My lungs are aching; my body went numb way back at Aspen Road. My breath has moved from controlled inhaling and exhaling to uncontrolled gasps and spurts. This is the point at which I usually love running the most. When every single ounce of my body is poured into propelling me forward, leaving me committedly focused on my next step and nothing else.
My next step.
Nothing else.
I’ve never run this far before. I usually stop when I know I hit my mile and a half mark a few blocks backs, but I didn’t this time. Despite the familiar despair that my body is currently in, I still can’t seem to shut my mind off. I keep running in hopes that I’ll get to that point, but it’s taking a lot longer than usual. The only thing that makes me decide to stop going is the fact that I still have to cover as much tread going home, and I’m almost out of water.
I stop at the edge of a driveway and lean against the mailbox, opening the lid to my water bottle. I wipe the sweat off my forehead with the back of my arm and bring the bottle to my lips, managing to get about four drops into my mouth before it runs dry. I’ve already downed an entire bottle of water in this Texas heat. I silently scold myself for deciding to skip my run this morning. I’m a wuss in the heat.
Fearing for my hydration, I decide to walk the rest of the way back, rather than run. I don’t think pushing myself to the point of physical exertion would make Karen too happy. She gets nervous enough that I run by myself as it is.
I begin walking when I hear a familiar voice speak up from behind me.
“Hey, you.”
As if my heart wasn’t already beating fast enough, I slowly turn around and see Holder staring down at me, smiling, his dimples breaking out in the corners of his mouth. His hair is wet from sweat and it’s obvious he’s been running, too.
I blink twice, half believing this is a mirage brought on by my exhaustion. My instinct is telling me to run and scream, but my body wants to wrap itself around his glistening, sweaty arms.
My body is a damn traitor.
Luckily, I haven’t recovered from the stretch I just completed, so he won’t be able to tell that my erratic breathing pattern is mostly from just seeing him again.
“Hey,” I say back, breathless. I do my best to keep looking at his face but I can’t seem to stop my eyes from dripping below his neck. Instead, I just look down at my feet in order to avoid the fact that he isn’t wearing anything but shorts and running shoes. The way his shorts are hanging off of his hips is reason enough for me to forgive every single negative thing I’ve learned about him today.
“You run?” he asks, leaning his elbow on the mailbox.
I nod. “Usually in the mornings. I forgot how hot it is in the afternoons.” I attempt to look back up at him, lifting my hand over my eyes to shield the sun that’s glowing over his head like a halo.
How ironic.
He reaches out and I flinch before I realize he’s just handing me his bottle of water. The way his lips purse together in an attempt not to smile makes it obvious he can see how nervous I am around him.
“Drink this.” He nudges the half empty bottle at me. “You look exhausted.”
Normally I wouldn’t take water from strangers. I would especially not take water from people I know are bad news, but I’m thirsty. So damn thirsty.
I grab the bottle out of his hands and tilt my head back, downing three huge gulps. I’m dying to drink the rest, but I can’t deplete his supply, too. “Thanks,” I say, handing it back to him. I wipe my hand over my mouth and look behind me at the sidewalk. “Well, I’ve got another mile and a half return, so I better get started.”
“Closer to two and a half,” he says, cutting his eyes to my stomach. He presses his lips to the bottle without wiping the rim off, keeping his eyes trained on me while he tilts his head back and gulps the rest of the water. I can’t help but watch his lips as they cover the opening of the bottle that my lips were just touching. We’re practically kissing.
I shake my head. “Huh?” I’m not sure if he said something out loud or not. I’m a little preoccupied watching the sweat drip down his chest.
“I said it’s more like two and a half. You live over on Conroe, that’s over two miles away. That’s almost a five mile run round trip.” He says it like he’s impressed.
I eye him curiously. “You know what street I live on?”
“Yeah.”
He doesn’t elaborate. I keep my gaze fixed on his and remain silent, waiting for some sort of explanation.
He can see I’m not satisfied with his “yeah,” so he sighs. “Linden Sky Davis, born September 29th. 1455 Conroe Street. Five feet three inches. Donor.”
I take a step back, suddenly seeing my near-future murder played out in front of my eyes at the hands of my dreamy stalker. I wonder if I should stop shielding my vision from the sun so I can get a better look at him in case I get away? I might need to recount his features to the sketch artist.
“Your ID,” he explains when he sees the mixture of terror and confusion on my face. “You showed me your ID earlier. At the store.”
Somehow, that explanation doesn’t ease my apprehension. “You looked at it for two seconds.”
He shrugs. “I have a good memory.”
“You stalk,” I deadpan.
He laughs. “I stalk? You’re the one standing in front of my house.” He points over his shoulder at the house behind him.
His house? What the hell are the chances?
