Chapter Five
It wasn't a disaster on paper, but his final eight hundred meters had been mechanical, his stride ragged and defensive.
Coach Miller hadn't yelled on the bus ride back.
He had just marked the splits down in his blue spiral notebook, folded the cover shut, and looked out the window at the highway mile markers.
That silence was worse than a chewing-out.
By the end of the week, the feeling in Lucas's chest hadn't drained. It had set into something hard and sour, lodged right behind his ribs.
On Friday evening, he sat on the edge of Maya’s low futon, staring at the blue glow of her television.
The sound was turned down to a low hum, some streaming comedy neither of them was actually watching.
The air in her small studio smelled of peppermint tea and the vanilla wax melt bubbling on her desk.
"You've barely touched the takeout," Maya said.
She was sitting cross-legged next to him, wearing an oversized gray crewneck and woolen socks, a plastic container of cold pad thai balanced on her knees.
"Ate before I came over," Lucas lied. He picked up his wooden chopsticks, moved a slice of bell pepper across the carton, and set them down on the napkin.
"Right." She set her container on the coffee table. The wood gave a hollow click. She shifted closer, her hip pressing against his thigh through his track pants. "You haven't really said ten words since you walked in."
"Just tired. We’re bumping mileage tomorrow morning. Miller wants twenty before lunch."
"You're always running, Luke."
Her voice wasn't angry, just tired. She reached out, her fingers resting lightly against the back of his neck.
Her skin was soft, warm, smelling faintly of cocoa butter.
Lucas didn't move away, but every muscle along his spine locked up like iron cable. Her touch was completely gentle—the kind of touch he’d spent the last two years thinking was normal, the kind that was supposed to make a guy lean back, pull a girl into his lap, and forget about track practice for an hour.
It did nothing.
His skin felt numb, like dead leather beneath her palm. There was no spark, no sudden hitch in his breath, no rush of heat pooling in his gut. It was just pressure. Just a hand on a tendon.
Inside his head, unbidden and vicious, came the ghost of a different grip—thick, blunt fingers digging into his waist hard enough to leave yellowing bruises, a rough palm shoving him against wet pine bark, and a low voice scraping against his ear in the dark: Look at me.
Lucas flinched, his shoulder jerking before he could stop it.
Maya pulled her hand back as if she’d touched a hot stove. Her brow pulled together, her eyes flicking over his face.
"Sorry," Lucas mumbled, the word tasting like lead. He rubbed his collarbone with his thumb, staring at the carpet between his sneakers. "Pinched a nerve during mobility drills yesterday. Upper trap's tight."
"Lucas, what's going on with you?"
"Nothing. Honestly. Just meet stress."
"You've been weird since the regional invite," she said, leaning her elbows on her knees. She picked at a loose thread on the cuff of her sleeve. "You're here, but you're not really here. Every time I try to talk to you, you're a thousand miles away."
"I'm right here, Maya."
"Are you?" She looked at him, searching his eyes for something he knew wasn't there anymore. "Because it feels like you're just waiting for an excuse to leave."
He wanted to reach out. He wanted to pull her in, kiss her jaw, and prove to both of them that everything was fine—that he was still Lucas Vance, the disciplined, straight-edged distance captain who had his life plotted out in four-minute increments.
He couldn't do it. His hands stayed flat on his knees, heavy and useless. The idea of kissing her made his throat tighten with a suffocating, clawing claustrophobia.
"I should go," he said quietly. "If I don't get sleep, Miller's gonna pull me from the conference roster."
Maya didn't answer right away. She looked at the television screen, her jaw setting in a quiet, hurt line. "Yeah. Okay. Do what you need to do."
He stood up. The futon cushions expanded behind him with a faint wheeze. He walked to the door, grabbed his windbreaker off the brass coat hook, and let himself out into the carpeted hall.
The lock clicked behind him, heavy and final.
The campus was dead quiet when he cut across the west athletic fields.
A sharp cold front had moved in off the lake, tearing the remaining red leaves off the oaks and sending them skittering across the empty asphalt of the perimeter road. The wind carried the dry, metallic bite of oncoming frost.
