Chapter 18 – Waylon
chapter
eighteen
Waylon
Just how many times can a guy jerk off to the memory of one kiss?
Was that a real question?
I got to the trail first because I hadn’t slept a single goddamn minute.
I’d gone home, stood in the shower for twenty minutes with the water too hot, and replayed the kiss over and over like my brain had decided it was the only thing worth thinking about for the rest of my life.
I kept thinking about the sound she made when my tongue touched hers, the way her fingers had fisted in my shirt and pulled, and the catch in her breath right before she tilted her face up and the whole world narrowed down to her mouth and the dark and the warm weight of her jaw in my hand.
I’d gotten hard in the shower thinking about it. Then again lying in bed staring at the ceiling. A third time after I rolled over and caught the phantom scent of shea butter on my pillowcase. I was going to keep replaying it whether I wanted to or not.
Three times, Johnson. Each time, my fucking dick still refused to go down.
So yeah, I was at the trailhead early. I told myself it wasn’t because I was anxious or because I needed to see her, and that the air was just cleaner before sunrise. I was a goddamn liar.
She came around the bend from Hadley Hall, and I watched her spot me from thirty yards out. There was a half-second stutter in her stride, just long enough to tell me she’d thought about not coming, and that she’d come anyway.
Points for you.
She made her face go neutral and kept walking.
She had the hat on. My Tigers hat, pulled down over her twists, the brim slightly bent from days of hard use. My chest went tight, and I told myself to knock it off.
“What are you doing?”
“Stop ruining the moment, Flash.”
I took out the thermos and cups and handed her one. She took it in both hands and looked at me.
“What is this?”
“Latte.” I pulled out the egg-and-avocado sandwich I’d made her and handed it over. As soon as I did, her stomach rumbled.
“You brought me breakfast?”
“Well, I got the impression you don’t eat breakfast. Something you said the other day. So I figured…”
She looked down at the cup and the sandwich. Then at me. “Waylon—”
“Drink the coffee, Flash.”
She shook her head, but she was fighting the smile again, and she was losing again, and seeing it made my chest go tight.
We sat in the grass near the crest. She pulled her knees up and held the cup against her sternum, and the sky was going amber and pink over the east end of campus. The lake caught the early light on its far edge. The fieldhouse was a dark shape below us. The academic buildings were still quiet.
I should have been looking at the view. I was looking at her.
You have got it so damn bad.
“I used to get up early just to run when I was in high school,” she said.
“Not for the sunrise. Just to have the road to myself.” She turned the coffee cup slowly in her hands.
“Then sophomore year, I watched Gabby Thomas run, and something in my brain just broke loose. I was good, but I just wanted to grind.”
She said it like she was telling me about a song she liked, not like it was the most important thing she’d ever told me. “The way she moved. Like she was making the track her bitch. Like every person watching her was lucky and she knew it.”
“I bet you were incredible,” I said. She laughed. “You don’t know that. For all you know, I could be terrible.”
There she was, the version of her she didn’t let out around Marcus, the one with fire in her.
“And you thought,” I said, “that’s going to be me.”
She cut her eyes sideways. “I thought, I want to run like that. Like I’m owed something.” She paused. “I don’t know that I ever figured out how.”
“You figured it out.”
“How would you know?”
“Because when you’re running, I don’t know, you look free. Like you’re having fun.”
She went quiet. The light caught the angle of her face, and I gave up pretending I wasn’t staring, because I was tired of pretending and because the way she looked right now, golden and still, was not something I could look away from even if I wanted to.
She must have felt my eyes on her because she turned and caught me dead.
For about two seconds, neither of us breathed.
The sunrise made her skin glow, and I was sitting close enough to count the tiny braids at her temple and see the pulse jumping at the base of her throat.
I watched her realize all of it at once, the coffee, the sandwich, the hill at dawn with a boy who wasn’t her boyfriend, and the look on my face that I wasn’t even trying to hide.
Then she shut it all down, fast.
She set the cup in the grass and stood like the hill was on fire. “We should run.”
“We should talk about it.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Right. Because two people kissing in the dark while locked in a tutoring center happens every day.”
Her jaw tightened. “It was a mistake.” She brushed grass off her leggings and started stretching her hamstrings like she hadn’t just spent the last ten minutes telling me about Gabby Thomas and showing me the realest version of herself, and now she needed to stuff it back in the box before I got any ideas. It was too late for that.
I stood too, slower. “It wasn’t a mistake.” Couldn’t lie, that stung a little.
“It was a mistake,” she said again, harder, like repeating it would make it stick. “I have a boyfriend, Waylon.”
There it was. Boyfriend. Like Marcus Kane had ever earned that word, or like anything he did to her counted as a relationship and not a hostage situation.
I should have let it go. Should have nodded and said you’re right and laced up my shoes and run beside her in silence and gone home and added it to the growing pile of shit I was pretending not to feel.
Instead, I said, “You kissed me back.”
