Hold My Breath (2 page)

I only caught a glimpse of her profile before she ran her fingers through her dark hair and let it fall along her face, shielding her from us. That glimpse was enough, though. This thing I’m doing—it’s going to be harder than I thought it was. Being here…I don’t know if I
can
be here.

“Well, you sure travel light, Will,” Curtis Woodsen says, pushing the trunk closed and turning to face me, one of my two bags in his hand.

“I didn’t want to overpack…in case…” I pull my lips together tight for a flat smile, exhaling through my nose.

“Planning on washing out already? That’s not the Will I knew,” Curtis says, his eyes crinkled with the pull of his lips on one side, like he’s looking at me and evaluating what he has left to work with.

Not much, Curtis. There isn’t much here at all.

“I’ve just learned to keep my expectations out of the equation is all,” I say, hoisting the straps of my stuffed duffle on my shoulder and following Curtis through the familiar front doors of the Shore Swim Club. I reach my right hand up out of habit to tap the top of the doorway as we pass through. I used to have to jump to reach this spot.

“Expectations aren’t much different from goals, Will. And I know you’ve got goals. That’s why you’re here,” Curtis says over his shoulder. I barely hear him through the rush of memories that pound me with every blink of my eyes. This is definitely going to be harder than I thought.

“Goals?” His hand is flat on my chest, and I shake away the demons.

“Huh? Oh…yeah. I just keep them simple. Sorta part of my therapy—one minute at a time, one step forward, then another,” I say.

Curtis twists his lips and studies me for a few seconds before his mouth curves into a smile and his heavy hand pats my chest twice.

“Well, sounds to me like you’ve got hundreds of expectations then…maybe thousands. They’re just all lined up.” His chest lets out a raspy laugh as he turns and continues to the steps that lead up to the small apartment area and business office.

“Oh there’s a line, all right. And I’m constantly standing in it,” I say. He laughs out hard, but since he doesn’t turn around, I don’t bother to smile. I wasn’t joking.

Curtis holds the door open near the end of the hallway, and my uncle and I walk in front of him into the wood-paneled room that smells of old towels and chlorine. The carpet is a green mesh, made for wet feet and cheap maintenance.

“It ain’t much, I know, but it’s still better then you all trying to rent something for a couple months. Just didn’t make sense to me,” Curtis says while I survey every piece of the place I’ll call home for the next several weeks.

“Oh, it’ll work just fine. Thanks for putting us up,” my uncle says, reaching his hand forward and gripping Curtis’s for a tight squeeze.

“Well…I guess I’ll let you get settled. Keys are on the dresser. They work on the main door and this one,” he says, jiggling the knob for the small apartment door in his right hand.

I hold them up and nod in acknowledgement, then push the keys into my pocket. I look toward Curtis, but not directly in the eyes. His gaze stops short too, and we both stare into a nothingness between us for a few seconds before he breaks the silence.

“Right, well…I guess I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow. We hit the lanes at five,” he says, and with a quick wink, he turns and pulls the door to a close behind him. I push it the rest of the way in until I hear it click, but something about the way my hand looks against the grain of the door holds me in my spot. I am literally swimming in memories, and even the good ones—like the way my hand looks right here, right now—feel like gravity pulling me down from my insides.

“I think you should take the bedroom,” my uncle begins, but I cut him off.

“I’m good on the couch,” I say, lifting the golden cushions and tossing them on the floor before pulling up on the bed frame. “It folds out, and I…I’ve slept on it before.”

It’s actually the last place I want to try to close my eyes and sleep, but my uncle is in his sixties, and I’m not making him sleep on something that I know will have him crooked and unable to stand by morning.

“I’m sure,” I say when I see his concerned expression. I lift his bag and carry it to the small bedroom, setting it on the twin bed pushed up against the wall. Honestly, when he sees this room, he won’t feel like he got the better end of something. He just got the
other
end.

Our eyes meet as he moves into the room, and he chuckles at the tight fit. I nod and let my chest shake with a laugh, too.

“I guess I’ll unpack then. I’m going to need to set up the desk with my tools if I want to get anything done while we’re here…oh damn. I think my toolbox is still in the car,” he says, patting his hands in search of the keys.

I pull them from my pocket, along with the ones for our room, and tell him, “I got it.”

“Thanks, Will,” he says, unzipping the top of his travel bag.

I leave my uncle to his things and run down to the car, grabbing his small toolbox from the backseat floor. My uncle brought a few special projects with him to stay busy and keep up with his business while we’re here in Indiana. Just a few antiques he’s been trying to get working again—one a wrist watch, one a pocket. He didn’t need to come, but I didn’t fight him very hard when he insisted. He’s the only family I have left, which means I’m also it for him. We’re a healthy kind of codependent, I think, because we definitely need each other. He’s also the only person who saw me at my worst, and I feel a little less like I’ll fall with him around.

