Quadruple Flip

Chapter 4

Chapter 4“Bollocks!”

“You okay?” Tom Alan was straddling Milo more than lying atop him. It was one of those practiced falls he’d gotten good at, because of how important it was that a guy as big as he was never make full contact with a girl as small as Erika.

Milo smiled. “Par for the course, mate. Though I’m usually the top.”

Tom Alan smiled, too. He struggled upright, freeing his hand with a yank that displaced Milo’s pants. “Sorry.” He stared at bare buttocks.

“S’alright.” Milo stood “It’s just me bum, now.”

A nice one, Tom Alan thought, blushing. “Nana korobo ya oki?”

“Wha-s at mean?” Milo asked.

“Fall down seven times, get up eight.”

He almost smiled at Tom Alan. “We’ll see about that.”

“Shake it off and regroup. Again!” Mrs. Mischen said sternly.

* * * *

After another two grueling hours, finally the exhausted temporary partners headed for the locker room. “It’s amazing how much a guy can sweat while on ice.” Milo chuckled.

“Yeah,” was Tom Alan’s response.

“You’re a guy of few words, Thomas Baron-what’s-it?” Milo took off his shirt and wiped himself down, neck to waistband.

“Baranowski. My dad was Polish. He died.” Tom Alan felt as inept at conversation as he did at being a swan.

“Sorry to hear that.” Pants off, Milo stood before Tom Alan in all his naked, hairy glory. While he barely came up to Tom Alan’s chin, he was a finely developed male with everything in perfect proportion. Even his coat of fur was full, but not overly thick, allowing plenty of pale, sun-starved, sinewy Britannic skin to show through.

“Is your dad…?” He was going to ask if he was all right, but then he would have to cop to listening in on the earlier call. Milo…Booger seemed to take the question precisely as posed.

“Not that I know of. Let me check my phone.” Milo sighed. “My parents are all still fortunately alive. But let’s continue this after,” he said. “We’ve earned this shower. No need to fanny about here. Hurry on.” He patted Tom Alan’s butt, then brushed past him. The sound that came out of him once the water started running was damned near orgasmic.

If it feels that good…Tom Alan stripped off quickly to get in there and join him.

Unlike some locker rooms, the one at Irina Mischen’s rink had waist-high walls separating each individual bathing space. If one was tall enough—like say, maybe six-six—the walls did little to hide the guy beside you. Someone Milo’s height, however, couldn’t see Tom Alan, even if he’d been in the next stall in the line. He wasn’t. Tom Alan had chosen the one farthest away. He was shy in the shower as well, which was about to become a problem, since Milo Fisher came over to join him.

Athletes shower together. Gay, straight, it’s no big deal—unless, there’s some sort of attraction involved, or maybe another reason a guy might want to hide his nakedness. In Tom Alan’s case, both were true.

“My dad…” Milo began, washing his pits with a handful of gel he’d brought over with him, the hair there as wild as that on his head. “I have two, you see. One’s almost right famous. You, um, ever hear of him?”

“Um. I don’t think so.” Befuddled, Tom Alan flattened himself against the wall and held a towel in front of his lower half. “Unless he’s Eddie Fisher—the chess player.”

“You’re thinking of Bobby Fischer.” Milo started in on the hair on his head, closing his eyes against rogue shampoo. “Eddie Fisher was married to Liz Taylor or Debbie Reynolds. Both, I think. Wasn’t he? He’s Carrie Fisher’s father. You know, from Star Wars.”

“I love Star Wars!” Star Wars reached all generations eventually, and Tom Alan was all sci-fi nerd. “Princess Leia’s your sister?”

“No. Wait. What?” Milo tried to open his eyes. “Ow!” He swiped at them with foamy hands. “Bollocks! She isn’t, no.”

“Oh. I just thought…since you asked if I knew your father, that he was some famous Fisher.” The thought of meeting Carrie Fisher’s brother had made Tom Alan forget there was nothing between his naked body and Milo Fisher’s except a damp towel and several inches. Suddenly aware, able to focus on nothing else, he snuck around the partition and wrapped the towel around himself.

“Did you, perchance, pay a lot of attention to the Summer Olympics a couple years back?” Milo reached out blindly. “Hey! Where’d you go?”

“Oh. Um, some,” Tom Alan stammered. “I’m out here. I watched the swimming. Lochte was awesome.”

“Any gymnastics, maybe?”

