IceBerg - 7. Chapter 7

‘Hey Nathan, sorry to do this, but I am going to have to cancel our meeting next Saturday. To be honest I am not in a good place right now. Will try and rearrange.’

I frowned, the energy dripping from me which each word I read.

Alex sent a laughing face emoji and I snapped back to our conversation. The giddy feeling was gone now.

‘Hey, so is it weird I saw you on the chat show?’ I typed to a reply to Alex’s emoji picture.

Immediately after, I went back onto Charlie’s email and just stared at the words; my hands rested under my chin, my frown was still present.

Alex replied.

I blinked and looked at his reply, ‘I hope I didn’t embarrass you. Or upset you. I didn’t know how to answer that relationship question really. I just go there to promote my sport really. I think it makes me come across very boring sometimes.’

That never bothered me. The relationship thing. Besides, he wasn’t boring at all, he was a bit quiet. But his looks and his face said more than words did, making audiences swoon over him.

Tilting my head, I couldn’t help but rely, ‘You’re cute, you know that, right?’

‘Ha!’

I give a little grin, knowing he was really chuckling behind his screen.

But Charlie’s email pulled me out again. Each word wanting my attention.

Clicking the email down, I typed back to Alex’s conversation, ‘What did you think of Charlie Conray by the way? You guys seem to get on screen?’

‘Yes, he is a nice guy’ that is all Alex typed. ‘Besides you are nicest guy I know, you let me win four times.’

He followed that with a funny emoji face.

I should have replied to Alex. I decided to go back onto my emails and reply to Charlie very quickly.

‘Hi Charlie, I am sorry to hear you are in a bad place, is this with your ex-partner? If you need to chat crap about it, you can always talk, or we can drink.’

Even as I sent it, I already knew what the response would be, something along the lines of, ‘Thanks, but I will be okay.’

Letting out a sigh, I then turned to Alex’s conversation.

Before I started typing, an email from Charlie popped up. That was quick.

I read it, scanning over it.

‘I was going to just have drinks at mine, if you want to come over it is up to you.’

I sat there, stumped.

‘You okay, Nathanial?’ Alex asked.

‘Sorry, just got an email from Charlie.’

‘Ah that’s why you were asking then.’

I tried to pause but my I was already typing away, ‘He has asked if I want to hang out tonight. Think he needs some support; him and his partner broke up.’

‘I remember you saying,’ Alex replied. ‘You should go and see him if he has asked. I know break up sucks.’

Before I could reply, he added ‘You’re a good person, Nathanial. It’s an incredible quality to have.’

‘You are way too nice to me,’ I typed.

An email popped up, but I didn’t turn away from the conversation with Alex.

‘You deserve so much more, Nathanial,’ Alex said.

My shoulders melted back, and my chest softened.

The email kept flashing at me.

But I replied to Alex first, ‘Thank you for choosing me.’

It was sickening sentimental, but I could allow myself that at least once.

‘Speak soon,’ he added a bright smiley face emoji after that.

I then looked at Charlie’s email, ‘If you are still okay coming over, I will give you, my address.’

I replied, ‘Yes please. P.S please don’t plan to murder me when I come over, I can’t emphasise how much I like to be alive.’

Sitting back, I glanced above me. The lightbulb in the room was darkening, desperate parts of small light trying to flicker.

                                                                       ***

‘This is what channel 5 is,’ Charlie leaned over on the couch and let out a long fart. He sniggered.

Taking a swig of beer, I sniggered back, ‘To be fair, you are right. Agh!’ I wafted at him ‘Man!’

He stuck his tongue and drank his own beer. He tapped the bottom of bottle, making sure he drank every bit of it.

‘Right,’ he placed the bottle down on the ground. ‘Onto the wine next!’

He reached down to the bags on the floor and brought up one smooth red bottle of wine.

Wine? After a crate of beer? He really did want to go full out.

Squeezing it open, the pop wasn’t as loud as I thought it would be. Charlie, with one hand, snatched a beaker from his coffee table in front of us and glugged the wine into the beaker. He filled it right to the top and leaned back, putting his feet up next to me. We both had our feet up on his couch. It was surprisingly a little tatty, little homey, patches of different shades of dark colours.

Knowing I would be drinking, I had taken an uber over. His flat was on the top of a smart block on the end of a busy street. I still think I tipped the uber driver way too much.

Charlie’s actual apartment was so spacious, lots of light and brown plank flooring. Dusty marks of where boxes were. So clean but so empty. It didn’t really have a smell either.

Charlie grabbed another beaker off the table and filled it up with wine and shoved it towards me.

Swinging the rest of my beer, I took the beaker off him. I stared at the beaker, hesitant on putting my lips on it. He was looking at me. Ah.

