The Tell - 1. Chapter 1

“Jack the legs, keep your elbows steady, and, most importantly, keep the core stable.”

Stan’s head tilts towards me, jaw slack, paying close attention. A single drop of sweat slithers down his chin and liberates itself onto the mat below. I look around to see if anyone has overheard, not knowing whether I’m paranoid for my own sake or on behalf of my tutee, sensitive as I am to his potential embarrassment about being guided but also to the sound of my own voice, particularly if I’d doled out advice that was ill-informed. Nobody was looking our way.

“It’s important that you keep your core stable. Don’t bend. Stay rigid. And make sure that you feel your abs working.”

He nods, but I know he’ll get it wrong, and am preparing to correct him with as much tact and decorum as possible. Grunting, he spreads his legs open in one sharp movement, and, sure enough, his mid-section sags towards the floor. Bringing one foot back to its initial place and then the other, he jacks again, and not only is there was no improvement, but it seems to take a lot out of him - so much so that I am unsure he’ll be able to do even a couple more.

I stop him. He lays with his legs on the mat, torso arched, shooting me a what-did-I-do-wrong look.

“I can’t stress enough how important it is to maintain your technique. It’s better to do 2 reps correctly than 10 with poor form.”

He looks down and sighs. A bead of sweat runs down the right side of his face.

“Now let me see that posture again.”

He mounts himself on his forearms and holds his body in a stiff plank, center of gravity slightly too high, which I correct by pushing down on the back of his right thigh. His shorts feel like they look – starchy and papery, as though past their expiry date. The t-shirt, hanging sadly from his mid-section, isn’t much better. It may have been fished out of his father’s wardrobe, or is perhaps a hand-me-down received when he was much younger and which he hadn’t had the wherewithal or motivation to replace, and his sneakers were much in the same league, equally outmoded.

“Go.”

The third time around is a vast improvement. Maintaining form, Stan executes 4 perfect jacks before giving up. Panting, he falls flat onto the exercise mat.

“That’s all I can do.”

A muted wave of elation rolls over me like a brief cocaine kick and I grin from ear to ear.

“Hey,” I say, extending my hand out for a high-five, “that was perfect.”

He returns it, but doesn’t look happy. Before I have the chance to say my next words, he interrupts me.

“Don’t say it. I already know.”

I laugh, open my mouth as if to retaliate, but decide against it. I can’t help but smirk. We look at each other for the longest two seconds, a knowing look, communicating something beyond the restraints of speech but to which we are both finely attuned; a common language that could only evolve in time, time spent together observing idiosyncrasies, behaviors, the subtle reactions and tells of body language observed closely – too closely, and through which, in its evolution, had turned our signals into pictures so vivid we were terrified of giving anything deeper than superficial away, and so we turn our heads, almost simultaneously, focusing our attention elsewhere.

****

The opportunity to sit opposite each other doesn't present itself, so he sits one seat to the left across the aisle. Directly to my right, an elderly Korean lady scolds a young man wearing headphones for leaning against the pole, leaving her no room to hold on. The entire carriage is a synchronized wave of heads turning to look, but nobody says anything. Stan’s eyes meet mine and we share a muffled chuckle.

An uninvited feeling runs down my gullet like ice-water. We’ll always be apart. He’ll always be just a bit out of reach. Always nearby, never opposite.

What I wouldn’t give to see the band of his boxer shorts peeking over the slim sweatpants he was still wearing; to get another glimpse of what I’d had the nerve and audacity to peek at in the changing room. It was still burned in my mind – the blonde trail on the flat of his lower abdomen, the ridges of his hips trailing lines into the most special of places. All the imagery resonated harder than it had for anyone else as physical desire melded with pure, unadulterated love like it never had before.

Somewhere down the carriage, a melody I haven’t heard since I was a child plays. It is only slightly louder than the ruckus coming from the train, and is being played in a way I’ve never heard it being played before. I look at Stan to see if he’s caught wind of it. He has, and we exchange a look of curiosity.

It’s a gypsy band. On my solo rides, they provide joy and entertainment, if my mood so allowed, but on this occasion I’m only concerned about Stan’s reaction. He looks over, curious, and eventually, once he truly understands what is going on, happy. He looks over at me and smiles. I smile back.

Money collection is my least favorite part of the whole affair. As always, I pretend to search my pockets as the band approaches, but I don’t anticipate Stan’s charitable gesture as he lures the panhandler away from my side of the carriage to his with a donation of what I could only guess was just under a fiver. He smiles as he does so, and glows with satisfaction as the trumpeter tips his hat to him. Right then I had a fleeting thought – that Stan and I would never work. Like a hollow-point bullet, the realization of my arrogance and selfishness pierces through my skin, and the stark contrast of his openness, generosity and warmth of spirit, pushes the bullet deeper, causing further, irreparable damage to my insides. And so strong a thought it is that it overrides the most obvious obstacle: that of his unwavering sexuality, until, like a kick to the chest, it too comes back to the forefront. The specter of inevitability once again drags me down like an anchor.

But how to hide it?

There had been situations where I’d been forced to put on a front, but I could never feel comfortable playing a role. And now, I was to be expected to play the most demanding of roles. To contain the uncontainable; to repress a natural urge and instinct so transcendental, so sublime. An incendiary concoction of atoms colliding. A force so strong it slices through time and age and culture and wealth and permeates the song, dance and written word of the giants of humanity and turns men into miniscule creatures forced to gaze in wonder at this thing that they can only describe, when the voice comes back to their throats, as otherworldly.

The next station, is Portland Street.

This was to be it for another day. As quickly as it had come, it would be gone. No sooner had I watched him stroll smiling through the gym turnstiles than he was standing up on that train and reaching out his hand to me to say goodbye.

I feel the warmth of his hand fade slowly from mine.

****

The store somehow still managed to retain a young crowd – not as trendy as those in the fast fashion outlets upstairs, but nonetheless a demographic the place enjoyed at the peak of its popularity, for the most part.

The mission, which once sounded simple, but had eaten into a significant chunk of my day and left me frustrated, was to find a jacket both stylish & warm; utilitarian and attractive in equal measure, and affordable to a degree, though ‘affordable’ was entirely flexible when I thought about my audience.

I wondered if it was still raining. It hadn’t been when I’d arrived, so it was unpleasant surprise to see water streaming off the domed skylight in the mall atrium after exiting the umpteenth shop, compounding my frustration. At the same time as wanting to leave this place, to be done with the endless search for an item of such apparent rarity so as not to be existent in an enormous mecca of consumerism, the thought of going back to an empty apartment was not much of a motivator.

The brand had gone stale to a degree, but here and there was a rack of decent-looking items, just enough to keep the place relevant, and its jackets, though I couldn’t yet see them from where I stood, could almost certainly be relied on for warmth and utility, which is why the place deserved a second chance.

There was a sense of camaraderie in this place; a sort of union of experience, a general airlessness catalyzed by the store’s haphazard clothing arrangement. A wave of sympathy bound me to my co-shoppers. Such was the random placement of clothing that I found myself in the sport section, and, perhaps by design, felt compelled to stop and browse, for myself at first, and yes, there were some attractive pieces, but soon I found my thoughts wandering to Stan. My hand found its way to a grey running top, fingers drifting over the soft, sweat-wicking cotton.

A perfect fit, I thought, and then my eyes wandered to the surrounding tshirts, and I couldn’t find one I thought wouldn’t look less than perfect, for all any of them would do is serve to accentuate an already perfect figure, like a glacier, the fabric gliding over his silken skin, begging to cling on but yielding to it, its suffering a cosmic injustice.

Medium.

It couldn’t be anything else.