Best In The Water

Freya is eighteen and the fastest development butterfly in British swimming right now. She knows this because Mark told her. She believes it because Mark told her.

Contains: married coach, coercive control dressed as intimacy, explicit content, one woman who hasn't worked out yet what the other woman already knows.

---

I've been swimming since I was six.

Mark says I have a once-in-a-decade stroke. He said it in week one, watching my splits on his laptop, and I didn't know what to do with my face. He said it again six weeks later. And again after that. Each time I got better at receiving it, which I think was the point, though I didn't know that then.

Once in a decade. I turn it over all the time. I want it to mean what I think it means.

---

Mark Calloway. Forty-four. Head coach, National Performance Centre, Bath. Married. His wife is called Helen. She posts photos of their Labrador on Instagram and seems very nice, which is information I carry around and don't know what to do with.

He has a way of watching you train. Not just technique. Something else. Like you're the most interesting problem in the room.

I noticed it in week two. Spent the rest of the month pretending I hadn't.

---

Kirsten Holst. Twenty-seven. She has the fastest butterfly split in the squad and she knows it. She's been at the centre ten years. She was there before me and she has no intention of making room, she has made this clear without saying it.

She has an extraordinary stroke. Controlled, economic. Nothing wasted.

She and Mark have a particular way of being in the same space. Not unprofessional. Careful. Like people who have an agreement.

I noticed that in week three. Took me considerably longer to understand what it was.

---

It started in his office. It always starts somewhere specific you can point to later.

Race tactics. My first individual programme review. He sat behind the desk and I sat in front of it and he asked the right questions and listened to the actual answers and I remember thinking: this is what it's supposed to feel like. Being taken seriously. Having someone pay attention to the right things.

At the end he said: I think you could be something genuinely special.

I said: thank you.

He said: I mean it, Freya. I don't say it if I don't mean it.

I know, I said. I don't know why I said that. I didn't know him.

I walked home and ate dinner and couldn't really settle.

---

The images started around week eight.

He'd texted me about my stroke rate data, which was normal, he texted the whole squad about training data. Then he asked how I was finding the programme. Then he asked if I was sleeping properly because rest was as important as the work. Then one evening he sent a reference clip from a Sydney training camp, a woman with a similar build to mine, said: look at the hip rotation, that's what I'm trying to get into your stroke.

I watched it four times.

Then he said: can I see yours? A video. Just from the hip down, movement analysis.

I went to the bathroom and propped my phone against the wall and filmed myself from the hip down, in my underwear, doing the hip rotation, because that's what he'd asked for and it was for training.

He said: yes. That. Exactly that. Do you feel the difference?

I did feel the difference. I was also aware, somewhere, of something I wasn't looking at directly.

Three weeks later he asked for another one. Shoulder rotation this time. He said: I want to see the full line if that's okay, it helps to see the whole picture.

I sent it.

He said: perfect. Freya you have no idea.

No idea about what, I said.

He didn't answer that. He sent a voice note instead, just his voice, quiet, telling me what he could see in my stroke, what the potential was, what he thought I could become.

I listened to it five times.

---

The first time was a Sunday. He'd asked me to come in for a one-to-one session, extra pool time, the centre mostly empty. We did a real session, a hard one, I was dripping and wrecked when I got out.

He handed me a towel. Our fingers touched and neither of us moved away from it.

He said my name once. I said his. He kissed me in the corridor outside his office and I kissed him back.

In his office he closed the blinds. His hands moved over me and I was cold from the pool and he was warm and I thought: this is actually happening.

He moved me to my knees. His hand at the back of my head, not forcing, guiding. Gentle.

Is this okay, he said.

Yes, I said. Obviously yes.

I'd done this before, with boys my age, rushed and graceless. Mark was neither of those things. He kept his hand in my hair and spoke quietly, telling me what was good, what he wanted, adjusting me. Like coaching. I did what I was told. I wanted to do it well.

After, he pulled me up and held my face in his hands and said: you're extraordinary. Do you know that.

I didn't say anything. My knees were cold from the floor.

---

I'm not naive. I'm also aware that every eighteen-year-old thinks that and that it doesn't mean much.

I knew he was married. I knew about Kirsten, or I knew something about Kirsten, enough to know there was something I wasn't being told. I knew the images on my phone were a thing I couldn't un-send.

I stayed anyway.

He had a way of making you feel like the most interesting person in the room. Like your specific development was the most important project he had. Texts in the evening. Voice notes. Little observations about my stroke, my mind, how I approached competition.

My times kept dropping.

I don't know what that means. I'm not saying it means anything. I'm saying it happened.

---

Kirsten in February, Paris selection trial. She got out of the water and Mark was at the end of her lane. He put his hands on either side of her face. She closed her eyes.

I watched from lane four.

That night he texted me: thinking about you.

I texted back: don't.

He sent a voice note. His voice, low. Said he knew how it looked. Said it was complicated. Said what happened between us was real, separately. Said he thought about me.

I listened to it in the dark.

I texted back: okay.

---

April. His office, only us.

I was leaning over the desk and he came to stand behind me and his hand moved to my hip and I let it.