I took a gulp of the wine, the mixture of sweet and bitter clashing with such awkwardness on my tongue. I took another gulp to get rid of the bitter. The music buzzed off the T.V.

Charlie had left it on a random music channel.

‘I can’t believe you thought this was about Karen,’ he said.

‘You were upset about her last time,’ I objected.

‘Well, we broke up a while ago. But we weren’t working for a very long time,’ he said, drinking, nodding his head to the music beats. ‘Some people just don’t work well together, that’s all.’

‘It sucks,’ I muttered, the only words I could say. I looked down into my cradled beaker.

He shrugged at me and tilted his head, giving me a little smile, ‘Your cold seems to be all healed up.’

‘Ha, yes,’ I replied, giving a small smile of my own. ‘They never last long, I always seem to catch something.’

He sniffed and smiled. We didn’t say anything, and I suddenly notice the unsettling beats of the songs that didn’t sound well-tuned.

I paused, ‘This music, is um, interesting.’

‘I’d call it garbage myself,’ he broke out into a little laugh, fumbling around for the remote.

As he flicked through the channels, he stopped at channel 5. His show was on. Crap. I looked sideways at him.

He snorted watching his ex-panel host, and muttered, ‘You know I genuinely thought they were all my friends, everything on camera was real. Class A idiot some days.’

‘I still don’t understand how they cut you from the show, you guys had really good chemistry,’ I said. ‘I don’t get T.V people.’

‘Be glad that you don’t,’ he swore loudly, then took a heavy swig of his beaker, nearly drinking it all in one go. ‘People who pretend to be your friend and yet when it came to the cuts, said nothing to support me.’ He raised his nearly empty beaker towards the bright screen. ‘Cheers for you guy!’

Friends. Sipping some wine out of my own beaker, I clicked my tongue. Were those his only friends? He saw me looking and raised an eyebrow.

Ah. I needed to say something. I cleared my throat and replied, ‘Are your other friends, um, are they out tonight?’

He narrowed his eyes on me. Had I insulted him? I shouldn’t have said anything, I should have just burped or made a joke or… wait, he was chuckling.

‘Oh no,’ he poured more wine into his beaker. ‘The guys know not to bother me when I am feeling like this.’

Oh.

‘Do you want me to go?’

‘What?’ he looked perplexed at me. ‘No, no, don’t be stupid. Here, let me top you up.’

He reached over and glugged the wine into my beaker, I watched it rise to the top, my stomach gurgling.

‘Don’t be stupid. You are stupid!’ Jake’s voice scolded my brain like hot water.

I stamped my feet hard against the ground in an instant.

Agh. Why did he have to follow me everywhere?

Charlie give me a strange amused look and sipped his beer.

I was being weird. This was embarrassing, I had no control over my feet or my head. Come on, Nathanial, I had to get it together. My face was almost all red now.

Taking a huge swig of my wine, I kept drinking until I had no wine left in my beaker. Dribs of red dribble down my beard. I wiped it away with the back of my hand while Charlie cocked a smile at me; he was both bemused and impressed. Raising his drink, I raised mine and our beakers tapped together in a strange silent toast.

                                                          ***

I didn’t know how long it had been, but there the floor became a sea of empty bottles. My ears were buzzing, my eyes were squinting. Jake was long gone and I hadn’t heard weird noises like my phone going off or the door knocking away.

I snorted out laughing in a disgusting manner at Charlie who was now tossing another empty bottle into the floor sea.

‘I can’t believe it’s all gone,’ he said, his face screwed up in annoyance.

I was laughing because he was trying to drag himself off the sofa, and he pulled himself away as if his body had no bones left. I laughed before when he let off gas, tears rolling down my eyes and I had a fit of laughing burps.

After what seemed a while, he dragged himself onto his feet, his body swaying.

‘Why don’t you crawl?’ I suggested.

He glared at me as if I was joking.

‘I will be back in a moment,’ he said, clambering over the clinking bottles.

After some banging in his kitchen, he stumbled out. Leaning against the door, he revealed a bottle of tequila in one hand and two shot glasses in the other.

He grinned at my aghast face and placed them on the table in front of me, ‘You done tequila death shot before?’

Before I could reply, he turned and stumbled back into the kitchen. He came back with a salt shaker, a small lime and a little knife.

Clambering back over the bottles, he went to sit down on the couch next to me. He completely missed it and smacked his arse off the ground among the scatted empty bottles of wine. I let out a loud belly laugh.

‘Pft!’ he waved his arms about, grabbing my leg. ‘Get down here.’

Sliding my lazy body onto the floor with a heavy thud, I sat next to him on the floor while he cut the lime in half. He then splashed a mess of tequila into the shot glasses.

