Page 5 of The Summer You Were Mine

Cris hated running. There was a time in his life where it was something he’d be forced to do as part of dry-land training with whatever team he was on.

He never, ever thought it would be an activity that he would voluntarily choose to do on his own—and certainly not before he’d even had coffee.

He chose this all right, and even chose this punishing route that wound up and down the golden hills around the Stanford Dish, but he still didn’t like it.

As he pushed into the next impossibly steep ascent up to the enormous radio antenna that crowned the hills above the campus, he took in the view of the Avery Aquatic Center below.

It reminded him of why he was up here at all.

For a thirty-two-year-old recently retired professional swimmer with shoulders held together by ligaments like Swiss cheese, it was pretty simple: running was not swimming.

It was just five days ago that he’d finally broken off his pseudo-relationship with fellow World Athletic Games competitor Violet Urbanik in Bali after a last-ditch effort to go from formally nothing to casually something.

Was Violet a girlfriend? She wasn’t not a girlfriend, unless the definition was a woman who championed movie night cuddles and Pinterest boards full of engagement rings, because that wasn’t Violet.

At all. But, as a gold-medal-winning diver on the USA team, she was someone who got him, that was for sure.

Their relationship was more of a convenient alliance than anything else, starting from when they met as seatmates on a team bus stuck in traffic from Haneda Airport in Tokyo to the World Athletic Games Village in Harumi.

The twenty-minute trip took over an hour, which was plenty of time for her to tell him that she had assumed he was an athletic nepo baby and for him to tell her that he’d thought she was a snob.

“I’d rather have focus than friends,” she’d said.

Violet explained that she’d overcome a lot to immigrate to the United States without her family, let alone become a professional athlete.

She didn’t have time for lapses in attention.

She was cold as ice, but he admired her drive and thought she was sexy as hell.

He wasn’t sure if she liked him at the end of the bus ride, but she did give him her number and said to text her only if he medaled.

Since then, they were sometimes in each other’s orbit, sometimes not.

Still, the relationship served a purpose.

It was great during the games, when tension and hormones ran high in the Athlete Village.

Having someone you could count on for a day of “active recovery” was priceless.

Who wanted to hook up with a random skeet shooter when, with each other, they were guaranteed a gold-medal experience?

Cris could never get excited about dating anyway.

It always seemed like a lot of organization and preparation for a ninety-minute dinner that would cost too much and feel too cheap.

But now that Cris was retiring, some part of both of them wondered if they’d successfully avoided a true love match all these years and decided it was a good time to find out.

A tug on something in the back of his brain reminded him that if it was love, he would have known it by now.

His only other experience with love was still unmistakable despite his mistakes—and he hadn’t even laid eyes on her in years. This didn’t feel anything like that.

So they tried, and the week in Bali started off with them doing what they did best—going for it on the flower-strewn bed within ten minutes of their arrival.

Sleeping in the same bed together became all but impossible as they contended with each other’s snoring, blanket hogging, and disorganized arranging of limbs.

Then it seemed that any attempt at deep conversation over cocktails lost its mojo like a lukewarm daiquiri, ending with both of them gazing out over each other’s shoulders.

After a couple of days, even the sex got weird.

It seemed like she’d spent a lot of time looking down at his midsection while he hovered over her.

When she’d grazed her hand across his abdomen, it felt less like she was passionately caressing and more like she was judging the new contours of what retirement looked like on his body.

Eventually, she stopped touching him at all.

“Hey, Cris!”

He raised his head to see Mark Cortland, one of the assistant coaches for the men’s swim team at Stanford, and another guy stretching by a bench.

For a split second, he thought about nodding a hello and digging back into the hill as he would have usually done in the past. When he was in-season, most people knew enough not to expect much in the way of pleasantries, much less a chat session.

He was currently fresh out of good reasons to be aloof, so flipped his right hand up in a greeting. He smiled and headed over to the guys.

“Hey, Mark, how’s it going?”

“Great, thanks. The team’s doing great also! Gearing up for the summer sessions now that campus is almost empty. Hey, have you met Rick Frasier? He’s going to be helping us out this summer with some of the weight training stuff.”

“Cris Conte. It’s great to meet you, man. I’m a huge fan,” said Rick. He was built like a piston, compact and powerful in track pants and a T-shirt that was so tight across his swollen chest that it looked like a crush hazard.

“Ah, thanks.” Cris forced a smile and shook hands, Rick’s aggressive movements yanking his arm. Why was it that the short guys were always the ones who had to grab on like a rottweiler with a chicken wing in its mouth?

“Yeah, so, you know… We’re in the pool now for the duration,” said Mark. He was a good guy, but Cris was bracing for what was coming next. “Anytime you want to come down and work out with us, it would be great to have you!”

“Thanks,” Cris said. There would be no way in hell he would be doing anything in the pool right now unless they had drained the water out of it or frozen it over to skate on. “I’ll definitely come by at some point.”

“Awesome,” said Rick. “Man, I’d love to see that butterfly in person! Watching on TV doesn’t do it justice at all!”

“Well, I’m actually headed to Italy for a while to visit my family, so…” He paused but added another smile when Rick looked a little crestfallen. “Maybe when I get back.” Not in a million years, he thought. “Take care, you guys.” Cris started to turn away to get back to running.

“Great. Yeah. Maybe when you get back,” said Mark. “Have a great time! Don’t eat too much pasta!”

He definitely would be eating too much pasta.

As far as he was concerned there were exactly zero reasons for him to not do any damned thing he pleased at this moment.

The athletes he knew would probably encourage him to add a few extra running sessions per week to justify his belligerent carbohydrate intake.

