Heal the Heart

1.

Hey you guys!!!
Is this a new book? Yes
Have I finished the other pending ones? Heh, no

But it ees what it ees.
Heal the Heart is a spinoff of String the Player, and you most definitely do NOT need to read String the Player to understand this story. New characters, new story, heck, even a new location.

Thanks to ONC, I finally have the motivation churn out Neil's story after he left India looking for new beginnings. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I loved writing it.

Prompt: On a blind date with a complete mismatch, you're increasingly uncomfortable but too polite to leave. Then an attractive stranger comes over and gives you an out.

Clubs were never my scene. Not when I was seventeen and snuck in to get a glimpse of all the gyrating bodies on the dance floor and not now when an over-enthused twenty-something year old strained his vocal chords to be heard over the music.

If you want to talk, you choose a cosy restaurant with decadent decoration and enough space between tables to classify all two-seated individuals sharing a meal as couples. You don't call your date to an overcrowded, mid-priced club where drunk wannabe-adults forget the purpose of their limbs to talk.

Even I knew this. And I had been to a club, maybe a total of four times.

Henry was droning on about how the new captain of some Canadian hockey team was gay, or it could've been another rant about Hollywood not Hollywooding. Above the noise—this music is rightly classified as noise, fight me—and a group of frat boys not shying away from demonstrating the presence of their elbows, paying attention to Henry was not on my priority list.

Perhaps a club was the worst place to have a date, but I was fine with it. Maybe Henry, like me, was looking for a release, and drinking, grinding on the dance floor, and taking the party back to one of our places could've been the perfect way to find that release. At least, I was of the notion that this was what was on his mind when he texted me to meet him here.

The moment I saw Henry, I knew I had to give Krishna something worth his time for setting us up. Tall, slim, broad-shouldered, blond, pretty eyes, snug jeans, even snugger T-shirt showing off his toned chest, blond, angular face, kissable lips, fantastic ass, so so blond.

Now, two beers and a whole bunch of unnecessary words in, I wasn't quite sure I even wanted to take it back to my place. Or his place. Or any place.

He finally finished stating every single one of his unrequited opinions and took a long swig from his beer.

That gave me enough time to sneak a peek at the texts Jess had sent. Is he the one? Heart-eyed emoji.

I replied: I wanna go home

Henry finished half his beer in one gulp. That was his first bottle. It had been nearly forty minutes since we arrived. I was thinking of getting a fourth and a fifth bottle. Maybe some tequila. Or vodka. Or rat poison.

"I've been talking non-stop," Henry yelled over all the cacophony he had voluntarily trapped us in. I caught a growing shade of red on his cheeks that could've been attributed to embarrassment—though I highly doubted it. But it could also have been the laser lighting tricking my already disinterested eyesight. "What about you? How are you liking Vancouver?"

Lesser by the minute. "Not so bad," I said.

"You don't talk much."

I wonder why.

I just smiled.

He again switched to another topic I couldn't care much about, and the fake-tanned frat boys showed me how they worked their elbows by digging them in my sides.