‘Right,’ he turned to me. ‘Salt, shot, lime.’

I shook my head, 'I'm not putting stuff in my eyes.'

‘Come on!’ he nudged my shoulders hard. ‘Do it, do it, do it!’

                                                             ***

All the shots I had done were burning my throat, my eyes were stinging. At least Charlie was laughing.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my palm.

‘Ach!’ I bit in the lime. I didn’t know how many I could do this without it coming back up. Charlie laughed more, leaning against me, his hand fell onto my thigh to steady himself. He straightened his back but forgot to take his hand away.

‘So, I got to ask,’ he said, his eyelids heavy. ‘Why do you, of all people, believe in it?’

‘Believe?’ I spat out the lime onto my hand and shoved it in my empty shot glass.

‘Bible stuff? God stuff? Why do you believe in it? You put it as a theme in all your stories online too. You believe in men in clouds?’

I frowned, ‘That’s not what it’s about.’

‘But you, a gay guy, believing in God. That is weird. Like watching a, a, um, a dog walk on two, paws, two, two legs.’

He was so unbelievably drunk.

I just grinned and said, ‘I didn’t realise you transformed into an interviewer when you are drunk.’

He stuck his tongue at me and took his own shot. His eyes closed and his jaw clenched.

Putting the shot glass down on the table, he said, ‘Well, after the year I’ve had, I think I deserve to be drunk.’

Glancing back over to the dusty spaces, I said, my voice hushed, ‘You guys were pretty serious then. When did she move out?’

He looked back at me and stared at the T.V. It had been on some random Asian channel for a while now.

He replied, without taking his eyes off the screen, ‘A while ago. Took ages to collect her stuff. Just left it all here for me to look at.’

My shoulders sagged and I stared down into my shot glass. Poor guy. He really had had a rough year.

‘I’m sorry,’ was all I could say.

His hand twitched on my thigh. He stared down at it as if he hadn’t realised that he had left it there. He leaned forward, still staring at his hand and his head rolled onto my shoulder.

‘You will bounce back,’ I tried to say but the words just slurred out. ‘Remember you told me. Every single success comes from million rejections. Can’t, um, let get you.’

His head was still on my shoulder. I turned my head to the side; his hair brushed against my nose. The scent of apples was refreshing. I couldn’t help but close my eyes and let myself inhale.

His head shot up off my shoulder, nearly catching my nose. Crap. I didn’t have time to look away. My neck stiffened; my cheeks were alight.

We were inches apart; his eyes were really a sharp blue. We were too close together. He was going to freak out. He was going to call me all the names under the sun, he was going to snort out laughing in my face, he was…

Kissing me.

His lips were gentle, testing the waters. He pulled back a little. I didn’t move. He leaned forward again and pressed his lips against mine. This time he was a little firmer. Everything inside me lit up.

I parted my lips and I responded. He gave out a small groan and curved an instant hand round the back of my neck, pulling me closer to him. My chest was crying out with excitement, my hands were electric; my fingers reached out and ran through his hair.

We fell onto our side, the bottles rolled out of our way. I let him push me on to my back. I nibbled his bottom lip and he groaned again, his other hand travelling down my side and pulling me closer towards him, tangling our legs together. Our tongues met and my fingers become urgent running with no control through his hair.

Charlie rolled on top of me. Travelling down to my pants, Charlie’s feeble fingers tried to unbutton me. I grabbed his hand and brought it back to my neck. His kissing became urgent; I could taste everything on his tongue. He was so hungry. He pulled me more against him, his lips became wild. Wrapping my hands around his neck, I moaned into his mouth. He held me tight against him, teeth clinking, his breath was deepening and deepening. One of my hands travelled down, and I got under his shirt, his soft warm back was against my fingertips. Groaning, he arched his back and then. He stopped.

He pulled away. He was still heavily breathing. Unwrapping himself from my arms and legs, he went onto his side, away from me. I lay there, panting, watching him.

Pulling himself off the floor, he coughed and walked out the room with a quick pace.

I felt so still on the floor. It took all my energy to sit up. Agh, the room was twirling around. I rubbed my temples and pushed myself up off the floor. I followed the lights in the corridors and saw Charlie was in his bedroom.

He was crouched on the floor, staring ahead, rubbing his face.

I kneeled behind him and put my hands on his shoulders. He flinched.

The air was so still. Taking my hands away, I curled my fingers under my palms. I knelt there behind him and we both didn’t say anything.

I opened my mouth, my voice croaked out, ‘I didn’t mean for that to happen like that, I…’

‘I think you should leave.’

What? I could feel my eyes heating up. My throat hurt. What happened? Why was this happening now?

Holding back a lump in my throat, I whispered, ‘Okay.’