"Well-Flagged" by Alicia Alcantara-Narrea

Well-Flagged

The entire class was devoted to the small nine-inch screens monitoring their progress on the bikes — heart-rate, speed, consistency of rotation — but Luciana could only focus on three unanswered text messages. All of them sent to Eyana. All of them appropriately dispersed across the course of ten days, and yet they have remained unanswered. Luciana secretly tucked her fingers behind the seam of her shorts and pulled out six capsules of Naproxen. She shoved them down her throat mid-pedal. Maybe a headache was coming on, maybe she felt like vomiting — you can’t self-medicate away the time spent waiting for the validation of someone you’re interested in, said her brain. Who seemed just as interested in me, Luciana thought, while she was dying on the stationary bike, pedaling for her life. But she wasn’t going to let sub-psychological needs, or text messages left on read, or Eyana, or anything, affect her performance. Even though it was Eyana who asked her to sign up for this fitness study and even after all the poor correspondence on Eyana’s part, Luciana still decided to make it to the only event she had marked on her social calendar.
Luciana felt the fatigue that came with being out of practice, not out of shape, because she’s been cycling for miles like the rest of the guineas in the group but had been coaxed, weeks in advance, by Eyana no less, to abstain from the gym, from cardio, from running circles around her block and to take it easy. Luciana ogled her water thermos. She would kiss it if it was full. She felt thirst to such a degree she nearly forgot it was emptied at the last terrain change in some stimulating Flashdance visual she performed. She actually screwed the cap on wrong. Of course, if she had reached for her thermos accidentally and found it empty, she’d still pretend there was something in it, hold the nipple between her lips for a few believable seconds, then try to ignore the feeling that others were watching as she placed it back.
Luciana’s tongue played back-and-forth with a pith of spit before delighting in its swallow. To distract herself from flatlining, she counted numbers by ones, then twos, then randomly, as she eyeballed the glass wall in front of her — not to scrutinize the frittata-colored makeup of the two-story athletic facility or its motivational quotes written in delicate script, which grew in boldface the closer they got to the ceiling — but, instead, to steal a peek at Eyana — her legs, her hips, her arms, her nape — gliding to-and-fro between the cycling participants, not once removing stylus from tablet. She would gulp if her throat wasn’t a desert.
Eyana approached, and Luciana suffered mental whiplash, gluing her sight on a horizontal plane an inch above her bike’s monitor. It gave her the privacy and authority to thirst secretly, but you can never be too neurotic, she thought, so she ducked her head lower when Eyana appeared behind her bike.
Luciana dipped her spine as her stomach clenched. Eyana’s aromatic scent was dizzying her more than her body’s exertion, and a groan was threatening to spill either out of agony or erotic lunacy.
Eyana paused briefly, hovering a breath behind Luciana, close enough to watch her vitals, her progress on the fictional mountain range that all participants were determinedly cycling through.
Emotionally suspended, Luciana couldn’t stop the beads of sweat running down her neck or stop the chill at the tips of her ears. She flexed her grip on the bike handles.
Short.
Full.
Breaths.
Her heart-rate WILL NOT PUCKER.
She . . . is . . . her . . . own . . . zen.
The hand on her shoulder did her in.
Eyana’s palm was cool and gentle and disarming and everything she exuded on their dates. Luciana almost choked. Her eyes demanded to climb, eager to undress a body they were beginning to know, but she glued them to a point just below the monitor. With her neck taut and — Luciana hoped — trembling unnoticeably, she struggled to remain in control. Managing it somehow. Reminding her brain that she wasn’t the one who stopped calling, texting — whose interest teetered like a seesaw.
Five excruciating seconds, and a fatal shot when Eyana’s fingers squeezed a bit. Luciana almost lost her footwork. Eyana let go and stepped away. She must have found the information she needed. Later, Luciana would ruminate over the entire episode but not right now. Congratulations, you’ve won against your urge to submit to an enticing connection, her brain said. Albeit pathetically, she included.
A chime went off on the bike, signaling its next terrain change. Luciana wasn’t so out of practice. She pedaled harder, her hips shifting higher, determined to have the upper hand. Unread texts be damned.

Alicia Alcantara-Narrea

Alicia Alcantara-Narrea is a second-generation American and first-generation college graduate, working toward a BA in Creative Writing at the University of Houston, TX. She was an assistant prose editor for Glass Mountain Undergraduate Literary Magazine and is an intern for Gulf Coast a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her work has been published in The Merrimack Review, Epigraph Press, and The Progenitor. She is influenced by a need to understand gender identity, human nature, and familial connections. She is originally from New Jersey but lives in Houston because the East Coast no longer has summers.

Headshot: Alicia Alcantara-Narrea

Photo Credit: Staff