“I think I can only cope with one no strings attached arrangement at the moment,” Giles says and he’s looking straight ahead, into his own eyes.
I swallow around a tight lump that has appeared in my throat. “Well, you know, if you want to make Tony that…”
But I trail off. I can’t say it. I can’t physically say that I think he should replace our no-strings arrangement for one with Tony.
Because I don’t want that. Ireallydon’t want that.
I don’t say anything else. And neither does Giles. He simply glances at my treadmill display and tells me to finish my second mile and then I’m free to go.
Which is ironic, because I feel anything but free right now. I feel tethered to a shitty situation that was completely my own creating.
*****
There is no avoiding a shower after two miles on the treadmill. To do so would almost certainly have Giles thinking even worse thoughts about me than he currently is as I follow his square shoulders into the changing room.
We’ve barely spoken since he got Tony’s phone number. Or rather, since I made him take it. The only advantage of me wondering exactly why he’s so annoyed with me, why he’s avoided my conversation and eye contact, is that it kept my brain very busy, meaning I barely noticed the last three quarters of the second mile I ran. My legs have definitely noticed it as I stagger to my locker while Giles moves to his. A hot shower is probably a good idea for them too.
I keep my fingers crossed that Giles isn’t going to shower as I rummage in my bag for my bottle of shower gel and towel, but when I turn around after closing the locker, I see him stripped down to his boxers and his towel is hanging over his shoulder.
We share a brief moment of eye contact.
At least, I’m pretty sure it’s brief but I can’t be sure as it feels long. Really long. It feels like it stretches and bends and fills the whole of thechanging room. And yet I can’t tell what it’s made up of. I am pretty sure Giles is angry with me, that I’ve done something wrong. But I don’t know exactly what thing he is angriest about. Was it when I told him to give Tony his number? Was it what I said about him having a no strings attached thing with Tony? Or was it something else that I’ve missed completely?
I’m busy drowning in questions when Giles breaks our gaze and walks past me before I’ve even realised he’s moving.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Giles
The shower isn’t hot enough and yet I can’t turn the temperature up any higher. My skin is on fire, turning bright pink under the spray, and yet it’s not enough pain. It’s not enough discomfort to pull me away from my unstoppable endless monologue.
No strings attached.
No strings attached.
No strings attached.
I repeat it three times. I have to.
What we’re doing is no strings attached. For Marcello, it means nothing.
And yet for me… For me it feels like whatever happened at my flat on Sunday very much attached me to Marcello. I’ve felt a pull to him all week, as if an invisible thread, a string, for fuck’s sake, connects us. Sometimes it pulls me back to the memory of his body under mine. Other times, I replay his voice calling me baby.Baby, baby, baby. And on more than a few occasions, I touch myself – one hand on my cock and the other pinching my nipple just like he did – and I come almost as hard as I did when I was in his arms.
But that interaction with Tony was like Marcello took a pair of scissors and neatly cut the thread in two, separating himself very deliberately from me.
And I feel like a fool. A fool for thinking maybe he felt the pull, the string connecting us too. A fool for hoping that if I just waited, spent moretime with him, maybe he would also develop feelings for me. A fool for hoping when I am too old for hope.
As the hot water continues to scald my skin, I hear shuffling outside my door and then the click of the cubicle next to me being closed.
“Giles?” Marcello calls out.
I set my jaw and close my eyes as I lean my hands against the tiled wall. “Yeah?”
“Are we… Did I really fuck up that badly? With Tony, I mean?”
Yes, you did,I want to say, but that’s not true. I’m the one who fucked up. I’m the one who thought we were more than we were.
No strings attached.
