Payson panted hard as she flopped onto her back. Sex with Sasha was even more exhilarating than winning gold medals—and she'd had plenty of experience with both over the past week to make the comparison.
Her fifth and final Olympic gold medal laid discarded on the floor a few yards away from the bed, along with her sole silver medal. A year ago Payson would have been horrified at the thought of such carelessness with Olympic medals, but when Sasha was tearing her clothes off of her the night before, she couldn't bring herself to care.
"That was one hell of a wakeup call," she said, still breathing heavily. Of course, she'd only been asleep for a few hours. They'd made love long into the night, and he woke her early in the morning to continue their celebration of her Olympic success. She preferred their private celebration to the large party held for her after she won the All Around.
He rolled onto his side so they fit onto the tiny bed easier. "Well, my wakeup call wasn't nearly as pleasant, so I'm glad you enjoyed yours."
She furrowed her eyebrows, all the indication of a question that he needed to answer her. "Marty was pounding on the door earlier," he explained. "You slept through it. You must still have been worn out from last night."
She ignored his teasing and sat bolt upright. "Sasha Belov, do you mean to tell me that I just had sex, loudly, with my old coach standing right outside the door?"
"I highly doubt he hung around and listened, Pay." He obviously did not understand the gravity of the situation. Payson, on the other hand, suddenly had the mortifying realization that all of the other coaches in the apartment had probably heard them. The only other time she'd spent the night at his apartment, she'd sneaked out early in the morning. Today she would have to face them when she left the bedroom.
She turned crimson and turned over to bury her head in the pillow. This was so embarrassing. She had never stayed overnight with Max, so she'd never done a walk of shame before. And not only would she have to face the men in Sasha's apartment, but she'd have to go back to her own apartment and explain everything to the girls. She wasn't ashamed of her new relationship, but she would rather everyone not be quite so aware of what she spent the night doing.
Sasha rubbed her back, slightly distracting from her worry. "Payson, you don't need to be embarrassed about this. We're not doing anything wrong here. I'll bet you anything that Marty will be the one who is embarrassed when we leave the room."
As if summoned by their conversation, Marty pounded on the door again and shouted, "You're not the only one in this apartment, Sasha. I've been wearing the same clothes for twenty four hours and I don't appreciate it, so stop screwing around, get dressed, and get your ass out of our room so I can change!"
Payson couldn't help but scoff. "Geez, I forgot what a drama queen Marty could be."
Sasha laughed. "Just act like that when we go out there. He won't know what to do with you."
"Fine," she grumbled. "I'll put on a show and act like this isn't one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. Let's just get it over with."
She rummaged around for her clothes, which were spread across the room where they had been tossed the night before. She was reluctant to put them back on. They had come straight to Sasha's room after the final press conference, but she didn't want to leave the bedroom wearing the competition leo and USA track suit she's been wearing at the arena. She found her gym bag discarded by the door and dug until she found a pair of shorts and a t-shirt.
After getting dressed, Payson carefully folded her two medals into their boxes and stashed them into her bag. She would put them away with her other four medals when she got back to her own room.
She was just hitching her bag onto her shoulder when Marty knocked on the door again. Apparently he was getting impatient. She stole one last glance at Sasha for support, steeled herself, opened the door and said, in as snarky a tone as possible, "Stop being such a diva, Marty. Trust me, if we had another place to go, we'd be there. We don't exactly enjoy being forced to use a twin bed that we barely fit in together."
"Payson?" Marty was in complete shock. He stared at her as she crossed the room, unable to say anything besides that one incredulous shriek of her name.
Payson didn't look back, but she heard Sasha clap Marty hard on the back and say, "Close your mouth, mate. You're catching flies."
She pushed aside her embarrassment and tried to pretend like there weren't five other men in the room who varied from close acquaintance to total stranger. She ignored them all equally and grabbed a bottle of water from the mini-fridge. Sasha came to stand beside her and she handed him a bottle too. "You know, getting our own room tonight isn't a bad idea," she said. "I think Ava is leaving today, but Austin reserved that room 'til the end of the week. I bet he'd let us borrow it."
