Chapter Eight
Marcos – ‘It’s complicated’
Each step toward the elevators sounded wrong. The dull thud of his weight on the carpet. The way the sound barely travelled. Contained to just him.
Marcos called for the elevator and rolled his head, closing his eyes. Flashes of Sebastian plastered themselves behind his eyelids. Different versions of him. Some younger, some bruised and dirty, some older and bigger. Then him on his knees.
Marcos’ eyes flew open, and he let out a sharp exhale. He adjusted his stance as he waited, and pain shot through his heel. He dropped his gaze to his shoes.
The fabric was folded and tucked under itself. The shoelaces were tangled, and the tips were jabbing into his flesh.
“Fuck,” he spat, bending to fix it as the elevator doors opened.
Stumbling over himself, Marcos got into the elevator and straightened himself. The ride down was slow. Though his stomach seemed to already be waiting for him on the ground floor, and the rest of his body needed to catch up.
He hated the feeling. As though something was missing. That something was wrong.
Marcos blinked hard and rubbed both hands down his face, letting out a sigh. What the fuck did I just do?
His gaze landed on his reflection. His hair was dishevelled, curls flicking out in all directions. The bruise on his cheek flushed and was more prominent than before. His lips were still red from the pressure of Sebastian’s.
He turned away. He couldn’t look at himself. Not now. Not after what had happened. It had been his decision, and that was what made it worse. There was no one to blame for how he felt other than himself.
The doors slid open as the elevator reached the ground floor, and Marcos stepped out, shuffling across the lobby without a second glance at anything around him.
Traffic noise hit him first as he pushed out the door.
Low rumbling and a few car horns. The gentle breeze came next.
Not cold. It was still carrying a hint of the summer day that preceded it.
A few people still wandered the streets, waiting for a bus or a taxi, but other than that, the night was bare.
Somehow, that sat uneasily in Marcos.
He started down the sidewalk, eyes glued to the pavement, pulse loud in his ears, and his gut collapsing in on itself.
Marcos cursed himself for not bringing his headphones with him. At least then he could try to drown his thoughts out. He had left his house too quickly and too impulsively to get them. He had one thing on his mind when he left, and he hadn’t stopped for anything. He had just run. Hard and fast.
Marcos hadn’t thought about what would happen when he got to Sebastian’s apartment. Hadn’t considered what it would mean. Or how it would feel. How he would feel.
If he did, maybe he wouldn’t have gone. Maybe he wouldn’t have kissed Sebastian.
But he had wanted to. He had liked it. But now it all felt wrong. He felt wrong.
Marcos’ fingernails dug into his palms, and he broke into a jog, his feet slapping against the concrete, each stride getting longer and faster. His thoughts kept up with his pace, though, arriving one after the other, each new one landing harder than the last.
He tried to make the run do what running usually did.
Foot down, breath in, breath out, shoulders loose, eyes ahead.
Keep the body moving and let everything else fall behind it.
But the city didn’t open for him the way it usually did.
Every stretch of footpath was too narrow.
Every shop window he passed threatened to throw his reflection back at him.
His mouth still felt wrong, swollen from kissing, and every time he swallowed, he became aware of it all over again.
Marcos pushed harder.
The first set of lights caught him halfway across a main road, forcing him to stop at the island while cars rolled by in front of him in a low, steady stream.
He stood there with one foot on the concrete edge and the other slightly behind him. His heel throbbed where the shoe had dug in earlier. The bruise on his cheek pulsed with each breath.
Those pains were easier to hold onto. They belonged to things he understood. Running too hard. Being punched. Pulling his shoes on badly because he had needed to get out of Sebastian’s apartment before the walls shifted any closer. For the second time.
Fuck.
The pedestrian light changed, and Marcos stepped off the island too quickly, breaking into a jog again.
Thoughts came jagged in his mind. Sebastian’s hand under his chin. The pressure of him waiting instead of pushing. The way Marcos had pulled him in because not doing it had seemed impossible for one bright, stupid second.
Sebastian on his knees.
Marcos’ stomach turned so sharply he had to slow down.
