My Straight Best Friend Thinks It's Bro Stuff novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Thanks, Bro

The Provincial University Meet filled Yuhua Normal's pool with eight hundred people and enough chlorine to make the eyes water from the car park.

At the call room, a volunteer in a red vest handed every swimmer in the 200 free final a numbered sample card.

"Keep it on you," she said. "You might be tested."

Tang pushed his into the pocket of his team hoodie.

Next to him, Cen took his own card, read the number, and uncapped a black marker.

He wrote it on the back of his left hand, under his lane number, in big digits.

"So I stop losing it," he said cheerfully, when Tang looked. "Last meet I left it in my bag. Four four seven one. Easy."

"Good luck out there," said Tang.

"You too," said Cen, and smiled at him.

On the deck, Fu had set up the physio table under the scoreboard with ice, tape and a flask.

He was in the team polo and glasses, and he checked Tang's shoulder without being asked.

His fingers pressed the joint in three places, quickly.

Tang stood very still under the hands.

He had not stopped thinking about one night in October for three weeks, and the hands did not help.

"It's inflamed," he said. "It will hold for two hundred metres, and it will complain for a week. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you," said Tang.

"If it locks, you stop. You don't finish."

"Lingchen, I've never stopped."

"That's exactly why I'm saying it," said Fu.

Three lanes over, Ji Hao, the Yuhua Normal swimmer who had been his rival since juniors, was warming up in front of a phone propped against the lane rope.

He was a broad, cheerful swimmer from Yuhua Normal with a gap in his front teeth and eighty thousand followers on a streaming app.

He had raced Tang since they were fifteen, and he'd lost to him more times than he'd won, and he never seemed to mind.

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