Chapter 12
Twelve
December, Two Years Ago
Wyatt
Reese and I may be serious, but I’m not dead.
That’s why, as hard as I’m trying not to notice the woman in front of me at the starting line of the Jingle Bell Trot, it’s proving impossible.
Thick, bitable thighs? Check. A gloriously round ass? Check. Nice tits? Impossible to say since she hasn’t turned around, but my imagination can fill in the blanks just fine. This woman is exactly my type, right down to her swinging ponytail.
I’m about to force my eyes away, out of respect for her and Reese both, when Ms. Exactly-My-Type shuffles back a step and that perfect ass is suddenly making contact with my groin.
“Oh, sorry!” She exclaims, spinning around, and all my floaty, happy thoughts of running behind her for the next thirty minutes implode.
Exactly my type? More like exactly my type of pain in the ass.
“For fuck’s sake,” CJ growls. “Why am I even surprised? Go run someplace else, Wyatt. I was here first.”
I pointedly glance to the left, then to the right, where we’re surrounded by a disorganized mass of humanity in race bibs, running shoes, and an eye-popping collection of festive accessories.
From Santa hats to antler headbands to tiny, battery-powered holiday lights wrapped around torsos of various sizes, everyone around us is festive as fuck and ready to run a 5K.
“I don’t think order of arrival matters,” I tell her.
She stomps her Nike-clad foot. “Just go a few rows back!”
I glance behind me, pretend to think about it for a bit, then turn back and say, “Nah.”
“You’re a child,” she snaps, waving her arm and almost clocking the pair of wiry octogenarians in matching snowman sweatshirts who’ve been stretching their hamstrings like they’re going to outrun all of us. “Fine. Looks like I’ll be setting a personal best time just to get away from you.”
Well, that can’t go unanswered. I move to stand next to her, enjoying my height advantage as I peer down at her. “You think you can kick my ass, Parrish?” I roll out the most condescending laugh I can muster, and it has exactly the effect I hoped. CJ actually quivers with rage.
“You’re such an asshole,” she says as she starts to circle me. “And what are you wearing?”
“My sister’s tutu from a ballet recital a few years ago,” I say matter-of-factly. “What are you doing?”
“Checking for weapons.”
I hold my arms straight out, indulging her paranoia. “If I’d known you’d be running next to me today, I’d have packed all of my knives and grenad—hey!”
CJ smirks up at me from where she’s just run her hands along my sides in a full pat-down. She even feels underneath the elastic on the fluffy white skirt digging into my waist.
“Can’t be too careful,” she says. “I’m here without my pepper spray.”
“I’m sure you’ll be able to improvise.”
We’re standing chest to chest now, and my blood’s pumping so hard at the challenge in her eyes that I miss the starter pistol.
So does she. The crowd around us surges forward, eager to get the race underway, and I have to plant my feet against the onslaught of runners at my back that threaten to knock us around like billiard balls.
But I find I can’t move a muscle as CJ blinks up at me and darts out her tongue to wet those soft, pink lips.
“Wyatt?” she whispers.
Five years fall away in a blink, and I’m thrown back to that night. The mistletoe, the laughter, the dive bar, the gaudy holiday lights. My hand on her thigh under the cracked linoleum table. I have to clear my throat before I can respond with a raspy, “Yeah?”
The dreamy expression on her face clears as she crouches and yanks the laces on my shoes free, first the left, then the right.
“See ya at the finish line, chump!” she yells over her shoulder as she vanishes into the crowd with a cackle.
Instead of responding with suave decisiveness and swift retribution, I stare down at my trailing shoelaces, stammering out an increasingly agitated, “What… what the… what the fuck, CJ?”
I kneel, batting aside the sparkly layers of Becks’s too-tight tutu, and jerk the offending laces into place, double-knotting them just to be safe. Then I flat out sprint.
I’m not much of a runner outside of light cardio at the gym post-weightlifting.
But I lost a bet with Gabe at Golfmas last December when the fucker landed a drunk hole-in-one that I insisted he’d never in a million years make.
At the time, I thought my punishment would be running sixteen thousand four hundred and four feet in Beaucoeur’s annual holiday race wearing an outfit of Gabe’s choosing.
Instead, my punishment is sprinting the first leg of those sixteen thousand four hundred and four feet in Beaucoeur’s annual holiday race wearing an outfit of Gabe’s choosing while my eyes scan the sea of heads bobbing around me in search of my own personal Krampus.
