver medal in the synchronized diving. His good mood immediately fled. Jealousy, sharp and ugly and bitter, had taken over so swiftly that it startled and embarrassed him. Though he’d planned to go downstairs and play a few rounds of pool, maybe it was better not to see anybody. Chuck went up to his floor.

Sarah was sitting outside of his room, legs tucked under her. She leaned back against the wall, clearly asleep.

Chuck pulled up so abruptly that the elevator doors nearly closed on his jacket. He cursed, fumbling to get the drawstring out of the way before the door could catch on it. He really didn’t want to explain to the Olympics committee how he’d damaged his official jacket by getting it stuck in an elevator. Freed, he approached Sarah cautiously. What was she even doing there? Was she lost? “Sarah?” he asked, crouching down next to her. “Hey, Sarah?”

He reached out to shake her shoulder. Before his fingers had even brushed her shirt, her hand shot out, fingers wrapping around his wrist. Only his quick reflexes saved him from being put in an arm-lock. He dodged backward as Sarah blinked fuzzily at him.

“Whoa,” he said. “Got it. Volleyball ninja, right.”

“Chuck? What are you doing here?”

“That’s my room,” Chuck said. “I was more curious what you’re doing here. Did you get locked out or something?”

“Sort of. Scrunchie on the door.” Sarah yawned.

“Scrunchie—oh, sock on the door. Right. What discipline is she sampling tonight?”

“I didn’t ask. I was going to call you, but I realized, I don’t have your number.” She let go of his wrist to stretch.

Chuck tried not to stare, but he could feel his heart beginning to beat a little faster. “But you knew where my room was?”

“I bribed the guy at the front desk with Twinkies.”

“Contraband,” Chuck said, unable to stop his grin. Sarah had come looking for him. That was...awe-inspiring. “You haven’t been here long, have you?”

Sarah waved that off, or started to. She broke off with a giant yawn as Chuck helped her to her feet. “It’s okay. I can sleep anywhere.”

“And wake like a ninja.”

“Go to a volleyball training camp, and you too can develop such magical skills.”

“Sounds like work,” Chuck said, and got a laugh out of her. He jerked his head at his door. “Wanna come in? Or we can go downstairs, if you’re more comfortable.”

“I can’t figure you out,” Sarah said, and Chuck blinked. His confusion only deepened when her cheeks turned faintly pink. “And I probably shouldn’t have said that. Sorry. I’m still half-asleep.”

Chuck, unsure what to do, shoved his hands in his pockets. What on earth did that mean? He didn’t really consider himself complicated. There weren’t any hidden depths with him. He’d always felt that what people saw was what they got. So he cleared his throat. “Uh, was that a yes on coming in or not?”

“Yes.” Sarah said it quickly, as if looking for any opportunity to change the subject. “Please.”

“My roommate left, which sucks because it means I can’t blame any of the mess on him,” Chuck said, unlocking his door. He flicked on the light and automatically glanced toward the empty bed in the room. After one unfortunate experience, he’d learned to knock loudly before entering. Thankfully, said bed was empty except for Chuck’s extra computer. Chuck spread his arms wide. “But hey, more space to myself. So, yeah, this is it. My glorious chateau.”

“It’s nice,” Sarah said, and the awkwardness that Chuck dreaded fell over the room. Should he sit at the desk, and let her take the bed? Sit on the bed and let her take the desk chair? Sit next to her on the bed? It was like being a college freshman all over again, trying to figure out how to be around Jill while they studied for their exams.

In the end, he took the coward’s way out and let Sarah decide by telling her to make herself at home. “I have to get out of this tie before I start feeling like a grown up.”

“I know the feeling,” Sarah said, sitting on Chuck’s bed. She pulled her legs up into a lotus position, facing him as he headed for his closet.

“You wear ties a lot?”

“Yeah, they really go well with the bikini.”

Chuck laughed as he pulled off his jacket to hang it neatly in the closet. There wasn’t any way he was going to end up on the medal stand, but if he did, he didn’t want to be a disgrace in a rumpled jacket. “If anybody could pull that off, you could.”

“Thank you.”

“What’d you want to talk to me about? I figure you probably didn’t fall asleep outside my room because you just missed my stellar company.”

“Who says?” Sarah asked, and Chuck tripped. She laughed. “I thought divers were supposed to be graceful.”

“Are you hitting on me?” Chuck asked, blurting it out before his brain could stop him.

He expected the regular reaction: complete and total confusion. But Sarah laughed, not caustically. A little self-deprecatingly, if he was going to be honest. “Yes, and I’m apparently not doing a very good job if you have to ask.”

“No, no, it’s not you, it’s—”

“Are you seriously giving me the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ speech?” Sarah grinned and scooted a little closer toward him, resting her elbows on her knees and her chin on her knuckles. “That’s cute.”

“Gah,” Chuck said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Why?” was all he asked.

Sarah shrugged. “You make me laugh.”

“You realize you’re way out of my league, right?”

“I don’t see how. We’re literally both in the Olympics.”

Chuck considered that. As much as he wanted to bring up the HGH and injuries that had landed him on the dive team, he couldn’t deny that he was living in the Olympic Village and using the Olympic training pool and eating international food, and hanging out with athletes from all over the world. So she had a point, though there was a wide gap between “Grateful to be there at all” and “Part of the team that was fully expected to take home the gold for a second time in a row.” He remembered Janice, her plastic smile under the lights, how she’d talked about Sarah Walker belonging with a more natural athlete like Bryce Larkin.

Sarah Walker and Bryce Larkin made a hell of a lot more sense than Sarah Walker and Chuck Bartowski. Bryce had already won a damned medal, hadn’t he? Nerves and dread churned in his middle.

“I guess you’re right. I’m just a little overwhelmed,” he said. He tried for a smile, albeit a weak one. “You sure you don’t just have a diver fetish? I mean, first Bryce, now me.”

Sarah’s face shifted from smile to shock. “Why would you even say that to me? Do you really think I’m that shallow? God.” Sarah gave him a disgusted, hurt look that made him feel worse than the lowest form of bottom-feeding scum. She moved fast on the sand, but faster off of it, apparently, for she was already across the room and out the door before Chuck had fully gathered just how badly he had screwed up.

Thankfully, he could move quickly, too. Before he had even processed what was going on—he’d stuck his foot in it again, and apparently said foot had struck a nerve—he hurried after Sarah, calling her name.

“Forget it,” she said.

“Sarah, wait!”

“No.”

“I can explain.” Crap on a cracker, she was fast. Chuck changed from a speed-walk to a jog, trying to keep up.

“I don’t care.” Sarah didn’t pick up her pace, but she also didn’t look at him, either. The Ice Queen mask had fallen back into place. “Go away.”

“Please, let me explain. Please.” He hurried to get a little ahead of her and switched so that he was jogging backward.

A tousled head popped out of one of the rooms down the hall. “There a problem?”

Sarah finally stopped the bruising pace. “No,” she said to the random swim team member Chuck didn’t recognize.

“This guy bothering you?”

“I’ve got it,” Sarah said, and gave the guy such an icy look that he disappeared back into his room, leaving cartoon speed tracks in his wake. Sarah turned that look on Chuck. “Fine. You’ve got twenty seconds.”

“That was a really stupid thing for me to say, and I’m an idiot,” Chuck said. Sarah rolled her eyes as though that were obvious, which he supposed was fair. “A really big idiot and I’ve never had this sort of thing happen to me, but that, that wasn’t about you, and that wasn’t fair. That was about m—”

“Oh, my God,” Sarah said. “Seriously?”

“What?” Chuck asked, wondering what he’d done wrong now.

“You’re going to give me the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ twice?”

“But it’s really not you.” Chuck didn’t chase her this time when she started to leave. “It’s—do you know what it feels like to have the person you trust most in the world tell you that you should just give up?”

Sarah didn’t stop walking, but she slowed. Chuck went on, knowing that he’d never told anybody about what had happened with Bryce, but it seemed inevitable now. Words came spilling out, the same ones he’d had to hide behind a false smile during the interview earlier. “He told me I should quit. He was the person I was supposed to rely upon most in the world, and he said I wasn’t good enough. And…it still gets to me. Every time I dive, there’s a little voice in the back of my head that wonders, what if I’m just doing this to prove Bryce Larkin wrong, and I’m making a fool out of myself in the process? And it doesn’t bother him at all, does it? He’s out there winning silver medals, and I’m just happy to even be here.

“But that’s no excuse for doubting you,” he said, still going because Sarah had stopped walking. “I don’t think that about you. I really don’t. I wouldn’t. I mean, I don’t know you very well, but I wasn’t lying the other night. You seem really awesome.”

Sarah finally, finally turned. The Ice Queen mask was gone, but he couldn’t read her expression. She walked back toward him, and Chuck’s knees nearly went rubbery. At least she hadn’t stormed off, hurt, though he suspected he’d have more groveling to do.

“So I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to imply that about you because frankly, it’s none of my business. You could outdo Carina and get two of every flavor athlete and it still wouldn’t be my business. This was just me being the same stupid, insecure idiot I always am because of Bryce Larkin. I really hate that guy. And holy hell, I’m babbling now, aren’t I? I wish you would say something so that I could stop that.”

“I would if you let me get a word in edge-wise,” Sarah said.

“Oh.”

“Chuck, let me ask you something.”

“If you want to know my sign, it’s Libra, but I have a feeling that’s not it,” Chuck said, nerves making his words tumble over each other.

Sarah ignored that. “Did you qualify to be here or not?”

“Technically—”

“Yes or no.”

“Yes,” Chuck said.

“Then you belong here. Deal with it.”

“But do I, really?”

“I really can’t figure you out,” Sarah said, said, shaking her head. “You’re both so secure in who you are and the most insecure Olympian I have ever met.”

“Um, thanks?” Chuck asked.

“Also, you talk too much,” Sarah said. Chuck opened his mouth to reply, but she grabbed the tie he hadn’t had a chance to take off, tugged him down, and kissed him. He braced a hand against the wall in surprise, shock carrying him forward even as his brain delightedly registered every sensation flooding his brain: the feel of her lips, the pressure of gentle strangulation from the tie, the wisps of her hair that tickled his face and ear. When she pulled back, she raised an eyebrow at him.

He felt the biggest, stupidest grin in his entire arsenal begin to bloom, but he didn’t give a damn. Grabbing her hand to keep her from yanking on the tie and cutting off his air supply, he kissed her back, just reveling until somebody down the hall opened a door and shouted for them to get a room.

“I should go,” Sarah said, taking a step back. She didn’t let go of his hand; her palm was smoother than he expected, though she did have calluses. “We both need to get some sleep. Alone.”

Chuck flushed. “Wait,” he said, his brain finally catching up. “Didn’t you want my number?”

“This is going to feel so middle school, but...” Sarah pulled a pen out of her pocket and grabbed his hand.

“I’ve got my phone right here,” Chuck said, laughing as she wrote her number in the center of his hand.

She shook her head. “Too late. There. Ball’s in your court now.”

“Apparently it is.”

“Good night, Chuck.” She kissed him and walked away, pocketing the pen as she did so.

“Wait, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

Sarah turned, but didn’t stop walking, heading backward instead. “NBC thinks we’re a thing,” she said. “I don’t have a problem with that. Do you?”

“No,” Chuck said, as Sarah climbed into the elevator. He continued to stand in the same spot, staring after her for a long time. “Definitely not.”

Chapter Text

The next day, Chuck turned off the Google alert on his name. In less than a day, it seemed like he’d gone from being one of the most unknown athletes on the US team to being notoriously hated. Sarah Walker had a huge following thanks to her previous time at the Olympics. It only made sense. She competed well in a sport where the uniform was literally a bikini, and with a face like hers, she was bound to draw notice. Just like, Chuck discovered when he checked his email the next morning, the person she set her romantic sights on was bound to draw a butt-load of vitriol from jealous fans.

After the third “What does she see in him?!” caption combined with a meme-style picture of one of his diving faces—which were never pretty—Chuck clicked out of his email and climbed back into bed, staring up at the ceiling. The world thought he was dating Sarah Walker. Because, Chuck knew, for some reason, he was apparently dating Sarah Walker.

After a moment to process that rather momentous news, he sat up and headed to the closet for exercise gear. There wasn’t pool time available until much later but he was due to meet Anna in the gym. As he reached for his lucky T-shirt, he spotted the number written on his hand and lost at least thirty seconds, grinning like a fool.

He called Morgan after he’d finished breakfast, this time sitting at the same table with friends he’d made on the Swedish swimming team. “So, don’t freak out, but—”

“You’re getting down and dirty in the sand with Sarah Walker for real?”

“What?” Chuck asked.

“How else can I put this? You’re serving it to her? Taking the plunge? Getting ready to spike it home? A facial for—”

“Morgan!”

“Okay, okay, that was a little uncalled for. But have you seen the news, dude? It’s basically, like, your face.”

“With a bulls-eye on it, yeah,” Chuck said. “How are the interviews going?”

“Forget the interviews! I want to hear what’s up with you and your lady-friend. Did you talk to her last night?”

Chuck left his tray on the revolving table that would take it back into the kitchen to be washed and headed for the downstairs gym. “As a matter of fact, I did, yes.”

“And?”

“And what? She dropped by my room—don’t you dare make another facial comment, nothing like that happened—we talked, she flirted, and I managed to stick my foot in it big time because I’m the reason I can’t have nice things.”

“Oh, man.” Morgan’s tone immediately turned to one of sympathy. That was one of the things Chuck liked best about his friend. In addition to not finding a single thing unbelievable about Sarah being interested in Chuck, for all of his faults, Morgan was the best wingman a guy could have. “Can I talk to her and do anything to fix it? I’ll go over right now, tell her what a great guy you are, get her to give you another chance.”

“Don’t you have an interview with ESPN?”

“Screw ESPN. This is a matter of the heart, Chuck! And the heart is the greatest muscle of all.”

Chuck had to laugh. “You’re right. But there’s no need, I promise. She gave me her number.”

“You got digits?” Morgan’s voice jumped up an octave.

Chuck looked at the inside of his hand, where Sarah’s number was still scrawled. He’d put it into his phone already, but it was a nice reminder. “Uh-huh. Of course, that was after she kissed me and—”

Morgan let out a high-pitched—well, it wasn’t a squeal and it wasn’t a squeak, but Chuck didn’t know exactly how to classify it. Excitable fourteen-year-olds might be familiar with the noise. “This is the best,” Morgan declared. “Chuck, you’ve got a girlfriend. You’ve got a girlfriend and you’re at the Olympics.”

“I’ve had girlfriends before!”

“Girlfriends like Sarah Walker?”

“Okay, point, but—”

“Oh, crap, I’ve gotta go. They’re coming in to trim the beard for the interview. Hope they got new blades on that razor because this thing is super strong. Talk to you later!”

Chuck hung up with a baffled shake of the head as he headed for the shuttle that would take him to the gym, where Anna was waiting for him. As he walked up, she held a hand to stop him from speaking, gesturing at her cell phone with an impatient look. Chuck raised his eyebrows at her, but she turned away. “Yes, Mr. Pearson, we’d be very interested in that opportunity. Two o’clock? Sure, I’ll have him there, no problem. We look forward to meeting you.”

“What was that about?” he asked. “Where’re we going at two?”

“Sponsorship meeting. That was a swimwear company. They’re interested in you. Which means…” Anna looked him up and down, frowning. “You’re probably going to need to shave.”

“What? Aw, man. No. The competition’s not until Saturday.”

“They may want pictures. You can either shave now or later on.”

Chuck sighed. “This sucks.”

“Hey, if you never wanted to be hairless and nearly naked in front of the world, I’d say you picked the wrong sport.”

“No kidding,” Chuck said, and decided to try and forget about it during his workout. As much as he would have loved to get on the trampoline, Anna had him lift weights and work on his form on the ground before she forced him onto the treadmill. He scowled. Running was his least favorite aerobic activity.

“Your girlfriend probably runs like twenty miles a day,” Anna said. “Do you want her to think you’re a wimp?”

“My ‘girlfriend,’“ Chuck said, using air quotes because he really didn’t know what this thing with Sarah should be called, “plays a game with three other people that’s normally played with twelve people altogether, and does it on the sand in a bikini. It’s perfectly fine if she thinks I’m a wimp.”

“Get on the treadmill,” Anna said through her laughter. She waited until he’d settled in to his pace. “So how’s Morgan doing?”

“Over the moon. We’ll be seeing more of the beard all over the intertubes today. He was being interviewed by ESPN when I talked to him earlier.”

Anna grimaced. “Did Big Mike warn him about a repeat of the Bounce Today magazine disaster?”

“He’s learned his lesson about mooning reporters. In his defense, he really was just trying to show off that mole that looks like Abe Lincoln.”

Anna grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”

“Do you think the normal coaches and divers talk about moles that look like Abe Lincoln?” Chuck asked.

“I don’t care. Get in at least a couple of miles and then go shave.”

“Back to my days of looking like Rufus the naked mole-rat,” Chuck said. In truth, it didn’t bother him as much as he complained about it to Anna, but they had habits. He complained about having to shave his chest, Anna listened to his complaints and told him to do it anyway. Every coach and athlete had some kind of ritual. Theirs just happened to be loaded with pop culture references.

---

He hit the hot tub after his workout, though he hadn’t over-extended himself. It was easier to shave after he’d soaked for a bit. Back in his room, he lost his shirt, sighed to himself, and set in to shave in the tiny shower stall. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to shave again until the night before his competition, or else he’d spend the week looking too red dot special for his tastes. Some divers didn’t shave, and as much as he’d prefer to be one of them, it really was better to present a sleeker look to the judges. At least he wasn’t a swimmer and didn’t have to shave his legs.

He was finishing up when he heard the door open. “Morgan?” he called. “That you? How’d you get in?”

He wandered out of the bathroom and pulled up short. “You’re not Morgan.”

“Who’s Morgan?” Carina Miller gave him an odd look. She was sitting at his desk chair in workout gear and the multicolored shades she wore on the court. Her feet were bare—and sandy.

“Uh, you saw him win a medal just yest—Carina, what are you doing in my room? How did you get in here?”

“Picked the lock.” Carina shrugged. “You think Sarah’s the only ex-criminal around here?”

Chuck turned in shock to look at his door, which was closed and locked, before her words registered. “Ex-criminal?” he said.

“What did I interrupt here?” Carina looked him up and down, her eyes roving over him. Chuck felt an embarrassed blush begin to start at his chest. He grabbed the closest shirt and hauled it on, cursing under his breath. “What is it you divers do when you’re alone, anyway? Is this some kind of ritual?”

“No, it’s shaving, which is part of the lifestyle and, you know what, I don’t have to explain myself to you. What are you doing in here? What are you talking about, ex-criminal? Where’s Sarah?”

“You have to shave all over?” Carina looked oddly delighted at the prospect. “Even your back? Can I do that?”

“Carina.”

The delight switched to a wounded look. “What? It’s an honest question. I’ve got wonderful fine motor skills.”

“No offense, but I don’t let women I barely know near me with sharp blades, no matter how good they claim to be with them,” Chuck said.

“Aw.”

