Page 7

7

Luke

E veryone is laughing and teasing each other about the hilarious results of the three-legged relay race, but my mind is still on Cody. He’s been gone a long time. I hope he’s alright. There could be any number of things wrong. Anything from an upset stomach to falling and hitting his head on a rock before falling into the water.

That last thought has me getting abruptly to my feet. “I’m going to check on Cody.”

“Cody’s a big boy, Luke, he doesn’t need you to hold his cock while he pisses… unless you’re going for something sexier than that.” Jason raises an eyebrow at me, but I’m not in the mood for teasing right now.

“I just want to check on him. I’ll be right back.”

Fortunately, it seems my worst fears are unfounded. I haven’t gone more than a few steps when I almost bump into Cody, who seems to be making his way back.

“Cody, I was just—Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

I stare at him. It’s obvious from his face that he is very much not fine. What’s his issue? “You can tell me. Truly, what is bothering you?”

Cody takes a deep breath and gives me a very obviously fake smile. “I’m just not feeling that well. Maybe something I ate isn’t agreeing with me. I think I’m going to lie down for a bit.”

I press my hand anxiously to his forehead. He doesn’t feel warm, but he certainly looks out of sorts. “You rest, then. I hope you feel better.”

“Thanks, Luke… for everything. You’re—you’re a great guy. I’m so glad I met you.”

“Don’t talk like that—you’re not dying. You’ve likely just got food poisoning. Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll be back to full health in no time.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Tell Brandon for me, won’t you?”

“Sure thing.”

Brandon thankfully accepts Cody’s absence easily enough. Cody doesn’t want to come out for dinner, so I bring him some in the tent, but he refuses it, claiming that he’s not hungry. I’m worried about him. If he’s not right by tomorrow, maybe I’ll insist that Brandon gives us temporary leave to go and see a doctor.

I don’t suggest sex that night—Cody clearly isn’t up to it—but I pull him into my arms and hold him close as I drift off.

I’m woken at some point later—I’m not sure how much later—by shaking. It takes me a moment to realize that Cody isn’t shivering; he’s crying. I hesitate, wondering what I should do. My instinct is to comfort him, but I don’t know how he’d react knowing I saw him like this. People are funny about others seeing them cry, and Cody thinks I’m safely asleep.

Perhaps it’s better to pretend I’m still asleep, but after five minutes, when Cody shows no sign of stopping, I can’t help myself.

I tighten my arms around him. “Cody,” I whisper. “Cody, what’s wrong?”

I know immediately it’s a mistake. Cody stiffens in my arms and pulls as far away from me as he can in the confined space. “Nothing. Please, go back to sleep, Luke.”

“I hate seeing you in pain,” I murmur. “Please, talk to me.”

“Luke, please just go back to sleep. That’s the best thing you can do for me right now.”

“Okay,” I say softly after a moment. Cody has told me what he needs, even if it wasn’t what I was hoping for. Of course, getting to sleep now is easier said than done, but I allow my body to go loose and my breathing to deepen. Cody’s sobs intensify as he becomes more secure in his assumption that I’m asleep.

I wish I could do more to comfort him, but if pretending to be asleep to give him his privacy is the only thing I can do, then that’s what I’m going to do. I can only hope that at some point, he’ll confide in me.

I only drift off after Cody eventually cries himself into exhaustion and sniffles himself to sleep. When I do sleep, my dreams are troubled, and I wake several times to hold Cody closer. In his sleep, he shifts automatically toward me, entwining the two of us more tightly together.

“LUKE!”

I jerk awake. The sound of Brandon bellowing my name like that never bodes well. I scramble out of my sleeping bag. Cody is nowhere to be seen. I’d worry that he worsened during the night and Brandon is calling me to accompany him to hospital or something, except Brandon doesn’t sound alarmed.

He sounds pissed.

I hurry out of the tent, pulling my shirt on as I go. “What’s wrong?” I look around and don’t see Cody anywhere. “Where’s Cody?”

“That’s a good question, Luke!”

I stare at Brandon, perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

“Care to tell me why Cody came to me in tears at the crack of dawn, telling me that he’s quitting the team and leaving immediately?”

“He did what?” I gasp.

“You heard me, Luke. What did you do? ”

“I didn’t do anything! You saw that we were getting on—more than getting on. Everything was going so well between us. I can’t believe he’d just leave like that…”

Brandon narrows his eyes. “So you’re telling me you two didn’t have a fight that prompted this?”

“No! I could tell Cody was upset about something, but he wouldn’t talk to me. We just went to bed. I was hoping he’d open up today, but…” I stare hopelessly around the Cody-free campsite.

I remember how he cried last night. What happened to prompt this? I remember how happy he was to win the three-legged race, but everything went downhill from there, seemingly out of nowhere. I wrack my brains to try to figure out what could have happened, but I’m coming up empty.

“I’m going to go call him.”

“No cell reception here, Luke.”

“Then I’m going home.”

“We’re out here on a team-building ex—”

“Fuck the team-building exercise, Brandon! There’s something going on with Cody, I know it! He wouldn’t just quit unless there was something seriously wrong. I’m not just leaving him in pain while there’s anything I can do about it.”

I realize that Brandon and most of the team are staring at me. “What?”

“You really care about him,” Brandon says softly.

I swallow a sudden lump in my throat. “I do.”

Cody and I have a special connection. Given time to grow, I believe it could become something truly spectacular… but Cody has cut that possibility short.

Well, it’s not gone forever, not yet. I’m determined of that much.

