Page 102 of Soft
The swimmer's name was Delano Crest. Auden brought him up to me during the first full week they were in the office. It would have been a lie to say I was shocked at their insistence on signing the kid.
In reality, I kind of enjoyed their fervor. Auden presented things with confidence, which they then backed up with facts.
"His times are already competitive at the collegiate level," Auden said, turning their laptop to face me across the desk. "And I'm not talking competitive in a he's-doing-well-for-his-age way. I mean he's within fractions of times that win at the Olympic level. His coach reached out to me because their current agency has been sitting on him for two years without moving. Just collecting the retainer and doing nothing more than getting him temp deals when he competes at nationals. I doubt he’s even seeing half of the money he could be."
I looked at the numbers on the screen. Auden was right. The times were striking. I knew enough about competitive swimmingto understand as much. More than that, the trajectory was striking—each season showing improvement at a rate that suggested he hadn't yet found his ceiling.
"Remind me how old he is?" I asked.
"Twenty. A junior. He's got extended family in Bellport, which is part of why the coach thought of us."
"What's his situation off the water?"
Auden sat back. "That's where it gets interesting. He's queer, he's Black, and he's been told more than once by the previous agency that he needs to be careful about how visible he is with his sexuality before he's established. Their exact framing was that it might complicate the sponsorship conversations rather than trying to work with people who would support him."
My gaze lifted from the laptop.
"Yeah," Auden said. "That was my face too."
The thing about the sports sponsorship world was that it had changed considerably over the last several years, particularly in Bellport's orbit. What Delano's former agency was operating on was an outdated playbook, one that treated visibility as a liability rather than a differentiator.
Meridian alone had demonstrated that the market for authentic, openly queer athletes wasn’t only real but actively underserved. There were companies waiting for exactly who Delano Prest appeared to be, and his previous agency had been telling him to make himself smaller in the meantime.
Fuck that.
"Pull the tape?" I asked.
Auden already had it open in another tab. They switched it over, then moved the screen to a position where we could both watch.
Two full race cuts and part of a third before I was satisfied. The kid moved through the water with a type of motion you couldn't coach into a person. You could refine it. You could build the strength around it. But the instinct itself was either there, or it wasn't.
In Delano Crest, it was very much there.
"Set up a call," I told Auden, motioning for them to take the laptop back. "I want to talk to him before we go further. And reach out to the coach to let them know we're interested and pursuing. Maybe it will help our cause."
Auden smiled, though it was more a smirk. They were already typing on their laptop. "I'll get it on the calendar by end of business today. We want to strike while we can."
It was comfortable, working with them. I hadn't known for certain that it would be, even after that first kinda casual lunch and everything that had followed. Bringing a person into a space I'd built alone was an exercise in trust. Yet Auden had made everything feel like a natural progression rather than a massive change.
They also didn't require me to be more than I was on any given day, which was worth a lot more than I could have expected. Preconceived notions were killer in working relationships.
I was about to pull up my notes on the sponsorship landscape for competitive swimming when my phone rang. I didn't recognize the number immediately. It was a different area code than anything I had saved, but the first three digits landed in my body like muscle memory.
A cold, specific recognition tore through me before I could get ahold of it. I’d already answered before the truth settled over me.
"Grizzly." My mother's voice came through in her familiar clipped tone.
I had not spoken to either of my parents in… longer than I wanted to think about. The last conversation had ended as turbulent as all the others. They were toxic to their core, a fact I only understood after years of therapy.
"Mother," I replied in as neutral a voice as I could muster.
Auden’s head whipped up. They read faces well. I knew this about them from our first meeting, and in the moment, I was aware of them noticing the change in mine without being able to do anything about it.
"Your father and I saw the news." No small talk. She was straight to the point. "We wanted to call before it became any more of a spectacle."
"What news specifically?"
"Don't be obtuse, Grizzly. The photographs. The articles. You and that young man."
