Today marks the release by MLR Press of EM Lynley’s Olympic-themed M/M anthology Going for Gold, which also means that my latest short story, “Hot Shots,” is at last available for consumption.  One of eight in the collection, “Hot Shots” is the story of Beau, a young Olympic hopeful who kinda sucks at sports, and Marcel, a dashing European shooting champion who undertakes to make an Olympian out of him.  Beau surprises them both by showing some real talent on the range, but his wandering eye could make it hard for him to hit the target when it’s Marcel’s heart.

Read a quick excerpt here, then buy the E-Book here!

(Also available on Amazon in paperback or for your Kindle.)

When I say that I had always yearned to be an Olympian, what I of course mean is that I am ass-over-teakettle nuts about jocks, and my life’s primary ambition has long been to fuck as many Olympic athletes as possible.  The first time I ever clapped eyes on Michael Phelps’ extraordinary body in nothing but a Speedo, I knew that world-class athletes were my sexual destiny, and I set my sights on the Olympics at an early age.  The shortest distance between two points being a straight line, I figured bunking up in a dorm full of them would provide me the easiest possible access to the Hottest Guys in the World.

A foolproof plan, you’ll agree, save for one detail: I was nowhere near a World Class Athlete.  In any sport.  Certainly not swimming, which—a bed full of broad-backed Aquamen being my primary target—I naturally tried first.  I was fit enough, and at 6-foot-3 I would eventually grow flippers for feet, but I never had the shoulders, and why does everybody act like swimming pools all go dry at ten o’clock in the morning?  If I have to roll out of bed while the neighborhood rooster is still sawing logs and get shirtless and wet before the damn sun comes up, I am unlikely to excel at any pursuit.  Swimmers are hot-bods, to be sure, but I figured I’d have better access to them in the Olympic Village cafeteria than in the pool, anyway, and I hung my Speedos out to dry after one unremarkable summer-club season.

Wrestling was no more of a success story.  It occurred to me that if my objective was physical proximity to jocks, a sport that required me to intertwine with them during the course of competition might be the ticket.  I cut an encouragingly sexy figure in the singlet, but I was still growing like kudzu—taller this week than last, skinnier tomorrow than yesterday—and I couldn’t muster the coordination to do much more than hump every boy they put underneath me.  Which suited me fine, but didn’t jive with the sporting objectives of most of the rest of the team, and my season was cut short when I came in my singlet during a particularly frictional exhibition match against the star of the all-boys Catholic high school from across town.

Like a slew of blond Californians before me, I turned to volleyball, for which I lacked the vertical leap; then to table tennis, for which I lacked the focus, to say nothing of the speed.  Boxing busted my nose, rowing was hard, and rhythmic gymnastics, for which I had a sparkling flare, turned out to be only for girls.  I shot my archery instructor in the leg during our first (and last) practice, and my taekwondo instructor laughed out loud when he overheard me use the words “me,” “Olympics,” and “taekwondo” together in a sentence.  I briefly entertained a foray into Winter sports—an ass-lover like me could do a lot worse than a speed skater, after all—but my ankle snapped like a twig my very first time in ice skates, and as I spun across the mall skating rink, sequined five- and six-year-olds effortlessly dodging my tumbling, bladed limbs, my dreams of snow-flaked Olympic glory died along with the damage deposit on the rented skates that the paramedics had to cut off of my ballooning foot.

And then, as often does in stories like mine, a funny thing happened.