Swimming to Freedom Read online

  Brandon shook his head to break his current train of thought and to shove the image of male genitalia away. His own was taking an interest in his thoughts, and he profoundly could not pop a woody in the locker room—even if the only other person in the room was Joel, who was probably running on autopilot too. Brandon had been fortunate that his interest in penises had never caused him to get an erection in the locker room. The way the guys teased and taunted those who did, made him especially grateful for that.

  Switching back into practice mode, Brandon quickly pulled on his own Speedo, taking an extra moment to tuck the added girth and length of his slightly swollen member as best he could. He grabbed his goggles and immediately made his way around the corner and out of the locker room.

  The big pool was so inviting to Brandon. From his earliest memories, the water had been a safe place for him, a place where he found pleasure when none could be found anywhere else. The pool was his sanctuary where nothing could follow him or hound him. In the pool, he could lose himself in the rhythm of doing laps, or the monotony of going back and forth, whether slow or fast.

  The pool was also where he came to work off his frustration, to build his formerly scrawny body into something more muscular and hopefully worthy of some guy taking a second glance sometime before he grew old. And over time the pool was where he excelled. It was the one place where he outperformed every other guy. It was where Brandon became someone to pay attention to, someone who won competitions and awards.

  He hadn’t set out to win anything. He swam for himself because it was fun and relaxing, but when others told him he was good, he tried competing and found it not that difficult. One thing led to another, and he was part of a team, his presence helping them do better than they ever had before.

  And then his father noticed and got involved, and it all went to hell in a hurry. But that was something he could think about another time. The water called to him, so he quickly slipped into his usual lane at the shallow end, dipped his head under water to get wet all over, donned his goggles, and started his first lap. He started at a slow, leisurely pace, without any attention to style or stroke—that would come later. Stroke, kick, turn, breathe, stroke, kick.

  Morning practice was all about building endurance. For two hours every single morning, he did lap after lap to teach his muscles how to perform as he wanted them to, as he needed them to.

  For those two hours, he also learned how to breathe and how to control the burn in his muscles, which crept into the forefront of his focus as he pushed himself—or usually as his father pushed him—to outperform what the human body could normally do.

  With the ease of a creature that lived in the water, when he reached the other end of the pool, Brandon automatically flipped over underwater and immediately pushed off to start the return lap. Over the next two hours, that was his entire world. Swim one direction, turn around and swim back to where he started and then return—the same thing over and over and over again. He had done so many laps that he knew instinctively when he’d reached the other side. Without even opening his eyes, he sensed when it was time to touch the wall and flip over and start the return lap.

  Brandon was usually very focused during endurance training. He was one of the few people on the team who did it without complaint. But for some reason, today Brandon’s mind was all over the place. He kept flashing back to the memory of seeing Joel’s dick as they’d changed in the locker room. He wished there had been more guys in the locker room so he could quickly glance at them, even if he’d seen them all before. He never tired of seeing dick. Dicks were sometimes all he thought about.

  “Dude!”

  Brandon looked all around at the sound of the voice. He’d been totally inside his head, inside his own world, and was startled to hear anyone else.

  “Huh?”

  “What’s going on with you today? You looked a million miles away. Did you hear anything I just said to you?”

  “Sorry,” Brandon said. They both rested against the end of the pool. “Did you ask me something?”

  “I just said how great it was to swim without all that yelling we usually have to put up with. It’s like a totally different experience this morning. It’s so gloriously quiet.”

  “What? Oh, right.” Of course. That was why Brandon’s mind was wandering so much—his father wasn’t there. It was a rare morning when Brandon got to become one with the water like he once had. Had his father been there, he would have been constantly shouting orders, issuing commands, pushing and cajoling his son to pick up the pace, to do more, and to try harder. Two hours “training” with his father was rugged because the man never cut him any slack. He was like a drill sergeant, convinced the only way to get any performance out of Brandon was to yell at him, give him orders, hound him, and constantly berate him for not trying hard enough.

  But this morning it was quiet, blessedly quiet. And that was why his mind wandered so much and why his swimming was so much more casual. His father wouldn’t tolerate Brandon being slow, or as he saw it, slacking off. But he wasn’t there, so Brandon could swim any way he wanted, and today he felt like a more relaxed pace.

  His father demanded Brandon’s absolute best at all times, regardless. Brandon could remember a few times when, for one reason or another over the years, he’d been off his game. Those times, rather than cut him a little slack, his father had only pushed him that much harder, requiring face-to-face sit-down talks about how much he was doing for his son and how swimming mattered above all else, that nothing else could possibly compare to where swimming could take him.

  Brandon’s father had big dreams for his son. His father had been a high school football player. After high school he missed the attention, the praise, and the public adulation he’d had as a young athlete. He’d wanted to go on and do more, but the truth was he just wasn’t good enough to break out of the pack in anything he tried. But Brandon was. Brandon was an incredible swimmer. He’d always been at home in the water and could go farther and faster than all the other kids his age since he could remember.

