*The moment my fingertips touched the pool wall and I turned around, I suddenly grabbed a warm handle.
Soft and reassuring.
"It's boring."
I apologized subconsciously. Blood rushed to the tips of his ears instantly.
"?"
The expression on the other side seemed to be a question mark.
"What makes it interesting?" When he spoke, his Adam's apple was looming, and water droplets slid down his Adam's apple toward his firm chest muscles.
"Do you want to hold me in the breaststroke? Or swim on my back in the backstroke?"
His voice was grittier than in the video, with an offended chill.
I panicked and sank into the water. During my struggle, my knees seemed to rub against some soft part, and I heard a muffled groan in my ears.
*There were sneers in the director's room:
"The best result of a professional athlete is third? I'm afraid the young master of the Lin family is not here to play."
But when the slow playback button was stuck at 0.25X speed, the tight back muscles of his butterfly stroke in the camera looked very much like those in my mother's collection of Olympic videos.
The "shooting star in the water" who came back to win the championship.
After winning the provincial competition, Lin Shen took off my voice recorder in front of thirty media outlets:
"Reporter Shen, do you want to ask some personal questions?"
The live broadcast camera was shaking, and he suddenly came close to my headset:
"For example, my secret to winning the championship is..."
Warm lips brushed against the earlobe,
"When being attacked, learn to wrap your legs around the perpetrator's waist to protect yourself..."
*When the water drops fall back to the surface of the pool, all the ripples become calm.
Blood dripped on my broken lenses, and in my mind I spelled out the words Lin Shen said to me when I was young:
"When you can't hold your breath, that's when you really start breathing."
——We will eventually learn to hide our heartbeats in deeper waters.
Idea: I originally wanted to write a short story, but the more I wrote, the more the characters started to move. So there were many new stories between them, whether to stick to it or waver, to persevere or to give up, for others or for myself, love or career. The protagonist encountered many forks in the road to make choices. What would be the consequences of each choice? It's really an exciting thing.