“What are you doing? You’re not here to add me to your score-sheet, are you? Because I mean this in the best way possible, but I’m not interested.”

“Are you sure about that?” Carina rose slowly, languidly. By Chuck’s estimation, she had to know exactly how powerful she was and how to twist people around her finger.

He took a step back and told himself it wasn’t out of fear. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”

“Really?” Carina reached for the hem of her shirt.

“Don’t you dare take that off,” he said, pointing at her.

“Aw, but Chuckie, you’ve seen me in less.”

Chuck put his hand on the thermostat. “I will turn this place into an icebox, Carina. Don’t think I won’t. And—” Crap, he thought, this was the weirdest conversation he’d had in a long time. “And would you please answer one of my questions? Does Sarah know you’re here?”

Carina started to give him a sulky smirk, but halfway through the motion, she seemed to give up. She stopped posing, choosing instead to cross her arms over her chest and study him a bit like a specimen in a zoo. “Huh,” she said. “Icebox. I was not expecting that. Original.”

“My head hurts so much right now,” Chuck said. “I’m not going to ask you again: what are you doing in here?”

Carina dropped back down into the desk chair and propped her feet on the bed. Her incredibly sandy feet. Chuck winced; Carina shot him an arch look. “Scoping you out. And you’re going to have to get used to that, pal. You run with a volleyball girl, sand’s pretty much part of the lifestyle.”

“If I’m going to get sand in my bed, I’d rather it be from Sarah,” Chuck said. He finally put it together. “Wait, what? Was this some kind of test?”

“Bingo,” Carina said.

Chuck put his hand on his face and counted to five. When that did nothing, he counted to ten. “You need to leave,” he said. “You need to leave right now.”

“I don’t do this for just anybody, you know.” But Carina gave him a little nod and started walking toward the door. “She really likes you. I had to make sure you were acceptable.”

“And what business is it of yours?” Chuck asked, ignoring the fact that only hours before, Morgan had made a similar offer to see Sarah on his behalf.

“Some people have family. All I’ve got is Sarah.” Carina reached the door, shaking her head a little (possibly at the fact that Chuck, still wary, edged even farther away). She opened it, but didn’t leave. “And because of that, you’re a little scary.”

“What? I’m not scary. Why am I scary?”

“You’re got her to smile during a match. Nobody’s ever done that before.” With that thought, Carina left him standing alone in his room, completely befuddled by the whole exchange. Because she was barefoot, he didn’t hear her footsteps recede, but he did hear a catcall and Carina’s reply of “Maybe later, babe” from down the hall, which was fitting.

The second the door clicked closed, his phone chirped. He snatched it off the desk. “Sorry, Anna, I’m running a little late, but I’ll be down in—”

“Chuck, it’s Sarah.”

“Sarah! Hey. Uh, hi. Wait—how’d you get this number? I haven’t called you yet.”

“Oh, I had it the whole time.” Sarah’s voice was brusque. “This is a weird question, and I don’t have much time, but where are you? Is Carina there?”

Chuck looked at the mostly-faded numbers on his hand. Sarah had had his number the whole time and had still come to his room the night before? He didn’t know how to feel about that. “I’m in my room,” he said. “She just left, but not before picking my lock and hitting on me.”

Sarah let out a ripe curse. “Chuck, I am so sorry. I should have known she was going to do that. I am so sorry she pulled you into it.”

“It’s—okay. I didn’t have to physically defend myself from a razor blade attack or anything. But what the hell is going on with you two?”

“Team politics. You’re really okay?”

“You make it sound like she was going to cut me to pieces or something.”

“No, she’s mostly non-lethal, but I really can’t get into it other than to say sorry. But I have to go. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a teammate to kill.” Sarah hung up.

“O…kay,” Chuck said to the empty air. In a bit of a daze—Sarah was an ex-criminal? Carina had done some sort of seduction test? This was a regular thing? Sarah had known his phone number the whole time?—he crossed over to the bed and tried to brush sand off of the comforter. At least he made his bed, which meant that the sand wasn’t too much of a problem. Still perplexed, he sat down on the bed and ran a hand through his hair. “This is the weirdest week of my life.”

Possibly proving him right, his cell phone rang. “Meet me outside in fifteen minutes. The company’s sending a car for us,” she said, terse as usual.

Chuck swore and headed for the bathroom to finish shaving. He hoped that the meeting didn’t take as long as he feared it would, as Sarah and Carina had a match coming up in a few hours and he didn’t want to miss it. Whatever the problem between them was, they needed to get over it before then.

---

“And neither Walker or Miller looks happy with that ace.”

“As well they shouldn’t, Spencer. That was a rookie mistake at worst. What is up with America’s golden girls today?”

“I don’t know, but these are not the Miller and Walker that pummeled the Italians into the sand, and definitely not the Miller that said in interviews that they would prove today why Álvares is right to idolize Sarah Walker.”

“What is it? Are they just not communicating? Is Walker’s shoulder acting up?”

“She’s not favoring it, Burt. I don’t know—”

Chuck reached over for the remote and hit the mute button. He’d been enjoying Spencer O’Hara and Burton Lassiter’s commentary on every one of Sarah and Carina’s matches, but even if Sarah and Carina were noticeably flagging against the Brazilians, he couldn’t help but think they were being more than a little unfair. It was only the first set, but Sarah and Carina were behind by five points, which was pretty much unheard of in their Olympic career. They had never lost a single set in Olympic volleyball. And with the Brazilians about to take this set, it looked like that was going to change.

Chuck gripped his water bottle as the camera lingered on a close-up of Sarah’s face. She was staring at the net, waiting for the next serve, a glimmer of sweat on her skin. The Ice Queen mask was in place, except for her eyes. They were angry. Carina’s regular mien remained unchanged, and she did her inappropriate dancing after points gained, but Chuck kind of got the feeling that Sarah wasn’t alone in that anger.

The swimwear interview hadn’t taken long. They’d paraded him around their London offices, which were sleek and lush and covered in sports photography of beautiful people doing amazingly athletic moves. While the Olympics were in session, they weren’t allowed to offer Chuck anything official, but there had been lots of hints that if he did well, there would be a substantial sponsorship in his future.

Anna had kicked Chuck under the table before he could snort his opinion of that.

As awed as he had been by the offer, he’d been relieved that the meeting had ended in plenty of time for him to come back to the Village and watch the game. The minute he’d arrived at his room, he’d received a call from the front desk that put the kibosh on that plan: he needed to report for a blood test. Thankfully, the waiting room had a TV, which was why he was sitting alone in a lounge, watching Sarah and Carina lose their first set to the Brazilians while he waited to go pee in a cup.

Álvares served to Sarah. She knocked it to Carina, who set it up for her to spike. Sarah made the leap. Brazil blocked it, sending the ball careening away from Sarah. Carina tried to dive for it, but the Brazilians took the point.

“Dammit,” Chuck said, and made the receptionist look over. “Sorry.”

She shrugged. Chuck took that as permission to focus his attention back on the game. He grabbed hold onto the edge of the faded couch cushions below him as the ticker at the top of the screen announced that this was a set point. “C’mon,” Chuck said. “C’mon, c’mon.”

This time they rallied, hitting it just within the lines on the third volley. By that point, Chuck was on his feet; at a look from the receptionist, he sat down, sheepishly. Sarah and Carina took the next point, too. Things seemed like they might be looking up…until Carina couldn’t get under the ball in time and it shot into the audience instead of toward the Brazilians.

The Brazilians celebrated. Carina and Sarah headed for their bench, identical stormy looks on their faces.

“Bartowski?” A man in a lab coat appeared by the door, and Chuck rose with a sigh. No matter the country or state, it seemed that the drug testing never changed. On the TV, Carina, almost to the bench, hip-checked Sarah. The blond stumbled sideways and turned, fist clenched and raised. On TV in front of the entire world, Carina wiggled her eyebrows—and Sarah burst out laughing.

“Oh, they’ll be fine,” Chuck said.

“Sorry?” the doctor asked.

“Never mind. I guess it’s time to give you some fluids.”

---

He didn’t see Sarah or Carina again that day, which disappointed him. Sarah called, but didn’t leave a voice mail and didn’t pick up when Chuck tried to call back. He left a message on Sarah’s phone to congratulate her and Carina for coming back to smash the Brazilians for pieces in the second and third set. After that, he funneled his frustration into watching the three meter springboard men’s competition, which he’d recorded on his laptop. He fed it into a program he’d created, which would take several hours to render, leaving him plenty of time to look over the results with Anna in the morning. He went to bed early, exhausted from two very strange days in a row, and woke up in the morning to a text message alert, from Sarah, inviting him to breakfast. He was out of bed like a shot.

“You know, I wouldn’t have been offended if you’d wanted to sleep,” Sarah said as Chuck yawned.

At five in the morning, the cafeteria was a lot busier than any of the all-night Stanford cafes would have been, but it still felt like a bit of a ghost town. There were a few athletes about—the games were half-over and quite a few had gone—but mostly, they had the place to themselves. Chuck was still in his pajamas. He’d shoved his hair under a team USA ski cap to avoid letting Sarah see the “animal shapes,” as his sister put it. Sarah, on the other hand, was wide awake and already in workout gear.

“No, it’s okay. I’ve got a light day, so I can sleep later.”

“If you’re sure,” Sarah said, doubtfully. She scooped a handful of blueberries onto her oatmeal.

Chuck did the same, with a sigh. He hated oatmeal. If it were up to him, his diet would be nothing but processed foods and sugar. “I’m sure. Congrats on the win yesterday.”

Sarah made a face. “You mean congrats on the last two sets, right?”

“Hey, a win’s a win. I do have to wonder what would have happened if you’d slugged Carina, though.”

“We’ve already faced interviews about ‘trouble in paradise.’ Speaking of which, I am so, so sorry she did that to you, Chuck. Usually she waits a couple of months.”

“It’s the Olympics. Everything’s on a tight schedule.” Chuck tried to keep his voice light. “I have to admit, I’m a little impressed. You couldn’t even tell the lock had been jimmied.”

“I’m going to kill her,” Sarah said under her breath.

“Probably better to wait until you’ve won gold for that.”

“If you insist.” They set their trays down at one of the empty tables. Sarah let out a long sigh as she eased herself into a chair. “I’m sorry I didn’t come find you after the game. Coach sat us down and blistered our asses, and there were interviews and I wanted to get away from it all and sleep, you know?”

“It’s not a big deal. Just because I seem to have loads of free time to think about how horribly I’m going to lose doesn’t mean everybody else does.”

“Hey,” Sarah said, kicking him gently.

Chuck blew out a breath. “I should’ve done springboard. Three-meters means I’d be done already.”

“But then you wouldn’t get to feel like Superman,” Sarah said.

Chuck blinked at her, wondering where she had heard that. It took him a minute to put it together, but when he did, he groaned. “You saw the interview? I didn’t even know that was out there. Oh, God, do I have anything I need to apologize for?”

Sarah laughed. “I thought it was sweet. Especially when you were talking about Morgan and your sister.”

“Uh, thanks. The local NBC affiliate came out and interviewed her, you know.” Chuck crunched into toast with unnecessary vigor. “At least she finds it exciting rather than intrusive.”

Sarah toyed with her spoon, looking away from him. “Speaking of intrusive, I think that interview may have been the thing to set Carina on you. She’s not used to anybody talking about me without mentioning…”

“The way you look in a bikini?”

“Oh, so you have noticed.”

“I, um, uh…”

“It’s okay. You can notice—I won’t be offended.” She nudged him with her foot under the table, her smile cajoling. It quickly faded into a serious look once more. “She didn’t say anything about…anything, did she?”

“She called me scary. I don’t see it, personally.”

“No, not at all.” Sarah grabbed her knife and began peeling an orange in an easy motion. “Tallest guy in your sport, work out every day, crazy enough to launch yourself off of basically the third story of a building and land head-first.”

“Okay, put it that way, I sound kind of scary. I still maintain that I’m not.”

Sarah squeezed his bicep. “Right. Like you’re not totally ripped under that T-shirt.”

Chuck’s eyebrows went into his hairline. “And how do you know what’s under my T-shirt? Unless you’ve been internet stalking me.”

“You’re not the only one who knows how to work Google.” Sarah finished peeling the orange and set the unbroken peel on her tray. “Oh, look, you’re turning red again. That’s cute.”

Chuck sighed. “I don’t think she meant physically,” he said. “She really cares for you.”

“She does.” Sarah went quiet, once again looking down as she plucked slices of orange free and arranged them on a plate. “You heard about how Carina and I started playing on the same team in high school, I’m guessing?”

“I read that somewhere, yeah.”

“It’s not exactly the full story. Carina and I, we met in a group home.”

“A what? A group home? For orphans?”

“She’s a reformed pickpocket. I’m a conman’s daughter.” Sarah looked up, finally, and met his gaze. There was almost a challenge in the look, as though she were expecting him to say something bad. As though she had prepared for it.

Chuck wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say. “Like Frank Abagnale? For real?”

“He never did check-fraud, but yeah, for real. He ended up mixed with some bad people, and the feds busted him. When they couldn’t find my mom, they put me in a home. Carina was my roommate.”

“I’m surprised NBC hasn’t been all over that story,” Chuck said.

“They don’t know. None of the other girls on the team even knew where Carina and I stayed at night, only that we hated each other. You know how in those sports movies, they put the two people that hate each other in a room and make them work out their differences?”

“So you two are a sports movie cliché?”

“Sort of.” Sarah sighed. “Our coach locked us in a room together, but it only led to bruised ribs and a black eye. After that, what he did was put us on the same team, the two of us against two seniors—we were juniors at the time—and he told us that if we lost, he’d make sure we would spend every moment of the day together.”

“And?”

“We pounded their asses into the gym floor. It was a hell of a lot of fun.”

“And the Walker-Miller domination was born?”

“Not quite. Coach signed us up for beach volleyball that summer, so it was a lot of time with the two of us, practicing together. And in that situation, you either grow to really hate each other or you become friends. We became friends. I think we’ve both always felt a little different, you know? Neither of us had regular childhoods or anything, and it’s hard to understand that from the outside. So we bonded, and in senior year, they found my mom, I moved in with her, and Carina followed.” Sarah frowned. “And now, she’s just there. She’s part of my life, I’m part of hers, and neither of us would have it any other way.”

“And how many black eyes have there been since?” Chuck asked, finishing off his oatmeal before it congealed too badly.

“A few.” Sarah smirked. “We’re rough drunks. The other teams always look worse.”

Chuck laughed, making a couple of the other early-birds look over at them in annoyance. “Well played,” he said, and Sarah dipped her head. “I’m glad the two of you found each other, then.”

“So am I, when she’s not being a pain in my ass. Anyway, this isn’t something we like to talk about. Please, don’t tell anybody about it.”

“Yeah, no, trust me, your secrets are safe with me.” Chuck mimed zipping his lip and throwing away the key, and winced. “But only if we can pretend I didn’t do that.”

“Deal.” Sarah gave him a smile from under her lashes and finally started eating the orange slices. “So that’s the whole sordid tale. We’re ex-criminals and now we’re going for our second gold medal. Rags to riches at its finest, I guess.”

“I think it’s impressive,” Chuck said. “And the Carina thing yesterday? Not a big deal. Her heart was in the right place. Hell, now I’m convinced she has a heart. She was coming off a little bit like a sex vampire.”

“Preying on the weak, undersexed athletes of the 2012 London games?”

“All these unsuspecting victims walking around.” Chuck feigned remorse as he shook his head. “The poor souls.”

“Oh, stop.” Sarah laughed and shoved at his shoulder, gently.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. Want?” Sarah asked, holding out an orange slice.

Chuck shrugged and took it with a nod of thanks. “Why tell me any of this? You barely know me. I mean, I’m flattered, don’t get me wrong.”

“I knew of you before I met you,” Sarah said, “so I wasn’t worried about that.”

“Bryce talked about me?”

“Yeah, there were some pictures in his apartment of the two of you at Stanford. That’s how I recognized you at the airport. Bryce still has a lot of respect for you.”

“Could have fooled me,” Chuck said.

“Going to try to beat him on Saturday?”

He didn’t have a Sno-cone’s chance on Tatooine of beating Bryce, but Sarah’s eyes sparkled with such fun that Chuck gave a modest shrug. “Of course. He may have won silver in synchro, but please, c’mon, I’m Chuck Bartowski. No diver in the world can compare with all of this.” He made a show of leaning back and flexing.

Sarah mimicked his pose. “Oh, please, like you’re the only one around here with guns.”

“What the hell?” Carina’s face was a portrait of confusion as she set her tray down next to Sarah’s. Sarah broke off into a fit of giggles even as Chuck attempted an innocent look. “Did you two drink the Kool-Aid?”

“Morning, Carina,” Sarah said. “Wasn’t there something you wanted to say to Chuck?”

“Huh? Oh. Right. Sorry, Speedo,” Carina said to Chuck before she dug into her oatmeal. Sarah cleared her throat; Carina glared at her teammate for a second. A brief, silent, furious conversation seemed to happen before Carina gave the most long-suffering sigh Chuck had ever heard, turned to him, and said, “I’m sorry, Chuck, that I attempted to seduce you with my awesome body in order to find out if you were good enough for my beloved teammate. And I would have rocked your world, for the record.”

“Uh, apology accepted,” Chuck said.

“I didn’t get too much sand in your bed, did I?”

“N-no, it was fine,” Chuck said as Sarah gave Carina a boggled look. “Let’s regard it as behind us and move on, yes?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Do I even want to know?” Sarah asked.

In reply, Carina plopped one foot on the table in a feat of gymnastic grace.

“Ew! We’re trying to eat.” Sarah shoved Carina’s foot, making the redhead fall backward. Both of their cell phones buzzed at the same time. Carina scowled and scooped oatmeal into her mouth; Sarah checked her phone. “That’s Beckman, telling us to get to the track. I’m sorry, Chuck, but we’re going to have to abandon you.”

“It’s okay. Have fun at the track.”

“It’s going to be a hectic few days for us, but…breakfast? Tomorrow?”

“I look forward to it,” Chuck said.

Sarah gave him one last smile before they left. As they walked away, Chuck heard Carina say, “Ooh, we’re having breakfast with Speedo again? How exciting.”

Chuck didn’t see why it would be, but he was definitely not complaining.

Chapter Text

The diving heats were fully underway now. After synchros—ladies first, men second—came the three-meter event. Chuck watched the finals because that was expected of him, but he sat as far away from Bryce as possible in the USA diving team section. He entertained twin feelings of horror and relief for the German diver that did a full back-flop. At least he wouldn’t be the first one to be pulling such a stunt. As each day passed, Chuck began to feel that sense of anticipation clawing at the back of his head. Anna became more and more terse. More of Chuck’s thoughts were taken up in form, execution, take-offs, landings. Nerves walked around with him like a constant companion, and tension settled in to make itself at home.

More and more cameras showed up during his pool time, which he cordially shared with Bryce, to get a look at the Americans. The diving hopes of a nation rested on the blue-eyed golden boy and the lanky underdog. When he wasn’t on camera for diving, he was on camera being interviewed, or shuffled through some of the promotional Team USA events, like the P&G house. Of course, on top of all of that, he tried to get as much time in the gym and with Sarah as he could.