Lucas didn't go back to Maple Hall.
He didn't even head toward the dorm quad. His feet followed the service road on instinct, moving past the darkened weight facility, past the locked gates of the track, straight toward the unlit boundary where the street lamps ended.
He told himself he was just running off the tension. He told himself he was going to turn around at the gravel lot, step onto the grass, and head back to his desk to review split sheets until dawn.
He stopped at the rusted steel chain.
The yellow sign was barely visible in the dark: PARK CLOSED DUSK TO DAWN.
His heart was hammering against his ribs, not with the clean, steady rhythm of an athlete at pace, but with an ugly, jagged thud that made his ears ring. His palms were sweating inside his jacket pockets despite the freezing wind.
It was an adrenaline fluke, he thought, staring into the pitch-black wall of the Blackwood Pines. He caught me off balance. It was just friction. It didn't mean anything.
If it didn't mean anything, he could turn around right now. He could walk back to room 314, sleep until sunrise, and never think about the smell of sweet cedar or the press of coarse denim against his hips ever again.
Lucas lifted his leg, swung it over the rusted links, and hit the dirt.
The trail was slick with frost, the damp needles crunching faintly under the soles of his training shoes. The canopy closed overhead immediately, blotting out the stars, plunging him into the freezing, breathless dark.
He didn't run. He walked.
Every yard he covered took him further away from the campus, further from Coach Miller's clipboard, further from the life he’d built out of routine and control. The silence in the woods was absolute, broken only by the sound of his own ragged breath and the blood rushing through his head.
When he reached the unmarked cut, his boots stopped moving.
The path down into the hollow was nearly invisible, choked by low briars and saplings. Down in the gully, where the terrain sloped into the natural bowl, there was no light. Just black earth and the outline of the uprooted white pine.
Lucas stood at the ridge, his breath drifting up in pale, trembling clouds.
Part of him prayed the clearing would be empty. If it was empty, the nightmare was over. He could walk back to the road, write it off as an aberration, and force himself back into the mold.
He stepped through the briars.
The thorny stems scraped against his nylon pants with a dry, hissing sound. He ducked under a low pine bough, his boots sinking into the soft loam at the bottom of the hollow.
The cold wind didn't reach down here; the high dirt banks cut off the gusts, leaving the air heavy, still, and freezing.
Lucas took two steps into the clearing and stopped dead.
Sitting on the massive, moss-covered trunk of the fallen pine, leaning forward with his forearms resting on his knees, was Jaxen Cross.
He wasn't wearing his gold track gear. He wore a dark canvas jacket over a gray hooded sweatshirt, black athletic pants, and heavy work boots caked in red clay.
His head was bare, his short dark hair ruffled by the walk in, the faint scar over his right eyebrow catching the dim, milky moonlight filtering through the branches.
Jax didn't look surprised. He didn't scramble to his feet. He just sat on the log, watching Lucas with that same steady, unblinking focus he’d had across the track turf.
Between his boots, a single white plume of smoke drifted up from a crushed cigarette butt, smoldering in the damp needles.
"You took forty minutes longer than I thought you would," Jax said.
The voice was low, gravelly, vibrating straight through the quiet clearing.
Lucas’s throat clamped shut. He stood frozen three yards away, his hands shoved deep into his windbreaker pockets, his fingers trembling against the lining.
"You knew I was coming," Lucas said. The words came out thin, stripped of breath.
Jax straightened slightly, his broad shoulders shifting beneath the heavy canvas jacket. He pushed off the log, his heavy boots hitting the dirt with a dull, final thud.
"You ran like shit in the five-K," Jax said, taking a slow, measured step into the center of the clearing. "You spent half the afternoon looking at the sprint tent instead of the track."
"I didn't—"
"Don't lie to me, Vance." Jax closed the distance, stopping barely an arm's length away.
The heat coming off him was immediate, cutting through the frost like a furnace, carrying that clean scent of cedar and heated skin that had lived in Lucas's head for six straight days.
Jax looked down at him, his gaze dropping to the front of Lucas's jacket.
"You didn't walk two miles into the freezing woods at midnight to talk about your splits. "