Page 7 of Salvaged Heart
He groaned, “I’m fine,” which sounded anything but.
I made my way toward him slowly, the waft of alcohol hitting me as soon as I was within a few feet of him. “Are you drunk?”
“Tipsy at best.” He shooed me away, pulling himself back up to his feet, where he wobbled slightly before finding his footing.
I grabbed his arm to help steady him. He was one misstep from tumbling down the stairs he had just come up. “I’d say you’re a little more than tipsy.” Fuck, had he driven home like this? It was a miracle he wasn’t splattered on the pavement. “Let me help you to bed.”
“Don’t need your help.” He spat, but there was no venom in it.
“Well, you’re getting it anyway.”
I managed to wrestle him into his room. Anders fought me with every step until he flopped down on his bed, fully clothed in his leather jacket and boots, his backpack still hanging from both shoulders. Something in it clinked as his weight landed on it. I went to tug one of his boots off, but he kicked me away, leaning down to undo the laces himself, so I moved instead to pull the bag from his back.
“Don’t touch that.” He hissed. “I told you, I’m fine. You can crawl back to Laurel and rat on me now.”
This guy was beginning to piss me off.
“I thought I made it clear earlier that I have no intention of spying on you for her.”
“You say that now.” The words were so slurred they were hardly recognizable, but at least he had managed to work out of his boots and jacket, both of which had been discarded in a heap on the floor.
Picking them up, I set the boots by the door and folded the jacket neatly on the bench seat in front of the bay window. By the time I turned back around, Anders was stripping, so I took that as my cue to leave. I headed back out into the hallway, trying my hardest to keep my eyes averted from the body that was slowly being revealed layer by layer.
I paused at the threshold, glancing back at him one last time. “Is there anything I can get you?”
He rolled over so his back was facing me. “Just fuck off.”
The sun rosein what felt like mere minutes after I finally drifted off to sleep, light pouring in through the window, casting a warm glow over the entire space. We were bunked up in one of the bedrooms in better condition on the third floor. The room was furnished with little more than an air mattress and an upside-down milk crate I had found in the small shed next to the boat dock the day we arrived. While the smaller bedrooms like this one were not our goal to restore, Laurel and I had given it a thorough scrub down the following morning while waiting on Margery’s flight to arrive from Denver. Now it was free of dust and cobwebs, there wasn’t much wrong with the room other than the decade’s out-of-date wallpaper and a semi-questionable stain on the hardwood.
Laurel, who had rolled away from me in the night, was snoring softly, overhanging the edge of the air mattress. Unlike me, she could sleep in most conditions. I usually tossed and turned all night, awoken by the smallest noise and the slightest bit of light creeping through the curtains. I made a mental note to prioritize installing blinds and hanging blackout shades. The sun rose so early over the summer, and I did not want to spend my first weeks off from school and a strict baseball schedule waking up at the crack of dawn.
Moving as quietly as a six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-ten-pound athlete could, I stood from the mattress low on the floor and moved to the window. The room must be almost directly above the one Anders was occupying, as the view over the lake was virtually identical. The lawn spread from the back porch in a gentle decline to the boat dock below, scattered with haphazard stepping stones so unevenly placed that someone with normal-length legs would need to jump from one to another to stick to the path. The water glistened invitingly, but I knew better than to swim in the polluted lake.
Completed in 1963, Lake Norman was a man-made lake primarily used to power the Cowens Ford Dam hydroelectric station and cool the nuclear reactors at McGuire powerplant. While the authorities and travel blogs insisted the water in Lake Norman was well filtered and perfectly safe, the many signs scattered around it stating not to drink the water or eat fish pulled from the lake begged to differ. In my opinion, no relaxing morning swim was worth risking cancer or turning a radioactive shade of green.
The sound of the back door opening and closing, followed by movement below, snagged my attention. A figure, a moment later confirmed as Anders, skipped down the porch steps with more energy and grace than should have been possible, considering the inebriated mess he had been only a few hours before. He strolled out onto the damp lawn below, something rolled up beneath his right arm. I watched him curiously make his way across the stones, his long legs able to bridge the gap between each one, before he made it to the boat dock and unrolled the item he’d been holding under his arm across the uneven boards.
Was that a yoga mat?
Stripping his shirt off, he dropped it to the side of the mat, stretching his entire body in a point towards the sky. He was too far away to see his muscles rippling and flexing with each new pose, but I found myself mesmerized by his movements and the way the sun reflected off his honey-brown skin. With each bend down, his ringlets flopped over his eyes, and he pointed his toes toward the sky with surprising nimbleness.
“What’s caught your attention?” Laurel’s voice broke me from my trance with the startled jump of a kid being caught with their hand in a cookie jar. It was admittedly a strange way to react, considering Anders had wandered into my line of sightin a public space and was simply working out. But there was a weird sense of intimacy about me watching what he was doing.
“Just mentally preparing myself for the day ahead.” I turned to her and gave a wary smile. “How’d you sleep?”
“Good.” She reached for her phone, noting the time. “Jesus, Beck, it’s only seven am. Come back to bed.” She gave me eyes that suggested she had no intention of us falling back asleep. The sort of sultry bedroom look that would have most men sprinting across the room to dive between those gorgeous thighs. But my cock was notably uninterested.
I assured myself I was just tired and physically exhausted, but the truth was, our sex life had cobwebs that rivaled those in this house these days. All normal for being six years into a relationship, I presumed. Add in the stress from the last few months wrapping up the semester, dealing with the crushing blow of my shoulder injury and the resulting end of the only dream I’d ever had, it was natural I’d lost some of that fire. But we would find our way back to it this summer.
Ignoring her wandering gaze, I rolled my shoulder in emphasis and pulled a shirt over my head. “I couldn’t sleep. I’m not exactly built for the air mattress life.” She nodded in understanding and turned back onto her side, away from the light. I glanced back out the window, noting Anders’ presence now missing from the end of the dock, and headed downstairs, hoping to bump into him before he disappeared back into his room.
5
ANDERS
I’d felt Beckham’s eyes on me the second I stepped outside, but I didn’t expect them to linger quite as long as they did. He watched me cycle through a partial Sun Salutation into a right leg lunge, low lunge, lunge twist, and half split before I repeated it on my left side. I hadn’t taken him for a yogi, but I intended to give him a show nonetheless, so I added a few more complicated twists and stretches before taking a seat to end my workout with some deep breathing meditation. It wasn’t until soon after that I felt his gaze finally leave me, meaning either Laurel was awake and had stolen his attention, or I would be seeing him very soon.
After our run-in last night, it would probably be the latter. I got the vibe that Beckham was the kind of insufferable human who felt the need to talk about everything, even things he had no business in knowing and absolutely didn’t understand. I stood, shook out my relaxed muscles, rolled the mat back up, and made my way to the porch to sit in a creaky rocking chair awaiting his arrival. My head felt foggy, like I was still drunk from the night before. While my tolerance to alcohol was pretty high from years of abusing it, last night, I’d pushed even my limits.
