A/N: As it frequently goes, once I write a story a follow up just sort of happened. I mentioned the night their relationship started in 2 in the Morning, and my brain just HAD to write it.
"Come on, guys, you can't go to bed now. Usain Bolt is running soon and it's a medal race!"
Sasha couldn't help but chuckle. Leave it to Payson Keeler to want to stay up late to watch another athlete compete just a few hours after she won her own gold medal—her fifth and last, along with a silver on the beam. She should be exhausted; Kelly and Lauren both were, and they'd only competed in one event each that day.
Nobody listened to Payson's protest. Lauren had been upstairs for the past half hour, Emily followed not long after, and now Kaylie and Kelly were both getting up from the couch yawning. "You're nuts, Pay," Kelly said. "We can watch his race online tomorrow. Late tomorrow, because I fully intend to sleep until noon."
"Yeah, this is day one of our retirement," Kaylie added. "Which means we're supposed to be lazy for at least a week. Maybe more. I might not get out of bed at all for a few days."
Payson pouted. "You guys are so lame. Sasha, Austin, are you staying?"
"Sorry, but I tap out when Kelly does," said Austin. He got up to follow his girlfriend up the stairs, but she pushed him away by the time he reached the third step and let him know in no uncertain terms that she was way too tired to do anything but sleep, so he could go to his own bed. He made a dejected path out of the girls' apartment, but if Sasha was any judge of the way the past few weeks had gone, it was all an act. He'd heard Payson complain about them monopolizing the room she shared with Kelly.
From the top of the stairs Kelly called back, "If you can't find some of your medals tomorrow, Payson, just know... it definitely wasn't me."
Sasha flashed a grin at Payson. "Do you think she'll actually steal them?"
"Yeah, she's kind of a klepto. She stole one of my gold medals from Worlds the first week we lived together. She always gives them back though. So... are you going to bail on me too?"
She looked so sad that her friends had abandoned her that he couldn't possibly leave, so instead he answered, "Are you kidding? And miss Usain Bolt defend his title for the 200 meter?"
The settled back into the couch to watch the Olympic coverage, which was not nearly as exciting after having been in the Olympic Arena themselves for so many nights, which is why they spent most of the half hour leading up to Bolt's race talking about their own experiences. Payson had done spectacularly well, and so had her friends. Their team gold had been followed up with a 1-2 finish for Payson and Kelly in the All Around, Emily had finished third in the bars final, Kelly had a silver on the floor, and Lauren had a vault bronze and beam gold. "I still can't wrap my head around the fact that the three most successful women in the competition all live together. I have never fully understood how the three of you ended up sharing a house anyway."
Payson snorted. "Honestly, I'm not certain either. It all happened so fast... first I was going to buy a house by myself, then Kelly needed to get away from her mom so she asked if she could live with me, and then Lauren just kind of inserted herself into the equation. We're like the weirdest group of people to live together that you could imagine, but I kinda love it."
"It's been good for you." This he could say without the slightest hesitation. Living with Kelly and Lauren had helped her loosen up. All of the things that had always been wonderful about her—her sense of humor, her kindness, her work ethic—were still there, but now she was more willing to goof off and have fun. She'd even gone to a few parties. "Do you think you'll stay together now that you're all retiring?"
Payson chewed on her bottom lip. "Yeah, I've been thinking about that... I might not."
"Are you going to move somewhere else?" He'd known for a while that she might leave Boulder once the Olympics were over, but he'd tried not to think about it.
"No, not that I might not keep living with the girls. I've been thinking that I might not retire."
There had been plenty of things that shocked him in the two years since he started coaching at the Rock, but this might have been the most shocking of them all. It had never occurred to him that any of the girls might want to continue competing after the Olympics. It had been done before, obviously, but the trend in America was mass retirement at the end of each quad.
Once he managed to wrap his head around the concept, he was thrilled. "I think that's fabulous, Pay. You've got so much left to give to this sport."
"And you'd be okay sticking around to coach me?" she asked, still chewing on her lip. Apparently this was something she was worried over. "I know you don't really have any ties to Boulder and you're only contracted through the Olympics, so I thought you might want to leave."
This was the easiest decision of his life. "As long as you want to compete, I'll be there to coach you. We can go all the way to Rio if you want."
