Cold Water

Seeing Sparks - Sequel!

Hello!

In very typical me fashion I have got over-excited and decided to post the first chapter of the sequel, 'Seeing Sparks', earlier than I planned to!

You might need to bear with me for a little while as updates might be slow while I get the start of the book properly outlined :)

The first chapter is available right now and a little sample is below - I hope you enjoy it!

(*~*)

Innocent things still reminded him of what had happened.

The sound of water running, no, splashing into itself.

Disparate shouting, no matter the tone – voices running into one another without the words being decipherable.

The feeling of wet hair fanning out against his skin, each strand tangling between his fingers and sticking there.

A slightly drizzly afternoon in a park in Newcastle had all of those things. The stream filtering into the duck pond. The determined group of children trying to play football as the weather closed in, their demands for the ball becoming more and more passionate whenever the ball got close to either of their makeshift goals, made from coats. His own damp hair against his hand whenever he combed it back into place.

Today, he didn't think about Stephen's accident. Not like that. Today, he recognised that he might have thought about the accident and congratulated himself for managing not to fall into that black hole of introspection.

Ant wasn't sure he deserved congratulations for that. It was over a year and a half since that fateful day at the theatre by now – long enough that he was starting to forget the version of Stephen he'd grown up through adulthood with. He couldn't imagine the younger man now without the quirks and behaviours that his newfound sheepishness brought. And still, every conversation was a comfort, no matter how long it took. It was just one more conversation with a close friend that Ant might have been denied had there been a different outcome.

The therapy was paying off, at least in some ways. The innocuous sounds and sights that had once prodded him from the back of his mind, teasing out memories he didn't want to revisit, could be blocked out if he concentrated on other sensations: his shoes crunching against the gravel; the excited panting of his mum's dog, Nellie, who trotted along beside him sometimes and went chasing away over the grass without warning; the whisper of a breeze blowing the light rain across his skin, proving that he was outside and not trapped in the dry air that had quickly gone stale as time ran to a standstill.

He wasn't so sure that his therapist approved of his continual habit of considering before and after the accident like a whole new chronology to BC and AD. He was certain that she didn't like the way he often talked about the alternative outcome. She told him to concentrate on what had happened, not what might have happened.

It was still hard not to think about how close they had come to losing Stephen.