Swimmer’s Ear

Excerpt

Swimmer’s Ear
Alex Winters © 2026
All Rights Reserved

Chapter One

ASPEN

“Brock?”

I’d seen him from across the street, fidgety and spry in his forest-green turtleneck and caramel-colored corduroy slacks. He held a single rose in one small hand, as he’d promised to do in our text thread earlier that day, and kept hooking the index finger of the other hand in his sweater collar to stretch it out. It was either a nervous habit or else he just really didn’t like tight things around his throat.

He was smallish, bookish, thick glasses on his handsome face and a cute little cowlick above his rumpled forehead. I’d lingered in a crowd outside the Gently Perused bookstore just long enough to screw up my courage before crossing Spruce Street and approaching him.

“Aspen?” His voice cracked adorably. His face flushed. He looked up at me. He had to be a good three inches shorter than I was. “Happy birthday!”

I smiled and took the rose he practically shoved in my chest, feeling overdressed in my little black cocktail dress as he shifted from foot to foot in his tiny loafers. “Thank you,” I gushed, admiring the rose as if I’d never seen one before. “That’s so sweet of you.”

“You’re the sweet one,” Brock insisted, gazing up at me shyly. “I mean, a blind date? On your birthday? I’m sure you’d rather be anywhere else than here. With me.”

He looked a little glum. I chuffed him on the shoulder and leaned in slightly to mutter, “I mean, does lying around in my jammies all night eating cheesy poofs and binge-watching Real Househusbands of Denmark count?”

My blind date brightened for the first time. “I love that show!” he agreed, fangirling as our eyes met. His were bright behind his thick lenses. “See, we’re off to a great start already.”

I leaned back and frowned. “But how do you feel about cheesy poofs?”

We were still laughing when he turned and nodded at the steadily blinking sign for the Winking Clam. I’d heard about the locally famous dive bar before but never had the pleasure of actually going inside. “I figured, since it’s your twenty-first birthday, it’d only be right to have it here.”

“How romantic,” I murmured, taking his arm. It was slight and yielding. He blushed again.

“Well, I mean…” he began, stammering as we approached the door. “Not that romantic.”

“No?”

“I’m only twenty but the bartender’s my roommate so I figured…” He hunched his shoulders and smushed his face to turn himself into a human question mark. “Two birds with one stone?”

I chuckled as he held the door open for me. Rock music pounded from inside, ruining our cozy little meet cute out front. “So, you’re saying this is the only place you can drink quasi-legally?”

“Only for another six months,” he shouted over some hair band anthem from four decades ago. I chuckled as we stumbled in. The walls were heavy with dark wood paneling and covered with dusty framed rock posters from bands and concerts gone by.

There was a small stage at one end of the room, and at the other a U-shaped bar, bathed in winking Christmas lights as if to mask the otherwise dingy vibe. We stood awkwardly between a dozen or so empty tables and the bar.

“You’re not mad, are you?” Brock asked, reaching for his wallet and, presumably, his fake ID.

“Hell no,” I answered over a blistering guitar lick blaring from hidden speakers high above. “Who wants to drink alone on their twenty-first birthday, right?”

He brightened, nodding at the tables behind me. “Wanna grab a seat and I’ll get the drinks?”

“Just a beer for me, thanks.” I found the table furthest away from the speakers and settled in atop a wobbly wooden chair. I sighed, nodding to myself to keep a stiff upper lip. After all, my pleasant demeanor and forced smile aside, I would literally rather be anywhere else at that moment.

The fact that my teammate and so-called “best” friend Dara had set me up on this blind date for my birthday, rather than being available for our annual double-feature of cheesy B-horror movies at the Salem Cinemas like every other year, was bad enough.

But that she’d set me up with a guy? Twice the betrayal.

Naturally, my phone was bleating from inside my little clutch purse as I set it down on the tiny tabletop. Dara’s rapid succession of tweets filled up the screen like little grey boxes in a video game:

So?

How’s it going?

He’s cute, right?

A little short, not his fault you’re an amazon!

You there?

????

Why aren’t you writing me back????

What? You’re. STILL. Mad?!?!

I thought for a moment about sliding the phone back in my purse and punishing her with the silent treatment for the next three hours straight, but it would only mean three more screens full of progressively angrier text bubbles in reply. Instead, I pointed the phone at Brock’s back as he stood at the bar, talking to some grungy goth dude who was presumably his roommate, and snapped a quick pic.

I studied the picture before I sent it: Brock, standing casually at the bar, grinning up at the goth dude with the strangest little smile. And the goth dude? Smiling right back and sliding a lock of his long black hair behind one ear with one long finger. The finger had silver rings all over it, most of them skulls. The ear? Blushing a bright, vibrant—one might even say nervous—red. I pinched and pulled to blow the pic up a bit and Bartender Dude wasn’t the only one. My cute little blind date was blushing too, and not just in the ear department. I wondered, idly, what that might mean.

I ignored the first impressions and sent it to Dara with a quick message:

The eagle has landed. He’s cute. Then again, so is his roommate. To be continued…

Like most of my friends, back home and here on campus, Dara had steadfastly refused to acknowledge my hints and murmurs about “not really being into guys” over the years and had subsequently taken it as a personal challenge to “change my mind” instead. The result? Some poor schmo smiling at me from across the room as he made the way back to our table, a beer in each hand and his heart about to be broken.

Or, at the very least, his cock about to be blocked.

“Thank you!” I exclaimed as he set the beers down on the table and sank into the rickety wooden chair across from me.

“To your birthday,” he said over another raucous rock song. “And to you, Aspen.”

I clinked his bottle. Sipped my beer. Pretended to study the bar and the stage and the rock god posters and the winking lights until my gaze fell back on Brock. “Is that your real name?” I asked, figuring I might as well have some fun if I had to be polite and endure a random blind date with a straight guy.

He nearly snorted out his beer. “Of course it is, why?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, I just… You don’t really strike me as a Brock.”

He nodded as if I wasn’t the first person to tell him that. Not by a long shot. “No, I know. My parents had high expectations when I was born, I guess?”

I winked and leaned a little closer in. “Lemme guess: your mom read a lot of romances while she was pregnant. You know? The kind with a wanton woman on the front cover and some bare-chested highlander about to rip off her bodice?”

Brock chuckled and sipped his beer. “Dara said you were a smartass. I guess she wasn’t kidding.”

“Guilty as charged,” I sighed, waving my beer back in his general direction. “How do you two know each other, anyway?”

“I was her Calculus tutor last semester,” he confessed shyly.

“That tracks.”

The door opened across the room, letting in a flash of late-afternoon sunlight and a swirl of fresh spring air before shutting again. An older couple, decked out in biker gear, went straight for the bar.

“Why do you say that?”

I shrugged. He’d inched slightly closer around the table, perhaps to be heard. His face was in stark shadows from the bar’s aggressively dim lighting. “I dunno, just doesn’t seem like you two would run in the same social circles, that’s all.”

He snorted again. His beer was already half-gone. “I meet a lot of new people at the Learning Lab. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have much of a social life.”

“Same with me and swimming,” I admitted, limbs pleasantly sore from that afternoon’s blistering practice.

“See?” Brock said almost hopefully. “That’s one more thing we have in common.”

“Two,” I countered, waving my still mostly full beer at the rapidly filling saloon. “That is, if you count dive bars?”