When I come back inside, I lock the front door and flip out the lights. The sun is setting, and for the first time in days, I feel like maybe, just maybe, I’ll close my eyes and find a few minutes of actual sleep. I tuck my uncle’s tools under one arm and take the steps two at a time, but I halt when I see the opened door opposite my temporary home. It isn’t fully opened, and there isn’t a light on, but I know for certain that it was closed when I ran outside.

“Uncle Duncan?” I say, pushing the door lightly. I hear papers spill onto the floor a second before my palm finds the light switch on the wall. She’s nothing but wild hair buried under her hands as she crouches down in front of the desk. She lets go of head, and soon her hands are rushing to gather spilled papers around her feet. I set my uncle’s tools down and hurry to help her.

“I got it,” she bites out.

I stand with the few pages I managed to pick up before she stopped me.

“I thought you were my uncle,” I say, my free hand moving to the bridge of my nose. My brow pulls in tight and I hold my mouth open, unsure of what to say next. I decide nothing is probably the best for both of us.

The more Maddy rushes, the more the papers slide free from her hold, but I let her work through it, eventually laying a mish-mash of ledgers and receipts into a disorganized pile on the desk.

“My mom will sort it out. Just,” she says, her eyes coming up enough to see the papers in my hands. She grabs them and adds them to the stack. “Just leave them here for her.”

My lips are still parted, my words caught somewhere in my throat. Of everything, I knew this would be the hardest. This place, the drills, her dad, the water—it’s all going to be hard. But seeing Maddy…

I can’t move my gaze up no matter how many times my mind screams at me to be civil, to pretend that none of this is strange or hurtful. I’m stuck on her hands, the way she’s balling her fingers into fists, the way her nails are filed down low—for speed.
Every piece of a second counts.
Maddy swore she was the fastest girl in the pool when she was in junior high because she was the only one without giant nails dragging through the water. My lips betray me and quirk a smile at that memory. She must be looking at my face, because the second my mouth curves, she tenses and grabs a phone and set of keys from the desktop near the papers.

“I only came in here because I forgot my phone. I have somewhere I need to be,” she says, rushing past me. She has nowhere to go. I could always tell when she was lying.

“Yeah, me too,” I say, surprised at my own voice. My eyes widen a little and my pulse picks up. Maddy stops at the doorway and turns her chin just enough that I catch a glimpse of more of her profile. “I have to be…over there,” I say, gesturing to my new home on the other side of the hall.

Her fingers drum once along the wood of the doorframe, and she grunts out a tiny laugh before she flees down the hallway and steps, slipping out the back door just like she used to when we were kids. I hear her car motor start up soon after and watch the shadow of the lights move along the windows that line the alleyway. When I hear her car hit the gravel, I let my head fall back and I bring my arms up over my eyes. I breathe in long and deep, holding my lungs full. She’s even more beautiful than she was the day before I ruined her life.

This is going to be hard. I want to quit already. But I can’t, because—whether she remembers it or not—I promised her I wouldn’t.

Never.

* * *

I
saw
this thing on the Internet. It’s a series of videos of these junior-high boys flipping half-filled water bottles on things, landing them just right, then running around with their arms in the air as if they’ve accomplished something amazing. My best friend Holly sent it to me, sort of as a joke.

What you’re doing can’t be half as hard as this.

That’s what her text said. It made me smile, because how stupid is a water-bottle stunt. Then I spent the next hour trying to get my damned water bottle to land upright on the floor. I just stuck it, and I refuse to pick it up now because that was really, really hard. I even threw my hands up when I did and let out a whoop—all alone, in my room, at sunrise. I whispered the whoop. And then I mimicked the sound of a roaring crowd.

Hats off to the water-bottle flippers of YouTube.

I miss Holly. I miss the late shift, and putting in stupid hours just trying to get ahead. I miss eating dinner out of the vending machine and talking about the cute doctors that I never really want to notice me, but that bring me some sort of feeling of normalcy—like maybe, just maybe, I’ll kiss a man again someday.

I took a sabbatical from the UV Mercy Nursing Program. When I get back, Holly will be on staff, and I’ll still be a senior. Damned fear of regret, though—it’s a powerful thing. I lit up the NCAA my junior year. All of those times when I was too slow didn’t matter now that I was faster than everyone. I was fast enough when it counted—fast enough to swim for gold.

Fast enough to swim for my father.

My dad runs one of the most elite training camps in the country. Four years ago, the US team came through here on their way to glory. It isn’t so much the pool, which is fairly dated, or the location—it’s my father that makes it the best. This year, he aims to be one of the coaches. I’m his ticket, and I’m all right with that because I couldn’t imagine going with anyone else in my corner.