It wasn’t easy. With the gold medal match looming, Sarah and Carina’s training intensified. They plowed forward, taking down all opponents. Chuck wasn’t able to make it to another game, but he listened or watched during his work-outs, and it seemed like each team came more determined to knock down the pair of secret ex-criminals going for their second gold. Though Sarah seemed at ease during their breakfasts together, exhaustion started to drag at her. The day after her quarterfinal match, she smiled at Chuck in greeting, put her head on her arms and slept. Chuck pulled out a paperback Fleming novel and read until she woke up. The sleep seemed to do her well, though, for she met Chuck for a late night game of pool down in the lounge that same night. He taught her the Stanford swim team dance. She beat him resoundingly at pool and kissed him.

Morgan, who’d left the Village due to his event being over, called every day. Chuck managed to see him, but it wasn’t the same as having his best friend around constantly. Morgan understood the pressure: he’d been there through Bryce’s betrayal, Chuck’s decision to get back in the pool, and those first couple of weeks after the Olympic announcement. But it was down to Chuck now. He dreaded the upcoming preliminary round. He longed for it to be over.

And before he knew it, Sarah and Carina had fought a minor land war against China on the volleyball court and had beaten them—barely—to head to the finals. They would be playing Forrest and Rizzo, the other American team, which meant that America would take home silver and gold in beach volleyball. It was only a matter of figuring out which team got to be prouder at hearing the national anthem on the stand.

Sarah had given him most of the tickets that were reserved for family, as she was estranged from her mother and Carina had no family. Chuck made it to the Palace Horse Guards right after Cole Barker, with whom he’d struck up a friendship over the past couple of weeks.

“Not sure I should be cheering for you Yanks,” Cole said as Chuck joined him, “but I can make an exception. Well, at least for Miller.”

“I’m sure she’s just your type,” Chuck said, and heard his name called from the court.

One of the volunteers in a purple and pink jacket was craning her neck, looking up into the stands. “Are you Chuck Bartowski?” she asked.

“That’s me,” Chuck said.

“Ms. Walker says I’m supposed to give you this.”

Chuck leaned down to accept the envelope. “Uh, thanks. What is it?”

“Dunno. She says to wait until you read it.”

With a small shrug, Chuck opened the envelope and retrieved a glossy photo. It was from the last game he’d attended, a clear shot of him being tackled by Sarah—and of the stunned stupid, almost fearful look on his face. Sarah, on the other hand, was laughing with sheer joy.

On the back, she’d written in Sharpie: “Bet you five bucks we kick their asses.”

Chuck laughed. “Hey, Cole, you got a pen and paper on you?”

“A pen, yes.”

It took some scrounging, but he found a receipt from a slushie he’d sneaked from a convenience store outside of the Village the day before. On the back, he wrote, “No bet. My money’s always on you. Knock ‘em dead.” He handed the envelope back to the volunteer, who took off with it.

Cole looked over Chuck’s shoulder at the picture. “Lucky git,” he said, shaking his head.

“Chuck!”

Chuck turned just in time to catch Ellie as she barreled into him with a rib-compacting hug. “You made it! You’re here!” He had his hand likewise crushed by Devon “Captain Awesome” Woodcomb. Morgan, who’d collected them from the airport, hit him from the side in a hug much like Ellie’s. “How are you? How was the flight? Do you like London so far?”

“I’m good, it went well, and we’ve only seen the airport,” Ellie said. She looked around the stadium. “This is amazing! Is it always this crazy?”

Chuck confirmed that it was. She immediately began to question him about his diet, sleeping habits (Captain Awesome, of course, winked at him, jerking his head toward the practice courts on the other side of the stadium; Chuck smiled sheepishly, as he’d done little more than kiss Sarah a couple of times), how his practices were going, was he getting enough protein, enough calcium. “Ellie!” Chuck said with an agonized laugh. “I’m fine, I really am.”

“Are you nervous?”

“He’d be crazy not to be,” Cole said. “Since I’m the one he’s up against.”

“Oh, right. Everybody, this is Cole. Cole, my sister Ellie, her boyfriend Devon, and you’ve met Morgan.”

Cole shook hands with all of them and assured them with a wink that the next time they saw him, they would see a great deal more of him.

“Speaking of diving, where’s Anna?” Ellie asked. “Do I need to go pry her away from her laptop?”

“No, she’s on her way. I just got a text.” He didn’t think Anna cared much about volleyball, but she’d begrudgingly agreed to come along only to “Meet this upstart trying to steal her diver.” In truth, he wasn’t sure he wanted them to meet. It was surreal, like all of the pieces of his life were clashing together at this volleyball game: his coach, another diver, his best friend, his family, his odd romance with a woman he’d met in an airport less than two weeks before. “She’s looking forward to seeing you.”

“Has she said so?”

“It’s Anna. She hasn’t said anything about anything but diving in over three days. You have to read between the lines.” Chuck pantomimed opening a book, which made Ellie laugh and wrap her arm through his. She rested her head on his shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Worried?”

“That I’m going to belly flop in front of millions and millions of people and humiliate myself in front of the entire world? Nah.”

“I bet you’re going to win a medal.”

“No, Ellie, you have too many med school bills for me to take your money.”

Ellie poked him in the side. Chuck, always ticklish, wiggled away, and right then, the volleyball players were announced. Alex Forrest and Zondra Rizzo came out to ear-splitting cheers, waving. When Carina and Sarah were announced, the crowd surged to its feet, cheers growing even louder. Chuck was positive at least a quarter of that noise came from Ellie. He clapped a hand over his ear in jest. Ellie stuck her tongue out at him. Neither Carina nor Sarah looked toward the stands, just as Chuck had suspected. For all Carina joked and danced, the minutes before the match began were crucial to both of them. They needed their concentration.

Anna arrived as everybody stood for the national anthem. Chuck had to figure that most of the crowd was American by the number of people singing along. It was a wild, raucous atmosphere compared to that of diving. The emcee-deejay was back at his post, trying to pump the crowd up with Maroon 5, which made Chuck’s indie-loving heart wince. He chose to ignore it and appreciate the fact that all four players had decided to thumb their noses at the criticisms about the sexist uniforms by wearing their bikinis.

Sarah’s answer to those criticisms had been a terse-yet-thoughtful sound bite about the culture of beach volleyball and how it had never bothered her because hey, she was at the beach anyway. Carina had simply said, “What’s the big deal? Have you seen this body? Why shouldn’t I show it off?”

She had then struck a strongman pose.

He’d spent enough time around them to know that Carina was nervous, too, as she and Sarah held a quick conference by their bench. Carina had on her usual multicolored, futuristic shades and her ball-cap despite the fact that it was already dark. Sarah wore the clear sports glasses and visor she preferred. She matched opponent and fellow digger Zondra Rizzo—the two of whom apparently had a rocky history, according to the press—in height, though Sarah was regarded as the better player. Alex Forrest, the oldest woman on the sand, had a solid three inches on Carina and had proved herself rather Cylon-like in her lack of mercy so far. The press hadn’t lied when it had said that this was going to be an interesting match.

“Wow, are they going to do that the whole game?” Ellie asked.

Confused, he followed her line of sight to the cameras and counted four or five of them pointed at their group in the stands. “Ready to be on international television?” he asked, nudging Ellie with a shoulder.

She immediately fixed her hair. “I should have put on more makeup. Can you tell I’ve been on a plane all day? Oh, this is so not fair!”

“You look great, babe,” Awesome said, kissing the side of her head.

“Chuck, flex!” Morgan said, leaning around them. “Show off those muscles. C’mon!”

Since Morgan, Cole, and Awesome all flexed, Chuck laughed and joined them. Why the hell not? Carina chose that second to glance into the stands. She elbowed Sarah, who looked up, right at them. For a second, she stared. The stare broke off into a small smile as she rolled her eyes at him good-naturedly and headed onto the sand. The cameras clicked away furiously.

“Awesome!” was Awesome’s declaration.

Sarah had the first serve. It was nearly an ace, but Zondra streaked across the sand, getting under the ball and pushing herself to her feet almost in the same, fluid moment. Sand flew as she made the vertical leap, slamming a hard shot down the line. Sarah, in an odd precognitive move, was waiting for it, and the fury began.

First point went to Zondra and Forrest, which made Ellie groan. “Don’t worry,” Chuck said. “The others are strong starters. Sarah and Carina are more tenacious.”

Indeed, Carina and Sarah did their high-five and set back up to take the serve. The next flurry was even more intense, the ball going back and forth over the net five times before Carina hammered a deep angle shot that just found the enemy sideline. She did a fist-pump as she jogged back to serve.

It wasn’t precisely a matched battle: Zondra and Sarah might have seemed comparable to some, but Chuck felt Sarah was the better all-around player, bias or no. If he had to be honest with himself, Forrest was probably the better blocker, but Carina certainly had zeal to make up for it. Sarah and Carina pulled forward with an early lead, but it was only by three points, and Zondra and Forrest fought to keep up. The score seesawed, the other team almost reaching Sarah and Carina, and then the dream team pulling ahead again.

By the time they reached set point—20-17 in favor of Sarah and Carina—Ellie had chewed through her fingernails. Even Anna was on her feet, shouting and slapping her hands against the rail. Chuck hoped that nobody had a microphone trained on them, as his dive coach’s favorite threats were a little too creative for the FCC’s tastes. He cheered, gripping the edge of the stands so hard that his fingers hurt, but mostly he stayed focused, concentrating, hoping, trying to figure out what the next move would be. In his spare time, he’d become a bit of a volleyball scholar, so he knew the names of kills, passes, sets, the dreaded lift, but watching it play out in fast, furious real time was completely different than watching recaps.

Carina served for set point, but her jump floater sailed past the end line. Groans arose from the stands. Carina gave them a “WTF is your problem?” look as the score was adjusted to 20-18. Sarah’s face never changed as she high-fived her partner and set up to receive from Forrest. It was a hard jumper; Sarah got under it easily, but she shanked the pass, knocking it nearly out of bounds. Carina sprinted and dove for it, but couldn’t get all the way under the ball, sending it careening into the crowd.

20-19. If Zondra and Forrest got this next point, Sarah and Carina would have to win the set at 22 points due to the win-by-two rule. The screens in the corners of the stadium all blared SET POINT #2 in huge font. Ellie’s grip on Chuck’s wrist tightened, and he nearly laughed as he thought about Morgan’s time on the trampoline, and how Bolognia Grimes had gripped his hand so tightly, he hadn’t been able to feel it the next day.

They needn’t have worried. Sarah easily lofted Forrest’s serve to Carina, who set it up. Sarah then hit a high, looping shot off the side of her hand, over the block and into the corner, paralyzing Zondra with the misdirection.

Chuck’s entire group jumped into the air, hollering as loud as they could. The first set belonged to Carina and Sarah.

“I don’t know how they do this,” Ellie said as the volleyball players trotted to their benches, out of breath. “I thought diving meets were intense. This just doesn’t stop.”

“Killer cardio,” Awesome said, nodding sagely in agreement. “Think they could give me some tips, bro?”

“I’m sure they can. I’ll ask,” Chuck said.

“I just can’t get over it. Chuck, you’ve got a girlfriend.”

“One who looks like that,” Morgan felt the need to point out to Ellie, literally pointing at Sarah.

Ellie ignored him. “And we’re watching her try to win a gold medal. This is just surreal! This beats your tenth-grade girlfriend, the one who was trying to be a vegan, oh, what was her name—”

“Hey, Shelly was very set in her beliefs. She just believed in changing them every week. And just for the record, I don’t know if Sarah is my girlfriend or not.”

“How do you not know?” Morgan asked.

“Because I just met her like nine days ago and we’ve both been a little bit busy,” Chuck said, giving his best friend a look. “It could just be a fling.”

“I don’t think it’s a fling, dude.”

“Hush,” Anna said, waving at all of them to shut up as Forrest prepped to serve the ball and start the second set. “I want to see this.”

Zondra and Forrest started on the better side of the net, which had something to do with the wind, but Chuck had no idea. It must have been a big deal, as the announcers always talked about it, but in his opinion, the playing didn’t seem to change. Whatever they had said to each other on the bench seemed to have worked wonders, agonizingly enough. They came back in the second set somehow stronger, scoring four of the first five points and sending Sarah and Carina scurrying all over the court. Sarah’s Ice Queen mask slipped into place. Carina looked downright pissed. She nudged her glasses up her nose, her lips were set in a narrow line. The gloss of sweat clung to both of them, making them look even more determined under the lights.

Forrest served to Sarah, who went down to one knee to get under it. She passed it tight to the net. Carina raced forward to set it. Sarah made the leap. For a split-second, she hung in the air, legs up like a runner’s, left arm extended, right arm cocked. It was like watching in intense, focused slow-motion as Sarah spiked the ball.

Forrest blocked it.

Chuck groaned, but miraculously, the ball was in the air and no whistle had blown. Sarah had somehow dug it in on her way down to the sand, setting it up perfectly. Carina easily dumped it over on the second hit, catching the other team off guard. Carina and Sarah let out a screams that were part frustration-part happiness as the ball landed, earning them the point. Carina tackled Sarah, who shook her head and shoved her teammate off of her, though the Ice Queen mask had disappeared. Sarah trotted back to serve, and at that moment, the game changed.

“Wow,” Ellie said, blinking as Sarah and Carina nailed home their sixth point in a row on an ace from Carina. “They, uh, they had their Wheaties this morning.”

“If those two had been on the Wheaties box when I was growing up, I’d have cheated on Cap’n Crunch in a heartbeat,” Morgan said.

“Amen,” Cole, Anna, and Chuck murmured, while Awesome only nodded.

Ellie turned to give them a dirty look. Morgan apparently elected himself to be the one to dig them out of their collective hole. “In the interest of promoting fairness,” he said, “I would also say that about the other team, too. See? It’s completely fair.”

“I don’t think that’s quite what she means, mate,” Cole said, but Chuck hushed them. Carina and Sarah had once again taken the lead, even though the other team broke their point streak by finding the sideline with an easy looper. That was followed by a furious, desperate bout that ended with three of them lying face-down in the sand while Carina hammered it home. Laughing, the redhead jogged over to pull her teammate to her feet.

“How much sand do you think they eat a year?” Morgan wondered, and Anna shushed him.

Even though Zondra and Forrest rallied to bring the score back, Carina and Sarah had found their groove. Within a few short minutes, they were ahead, 16-12, and Chuck could feel the tension mounting. They were potentially five points away from taking their second gold.

He felt nerves in his belly like a sick ball of dread. “C’mon…c’mon…”

“How is that helping them?” Anna asked him, giving him an annoyed look.

“It’s not. It’s helping me.”

“Oh, God. I can’t look,” Ellie said as play resumed. She buried her face in Awesome’s sleeve. “Just tell me when it’s over. Tell me when they’ve won. Tell me when they’ve—GO CARINA! GET IT!”

“Can’t look, huh?” Chuck asked when Sarah and Carina trotted back, point achieved.

“Shut up. Ooh, at this rate, I’m going to need an antacid. I’m going to be a wreck by Friday, I just know I am. GO SARAH!”

“She was always louder than the moms at all the dive meets, too,” Chuck told Cole, who was giving his sister an impressed look. “You sort of learn to live with it.”

The other team took the next point, which made every single person in their row groan. Four points to 21, Chuck reminded himself. Four points until they won. Sarah just barely dug a shot aimed at her face, which Carina then put over on two, just out of Zondra’s reach. Three points.

Forrest hit the ball over. Carina missed the block, falling backwards. Chuck wasn’t sure what happened, but she yanked her elbows in as she landed, somehow hitting the ball with the back of her wrists. Sarah threw herself sideways and horizontal, digging the ball right in front of Carina, who jumped over her teammate to crush the ball. Zondra tried valiantly, but couldn’t keep the ball on her side of the net; Sarah sent it back with a chop shot off of Carina’s set, dropping the ball just over the net and earning them a point. The minute it hit, Sarah threw her hands up, but Carina held her hands in front of her like a T-Rex and let out an actual roar.

Half the audience roared back.

Two points to gold.

Zondra and Forrest won the next point on a service error. Ellie by this point was watching through her fingers; the rest of them were gripping the edges of the stands, shouting encouragement through throats that were rapidly growing hoarse. Carina nearly lost a joust, but managed to hold out long enough to drop the ball on Forrest’s side and into the sand. Every single monitor in the stadium seemed to explode with the words “MATCH POINT.”

“They have to win this,” Ellie said. “I literally cannot take a third set of this. I have no stomach lining left.”

“Ditto,” Morgan said.

Every single camera on that side of the court, Chuck thought, had to be showing a close-up of Sarah’s face under her visor, as she stared in grim determination at her opponents. It was the look of a warrior about to face a final battle after a long siege and—that was dopey, he thought, nearly hitting himself on the back of the head. He was getting hyperbolic, which meant the next step was reciting love sonnets.

He leaned forward, both hands white-knuckled as they grabbed the barrier at the front of the stands. Ellie grabbed onto his jacket. Whether out of excitement about the game or to keep him from vaulting down, he didn’t know. They all watched, completely transfixed by the hush of the crowd, as the ball was served and play began. Every single time it crossed the net, Chuck forgot to breathe. Sarah and Carina wanted that point; Forrest and Zondra wanted them not to have it even more. All four women fought hard, throwing themselves down, springing to their feet, sprinting. There were a couple of spectacular near-misses until finally, Carina set it perfectly on the first hit and Sarah moved to spike on two. Forrest leaped, ready to eat it with her massive block, but instead of spiking it, Sarah bumped it with her fist back to Carina, who’d already made her approach. She leaped a clear three feet in the air to pound the quick set home. With no one to block her, Carina slammed the ball into the sand two feet in front of the stunned Zondra.

Even as the audience surged to its feet, Sarah and Carina fell off of theirs, gasping. Chuck had no clue what was going on, save that he was shouting, his heart pounding, his arms over his head, and that every single person around him seemed to be doing exactly the same thing. Carina jumped to her feet and tackled Sarah, who laughed and hugged her back, holding on tight. They’d won gold. They’d won their second gold.

With a whoop, Carina jumped to her feet again and began to run around the sand, hugging everybody that came near her—the other team, line judges, volunteers. She ran along the bottom of the stands, exchanging high fives with crowd members while Sarah slowly rose to her own feet. The blonde kept her composure long enough to hug the other team, saying a few words to Zondra. She shook the ref’s hand. And then, heading back across the stands, she suddenly broke into a dance for a couple of steps.

“Holy crap!” Ellie shouted.

“Chuck, that’s the Stanford swim team dance!” Morgan called at the same time, as though Chuck hadn’t recognized it.

He didn’t get time to reply, for Sarah ran after Carina straight for their section of the stands, jumping up for a hug. To keep her from breaking his neck and pulling him over, he hauled her up to their level, giving her a hard hug despite the sweat and the sand. “You did it!”

Sarah balanced on the edge, keeping one arm wrapped around him as she leaned back to beam at him. “Your turn next,” she said, and gave him a smacking kiss that made everybody in the vicinity immediately shut up. Sarah turned to grin at Ellie briefly, and hugged her with her free arm. “You must be Ellie. Hi, I’m Sarah, but I’ve gotta go.”

