Page 140 of Dickathlon

“Well, that’s something. I was worried when I didn’t get a hold of you right away, but Asher said you left early, so I knew you were somewhere.”

“Ty was upset.”

“Understandably. This will be our last day of intense training. The rest of the week you can scale back. Recover, rest. This is what will help you now.”

He must’ve sensed my doubt.

“I know that will be tough for you, but trust me. Your body is ready.”

He was right. My body was ready. It was ready to fuck.

The decathlon couldn’t come soon enough.

And then once it did, so could I.

25

Tyler

With Cam on the mend and back together with Luke, the men’s team was in beast mode for their individual event finals. We weren’t slamming up golds, but Cam and Colton had both earned silver medals in their events yesterday and Alex was just finishing his rings final now. It was faultless so far. It all came down to the landing.

It felt like gold.

He was preparing for the dismount. To get enough momentum, he’d had to swing completely around twice, whipping his feet around during the last rotation. I held my breath as I watched his double twisting double back salto.

And the two-time current national champion aced it. It was perfect. Alex was a perfectionist and it paid off. I wasn’t going to say anything out loud to jinx it, but a medal seemed guaranteed. After a routine filled with a lot of difficult elements, I don’t know how he had enough energy to finish so strong.

“Nice job, Alex,” Woodward patted him on the back as he came off the podium. Alex had a huge smile on his face.

“Nice? That was epic! You killed it!” I pulled him in for a hug. Then we headed over to the side to wait for the score. Alex fidgeted with his wrist tape.

15.033.

“Uh, that seems pretty low, Coach,” I said, glancing at Woodward. He was lost in thought.

Alex seemed a little disappointed. I put my arm around him for comfort.

“We can always file an inquiry. See how they scored it,” I suggested. It was a mild financial risk, but I don’t think we’d filed in the last decade. And even though that score put Alex in first, the heavy hitters were coming up and I wasn’t going to let Alex get smoked by a clerical error. There had to be a mistake!

“I’ll go,” Coach said, then turned at the last minute to point at his bag. “The forms are in there, filled out. Find Alex’s and start adding the details. There’s cash in a black zipper bag. We only have a few minutes.”

“What do you think happened? Do you really think it should’ve been higher?” Alex asked, as I unzipped Coach’s bag and started to rifle through it.

“We’ll know for sure when we see the score sheet, and yes, that wasn’t a fifteen point routine. It’s the hardest routine on the rings anyone’s attempted this week and it was immaculate.”

I found the black zipper bag and a few folders. I pulled them all out and started looking for Alex’s form. Like Coach said, we only had minutes - I had read all the rules, twice. To save time, these forms were pre-filled out with most of the required information. All we had to add was the date, the event, and the item or items we were protesting.

“I’m back.”

“I found everything.”

“His second series didn’t get the correct starting value.”

“You already found something?” Alex asked, joining us to look at the score sheet.

“Damn right I did.”

It was maybe the second time I heard Coach swear. I kept my eyes peeled to the sheet, however, looking for anything else.