Valentine's Day. Nicola Marsh

       ELEVEN

      February

      There was only so much thermal a man could wear and still run comfortably. February meant he moved most of his outdoor exploits indoors. He hit the treadmill instead of the highways, and he did endless laps of his grand staircase and reacquainted himself with his friendly neighbourhood indoor-climbing facility in lieu of hiking.

      It kept his event fitness up and his time occupied. In body if not in spirit.

      ‘Mr Rush,’ the guy belaying his stack said. He’d been coming here every winter for the last six years but still he was Mr Rush to them all. He’d never invited them to call him anything else.

      It’s Zander...he imagined saying.

      How hard could that be to say? Just a few short syllables. But the words were an overture for something else, something he wasn’t in a hurry to have. Acquaintances. God forbid, friends. You told a guy your Christian name one week and you were helping him move house the next.

      Georgia had accused him of having a hundred ways of keeping her at an emotional distance. Maybe that kind of thinking was just one of them. Most people would be too polite to push past that kind of passive resistance. And only some people had what it took to sneak past it.

      Georgia had it. Straight in under his skin. Between his ribs. Into his thoracic cavity where his heart hung out.

      He’d never imagined that having all his time back just for himself would be such a burden. He’d whinged long and hard to Casey about Georgia’s endless classes, the impost on his time, and she’d tutted and said all the things a boss liked to hear—Yes, Mr Rush. I’ll see to it, Mr Rush—yet, somehow they’d snuck up on him and started to feel normal. So that when they were gone he felt...

      Bereft.

      As if a part of him were missing. Yet it was much bigger than the sum total of the hours he’d put in at class.

      He smiled at his spotter as he finished fixing his rigging. ‘Thanks, Roger.’

      See...Roger. How hard was that? But still he didn’t say it. Call me Zander.

      He forced his mind off his bloody social skills and onto the stack ahead of him. Newcomers climbed the left—hard but civilised—regulars got the fierce alignment. A good brutal climb was definitely in order.

      It worked for about six minutes. People thought the point of indoor climbing was to spider monkey up the fastest, like some kind of country-fair attraction. For a free stuffed elephant. To him, the point of indoor climbing was stamina and endurance. Taking it slow and making it hard. Making it hurt.

      Pain had a way of putting everything else into perspective.

      Except today. Today it wasn’t working.

      Isn’t that how you prefer your life? she’d said. As empty as your house?

      No, actually it wasn’t. He liked it quiet. He liked it predictable and undemanding. But he didn’t actually choose empty. Empty chose him. When you worked as hard and as long as he did, when you had the kind of responsibility the network had entrusted him with and the kind of income they offered, then there really wasn’t a lot of room for anything but empty.

      Of course Georgia would have called those excuses. She would have asked him what he really wanted to do with his life and then challenged him to do it. No matter what.

      Which kind of relied on him knowing what he wanted to do. And he had no idea.

      He just knew what he was doing now definitely wasn’t it.

      His hand slipped on a misplaced transfer and he slammed hard against the wall, braced only on one foot peg, two fingers taking his entire weight.

      Now wasn’t it. The network wasn’t it. EROS wasn’t it.

      The enormous gulf those missing classes had left started to make some sense. He’d enjoyed those. A lot. Recording the experiences, capturing people’s stories. He’d exercised creative muscles that he’d let wither over the past corporate decade. He’d plucked remembered strands from something he’d been passionate about before the network. Before Lara.

      His roots.

      And audio production was a thousand miles from what he was doing now. What he’d grown rich and famous on.

      What he’d grown empty on.

      He tried not to imagine his big empty house, because every time he did the same thing happened. He saw it full of life, and colour.

      And Georgia.

      She’d planted the seeds of herself as surely in his imagination as she did plants in her garden. And she’d grown there, like some kind of invasive creeper vine. Tangling. Binding.

      Bonding.

      Until he could barely separate the reality of what he was left with from the fantasy of his imagination.

      ‘Bloody hell.’

      A grunt to his left drew him out of his self-obsessed focus. How long had he been hanging here, not moving? Roger knew him too well to think he was in difficulty, but while he was off absorbed in fanciful thoughts another climber had managed to get fully rigged and halfway up the wall. Albeit the easier configuration.

      He turned to look at the new guy and nearly lost his finger hold again.

      Bradford.

      No question. He’d been in enough newspaper articles and on enough gossip sites to be recognisable anywhere. Even sweaty and bulging on a rockface. However simulated.

      An insane rage overcame him.

      This man had rejected Georgia. She gifted him her unique heart—she risked and exposed herself—and this guy thought himself too good for her. He hadn’t fought for her when she ended it and he’d wasted no time in picking up with someone new once he was free to.

      Bradford glanced at him, frowning, and then very purposefully climbed ahead.

      Every hormone in Zander’s body urged him to speak. To demand Bradford justify himself. Explain in what universe hurting the most gentle, courageous woman on the planet was acceptable. Except then he remembered that he’d done effectively the same thing and much more recently.

      Rejected her.

      Returned