Tom Alan watched Milo work the shampoo’s foam through his ringlets. Washing another man’s hair was one of the most sensual things he could imagine. Call it a fetish, maybe, a mild one. Tom Alan saw it more as romantic than s****l. At the moment, however, a tingle in his groin had him thinking it was definitely both.

There was no denying he was hot for Milo Fisher the moment he smelled him—met him. He’d been hot for a lot of guys. Being gay was not a question for Tom Alan. He wasn’t confused. He wasn’t hiding it. He was out to his coaches—his family. They all knew he was sexually and emotionally attracted to men. What Tom Alan hadn’t yet decided was whether or not that attraction meant he could never be happily married to Erika.

“I just remembered,” Tom Alan said quickly, “I have to call home.”

He rushed from his position behind Milo Fisher, stole one more glance at his sexy, wet form, and exited the room. Taking a seat on a bench just outside, willing his half hard-on soft, he dialed Japan. “Moshi moshi, Otousan.”

* * * *

Tom Alan hardly remembered Thomas Baranowski, Sr. at all. He could only conjure his face from an old photograph, and always pictured him in the same red-and-white shirt his dad had worn in it when plugging him into imaginary family scenarios, or maybe onto the bleachers at events. His mother’s second husband, he was a monster. He didn’t deserve a label with “dad” in it, not stepdad or otherwise. Tom Alan owed the Tsuchinos his life—possibly literally—for getting him away from the guy. Maybe there was only one way to pay off that debt.

* * * *

“You are doing well your first day with Irina Mischen?”

“Yes, Papa. She taught me how to flutter my arm.” Tom Alan said it like a proud little schoolboy.

“That’s…nice,” Nobuo commented. “And the boy with whom you are skating?”

“Booger.”

“I beg your pardon.” Nobuo Tsuchino sounded so formal as “papa,” never raising his voice, never cursing. He saved those for the ice. “Did you say ‘Booger’?”

Tom Alan almost laughed at his papa’s staid pronunciation, until homesickness grasped him by the throat. “Milo is his real name. He’s nice.”

“Ah yes, Mr. Fisher. He is good. Let us hope the fruit has rolled far from the proverbial tree, however.”

“Whadda you mean?”

“‘Whadda’ is not a word, Tom Alan.”

“Sorry, Sensei.”

“No matter. Milo Fisher’s father is not our real concern.”

“Oh. Okay. How’s Kiki?”

“She is doing as well as she was twenty hours ago. You have not been gone that long.”

“It feels like it.”

“It is good to travel farther than your own backyard.”

“Is that some ancient Chinese proverb, Otousan?”

“We are Japanese, Tom Alan.”

It was a running joke between the two anytime Tsuchino said anything the least bit profound.

“I travel the globe from October to March every year, Papa.”

“Though you always bring home along with you.”

There was truth in that. Papa, Kyoko-san, and Kiki all back there; it was the first time Tom Alan was thinking of Japan as his home. “Home is where the heart is,” he guessed. And the heart was wherever those you loved most were. “You and Kyoko-san and Kiki have always felt like home, Otousan,” he said. “But, honestly, I was never sure Japan could.”

“It must, Tom Alan.” It was the first time his papa had ever said it so emphatically. It was a definite change. Maybe he was affected by Tom Alan’s absence, too. “You are a Tsuchino,” he said. “You are the future.”

“Of what?” Tom Alan asked naively.

“Of everything.” Nobuo Tsuchino took a beat. “I do not, however, want you filled with regret, with doubt or questioning. You must not feel as if you have not explored, that you have left a part of you unfulfilled. That is not fair to you or to Erika.”

Otousan’s decrees could be as confusing as artistic arm movements. Was he telling Tom Alan to, um, bang Milo Fisher—or some other guy—before marrying his daughter? “I don’t understand,” he admitted. “What do you want me to do?”

Tom Alan knew he could fight off s****l attraction, lust—he’d gotten damned good at it—but if he developed emotional feelings for Milo, which already seemed possible, that could be a lot harder.

“Tom Alan,” Tsuchino said. “You must cut your pathway through your own meadow. Though it will eventually cross paths with that created by another, your first few steps must be where no one else has trod.”

“Is that an ancient Chinese proverb?” Tom Alan asked softly, sorrowfully, confused.

“We are Japanese,” his father and coach responded by rote, the humor sadly missing.

“I love you, Papa.”

“Good-bye, Tom Alan.”

Tom Alan knew “I love you” never came from a traditional Japanese father to his son. “Good-bye, Papa.” That didn’t mean he didn’t feel it from him.

Tom Alan ended the call, then dressed and took off without so much as a “so long” to Milo.