Chapter 27 Rachel
Currently Playing: More Than a Woman by The Bee Gees
***
“Adam.” I huffed out a heavy breath. “I can’t keep…going.”
“You’ve got it, honey. You can handle it.”
“It’s…too…much.”
“You know what you’re doing.”
I halted my sprint halfway up the hill, my thighs burning with a deep fire and my chest heaving. Adam paused alongside me, chest certainly not heaving. Our eyes locked, and amusement flashed across his face. My lips curled.
“I just heard it.” I huffed a laugh but then winced because my breath was not a commodity to be wasted on crude fifteen-year-old-boy jokes.
At what point did you get the so-called ‘runners high’? This was my fifth day of running with Adam. Each day, he tacked on an extra turn down the road, or he would make me walk up and down his driveway until we hit the goal that he tracked on his fitness watch. Five days, and I felt like my legs belonged in a bowl of blue raspberry Jell-O rather than attached to my body. If I was going to be any type of high, it was going to be from the sheer amount of extra strength ibuprofen I would be popping like candy tonight.
If it was only the exhaustion in my legs, that would be one thing. If it was just the deep ache in muscles that caused me to let out the most pathetic whimpers when I got out of bed in the morning, then I could probably manage to finish this thing.
But it was the breathing that did me in. Fighting to simply fill my body with its required level of oxygen while not getting so lightheaded I’d tell my friend/husband that short shorts were made for legs like his was where I drew the line.
Adam said it was a mental game, more so than physical. He said it was your mind telling your body that you can’t push any further, and when you do, you suddenly become aware that you are capable of more than binge watching three days’ worth of your favorite sitcom in only five hours. His words, not mine.
“Let’s talk about something.” He continued his light jog, but I could see he was itching to sprint, like his long legs were caught up in a tiny box next to mine. He’d slowed his pace for me.
What I wanted to talk about was the fact that this man had kissed me last night with enough passion to burn the entire house down. He’d lifted me up onto his countertop and had set me down with a brisk good night before going to his room and locking the door. I knew it was locked because about an hour later, when I eventually peeled myself off the counter, I checked to see if he was still awake and wanted to explain further what his mouth was doing touching my mouth in a way that was kind of concerning for feminism.
Our homemade pasta never saw a boiling pot. Instead, I freaked out and dumped the entire thing into the trash and told myself I would make more when I wasn’t replaying a kiss in my head over and over and listening to my high school self’s in the mood playlist.
Adam cleared his throat. “To get your mind off it.”
It was a crime that he could get a sentence out without a hint of whining.
“Let’s not talk at all,” I wheezed.
“Has your mom tried to call you again?”
I could hear her shrill voice now, shouting about divorce rates and warning that a man like Adam isn’t for me. Pregnant. I wanted to scoff, of course she would assume that. In her mind, no one would marry for the sake of love and happiness. Not that that was what this was. But it did make you wonder how she possibly could have managed to get with my dad, who was practically a tattooed, burly version of a butterfly.
“No.” We slowed our pace downhill so I could catch my breath. “I don’t plan on answering if she does. She can email me all the menacing thoughts that brew in her Wicked Witch of The 90210 brain.”
Adam sniffed in amusement. We walked in comfortable silence for a moment. The sun was just peeking over the hilltops behind the tall buildings in the distance. Distant sounds of traffic and construction lulled in the background, but closer to us, was my newest running playlist. It mostly consisted of my favorite early 2000s hits that Adam claimed showed my true age. The smell of dew on the grasses of houses around us coincided with fresh, clean air. It felt like being out here was a reset to your senses when you slowed down. Made you pay attention to the little things. A dog digging an escape under a white picket fence. A car starting. A man in a suit walking to it to go to work. Adam’s consistent breathing. Adam’s shorts swishing with every steady step. Adam’s arms swaying front and back. Adam.
“And your dad?” He knocked into our silence. “Does he remember you telling him everything?”
