I mean nothing to him

by James

I’m not gay. I need to get that down in black in white. I’m going to burn this piece of paper but it needs to be said: NOT GAY.

Not overcompensating either.

Bloody girls in my team. Lovely ladies, but get them on two for one cocktails, let slip you go to the gym with Colin, and then nothing will shift them from the subject of his hot gay bod. I tried telling them it wasn’t like the showers at school, how it’s all private cubicles of frosted glass and nothing to be seen but blurry shapes.

Stilled them for two seconds, that did, and then the obvious question: how big are these shapes?

Colin is a beautiful man. He’s slim build, not into bulking, but the kind of body where everything in the right proportion, biceps and pecs, but not the musclehead strut through the changing rooms kind. Polished marble statue. Greek god.

That dinner the first time we spent any time together that wasn’t gym and wasn’t sales talk. Did I talk much? Only thing in my head was how it was a little over two hours and we would be going to bed together.

He told me he could have used a little of my fatherless childhood, spared him some of the fun of coming out to a Viennese Pentecostal bible seller. But Colin able to grin about it now, laugh about it even, pleasing his old dad by joining the wrestling team. Not that he ever won many bouts, too busy getting pinned, you know?

Why could I not have ridden out that cancelled flight with one of the girls from sales? Sadie on a mission to do every guy in the department, or Alice, acrimoniously divorced from a cheating scumbag, and so the rumour mill went, gagging for it. We were lucky to score a room at all. Blizzard that rose out of nowhere, hotel lobbies crammed with elbowing suits and leather laptop cases more lethal than Ninja throwing stars.

Neither of us were drunk when we went to bed. We split a bottle of wine, shared some bourbon. Relaxed, and easy, I guess you’d say.

Colin stopped time by looking me in the eye and saying he was glad he was stranded with me.

Colin, with his pianist’s fingers paused delicately at the clasp of his belt, those same fingers I had seen grip the shaft of a barbell with vengeful fury now tenuous and uncertain as he continued to look me in the eye.

I matched his smile, and then he spoke again.

Glad to be stranded with me, because imagine the rest of those dicks on our team. Hello, reception? Can you send up some armour-plated pyjamas? And while you’re at it, any elephant strength sedatives on the go?

What was it with some guys? They ever stop to wonder that the reason he went to the gym and the reason he wrestled was he liked the gym and he liked to wrestle? It was possible to share a bed with a gay guy and for it not to turn into College Guys Gone Wild 3.

Colin and I shared a bed together, and it was eight hours of shut eye bliss.

For Colin.

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