My sides are heaving by the time I spot CJ’s ponytail bouncing ahead of me. My first instinct is to hang back and try to slow my breathing before joining her. But dignity’s never really an option with her, so I pick up speed again and fall into pace beside her.
Her double take is priceless, as is her irritation.
“Pretty sad,” I pant out. “Can’t beat me, so you have to cheat.”
“Oh my god, why can’t you just be normal and ignore me?” she pants back. “I ignore so many people I don’t like!”
“Like you ignore me?”
“You know, a better man would admit that he’s wrong.”
“I did, as I recall.” I’m sure I could get in front and beat her to the finish line, but for now, I’m content to run next to her, exchanging increasingly breathless insults. In fact, now that we’re running side by side, I even shorten my strides to accommodate her little legs.
She shoots me a hateful glance. “When have you acknowledged any wrongdoing, ever?”
“Let’s see… I said I was wrong about you.”
Her footsteps pound the pavement a little harder in the wake of my taunt, but she doesn’t react otherwise. Then she throws me for a loop.
“Do me a favor,” she says between breaths. “Ask Reese about the scoring matrix she used for measuring divisional value.”
She still wants to talk about the fucking audit? “Why?” I ask, annoyed that she’s even bringing it up.
“Call it professional curiosity.” Her arms pump at her sides even harder than before, and she starts to pull ahead of me, her breath sawing in and out of her lungs and her words coming in spurts. “Just… ask her. See if… your girlfriend can… walk you through… the methodologies.”
Fuck, the brains on this one, to be able to put one foot in front of the other and still spit out forensic accounting bullshit. But rather than dwell on how smart she is, I give in to the muscles in my legs that are screaming for relief and pull out my easiest ammunition.
“Reese isn’t my girlfriend.”
CJ shoots me a confused look over her shoulder. “What?”
“Not my… my girlfriend,” I huff out. “My fiancée now.”
I’m struggling so hard to run and talk that I don’t react in time when CJ stops dead in her tracks. I barrel into her, sending us both to the pavement in a tangle of limbs.
For a disorienting few seconds, I’m too stunned to react. CJ’s flattened underneath me, her sweat-damp shirt pressed against mine as she tries to suck in a breath.
“You hate me so much,” she wheezes, “that you’re trying to kill me now?”
Other runners detour around us like currents of a river slipping past the big, sweaty, argumentative boulder that is us. “You’re the one who stopped in the middle of a race, you lunatic!”
“Lunatic?” She shifts her hips and wriggles against me, her fingers curling into the neckline of my T-shirt as the flowery scent of her hair invades my lungs.
“Lunatic? You completely ignore the five million obvious clues all around you, but I’m the lunatic?
” She pushes again, her nails digging into the skin of my collarbones. “Get off me, you oaf.”
“Gladly,” I snap, rolling to the side and hauling myself to my feet.
My palms are scraped and my knees fucking hurt from the fall, but I won’t give her the satisfaction of a single wince of pain.
“How is it possible that every time we see each other, it’s an even bigger disaster than the last time? ”
“Because you’re the worst person I know.
” She’s blinking rapidly, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think she was fighting back tears.
But in a flash, she’s back to glaring as she pulls herself into a sitting position and starts to rise.
When she puts weight on her left ankle, she slumps back to the ground, and although she doesn’t make a noise, it’s clear something’s wrong.
“Shit. Are you hurt?”
“No.”
She tilts her head forward, not looking at me as I crouch and eyeball her ankle. “Sprained, probably.” I glance around. “The finish line isn’t far. Can you make it?”
“Yes.” She keeps her eyes fixed on the ground. “Just go finish the stupid race.”
“Are you going to finish the stupid race?”
She tries to stand again and this time can’t hold back the little cry when she puts weight on that same ankle. “Yeah, I’ll finish. Don’t worry about me.” She finally looks up, her face tight with pain. “Just fucking go, Wyatt.”
We’re the only two on the road now, although I suspect a wave of 5K walkers is still to come, ready to trample us on the way to the finish line.
“No way.” I stand and hold out my hand to her. “If I beat you when you can’t even walk, you’ll hold it over my head forever.”
She rolls her eyes. “Forever? Like we even talk that often.”
“We talk all the time!” I bellow. “I run into you like clockwork every December!”
“Then stop following me!” she shouts from the pavement.
“Stop following me! Fuck!” I kneel, and before she can protest—hell, before I can protest—I slide an arm under her knees and another around her back, hoisting her up.