“Fine. I suppose we’ve done enough team building for the time being. There’s no point in continuing when we’re all going to be worried about Cody anyway. Let’s head out, and you update us when you get hold of him, okay, Luke?”

“Of course,” I say distractedly, already heading to my tent. The sooner we get packed up, the sooner we can get out of here.

I make the call the moment we’re all packed into the bus. The team is uncharacteristically quiet. They seem almost as worried as I am, which makes sense. They care about Cody too, albeit in a slightly different way than I do.

Cody doesn’t answer.

I call five times before sending him a series of text messages. They all show as delivered but not read.

Well, I’m not giving up that easily. I know where Cody lives—we exchanged addresses with the idea of staying over at each other’s places some nights. If he doesn’t want to answer, I’m going to get answers myself.

I know it’s borderline stalkerish to force myself on him like this, but I can’t stand the idea that he may be alone and in pain, shutting himself away from the world. If we talk and he tells me that he truly doesn’t want to see me, I’ll back off, but first, I need to assure myself that he’s alright.

The rest of the team tries to talk to me on the drive back, probably in an effort to distract me and make me look slightly less pitiful, but it doesn’t work. All I can think of is the way Cody cried last night. I wish I had pushed harder for him to talk to me. Perhaps if I had, none of this would have happened.

We get back to the team headquarters and I say a quick goodbye to everyone, not even stopping for a real hot shower before getting into my car and driving straight to Cody’s place.

I hurry to the front door and ring the bell.

No answer. I ring several more times before knocking on the door.

“Cody! Cody, please let me in. I just want to talk. Cody? At least let me know that you’re alive in there.”

“Go away, Luke.”

Well, he’s alive and conscious, that’s something. “Please, talk to me. What’s going on? Is it something I did? Whatever it is, we can work it out. You just need to let me in.”

No response. Fuck.

I spend a solid half hour pleading with the closed door, but I don’t even know if Cody is still listening on the other side. I ring the bell and knock until my knuckles are bruised, but for all the response I get, the house may as well have been empty.

I sit slumped on the porch, sending Cody frankly pathetic texts, begging him to talk to me. They go from delivered to read, and still no response.

After half an hour, I realize that this is doing no good. Cody has made it clear that he doesn’t want to talk to me and forcing my presence on him isn’t helping anything.

I press my hand against the door. “I’m here when you want to talk, Cody. Please, don’t ever forget that.”

I go to my car, wiping tears from my face as I walk.

The next few days are brutal. We’re still on leave from practice, so I have nothing to distract me from my thoughts of Cody. I keep going over every moment we spent together, and the more I go through it, the more I’m convinced that Cody and I could have had something great together, if he’d just given it a bit more of a chance.

I still can’t figure out what went wrong. Things were going so well, and then it all suddenly just fell apart.

When I finally go back to practice, it’s a relief just to have something to take my mind off Cody.

What I don’t expect is the weird looks I keep getting. I mean, I knew everyone was aware that Cody and I were having sex, but they had no way of knowing exactly how close we’d become. They couldn’t know that I’ve spent the past few days when I’ve not been in the gym or at practice, in bed being miserable.

Today is a practice game where half of our team will play against the other half. I expect us to walk out onto the field like usual for our pre-game walk through, but instead, Brandon takes me aside. “I’d like to talk to you in my office, please, Luke.”

Great. Judging by his concerned tone, I’m probably going to have to endure him questioning me about how I’m doing, and I have no idea how to begin answering those questions.

Once we’re seated in the office, Brandon’s first words surprise me. “You can’t play today.”

“What?” I squawk. “You can’t be suspending me! I told you, I didn’t do anything to Cody, you can ask him yourself!”

“Relax, Luke, you’re not being suspended. But you look like the walking dead, buddy. It would be downright neglectful of me to allow you to play in this state. Go home, get some rest.”

“That’s what I’ve been doing all week! I’ve been counting on this, Brandon.” I realize that I sound whiny and I can’t help it. “I need to play.”

I know Brandon is no stranger to relying on playing to help regulate your emotions, and his face softens in sympathy. “I can’t let you play, Luke, but you can watch and hang out with us afterward. The company will do you some good.”

“Fine,” I grouch. I really wanted to play, but if this is the best Brandon is going to offer me, I suppose it’ll have to do.

I watch jealously from the stands as everyone else runs through warmup and the game starts. As much as I hate to admit it, Brandon’s stupid team-building exercises do actually seem to have helped. The team is working together more smoothly than ever, but it looks empty and sad without Cody.

I viciously battle that thought back. I am not thinking about Cody, not anymore. Doing so just makes me sad, and I’m done being sad about this.

Cody is gone. He has cut me out of his life. I don’t know why, but I deserve better than that. Whatever happened, it couldn’t have been so bad that he couldn’t at least give me an explanation.

I need to move on and forget about Cody and our connection. Clearly, he didn’t feel the connection the same way I did, or he wouldn’t have left in the way that he did.

I need to move on with my life.

And I do. Slowly but surely, I do.

A couple of days later, Brandon lets me back into the gym and to practice, which does wonders for my mental state. We ramp things up, preparing for our next game. I go back to eating healthily and keeping a good sleep schedule. I learn to smile again and laugh with my teammates.

In most senses, I’ve moved on, but Cody is always there, in the back of my mind. I feel shards of pain stabbing my heart every time I turn to share something with him and he’s not there. I’m haunted by the future we might have had, like a memory of what should have been, except that memory never happened. It never became the memory it should have.

I’ve moved on, but I fear that I will never truly leave Cody behind. He’s made a mark on me, and I don’t think that I’ll ever escape from that. I’m not sure if I want to.