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?”