He stopped near the front of a closed pharmacy and braced one hand against the brick beside the window, head dipping as he dragged air into his lungs.
The glass beside him held a faint version of his reflection, enough to show the damp fall of his hair, the dark mark on his cheek, the strange shape of his mouth.
He pushed away from the wall and walked instead of ran.
The night started to thin out around him.
There were still cars on the main roads and the occasional person waiting under the pale light of a tram stop, but the streets became quieter the farther he walked from the city.
Apartment blocks gave way to smaller buildings, then houses sitting closer to the footpath, bins near kerbs, curtains drawn, warm lights on in front rooms.
Nothing had shifted. Nothing outside him had changed.
Marcos kept walking, shoulders tight, hands curling and uncurling at his sides.
That was the part he couldn’t make sense of.
Nothing had happened that needed fixing. He hadn’t done anything wrong.
Still, his skin was too tight, and every step carried him farther from Sebastian’s apartment without making the feeling loosen.
His legs were starting to register the distance he’d travelled now. Not only from the run he’d just done, but the one before, too. The one that had started at his front gate and ended at Sebastian's door. The kind of running he did when he wasn't thinking about running.
His calves had tightened somewhere between the main road and the quieter streets, and his right knee carried a low ache that would be worse by morning.
He'd felt this before. After hard sessions, after long games, after the kind of effort that only made sense while the adrenaline was still coursing through him.
He passed a field he'd trained on as a kid. The lights were off, the gates locked, and the oval sat dark and flat. He'd played on that ground maybe a hundred times.
Marcos didn't slow down. He kept his eyes forward and his hands loose and tried not to think about the version of himself that had stood at the centre of that ground as a teenager, already knowing what position he wanted to play. Already certain about most things.
Marcos had never minded being alone. He liked it, sometimes. His own company, his own pace, his own head.
But his own head was the issue tonight.
By the time his street came into view, Marcos’ legs had lost the clean rhythm they usually found on the way home, though he wasn’t sure if he ever found it tonight. He slowed before the corner, giving himself a few more seconds before the house came into sight.
He needed to walk in as if he had only gone for a late run. As if his cheek didn’t hurt, his lips weren’t still swollen, and his body wasn’t carrying the memory of Sebastian’s hands and mouth in places he couldn’t scrub out on the footpath.
The house appeared ahead, mostly dark except for a low light somewhere deeper inside.
Marcos stopped at the front gate with one hand on the latch.
It looked like most of his family was asleep, except maybe one of them. He could manage one.
Marcos breathed through his nose, trying to put his face into a shape that belonged to him. The version who had left the house hours ago could walk through that door. The version who had got into some stupid fight at training, who had gone for a run, and now needed a shower before bed.
He tried to settle his shoulders and loosen his hands. It didn’t work. His body kept holding itself wrong, too tight through the chest, too careful through the mouth.
He knew he was failing, but he stepped through the gate anyway and toward the front door.
The lock turned too loudly under his hand. Marcos froze, listening, then eased the door open and slipped inside. He closed the door behind him and stood there long enough for his eyes to adjust.
Marcos threaded through the house as quietly as he could, stepping over the creaking floorboards and avoiding the end table that stuck out a little too far from the wall.
He moved by memory more than sight, past the front room, past the doorway to the kitchen where the bench caught a faint line of light from somewhere down the hall.
He headed straight for his room, his gaze stuck to the light coming from under Paula’s closed door before falling on his own.
He didn’t stop. If he stopped, he might have to decide whether to knock on her door or keep going, and he didn’t trust himself with choices right now.
Choices had got him across half the city.
Choices had got him into Sebastian’s apartment.
Choices had left him standing in an elevator unable to look at his own reflection.
His bedroom door was already half open.
Marcos slipped inside and lowered himself onto the edge of the bed, bending to take his shoes off.
His fingers went to the laces, but his hands shook too much to make sense of the knots.
One lace had tightened strangely where he’d forced his shoe on earlier, and the more he tried to loosen it, the more his fingers fumbled against each other.
He gave up and forced the shoes off, leaving the laces tied.