  When his father had sold his business, in the process making a boatload of money—enough so that he’d never have to work another day in his life—he found himself with loads of time on his hands and not a single thing to do. Retirement for a driven man who was so young just wasn’t realistic, as Brandon’s dad quickly discovered. His solution was to work with his son, to mold him into a world-class swimmer who could compete on both a national and an international level.

  Without discussing it with Brandon, his father made plans. He had dreams of Brandon competing in the Olympics, of him becoming the next Ryan Lochte or Michael Phelps. It didn’t matter that his dad didn’t know anything about swimming, didn’t know the rules, didn’t know the standards, and didn’t know how anything worked. But he knew how to drive his employees to work hard. So he transferred his pent-up alpha-male energy from his business toward his son. Overnight Brandon became his father’s sole focus. It was that day that Brandon’s life changed.

  Brandon loved swimming. He loved the water—he always had. But he didn’t feel the same need to compete against everyone over everything like his father did. His father had always been driven, which was why his company grew at breakneck speed, crushing his competitors. That was simply the way he worked. He competed in everything and didn’t think something was successful unless he outperformed, out-whatevered everyone else. Brandon had seen him gleeful over driving a couple of other companies out of business. That night Brandon had nearly been nauseated. His father was actually ecstatic that he’d driven businesses into bankruptcy and had forced several dozen people out of work and onto unemployment. While his father bragged, Brandon worked hard to keep a poker face that hid how he really felt.

  “Yo, dude, you still with me?”

  “Sorry,” Brandon apologized. “What you said, about it being quiet, I guess I’ve noticed it too and let my mind wander onto other stuff for once.”

  Joel flashed the
full brilliance of his smile Brandon’s way and said, “Well, dream on, my man.”

  Brandon was glad he was in the water so Joel couldn’t see the way his Speedo was starting to tent. He wasn’t especially attracted to Joel. There was nothing wrong with him at all, and Brandon would have done him in a heartbeat, but Joel was straight. Calling Brandon “my man,” meant one thing to Joel, but Brandon’s dick heard something entirely different. He was delighted when Joel took off down his lane, getting back to practice.

  He took another moment to enjoy the silence. It was such an absolute relief for once to not have the constant harping, the constant critical nagging that he usually had. For Brandon it was almost as if Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July had all been rolled together into one grand holiday. He wanted to wallow in the moment, to relish it, but he knew it was only temporary, and in just a little more than a week, it would all be over and they would return to their prior pattern.

  Brandon took a deep breath and pushed off as well. Time to get back to reality and back to work.

  Chapter 3—The Calm before the Storm

  THE ONLY thing that had changed when they finished practice was there was some light in the sky. The temperature had not budged a frigging degree and the wind most certainly hadn’t calmed any.

  Brandon and Joel made the dash to Joel’s car no less quickly than they had earlier. The only difference now was the car hadn’t been running long enough to warm up when Brandon hopped inside. At least the closed doors stopped the wind from cutting through them like a knife—a very sharp, very long knife that seemed intent on slicing straight through his body as if he wasn’t wearing any clothes whatsoever.

  “Fuck!” Brandon swore loudly.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that,” Joel commented with an admiring smile.

  Instantly embarrassed, Brandon blushed and looked down. “Sorry. I can’t say words like that when my dad’s around. He doesn’t permit it.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” Joel complained. “I’ve heard him say that and a lot of similar words hundreds of times during a standard practice. Why is it okay for him to swear but not for you?”

  “He says that it isn’t proper for an Olympian to swear, that cameras are always around recording stuff when you get to that level and people are always looking for dirt, looking for a way to trip you up and to make you look bad. An Olympian must always be on his best behavior because you never know when someone is watching, listening, and worst of all recording.”

  “Dude, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not an Olympian. You’re a high school student. You swim good and all, but that’s a long ways from being an Olympic competitor.”

  “I know that. But he says it’s important to practice now so that it becomes second nature to behave properly when I do become an Olympian.”

  “He seems pretty confident in you.”

  “He knows what he wants,” Brandon commented quietly.

  The heater in the car finally started to pump out a little warmth, but not enough to force out the cold that seemed to inhabit Brandon right down to his core.

  “What about what you want?” Joel asked as they sat in the idling car. The question caught Brandon off guard. “What do you want, man?”

  Brandon turned to stare at Joel, his mouth slightly open. “No one… no one’s ever asked me that before. I don’t know how to answer that question.”

  “It’s a simple question, dude. Everybody wants something. Everybody has a dream for themselves, even if it’s buried deep inside and never shared with another living soul. So what is it that you want?”

  “I… I don’t know,” Brandon said softly. He actually did know. Brandon did have a dream, but it was a personal dream that would remain buried where it was and not brought out and paraded around for public consumption. There was no way Brandon was going to tell Joel that his dream was to meet a man and find the love of his life, someone with whom he could share the ups as well as the downs. Someone who would love him and who he could love, someone to wake up next to every morning, someone with whom to make mad and passionate love every night.

