After college, he worked with Fallon as an architect before transferring out of the country all those years ago to build skyscrapers in Dubai.
I was thirteen when he moved abroad, and his baseball cap is all I have left. I traded him my compass for it on his last night in town. Does he still have the compass? I guess he wouldn’t be wearing it. I dip my head down to hide the hat, my cheeks warming with embarrassment.
But I catch myself in the mirror behind the fountain. My hair’s a mess, makeup’s gone, and I’m sweating already. Thankfully, my tired eyes are hidden under the bill of the cap.
No, it’ll be awkward. This isn’t how I imagined seeing him again.
I walk to one of the Pelotons and climb on. Starting a Lanebreak workout, I mute the music and just follow the designated pacing and resistance while I absently read the headlines floating across the bottom of the TV screen above. Through my earbuds I hear barbells clanging and feet pounding the treadmills, and I almost settle into a pace until he passes behind me with a friend.
“Come on, cardio,” his buddy says.
His friend jumps on the treadmill on my left, Lucas taking the one on the other side of his friend. I pedal hard, glancing at them both in the mirror on the wall in front of us. His friend turns his head toward me, his short dark hair falling over his brow. He wears black shorts and a gray, sleeveless T-shirt with the sides cut out, showing off his tanned muscular arms and pecs.
Is that…Lance?
He turns to Lucas on his other side. “I fucking hate working out at night,” he says. “What do you do with the endorphins when you leave?”
Lucas doesn’t reply. Guess it was a rhetorical question. I keep facing forward, minding my own business.
Lance is an old friend of Lucas’s from college. I saw him maybe once or twice growing up, but Lucas kept his friend group largely separate.
“I need my wife,” his friend remarks with a smirk as he jogs. “Thank God, I married a woman with as much energy as me.”
“Girl,” Lucas corrects him. “You married a girl ten years younger than you.”
“I had to cast a wider net to find my soulmate.”
They obviously think my earbuds are on and that I can’t hear.
And if he’s the same age as Lucas, then his wife is older than me. That’s not a girl.
His friend is right, though. I hate working out at night. It takes longer to calm down when I go home and try to sleep.
Lucas taps his earbud. “Lucas Morrow.”
My stomach swims up to my heart, hearing him say his name. My hands almost slip off the handlebar, but I wipe the sweat from my palms onto my shorts and refasten my fingers around the bike. I hide my smile.
Why didn’t I know he was here? He didn’t stay in touch, walked away from us as if he just wanted to keep his eyes forward and the past in the past, but...we were all so close once. Wouldn’t he want to see me?
Why would he, I guess. I was just a kid. He’d probably be more interested in looking up an old girlfriend first.
His friend continues to run next to me, Lucas listening to the other end of his call.
“I won’t be away long,” he tells whoever he’s talking to. “Retrofitted? No. That boat’s fifty years old. He’s not paying for that.”
I watch him, his squared shoulders outlining the wall of his chest that’s bigger and broader than the last time I saw him. It would feel like I was in a cocoon if he wrapped his arms around me. I lick my lips, my blood warming at the thought.
He just told whoever he’s talking to that he won’t be away long. Would he just leave, without me ever knowing he was in town?
“He can have his dock outside his office building as long as the city sanctions it,” Lucas says. “Blame the timeline on them.”
His voice is deeper, and I try to see his eyes in the mirror, but they’re cast down. He hasn’t noticed me at all since he’s been on the treadmill.
He nods. “Bye.”
And he ends the call.
He jogs, taking a drink from his water bottle. His brow is pinched, and I don’t like that he still has that look on his face. One he didn’t have when he was in college but certainly developed before he left.
