First meeting
I’m 15, I’m in 1D S, and my world is handball. I train a lot; my dream is to be in the France team and to do the Olympics. That year, I was a bit of the leader of the team, and I went out with our young coach, who was five years older than me. For me, it’s rewarding: I feel special. I do national internships, selections for the French junior team. Our privileged relationship revolves around the practice of handball and excellence. We are discreet. For me, it’s not really serious, like the intense but brief college romances I’ve had so far.
At the end of the year, a three-week trip to Scandinavia is scheduled for the handball teams, girls and boys, to play friendly tournaments. In handball, the atmosphere is quite unbridled, and we know that these are favorable moments for rapprochement… The coach is not traveling and, with my best friend from the team, we plan to take advantage of this promising journey by meetings with boys from many different countries. Our motto is: above all, we do not go out with French people.
We are traveling in a bus full to bursting, it’s a bit of euphoria. We sit in the back of the bus, with the more daring and less well-behaved boys, who like to entertain. Among them is Mark. He’s a handsome brunette, a year younger than me. He immediately announces that he wants to go out with me. The others dissuade her: no chance, she is going out with the coach. That doesn’t discourage him, and that pleases me, in addition to his fantastic brown speckled green eyes.
He talks to me, we talk, and I don’t remember exactly, but in less than two hours we kiss shamelessly. We stay glued to each other for several days, he comes to visit me to kiss me at night after curfew, gives me his bracelet engraved with his first name. I am touched when he tells me his family history. He is little pampered by parents who do not want him too much, and raised in large part by his maternal grandmother.
And then, after a few days, in the middle of the tournament, exoticism catches up with me. I leave him for a handsome Czech. Symbolically, I give him back his bracelet. He is sad but there is no drama, the atmosphere is festive and light, and he quickly consoles himself with a teammate. After this episode, we each go our separate ways. We meet two or three years later at a bend in the street, by chance, and we just say hello, but I see his eyes again, and still… they are beautiful.
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