Mr Chan brought his dumbbells back to the rack and nodded at my fluttering fingers. “Restless? Wife at home waiting?”
And that was the other reason I liked him: he had zero clue who the hell I was and asked me three times a week how my wife was, despite the fact that I’d told him a hundred times that I didn’t have one.
I didn’t feel like repeating the conversation today. I cut my losses and nodded. “Yup. Hot date.”
As if. I’d never been on a hot date in my life, unless you counted heading home to Sam with a pizza and bad intentions. Or my ill-fated Grindr nights out. My mind took flight to what a hot date with Sam would be like. We’d done the eating out thing—once—and the cinema was whack when I could watch movies with him at home, in private. Maybe we could go away, get one of those cabins in the woods, and fuck in front of a cute little fireplace. Did Sam like the great outdoors?
Shamefully, I had no idea. I didn’t even know ifIliked it, as the closest I’d ever got to the wilderness was Watford. Everyone thought that travelling with a top-flight football club was all glamorous and shit, but I’d never travelled for fun. I didn’t know how.
Mr Chan’s session came to an end. I walked him to the changing rooms and retrieved my phone from my locker. Sam had sent me a literary meme I didn’t understand, and I had an email from my old club and a couple of messages from Freddie I deleted without reading. I ignored the email too. I could forgive Freddie toeing the line to keep his game alive, but the rest of them could go fuck themselves.
I opened up a Google search for log cabins in the woods. Then got instantly distracted by log burners and wondering if one day Sam would want to move to a place with a garden, with me, and my heart took off at a hundred miles an hour, finally catching up with the galloping brain I’d woken up with that morning. We already lived together, but I was basically his lodger. What would it be like to choose somewhere new together? What if we left London? Or moved back to his hometown? To Whitby? The place where time had seemed to stop and it had just been me and him?
And his parents and their deep-fat fryer. I could still smell the chips.
More than that, I could still feel the sea spray on my face, taste the salt, and if I closed my eyes, the sensation of Sam’s hand tucked in mine warmed me to the bone.
“Micah?”
I blinked. The gym’s receptionist was in front of me, a young dude whose name I could never remember, but the sensation of an unfinished conversation still lingered between us. “What?”
“Sorry. I thought you’d fallen asleep. You told me not to let you do that again.”
Ah. That was it. When I’d first scored PT space at the gym, I’d been so fucking tired of life, I’d have a kip in the corner of the changing room, slumped against the lockers like a drunk old man, just to escape for a few minutes. After a while, though, I’d figured it wasn’t a good look and recruited desk dude to supervise me. Larry? Barry? Fucked if I knew.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Had I been asleep? That I didn’t know disturbed me, but I wasn’t about to admit it to someone I didn’t know well enough to remember his name.
It’s not his fault you have a brain like a sieve. Ask him.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do that either. So I didn’t. I plucked the first thing that wandered into my mind instead and blurted it out. “I’m looking for a log cabin.”
Dude raised a brow and I finally noticed the name tag pinned to his shirt. Everyone who worked here wore one, even me, which was a blast when someone thought they recognised me and contorted themselves into a triangle trying to read the badge I deliberately pinned upside down.
Whatever. Dude’s name was Danny. So much for Barry and Larry. And he was staring at me like someone who’d repeated a question a hundred times and was still waiting for an answer.
Again, the sensation of slowly drowning hit me. My ears buzzed, and the room tilted. At least, I thought it did. Then I blinked and everything was as it should’ve been.
I focussed on Danny and sifted through my brain for the fragments of conversation I’d clearly missed.Log cabin. Scotland. Newspapers.
What?
I gave up and shook my head. “Sorry. Spaced for a minute. What did you say?”
Danny opened his locker and tossed a red top at me. “I said my sister spent her honeymoon at a retreat in Inverness. It’s so remote you can’t find it online. They only advertise old-school style in the back of the newspapers. I dunno which ones, but you might get lucky with this one.”
I caught the paper and turned it over in my hands as Danny left the room. It felt good to be alone again, but at the same time, solitude was terrifying, and I couldn’t deal with the conflict raging in my chest. I didn’t understand it. I’d felt like this for days, elated one moment—and so fucking in love—only to be so needy and scared the next that it was all I could do not to bolt from the changing room and run all the way down the road to where Sam was working at the pub. Perhaps Meera could’ve explained it or helped me explain it to myself, but I’d let my appointments lapse, and she was fully booked now until the end of the month.
Idiot.Missing therapy appointments had never panned out well for me in the past. Right now, I didn’t have the kind of brain that could handle being left unsupervised so long.Call her. Tell her you need to see her.
But the only calls I’d made in the last few weeks had been to Sam.
The image of him and me stretched out naked and fucking in front of an open fire filled my head again. Angst forgotten, I opened the paper. Knife crime and sensationalised celebrity gossip bombarded me like a bad smell. I moved to flick through it to the ad pages at the back, but a headline caught my eye.
“Gay Footballer Finally Goes Public With Roommate Romance!”
Time seemed to stop, along with my perception of reality. For a long moment, I honestly thought it was talking about someone else. Some other poor fuck who’d had his sexuality exploited by the media. Another daft sod who was head over heels in love with his roommate. But no. It was me. For the second time in as many years, my entire life was laid bare for all to see.
And so was Sam’s.