“Surprisingly, yes.” It was almost funny, really. The man usually didn’t remember whether he had already eaten breakfast most mornings, so by eleven o’clock, he’d had four bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios. But somehow… “Every time I call or go up there, his first words are ‘Hello, Mrs. Wells.’”
Adam smiled at the ground at that.
“It’s like he’s been truly waiting for this for years. Like it was somehow cemented in his brain.”
Not to say it wouldn’t leave again soon. The memories came and went for him, and I wasn’t going to hold him to a standard that required him to strain more than he needed to.
“I’m glad. Maybe he just needed something to hold on to.”
My lips curved. If he was going to grab on to something, me being married to Adam wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Without asking me, because he was a torturous man who enjoyed seeing me breathless, Adam picked up speed as his house began to lift on the horizon. My legs burned with fire, but I kept what he told me before in the forefront of my mind. I wasn’t doing this for health benefits. Though if I suddenly got legs like Simone Biles, I wouldn’t be complaining. I was doing this because Dad couldn’t. It was for him, whether he knew about it or not.
I steadied my pace with his, ignoring the throbbing in the balls of my feet and the sharp ache in my chest as my lungs begged for more air. My body screamed at me to stop, requesting an extra-large beanbag chair and a can of Diet Coke.
“What song are you thinking of?” Adam asked beside me, his eyes focused on me with this tinge of concern.
“What?” I huffed.
“The song you’re thinking of. What is it?”
I considered for a moment as his house looked less and less like a blurry dot. A smile began at my lips, pulling from my chest.
“‘Holding Out For A Hero’ by Bonnie Tyler. But I’m the hero. Just in my training stage. I’m wearing my fighting leathers, and the whole squad is underestimating me. The part of the movie where they have the montage of them working out and drinking egg smoothies, and then in the next scene, they’re jacked and ready to take on the dragon. Or an evil curse or whatever dark thing I have to face at the end of this.”
“I like that.”
My lips curled. “Yeah?”
He nodded. “’S cute.”
My cheeks warmed at that. But it was also the precise moment we were coming around the curve of his driveway, and my whole body was lit in a flame. Adam lifted his wrist, pushing a few buttons on his watch and calculating our mile average.
I grabbed the water bottle I’d left resting by the tire of his covered motorcycle, which he had named Toothless after resisting the nickname for years.
“So how far was today?” I exhaled against the lip of the bottle.
Adam twisted his head back and forth with a squint. “About a third of what you need to do.”
A third? If that was only a third, then just the biking and swimming to work on. That meant I could wrap this up fairly quickly and have time to—
“Of the running portion.” He winced at what must have been some form of relief on my face. “A third of the running. So more like one-ninth of what you need to do.”
I tossed my head back with a groan. “No wonder Dad never did this. This sucks.”
We walked through his front door, taking our shoes off and making sure they were straight before settling on his couch. I could see it bothered him that neither of us showered first, but he had no complaints.
“At least I’m doing it with you.” Adam shrugged.
My eyes scaled his body, from the shorts clinging to his big thighs, up to his chest and shoulders. His height was a natural advantage. His physique was one you could see he worked on, though.
“You could run a marathon tomorrow without even thinking.” I bent over and pressed my thumbs firmly into my calf, raking through the shooting pains. “So does it really count?”
My amusement turned to a wince as my thumb dug into a particularly sore spot on the higher area of my calf. Adam set down his water and reached for my leg. “Let me see.”
I happily propped it up on his thigh, and his hands got to work. His long fingers pulling and pushing my muscles in all the right places, lighting me up with this sting that somehow felt like the perfect concoction of pleasure and pain. My eyes crossed at some point, my head dipping back to the throw pillow behind me, and a soft groan left my lips. His fingers dug harder.
“How’s the store?” he mumbled, but my mind had a smoke machine inside of it like the beginning of a Fleetwood Mac concert.
“Hmm?”
His legs shifted as he puffed an amused sound. “The record store? How’s it been?”
