Page 14 of The Summer You Were Mine

Cris and Ellie sat staring at each other for a long moment.

He broke first, picked up his hamburger, went to take a bite, then put it down again.

She was still staring at him, probably conjuring up every horrible, nasty thing she could imagine him getting into while wishing he’d disintegrate.

Suddenly thirsty, he cracked the cap off a bottle of mineral water and took a sip.

There was only one way to get out of this, which was to get straight into it.

“Some guy wrote an article about me in Sports Illustrated .” Silence.

Ellie dabbed a gloss of olive oil off her lower lip, and he almost lost his train of thought entirely.

Cris tried to refocus. He was tired of going over the events in his head and had used most of his courage in telling Simone earlier.

But she was waiting, it seemed, expressionless and no longer eating.

“You know I’ve had a bunch of surgeries on my shoulders.

” He looked up at her face, but again, there was nothing.

She probably had no idea. And why would she?

“Well, I’ve had a bunch of surgeries on my shoulders.

Lots of people have the same kind of problems that I do.

They have surgery, go through PT, and can keep going.

I did everything they told me to do, with no shortcuts.

I had no reason to think it wouldn’t be okay.

” He paused and took a sip of water. “The doctor told me that they’d been able to repair everything with the last surgery.

But it didn’t feel like it. The pain was… ” He trailed off.

Ellie lifted her chin a tick. She was listening. He was scared to tell her but wanted her to know somehow. He knew he’d better keep talking or he would lose his nerve.

“The pain was awful. It was there all day and all night. Not only when I was in the pool, but when I was sitting and showering and eating and trying to sleep. I’m not stupid.

I know I’m thirty-two. It’s not old, but I knew this summer would probably be my last shot at another medal.

” He put his head down. Man, it was getting hot out here.

She was still looking at him with a totally blank face.

They hadn’t had a full conversation in over a decade and this is how he was choosing to get reacquainted?

Maybe she wasn’t actually listening. “You don’t want to hear this.

” He pulled the baseball cap off his head and ran his hands through the mop of dark hair that tumbled out.

“Do you have a story to tell?” she asked.

“Yeah. I have a story to tell, but it’s not what that guy wrote.”

“Then you should get used to telling it to people who may or may not believe you.” She was right.

If he was looking for sympathy or understanding, he was going to have to work for it—with her and with everyone else in the world, too.

He took another sip of water. She wrinkled her nose under her sunglasses and gestured around the terrace.

“And lucky for you, I’ve got a lot of time and no place to go. ”

“Fine,” he said, deciding to not read into her comment.

“Well, I found myself fantasizing about not swimming anymore. I’d never done that.

I always spent all of my time trying to figure out how to do more, not less.

I’d had all the surgeries there were to have and I could see that I was going to have to make a decision.

It was killing me. I talked to my agent, my coaches, other teammates, and told them that I was done.

It wasn’t a secret that I was going to retire.

I was waiting to announce it to the public at the right time.

I figured, let’s wait until after the new year and start fresh.

But I made a mistake. My last week in the pool was the week before Thanksgiving.

I was in so much pain and I wanted to be done—just to end the misery.

I’m not the guy to take painkillers, you know?

I mean I’ve been trained my whole life to not take that junk.

Even when I had my wisdom teeth out, I downed a few Motrin and went to sleep.

I don’t do anything stupid.” A slight twitch flashed on her cheek, but he kept going.

“So, I found out about this stuff that you can take that doesn’t get rid of the pain, but it’s supposed to help you heal faster.

I thought maybe that would be a way to get around it.

Maybe if I could fix it faster, the pain would get better. ”

“But, why didn’t you announce your retirement first before trying anything?” As much as he was glad she asked it, because it meant that she was interested, he hated this question. It was the one thing he didn’t have an answer to.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head.

“You don’t know or you don’t want to know?” she asked, finally taking another bite of bruschetta.

Cris leaned back in his chair. He knew. Of course he knew. “When my father died, there were a lot of reporters calling me.”