She hopped down easily and ran off, leaving the entire group stunned silent in her wake.

“Okay,” Ellie said. “Chuck? That is definitely a step up from Shelly.”

“No kidding,” Chuck said, his grin threatening to break his face.

---

Your turn next.

Less than forty-eight hours after Sarah had whispered that to him, Chuck felt the words bounce around in his skull like ping-pong balls shot out of a cannon. It was almost giving him a headache. Your turn, your turn, your turn.

Preliminaries had arrived. After what felt like an age and a blink, Chuck’s event had come up. He’d gone to the semifinals and finals for the women’s ten-meter platform diving, as he’d made friends with Lou, the sole American in that event. She’d placed seventh. He’d be lucky to place thirty-first.

Nerves ate at him the night before and morning of the preliminaries. He wasn’t afraid of diving. There had never been a fear of jumping. In the air, he knew what he was doing. He loved diving. He loved that moment of quiet in his head as he stepped to the edge of the world, looked down, and jumped in. He loved the plummet. He loved the entry. What he didn’t love was the rest of it.

He’d gone through his warm-up routine with Anna, who’d given him a stoic “Good luck” and promised to see him on the other side. The other divers were still getting pep talks from their own coaches, but Anna didn’t believe in hand-holding. By her reasoning, Chuck knew what he had to do. He just had to go out there and do it. So he stood apart from everybody else, waiting until he could get his warm up dives in. Nerves and fear tangled in his gut like a palpable force, threatening to twist him into a pretzel.

“Chuck! Psst!”

“Hey, Speedo! Over here!”

Confused, Chuck turned. He’d distinctly heard Sarah and Carina—their voices were unforgettable, even if he hadn’t seen them since they’d stood on the platform with their gold medals—but he could see nobody in the ready-area that even looked like them. After a second, he spotted a hand poking out around a corner. Sarah crooked a finger at him.

He glanced around to make sure nobody was paying attention to him before he wandered over. Carina and Sarah had stuffed themselves into an alcove, off to the side. They had a volunteer with them, so he figured they hadn’t actually sneaked in, but they apparently didn’t want to be seen. “Hey,” he said. “How’d you get in here?”

Neither woman answered for a minute. When Chuck figured out why, he nearly flushed all over. The Speedo really, really did not cover much.

Sarah wrenched her eyes up to his face first. “Gold medals get you everywhere,” she said, grinning at him. “We wanted to wish you luck.”

“Thanks. Um, Carina, eyes are up here.”

“Oh, fine.”

“Thirty seconds,” the volunteer said. “They’re calling for all unnecessary personnel to clear the area.”

“Going to be okay?” Sarah asked. “You look a little green.”

Chuck felt a little green. “I’ll be fine.”

“Well, okay.” Sarah gave him a hug and held on. Chuck hoped she didn’t feel him shaking. “You can do it, remember. You belong here just as much as any of these mostly-naked men.”

“I’ve never heard it put that way before, but thank you.”

When Carina moved to hug him, Chuck held out a hand. “Maybe just a handshake?”

“Oh, fine,” Carina said again, and Sarah elbowed her teammate when Carina did nothing to stop the wandering eyes. “Knock ‘em dead, Speedo.”

“Ellie says good luck, and we’ll see you on the other side.” Sarah gave him a peck on the cheek and then they were being ushered away by the volunteer, who did not look overjoyed in the least to have Carina as a charge.

“Some blokes have all the luck,” Cole said, appearing at Chuck’s side to watch the women walk away. “You never did get me that introduction.”

“Tell you what. We both make it to the next round, and I will.”

“Deal,” Cole said, and they shook on it.

---

He’d drawn the fifteenth slot in the middle of the pack of thirty-two divers. Some of the divers he recognized from a few of the events he’d competed in alongside Bryce, though there were plenty of new faces. It was a young man’s sport. He wasn’t anywhere near the oldest, but his age put him toward the older range, especially since he was considered inexperienced compared to others his age. Like Bryce, for instance, who had a silver from Worlds the year before in men’s individual ten-meter. Chuck had a few JO titles, his Olympic qualification, and the awards he’d won diving with Bryce. He had as many hours in the pool as most everybody else his age, but what he lacked was the fancy coach, the sponsorship, and the prestige. And for the world, all of those were hard to ignore.

He went through his practice dive on autopilot, knowing that the people in the stands were already watching. His form was a little loose for his liking, but at least he nailed the entry.

When the event began, there was little fanfare. The stands weren’t even full. With so many divers, the volunteers had to shuffle through them quickly, so it became less about presentation and more about efficiency. There was only enough time to get the score from the judges before the next diver was up.

Chuck clutched the chamois—it was a new one, a gift from Morgan, in Superman red and blue—and counted divers, listening to the roar of the crowd. He tried to ignore the scores, but it was difficult. 7.5. 6.0. 4.5—ouch—8.5. 9.0. 10.0. His first dive was a 3.6 degree of difficulty, not his hardest but certainly difficult. It was his armstand dive, too, which meant he got that out of the way early. He hated armstands.

Finally, Garcia, diving fourteenth, headed up the stairs, and Chuck was shuffled to the front of the line. He heard his very first coach’s voice in his head. “If you’re gonna lose your lunch, now’s the time, kid.”

Chuck swallowed hard and kept his lunch down, like he always did.

Garcia hit the water, applause breaking out. Chuck began the climb. Nerves coated the inside of his esophagus with a slick film. There weren’t any cameramen, but he could see the beady black eyes of the lenses suspended from the ceiling, cameras that would catch his every move and play it in heartbreaking slow-motion for the rest of the world.

He mentally recited what he needed to do. Walk forward. Toss the chamois over the side. It would be waiting for him poolside. Step forward. Ignore the crowd. Your turn. He tensed his arms as he walked, feeling his muscles, feeling the points of his elbows, down to his knees, his hips, his ankles, his toes.

One final breath. When the volunteer gave him the nod, he moved forward, deliberately. He walked to the edge, eyed the water. He chose his point of focus before he crouched facing the water and placed his hands on the ground. He leaned forward until all of his weight was on his hands, raising his feet into the air with his back to the pool. Years of practice let him know when he was perfectly vertical, presenting a firm line to the judges. And the second he hit that point, he began to hum The Legend of Zelda theme.

When the trumpets kicked in for real, he coiled all of his power into his arms and pushed off. And then he was airborne, every muscle taut, body rigid, toes pointed. One somersault, two somersaults, twist, kick out to straighten, and BOOM. In the water. He tried to course correct and save the dive, but even as he swam toward the side of the pool, he knew he’d come in at too much of an angle. That didn’t seem to deter the crowd at all: they screamed and cheered, and he heard chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” as he surfaced.

He hauled himself from the water, snatching up the chamois on the way, and headed to hop in the hot tub before his muscles tensed. Cameras followed him. He tried not to look at them, like he didn’t look for Ellie and the others in the crowd.

The first dive was the worst because it broke the ice. He was already itching for his second dive, which was a lower degree of difficulty and meant to build his confidence up for his third dive, ranked his hardest at 3.7. Still flying high from his first dive, Chuck wanted to get out there and do it right away. The problem was, he had to wait for thirty-one people to go before he could.

Cole, who was diving twentieth, caught up with him after the hot tub, while they were waiting to climb the stairs to the next platform. “How’d you do?” he asked.

“Eighty-one,” Chuck replied. “You?”

“Sixty-six,” Cole said, wincing. “Botched the take-off. Practically felt the platform go by.” He flicked a hand through his hair, sending a spray of water across the platform and annoying the two Italians standing nearby. “I swear, this part is the worst.”

“No kidding.”

“Were you at Shanghai last year?”

Chuck had still been in the comatose, eating-cheese-puffs-by-the-barrel part of his post-Bryce stage. It was easier to shake his head than to admit that.

“Took an hour and a half to get to the next dive. I was doing push-ups on the platform to keep warm.”

“Sure it wasn’t just showing off for the ladies?”

“Of the two of us, who has had not one but two visitors of the beautiful and feminine variety, mate?”

“Point,” Chuck said, and went silent as Bryce walked by.

He and Bryce, whenever they’d had to be in a room together, had fallen into an uneasy peace. Today, Bryce gave Chuck a nod as he walked by. He was wearing a Speedo with an American flag on it. “Nice dive,” he said, and headed up the stairs.

“Huh, that’s the first thing he’s said to anybody all day,” Cole said.

“Yeah. I wish he’d kept it to himself.” He didn’t want compliments from Bryce. He wanted Bryce to keep to their unspoken agreement, and leave him alone.

“You okay?” Cole asked.

Chuck shook off the intense feeling of dislike. Five dives left to go. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m fine. Just want to get going.”

“Don’t we all.”

They reached the thirty-second diver, who hailed from Israel, and the second round began. Chuck was separated from Cole to go up to the next platform, where he waited with the other six in the twelve through eighteen group. His second dive was inward, his least favorite. He’d conked his head on the platform on an inward dive when he was seventeen, an experience that still gave him nightmares. Repeating that trauma at the Olympics would just be a giant feather in the cap of failure.

Garcia, the diver before him, took the platform. Chuck took a deep breath, bouncing in place to keep his muscles loose, and thought about things that made him happy rather than that day at the Los Alemedos High School Pool Complex. The end of Final Fantasy VIII. Seeing Morgan’s face on the medal platform. Sarah as they played pool in the Village. Ellie’s reaction when he’d told her he was going to the Olympics.

Garcia dove. Chuck began climbing. His happy thoughts turned to technical ones. In synchros, this was where he and Bryce would have split to go to separate platforms, walking down those platforms together. Now, Chuck walked alone. He heard the brief roar of the crowd before it fell into hushed anticipation for the American diver. No matter that Bryce was the more well-known diver, the one expected to win, Chuck wore the stripes today, so they would cheer for him, too.

Once again, he walked to the edge of the platform, standing on his toes with his heels hanging over the edge. He picked his point and spread his arms—his wingspan, he knew, was the largest out of everybody in the group—to gain his balance. This time there was no Legend of Zelda. For inward, he heard, “Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na,” in his head. When he hit the first “Batman,” he took off, springing backwards and somersaulting into a tuck. Three and a half somersaults. It was a better vertical landing this time, but he’d been loose, and he knew that even as he hit the water.

The crowd didn’t give a damn. When he surfaced, they were chanting his name. He hauled himself over the side, gave them a wave. His scores rolled in. One 8.0, which was nice, but the other two kept scores were 7.5. He’d been hoping for 8.5s on that dive to make it worth the lowered difficulty score. No matter. He was still in the top eighteen, which was what he needed to do to go to the next round.

Over halfway done, he thought as he headed to the platform for his fourth dive. It was a reverse, which he wasn’t fond of, but he’d paired it with the Superman theme, which cheered him up. There was just something freeing about being able to launch himself into a forward hurdle, almost as though he were going to take off flying. And at 3.2, it was his easiest dive.

Which meant, of course, that it went horribly, horribly wrong. He felt it even as he left the platform. His balance was off, his ankles weren’t together, and his pike was so bad, making even the most novice swimmer wince. He lost sight of the water. He didn’t straighten out in time, and Shamu would have been proud of his splash.

Stupid, stupid mistake, he thought. Stupid. He pulled himself from the pool, acknowledged the audience with a wave, and headed off as fast as dignity would allow. The camera followed him to the hot tub. Chuck jumped in, submerged himself for one glorious moment of heat, and sat for a moment, hoping to gain some semblance of equilibrium. Hadn’t he expected every dive to go that badly? And maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe it could be salvaged.

His scores were read, and Chuck winced. He hadn’t even made a 50 on that dive.

Because the cameras were watching, Chuck tried not to let his disappointment show. He understood better than ever in that moment why Sarah had developed the Persona. Thousands watching live in Europe and Great Britain and streaming everywhere else had seen him all but back-flop. For all he’d talked about doing a belly-flop and humiliating himself, he’d hoped that his dives would all be 70s or above. It burned like a firebrand applied straight to his abdomen to have a dive score less than 50. To buy a minute, he leaned his head back against the lip of the hot tub, placing the cold chamois over his face. What a lousy dive.

A moment later, Cole came over and dropped straight into the hot tub. He stayed in, his chamois hanging over his shoulder. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, it’s fantastic.” Chuck managed a shaky laugh. “Nothing like a near belly-flop to really put your life in perspective.”

“Could be worse,” Cole said.

“How?”

“Did you hear about Guatemala?”

“No. What happened?”

Cole spread his hands wide.

Chuck’s eyes widened. “He Monty’d it?”

“Diver went one way, suit went the other. The ladies seemed to really appreciate it.”

Chuck immediately adjusted himself, just to make sure. He winced. “Holy crap,” he said. “I really hope that doesn’t happen to me. I’ve got somebody in the audience I’m trying to impress, you know, show her I’m really not a total spaz.”

“And how do you know dropping trou won’t impress her?”

Chuck didn’t blush. Years on the Stanford swim team had mostly cured him of that. In fact, the only one he seemed to blush in front of was Sarah, and that was usually accompanied by stammering. “Well, I may be wrong, but I think she doesn’t really want the rest of the world, or maybe specifically her partner, there when she sees...you know what?” He finally remembered the camera, which was hovering a few feet away, watching the pair of them. “That camera probably has a microphone. I’m shutting up now.”

“Good point. Let’s go up to the platform. Fewer nosy buggers there.” They trotted around the corner, hurrying past the seating area where the coaches and support staff watched the dives, and headed for the stairs. “You know what impresses the ladies, mate?”

“Being Bruce Wayne?” Chuck asked.

“Nah. Spending as much time as you can looking like this.” Cole swept a hand up and down his torso like Vanna White showing off the goods. “More reason to qualify so we can do this tomorrow.”

“Good point,” Chuck said, though with that awful dive, he doubted he had a shot in hell unless he pulled off a miracle with the next dive. He didn’t, though his score improved by over thirty points. He was ranked 21st at the end of the fifth round of dives, according to the boards. Cole was ranked fifteenth, Bryce at seventh. He needed to be in the top eighteen to continue, and it looked seriously like his Olympic career was over as the sixth round began.

As he waited by the stairs, he spotted a few American flags off to one side. Probably there for Bryce, he thought, but did a double-take at the flash of bright blond and red among the group. Could that be? He squinted, but it wasn’t clear from this distance. Breaking his regular rule, he kept an eye on that little patch of the stands as he climbed to the top.

And then, as one, all five members stood up and he saw his name spelled out on five individual shirts.

“Whoa,” he said, a grin automatically spreading. “That is cool.”

He had to school the smile from his face when the volunteer on the platform gave him the go-ahead, as the judges didn’t like people smiling. A towel had been placed on the end to prevent him from slipping. As he tossed his chamois over the side and went through the motions, a little voice slid through his concentration, a voice that reminded him that if this was going to be his last dive in the Olympics, he might as well make it worth it.

Why the hell not? What the hell did he have to lose?

Chuck took his stance on the edge of the platform, his heels hanging over, balancing on his toes. Every muscle in his body—weary from the past three hours—was taut, every limb perfectly placed. He thought, “Spider-man, Spider-man, friendly neighborhood Spider-man” to himself, and he launched himself into the open air.

He didn’t need the roar of the crowd when he surfaced to let him know that they’d forgotten all about the 44.55 dive. He ignored the hot tub and instead hurried around to the coaches’ area. Anna hit him on a flying leap of a hug. “Where the hell did that come from?” she asked, giving him a wide-eyed look. “Where have you been hiding that all day?”

“I have no idea!” He spun her around in pure happiness. “What’s my score? How’d I do?”

“They haven’t—” Anna began to say, but was cut off by the scores. When the final tally was called, both she and Chuck stared at each other in pure shock. 452 points total, off of a 92 point dive, his highest of the entire night by over ten points. “Chuck, that just put you in thirteenth place!”

“But I was in twenty-first—”

“And now you’re in thirteenth. Now, shh, I want to watch this.” Anna kept her gaze transfixed on the next diver, her pen hovering above her clipboard in anticipation. Meanwhile, Chuck reeled. Thirteenth place. That was far better than he had expected. There were fifteen divers left. He only had to beat two thirds of them to go forward.

The two divers after Chuck stayed ranked after him. The third bumped Chuck up to fourteenth. Anna swore, viciously, and marked it down on her clipboard. Chuck looked toward the stands, trying to see how the others were taking it, but they were too far away to tell.

Cole bumped him to sixteenth place, but Chuck remained there for three more divers.

At thirty divers, he was in seventeenth place, and he had officially stopped breathing. If both of them beat him…

“I’m going to puke,” Chuck said, watching the second to last diver take the platform. “I’m going to puke, and then I’m going to retire and take up something that won’t destroy my nerves, like knitting or beat-boxing, and I’ll pretend like I’ve never seen a pool before in my life. Oh, God, I can’t watch.”

“Shh,” Cole said.

“Easy for you to say, you’re already in for tomorrow,” Chuck said.

The diver took his mark. Chuck wondered if he should start praying. The diver raised his arms. Chuck wished he knew how to say a Hail Mary. The diver launched.

Chuck closed his eyes. He heard the splash, the noise of the crowd cheering, and then Anna hit him from the side like a linebacker. “You did it!” she said, and Chuck opened his. “Chuck! You did it. He didn’t beat you. Even if this next guy does, you’re at least—”

“Eighteenth,” Chuck said. “I’m at least eighteenth. I’m going to the next round?”

“You’re going to the next round.” Cole gave him a smack on the shoulder. “See you at the pool bright and early, mate. You can introduce me to the ginger then.”

“It would be my honor,” Chuck said before he collapsed against the wall in a boneless pile of disbelief.

Chapter Text

“Oh, my God!”

He didn’t know if he was dating Sarah Walker, or what was really going on between them other than they liked each other and kissing was nice, but Chuck had learned one thing: where Sarah went, Carina followed. And when the blonde tackled him in a running hug, Carina wasn’t far behind to throw herself into the frenzy. Ellie didn’t let the fact that she was trying to keep up with two gold-medalists trip her up, either. She joined in the dogpile, which the NBC cameras caught in full high-definition.

“That was so awesome, dude.” Once Chuck had extracted himself, Awesome pulled him in for a hand-grip-hug, pounding him on the back almost hard enough to bruise. “That last dive—totally killer.”

“Yeah? I saw the shirts! Whose idea was that?”

“Mine, duh,” Morgan said. “Though I have no idea where we’re going to find a place open to wash them this late to wear again tomorrow because, dude! You made it!”

“I know!” Chuck went through another round of hugs, answering the questions fired at him without really comprehending them. He was floating. All through his post-dive shower and the coordinators telling him what time he needed to be back at the pool the next morning, and Anna analyzing his dives, he’d been floating in a perpetual state of stunned disbelief. He’d moved on to the next round. He was going to the semifinals at the 2012 London Olympics.

“Okay, okay,” Anna said, appearing at Chuck’s side. “The star needs his sleep. You can celebrate with him after he’s won gold.”

“I highly doubt that I’m going to,” Chuck started to say, but he was interrupted by another dogpile, this time with all of them included. “Okay, fine! Fine! I’ll win gold. Sheesh. Animals.”

