The Thomas Flair - E.J. Russell Page 0,29

the march-in, leaving Tony alone in the dressing room, staring at his locker as if he could open it up and pull out some fucking courage.

“Hey.” Sol sat next to him, facing the other direction. “You okay?”

“Beats the hell out of me.” Tony closed the locker with a soft click. “I thought you’d be out with the guys by now.”

“Nope. Had to check my levels.”

Tony whipped around to stare at Sol. “Are you crashing? Do you need to—”

Sol laughed. “Calm down. I’m fine. The schedule is just weird, so I had to adjust my meal timing today. It’s all good.”

Tony heaved a huge breath. “Thank God.”

“Why are you still in here? Based on how you’ve been behaving in the gym for the last week, I’d have expected you to be out there already, pumping Eddie up and calming Jason down. Joking with Danny, the two of you trying to get Rahul to smile.”

Tony shrugged. “I don’t know. I just feel… off.”

“Tony.” Sol inched closer, so their hips touched, a comforting warmth even through uniforms and warm-up suits. “You’ve got this.”

“Do I?” Tony huffed a laugh. “Whatever this is, I seem to have misplaced it somewhere over the last week.”

“Nah.” Sol nudged Tony’s shoulder with his own. “You’ve just got stage fright.”

“Stage fright?” Tony turned an outraged glare on Sol. “You’re talking to the guy who bared his ass for all the world to see. The guy who jumped off a cliff in Acapulco wearing a helmet cam. The guy who—”

“Who hasn’t faced judges at the Olympic trials for nearly four years?”

Tony deflated like a pricked balloon. “Is that what it is, Solly? Am I really that terrified of judgment? I put myself out there on the XBL channel all the time, and trust me, the commenters can be brutal.”

“Yes, but none of them control your destiny.”

Tony stared down at his feet. “And the judges do?” Let’s not even think about my father.

“No.” Sol leaned into him, shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm, hip to hip. “Your destiny is your own. Whatever the judges say, their marks aren’t going to be the only things the selection committee considers. Yeah, they’re a component, but the committee wants to build the best possible team.” Sol glanced around at the empty room and then raised one finger to angle Tony’s chin for a kiss. “So go out there and show them the fabulous Thomas flair.”

Sol’s kiss sent a different kind of zing along Tony’s skin, one that went a long way toward calming his earlier nerves, like that physics phenomenon, whatever it was called, when two frequencies canceled each other out.

He stood up, the bench the only thing that kept him from grabbing Sol in an NSFW hug. I’ll have to ask Rahul about that wavelength thing later. Although he’d probably say he was an engineer, not a physicist.

Sol smiled crookedly at him. “Ready?”

“Born ready, baby.”

“Then let’s do this.”

They joined the other guys in the tunnel leading to the arena. The two of them were on different rotations—Tony starting on vault and Sol on pommel horse—so they lined up with their appropriate groups. The instant they marched out onto the floor, the familiarity of it all settled around Tony like a well-worn bathrobe, further soothing his nerves. The applause of the crowd as the guys walked to their apparatus. The smell of chalk. The chill of the air conditioning. The lights, the long table with all the commentators, the judges in their regulation navy blazers, stone-faced at their stations.

This I know. This I can do.

But the first time he stepped up on the podium for his run at the vault table, he almost missed the green light from the D1 judge because this was it. Regardless of how or why he’d gotten here, he was back. Back in the place where he belonged. He almost choked up, which would be the worst possible thing to do when he was about to sprint for twenty-five meters and then fling himself into the air.

God, the vault table looks farther away than the moon. But he took a steadying breath, remembered Sol’s kiss, and with a little hop, launched himself down the runway. Rebound off the springboard. Half-twist onto the table. Push off into a double-twisting layout.

Then the mat was there, under his feet, almost before he’d registered being in the air. It surprised him so much that he took a hop. Hell. There goes at least a tenth. But he raised his arms in his final