Glad Will was looking for a funnier side to it all, Micah played along. “So is your evil twin going to turn up at some point?”
“He’s always been here,” Will replied. “I can finally admit it was him in that change room.”
“And I’ve been blaming you for knocking me out?” Micah punched his chest in sorrow. “I apologise wholeheartedly.”
After signing off from Will, Micah’s mood was so improved he finally opened Grindr for the first time in weeks. A wave of old messages filled his screen and he deleted them without mercy. He went into the list of blocked users and found the guy he was looking for—Pikachu95, man, he hadn’t even remembered him being a Pokémon fan—and unblocked him.
Pikachu95 wasn’t online, but had been on the day before so Micah knew he was still active.
I haven’t been around much, he said in a private message. Okay, it was a lie, but if this guy gave him a chance he would come clean about what he had done. I was hoping we could meet up again. But for a coffee.
Was it presumptuous to get on an app notorious for its promise of hook-ups and simply ask for coffee with a person you’d done the beast with two backs with?
Oh well. There was no going back now. The message was sent. All he could do was wait for a response if it was forthcoming. He had wanted to delete the app from his phone, but he really wanted to see this through first. It’s not like he thought Pikachu95 was pining away after him, but Micah knew he had been pretty coldblooded with a guy who had actually wanted more from him than Micah was willing to give at the time. And Micah could have been honest with him, but had basically treated him like a wadded tissue to throw in the bin after the deed was done.
That was old Micah. And yes, he had been old Micah before he had turned over a new leaf. So he was doing it again. This was new new new Micah.
Hopefully new new new Micah was here to stay.
HIS ROUND of pills was almost finished, the Dockers won another game, and Micah was starting to feel a little more grounded now that his parents’ plans to move to Perth were firming up.
But there still hadn’t been a message from Pikachu95. And he had been online, because his status showed he was last on four hours before Micah checked for the thirty-second time.
So he was probably getting a taste of his own medicine. This was what happened when you treated people like shit. Karma, etc., etc. Even if he had told Will he didn’t believe in it.
He kept getting messages from other potential hook-ups, but he ignored them all. He was only on this for one reason at the moment, and seeing as he was still within the testing period, he refused to get naked with anybody else. New new new Micah was responsible, smart and safety-oriented. And much more emotionally open with people.
“Dinner’s at seven,” Sam yelled after him as he ran up the stairs to the floor he shared with Dane.
“Sure thing, Dad!” he yelled back to Sam’s laugh.
He had waited to get a shower back home after training. After a game, you always wanted to be clean straightaway, either to get the stink of failure off you or to look like a righteous avenging—and pristine—angel when you went out to bask in your success after a win. But he just wanted to get home tonight. He had showering down to a fine art; in five minutes he was flinging himself onto his bed, clad only in a t-shirt and boxers. Obviously he would put pants on to go down to dinner. He wasn’t that comfortable with the Mitchells.
Scrolling through playlists on his phone, he selected Sia and swung from a chandelier beside her as he checked his e-mails. Nothing that exciting, except for an e-mail from Emma about possible Halloween costume ideas. At the moment she was leaning towards Batwoman, lesbian superhero with fiery red hair. Nothing at all like me, she had written.
No, not at all, he responded. She has money, charm, and an actual love life.
He wished he could see her expression when she opened that e-mail.
Knowing it was hopeless to do so, he opened the Grindr app to see if Pikachu95 had finally messaged him. Flicking through new messages he had received, none were from the guy he wanted to talk to. He deleted them all and went back to the main screen. The rows of men stared up at him, or at least the ones who had faces because many of them were simply torsos. Just about to hit the home screen to leave the app, his eyes focused on the green dot in the first square—which informed him that the torso in the picture was less than 200 feet away from him.
Intrigued, Micah hit the photo to enlarge it.
The torso was slightly scrawny—but with some definition in the arms, which Micah would later guess was probably from all the slamming of doors he did—judging from the one that held the phone away from his body in order to take the picture. But Micah looked past the body to the room in the background. A room that actually was familiar to him now that he had finally gained entry to the most exclusive bedroom in North Beach. Even if he hadn’t recognised the bedroom itself, the poster to the right of the torso gave the game away. Well, the bottom half did—a pair of legs in footy shorts with the words “Sam Mitchell” emblazoned beneath them.
And just like that, the picture winked out. The torso in question had gone offline.
It was like his brain had turned into white noise. Micah threw open the door to his room and covered the hall between their rooms in two steps and just as many seconds. He didn’t knock or pause for any kind of social niceties but burst through into Dane’s room. Dane was sitting on his bed, not even having enough time to hide his phone and pretend it wasn’t him or come up with some plausible story. He didn’t even berate Micah for invading his privacy. All he did was look up at him.
And it looked like his whole world had come apart.
The anger faded, from blistering rage to a dull throb. “Don’t even try and tell me that wasn’t you I just saw on Grindr.”
Dane sniffed. Oh fuck, he was ready to cry. “It was me.”
“How long?”