Will
…I guess he’s the wild card. Or maybe he’s the insurance. If my dad can make him a winner too, then there really isn’t a better choice to head the team against the world.

The pound on the door is harsh and fast. I’ve been up for more than an hour, but it still startles me as if I was roused from a dead slumber.

“Rise and shine. We’ve got some serious conditioning to do,” my dad says, his voice trailing off as he moves down the hallway.

“I’m up!” I yell, my voice sounding defensive, like a teenager rather than a twenty-three-year-old who’s had her own apartment and knows how to pay her bills on time.

I glance at the water bottle on my floor then push it over on its side with my foot.

“Half as hard as this, huh?” I chuckle to myself.

I grab my packed bag and slide my feet into my flip-flops before opening my bedroom door. My mom ordered a mattress so I wouldn’t have to sleep on the futon now residing in my old bedroom. It’s an odd mix of things that used to define me in this den-slash-guest room my mom transformed the space into the second I signed a lease near the university. It didn’t make sense to spend the money on a place while I was here, especially since it’s temporary, so for the next few months, this time warp is my home.

Dad is already in the driveway with the car engine running, and my mom is holding a power bar out for me to take along with one of her special drinks.

“I can drive myself,” I say, ripping the bar open and taking a bite before leaning into her and kissing her cheek.

“Yeah, but he likes this idea of you and him doing this together. Humor him. Underneath that tough-guy persona, he’s scared shitless,” she says with a wink.

My mouth tugs up on one side.

“Fine,” I sigh, feigning frustration with a roll of my eyes.

“Good girl. Now drink your shake. You’re going to need the energy,” she says, shoving the smoothie into my right hand. It’s green, and her shakes make me gag, but they seem to do the trick.

I tilt the glass and take a big gulp, turning before she sees my disgusted face. My dad has his music on when I get in the car, and I’m hit with a second whammy—Abba’s greatest hits.

“Are you and mom trying to make me quit?” I ask, raising a brow.

“What? Who doesn’t like Abba?” he says, turning the music up and singing along, off-key as always. I shake my head and smile, looking out my window while I force the rest of my drink down, chasing it with what’s left of my protein bar so I have some hope that I don’t burp the awful flavor up over the next four hours.

When we get to the club, a few other cars are in the lot. I know most of the swimmers. A lot of them aren’t really ready for this, but one or two have a shot at some of the distance trials. There’s only one that I’m interested in, though. And by interested, I mean interested in avoiding.

Will’s already warming up when I pass by the glass doors to dump my things in the women’s locker room. It’s going to be impossible not to look at him. I came to terms with that fact sometime around three in the morning. I’m going to have to get used to looking at him; I need to become numb to the similarities. Only now that I’m here, at the pool, faced with the reality of actually looking at him, I’m not so sure I’m strong enough.

I sit on the bench and let my head fall back against the metal locker door behind me, pulling my phone into my palm. I text Holly.

I think I made a mistake.

That’s the thing I love most about my best friend; I can be raw and honest with her. She’s one of a handful of people I’ve always been able to cut through the bullshit with and get right to the heart of things. The other two people were Evan and Will.

My phone buzzes with her response.

Don’t be a pussy.

I laugh out loud.

Okay.

After tucking my phone away, I push my locker closed and grip my goggles and cap tight in my hand. It’s just a pool. Fifty meters that I can cross in seconds.
My lane—I see nothing but my lane.
I remind myself of the words my father used to tell me when I got nervous before a race when I was a kid, and it works for the few seconds it takes me to walk to the pool’s edge.

And then nothing will help. Nothing could ever help, or ever will help this. Will is standing on the opposite end, dripping from warm-ups, his body strong and similar. His hair wet…and similar. The blue of his eyes…piercing.

Similar.

The same.

There are maybe a dozen other athletes around—splashing and chaos between us—my father whistles, orders to begin, but we’re both locked in the past, and I just can’t seem to tear my eyes away. The hurt is almost good. It reminds me that something real was in my heart once, and as much as I want to run away from it, in this moment, I also want to hold onto it. I want to remember what exceptional felt like so I make sure I never settle for less. I wonder if exceptional comes along twice in a lifetime?

I wonder what this feels like for him? I wonder if the hurt is the same? Will and Evan were more than brothers; they were best friends. One ended and one began. I breathe in deep and let my chest feel full on the air and those thoughts, and I finally look away, bending down and splashing water on my arms, dunking my cap and goggles before getting in.

The water is my home, and I manage to do as my father always told me for the next few hours. I focus on the lane. I count my strokes, and push my capacity. I breathe and then hold my breath. I dig my arms into the water, and I kick and push. By the time my father blows the whistle for us to stop for the day, I’m spent—more than I have been in years. It takes me a few attempts to pull myself from the pool, and as I’m about to push my elbow into the ground to lift myself, I feel a hand wrap around my bicep and steady me until I can find my feet.