“I remember,” she said, not looking up from her plate.

“Well then you might also remember that they leaned into me pretty hard. Ale and Leo, too, but they took it better, I guess. Me? Not so much.”

The local news had asked if they could send a journalist and photographer out to talk to him at the pool not long after his father passed.

They’d wanted a standard story of the young athlete working hard despite the loss of his father and the subsequent path to victory.

When they showed up unannounced, it happened to be the day after one of the meets where he’d choked so bad it was like he was swimming backward.

He’d been sitting in the coach’s office, watching the TV broadcast from the competition, when he heard one of the commentators say that maybe Cris had better take a break from swimming in order to not sully his family legacy.

He lost it. He marched outside and threw three empty recycling bins against the brick wall of the training center before realizing that the two guys watching him were actually filming the whole thing.

He calmed down enough to give them an interview, but they still ran part of the footage of him going bananas in the parking lot and positioned him as an emotionally unstable loose cannon instead of the victorious hero.

He choked again at the very next meet, when Gio and Ellie had come out to see him.

He was mortified. And he was also certain that even the press could see he was failing to be the role model he wanted to be—the one he felt he had to be when Alessandro died.

To have all of his hopes erased by one low moment was intolerable.

So, instead of fighting to set the record straight, he stopped wanting to fight at all.

He’d tried his best to stay under the radar ever since.

“I remember that, too,” Ellie said quietly. Her eyes finally met his.

“Let’s just say I developed an allergy to the media, in general.

I avoided dealing with them at all costs.

I know that sounds like an excuse.” Ellie was watching him, not reacting.

He was surprised to see an old trait of hers still intact—studying him for clues when they talked, as if she were trying to understand some hidden subtext.

It made it impossible for him to hide things from her when they were kids.

He hoped like hell she wouldn’t pick up on how hard he was finding it to focus on the conversation when he wanted to break past this awkwardness and reach across the table to pull her into his arms like he used to without even thinking.

“The truth is that I figured it didn’t matter what I took because I was done,” he redirected. “And I only took it twice. I don’t even know if it worked. I might have felt better just because I stopped swimming. I actually kind of forgot about it.”

“What did you take?”

“I didn’t know it was banned,” he said. “I didn’t even know it was a real thing.”

“What the hell did you take?” Ellie pushed her plate forward and clasped her hands under her chin, staring at him.

“Deer antler velvet.”

“Excuse me, what now?” She guffawed.

“You heard me.”

“I understand all three words, but I do not understand them together.”

“It’s this fuzzy stuff they scrape off deer antlers as they mature. I got it from a doctor in New Zealand. They use it all the time down there.”

“Oh, God, you’re serious.” The corners of Ellie’s mouth started to turn up.

“Why is this funny?” Was she going to laugh right now?

“Deer horn. You got busted for what? Snorting deer horn?” She leaned closer. Ellie was trying to put on a straight face, but it wasn’t happening. She mashed her lips together, clearly trying not to crack up. “Wait. Is this like a male performance enhancer? Is that what you’re so mortified about?”

“What? No!” Cris was about to be really pissed, but the sight of Ellie covering her mouth with her hand and trying like hell not to laugh set him off, too.

He broke a smile watching her shoulders shaking, and she silently convulsed behind her hand.

“Come on, it’s serious,” he said, but it was a total loss.

Ellie let a rip of laughter out, making Cris cackle when she snorted.

The table of kids next to them even looked up from their iPads long enough to try to figure out what was going on.

Before he knew it, they were both wiping tears out of their eyes and coughing.

It wasn’t even that funny. The situation did not deserve to be laughed at.

But, the sight of Ellie practically peeing herself at his expense was a lot better than her looking at him like he’d gone moldy.

For a second, the old light of what they used to be shone through, and after fearing it was gone forever, he was thrilled to see a glimpse of it.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It sounds like something from a bad movie. I get EPO and steroids and whatever, but who thinks of deer horn silk?”