Payson beamed. She looked as happy now as she'd been standing on the gold medal podium; he had no idea how much it meant to her to have him as a coach. He was flattered beyond reason.
They stopped talking when the race was about to start, and then cheered like crazy for the twenty seconds that it took for Usain Bolt to win. After half an hour of lead up to the race, it was almost anticlimactic how fast it was over. Of course, there was also the medal ceremony, which Payson insisted that they watch.
Neither of them actually made it to the medal ceremony before they fell asleep.
It was a little after midnight when he woke up. Payson had slumped over against him in her sleep so that her head was resting against his chest. He looked down at her and was struck by how beautiful she was. He had always known that about her, but he'd never felt it in this visceral, gut wrenching way before. She was so gorgeous that it took his breath away.
He brushed his fingers across her cheek, reveling in the softness of her skin. He had no idea what had come over him. He was mesmerized by her—he traced his fingertips across her eyelids, down the smooth slope of her nose, along the edge of her jaw, memorizing the contours of her face. His thumb finally settled against her lower lip, remembering the way she'd chewed on it while they'd talked earlier. She'd been so nervous that he wouldn't want to stay and coach her, as if there was even the slightest chance that he'd leave her.
Sasha watched as Payson's eyes fluttered open, knowing he should decamp from his current position but somehow not managing to make himself do it. He'd thought she was beautiful when she was sleeping, but she was even more so while waking up. He could watch this over and over again.
Far from being shocked or upset by his hand cradling her face, a slow smile spread across her lips and a low chuckle rumbled out of her throat. "You know, I've had dreams that started this way."
He hadn't previously been aware that his eyebrows could go that high, but his incredulous expression didn't embarrass Payson the way it should have. A very faint blush spread across her cheeks, but other than that she was decidedly unabashed, and damn if the blush didn't just make her prettier.
He had a savage desire to make her be embarrassed, so he asked the most inappropriate question he'd ever asked her: "You dream about me?"
"Are you really so oblivious that you're surprised by this?" she asked, chuckling again and flashing a smile that could only be described as sexy. He would never be able to forget her this way.
"I a-a-apparently am," he stuttered. He'd failed to embarrass her, but he'd wholeheartedly embarrassed himself. How oblivious was he?
Memories started flashing through his mind, one after another—and then doubt came. Had she really always looked at him the way he was remembering now, or was he imagining it? And when she sat with him the night she broke up with her boyfriend and complained that he didn't understand her, she hadn't actually compared Max to Sasha, had she? He didn't trust his memory to tell him the truth, because suddenly he realized that he wanted her to have feelings for him. What he wanted more than anything else in the world was for her to keep looking at him exactly the way she was at that moment.
His thumb brushed against her lip of its own volition, eliciting a soft sigh from Payson. He took that as a cue and closed the small gap between them. It was the most perfect kiss of his life.
He wasn't sure how long they lost themselves in each other before he found himself staring into her eyes again, with that same sexy smile playing across Payson's lips. Had she always smiled that way? How had he never noticed before?
"I'd started to think that was never going to happen," she told him.
"How long? I was trying to figure it out, but I don't know what's real and what I'm imagining in retrospect." He wasn't sure why it was important to him to know how long she'd had feelings for him, but it was.
Her answer was simple. "Always. Since the day I met you. It just... got stronger as time went on. It started out as a crush, but by the time I kissed you I was full blown in love. Listening to you try to explain away those feelings and pretending like I agreed was one of the hardest things I've ever done."
"At the time I completely believed what I was saying. I was an arse."
Her giggle was another new experience for him. He'd heard her hearty laugh a million times before, but her earlier sultry chuckle and this giggle were completely new to him. He thought he knew Payson completely, but he'd learned so much about her in just a few hours. The most shocking of all was that she loved him, and had for nearly two years. A small voice at the back of his head told him that he felt the same way, although he wasn't even close to being ready to admit it.
They spent the next few hours talking, going over every misunderstood moment between them for the past couple of years. He'd been even more of an idiot than he'd realized, but he was done with missed opportunities. From now on he was going to kiss her every moment that he could—and plenty of moments availed themselves that night.
The whole world had brightened when Payson uttered the word 'love,' so he didn't even notice when the sun rose. Of course, it didn't help that his eyes were mostly closed and the rest of his senses were consumed with everything Payson. The world could have ended and he wouldn't have noticed.
