Page 34 of Worth the Wait
Tuesday wasn’t much better.
He stayed in bed too long, ignored three emails from work, and only dragged himself out for a guilt-fuelled five-mile run along the seafront. The April wind bit his cheeks, but he welcomed the sting. Punishment, maybe. Or distraction. He followed it up with a gruelling session at the gym. Deadlifts. Squats. Anything that made his muscles burn.
Training for the five-a-side match. That’s what he told himself.
Staying strong. Staying fit.
But he knew better.
He wasn’t chasing fitness.
He was running in circles. Burning up the road and throwing weights around as if that might somehow lift the one crushing him from the inside out.
But it didn’t.
Nathan Carter was still in his head, no matter how far he pushed his feet into the pavement… or how much weight he tried to lift off his shoulders.
Fifteen years ago…
Sat hunched over his desk, Freddie pretended to focus on his Sports Studies coursework, but failed miserably. He kept checking the glowing MSN Messenger window in the corner of his old Dell monitor and his essay sat half-finished, cursor blinking. Like it knew he wasn’t really paying attention.
He wasn’t.
He was waiting.
Waiting for N8 (football icon) to come online. The screen name Nathan had set up years ago during one of their IT classes and never changed. Still had the same dumb arse status too:too tired to care, too wired to sleep.But MSN had become their version of flirting. Never in texts. Not on the phone. Someone might see that. Only here, in the safety of green and orange icons and stolen moments between “seen” and silence.
Freddie clicked open the chat box, fingers poised, heart already too fast for no good reason. He never messaged first. That was part of the unspokenthingthey had. This dance they were still figuring out the steps to. Freddie had to let Nathan come to him. And he was as impatient waiting for that as he was a dial up connection to load the bloody thing.
Music played low through his tinny speakers. Kasabian, Arctic Monkeys, a burned LimeWire mix. And he tapped his pen on a battered Nike pencil case, trying not to look as if he was waiting for a ghost to appear. He knew Nathan wasn’t at school or the computer lab in the library, meaning he had no access to internet right then. Still, he waited.
Waited for N8-football icon.
He wasalwayswaiting for Nathan.
A knock came at the door.
“What?” he called out, not looking up. Probably Piper wanting to borrow his old maths notes again. Or Mum, angling for a tenner from his TGI Fridays wages so she could invest in some pyramid scheme.
The door creaked open.
It wasn’t either of them.
Freddie swivelled in his chair, the half-written sentence on his screen instantly forgotten.
Because there he was. In the flesh. Nathan. Filling the doorway as if he didn’t know how to be looked at. Shoulders slouched, jeans grease-stained and clinging in all the right places, with that same navy hoodie, half-zipped and hanging crooked, sleeves pushed up, barely covering the white grease-stained vest hugging his chest beneath.
Christ. He lookedunreal.
Freddie’s mouth went dry. Every inch of Nathan Carter, every careless, gorgeous, too-big-for-this-towninch, was unfairly hot and Freddie was stupidly grateful for the thick cloud of Lynx Africa still clinging to the room from his post-football spray-and-pray. Because if he was gonna melt into a hormonal puddle, he might as well smell halfway decent doing it.
“Hey.” Freddie cocked his head. “Thought you were working late at the garage?”
“Yeah… I was.” Nathan wasn’t looking at him, and it was unnerving. But he stepped inside, running a hand over his buzzed back and sides, then crossed the room and flopped onto the edge of Freddie’s narrow single bed as if someone had cut the strings holding him up. His elbows hit his knees, and his head fell into his hands.
Freddie spun the chair all the way around, frowning as he watched him and rocked the chair from side to side. “Your old man again?”
No answer.
