The only quickie he’d had in forever...
A smattering of texts later and he found his running club, a group of guys all lean and lanky like him who were less a “club” and more just a bunch of individuals too socially stunted to do more than run together and—on rare occasions, now that more of the guys had kids—grab a smoothie after. No beer for this crowd. Everyone ate clean, lived clean, and focused on purifying the soul by keeping the body as whole and energized as possible.
They were kind of boring, now that he thought about it.
So are you, Dylan’s voice whispered in his head as the race began and the throng of runners shuffled out of the starting line. Being part of a mega-organism made up of individuals was exactly what Mike needed right now. No thoughts. No feelings. No decisions. No deliberations.
Just the thump-thump, thump-thump of rubber soles on concrete and the unremitting thousand-mile stare of the six-plus miles ahead of him that he could whip off in under half an hour.
Blissfully not thinking.
Or feeling.
Or so he told himself. Jill used to run with him, more often than not. It was how they bonded without talking, without the endless babble of words that never seemed to come close to explaining how his soul screamed into the void of the world. Mike wasn’t good with words. He expressed himself in movement. Acts of kindness and love. In deliberation and in being a presence, someone who was just there when you needed them.
For most people, that wasn’t enough. Being there was inadequate. Then again, most people were never fully present. In the rush rush rush of daily life, where being busy was like a badge to shine every day, Mike’s friends and acquaintances seemed to consider his silence to be a deficit, as if he were somehow lesser because he didn’t express himself the same way they did.
On the slopes, in a race, though—and he sang. Motion was his language, and as the runners thinned out, each taking the pace they had decided for themselves, he pulled away from the pack. In any given race he would start out strong, trying to meter out his body’s reserves but failing. Impulse control with the blood pounding through him and the heady rush of endorphins was damn near impossible.
He’d pull back only later, when it was clear he needed to, and even then it would be a grudging acknowledgement that being the size of a small telephone pole meant other runners were faster. Built for this. He wasn’t.
In body, at least. In spirit, he was the king.
Intrusive thoughts slammed through his mind as he ran, images of Jill as she sat in the oncologist’s office, flanked by him and Dylan, the news indescribably bad. How she’d sobbed into his chest until his t-shirt was so soaked a tiny cut on his chest had burned from the salt of her tears. Her call to her parents, gut-wrenchingly real, and their desire that she fly home and let them find the best specialists in the world. The moment her hair began to fall out and how she’d shaved it, laughing as long strands of hair had fallen to the floor like autumn leaves.
How he’d shaved his head in solidarity, Dylan unable to join him because of a modeling contract. How Mike had felt a bond there with Jill, his head a big fucking dare to the world.
Don’t say a word.
Not one fucking word.
Something close to tears threatened to pour out of the back of his throat, thick and viscous, not quite salty. Like vinegar, it left a bitter taste, like words he’d swallowed over the years coming back to life, tickling and teasing, tormenting and taking over.
“You okay?” a runner to his right grunted, not breaking pace. “Get an orange.” Shelly. That was Shelly from work, one of the young women who worked at the resort’s offices. He’d forgotten she said she was running here. A sprinkling of people from the ski resort where he worked as a ski instructor were here, unidentifiable right now in the mass of the crowd.
Orange. His stomach growled at the thought, steady and solid. Food. Calories. Liquids. Hydration. The body was an amazing thing, really. While his mind was damn near impossible to tame, wild and wry, wily and weird, his body was a haven. Try as he may, he couldn’t fool it. Wiser than the mind, the body knew exactly when to complain, when to boycott, when to insist.
A volunteer stepped forward with a quarter of an orange in a wax-covered cup, his hands grasping it hard, other hand waved in a lame attempt at a “thank you.” He shoved the flesh of the juicy citrus against his parched tongue, reveling in the sinfully sweet burst of flavor, the sheer fact that something so tasty even existed like rocket fuel for his legs.