Sasha slinked his arms around her waist. "It would be nice to sleep in a real bed for a change."
For a few seconds she really did forget the others around her and got caught up in flirting with the man holding her. She inched closer to him and said, "Who said anything about sleep?"
"Nobody," he ceded. "I can think of a few other uses for a regular sized bed, though. Sleep is completely optional."
"What?" Marty finally screeched. "What the hell is going on here? And how long has it been going on?"
Payson winced at the intrusion of their imagined privacy. This was exactly what she didn't want to deal with. "Do you mind handling this? You talk to Marty and I'll go break it to the girls that my mystery man is you."
He didn't want to talk to the girls about their relationship any more than Payson wanted to talk to Marty about it, so he agreed in a heartbeat. She kissed him on the lips, inciting more yelling from Marty, and then left.
o-O-o
Sasha watched her go with a smirk on his face. He could tell how uncomfortable she was about Marty discovering their relationship, but he was certain that Marty couldn't. She pulled off the confrontation with an excess of attitude. He always had loved her sass.
He turned to face his fellow coach with his grin still in place. He was way too happy to let Marty spoil this for him.
He never even saw the punch coming.
He spun a little with the momentum, but last time Sasha punched Marty he'd leveled him to the ground, so this was comparatively a win. And he was still in too good a mood to let Marty ruin it. He turned around again and said, "Was that really necessary, Marty?"
"Yeah, it really was," he yelled back. "You're sleeping with Payson, you son of a bitch!"
Sasha kept an even tone and a smile on his face. He wasn't going to let Marty rile him up. "You have a habit of sleeping with other men's wives and girlfriends, mate, so I don't think you in much of a position to judge."
"She's a child!"
He almost snorted. He'd made the same arguments to himself thousands of times before, but Payson had definitely proved over the past few days that she was all woman. "Payson is probably more of an adult than both of us combined. But if you're speaking technically, she is eighteen."
"And you think that makes it okay?" Marty asked.
"In most countries, yes."
His friend apparently did not think the joke was funny. The older man started to throw another punch, but Sasha blocked it and then twisted Marty's arm behind his back to prevent another attack. "Marty, you don't know the whole story, so stop jumping to conclusions. And stop trying to punch me. You know you always come out on the losing side of a fist fight with me."
"Then how 'bout you explain to me how you sleeping with one of your gymnasts isn't a complete violation of her trust and her parents trust. Because honestly, I can't see any way you could spin this story to make it alright."
Sasha glanced at the other men in the room. He knew two of them very well, but the other two were only slight acquaintances, so he didn't particularly care to go into the details of his relationship with them. He let Marty go and gave him a slight nudge toward the bedroom. They could talk in private in there.
Marty went, but probably only because he was remembering all of the times he ended up on the wrong side of Sasha's fist. He cringed when he saw the mussed up sheets on Sasha's bed and the box of condoms that they'd accidently knocked onto the floor earlier that morning.
Sasha thought of a way to explain part of the situation to his friend. He picked his cell phone up off the ground—it had been knocked off the nightstand along with the condoms—and opened up his photos. Then he tossed his phone to Marty.
"What is this?"
He resisted the urge to answer sarcastically. "Exactly what it looks like. I'm not trying to trick you with anything; I just want you to look at the pictures."
Marty scrolled through the album, the vast majority of which happened to be pictures of Payson. Some of them were with him or the other girls at various events, but most were photos that he'd snapped when she didn't know he was watching. It had been his guilty pleasure for more than a year, one he knew he'd get in trouble for if anyone ever saw it.
"You've been stalking Payson?" Marty finally asked.
He wanted to argue, but his fascination with her could probably be taken that way. He remembered back to his first night in Boulder when he'd followed Payson to that keg party. He'd thought to himself back then that he was bordering on stalking. "That's not really the point I was trying to make," he said, deflecting the question. "I just wanted you to understand that this is not something casual. Payson has pretty much been the center of my attention from the day that I met her. I'm in love with her, Marty."
He didn't use those words casually and Marty knew his well enough to understand that, so the statement had impact. Marty shook his head in regret. "That doesn't make this okay, Sasha. You're her coach; she looks to you for advice, for guidance. You influence her without even meaning too."
