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Given her substantial lead in the final leg of the race, Dillon could have walked the last fifty meters and still been first to cross the finish line. Her failure in Hana had given her no choice but to win. A second-place finish was out of the question.
Not because her sponsors put pressure on her. Not because her coach, Alistair, had found anything wrong with her Hawaiian finish. Not because she needed any points to hold her world ranking. None of that was true. Her sponsors were thrilled—year in and year out—with her performance. Alistair felt her showing in Hana had been on target, given the circumstances leading up to the race. Her ranking would hold its own even if she came in last the next three consecutive races. A probability less likely than her stumbling across Atlantis on her morning swim.
No, it was Dillon who applied pressure on Dillon.
She couldn’t tolerate defeat. She couldn’t cope with mediocrity. She was rarely pleased with a result, always wanting better. And so, when she crossed the finish line and looked at the timing board, her first thought wasn’t that she’d beaten the course record—which she had—it was that she knew she could have done it thirty seconds faster. She’d lost at least ten seconds with a caught zipper on her wetsuit in the transition from the swim to the cycle, and if she’d pushed a little harder on the lastmile of the run, she was certain she could have shaved her time down another quarter of a minute.
“Jesus Christ,” Alecia Finch panted when she threw herself across the timer, dropping to the ground next to where Dillon sat stretching her cramping muscles. “Do you think you could keep to your own side of the pond and give the rest of us a break for a little while?” Sweat plastered her long blonde hair to the tops of her heaving shoulders. She’d come in second, running the course almost a minute behind Dillon. “You’re making me look like an amateur.”
Dillon laughed. She and Alecia had been leap-frogging one another in the world rankings for the past four years, ever since Alecia burst onto the scene as a twenty-one-year-old unknown.
She liked the American. Alecia was gritty. Ruthless. She had what it took to be a champion. Never once had Dillon seen her back down from a challenge. When they’d raced against each other in Melbourne the previous year—Dillon taking silver, Alecia earning bronze—she’d watched the younger competitor run the last thirty meters of the race with a torn Achilles tendon. She knew—with Lena Ammann, the Swiss athlete who had beat them both out of gold—retired, if there was anyone that was going to give her a run for her money in the Los Angeles Olympics, it was going to be Alecia.
And Dillon loved every competitive second of it.
It didn’t hurt that the pair shared a flirtatious raillery since pretty much the day they’d met. Alecia was straight, married last year to a fellow Olympian—a dinghy sailor from New Zealand—but prior to that, had Dillon not been committed to Kelsey, she was relatively certain they’d have found a lot of more enjoyable ways to celebrate their triumphs on the podium.
“Well, I did think the sun might set by the time you finally got here,” Dillon razzed, dragging her adrenaline-depleted body to her feet as two more competitors crossed the finish line.
“Aren’t you original,” Alecia rolled her eyes, accepting her outstretched hand. “I thought you English were supposed to be clever.”
It was a playful jab. Alecia was well aware, despite Dillon’s English mother, that she unreservedly considered herself Welsh.
The two of them navigated toward the aid station, draining a cup of water and toweling off their dripping hair as another cluster of athletes finished the race.
“You coming to the after party?” Alecia sucked the juice out of an orange slice.
On another day, Dillon would have amused herself with an inappropriate comment, pointing out Alecia’s impressively wide mouth, but today her thoughts were elsewhere.
“Nope.” She tossed her Dixie cup into the biodegradable rubbish bin. “Going to finish up here and then it’s back to the hotel for me.”
“You know everyone else thinks you’re a stuck-up bitch, right?” Alecia said at her elbow as they worked their way toward the waiting media. “It wouldn’t hurt to come hang out.”
“And ruin my hard-earned image?” She was long aware she rubbed many of her fellow competitors the wrong way. She was cocky. Confident. Sure of herself. She imagined the thing they disliked the most about her was that she could walk her talk. But Alecia got her. They were opponents cut from the same cloth. The only difference was that Alecia was willing to turn up at the post-race events and put on a happy face.
“Just think, if you came, you could ruin Dana Myer’s standing bet you won’t show up.”
“After all these years, I’d hate to disappoint her.”
“Well, what about disappointing me?” Alecia side-eyed her, putting on a fake pout.
“Pretty sure I saw your husband in the crowd.”
Alecia shrugged. “Always room for a third.”
Dillon laughed. “Hard pass.”
They’d reached the media exit and, as the race winner, she was being shuffled toward the tent.
“I guess you’ll just have to entertain yourself,” Alecia whispered, covering her provocative smile by taking another sip from her disposable cup.
“Who said I’d be alone?” she returned, leaving her with a wink.
An hour later, with the race over, the media appeased, the podium vacated, and doping control testing met, Dillon finally allowed her one-track mind to wander.
As fanatical as she was about her training, her sleep, her diet, she was equally dialed-in on her focus. It was her self-imposed rule that her mobile was turned off forty-eight hours prior to her start-time. She had never been one for TV or social media, and intentionally avoided anything that could lure her thoughts in any direction outside of her primary objective:to win.
But for the first time in as long as she could remember, she’d found herself struggling to maintain her concentration. Even Kelsey had never succeeded in steering her from her habits—though it hadn’t been for lack of effort. It had been a consistent fight of theirs—her reclusiveness during race season—and one the extroverted footballer had never managed to convince Dillon to break.