She stopped stretching. Her whole body went rigid. “I didn’t—”
“Honey.” I kept my voice easy, almost bored. “You kissed me. Your fists were in my shirt. You pulled me closer. I remember, because I haven’t been able to think about anything else since last night, so I’ve had plenty of time to mentally review the footage.”
She chose deflection over answering. “Why did you kiss me?”
“Why did you kiss me back?”
Her eyes flashed. Good. Angry Josie was better than shut-down Josie. Angry meant she was still in there somewhere, behind the wall she was putting up.
“You’re delusional.”
“It’s okay. I know I’m cute.”
“You are not cute.”
“You’re right, I’m devastating. Drink your coffee.”
“I’m not drinking your coffee. Nothing happened. You need to understand that nothing happened.”
“Okay.” I picked up the thermos, screwed the cap on, and took my time with it.
“Nothing happened. You don’t like me. The kiss was a mistake.
You have a boyfriend.” I looked at her and let that sit for a second.
“When you figure out who that boyfriend actually is, let me know. I might still be around… Maybe not.”
For a second, she looked hurt, and then it was gone. If I hadn’t been staring at her, which I always was, I would’ve missed it.
“I don’t even like you,” she said, but her voice hitched on the last word, and we both heard it.
“Yeah, you do.” I stepped closer, just enough that I could smell the shea butter and the coffee and see the way her breathing had changed. “You like me so much it’s eating you alive, Flash. And right now, if you’re feeling what I’m feeling, you’re still thinking about how I taste.”
She didn’t back up. Her chin came up, and her eyes burned into mine, and I could feel the heat coming off her from a foot away.
I let her have all of it, the anger and the denial and the effort of pretending that what happened between us in the dark was nothing.
Then I grinned. “Now will you stop bullshitting and run, Flash?”
“Stop calling me Flash.”
“Make me.”
I took off down the slope without looking back, at a pace that was about ten percent faster than smart. I let my legs eat up the trail and the cool air fill my lungs. Somewhere behind me, I heard her feet on the dirt, closing fast.
She caught me on the flat, pulled alongside, and didn’t say a word. Her stride was longer than it should’ve been for her height, and she had a gear I hadn’t seen before. Her arms pumped tight, elbows sharp, and her face had the same expression she’d had talking about Gabby Thomas.
We ran side by side in the gray light. Sprinklers clicked on across the north lawn.
A maintenance cart hummed somewhere past the library.
She pushed the pace, and I matched her. She pushed harder, and I matched her again.
On the hill past the science building, she surged ahead, and I let her go—partly because watching Josie run from behind was a religious experience I was not above admitting to, and partly because she was genuinely fucking fast and I wasn’t sure I could keep up if I tried.
She crested the hill and looked back.
I caught up. My lungs were screaming, and my quads were on fire, but I would have run another ten miles if she had asked me to. I would have run off a goddamn cliff.
Get a grip, Johnson.
“Your mom,” she said after a stretch of quiet, both of us breathing hard. “You talk about her a lot.”
I hadn’t realized that. “Do I? I hadn’t realized. She’s pretty cool, I guess.”
“Tell me about her.”
I thought about it. She was letting me in slowly and grudgingly, like it cost her something and she’d regret it later and was doing it anyway.
“She’s a resident. ER. Works nights. Smartest person I’ve ever met, and she’d kill me for telling you she’s tired, but she’s tired.
She put herself through med school while raising me by herself.
” I kept my eyes on the trail. “My dad’s an asshole of the highest order.
She left him when I was a kid. End of story. ”
She looked at me the way she had in the tutoring center before the power went out, like she could see right through the easy grin.
“How can that be the end of the story.”
I didn’t want to tell her that I hated talking about my piece of shit sperm doner. “It’s the end I’m telling.”
She didn’t push. She just ran beside me and let it be quiet, and I liked her for that.
I liked her for a lot of things. I liked the way she held the coffee cup against her chest like it was something precious, and the way she said Gabby Thomas’s name like she was talking about God.
I liked her in a way that was going to ruin me, and I was running straight at it anyway.
When we looped back to the trailhead, she stopped, hands on her knees, breathing hard. I pulled up next to her and tried to look like I wasn’t dying. I was absolutely dying.
She straightened, wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, and looked at me with those dark eyes, and it hit me like a check into the boards.
“Same time tomorrow?” I said.
“Maybe.”
“Bring the hat.”
“It’s my hat now.”
“That’s what I said.”
She shook her head and started walking backward toward Hadley. Right before she turned, the corner of her mouth twitched, the smallest hint of a smile she’d rather die than let me see. I saw it anyway.
I stood there like an idiot for a full thirty seconds after she disappeared around the building, heart hammering, legs wrecked, coffee gone, the image of her running in my hat burned in behind my eyes.
She’d told me she didn’t like me, and I was standing in an empty parking lot at six in the morning grinning like I’d won the fucking lottery.
You are so fucked, Johnson.
Yeah. I really was.