It is a walk that is only ten paces. From one side of the gym to the other through spine that is a central passage. A frenzied passage of people coming and going, horizontally and vertically, as the spine also connects to the lobby to the stairs down to the locker room.
It was at the sixth pace that our eyes met. Not because we were heading in opposite directions, but because I’d turned to look to my right towards the check in desk in the lobby.
As I continued through those ten paces our focus remained on one another. I tried to stop, to look longer, but the momentum of my body carried me forward so that the stop wasn’t a stop at all but just the momentary interruption of a path predetermined.
A moment later I was downstairs at my locker. I pulled my shirt up over my head, then turned to the right to release my arm and found that he was standing at the locker next to me.
My eyes to widened, my shoulders to retracted, and I inhaled – all such slight movements and all so quickly as I reacted to his sudden proximity and perplexed by how he’d moved through the space to have found me here. And in that instant I inhaled him, filling my insides with his essence. Then our eyes met again. this time in demure glances, attempting to hide, but not entirely, the curiosity we had for one another’s naked body.
We’d wrapped ourselves in towels and I headed to the showers – he immediately behind me. Odd, I thought, that he’d arrived at the gym to take a shower first – though perhaps he had come from work. To look behind would have been too obvious, so I listened instead, wondering if perhaps he was heading to the pool.
And then sound of his feet on the tile behind me vanished. The sound space changed because the steam room door had been opened – and in there he vanished into the cloud of mist.
I hesitated briefly and then decided ‘yes’ – I would follow. I entered, stepped up to the tiled bench and sat, but could see nothing because of the dense steam. Soon enough it dissipated such that I could see more than just whiteness. Like a photo being processed in a dark room, his image emerged slowly until I saw him fully.
Leaned back and relaxed. Slender.
The bronze skin now in contrast to the white tile. Elegant.
Curly hair stretched horizontally between his brown nipples. Inviting.
His wanton brown eyes focused on me as they had been upstairs. Magnetic.
The sensation of want and desire expanded with tension like a thread of elastic between us. We discovered this thread together. Now, at once. Feeling it – the tension pulling us to one another. Words and gestures not needed and simply too parochial under the circumstances. I wanted to reach our and touch him. To feel his satin skin. To kiss his lips and feel his trimmed beard against my face.
I had to leave. The timeline required that I leave to be to work on time.
Showered and now dressed for work, there was no evidence left behind that this had occurred. Until I opened my phone. A message from Scruff popped up. He introduced himself there. He was upstairs now.
There I found him. He smiled as I approached. Hands outreached this time to make contact – and we shook hands to introduce ourselves. He was in from New York for the weekend visiting friends and suggested that we should stay in touch.
The 36 Broadway 
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