  “That tells me all I need to know,” Joel commented.

  As Joel drove them back toward home, he thankfully did so at a more sane speed, since this time they didn’t need to rush to be somewhere. While he drove, Joel talked about some of the things he was considering doing in the city that day, the stores he wanted to go to, the things he wanted to look at, and the things he planned to buy, the movie he wanted to see, a friend he wanted to drop in on to see if he could find her alone and talk her into sex.

  Brandon half listened, enough to know that he was intensely jealous, not just about the sex but about everything. The idea of being able to determine his own path for even one day was so foreign to him Brandon just couldn’t comprehend it, as Joel babbled on. He heard enough to know when a polite nod of his head was called for, or when to mutter a word in acknowledgment to something Joel had said.

  Since they were not rushing quite so much, Joel actually drove up Brandon’s driveway as far as he could. It wasn’t entirely shoveled out yet. That was one of Brandon’s chores, but the cold weather had made extended bouts of shoveling highly unappealing. He knew he had to get it all done before his father returned, but that wasn’t anytime soon.

  “Same time, same place tomorrow?” Joel asked.

  Brandon sighed. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Sure you don’t want to go with me today?”

  “You don’t know how much I wish I could, but I can’t,” Brandon said, feeling as if he bore the weight of the world on his shoulders and was about to collapse under the load.

  Joel was usually bold and boisterous, but for once he was quieter. He looked at Brandon with an understanding that told Brandon he got it. “All right, man, but sometimes I think you need to strike out on your own and just tell him to fuck off.”

  Brandon laughed, but it was not jolly, joyful laughter but was instead filled with sadness. He thought of that frequently but knew he would never be bold enough to do something like that. There was one absolute, undisputed alpha male in his house, and it sure as hell wasn’t Brandon. He was definitely the beta or even the omega male in their house, but it was a role he knew well since he’d always occupied the exact same position, even when Jeremy, his older brother, had still been in the picture. They’d never had any problems, just so long as it was clear that Jeremy was the older brother. Brandon missed him, even though they hadn’t been especially close. He still to this day had no clue what had gone down between Jeremy and their dad, but whatever it was, one day Jeremy was there and then the next he was gone, and his dad was more pissed-off than usual. Brandon could still remember his dad’s words, “We will not speak of him again.” Brandon shook his head at the memory—his dad sure had problems with control issues.

  SWIMMING BURNED a lot of calories and always left Brandon hungry. So the first thing he did once he got home was cook and eat a huge breakfast to replenish his body’s fuel. Afterward he immediately washed the dishes, something second nature at this point.

  He did allow himself one luxury—he sat down on the sofa and tackled some of a novel he was supposed to read for his English class. It was due right after the break, so he wanted to try to knock it out as quickly as possible. The only problem was the book was tough to read, not something that could be called a real page-turner. He knew it was a classic, but did it have to be so damned boring and slow to develop? And why couldn’t they write words that made sense?

  He very nearly dozed off from boredom but was rescued by the ringing telephone. He grabbed for the phone, which sat nearby, and said, “Hello?”

  “Brandon, it’s your father.” The voice immediately launched at him. “Did you practice this morning?” he asked with an accusing tone to his voice.

  “Of course,” Brandon said.

  “I bet you slacked off without me there to ride your ass, didn’t you?”

  “Not t
hat I’m aware of,” Brandon offered but knew it wouldn’t carry any weight with his father, whose mind was clearly already made up on the subject. He wasn’t sure his father even heard the words Brandon said, but he had to try. “I practiced just like I do every morning.”

  “I swear, I need to ride you every minute to make you do what you need to do. This isn’t a game, Brandon. This is real life and real life requires a lot of work and a lot of sacrifice.”

  As his father babbled on in one of his standard speeches, all of which seemed to automatically assume Brandon was a disreputable slacker who needed constant hounding, scolding, and harassment, Brandon’s mind wandered a bit. He even grew so bold as to try to read another page of the horrible book still in his hand.

  “Are you listening to me?” his dad asked, a fairly standard question from the man, which got a standard answer.

  “Of course I am, Dad.”

  “You better. Tomorrow morning I want you to practice and give it your all. You cannot slack off just because I’m not there to crack the whip. The more ground you lose, then the harder we’ll have to work when I get back to make up that lost ground, so do yourself a favor and do the work now.”

  Without any comment about how everything else was going or how golf in Florida was or even what the weather was like there, Brandon’s dad finished his speech and hung up. Brandon’s obligation for the morning was now complete. Well, mostly.

  Tossing his book aside, Brandon reluctantly bundled up in many layers and went back outside to try to knock out some more of the driveway. Shoveling the heavy snow wasn’t much fun even at the best of times, but doing so in the cold and with the constant, biting wind chasing him made the chore seem ten times harder, which was why Brandon had been trying to do the work in small chunks.