“Good morning to you, too, stranger.” I wrapped my arms around his waist. “Six months is too long,” I said into his chest. He squeezed me tightly.
“You smell like summer,” he said, then put his hands on my arms and stepped back. His gaze traveled over my spandex-clad form. “You look like a runner.”
That was his doing. I had a drawer full of exercise gear based on the list of items he’d suggested. I had put on shorts and a tank top as well as a sports bra, which Sam had embarrassingly included on his list, and one of the cotton thongs Delilah gave me before she left for her mother-daughter European vacation, which he had not included. My hair, now well past my shoulders, was gathered into a thick ponytail high on my head.
“Fake it till you make it, right?”
He hummed and then turned serious and took me through a series of stretches. During my first squat, he stood behind me and put his hands on my hips. I almost tumbled backward with the shock of his grip.
When I was suitably limber, he ran his hand through his hair and went over the plan: “Okay, let’s start with the basics. The most important part of learning to run is . . .” He drifted off, waiting for me to fill in the blank.
“Good shoes?” I guessed, looking down at my new Nikes. He shook his head, disappointed.
“Didn’t you read the couch to 5K article I mailed you?” He’d clipped it from a running magazine, complete with some kind of complicated time and distance chart. I read it . . . once . . . ish.
“The most important part of learning to run is walking,” he said with his hands on his hips. I smothered a giggle. This bossy thing was entirely new and sort of adorable and definitely funny. “So we’ll spend the first week doing a 3K out and back, increasing the distance you spend running each day until you’re running the whole 3K by the end of the week. You’ll take two rest days a week, and by the end of week two, you should be running a full 5K.”
I barely understood a word he’d said, but five kilometers sounded pretty far. “How far do you usually go?”
“To town and back. It’s about 12K.” My jaw dropped. “I worked my way up to it. You will, too.”
“Nope. No way!” I cried. “There are too many hills!”
“Calm down. We’ll take it day by day.” He gestured down the road and started walking. “C’mon. We’ll walk for the first five minutes.” I looked at him dubiously, but picked up my pace to match his.
If my elementary school’s annual track-and-field day of hell hadn’t already made it obvious years ago, it was now: I was not a natural runner. Ten minutes in, I was brushing sweat off my face and trying to ignore the fire in my lungs and thighs.
“Three updates?” Sam asked without a hint of breathlessness.
I scowled. “No talking.”
He slowed his stride after that. At the halfway point, I took my top off, wiped my face with it, and tucked it into the back of my shorts. We walked the last leg of the route, my legs as shaky as a baby deer’s.
“I never knew you were such a sweater,” Sam said when I toweled off with my top again.
“I never knew you were such a masochist.” This running thing was not adorable anymore.
“That writers’ workshop really improved your vocabulary.” I could hear the smirk in his voice. I hit him across the chest.
The Floreks’ drive came before ours, and I turned down it. “I need to jump in the lake, like, right now,” I said, cutting around the house and heading down the hill to the water with Sam beside me, a lopsided grin on his face.
“I don’t know what you find so funny,” I huffed.
“I’m not laughing.” He raised his hands.
I took off my shoes and socks as soon as we reached the dock, then peeled my shorts down and tossed them aside.
“Geez!” Sam cried from behind me. I spun around.
“What?” I snapped just as I realized I was wearing a pink thong and that Sam was staring at my extremely bare ass. I was too hot and pissy to care.
“Problem?” I asked, and his eyes flashed to mine, then down to my bum, and then up to my face again. He muttered a fuck under his breath and looked skyward. He was holding both hands over his crotch. My eyebrows shot up. Not knowing what to do, I ran down the dock and cannonballed into the water, swimming under the surface for as long as I could.
“You coming in?” I hollered back to him when I came up for air, a cocky grin plastered on my face. “The water might cool you off.”