Brian took deep pulls of air, concentrating on filling his lower diaphragm and hoping the focus would keep him tethered to the ground. He hadn’t had a running partner since he was a kid in university. He felt buoyant. It was so fun! And Katelyn was a champ. Not as fast as him—or not yet—and not as used to running trails, which was different than treadmill running, but they’d quickly, almost accidentally, fallen into a pattern. He’d resumed his running habit a couple days after his introduction to the creep, as he’d taken to calling Steve in his head. He thought Katelyn might have spotted him running before, but she didn’t comment on it until the morning after their first movie night. He’d been doing a warm down, loping past Spring cabin, sweaty and feeling totally spent, and she’d looked at him longingly. “I used to run.”
He’d stopped in his tracks and jogged on the spot by her porch. “So why don’t you again?”
She shrugged. “The kids, mostly. Once I started using childcare a lot, I wanted to be home with them as much as possible when I wasn’t working. Plus our old apartment had a treadmill that someone left behind. It was like a gift at the time.”
Aisha, who’d been sitting in a lawn chair by the three playing kids, made a shooing motion. “Why don’t you go now? It’ll be good to do a trial run—no pun intended.”
Brian groaned at Aisha’s joke, but Katelyn found it funny and her eyes squinted in the cutest way. Then she’d slapped her hands on her thighs. “Okay, I will.”
And the rest, as they say, was history. They’d been running together almost every day since, with Brian warming up and running full out for twenty minutes or so before she joined in. He was already trying to figure out how to keep her running with him after she returned to work.
He liked their movie nights, but he loved their runs under the protective evergreen canopy in the forest around River’s Sigh. The time they spent exploring the soft duff trails was practically the only time Brian enjoyed peace of mind and freedom from depressing thoughts, since returning to Greenridge and finding his home destroyed.
And on that note, as if sensing the shadow that crossed his thoughts, Katelyn glanced over her shoulder at him. Her face was dewy with perspiration and she was radiant, like she herself was a source of light and life—
He shook his head at himself just as she asked, “So how did it go?”
“With?”
“You know, lunch with your mom and everything.”
He did know, and what’s more, he had no desire to pretend that he didn’t. Shortly after his initial phone call with his mother, he’d ended up spilling everything to Katelyn: how depressed and angry his parents’ relationship made him in general, how torn he felt about his mom, but how he’d ended up telling her he wouldn’t represent her, even though it made him feel like he was letting her down. The disclosure had surprised him by feeling infinitely right, not scaldingly embarrassing. There was something he hadn’t told Katelyn, however. Not because he was holding back, but because it hadn’t come up.
“About that, funny thing. We ending up postponing our lunch date.”
“Oh, yeah?” She sounded interested, but not pushy. An unfamiliar feeling wrapped around him: kinship. He was used to women reacting to him—or to who they thought he was, anyway. Katelyn seemed to respond to who he actually was, a subtle but critical difference. And when they were outside like this, working hard together, but also completely focused on their own independent progress, it felt natural to share things he usually kept bottled up.
“When you see her in person, are you going to stick to your decision?”
Brian raised his eyebrows and gave a small shrug without breaking his stride.
Katelyn glanced over and caught his response. Her pace didn’t slow either. “I was thinking about all this the other night, avoiding my own problems, you know?”
Brian laughed. “It’s always much more fun.”
“Right?”
“And what did you come up with?”
“I don’t know, not much. Just that I’m kind of furious at your mom, even though I get where she’s coming from.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. It’s tempting because you get so lonely, but no parent should ask their kids to intervene in their relationship. They’re kids, no matter how old they are. It’s not their job.”
Katelyn was breathing a bit heavily now, as if emotional exertion was far more winding than anything physical you could throw at her. Brian totally related.
Her voice was soft when she spoke again. “You try to take care of people, Brian, but who takes care of you?”
The question caught him off guard. “Who takes care of you?” he shot back.
“Me. I take care of myself, or I try to.”
“Exactly.”
They both stopped running for a moment and studied each other.
After a few beats of silence, Katelyn said, “Game to pick up the pace?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
They pounded out another two kilometers or so. Any time Brian wondered if he should inch ahead, it was like Katelyn sensed his thoughts and lengthened her stride just that little bit. She was a petite, like, what? Five foot two or three, maybe, so keeping up with him—not to mention leading—had to give her a pretty good workout.
“Don’t your muscles ache when we’re finished?” he puffed.
She laughed breathily. “The first couple days it was like they were on fire. It was awesome.”
He laughed and slowed to a jog and then to a walk as they neared a jade green creek. It was moving hard and fast, just like they had been, and was close to overflowing its banks because of spring runoff. Katelyn stopped too, and using a large jutting rock as a stool, she propped a foot and leaned to stretch her hamstring, then did the same with the other leg. Her purple T-shirt was soaked to the point of transparency, the outline of her racer back bra clearly visible and somehow as erotic as any daring lingerie. Faded block letters on the shirt’s front read “I run like a girl.”
“Great T.”
She glanced down, as if to remind herself what she was wearing, then shot him a dubious look, like she suspected he was mocking her. “You think?”
He nodded. “I do. You’re kick ass fast and you never get tired.”
She made a huffing sound that could have been a held back laugh, but maybe wasn’t, maybe was something different altogether. Then she checked her wristwatch—she and he might be the only people in the world who still wore those, he thought—and exhaled explosively. “We should get back.”
“Okay. Who should lead the way home?”
She hesitated only a second. “Whoever’s not it!”
She smacked his arm, making it clear he was the “it” in question and bolted, jumping a fallen log like a deer and getting a good lead.
Brian sprinted after her, but the energy he’d expended before she’d joined him showed. Try as he might, he didn’t catch her until they broke through the tree line that opened into a grassy clearing that edged Jo and Callum’s house and the guest hall and office.
“Yes!” Katelyn fist pumped the air.
The sun, as if responding to her celebration, burst from behind an ominous black cloud. Suddenly the weather was doing the weird thing it sometimes did in their coastal-influenced rainforest. The sun smiled down hot and brilliant, while rain simultaneously poured on their upturned faces.
Without a thought, Brian swooped Katelyn up by her small waist and swung her around in a circle, reveling in the sensation of her sinuous muscles beneath his hands. “And the winner is!” he announced. “Kate . . . by a cheating landside.”
She shrieked with unsuppressed glee—but then the sound died in her throat and something in her face clenched. Brian set her down at once. Her head bowed, and she crossed her arms tightly over her ribcage, beneath her breasts, like she was trying to protect herself from a blow. A rock of apprehension formed in Brian’s stomach. He turned to face the same direction she was staring.
Callum had descended the three wide stairs from the office’s large cedar deck. It was obvious he’d witnessed their antics from across the expanse of green lawn. His eyes flickered over Katelyn, then fixed on Brian, and he shook his head, but looked amused. It wasn’t Callum’s obvious misinterpretation about what he’d seen that increased the weight lodged in Brian’s gut, however. It was Steve, standing behind Callum, stone-jawed and ice-eyed, glaring at Katelyn as if Brian wasn’t even there.