What he did notice was Lauren's voice saying, "Eww. Now we have to burn the couch."
Payson reluctantly broke their kiss and winked at him before pulling out of his arms and addressing her friend. "Okay, I'm a hundred percent certain that you had sex with James on our couch—which is really my couch because I bought it—so you don't have a leg to stand on."
"First, you didn't have to see that, so it's totally different, and second, the person you're making out with is Sasha, so we're back to eww. No offense, Sasha."
"No, I think I'm going to be offended by that," he replied. He refused to give Lauren the satisfaction of laughing.
She sat down next to them, forcing them to shift over to accommodate her. She wasn't the least bit bothered by the revelation that her coach and best friend were apparently now in a relationship. She didn't even seem to be surprised. "So is this new or have you just been lying to us every time one of us asked you if there was anything going on?"
The question was directed at Payson, but Sasha was the one who responded. "How many times have you asked her that? And why?"
Lauren rolled her eyes. "Oh I don't know, maybe the millions of longing looks that you two exchange all the time, or the way you hang out at the gym together after practice, or that you're the top number on Payson's cell phone favorites. We've been convinced that you two were dating since like a month after she broke up with Max."
"This is getting too surreal for me. Payson, do you want to go somewhere else? Literally anywhere else."
She laughed and smiled up at him, and he was almost sad to see that it was her normal smile, not the sexy smile she wore last night. "I would love to, but I have an interview scheduled later this morning and I should actually try to get some sleep before then. Raincheck?"
It wasn't what he wanted to hear, but he knew she was right. He'd like to spend the next few days in a new-relationship-hideaway, but she'd just won the Olympics and there were going to be a lot of media demands on her. He'd have to share her with the rest of the world, so as much as he wanted to tell her to blow off her interview and stay with him, instead he said, "Deal. I'll see you later."
He stole one more kiss and left her to the heckling of her best friend, with his world looking completely different than it did the night before.
o-O-o
Sasha was hanging out with Austin, trying to kill the time until Payson texted him that she was free. He'd suffered without complaint when Marty teased him about coming back to their room in the morning, but refused to give him any details about where he'd been. He fell into bed and slept for a few hours, which was full of dreams of Payson, and then woke hoping to see her for real, and if he was being honest with himself, hoping to fulfill some of those dreams in reality. Instead he found out that her agent had stretched one interview into three, with a business lunch thrown in the middle, and she wouldn't be finished for hours.
Austin knew about them. Apparently Lauren told all of the girls as soon as they woke up, and Kelly told Austin pretty much immediately after. He'd been busting Sasha's balls about it for the past few hours, first openly and then with more subtlety once some of the other men joined them. Once he figured out that the jailbait jokes weren't going to affect Sasha, he'd moved to trying to get details out of him. With a jerk of his head toward the beach volleyball players on the TV, he asked, "Who's got a better rack, that woman or...?"
"You're an idiot of you think I'm answering that question. There is no winning in making comparisons. How are you even still in a relationship?"
Austin shrugged. "Kelly's not exactly normal. But then again, neither is... you know."
Trying to keep this a secret was a pain in the arse, but he didn't know how Payson might feel about being in a public relationship with him while there was so much attention on her. He was going to let her make that decision, and until she did, Austin would just have to keep referring to Payson as 'you know' while he asked inappropriate questions.
Thankfully beach volleyball was over when Payson got back, accompanied by Kelly and Lauren. Sasha wasn't entirely sure how to greet her, but he was fairly certain his initial desire to throw her over his shoulder caveman style and carry her back to his room wasn't appropriate. His indecision kept him glued to his seat on the couch.
Payson was not so indecisive. She walked straight to the couch and sat down beside him, leaning against his chest the way she'd sat all through the night before. She didn't seem the least bit concerned with the other members of the men's gymnastics team staring at them in shock.
"So is this just your place now?" he teased, amused by her forwardness.
"Yep. You got a problem with that?"
He had a feeling he was going to get very used to the huge grin that was currently gracing his face. "No, no problem. You can sit here for the rest of your life if you want." He may not be able to follow through with his caveman desires to lay claim to her, but he was more than willing to let her lay claim to him through her seat choice, and she could keep on doing it as long as she wanted.