Sasha cut him off before he could go any further. "I get it, you think I pressured her into this, but I promise you that it was the exact opposite. I did everything I could to discourage her from wanting me, even down to outright lying to her. Every argument you could possibly make for why we shouldn't be together, I've already made. I fought this for more than a year, and I hurt her a lot in the process, and I'm just not willing to hurt her anymore. She wants me, and that might not be the smartest decision she's ever made in her life, but I'm done fighting it."
"So how long has this been going on," Marty asked. He was starting to cave, even if it was by just the smallest amount.
"Since last Friday. She left the party that night to come confront me. She was angry that I had lied about my feelings for her when she kissed me last year and wanted me to tell her the truth, so I did. I never knew that she felt the same way. I honestly wish I hadn't wasted so much time, because these last four days have been the happiest I've ever been in my life."
Marty sank down onto his bed and dropped his head into his hands. "Well, God knows you deserve some happiness after all the shit you've been through, but you sure picked a hell of a complicated way to find it."
o-O-o
Payson paused for a moment in front of her own apartment door, but she wasn't nearly as nervous about facing her friends as she was about facing her old coach. The boldness she pretended to have with the men was real with the other girls on her team. It was a matter of comfort.
When she walked through the door they all turned to look at her. They were sitting together in the living room, likely waiting for her to return. The day before, she had whispered to Lauren not to wait up for her before running off to meet Sasha, so they knew she was spending the night with her new boyfriend. They were going to press her for details like they had every other time she's sneaked off over the past few days. The difference was, today she was going to give them answers.
"So, Payson," Kelly asked, keeping a casual tone. "Where ya been?"
Payson answered just as casually. "At Sasha's apartment."
"Damn it all," Lauren said. She stood up and left the room, much to Payson's confusion, but she came right back with a hundred dollar bill in her hand. She gave the money to Kelly.
The meaning of the exchange suddenly clicked in Payson's mind. "You were betting on who I've been with?"
"Only Kelly and Lauren," Kaylie answered. "Lauren thought it was that swimmer you were dancing with at the party, Nathan Adrian. Honesty, I was with Lauren on that. You've really been sleeping with Sasha?"
"It's a little more than that, Kay. I mean, yeah, we are sleeping together, but we're actually together together, too. We love each other. How did you know, though, Kel? If Austin told you then I'm going to kill him."
Kelly shook her head. "He didn't tell me; I figured it out on my own. He was so pissed off about you breaking up with Max, so when you guys talked and he wasn't mad anymore, I figured it had to be Sasha. He used to joke all the time about how the two of you were going to end up together. There was nobody else he'd be so happy about you dumping Max for. I've been trying to convince these idiots for days."
No wonder Austin and Kelly had ended up together—they were so similar. Kelly was every bit as observant as Austin was.
Emily refused to let them get side tracked. "Okay Kelly, you can gloat later. For now, we need details. How did this happen?"
Payson told them everything, starting with the crush she had on him as a girl, the deep feelings that developed soon after his move to the Rock, their growing connection and her certainty that he was in love with her, too, in the days leading up to the kiss. Then she talked about how devastated she'd been when he rejected her, and how she'd tried to move on with Max but never quite banished her feelings for Sasha. They gasped in surprise when she related her discovery on the morning she went to his bedroom to wake him up, and how she'd struggled to work out her feelings that day. When she told them about going to his room that night while everyone else was at the party, Lauren demanded a few details that Payson refused to give. It honestly felt good to be truthful about everything that had happened, but she was not going to talk about her sex life.
When she finally shook them from the topic of sex, Kaylie asked, "So what happens next? The past few days have been all about the forbidden romance, keeping secrets and sneaking off to be together. Aren't you afraid that there won't be any excitement left once the secret is out?"
Payson relaxed into the couch with a huge smile on her face. "No way. Keeping the secret wasn't exciting, it was frustrating. Now that we're free to be together we can actually live. We've had all the ups and downs of a love story, and now… now it's time for our happily ever after."
A/N: So this was supposed to be the last chapter, but then it led very naturally to an epilogue, so expect that in a few days :)