“For example.”
“Um…I’m kind of between guns at the moment,” I hedged. “I was hoping maybe you’d have one I could borrow.”
“I see,” he said. “What do you usually shoot?”
“Um…pigeons?”
Marcel was nonplussed, but only for a moment. He took the handle of my rolling suitcase and turned to lead the way to the airport’s tiny car park. “Well, there’s no rush,” he said, pointing to my crutches. “What happened?”
“Oh, this? It’s nothing,” I said. After a beat, I hurried to add, “It’s an old ice skating injury.” The gun conversation didn’t appear to have gone as smoothly as it could have, and I hoped that a reference to a sport—any sport—would make me sound suitably Olympian.
“Is it quite serious?”
“Well, it’s healing nicely,” I assured him. “I should only be on the crutches for another few days.”
He came alongside a BMW the color of blue smoke and gave my shoulder a hearty whack as its trunk whispered open. “Good,” he declared. “Then we’ll get started.”
The Luxembourg that I remembered from growing up was essentially the European Mesa Verde—shops and dwellings perched on the side of a canyon, the floor of which was crisscrossed by buses, trams, and excessively serious people in overcoats. But Marcel lived far outside the city on what amounted to a ranch, in a modest, modern home on the edge of an undulating blanket of green. Almost all of the living space was on one parquet floor, his bedroom separated from what was to be mine by a small, sparkling cubby containing the shower. The toilet was across the hall, and the sun-soaked kitchen took up fully half of the square footage. Through the kitchen and down a narrow, Escher-esque staircase, Marcel’s leather-laden office opened onto the verdant acres of what he adorably called “the garden.”
The office was a monument to Marcel’s career and to shooting in general. The walls were covered in plaques and posters from Championships on every continent; every flat surface was jammed with photos of Marcel in protective eyewear either blasting away at something, or shaking hands with an official, an opponent, or, in one instance, the Grand Duchess Maria Teresa who, judging by the gleam in her eye under what appeared to be a veil-trimmed sombrero, was able to appreciate more about Marcel than just his skill on the range. Pride of Place was reserved for two bronze medals, which hung from blue ribbons on either side of a lavishly framed print of the Sydney Opera House being bombarded by fireworks. He had competed in Atlanta and Athens, too, but had brought home Luxembourg’s biggest medal haul in a single Games in 2000, and it was the shrine to this achievement that would, after a couple of weeks, get me into trouble.
I tried to keep my own medal podium fantasies to a minimum. I wouldn’t know the Luxembourg national anthem if Marcel whistled it into my ear, for one thing, and, thanks to my crutches, I had yet to even handle a gun, much less shoot my way to Olympic glory with one. I figured if I didn’t shoot my eye out, we’d come out ahead. All I needed, I reminded myself, was a spot on the team, a plane ticket to London, and a crack at the fellas—someone had to come in last, and I didn’t care if it was me. But the burnished medals were so handsome, seeming to reflect the glow of the fireworks, I found myself easily entranced. It was a universally recognized accomplishment, an Olympic medal, and the knowledge that casual, flare-haired Marcel possessed such a high level of skill and acumen stirred something in me.
In fact, the combination of my proximity to two bronze rounds carved with five interlocking rings and to the person who had earned them gave me a rather insistent hard-on, and, after two heroic weeks of ignoring its aching demands for attention, I found myself alone with it in Marcel’s office. The gleaming medals, the photographs of Marcel so handsome and competent, the smell of him that lingered on the leather chairI was halfway to climax before I even realized I was stroking myself, and I was just beginning to wriggle out of my jeans when I heard Marcel come down the stairs, calling, “Beau?”
“I’m in here,” I called back, like a dope. There was nowhere else at the bottom of the stairs to be, and the crack in my voice made it plain that I was up to no good.
Marcel came around the corner at the same second I re-zipped my jeans. “So…” he started, glancing once—then, eyes wide, a second time—at my bulging fly. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, nothing,” I replied, ever-so-casually. “Just admiring your office. These medals are so cool.”
“Thanks,” he said. “So…” this time he directed his gaze, and mine, to my foot. “You’re feeling better, I see.”
Shit! I frantically raked the room with my eyes for my crutches, reaching out for their protection, coming up empty.
“They’re in your room,” he said. “I’m glad—I thought you seemed to be getting better.”
And I was glad that he didn’t accuse me outright of faking it, which I had been doing for the last three or four days. My ankle was completely healed, which made the crutches more of a hassle than anything else, but I knew they were keeping me off the shooting range, so I’d continued to drag them around with me. I had waxed rhapsodically about my passion for shooting in my e-mail, but had not been able to carry on a conversation about it for three seconds, and the longer I put him off, the greater my fear grew that he would drive me straight from the shooting range to the airport when he discovered I couldn’t tell a rifle from a referee. My lust for his skills had driven me from my room with nary a second thought for props, and now I stood before him, still hard as a rock, exposed in more ways than one.
“Yes,