I don’t look at him completely. I knew it was Will’s touch the instant I felt it. It’s the only thing that doesn’t really remind me of Evan at all. Will’s hands—the size, strength and tenderness of their movement—that was always something unique to him.

“Thank you,” I say, smiling, but again, not at him. I move to the bench near the women’s locker room entrance and work my cap from my hair, toweling myself dry while I try to ignore the panicked thumping in my chest as I see Will walking toward me in my periphery.

“We have six weeks,” my dad says. Most of us sit at the loud boom of his voice, some of us on the ground. Will leans against the metal pillar several feet away from me, and I sneak a glance when his attention is on my dad.

He looks like Evan.

“Trials are going to be like nothing you’ve ever seen. Some of you,” my dad pauses, dipping his head to catch my eyes, “are going to have major targets on your backs. You’re the ones to beat. And the people chasing you are going to swim the race of their lives, faster than they’re capable of, running on adrenaline alone.”

His words soak in, and I know that as tired as I am from today, I still didn’t empty my tank. I need to give more, because I’m going to have one shot at clinching this. There is no
next
meet. There are trials, and today…I was distracted. My gaze drags along the ground to Will’s feet, then his legs, then his body. I can almost sense what it feels like to run my hands along his chest, around his back, to his neck, the wet ends of his hair, his jaw, his mouth. Not him, but…
almost.

“Tomorrow we add an hour in the evening. Even for the sprinters. Distance is good for your lungs, and we all need bigger lungs. I’m going to turn you all into fish. Now go eat something real for breakfast,” my dad says, reaching down and pulling a small granola bar from the hands of one of the younger female swimmers. She shrugs as he tosses it in the trash and heads inside through the men’s locker room.

I don’t mean to look, but my eyes just go to Will. He’s packing up his things, his jaw working and his eyes hyper focused on the small space directly in front of him. He’s trying to become invisible…
to me.
My chest grows heavy, and my gut twists. I’m not being fair to him, blaming him because of his blood—because of who he reminds me of. He can’t help that any more than I can help the fact that my past is forever connected to his brother. But him being here…it’s also stirred other feelings—the kind twisted up in memories and adolescence. I don’t like the guilt that comes with those feelings.

But that…
that’s
not Will’s fault, either.

I linger, my fingers tingling with doubt while my mind second guesses what I’m about to do, but I know that I can’t keep going like this. If Will and I are going to swim in this pool together for the next six weeks, we can’t do it with the weight of the past drowning us. We need to find our way back to our younger selves—to the kids who used to dare each other to swim across Peterson Lake in the dark. We need to be pushing each other, not pulling the wrong way.

“You want breakfast?” My question squeals from my mouth, my voice cracking. My teeth bite down on my lower lip while I stare at the wet pile of towels on the ground between us.

“I could eat,” he says.

His voice.

“I…I rode with my dad, so…” I glance up and our eyes meet briefly before I blink away again.

“I can drive,” Will says.

I nod slowly and remind my mouth to make a smile as I look up again.

“I’ll meet you out front,” I say, every word rehearsed in my head a millisecond before I utter it. Will doesn’t respond right away, but his eyes don’t seem to be as skittish as mine. He holds his stare on me, and his mouth is curved in a sincere hint of a smile. I’ve missed him.

After a long second, he nods and tugs the men’s room door open, disappearing inside and leaving me alone under the covered patio. I look out at the water, the surface smooth—no breeze to make ripples. My insides are the exact opposite.

My father is talking with two of the younger swimmers as I walk out to the main lobby. He’s holding one girl’s arm out and splaying her fingers, then cupping them.

“Grabbing the water, are we?” I say through a closed-lipped smile. My dad’s expression reflects mine.

“That’s how it all started with this one, you know. She was always coming in second. It was like this curse we just couldn’t seem to break until I told her she needed to grab more water,” he says.

“I’m really excited to be swimming with you here…I’m…I’m a fan,” the girl says, shaking her arm out and flexing her fingers in and out like she was just instructed. I reach down and grab her palm, squeezing it lightly, but with enough muscle to live up to her idea of me.

“I’m nothing special. I’m excited to be swimming here with you,” I say, pausing and tilting my head, waiting for her name.

“Amber,” she says.

I repeat it and smile, and I can feel her grip grow a little stronger just before she lets go. Confidence is a funny thing. The slightest sentence can be either a rocket or a missile to self-esteem.

My dad always keeps the negative away from ears, especially young ears. Even now, as the two girls leave us alone in the lobby, he waits for the door to close to tell me what he really thinks.

“She’s not ready. She’d get eaten up at trials. But…she can train. She’s young, just graduated high school. Maybe…maybe in four years, if she sticks with it,” he says, turning to me, our eyes locking.