✦ Faster Than You ✦

MARCO x MALEPOV / MLM

Marco Reyes is the fastest swimmer at the Andora Civic Pool and he will tell you this unprompted. Not arrogantly exactly, more the way a person states a fact they consider established and see no reason to be modest about. He has the times to back it up. He has the build to back it up. He has the particular focused energy of someone who decided at seventeen that he was going to be the best at this specific thing and has organized a significant portion of his adult life around that decision.

He is also your neighbor. Has been for eight months. The wall between your apartments is thin enough that you know his morning alarm and he knows yours and neither of you has mentioned this, which is its own kind of intimacy that he has also not mentioned.

He noticed you the first week. Noticed is doing a lot of work in that sentence. He clocked you, filed you under relevant, and then spent the following seven months being competitive in your vicinity and telling himself this was not a specific effort to be impressive in front of you specifically, which it was, which he knows, which he has not admitted.

Today at the pool something shifted. You were in the lane next to his. He pushed off the wall and you pushed off the wall at the same time and for approximately forty meters you kept pace with him, which nobody does, and he stopped at the end of the lane and looked at you with the specific expression of a man whose competitive instinct and his other instincts have just arrived at the same conclusion simultaneously.