How could he be so endearing and mystifying at the same time? The Micah I knew was so committed to his clients he dragged himself to the gym when he had the flu. Sat up till late writing training plans and researching rheumatoid arthritis so he could best serve his favourite elderly clients. He didn’t blow them off for a book that still had a week on its lending term.
I sipped tea and tried not to let my imagination run away with me. Making assumptions about Micah had lit a fire beneath us before, and not the good kind. I tried to focus on what hadn’t changed, namely how sinfully beautiful he was—his dark hair and liquid eyes, his gorgeous skin and strong body.
More than that, his innocent smile when he caught me looking at him.
“What?”
My turn to shrug. “Nothing. Just eyeing you up.”
“You’re stocktaking at ten.”
“So?”
“So you don’t have time for whatever you’re thinking about.”
“I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, only you.” It was true, but he was also right about the time. Stock checks at the pub happened every week, but every couple of months, we got roped in for a deep count, and this round, I’d caught the short straw: a double shift scheduled immediately after. I’d be at work for approximately fifteen hours, and even if Micah fucked me six ways from Sunday before I left, I’d never be in the mood for that nonsense.
With a reluctant sigh, I hauled myself from the couch and sloped off to get dressed. For a moment, I thought I heard Micah follow me, but when I got to my bedroom, I was alone.
I threw clothes on—jeans and the only T-shirt I was prepared to spend a whole day in at work and risk being ruined. Placebo hadn’t been my bag since 2010 when I’d been a thrilling combination of hormones, rainbows, and angst.
Whistling, I searched my bedroom floor for socks clean enough to pass. Like magic, Micah appeared in the doorway with a balled-up pair. He tossed them to me, looking guilty. I frowned. “What’s the matter?”
“That’s your only clean pair. I forgot to do the washing.”
“It’s not your job to wash my clothes, babe.”
He flushed like he always had when I used that particular term of endearment, even before we’d started fooling around. It didn’t seem to matter that I used it for the handful of people I actually liked and not just for him. “Yeah, but still. Youalwaysforget, and I don’t want you to have no clean socks.”
“I have clean socks. You just gave them to me. Feel free to crawl around my bedroom floor and find all my dirty ones, though.”
Micah stepped into the room.
I blocked him. “Don’t you dare. I was joking.”
“How am I going to wash them if you won’t let me have them?”
“The same way you always do, by digging them out of the couch.”
He rolled his eyes and ambled away. The exchange had been so familiar I could’ve written our words down before we’d said them. And yet somehow, I still felt like I’d had a conversation with a stranger. Had our physical relationship really altered our friendship that much? Or was I being an angst queen again when all Micah wanted to do was get back to normal?
With blowjobs, obviously.
And declarations of love.
And sleeping side by side every night as if we’d done it a thousand times.
I considered what my life would be like if Micah really did wake up one day and want things to go back to how they’d been before—when we’d been roommates who ate dinner together, talked about the weather, and watched crap films until one of us fell asleep. When we’d hugged goodnight every time I’d been too drunk to resist, and he’d humoured me with the kind of bear hug that kept me up all night. Life had been good then. Easy, maybe. Now, simple things like clean socks gave me a migraine, but there was a Micah shaped imprint in my bed—and my heart—and I’d die before I gave it up.
* * *
Micah
Mr Chan was my favourite client. He always showed up on time, trained hard, and spoke only when I asked him to. Sometimes he brought me noodles his wife had made too, glass ribbons with peanuts and chilli. It said a lot of how I felt about Sam that I often saved him half. Those noodles were good.
It was mid-afternoon. I led Mr Chan around the gym, pushing his elderly body to the limit, impressed, as ever that he could still shift fifty kilos on the leg press and smash out supersets of bodyweight pull-ups. He was a fucking unit, and watching him train often hypnotised me to the point where our hour session passed in the blink of an eye.
Not today, though. Today I had ants in my veins and time had slowed to a painful crawl. I clock-watched and drummed my fingers on every available surface—the wall, the mat, the weight rack, even my own head when there was nothing else within reach, the fraught rhythm tapping into my brain until I couldn’t keep still.