Anna tugged him away, shaking her head. “You need sleep. The semis are at an inhumane hour tomorrow. So go back to your room and get some rest. Alone. I’m putting an embargo on seeing any blonde volleyball players until you dive again.”

“Don’t worry,” Chuck said. “I’ll be good.”

Anna gave him a stink-eye. “I know all about the condoms the Olympics coordinators gave you. Don’t get tempted. You need to be clear for your dives tomorrow.”

“Okay, okay. Though we haven’t actually—”

“I don’t want to know,” Anna said, and shoved him out toward the pathway that led to the Village.

Two hours later, Chuck rolled over and punched his pillow, trying to get more comfortable. He’d gotten a couple of texts from Ellie, nothing more than her telling him congratulations and letting him know they were going back to the hotel to rest for the next day, as they were going to celebrate hard when Chuck won. He smiled at that. They were delusional if they thought he’d make it past the semis, but it was neat to make it even that far.

His cell phone buzzed with a new text. Grateful for something to break through his nervous thoughts, he picked it up, expecting it to be Morgan.

It was from Sarah: Text me when you get up? I’ll buy you breakfast.

He wrote back, Are you sure? I don’t want to bankrupt you.

You’re awake?

Can’t sleep.

Her text reply was almost immediate. Can I help?

Chuck debated. Though he was tired, he still felt restless. At Stanford, there would have been homework to complete, but in the Village, he had nothing. Most of the athletes would be in the bar, far away from the dormitories, or out on the town in London. For most of them, there was only the closing ceremony to look forward to.

But the basement would be empty, probably, and the basement had a lounge. Sarah’s hotel was only a block away from the Village. Tired of trying to count sheep. Meet me at the pool table?

Be there in ten, Sarah texted back, and Chuck rolled out of bed to pull on a shirt.

She arrived only a minute or two after he did, brushing raindrops off the shoulders of her Team USA jacket. She wore jeans and her hair was down, so that she looked completely relaxed. Next to her he felt rumpled and out of sorts, like he should have dressed up rather than coming downstairs in his pajamas.

“Wired, huh?” she asked as he racked up the balls for the first game.

“It’s my first post-Stanford competition,” Chuck said, rearranging the stripes and solids so that they were in the proper order. “Making it also the first time I haven’t come back and had to solve a twenty-page differential equation after a meet.”

“I see.” Sarah swung her pool cue from hand to hand as she regarded him. “You want to break?”

“No, you go ahead. You’re going to kick my ass anyway.”

“Glad to see those confidence levels are still sky-high,” Sarah said. She bent over to the take the shot, giving Chuck quite a nice view down the front of her shirt. When she caught him looking, she raised an eyebrow and, without taking her eyes off of him, made the shot.

She knocked the two and the four in easily, but didn’t hit anything on the next shot.

“Gah,” Chuck said, both because that was incredibly hot and incredibly unfair. “Is there anything you’re bad at? Anything at all?”

“Nope,” Sarah said, and proceeded to dance-walk around him as he set up for his shot. When he lined up to take out the eleven, she hoisted herself onto the side of the pool table right next to him and gave him an innocent look. “What?”

“You’re kind of blocking my shot.”

“Oh, that one?” Sarah leaned over—the fact that her hair brushed his neck and shoulder had to be deliberate—to get a look. “You won’t make that shot. Not from this angle.”

Her hair tickled, breaking his concentration. She didn’t sit back up, so her face remained inches from his. Through sheer willpower, he kept his focus. “I bet I can,” he said, his voice deeper than usual. He almost cleared his throat, but he didn’t want to alert Sarah to just how much she was getting to him. This would not be Pac-Man all over again.

Of course, it would probably be better than Pac-Man, but he had to have some pride.

“What’s the deal?” Sarah asked, deliberately dropping her gaze to his lips.

It took an Olympic effort to not throw the cue to the side and kiss her. “If I make this shot,” Chuck said, “I win.”

Sarah smirked. “Deal.”

“Eleven ball,” Chuck said, his voice a little shakier thanks to that damned smirk. “Side pocket.”

“I do have to say that there’s no way you’ll—”

Chuck took the shot. The cue ball took off with a perfect spin, easily nudging the eleven into the side pocket with just the right amount of force.

“—make that shot,” Sarah said, and gave him a startled look. “Okay, wow. I did not see that—”

Chuck dropped the pool cue and closed the distance between the two of them. He felt Sarah’s chuckle through his lips, but he didn’t care. The woman knew exactly what she did to him. It was so unfair. It was perfect. She wrapped her arms around him, her fingers toying with the ends of his hair as he shifted over so they weren’t at such an awkward angle. The kiss deepened until every point of contact between their bodies felt like a furnace. Chuck didn’t give a damn that they were technically in a public room or that he had never been in favor of excessive PDA. As long as Sarah kept doing that with her tongue, he’d sign off on anything and everything. He braced his free hand against the cool felt of the pool table, the other hand playing with the hem of Sarah’s shirt, slipping below to feel the skin underneath.

Sarah must have liked that, for she tightened her grip, scooting even closer to him. When she tilted her head back in invitation, he moved his lips down her neck, smiling as she gasped. She bit his ear—gently, at least—in reply, and her fingers went for the hem of his shirt.

He needed no prompting for that. With the ease of a long-time diver, he whipped the garment off. Sarah’s eyebrows went up; she leaned back, her gaze openly appreciative.

“What?” he asked.

“God bless all those hours you spend in the gym,” Sarah said. “Oh, before we do anything else, I do believe...” She leaned all the way back on her elbow, reaching over. In an easy move, she flicked the eight ball into the corner pocket. “Victory is yours.”

“So hot,” Chuck said, and climbed onto the pool table with her. He leaned down to pick up exactly where they’d left off...and a throat cleared from the doorway.

Chuck went still. Under him, he felt Sarah do exactly the same thing, which told him they both recognized that cough. “Dammit, Bryce,” Chuck said, forgetting in that second the ranged and complex history between his dive-partner and himself. “What do you want?”

“I don’t think that’s what that pool table’s meant for, Chuck. You might want to get a room.”

“Thanks for the tip, dude. Or you could leave.”

“There’s some folks coming in behind me, dude,” Bryce said, his voice mild. “You’ve got time, though.”

Chuck blew out a long breath and met Sarah’s gaze. It helped that she looked just as annoyed as he felt. Somewhat. “Need a minute?” she asked him in an undertone.

He nodded tightly.

“I’ll get rid of him,” she said, and slipped out from under him, a peevish look in place. “Bryce.”

“Sarah.” Bryce gave her a nod. “Congratulations on the second gold. I knew you could do it.”

“Thanks. I need to get some water. Keep me company?”

Chuck heard their footsteps recede, but didn’t move for a minute. Sanity slowly returned: what the hell had they been thinking? He had a perfectly good room upstairs, where people like Bryce Larkin wouldn’t just walk in on them and be privately amused at their expense. And he was due to dive again in less than ten hours, how the hell did he think he was going to concentrate?

But, he really, really had not wanted to stop.

When Sarah came back, he’d tidied up, pulling his shirt back on, putting the pool cues in the cupboard, making sure the pool balls were properly racked up for the next people to use the table. He sat on the edge of the pool table facing the door of the lounge. Sarah walked in, took one look at his expression, and her own face seemed to fall for a split-second.

“Dammit, Bryce,” she said with a sigh. “I guess we’re not picking up where we left off.”

“I shouldn’t. I need...”

“To be focused tomorrow. I get it.”

“Can I walk you back to your hotel?” He could kiss her good-night like it was a real date instead of their undefined Olympic fling.

“Sure.” Sarah held out a hand to him. “I’d like that.”

They headed out of the Village together hand in hand. Chuck was grateful he’d remembered his pass and that they wouldn’t have to go up to his room to fetch it, as he didn’t want to be tempted. “What’d Bryce want?” he asked as they walked through the gate into the regular part of Stratford.

Sarah shrugged. “Apparently he couldn’t sleep either and had the same idea we did.”

“Jerk,” Chuck said without much heat.

Sarah didn’t disagree. “I’m sorry. I really was trying to help, and I think I’ve made it worse.”

“Don’t apologize. That was hands down the best game of pool I’ve played. Ever. I mean, after all, I won.” He grinned. “Totally worth it.”

They headed around the corner toward Sarah’s hotel. Before they could reach the doors, though, she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and gave him a serious look. “Chuck, whatever happens tomorrow...”

“Yes?” he asked, nerves beginning to flutter in his midsection.

“Win or lose, and I personally think you’re going to win, for the record—win or lose, we’re picking up where we left off tonight. Tomorrow night. Got it?”

Chuck felt a smile take over his face by degrees until his cheeks physically hurt. “It’s a date?”

“It’s a date. Now go, get some sleep so you can win tomorrow. You’ll need every bit of rest you can get.” Sarah winked at him and, while he was standing there in a happy state of stupid shock, gave him a quick peck on the lips and a shove to get him started back toward the Village. He gave her a wave and headed off.

He had a date with Sarah Walker the next day. Win or lose, it was going to be awesome.

---

He let Sarah sleep and met Anna for breakfast, not in the Village but at a café a couple of Tube stops away. He’d expected that his stomach wouldn’t be able to handle a single morsel, but instead he ordered what felt like one of everything on the menu and finished Anna’s plate off for her, too. She watched him go with her eyebrows raised.

“I thought I said no volleyball players, Chuck,” she said as he downed a glass of orange juice.

He choked. “What? N-no, this isn’t post, um, this isn’t post anything. I’m just hungry.”

“You’re never hungry before a big meet,” Anna said. “So clearly somebody got up to something naughty last night—against orders!”

“Nothing happened. Well, okay, not much happened and—it’s not that I’m hungry because of sex. Geez.”

Anna looked around, clearly unimpressed. “I don’t think the guy in the corner heard you, but everybody else did, so you’re okay. You could say it louder, though, if you want.”

“Crap,” Chuck said, putting his head on his hands. “Kill me now.”

“Can’t do that. You’ve got to be at the pool soon and even though I’m pretty sure I could take your girlfriend, it’d be a pain to get bloodstains out of this official USA coaching jacket they’re forcing me to wear.”

“I’m not commenting on how you can take Sarah in a fight in any way, shape, or form.”

“Okay. Then let’s move on and talk about your dive list.”

“Yeah.” Chuck lifted his head and dug into his eggs. “I want to put the reverse first, get it out of the way.”

“Nope,” Anna said.

“You saw how horribly I screwed it up last night—if I get it out of the way early…”

“You’ve practiced this order,” Anna said. “You’re going to stick with this order.”

“But I’m going to be freaking out about that dive the whole day,” Chuck said. “I really think I should get it over with.”

“Consider it motivation.” Anna daintily spread jam on a scone.

Chuck scowled. “I bet another coach would let me change the dive order.”

“Another coach convinced you that you were only good in synchros and piggy-backing off of another diver, and now you’re in the semifinals for the Olympics on an individual event.” Anna shrugged. “If that’s not proof that I know best, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Fine. But if I screw up the dive, I get to say ‘I told you so.’“

“If you screw up the dive, I’m going to kick your ass, scary girlfriend or no.”

“You’re the best motivational speaker I know, Anna Wu.”

Anna’s lips twitched, but otherwise her expression didn’t change. “Look at it this way,” she said. “Yesterday, you had to beat fourteen divers to level up. This morning, you only have to beat six.”

“Level up,” Chuck said, rolling the words around on his tongue. “I like that.”

“I thought you might.”

“How cool would diving with armor be?”

“If you’re not worried about your entry or drowning, completely cool.”

“You know, if this fails, we could start up a company and sell T-shirts. They can say stuff like, ‘My other Speedo is Mithril’ and ‘Sonic the Hedgehog Diving Academy.’“ Chuck shook his head fondly. “Sonic’s probably the best diver. Amazing tucks. Never had to tuck cowboy style in his life.”

“Tails gets better height on his dives.”

“Good point, but the second tail really screws up his entry.”

“And on that note, we should probably get you in the warm up pool before you design an entire clothing line.” Anna dropped money on the table, more than enough to pay for Chuck’s truckload of food and cover a serviceable tip.

“What would we call it, though?” Chuck asked as they left. “The Diva Diver line?”

“Sure, Chuck, that’s exactly what we’ll call it. We’ll be millionaires within days.”

“I knew it. I so knew it. And I should spend less time around Morgan, huh?”

“Hey, you said it, not me.”

At the pool, Anna hung around for his warm-up, shaking her head whenever he came up with a new nerdy slogan. The only time she engaged him was to argue against Luigi being the better diver (“Just because you’re a statistical anomaly, Chuck, doesn’t make all tall guys secretly good divers. Mario’s way better, and don’t even argue that Yoshi could kick their asses. He’s so the wrong body type”), but for the most part, she left him alone to his rambling ideas. Their laughter did, however, draw surprised looks from the other divers stretching out to await their turns practice diving.

“What happened to you?” Cole asked, raising his eyebrows at Chuck, who was bouncing in place on his toes. “Somebody spike your morning tea?”

“Nope.” Chuck stretched out his arms, flopping them around his body to keep his muscles loose. “Just feel good.”

“Hm,” said a voice behind him. “I’ll have what he’s having.”

Chuck didn’t turn. “Bryce,” he said, his voice neutral.

“Chuck.” Bryce seemed amused as he mirrored Chuck’s tone perfectly.

“Oh, I can do this, too.” Cole affected a terrible American accent as he said, “Bryce. Chuck. Cole.”

Bryce shrugged, apparently not offended at all. “Just came over to wish the both of you luck.”

“Thanks.” Cole shook Bryce’s hand. “Not sure we’ll need it, but thanks. Good luck to you, too.”

“Good luck,” Chuck said, and shook his ex-teammate’s hand.

Bryce headed to the other side of the platform with another nod, leaving Cole and Chuck behind. “Such an odd bloke,” Cole said, shaking his head. “You two did the synchro thing, right?”

“Yeah. We used to be pretty good.”

“I’ve no patience for synchro. I like having all the glory myself.” Cole stretched, popping his shoulder. “Plus, if I’m going to synchronize my movements to somebody, I’d rather not have it be another bloke. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. It’s just not for me.”

Chuck bounced in place again. “My coach never really let me compete in the individuals. I needed Bryce to keep me in line or something.”

“Your coach was daft, then. Oh, looks like we’re finally going. Good luck, mate.”

“Same to you. See you at the bottom.” Chuck clapped Cole on the shoulder and followed the Canadian diver, Lester Patel, up the stairs. Because he’d placed seventeenth the day before, he was diving second today. It meant he got his dives out of the way early, but it also meant waiting in agonizing purgatory at the end while every other diver had his turn.

Lester’s first dive was his reverse dive. He stood back near Chuck and the volunteer at the top of the stairs and took a running start. The crowd, which was a little larger than the night before, let out an appropriate cheer, and Chuck felt the first nerves of the day set in.

He didn’t like that feeling, so he simply pushed it away. If he did poorly, so be it. As he listened for the rumble of the scores to be announced—and cheered at by the Canadian contingent of the stands—he went through his routine, focusing on each individual part of his body as he always did. Toes. Ankles. Knees. The sharp edges and the planes, every part that made him Chuck Bartowski. He didn’t think about Sarah or Ellie or any of the others in the stands. He simply walked out, tossed down his chamois, and assumed the position, resting all of his weight on his hands until his body was perfectly vertical.

Here goes nothing, he thought, and began to hum the Legend of Zelda theme song.

---

“Seriously, what the hell has gotten into you? Where can I get some?” Cole, a little out of breath from his third dive, leaned back against the wall under the shower, where Chuck had been standing, trying not to grin and to ignore the camera simultaneously.

“Dunno,” Chuck said. “Woke up feeling great. It’ll probably go away any minute.”

“Did you see the glares you were getting from the Chinese coaches?” Cole ducked his head under the water and shook it, sending droplets everywhere. “Hell, from most of the coaches. Even my coach is out there trying to figure out who you are.”

“Really?” Chuck scratched the back of his head. “I’m not really anybody.”

“You just pulled three 90-pointers out of your ass. Nobody believes you’re nobody anymore, mate.”

“It was probably just luck.”

“If I weren’t so genial and charismatic, I’d punch you in the face,” Cole said, laughing. “Seriously, you’re a bit of a bastard.”

“I’m in good company.” Chuck flicked water at him. When a volunteer beckoned, he pulled his chamois from around his neck and saluted Cole with it. “That’s my cue. I’ll put a little more flair in it this time for you. Maybe some spirit-fingers.” He wiggled his fingers at Cole as he left, grinning as the other man called, “Bastard!” after him.

In truth, Chuck wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. He hadn’t lied: even though he hadn’t slept much the night before, he’d woken up ravenous and excited rather than beside himself with terror, like the day before. It was obvious that his feelings for Sarah and everything that had happened between them played a huge part, but that wasn’t all of it. For the first time ever, he...just didn’t give a damn. He’d woken with the idea on his mind that diving no longer defined him. It was something he did. It wasn’t something that validated his existence.

Irony had a twisted sense of humor, Chuck thought. The minute he stopped using diving as a benchmark to measure himself against, he’d apparently started to excel at it. He’d heard of others having epiphanies—and he’d had a fair few himself, like the time he’d nailed his first three and a half somersault—but this hadn’t even been that severe. It was just like all of the years of training, the hours in the pool, nights and days of sore muscles and injury, and everything stopped fighting him. So what if his coach was too young? So what if he was too tall? He was here. He could do this.

When it came his turn, he took his spot at the rear of the platform, ready to perform the same reverse dive that had ended disastrously the night before. He’d always hated the reverse. It was one of the two dives where his height really worked against him. Jumping outward and then spinning back toward the platform always seemed like the utter pinnacle of lunacy to him, but competitions loved those dives, and the Olympics required them. He just had to remind himself that once he made it through this dive, he’d get to do his back dive and his voluntary, two of his favorites. He ignored the nervous excitement running through the stands—after the first three dives, they were definitely paying attention to the underdog American diver—picked his orientation spot on the ceiling, hummed the right song, and stepped forward with his left foot. One step, two steps, one step to push off, coil the power in his legs, and launch. He drew his arms as tight around his knees—tighter, Anna’s voice urged—as he could get them and let himself somersault down, sighting the water. A thrust of the hips to kick his legs out straight, a damn-near-vertical-entry, and he was in the water, the roar of the crowd in his ears.

There was no way in hell he was getting another 50 on that dive, not with that entry.

“Sorry, I forgot the spirit fingers,” he told Cole when the other man finished his dive.

Cole laughed. “Damn. I was willing to let you try to beat me for gold in trade for proper spirit fingers.”

“You’d have let me win gold? Aw, that’s nice.”

“I said try. Your lot did chuck a great big deal of tea into the ocean once.”

“It’s so nice that you English don’t harbor long grudges or anything.”

“I do have to ask: what the hell are spirit fingers?” Cole asked, and Chuck laughed.

His last two dives were pike, which he liked better than tuck. He got more speed on tucks, but pike required abdomen control. He’d always thought pike simply looked better, too, and Anna agreed, which was why she let him save these dives for last. “It gives you something to look forward to,” she had said at the time. “Think of it as the carrot on the stick.”

