“I was running,” I say, shrugging, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“Since when do you run?” He’s all shadows and sexy mouth and quirking eyebrows and proud nose and it is distracting. Especially when I’m trying to answer such a simple but impossible question.
“You don’t know everything about me,” I say, and I’m glad that I’ve stopped panting and can form a sentence without sounding like I’m about to pass out.
He’s thinking so loudly I can practically hear the gears in his brain whirling like the inside of a clock, trying to figure out what’s going on. “He’s not dead,” he says so quietly I almost don’t hear him.
“I know that,” I say, and my voice comes out raspy. So much for not sounding like I’m dying. My lungs feel like they’re about to explode, and I’m sure Aaron can hear my heart pounding away like the hooves of a thoroughbred about to win the Kentucky Derby.
He nods and puts his hand up to his chin, pondering, and he looks so much like that sculpture The Thinker, and in all the years I’ve known him I don’t know if he’s ever looked more adorable.
“How long has this been happening?” he asks.
“You mean how long have I been running?”
“Yeah.”
“A few weeks. After the accident.”
“Why are you wearing … that?”
I look down at the jersey. When I was grabbing it in the bedroom, it didn’t seem strange, but now, out here, with Aaron, it seems … weird. More than weird. Borderline deranged. Obsessed.
“I mean, you look good in it, better than Marcus does,” says Aaron, and there’s a hint of playfulness looped around his words, like the frosting on the edges of a gingerbread house.
“Don’t tell him that,” I say, and as soon as the words are out of my mouth they fall to the ground and I wish I could pick them up and swallow them because they are exactly the wrong thing to say.
“I wish I could,” he says, and there’s no sugar in his voice now. Just sorrow.
“Yeah. I know,” I say, and it is the most inadequate response in the world. It doesn’t come close to how much I wish I could tell Marcus everything, anything right now. But there isn’t anything else I can say.
I don’t get cold when I run so I don’t have a coat, but we’ve been standing here for several minutes now and the night air, my earlier lover, must be jealous of Aaron because it’s giving me the cold shoulder and chilling the film of sweat all over my face and neck and arms and legs. I shiver.
Aaron pulls off his sweatshirt, and as he does I see a wide expanse of dark skin above his shorts, and it looks like it was molded by a master sculptor, which makes sense because that’s what his face looks like, and I’m so distracted by that hint of skin I almost don’t notice him press the sweatshirt into my arms.
“Here,” he says.
“I’m all right,” I say, even as my nipples (my nipples!) poke out to declare that they are cold and would appreciate the sweatshirt. I doubt Aaron is looking at my nipples, though.
I don’t know if I want him to look or not.
I’m so embarrassed by my rapid spiraling of thoughts that I pull the sweatshirt on, mostly to hide my face, because I’m scared he’ll be able to read my thoughts there. And to hide my stupid nipples.
“Wing.” He wraps his arms around himself and I almost regret taking his sweatshirt, except for the fact that I love how it feels against my skin and how it smells and the fact that I’m wearing his sweatshirt. “What’s going on?”
I want to tell him everything: How my dragon and my lioness visited me the night of the accident and I followed them outside and ever since then I can’t stand to be indoors, all I want is to be out, running, where it is just me and the sky and the feeling of my feet hitting the ground. I want to tell him that I’m doing it for Marcus, because I’m sure somehow my running is keeping Marcus alive, that my footsteps are making his heart beat, way more than the machines he’s linked up to. I want to tell him that when I run I don’t see the giant numbers that are getting bigger and bigger with every hospital bill, every legal fee. I want to tell him that when I run, I run away from all that and I’m free. Running was a secret inside myself that I didn’t even know was there, and now that I’ve found it I don’t ever want to let it go.
I don’t tell him any of that. Instead, I tug off Aaron’s sweatshirt, making sure to hold down the football jersey underneath so it doesn’t ride up, toss it on the grass, and look him straight in the eye. “How about I show you?”
CHAPTER 18
I don’t think. I don’t even breathe. I let my body take over and I soar. I can sense Aaron behind me, and I wish I had eyes in the back of my head to see his expression, to see his face as I glide along in front of him.
“Wing!”
I slow down the tiniest fraction, and it takes almost more effort to slow than it does to speed up, and glance over my shoulder.