I smiled with my eyes shut. That was one area of my life that was going swimmingly. It wasn’t how it used to be, of course. That was to be expected when it was anyone other than Arthur owning it. It needed updates. The manager who’d started a couple of weeks ago swore he would get right to it as soon as he could get the funds approved by the new owner. But it was still my place.
“Good.” I scrunched my nose. “Really good. Art came by the other day.”
Adam’s fingers slowed. “Yeah?”
I nodded. “I told him we were going to rip up the floors and find a similar pattern with better quality, and I mentioned the new light fixtures that I showed you too. He said they were too funky, but I think it fits perfectly.”
Ever since he sold the place, Art would pop in about once a month. He never bought anything, but he would walk in and look around like it was a Walmart in a foreign area, where you knew the gist of it but could still easily get confused.
The new manager was a guy from the south side of Philly, but he was cool. He came once a week to check in on things, but for the most part, I had the place to myself. And since the new people had liked the slideshow I made a couple of years back, I managed to convince them to hold more author/artist events.
“Sales seem to be good.” I grinned as my eyes peeked up at Adam, who was focusing in on my legs, back to his pushing and pulling.
He pulled his lower lip into his teeth, biting down on it. I sat up a little, my mind racing back to his lips against mine the previous night. A kiss full of stardust and flour while Karen Carpenter’s sweet, slow voice buzzed in my ear. It felt like he was unthawing me. Slowly and surely, this warmth that started in my chest reached all the way down to my hips where his hands pressed since moving their way up further.
“That’s good, I—”
“Adam.” I interrupted instantly, because thoughts of the record store drifted away from my mind, and his lips were taking the center stage.
“Yes?”
“Yesterday…when you kissed me…”
He looked up at me, eyes dancing across my face, looking for an answer. “Mmm?”
“Did it…” I sighed. This was ridiculous, but I needed to know. “Did it mean something to you?”
His laughter surprised me, and I pulled my feet back into my own area of the couch. I reared my head back. Maybe it was a little more ridiculous than I thought. I had slept in the same bed as the guy. We’d done who knew what in Vegas and the night we met, so was it that unbecoming of me to ask what a simple kiss meant?
Adam reached for my leg again, his hands wrapping around my ankle and yanking me back down the cushion so my calves would rest on his lap again.
“You’re my wife. Yeah, it meant something to me.”
My brain let that soak for a moment. And then two. “Yeah, but I’m, like, your fake wife.”
His hand left my foot and reached for my hand, his thumb brushing against the ring that I had grown so fond of. “Is this ring fake? The papers we signed?” His eyebrows dipped at me. He looked like an artist explaining his final piece before someone to review. As though these were the facts, and he wasn’t going to waver from them. “You’re in my house, on my couch, in my shirt. Is any of that fake?”
Maybe in my mind it was, because I decided in that moment to look around us, as if this were a hallucination. “Well, no.”
“Neither is our marriage, then.”
He said it as if he was entirely sure. Like he was reading the Bill of Rights or instructions on how to make Hamburger Helper. Clear as day, that’s all it was. Nothing left to be argued. His wife, in his house, on his lap.
I sputtered. “Adam, but we’re—” I huffed out an amused breath. “I mean, we’re, you know.” Us, I wanted to say. A completely undefined us that couldn’t be put into one box. And his kissing me the way he did was adding about fifty more boxes to the list.
He dipped his chin. “Explain to me what you think this is.”
I answered before I could think. “An acknowledgment between…” I paused, “…friends to reap benefits of a contractual agreement.”
His lips, still smiling, fell slightly. “Then there you go.”
“But when you kiss me like that, it doesn’t feel like that.”
“What does it feel like, honey?”
Warmth. Like being held by a friend you haven’t seen in years, or like rewatching your comfort movie for the fiftieth time. The last bite of an ice cream cone. The crisp click of a needle on your favorite vinyl.
“Like I’m yours.”
His smile melted over me. “Don’t you think, in some way, you’ve been mine since the night we met?”