With Anna, it was usually more stick than carrot, but Chuck agreed in this case. He went through his second-to-last dive without much trouble, though he scored a little lower than he would have liked, and waited by the hot tub for Cole to come back for another round of banter.

When the audience let out a collective, “Ooh,” he hurried out to the coaches’ area. That was never good at a diving meet. A few seconds later, he was moving through the rest of the divers, trying to get near the edge of the water.

Cole had his head above water as he swam to the side of the pool, but his right arm dangled uselessly by his side. Immediately, medics in Great Britain polo shirts stormed the side of the pool, armed with ice bags and a stretcher. Cole pushed himself to his feet and tried to wave them off. “It’s only dislocated—you can pop it right back in, it’s fine, I’ve done this loads of times. Hell, there’s no need for that...”

He looked back over his shoulder as he was hurried off by the medics. “Good luck, Chuck! Guess you can win gold now.”

“Uh, thanks,” Chuck said, but he wasn’t sure Cole heard him. He stood with the rest of the divers and watched. None of them, he knew, couldn’t stop the little voice in the back of the mind, the little voice that asked What if I’m next? Even more shameful than that was the voice that whispered, That’s one less to beat.

---

Fourth.

Holy crap, he’d placed fourth. Out of eighteen of the best divers on the planet, he’d placed fourth. Chuck still couldn’t believe it as he zipped up his bag. The divers had a few hours to rest, time for massages and proper cool-downs before the warm-ups for the evening’s finals. The evening’s finals where Chuck would dive fourth-from-last because he’d placed fourth in the semifinals.

The head diving coach had told Anna that Chuck was supposed to report to the Louganis room, where most of the sports medicine staff had set up. Cole’s injury had put all of the other divers on edge; Chuck could see the two Chinese divers being shuffled off to their own ready-room, the remaining Great Britain diver being whisked off in another direction. He slung his gym bag over his shoulder and followed Bryce. Anna was waiting for him outside of the locker room. She didn’t seem happy to share her charge, but she knew enough about the sport not to complain. “How’re you feeling?” she asked Chuck as they walked along.

“Am I dreaming?”

Anna pinched his elbow.

“Ow. That was rhetorical.”

“Either way, it answered your question. How’s your shoulder?”

“A little stiff. My knee’s fine. Overall, I’m pretty loose.”

“Tired?”

“I could use a nap,” Chuck said. “Anna, am I really in fourth place?”

“You were. Now you’ve got a whole new game level to get through.” They approached a corner and Anna grabbed his arm to stop him. “Wait. There’s reporters in the breezeway. You’ll want to give them a little breathing room between you and Bryce.”

“On a scale of one to ten, how much are the news outlets eating this up, this thing with Bryce and Sarah?”

“Well, let me put it this way, Chuck: for the first time in years, they’re actually paying attention to men’s diving, and it has very little to do with those tiny Speedos.”

“Don’t they get enough soap on daytime TV?”

Evidently not, Chuck soon found. The first reporter that called his name bore a microphone with the TMZ logo. Baffled and surprised by all of the cameras suddenly around him, Chuck wandered over. “Chuck, what do you have to say now that Bryce and Sarah have reconciled?”

“What?” Chuck asked as a paper was shoved at him. He looked at it in confusion. It didn’t take him any time to figure out that it was a picture from the night before, though the image was blurry and grainy. Bryce and Sarah were walking together in the Village courtyard. He recognized Sarah’s top because he had to figure two minutes before the picture had been taken, he’d been trying to get it off of her. “Huh. This is really blurry.”

Anna snatched the paper away from him, glanced at it, and turned her most ferocious scowl on the reporter. Though said reporter didn’t flinch, the cameraman backed up a step. “What the hell is this? What are you trying to pull? The man’s in the middle of an international competition against the best divers in the world and you’re trying to generate fake drama? What, do you write for the CW? Go away and come back when you have real reporting credentials. As for the rest of you, Chuck is not taking any questions right now. You can talk to him after he’s won.”

“So you’re going to win the gold like your girlfriend, Chuck?” the reporter from CNN asked, all eagerness.

“I just want to go out there and dive well,” Chuck said, ignoring the girlfriend comment since Bryce was still nearby, talking to one of the bloggers from ESPN. Even though there was still some residual annoyance at Bryce for interrupting him and Sarah the night before, he wasn’t going to rub Bryce’s nose in it. That felt all too high school for his liking. “But my coach is right, guys. I gotta go. Dives to do, medals to win.”

In the Louganis room, he climbed into one of the hot tubs and let out a sigh. Six dives was actually a short regimen comparatively, but that sort of focus put a lot of stress on his muscles.

Bryce climbed into the other hot tub and sighed as well. “Is it over yet?” he asked, and Chuck flashed back to Stanford for a brief second, toward the end of one long, exhausting practice or another where there were sore muscles to rest and homework assignments awaiting them.

“God, I wish,” Chuck said, and submerged himself under the water. When he came up for air, he rested his head back, closed his eyes, and tried to meditate. It failed, like it always did, but at least Bryce remembered that habit well enough that he didn’t try to make small talk. Sometimes it helped to have a history.

---

After a post-mortem with Anna, a massage, an examination from the Team USA staff, and a more well-balanced lunch than he would have preferred, Chuck was allowed a nap. They stuck him in a little rec room, where Chuck imagined the other swimmers and divers reviewed tape between their heats. He and Anna, however, had been operating independently, so to Chuck, it was simply a warm room with a large-screen TV and the ever-present smell of chlorine, a familiar scent throughout his life. Chuck easily dozed off on the couch.

He woke to a light tap on the door. “Yeah, Anna?” he asked, groggy and disoriented. “Is it time?”

“It’s me.” Ellie poked her head through the door. “They told me you should probably wake up and eat something.”

“What time is it?” he asked, looking around for a clock.

Ellie showed him her watch. He’d have preferred another half hour, but the minute he’d become a serious contender for the medal, he’d become official property of the dive team and had to follow their schedule. So instead he gave Ellie a smile, albeit a sleepy one. “Hey.”

“Hi.” She gave him a hug. “You were amazing. Congratulations. Do you want me to save my ‘I told you so’ for later or just tell you now?”

“Go double or nothing.” Chuck scrubbed his hands over his hair, wincing as he felt just how much his hair was standing up. He let out a massive yawn and began to stretch out his limbs, popping his shoulders in a way that made Ellie wince. “Sorry. Who’d you have to kill to get back here?”

“Sarah and Carina are distracting the guard so I made a run for it.” Ellie nudged him with her elbow, her grin taking on a mischievous glint. “I like them. They’re a lot of fun. Far more down to earth than I was expecting.”

“Down to earth? Carina?”

“Well, more Sarah. Carina put Devon in a headlock.”

Chuck’s laughter bubbled up, shaking his shoulders and making him drop down onto the couch. “Of course she did.”

“How are you doing? You were killing it out there, Chuck. It was like you had no fear. It was, well, in a word, it was amazing.”

“Completely different than yesterday.” Chuck stretched out his back. “I don’t know. It was the first time where I was like, ‘this is fun to be here.’ I don’t know if it’ll last, but I’m enjoying it while I can.”

And trying, he thought, not to end up like Cole Barker. At least it was only that his arm had popped out of its socket, a fairly common injury for divers. Cole would be back and in training in a couple of weeks.

“Good,” Ellie said, surprising Chuck. He’d been expecting a pep talk, but Ellie only smiled at him. “That’s all I ever wanted for you. You used to love diving so much until you went to Stanford. It’s nice to see that you’re enjoying it again.”

“On the world’s biggest stage. In front of billions of people. I picked quite the comeback, sis.”

“I know. It’s so typically you that I have to laugh. Speaking of which…you know your girlfriend can only watch you dive through her fingers, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Here.” Ellie pulled her camera out of her pocket and flicked it on, sorting through the pictures. “This is what she looks like, every single time you dive.”

Chuck took the camera, his brow crinkling. It was a close-up of Sarah, with Carina in the background munching on popcorn. Sarah had both hands over her face and was peering through her fingers, her expression clearly worried. Puzzled—the woman regularly threw herself to the ground to hit a ball aimed at her face at speeds of like fifty miles per hour—Chuck thumbed to the next picture, which was a motion-capture of Sarah and Carina in mid-jump, screaming. He went back to the first picture.

“It’s really kind of cute,” Ellie said.

“But she’s fearless. She—well, you were at one of her matches, you see what they do every day. That makes no sense. I mean, it’s just a dive. I do that all the time.”

“You’re cute when you’re oblivious, too.” Ellie patted his knee. “Anyway, I think my time’s up, but I wanted to tell you that no matter what happens today, I’m proud of you. I’ve always been proud of you.”

Since he couldn’t really find words, Chuck just hugged her. “Thank you.”

“Aces, Charles. You’re aces.”

“A Dad quote?” Chuck grinned. “I’m impressed. Tell everybody out there I love them and that I’ll see them after?”

“Will do. Good luck.”

Once she left him alone, Chuck took a deep breath, feeling the nerves that hadn’t bothered to come around that morning finally come and settle in his stomach. It was time to go get warmed up to try to win an Olympic medal.

Chapter Text

The atmosphere in the stadium had shifted during Chuck’s quarantine from the world. That morning, it had been tense, but there’d almost been a sleepy atmosphere among the fans, as it had been way too early for a competition for most of them. In the intervening time, they’d woken up. The stands were nearly full, with more people filing in even as the divers lined up in order on the platform to start their practice dives. Chuck searched the stands, but he didn’t see his group. He hadn’t thought to ask Ellie where they would be sitting.

Anna talked to him during warm-up, but it wasn’t the terse, fevered “you can do it” speech he’d been expecting. They’d already discussed how to improve on that morning’s dives, so Anna kept it light, teasing him about things she’d seen online. People wanted him to get a Twitter account, she told him. They’d already set up some fake ones in his name, and fake ones in Sarah’s name, and some of the stuff that went on between the accounts was pretty dirty—and in some cases, a ménage a trois with fake Carina accounts. Chuck boggled.

She left him with that and a simple reminder to keep his left foot pointed on entry.

Diving first was Lester Patel, the Canadian. He was a squirrelly dude in a red and white Speedo with a maple leaf on the butt, nothing intimidating, but Chuck had learned not to underestimate him. He was a solid diver.

Chuck was slated to go fourth-from-last, right ahead of Bryce. With adrenaline from his practice dives still coursing through his limbs and nerves pooled in his abdomen, he waited as long as he could under the shower with his head back against the wall. He couldn’t get Ellie’s words out of his head.

You used to love diving so much until you went to Stanford.

Was it really that uncomplicated? Was Stanford really the problem? It had been his dream school. His father had gone to Stanford. Even though Stephen Bartowski had vanished emotionally and then physically, Chuck had still felt a connection to the school. He’d worked hard to get a dive scholarship there—it had been his only goal, in fact, all through high school. He’d worked hard to be part of the team. And his coach had put him in synchros. He hadn’t minded, but...

A noise to his right made him open his eyes to see Bryce. The other man leaned back against the wall under the shower, the water plastering his dark hair to his head. He wasn’t looking at Chuck but straight forward, getting into the mindset.

For the first time during the games, Chuck spoke first. “How come you didn’t stay with Graham after you graduated?” he asked. Bryce had been Graham’s star diver.

“Took me a few months after you quit to realize that the man was poison. Shaw’s a much better coach.” Bryce shrugged.

Chuck didn’t have much opinion about Bryce’s new coach one way or another. He’d seen Shaw about, but the man’s face lacked expression.

“I mean, he’s kind of a despicable human being.” Bryce slicked his hair back. “We don’t hang out or anything, but then, we don’t need to. Nobody really has a good relationship with his coach, not really. It’s something you learn to live with.”

Chuck frowned, thinking about Anna and the way she’d joked with him during warm-ups. “Yeah,” he said, and silence fell.

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t see Graham’s agenda at work,” Bryce said, out of the blue. “I should have realized—I mean, I shouldn’t have said any of that stuff to you. That was wrong.”

Chuck almost asked him why, but even before the word formed on his tongue, a volunteer with a clipboard hustled up to them and informed them that they needed to be on the platform for their dives. The eighth diver launched off even as Chuck began climbing. It had been at Graham’s behest that Bryce had dumped him as a partner? He should have been thinking about his dive, but suddenly, he was remembering all of the injustices he’d suffered on the Stanford diving team. He’d gotten more coaching from Anna than he had from Graham even then. Bryce was the star diver. Chuck would clearly never go anywhere.

Except...he had. He’d placed fourth in the semifinals at the Olympics.

Why didn’t matter, Chuck realized. Why Bryce had done it didn’t mean a damned thing to him anymore. The only thing that mattered was that Bryce was wrong. Bryce had even said so.

When it was his turn to head up to the ten meter platform, he paused at the bottom of the stairs and turned to Bryce. “Whatever happened with us, the slate’s clear. Good luck today,” he said. “But you should probably know, I’m going to beat you.”

“You can try,” Bryce said, and for a moment, friendly competition flickered across his face.

“And I’ll succeed,” Chuck said, and headed up the stairs.

He raised himself into an armstand, sighted his focal point, and thought Kiss my ass, Langston Graham, and pushed himself off of the platform and into the air, his body perfectly ready to prove to the world that he wasn’t going anywhere.

Even as he pulled himself out of the pool, he knew it his best dive yet.

---

Two dives later, the Chinese coaches were no longer just glaring. Chuck was pretty sure they were actively plotting his death. The crowd, on the other hand, had learned his name, and given the volume at which they shouted it when he surfaced, they weren’t going to forget it anytime soon.

---

“What is it?” Lester Patel asked him after the fourth round. “Seriously, what’s your secret?”

“Volleyball players,” Lukas Eckert said in a thick German accent. When Lester’s eyes widened—Carina’s reputation had apparently spread to the Canadians—the German diver shook his head. “Don’t even try. The blonde is taken and the redhead has already got her diver for this games.”

Lester turned to look at Chuck expectantly, waiting for the story, but it was Dieter Rademacher, the other German diver, who shrugged. “She’s good, but she scratches too much,” he said, and left Chuck and Lester in shocked silence as he headed to the platform.

---

Chuck felt weariness like a tangible force as he climbed the stairs once more, preparing for his fifth dive. Though it wasn’t a marathon, diving required a lot of concentration and control, and most of all, precision. After nearly twenty-four hours that were all about diving and little else—with a wonderful interlude on the pool table in between—Chuck could feel the control longing to give way to exhaustion. He bounced in place to keep himself warm and loose, flapping his arms about as he prepared for his next dive.

Two dives. Two dives left to go. Despite his boast to Bryce, he didn’t know what place he held. His lowest dive for the day had been an 86.40, which was downright astounding, but he didn’t think about it. He had to move forward, to keep thinking about the next dive. Like a shark, he thought, and nearly smiled at the thought. Chuck Bartowski was no shark.

When he reached the platform, he centered himself with a long breath in, and walked out to the edge of the platform. His shoulder hurt. It always started hurting toward the end of a meet. His left hip tingled. He could feel the tiredness trying to poke holes in his concentration so that the buzz from the crowd hit his ears like a crescendo from a bad radio, warbling in and out. Two dives left, he thought, pushing all of that away.

He raised his arms, gaining his balance and presenting for the judges. The words “Two dives left” echoed concurrently in his head with the theme song of his choice. When he hit the trigger cue, he sighted the ceiling, ignored the crowd, and went backwards.

He entered the water with one single thought on his mind: one dive left.

One dive, and it would be over. Chuck pulled himself from the pool, trying not to wince as his shoulder let him know it was not happy with him. He scanned the stands for his entourage as he walked back to the hot tub, but he couldn’t see the “CHUCK” shirts anywhere in the crowd. That was okay, he decided as he climbed into the hot tub to give his stiff muscles a reprieve. They were out there somewhere, cheering him on, and that was all that mattered.

When other divers needed the hot tub, he climbed out and headed for the shower instead. One dive left. He had to figure he was in eighth or ninth place, though he hadn’t been looking at the scoreboard monitors in the complex.

Eighth or ninth place in the Olympics was not bad, not bad at all.

He felt twin spirals of nerves and an odd sort of melancholy as he headed to the stairs for the final time. No matter that his journey had been strange, the Olympics had been one of the most interesting times of his life. He’d met Sarah and Carina, and in that moment, he’d fallen hard. He’d made a slew of new friends from all over the planet. He’d visited London, one of his dream destinations. Morgan had won a medal. Sarah had won a medal. He’d made it to the finals. It was a damned good games, no matter how he did tonight.

“One more to go,” Chuck said to Bryce as they waited together. “Is it always like this?”

Bryce gave him a tired look. “You have no idea, do you?” he asked.

“What?” Chuck asked, but he was called up to the platform for his final dive. This is it, he thought as they called out the dive code. Back dive, two and a half somersault, two and a half twist. Code 5255B. The final dive he would give at the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Might as well make it his best, Chuck thought. It took every bit of willpower he possessed, every skill he’d learned over years of diving and struggle. And there had been so much struggle. The last year in particular had been lean, so lean. Anna had basically worked for free, and he’d eaten Ramen more times than he wanted to count in order to spend his time training and not working. Every moment of that had been worth it, for here he was, about to dive his final dive. He willed exhaustion away, focusing not on the way his entire body felt stiff and sore and abused, but on the core within him, the one that kept reminding him where he was and what he was doing, and that he could do it. One final breath. One final walk to the edge. One final balancing act on his toes on the very edge of the platform with his heels hanging out. Spread his arms for balance.

Chuck tightened his abdomen, leaned forward the slightest bit, and shoved off the platform with as much power as he could muster, already arcing gracefully into his first somersault as he went backward. It took everything he had to keep his body on track, to sight the water, to twist and kick out on just the right beat. His face screwed up in concentration, every single muscle in his body taut.

Something in his head clicked. He kicked out right on time and hit the water almost perfectly vertical, with barely a splash.

That one’s gonna get me at least one 10.0, he thought, and swam to the side of the pool. This time he waved with both hands, wanting to shout something silly like “Hello Wisconsin!” that nobody but a pop culture junkie would get. Instead, he bowed to the crowd—who went nuts—and jogged off, making the guy behind the camera curse as he tried to keep up.

Anna leaped on him the second he came around the corner. “What the hell!” she shouted at him, nearly strangling him with her hug and not seeming to give a damn that he was dripping wet. “What the hell—what the hell, Chuck! Where—what—where did that come from?”

“I don’t know!” He laughed and hugged her closer. “I don’t know. It was just...there. How am I doing? Seventh? Eighth?”

Anna took a step back, her jaw dropping.

“What? I’m not in twelfth, am I?” Concerned—that was not a good look on Anna’s face—Chuck looked at the score board for the first time in the competition, as he’d only been listening to his own scores. When the truth on the board failed to register, he looked again.

“Um, Anna,” he said.

“Yeah, Chuck?”

“I’m in second place.”

“Yeah, Chuck.”

“What am I doing in second place?”

Anna stared at him as though he’d started imitating Michigan J. Frog, cane and boater and all. “You really didn’t know?”

“I need to sit down,” Chuck said, as it hit him all at once. The blood drained out of his face and he felt the room begin to shift and shake as a bout of light-headedness came on.

