My Man

Chapter 7

Arthit's POV

Forty four.

Forty five.

I was sweating profusely, my heart rate picking up with every crunch that I managed to do. I know I was pushing my body beyond it's limit when I felt the burn in my abdomen intensify and my breath became laboured.

But I didn't stop.

Forty six.

Forty seven.

I wanted to feel the pain.

At least the intense work out was making me feel alive. The sizzling heat spreading through my muscles, which were protesting the strain that I was inflicting upon them, was the only indication of making me feel something other than the numbness that I have been feeling for over a week now.

Forty eight.

Forty nine.

I wanted to feel something.

Fifty.

I fell on my back catching my breath and taking in huge gulps of oxygen that I had deprived to my lungs with my workout. I felt the beads of sweat rolling down my temples and a few salty drops getting into my eyes. I closed my eyes to lessen the burn. As soon as my eyes were closed, I was able to concentrate more on the various sounds that were a jumble around me. I could hear few men on the weight machines and their boisterous chat over the comparison of their rippling muscles or lack thereof, a few jabs and light hearted joking, people on treadmills and elliptical, a group of girls concentrating on the aerobics training and a few men eyeing the trainer, heavy clashing and groaning of the gym instruments, so on and so forth.

It had been an hour since I have arrived here and I have pushed myself more than I could handle. I have been sad, hurting and angry over the past week after which I have finally settled down to a blank state of numbness. I didn't want to think about Kong or his adorable kid or the perfect family he had that doesn't include me. I know I had no right to be angry or jealous over him. I had no right to spend time with his kid. I had no right to yearn for the love that I had been missing for the past six years. But God damn it! It was hard!

Every time my mind wandered to Kong or his son, the rational side of my brain peeked into the picture perfect image of Kong's family to mock me, that I was the idiot who had thrown away everything in the first place. That did nothing but rile me up further, making me irritable and to get angry with all my friends and colleagues. Jason had just got an earful this morning for misplacing my iPod after he had used it. I had made the poor guy blanch and become as pale as a ghost after I had literally screamed in his face. He silently went around me to pick up the iPod from my side table drawer and had walked away without a word after handing it over to me. On any other day I would have made some silly comment or made a playful jab or even whacked him in the back of his head for misplacing my things. But I never yelled at him for silly things like that. Now that I think about it, I felt really bad for taking out my frustration on one of my best friends. Like I said I was losing my shit over the simplest of things just because my mind was a messy puddle from all the unwanted intrusions into my life.

I let out a deep sigh and felt myself getting angry as my mind had wandered again to a territory that I intended to avoid, nullifying the sole purpose of coming to the gym and spending the past hour punishing myself. I shook my head to clear those thoughts and got up from where I was lying. I picked up my towel to wipe my face. I started walking towards the locker rooms to take a shower when I heard someone kicking the living shit out of the punching bags as I turned around the corner.