Heal the Heart

7.

Blue skies, light breeze, smell of wet mud. The plain tee I'd worn under my jacket tickled my ribs with each flutter of the cool air. The morning started out dewy and cold, but by the time the sun came up, I was sweating bullets, and had to tie my jacket to my waist.

Running had always been a way to distance myself from the world. Each bated breath I took turned off all the gears in my mind. I only focused on how much more I could cover, how much more my muscles could take before they gave in. My legs would burn, and my calves would ache, lactic acid thrumming through every muscle.

I dropped off the trodden-trail and went for the woods. There was a somewhat paved route here; paved by the runners who didn't have the patience to follow the same trail day in and day out. I liked the crunch of dried, fallen leaves under my shoes, and how the muddy smells turned stronger the more I went in. Hummingbirds buzzed between trees, squirrels skittered away the closer I came, and twigs broke and fractured with each step. I didn't wear headphones when I ran. These sounds were music to my ears.

That and the constant storm inside my head. Didn't matter the season, cold, hot, spring, for the past two years, just cyclones consumed me.

Cold sunlight fell on my face when I emerged out from the forest and continued on the trail that turned with the curve of the lake. Sunlight shimmered across the lake, crystallising the blue water. This was the kind of blue you got lost in.

The kind of blue that Christopher Beckett's eyes were.

When was the last time I had been so captivated by a man? By all of a man?

It was easy to fall for a man's appearance. God knows I'd been guilty of that more times than I could count. But how many of those men had the ability to actually allow me to get to know them more and prevent me from running straight out? I needed exactly one finger to count that.

Now, two.

I never had that testosterone-fuelled fuck it out of system phase. Arya used to say if a guy had a killer-bod and fuck-me eyes, the checklist ended right there. Have some good, hard sex, get it out of your system, dust your hands, and show up early on the field the next morning with no excuses.

Meeting a man like Christopher Beckett was like finding a needle in a haystack. No. It was like finding a well-polished diamond in the sand in the middle of nowhere. He had a shy yet confident attractiveness I couldn't get enough of.

If he had called me—or texted me—I would've followed through. I wanted to see him again. I made it clear the moment he handed me a pen to write down my number. The eagerness in his eyes, in the way his hands couldn't stop grabbing me even after we had shared a million goodbyes in those fifteen minutes, couldn't be a farce. Could it?

I saw the hunger in him. The fire burnt inside him just as bright as it did in me. But he wasn't hungry for me, was he? Maybe he was hungry for the experience. Was he closeted? I knew what it was like being a sportsman and gay. People expected it to be mutually exclusive. The two circles in the Venn Diagram weren't supposed to intersect. If they did, then... I didn't know what would happen, but I'd expect it to be Chernobyl level disastrous. I'd imagine it would be hard to carry on with hookups when everyone knew who you were. Then, you find that one clueless duckling in the ocean, and swoop in, get the prey before anyone blinked. For him, I had a dick, decent-ish muscles, and was more than ready to have his mouth on me.

Damn it.

Another sportsman.

I was probably just 'some guy' for Christopher Beckett, but he got under my skin. Way under.

I remembered him skating wildly on the ice, his stick again held high as he tackled his teammates with hugs and screams, adrenaline spilling over the edges. The Eagles won. Of course, they did.