Anna grabbed his forearm. “Cameras,” she said through her smile. “Cameras all around us, Chuck. Don’t you dare pass out on me again.”

“I’m in second place,” Chuck said, shaking his head. It cleared some of the fog, but not all of it. “I’m in second place.”

Anna kicked his ankle. The sudden stab of pain jerked him out of the shock, making him realize that there were only two divers left...and he was still in second place. He had a chance to actually win an Olympic medal. Something warm and unbelievable began to spread, starting in his chest, going all the way to the tips of his toes, running along his fingernails and the top of his skull and collecting at the backs of his eyelids. He watched in a strange, disconnected sort of disbelief as the first of the divers took his turn. Scores rolled in.

He was still in second place. Anna stopped breathing.

He’d won a medal. He didn’t know what color it was, but he’d won a medal. Chuck Bartowski, world’s least likely diver, had won a medal at the 2012 London Olympics. Abruptly, he turned and started scanning the crowd.

“What are you doing?” Anna asked, tugging on his arm as the final diver, Hu Chen, took his place on the platform to finish out the diving. “Chuck, he’s about to go—pay attention—”

“I need to find Sarah,” Chuck said. “And Ellie. I need to find Ellie and Sarah and Morgan—I want to see them. They all helped me get here, they should be here.”

“We can find them after. For God’s sake, Chuck, cameras!” Anna tugged him around. He turned in time to watch Chen present to the judges and make the leap off the platform, though his mind was too jumbled to really judge how well Chen had done. There wasn’t much of a splash, after all, but maybe he’d flubbed the take-off a little bit? It was probably enough to keep his spot in first, but Chuck didn’t give a damn. Chuck was fine winning a medal, any medal.

It seemed like the entire world held its breath as they waited for Chen’s scores to be read. And when they were—

“Oh, my God!” Chuck said, picking Anna up and swinging her around. She was laughing and her nails were digging into his shoulder, which still hurt, but he didn’t give a damn because: “Oh, my God!”

The entire stadium erupted in cheers, but Chuck couldn’t hear them over the roaring in his own ears, roaring that had absolutely nothing to do with any crowd on the planet.

“You did it!” Anna said.

“We did it!” Chuck set Anna on the ground and shoved both hands through his still-wet hair, leaving them there as he processed it.

He’d won gold.

He’d beaten thirty-one of the world’s best divers, men who devoted their entire lives and all of their money to excelling at this sport, who had entire staffs of experts behind them correcting their every move. And with his twenty-three-year-old coach and public pool training experience, he’d come from behind and beaten every single one of them.

He literally could not wrap his brain around that even though it was right there on the screen: BARTOWSKI, C next to a gigantic American flag. Right above China and Great Britain, for the gold medal spot.

To his left, the British swim team picked up their diver and jumped en masse into the pool. Chuck laughed, his hands still in his hair. He couldn’t think. If he thought something, anything at all, he’d start hyperventilating because there was no way this moment was real.

He didn’t see Bryce, chamois over his shoulder, until the man was almost right next to him. Bryce was smiling, but Chuck knew his ex-partner well enough to recognize the hidden disappointment. “Congrats, man,” Bryce said, shaking his hand. “That was amazing.”

“You, too,” Chuck said, sneaking a glance at the score board. Bryce had placed fifth, which was almost kinder than fourth place. “You were a worthy opponent.”

“Don’t think I’m going to go easy on you at Worlds,” Bryce said with a laugh that wasn’t at all feigned. He clapped Chuck on the shoulder and headed off, shaking the hands of a couple of divers on his way back to the locker rooms.

People descended on Chuck, wanting to congratulate him and shake his hand. Anna kept close by his side, and only kicked him when she caught him scanning the audience instead of paying attention. He couldn’t help it. He’d just had one of the biggest moments of his life and the people he wanted to see most were his sister, his best friend, and Sarah.

---

In the locker room, there was a crowd to prep the athletes for the medal ceremony. Chuck had shaken hands with Hu Chen, the silver medalist, and had gotten a stoic nod in return before the other man had been shuffled. Freddie Page, the bronze medalist from Great Britain, had been hopping around too much for Chuck to get close, so he didn’t try. Instead, he donned the track pants and the gray United States team jacket, feeling numb. This was the outfit that the medal-winners wore, or at least the ones in indoor sports. Sarah and Carina had worn something else, something dark blue. Chuck laced the ridiculous shoes up in a daze, listening with one ear to the organizer that told him what he would be doing. Morgan, of course, loved these shoes. He already wore them everywhere. Chuck would rather have his Converse sneakers, though he knew the US sponsors would throw a fit.

Publicists talked over him. He nodded when expected. It still didn’t feel real that he’d won a medal. He hadn’t seen Ellie or Sarah or Morgan. He had no idea where they were.

When it was time to head to the ceremony and take a lap of the stadium, he stood behind Hu Chen. The applause was tumultuous, thundering over the building and shaking the floor when they emerged. Most of it wasn’t even for him. Somebody had told him that Freddie Page had broken a record for Great Britain that had been in place since 1960, and the home country was going nuts. But there were plenty of Americans in the audience, judging by the sheer number of flags he saw being waved in his direction as they walked out.

Chuck waved as he searched the crowd. Men and women held out flags to him, trying to get him to take one and drape it over his shoulders, but he ignored them. He wanted to see the look on Ellie’s face. He wanted to watch Morgan freak out. He wanted to see Sarah’s smile.

“Chuck!”

Almost like magic, there they were, crowding the front row. He felt his smile grow to goofy proportions. Cole, his arm in a sling, stood beside them. Chuck made it up the steps between the walkway and the stands in two strides and was nearly buried under another group hug. Morgan hugged him for so long that Ellie had to pull Chuck away to get her own hug. Devon pounded him on the back hard enough to bruise this time. Carina punched him in the shoulder—another bruise—and gave him a peck on the cheek.

“Guess I didn’t make a liar out of you after all,” Chuck said when Sarah nudged her teammate aside and hugged him.

“Guess not.” Sarah smiled and handed him a folded flag, with a look that told him Later before she kissed him.

Quite a few people giggled when Chuck stumbled backwards after that kiss. He held the flag up over his head in reply. The grin didn’t leave his face throughout the ceremony, where they laid a medal that couldn’t possibly be real around his neck and handed him a bouquet. In fact, it only grew broader as he took a step back so that Freddie and Hu could join him on the platform for the medalist pictures.

He was an Olympic medalist.

Just like his girlfriend and his best friend before him. It was, Chuck thought, the greatest thing ever.

---

It was nearly ten o’clock before they finally sent him back to the Village. Following the meet, there’d been a press conference with both him and Bryce. The interviewers really couldn’t get over the fact that he hadn’t known how he was doing until the end of the meet, so there were repeated questions, lots of teasing, general amusement from all of the media sources waiting to interview him at the press conference. After that, there were tests and contracts and tax documents to sign for his medal, followed by more interviews, this time one on ones with various news organizations. Somebody brought him dinner, which he ate without tasting. He drank enough water that somebody joked he would no longer be buoyant. A PA produced a lemon cough drop; Chuck declared her his new best friend. All the while, the cameras rolled, mostly catching him goofing off with the PAs and producers. NBC took him to talk to Bob Costas, which he did in somewhat of a fog. He’d seen so many interviews with Bob Costas over the years that, just like winning gold, it didn’t feel real to sit opposite the man and answer his questions.

At some point, a woman with a clipboard informed him that they were putting him on a plane to New York as part of the official post-Olympics press tour on Monday, that the Olympics committee PR specialist would meet him there and manage his schedule. Chuck had nodded, as it was easier than trying to actually process anything happening to him.

He turned his phone on to find fifteen texts from Ellie, Morgan, Sarah, and even a couple from Carina. He sent a mass text to let everybody know he’d been sprung and was back at the Village. His escort arrived only five minutes later in the form of the last person he expected.

“What?” Carina asked. “I volunteered.”

“Cool.” Chuck gave her a hug. “Thanks for coming out today.”

“Men. In tiny Speedos.” Carina eyed the medal hanging around Chuck’s neck. “Mine’s shinier.”

“Of course it is. Let me go in and get changed and we’ll walk over—they’re at your hotel?”

“Your sister’s. We’re all getting our drink on.”

When Carina tried to follow him inside, Chuck simply grabbed her by the shoulders, maneuvered her so that she stood by the wall outside his door, and closed the door between them. He locked it. She smirked at him when he emerged in his least threadbare button-down and jeans, but she bumped him with her elbow, too. Chuck figured that motion alone meant he’d been accepted.

“So what have I missed?”

“Martin and one of the bikers had a beard-off. Martin won,” Carina said.

“You realize his name’s Morgan, right?”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

Carina filled him in on the rest. Morgan had smuggled the group McDonald’s from the free twenty-four hour store in the Village, so they’d eaten junk food and watched bad British sitcoms, punctuated by drinking, while they waited for him to be free—hours ago, Carina had pointed out with a long sigh. The German divers had dropped by. Anna had arrived. Some of the US track team had stopped in, followed by part of the Australian swim team. Ellie’s door, apparently, had become an international revolving door of athletes, coaches, and random people from the hotel. Some had brought booze. Others just came by for the company.

“It’s more fun not to warn you that Ellie and Sarah have really bonded and might be plotting evil things that have to do with you,” Carina said as they headed in the front doors of the hotel. “In fact, the old Carina might not have even warned you at all. But I’m turning over a new leaf.”

“Very impressive. You’re a regular Mother Teresa,” Chuck said, and Carina accepted the compliment with a tilt of the head. He wasn’t sure exactly what sort of evil things Sarah and Ellie could be plotting with him in mind. If he was lucky, he’d never have to find out.

In Ellie’s room, Chuck was hugged, kissed, pounded on the back, and congratulated by even people he’d never met. Somebody handed him a beer. There was a veritable league of nations on the floor in a circle, legs crossed as they played the circle of death drinking game in several languages. Chuck waved off a spot in the game, choosing instead to take the recently vacated desk chair. As he took a long sip, Sarah abandoned the edge of the bed and dropped into his lap. She hooked an arm around his shoulders.

“What?” she asked, arching an eyebrow at him. “There’s limited seating. I’m doing my part.”

“I don’t mind,” Chuck said. “Do you want to get out of—”

“So, Chuckster,” Awesome said from across the room. For some reason, he was holding a card against his forehead. Chuck squinted; it looked like the Jack of Hearts. “How’s it feel to gold-medal, dude? What’d they do, keep you in lock-up for hours?”

“Blood tests, probably,” Sarah said. “That right?”

“Yeah, full range of tests, press conference, interviews, there were people talking about New York, and they fed me, and after that time, I stopped knowing what was going on.” Chuck shook his head, hitting Sarah’s ear as he did so. “Oh, sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“Wait, you’re going to New York?” Anna asked. “Nobody told me about this.”

“You ate already?”

“Interviews? Who with?”

Questions tumbled over one another until Chuck let out a groan and rested his forehead against Sarah’s shoulder. “Okay, okay,” Ellie said. “We can take a hint. No more questions. Let the mighty Olympian relax.”

“Thank you,” Chuck told his sister.

“Besides.” Awesome tossed his card on the top of the stack and brushed off his pants. “It’s time we explore. Everybody up! Let the Official Olympic Pub Crawl of 2012 begin!”

There were protests, but Awesome would hear none of it. He cajoled until they trooped down to the hotel lobby en masse—a couple of the other athletes broke off to head back to their rooms—a ragtag group of Olympians, and Awesome and Ellie. In the lobby, they ran into a few friends that the others had obviously made in the hotel, so the group only grew until they spilled out onto the street, Camden-bound at Cole’s recommendation.

“You sure you want to go?” Chuck asked Sarah as they headed for the bus stop.

She gave the group around them a measuring look and shrugged. “We can sneak away later,” she said before she grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him, her tongue teasing his mouth so that he grabbed her waist. They pulled back from each other, blinking at the sound of applause—which was coming from Morgan and Ellie.

“I’m not taking a bow,” Chuck said, pointing at his sister and his best friend with his free hand. “You two are being weird. Cut it out.”

“Aw! But, Chuck, you’ve got a girlfriend and—”

“Hey, babe, let’s give them a moment alone, yeah?” Awesome winked at Chuck—which didn’t help—as he dragged Ellie away with one hand and a sighing Morgan away with the other arm. Carina, who’d been hovering behind the group, made a dirty gesture at them before she bounded after Awesome.

“Still want to go?” Chuck asked, wincing.

“You’re not getting out of this that easily,” Sarah said. She stood up on her tip-toes to kiss him again, this time uninterrupted by applause or cheering, though they did have to hurry to catch up in time to board the bus.

It took fourteen minutes for Carina to get them kicked out of the first pub. Sarah opened up the festivities at the second by buying a round of shots, possibly as an apology for Carina. The group headed to play pool, but even the sight of a pool table right then would have made Chuck twitchy with lust, so he stayed at the bar and did Irish Car Bombs with Morgan and Awesome.

The latter, of course, had all of his frat days of drinking to prep him for occasions such as these, but both Chuck and Morgan had been broke for pretty much their entire lives. Drinking meant cheap beer, and that meant that Chuck was already out of his depth with everybody insisting on buying him drinks. By his second Car Bomb, there was quite a happy padding between Chuck and sobriety, and he didn’t give a damn. He laughed as Sarah hustled some guy at darts and led the cheering when Morgan challenged a man twice his size to an arm-wrestling competition. After said opponent failed to lose graciously, it was decided that maybe they should move on to the next pub, and quickly. Chuck walked along, no longer feeling the bite to the chill air, one arm around Sarah, the other looped through Carina’s, as he, Awesome, Cole, Morgan, and Anna belted out an old Toto song at the tops of their lungs.

At the next pub, there were more shots. The alcohol must have been working because he didn’t protest when Anna and Sarah each grabbed an arm and hauled him out to the dance floor. He might have been ungainly on land, but he could goof off with the best of them, jumping around and tossing the dice, changing the light bulb, and any number of stupid dance moves. Sarah giggled and danced up against him, the crowded dance floor closing them into close proximity with each other. For once in his life, Chuck blessed overpopulation of a bunch of drunks.

That was, until the swimming and diving teams walked in. Bryce was with them.

Sarah spotted him at the same time as Chuck did. “We can go,” she said, leaning in close to be heard over the music.

“Nah, it’s cool.” Chuck smiled and kept dancing.

Both of Sarah’s eyebrows went sky-high. “You sure?”

Indeed, Bryce wandered over to the edge of the dance floor, where they’d been forced by the crowd. “Hey, Chuck. Sarah, can I buy you a drink?”

Because he smirked at Chuck when he said it, Chuck laughed. “No,” he said. “But you can buy me one.”

“Didn’t know your name was Sarah.”

“It is now. Make sure it’s something purple and fruity. Really girly, with, like, an umbrella.”

“Ignore him,” Sarah said, smiling politely over at Bryce. She’d left a hand on Chuck’s chest, Chuck noticed, and one on his shoulder, though she was turned toward Bryce. He wasn’t going to protest. “He’s a little drunk. We’re fine. We don’t need anything.”

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure. Congratulations out there today, Bryce. You did a great job.”

“Thanks. I’ll let you get back to dancing.” Bryce left to go to the bar.

Sarah turned back to Chuck and put her arms around his neck, even though it hadn’t switched to a slow song. “The two of you made up?”

“He’s not all bad,” Chuck said. “Though you really should have let him buy me a drink. I’m thirsty for something purple.”

“I can’t help you with that, but...” Sarah kissed him, long and slow and perfect despite all of the bodies jostling around them. “There. Does that help?”

“I’m not sure.” Chuck wrinkled his forehead. “Maybe do that again? Just to be sure?”

“Maybe,” Sarah said, but the rest of the swimming and diving team descended on them to congratulate Chuck (and hit on Sarah). By the time, they managed to escape, one of the wait-staff had come up with two vividly purple shots, courtesy of the “Hot bloke at the bar.” Bryce toasted them with his own shot from across the room. Laughing, Chuck raised his glass in reply and downed the shot.

It was kind of foul, but Chuck didn’t plan on telling Bryce that. He grabbed Sarah by the hand and pulled her away from two of the men’s relay swimming team, over to another part of the dance floor so that she could take her shot, too.

“You’re not getting jealous, are you?” Sarah asked before she slammed back her shot. She pulled a face.

“Nope. I’m way more charming than those guys.”

“And so modest, too.” Sarah stood up on her tiptoes to give him a kiss.

“No time for that!” Somehow or another, Carina appeared at their side like the magician’s interrupting assistant. She had shots in her hands, two of which she pushed onto Chuck and Sarah. “Drink up and then it’s time for asteroids, bitches!”

“Asteroids?” Chuck looked around. “They’ve got that game here?”

Sarah clinked her glass against his, drawing his attention back to her. With a shrug, he tossed the shot back. He was too drunk to know if it wasn’t all that strong or if he was just too inured to alcohol at the moment to tell. With Carina, he had to figure it was the latter.

The redhead gave him an odd look. “What game? I’m talking real asteroids. Outside!”

“What?”

Morgan raced over, pulling on his jacket. “Chuck! It’s the meteor shower tonight, we completely forgot, but Cole says there’s a really great spot to watch not too far from here—we should get going, though. Think of all the meteors we’re missing.”

“Oh. Like actual meteors,” Sarah said, blinking.

“Asteroids!”

Chuck opened his mouth to correct Carina, thought about it, and closed his mouth. “So we’re leaving?”

“Yeah—it’s not far, but it’s a really neat spot.”

“Well, I think Sarah and I were thinking about—”

“No, dude, you can’t leave us. This is a celebration!”

“With asteroids,” Carina said.

Chuck figured he and Sarah could do plenty of celebrating that didn’t involve asteroids, meteors, or a great deal of other people—especially not his sister—around, but before he knew it, they were being bundled out of yet another pub. Chuck had never heard of Hampstead Heath, but it seemed like a really nice park. Or maybe it would, when he was a little more sober and there was a little more daylight. As it was, he stumbled after the others, holding Sarah’s hand as he recounted his breakfast with Anna and all of the great T-shirt ideas they’d had. Even though Sarah probably didn’t understand a single one of them, she still smiled as she pulled him along. They crowded around a park bench to look into London town and watch the sky simultaneously for any of the shooting stars. Because the world was starting to spin a little bit, Chuck chose to lie down on the grass rather than find another bench. Sarah lay on the ground next to him, cuddled against him for warmth.

After a minute, though, she started to giggle.

“What?” Chuck asked. “What’s funny?”

“This is,” Sarah said, breaking off to laugh for a moment, “the strangest day I’ve ever had.”

Chuck didn’t know why that would be funny, but he grinned at her. It was an awkward angle, but he rolled over slightly to kiss her until—

“You’d better not be having sex back there!”

“Damn it, Carina,” Sarah said, leaning her head back against the grass hard enough that Chuck heard a definite thump. “Ow!”

“I thought volleyball players were supposed to be graceful,” Chuck said.

“Shut up, I’m drunk.” Sarah shifted so that Chuck could free his arm and offer it up as a pillow, which she accepted, cuddling closer to him. “When are we going to see a shooting star?”