Screw that guilt crap. He wasn’t running for penance.

The Dish loop hurt just enough to remind him that he was healthy, and that was fine with him.

It wasn’t like he was out of shape, it was just that his eight-pack had diminished to maybe a two-pack.

He could get the shadow of three or four most mornings when the light was right in the bathroom.

Who cared, anyway? He’d spent most of his adult life with his torso looking like a stick of gum.

At six foot three, any new weight was going to settle a bit all over.

The funny thing was that he looked more like the guys in the photos of his dad’s water polo team now.

Back in his dad’s day in Italy, there weren’t any sports nutritionists armed with whey protein and a macro calculator, managing an athlete’s diet with surgical precision.

There was polenta because it stuck around longer and uova fritta because “eggs give you energy.” He would have fit right in with his beefier physique.

He wondered if he would have been even faster, too.

Cris threw a towel over the driver’s seat of his truck before getting in with his sweaty self and checked his phone.

The family WhatsApp thread was blowing up, and he could see that his mom, grandfather, and two brothers were taking advantage of the rare moment when time zones aligned to chat.

It looked like the main goal of the conversation was for his grandfather, Simone, to make as many jokes as possible about how terrible he felt to be the grandfather of two men that thought so little of his wedding that they would show up late so that they could train for the World Athletic Games instead.

At least your old brother has the sense to retire on eight medals.

You two should give up and spend the week here.

Also I hear the wine is terrible in Colorado Springs , he wrote.

Leo and Ale Jr. were, of course, capitalizing on the fact that their grandfather had referred to Cris using the word “ vecchio ” to remind him how deeply decrepit he was.

His mom was ignoring all of them by asking Cris Hai prenotato l’Uber?

for the sixth time since they would be sharing the ride to the airport together and she was not confident about his ability to reserve transportation for them a week in advance.

Cris rested his head back against the seat, closed his eyes, and tried to tell himself that this was the good part.

Retiring meant he could be there to watch his grandfather get married in his hometown with his whole family around.

This was exactly the kind of thing that he’d missed out on for so long.

So why was he so anxious? Chiavari had been the place where every one of his happiest childhood memories lived.

The core of all of it was the beach club, the Bagni Delfino.

Though it had been years, he could see the whole place in perfect detail, from the painted sign over the entrance that featured a jumping dolphin to the pebbled beaches and sparkling sea.

He’d spent more time there than in his own house, playing water polo with his dad and brothers, eating lunch under the umbrellas on the big blue deck, diving off the rocks with Ellie and the rest of the beach club kids.

Ellie.

Of course, he knew why he was anxious. It didn’t seem to matter how many years had passed since everything fell apart between them, he still felt the same tightness in his chest whenever he thought of her.

He still remembered opening the last email she sent, the way her rejection sent him spinning.

Steeped in guilt, Cris had given her a wide berth since then and had found a way to avoid showing up anywhere he knew she’d be.

“You know, if she’s smart, she’ll bounce you like a day-old bagel,” Violet said, throwing in a last dig before walking out of his life.

She did not hesitate to take a last swipe at him, obviously assuming that he’d broken up with her in order to rekindle something with Ellie in Italy.

She was wrong, but he blamed himself for giving her ammunition.

He’d let a flight of tequila shots open his mouth up the night they wrapped up the games in Tokyo, getting all bleary-eyed over lemon sours at SG Low in Shibuya when the worst apology song of the entire 2000s popped on the stereo.

He thought it would be okay to tell Violet, a woman who would likely rather do her next dive into a pit of snakes before she admitted to having an emotion, that “there was a girl.” It was ancient history, a fragment of his past. In truth, he didn’t remember what he’d told her about Ellie over the sound of the cheesy track blaring out over the crowded izakaya .

Whenever he talked about her—whenever he even thought about her, for that matter—there was that sick feeling that could only come from knowing that whatever had been between them had been broken.

The memory of it hung in his head like static in the air after a storm and sometimes it felt so charged, he had the urge to physically duck away from it.

He was not proud of that. He knew that he should have done things differently, but at barely eighteen and just a few months from his father’s death, he was only capable of treading water.

In some ways, he had deserved her rejection back then.

But that never stopped the dull ache that grew when he thought of it—even now.

He had tried to text Ellie a few times, usually after his emotions pooled inside a cocktail glass and sent him to pick up his phone.

Never able to get the words out, he typically spiraled into thinking she wouldn’t want to hear from him anyway and gave up.

Now he was going to be seeing her again in a matter of days, but what was he going to do? Apologize for being an idiot a decade ago? A text message pinged on his phone. It was Mark. Was he really going to insist that Cris stop by practice again?

Hey Cris. Glad to see the SI article is not too upsetting.

Screw that guy, anyway. He’s a hater.

We all know it’s not true. Take care!!

Cris felt the blood drain from his head.

This was the exact reason he tried to keep his life private.

The one time he’d told a journalist anything, they’d humiliated him, so he certainly hadn’t done an interview with anyone from Sports Illustrated .

The only reason they’d be writing about him was if they had some skeleton they’d dug up.

He didn’t even respond to the text but opened the browser on the phone.

He paused with his thumb hovering over the screen.

Rule number one of being in the public eye was to never google yourself.

He’d mostly resisted, but this felt like an emergency and he couldn’t think about taking the extra time to call his agent.

How the hell did you come up with search terms to enter when trying to learn about yourself?

He decided to focus on the only two things he knew: “Cristiano Conte” and “ Sports Illustrated .” His stomach understood the headlines before his eyes did and promptly dropped to his feet.

CRISTIANO CONTE: WHEN DID THE DOPING START ?