“Bad tennis.” I pulled a face. “And a straight romance.”
“Wow, that’s discrimination.”
“It very much is not. Oh my god, he’s not even holding the racquet properly. Please change the channel.”
He lifted his feet onto the coffee table, crossing his ankles like a man settling in for the night. “Nope. You said I could choose and I choose to torture you for the rest of the evening.”
“Even if it means torturing yourself?”
“Even if it means torturing myself.”
And so for the next hour, we sat side by side on the saggy old couch eating the most expensively procured chocolate mousse cake in all of London, while laughing and groaning over the movie’s inaccuracies. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen it, but it was the first time I actually enjoyed myself to the point of being almost sorry when it was over.
“I’d better go,” Miles said, turning the TV off and sitting up. “I still have some shit to do.”
“I’m sure I had things to do,” I said, remaining slumped. “But after all that food, I think I’ll just sleep.”
“Hope none if it was important then.”
“Probably not.”
He shifted to face me. “Hey. Thanks for being my pity friend.”
“You’re welcome.” I turned my head against the couch. “It was actually fun, though I hate to admit it.”
“Yeah, it was. Turns out you’re . . . not exactly what I expected.”
“Unclear if that’s an insult or a compliment.”
Miles gave a half shrug, his smile coy.
“Well, for the record, you’re not exactly what I expected either,” I said, shifting forward to lever myself out of the black hole that was the old couch. “And that’s definitely a compliment.”
The corner of his lips smirked up. And in a waft of that subtle cologne, he leaned in and kissed me.
Not a passionate kiss, just the press of his lips softly parted against mine, yet the sensation shrank the rest of the world to nothing. It was a kiss begun only to stop as though someone had hit pause, but what ought to have felt hesitant and awkward without movement, without deepening, was instead all the more intimate for its stillness.
My heartbeat sped, the beginnings of both panic and something far worse leaking through the shock. But before I could decide what to do, Miles drew a breath as though for courage and broke away, slowly enough that our lips stuck a moment in the aftermath. He remained close—too tantalisingly close in truth—his gaze fixed on my lips.
“I should go,” he murmured.
To my surprise, what I really wanted to say was ‘you don’t have to’, but I’d lived this moment too many times to be that stupid. “Yeah,” I said instead. “You should go.”
“Yeah.” A small laugh huffed out, and he drew back. His gazeflicked to my eyes and away, his expression hard to read. “Goodnight, Matteo.”
He was up and striding for the door before I could reply, the firm thump of it closing behind him his final punctuation. As his footsteps faded away along the corridor, I threw myself down on the couch with a groan, my frustration worsened by the semi swelling in my shorts. And the sure knowledge he absolutely wouldn’t be back.
Five
THE GYM WAS quiet. Most of the hardcore gym rats had already been and gone, leaving a Sunday morning lull that belonged to a trio of middle-aged women encouraging each other through their cardio, some serious lifters, and me. I pulled myself onto a bike to warm-up, body and mind heavy and not just from all the food.
I pushed the pedals into motion and pulled up Danny’s notes. He wrote everything down because I wasn’t good over the phone, but today my eyes kept glazing over. Exhaustion, I told myself, though I had slept fine. Eventually. After lying awake thinking about that kiss for far too long, thinking about what it absolutely didn’t mean and where it absolutely wouldn’t have gone until I was jerking off to an entirely imaginary Miles Callahan.
Not for the first time either, my fifteen-year-old self reminded me. Back then, his cocky confidence had been no small part of the appeal, though it had become what I hated most about him in the years that followed. On court, Miles Callahan was a force to be reckoned with, consistent rather than flashy, purposeful rather than spontaneous, every shot deliberate. Somehow, spending timewith the man beneath the façade had been like that, the real Miles a man with a deeper, steadier sort of confidence that had been all too appealing. And in the wake of that kiss, I had imagined that intent stare and those strong hands and moaned into my pillow.
With a quiet groan of embarrassment, I closed Danny’s notes and brought up the message Katie had sent half an hour before.
Katie Zhang