I turned my head and he kissed the side of my neck. Slow. His hand moved under my shirt.

Turn around, he said.

He sat on the edge of the desk and I stood in front of him and he looked at me the way he looked at split data.

I've been thinking about you all week, he said.

I need to tell you something, I said.

He waited.

I saw the mark on your neck last month, I said. The one you didn't get from Helen.

He didn't say anything for a moment.

I'm not asking you to explain it, I said. I'm just saying I know.

He put his hand on my face. Tilted it.

It's complicated, he said.

Everything's complicated, I said. I'm still here.

He kissed me.

---

May. A Friday evening, pool closed. The three of us in his office going over Paris strategy. He poured whisky. He was the only one who drank.

The strategy conversation wound down. Specific, deliberate. Like a tap being turned off.

He produced two lengths of fabric. Folded. Set them on the desk.

Kirsten picked hers up without hesitation.

---

The blindfold changed something immediately. You lose the room. You lose your sense of where people are. You're left with sound and skin and the particular quality of attention.

He said: let's see who wants it more.

Kirsten didn't ask what that meant. Neither did I. She already knew. I was still catching up.

Lie back, he said. Both of you. Don't touch each other.

We lay side by side on the floor. The carpet thin under my shoulder blades. I could feel the warmth of her without contact. She smelled of the pool and something underneath it.

Touch yourselves, he said. First one to come gets me.

I understood what that meant. The one who didn't get him would get nothing. Would watch.

I reached down. Beside me I heard Kirsten do the same.

She had an extraordinary stroke. Controlled, economic. Nothing wasted. Even at this. Particularly at this.

I matched her rhythm. Or tried to. She was ahead of me and I could tell by the quality of her breathing, the way it had already started to change.

He crouched beside me. Close. Didn't touch me. Then stood and moved to her.

His hand on her. I heard it in what her sounds became, the slight catch, then the work of breathing through it, controlled even then.

She came before I did. Her whole body went quiet first and then less quiet. I listened to it and found it more useful than I wanted to.

He said: there we are.

I lay there with my hand still between my legs and listened to him move over her.

I came anyway. On my own. Quietly.

He didn't notice, or didn't say.

---

He lifted our blindfolds. We stripped when he told us to. I was aware of Kirsten undressing in my peripheral vision and made myself not look, then changed my mind and looked. She was deliberate about it. Folded things.

He used us in turns.

He put her on her back and worked at her with his mouth until she stopped being considered about the sounds she made. Then he came to me and did the same and I lay there with my fingers in his hair trying not to think about her watching. I tried to be quieter than she had been. I wasn't.

When he moved back to her I watched. That felt important. Not looking away felt important.

He turned her onto her front and pulled her hips back and pushed into her and she made a sound that told me this was exactly what she'd been waiting for, and he looked at me over her shoulder the whole time. Kept looking. Wanted me to watch and wanted her to know I was watching.

Then it was me. She watched.

That was the actual point. Both of us watching him with the other one.

Then she was above me, her hair brushing my thigh. Her mouth was very considered. Like a problem she'd decided to solve properly. She used her fingers as well and I understood why she'd won, and she was very good at it, and I came. He probably knew I would. He was sitting with his back against the desk, watching us both. Not involved any more...watching, his hand working slowly, taking his time about it.

Afterwards he reached for Kirsten's knickers from the floor, the ones she'd folded and set aside. He finished into them without any particular ceremony. Folded them back. Set them on the desk.

Neither of us said anything about it.

---

Kirsten and I lay on the floor not speaking.

She sat up. Reached for her things. Then she looked at me and held her hand out.

I didn't understand.

Your knickers, she said. Give me them.

I looked at her.

She waited. Not unkindly, more certain.

I gave them to her. She folded them small and put them next to the others in her bag.

He's very good at what he does, she said. At all of it. Be careful what you measure yourself against.

She lay back down.

Then: Paris is mine.

She said it quietly. To the ceiling.

Whatever comes next is yours. We're not competing.

I looked at her profile in the dark. We absolutely were.

---

June. His office, only us.

He sat me on the edge of the desk and stood between my knees and put his hand at my throat, not hard, just present. I put my hands behind my back without being told.

He looked at me for a moment.

Then he worked me hard enough that thinking stopped being useful. At some point I was on my back across the desk with my ankles in the air and he was watching my face more carefully than he watched my splits, which told me something, and I filed it somewhere and carried on.

Afterwards I lay there getting my breath back. Happy. I would have stayed there.

He was already standing up.

---

Wednesday morning. Five forty-five. Flat white lights, cold deck. I got in before Kirsten for the first time.

When she arrived she got in without looking at me. Already somewhere else.

I pushed off the wall and found my stroke and went. At the far end Mark was with the stopwatch. Waiting.

I turned. Tight. Clean.

I thought about the images on his phone. The voice notes. The office floor. I thought about lying on that floor beside Kirsten in the dark. I thought about the text back, one word, every time: *yes.*

I surfaced and went again.

I am the fastest development butterfly in British swimming right now. Mark told me this.

I am starting to understand exactly what it cost.