“I notice that wasn’t a no on the sex,” Carina said.

“Carina!” This time it came from both Sarah and Chuck.

“I was just curious.” Carina sounded wounded. “I mean—”

“Ooh!” Ellie’s cry made all of them look up. Chuck didn’t see the shooting star, but he was grateful that silence fell. It was nice lying there next to Sarah, watching the sky and reveling in his day. Here, he was just a guy watching shooting stars. It didn’t matter that Sarah had won a gold medal, or that he had done the same, or that they were sort of famous now because they’d decided to start locking lips and the world was way too creepily invested in their sudden love life. Right now, it was calm and peaceful, and he was surrounded by new friends and the people he loved most on the planet, watching the night sky with Sarah right there beside him.

It may not have been the perfect moment, but it came pretty damned close.

Sarah shifted to be closer to him, so that he could feel her breath on his ear. “Just so you know,” she said, “for when we get back to L.A.: Carina and I are not roommates.”

“I hope you’re not offended, but thank God.”

---

Beeping drove Chuck away from the lull of darkness and into reality. He started to roll over to reach for his phone on the nightstand, but something very soft and very warm blocked his way. Confused, Chuck opened his eyes, wondering what could be in his bed with him.

His first realization was that he wasn’t in bed.

His second was that it wasn’t a what next to him, but a who. Sarah grumbled and rolled away. Chuck blinked at her. He was on the floor. He’d gathered that much from the fact that his back was aching and he was using a balled up towel as a pillow, but what was he doing on the floor? And what floor was this? To his left, he could see Morgan sacked out, sitting up against the wall, mouth open in sleep. On Sarah’s other side, Carina lay sprawled, wearing her clothes from the bar and one high heel. Ellie and Awesome’s room, Chuck determined after glancing toward the bed. They must have come back to it at some point after the third or fourth pub following the meteor showers, but the entire night was a blur in Chuck’s memory.

Sarah rolled over again, this time toward him. Without opening her eyes, she stuck her hand in his pocket. Chuck yelped, but Sarah only pulled out his cell phone, silenced it, and dropped it in Chuck’s lap.

“‘S’better,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Why’s it making that noise?”

“I have to—” He had to what? Why had he set an alarm on his phone anyway? That seemed like a silly thing to do when his head was nearly splitting. “I have to—oh, crap, sponsors. I have to go.”

“So go.” Sarah rolled over again. Chuck didn’t blame her. His head felt like somebody had pried open the top with a crowbar and crammed the USC marching band drum line into his skull. The snare drummers were holding a rave. He stumbled to his feet, thought about giving Sarah a kiss on the cheek, but ultimately rejected the idea since his mouth tasted like a whiskey still. He stumbled to the bathroom, where he got his first look at the sheer amount of red gathered in his eyes and nearly gave up living. But the sponsors wanted him to do this interview and they held the checkbook, giving him no choice.

He had to step over four more people to get to the door, but nobody else awoke as he let himself out. Maybe the meeting would be quick, and he could go back to bed.

It wasn’t.

Three hours later, feeling like crap and knowing he looked worse, Chuck wanted only to sleep. He had hours until the closing ceremonies, which he’d hoped to spend with the others, but that would have to wait until his body recovered from the sheer amount of abuse he’d put it through. He whimpered as he dragged himself back to his room, and pulled up short.

He could see a lump in either of the beds, buried under the covers so that he couldn’t make out features, but he recognized the four high heels piled by his door. Sarah and Carina had apparently traded up Ellie and Awesome’s room for his. With a shrug, he kicked out of his shoes, ignored modesty to strip down to his boxers and his undershirt, and climbed into bed.

“Speedo?” Carina’s voice made him freeze. “I don’t think I’m your type.”

Chuck scrambled out of his bed so fast that he hit the carpet, landing solidly on his butt. “Carina! What are you doing in my bed?”

“Chuck, over here.” Sarah’s tousled head appeared from beneath the covers of the other bed. “She took that one before I could stop her, and I’m too tired to fight.”

“You had better not be getting sand all over my sheets again,” Chuck told Carina, and crawled into the other bed. Sarah shifted over to let him have a meager slice of the mattress and the pillow, but it felt so nice to be lying horizontal that he didn’t care. He let out a contented sigh. “How come you came back here instead of your own room?”

“Carina locked herself out and was too hungover to drag herself to the front desk.”

“But not to pick the lock on my door?”

“That was me,” Sarah said, yawning. Clearly still half asleep, she nuzzled into his shoulder. “Remind me to apologize at some point. How’d it go?”

The swimwear company was going to pay for his training, hotel, and ticket to Worlds, which was astounding on too many levels for Chuck to process. To him, it was almost more important than the gold medal tucked away in a nondescript box under his bed. He was legitimate now. He was getting paid to do what he loved.

“It went really well. They want me to come to New York for—”

“Do you two mind? I’m trying to sleep.”

Sarah threw their pillow at Carina. Thanks to years of honing her deadly aim, she hit the target dead-on. Of course, said target then stole the pillow, leaving Chuck and Sarah without one. Sarah sighed. “I’m too tired to get up and get it back.”

“Me too. Just use my shoulder.”

“Okay. We’ll talk later.” With a final yawn, Sarah fell asleep again.

When he woke, he had the bed to himself and his pillow back, and Carina and Sarah were nowhere in sight. His bed was neatly made up, a square of paper left on the pillow. The writing, which informed him that they’d gone back to their hotel rooms and to call when he woke, had to be from Sarah. Carina’s addition was the stick figures doing obscene things to each other.

He tossed the note to the side while he got dressed. Team USA athletes were supposed to report to the closing ceremonies in the late afternoon, but he had plenty of time. He called Ellie, who was exploring the British Library, but declined when she offered to come meet him. Her flight was leaving the next morning, but he would see her after the closing ceremonies.

He took a chance and headed for Sarah’s hotel. He had no idea what her plans were, but if she was out, then at least the walk couldn’t hurt. In fact, his head was mostly clear when he spotted the flower stand on the corner by the hotel. He debated with himself for a minute, figured it couldn’t hurt, and bought a dozen white carnations wrapped in Union Jack tissue paper. As he turned, he heard the click of cameras behind him.

Some of the paparazzi that he had seen hanging around the games were on the opposite street corner. Chuck gave them a puzzled look as he accepted his change from the vendor. Weren’t there any real celebrities for them to follow in London?

Apparently, there were. Right as he took the flowers, a guy bedecked in aviators and tattoos came strolling out of the front door of the hotel. He ignored the paparazzi as he moved to a waiting limo, though he did shout something about Cleveland as he left.

Chuck shook his head and headed upstairs.

When Sarah opened the door, wearing a robe, her hair wet, he jerked his thumb behind him. “Did you know you’re staying in the same hotel as Tyler Martin?”

“Who?”

“Probably better that you don’t know who he is. Your ears are safer. Hi.” Chuck held out the flowers. “For you.”

“Aw.” She took the flowers and curled her fingers around the back of his neck, kissing him slowly. “That’s sweet of you.”

Chuck shrugged and shuffled his feet. “I apparently have good timing,” he said, nodding at her robe. “Or really terrible timing. I don’t know which.”

“We’ll go with good.” Sarah grabbed his sleeve and pulled him inside. “Want anything to drink?”

“After last night, I’m never drinking again. Ever.” Chuck flopped melodramatically onto Sarah’s bed. After a minute, he propped himself up on his elbows. “I have vague memories of singing ‘The World is Saved’ with Morgan and possibly playing air guitar. For hours.”

“It wasn’t hours.” Sarah crossed to a mini-fridge and pulled out two bottles of water. The first, she tossed to Chuck. The second, she downed in a few gulps. “Sorry. Just got back from running drills with Carina.”

“You worked out today? I’m pretty sure that’s a sin to work out on the day of the closing ceremonies. And with a hangover.”

“I don’t get hangovers.”

“You’re not human, and I kind of hate you.”

“Aw,” Sarah said again, setting the water bottle down. Chuck noticed belatedly that her free hand was playing idly with the belt of her robe, and the temperature in the room skyrocketed abruptly. Sarah met his eyes, her expression a little pouty. Just like that, the air went from comfortably intimate to sexually charged. He almost had to marvel, but he was too busy trying not to stare at her lips. “Hate is such a strong word, don’t you think?”

“Ask me again when I’m hungover.”

“So a clean bill of health, huh?” She kept toying with the belt, which was doing interesting things to his blood pressure. “Head’s clear?”

“And no longer pounding.” Chuck raised his eyebrows at her, questioning if they were really going to do this, if that moment had finally come.

“I’m glad to hear that.” Her face showed her amusement as she tilted her head, the slightest invitation.

He needed no more than that. Chuck held out a hand toward her, not getting up. Sarah laced her fingers through his, letting him tug her over until she was next to him on the bed. He took his time kissing her, enjoying the way her hair tickled the back of his hand when he rubbed his thumb down the line of her jaw, to behind her ear. He could feel nerves beginning to take hold, but the last couple of days, the way Sarah had looked at him almost from the start, like he was somebody worthy of being right where he was, all of that helped. Still, he pushed himself up, breaking off the kiss before they could go any further.

Sarah gave him a baffled look. “Something wrong?”

“Two questions.”

“Yes, the door’s locked, and no, she’s busy.”

“Oh, thank God,” Chuck said, and returned to the kiss with a great deal more fervor even though he could feel Sarah laughing underneath him. “How long do we have?”

“Hours. You should take that shirt off. In fact, you really wear too many shirts, you know. You should do something about that nasty little habit.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Chuck said, though he didn’t scramble like he normally would have. If they had hours, they had plenty of time, and he was going to spend every moment enjoying this.

---

“Dude, you’re late! Why are you late?” Morgan, decked out in a white Ralph Lauren suit, stood up from where he’d been leaning against the wall, obviously waiting for Chuck to arrive. “You know the call-time said—oh.”

“Hello to you, too, Morgan,” Sarah, who’d followed Chuck in through the back entrance to the stadium, said. She gave Morgan a kiss on the cheek; he stammered a little, and Chuck wanted to laugh because he knew exactly how that felt. “Carina’s here, right?”

“Yeah, she’s arm-wrestling the soccer team or something.” Morgan waved in a general direction. Team USA had been gathered in one of the back hallways of the stadium so that everywhere Chuck looked, there were volunteers in blue blazers, wearing bowlers with light bulbs attached to them. Mingling around them was Team USA in blinding white: white blazers, white shirts, white pants and skirts, white newsboy caps with one red and blue stripe up the side. The atmosphere was raucous and wild. Even while volunteers tried to get them to calm down, Team USA knew it had come out of the games on top. From the smell of alcohol on the air, Chuck figured the partying for the closing ceremonies had already started.

Sarah gave Chuck a quick kiss. “I’d better go avert disaster. I’ll come find you.”

“Good luck getting through that,” Chuck said.

Sarah shot him a look that said, Please, as if this is difficult, as she left.

“No wonder you weren’t answering your texts,” Morgan said. “I thought you might just be busy. But nope, I was wrong. It wasn’t being busy, it was getting busy, huh?”

“That was a terrible play on words and you should be ashamed,” Chuck said.

Morgan raised his eyebrows. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“You have fulfilled your destiny, my son, by going where no nerd has gone before.” Morgan nodded sagely. “The bylaws of Nerddom state that there must be a post-mortem with specific detail within thirteen hours of the original act of coitus and—”

“Morgan!”

“I’m sticking to the bylaws, Chuck.”

“I’m not describing it for you.”

“Not even a little?”

Chuck gave his friend an unimpressed look.

“Give me something here. You’re like a sphinx. I can’t read you,” Morgan said.

“Oh, fine, if you must know...” Chuck let his words trail off even as his smile, the one he’d been fighting back the entire trip through the labyrinth of the stadium to get to the rest of Team USA, grew.

Morgan’s eyes widened. “You lucky, lucky dog,” he said. “Every straight man in America hates you right now, just so you know.”

“Let ’em.” Chuck yawned and tried to pretend it wasn’t because he was worn out from the past twenty-four hours. Not that he was complaining—he was definitely not complaining, not even a little—but diving, drinking, and Sarah had done a number on his system. On the other hand, he’d never felt this relaxed in his life. He wondered if the cameras would pick up the afterglow in HD. “You gotta admit, this is the life.”

“Olympians,” Morgan said, picking his medal up to play with it. Chuck had opted not to wear his own medal, as he’d never been a big fan of bling. “Chuck, we did it. We came, we saw, we kicked their asses.”

“That we did.” Chuck laughed and gave Morgan a fist-bump. In perfect solidarity, they continued to lean against the wall, watching the rest of Team USA move around them. Chuck was pretty sure there was a goofy smile on his face, but that was going to be there for ages, thanks to the medal, the girlfriend, and the sponsorships. If he weren’t so pleasurably used up at the moment, he’d have been reenacting the song and dance from Singin’ in the Rain, much to the amusement of any media personnel that might happen to be in the vicinity. “Clearly this just means we’re awesome.”

“Never doubted it for a second,” Morgan said.

“Nope. Has Carina learned your name yet?”

“She’s no longer my volleyball-playing Mona Lisa, Chuck. I have set my sights on a new target.”

Which meant, Chuck thought, that Carina was indeed still calling him Martin. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Who is it this time?”

“Think Anna would object if I asked her out?”

Chuck was grateful that he did not have a drink in his hand at that moment, as said drink would have ended up all over the other Olympians in their all-white clothing. He had a brief, errant thought wondering why Ralph Lauren seemed to want to turn the entire US Olympic team into participants in a wet T-shirt contest in the event of rain, but he pushed that aside to shake his head at Morgan. “Dude. No.”

“Aw, why not? I honestly think there might be something there—I certainly felt something last night—”

“Nuh-uh, no way. I do not want to hear about anything you felt last night.”

“Killjoy,” Morgan said with a long sigh. “Just why exactly do you object to me trying to date your coach, Charles Irving?”

“Because I know how easy it is to drown people, and I don’t want that fate for you.”

Morgan gave him a stubborn look.

“Fine,” Chuck said, relenting with a sigh. “But stay in the shallow end if she lures you into a pool, do you hear me? And if she tells you no—”

“Yes, yes, I’ll listen. Geez.”

“Good luck,” Chuck told him as Sarah found them, dragging Carina by the elbow. “I can’t help but think this is going to end up with you dangling from a platform, for the record. Just remember what I taught you.”

“Clench before I hit the water, yeah, I know.”

Carina and Sarah raised their eyebrows. “Going into synchronized diving there, Speedo?” Carina asked.

“Dating tips,” Morgan said, and the eyebrows went up further. “You look lovely tonight, ladies. May I?” He offered an arm to Carina, as the athletes had begun to shuffle down the hallway, clearly a sign that they were about to head out into the stadium for the closing ceremonies.

“Why not?” Carina gave Sarah and Chuck an amused grimace before she took Morgan’s arm, abandoning her partner without a qualm.

Chuck had a brief flash of memory of standing at LAX, watching Carina drag Morgan away in self-satisfied amusement, leaving him alone with Sarah for the first time. “God,” he said without meaning to. “Has it only been two weeks?”

“A little more than that, but yes.” Sarah, like she always did now, seemed to read him perfectly. She reached up to fix his collar, her eyes smiling at him. “Were the Olympics all you expected and more?”

She met his eye and even with everything they’d done to each other that afternoon—and the reason they’d been so very late arriving at the closing ceremonies—Chuck felt a blush rise. He figured it would probably always be that way, with Sarah able to turn him into a stammering idiot at the lift of an eyebrow. “Given that I was expecting to belly-flop in front of billions of people and instead I met the most amazing person on the planet, to say nothing of the gold medal that will ensure I never have to pay for a drink in my life? I’d say maybe it’s a little better than I expected.”

“Only a little?”

“Okay, a lot.”

They inched forward, Chuck getting jostled by some of the track team. Sarah grabbed his hand, trying to keep him next to her. “So what happens to us now?” she asked, dropping her gaze from his. It was probably the biggest cue she could have given him that it was a serious question.

“I’m not sure. I heard there’s a Spice Girls reunion. I think they’re on cars.”

“Chuck.”

“Oh, you mean after the Olympics?” He finally broke character to laugh when she gave him an aggrieved look. “I’ll have to give you my actual cell phone number as opposed to this cheap phone I bought at the train station on the first day. But you know, I think it could work. You’re in L.A., I’m in L.A.”

“We’ll both be traveling a lot.”

“That’s why God invented video chat, email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Digg, Reddit, MySpace, Friendster, smoke signals, the Plain Old Telephone System, and the United States Postal Service.”

“Chuck, I am not having sex with you through the United States Postal Service,” Sarah said, and had quite a few athletes nearby turning to give them both wide-eyed looks. Chuck clapped a hand over his mouth to keep the laughter in, but Sarah gave the onlookers the side-eye so hard that they immediately found the walls around them interesting.

“I’m kind of curious how the logistics of that would work,” Chuck said after a minute.

Sarah laughed and rested her head on his shoulder for a minute. “Only you.”

“Seriously, though. I’m willing to make it work, if you are. Postal Service optional.”

“We could look at the bright side. The longer we stay together and keep winning medals, the more people will want to feature both of us, which means more working together.” Just as Sarah spoke, they reached the entrance of the stadium and the sound of cheering and music poured over them like a wave. On cue, cameras descended on them. They walked out, waving and looking around. It was an even bigger crowd than the night before, with what felt like millions crowded into the stadium. He felt anxiety clutch at his belly for a split-second, decided what the hell and settled in to enjoy it. The stands all around the stadium floor were glowing. He squinted at them, trying to see what kind of lighting system that was, until Sarah grabbed his arm to get his attention and waved at a camera shoved almost directly in their faces. “See?”

He managed a wave before the swimming team spotted the cameras and crowded them to goof off at the lens. Sarah tugged Chuck away from the group to where Carina and Morgan walked, still arm in arm. Morgan was giving a royal wave When another camera started walking in front of them, Carina yanked off her newsboy cap and tossed it into the air like a graduate celebrating. It hit a cyclist in the face; from the way Carina glanced at his thighs, she’d been looking for such an opening. She wasted no time in heading over retrieve her cap.

“You know, you have to admire her methods,” Chuck said. “Bow to the master, if you will.”

“Yeah.” Sarah shook her head and turned to give him a brilliant smile. “So we’re going to make this work?”

“I’m game if you are.”

“Definitely.” She kissed him, and every camera in the vicinity swung toward them with an unflinching accuracy that made Chuck nervous. Sarah threw up her arms and let out a whoop, no trace of the Ice Queen present, and since Chuck was still holding her hand, he mimicked her. Morgan leaped up, an arm around Chuck’s shoulders, at the same time as Carina came from behind and tackled Sarah, who was still laughing. A flashbulb exploded in their faces, capturing that perfect Olympic moment. It would headline all of the articles about the Closing Ceremonies the next day, and stay in Chuck’s living room for years, dangling between twin displays of gold medals that had “London 2012” emblazoned on them.

But for now, Chuck just settled back to enjoy the closing ceremonies for two and a half of the most perfect weeks of his life—until Sarah gripped his sleeve, pulled him close for a kiss...and whispered, “What’s Facebook?”

The End.