———
The best part of the day is the five minutes before Darius shows up.
There’s a kind of electric hope in the air, like the universe is holding its breath just to see if he’ll bail or if this time I’ll get to see that look on his face when he spots me, like he can’t believe we’re still doing this, like maybe I’ll vanish if he blinks too hard.
Green Lake is fucked at this hour, not in the scary way, just in the absolute bleakness of the wet running path and the city’s ghosts, dog-walkers, insomniac retirees, the ever-present smell of fertilizer and stale weed.
The lamps flicker orange over the water, which is black and perfectly still, and every now and then I catch my own reflection in the glassy surface and almost recognize the guy staring back.
I do a few high knees, pretending I’m not freezing, and check my phone even though I know there’s no new messages.
I scan the lot for Darius’s car, knowing it by the missing hubcap and the way he parks slightly crooked, like a warning to anyone who thinks about getting too close.
He’s always late, but only by a minute or two.
Enough to keep me guessing. He rolls up right on schedule, window cracked, and nods at me like we haven’t seen each other in years.
“You ready, old man?” he says, voice still rough from sleep.
“I was born ready,” I lie, and we both know it.
We take off, shoes hitting the path in perfect sync. We don’t talk, not at first.
The run is its own language, the way he accelerates on the downhills and I catch him on the turns, the way our arms brush when we try to pass a stroller without breaking stride, the way he grunts at every quarter-mile marker just to remind me he’s keeping count.
The cold cuts through my lungs, every breath a shock, but after the first mile it gets easier.
We settle into a pace, side by side, eyes fixed on the black strip of trail ahead.
When we hit the north end, he tilts his head, just a fraction, and I know he wants to double the lap. I nod, and we keep going.
We’re communicating in grunts, in the set of our jaws, in the way we both slow to a walk at the same point, like we agreed on it without ever saying a word.
“Good pace,” he says after we catch our breath, hands on his hips, sweat steaming off his neck in the cold air.
“You were dogging it,” I reply, but he just smirks.
The walk back to the cars is slow, the sky starting to pink up at the edges.
I can feel him watching me, not in a creepy way, just in the way people do when they’re trying to figure out if this is real, if we’re going to keep doing this, or if it’s all just a hallucination brought on by trauma and caffeine.
We stop at a coffee place in Fremont, one of those ancient joints that looks like it should have closed in the nineties but keeps hanging on by sheer spite.
The neon sign is barely alive, flickering “C F E” above the door like the universe is making a joke at my expense.
Inside, it’s dead quiet, except for the barista, who’s wearing headphones and reading a physics textbook the size of my leg.
Darius orders black coffee for both of us and a cinnamon roll the size of a hockey puck. We sit by the window, the glass fogged up from our body heat, and stare at the traffic inching by on 34th.
He tears the cinnamon roll in half, gives me the bigger chunk, and says, “My dad would hate this place.”
“Why?” I ask, mouth already full.
“He’s a Starbucks guy. Says it’s efficient. You walk in, you say what you want, you get out. No conversation, no ‘how are you’ bullshit.”
I swallow. “Bet he’s a blast at parties.”
He shrugs, but there’s a glint in his eye. “He used to call every decision in life a ‘power play.’ Like, ‘Darius, you gotta treat the SAT like a five-on-three advantage. You don’t waste a shot.’ He thinks emotions are a waste of time.”