He straightens up and taps his fingers against the letters on the front of the mailbox.
The Holders.
I can feel the blood rushing to my cheeks, but it doesn’t matter. After a middle of the afternoon run in the Texas heat and a limited supply of water, I’m sure my entire body is flush. I try not to glance back at his house, but curiousity is my weakness. It’s a modest house, not too flashy. It fits in well with the mid-income neighborhood we’re in. As does the car that’s in his driveway. I wonder if that’s his car? I can deduct from his conversation with whats-her-face from the grocery store that he’s my age, so I know he must live with his parents. But how have I not seen him before? How could I not know I lived less than three miles from the only boy in existence who can turn me into a ball of frustrated hot-flashes?
I clear my throat. “Well, thanks for the water.” I can think of nothing I want more than to escape this awkwardness. I give him a quick wave and break into a stride.
“Wait a sec,” he yells from behind me. I don’t slow down, so he passes me and turns around, jogging backward against the sun. “Let me refill your water.” He reaches over and grabs my water bottle out of my left hand, brushing his hand against my stomach in the process. I freeze again.
“I’ll be right back,” he says, running off toward his house.
I’m stumped. That is a completely contradictory act of kindness. Another side effect of the split personality disorder, maybe? He’s probably a mutation, like The Hulk. Or Jekyll and Hyde. I wonder if Dean is his nice persona and Holder is his scary one. Holder is definitely the one I saw at the grocery store earlier. I think I like Dean a lot better.
I feel awkward waiting, so I walk back toward his driveway, pausing every few seconds to look at the path that leads back to my home. I have no idea what to do. It feels like any decision I make at this point will be one for the dumb side of the scale.
Should I stay?
Should I run?
Should I hide in the bushes before he comes back outside with handcuffs and a knife?
Before I have a chance to run, his front door swings open and he comes back outside with a full bottle of water. This time the sun is behind me, so I don’t have to struggle so hard to see him. That’s not a good thing, either, since all I want to do is stare at him.
Ugh! I absolutely hate lust.
Hate. It.
Every fiber of my being knows he’s not a good person, yet my body doesn’t seem to give a shit at all.
He hands me the bottle and I quickly down another drink. I hate Texas heat as it is, but coupled with Dean Holder, it feels like I’m standing in the pits of Hell.
“So…earlier? At the store?” he says with a nervous pause. “If I made you uneasy, I’m sorry.”
My lungs are begging me for air, but I somehow find a way to reply. “You didn’t make me uneasy.”
You sort of creeped me out.
Holder narrows his eyes at me for a few seconds, studying me. I’ve discovered today that I don’t like being studied…I like going unnoticed. “I wasn’t trying to hit on you, either,” he says. “I just thought you were someone else.”
“It’s fine.” I force a smile, but it’s not fine. Why am I suddenly consumed with disappointment that he wasn’t trying to hit on me? I should be happy.
“Not that I wouldn’t hit on you,” he adds with a grin. “I just wasn’t doing it at that particular moment.”
Oh, thank you, Jesus. His clarification makes me smile, despite all my efforts not to.
“Want me to run with you?” he asks, nudging his head toward the sidewalk behind me.
Yes, please.
“No, it’s fine.”
He nods. “Well, I was going that way anyway. I run twice a day and I’ve still got a couple…” He stops speaking mid sentence and takes a quick step toward me. He grabs my chin and tilts my head back. “Who did this to you?” The same hardness I saw in his eyes at the grocery store returns behind his scowl. “Your eye wasn’t like this earlier.”
I pull my chin away and laugh it off. “It was an accident. Never interrupt a teenage girl’s nap.”
He doesn’t smile. Instead, he takes a step closer and gives me a hard look, then brushes his thumb underneath my eye. “You would tell someone, right? If someone did this to you?”
I want to respond. Really, I do. I just can’t. He’s touching my face. His hand is on my cheek. I can’t think, I can’t speak, I can’t breathe. The intensity that exudes from his whole existence sucks the air out of my lungs and the strength out of my knees. I nod unconvincingly and he frowns, then pulls his hand away.
“I’m running with you,” he says, without question. He places his hands on my shoulders and turns me in the opposite direction, giving me a slight shove. He falls into stride next to me and we run in silence.
I want to talk to him. I want to ask him about his year in juvi, why he dropped out of school, why he has that tattoo…but I’m too scared to find out the answers. Not to mention I’m completely out of breath. So instead, we run in complete silence the entire way back to my house.
When we close in on my driveway, we both slow down to a walk. I have no idea how to end this. No one ever runs with me, so I’m not sure what the etiquette is when two runners part ways. I turn and give him a quick wave. “I guess I’ll see you later?”
“Absolutely,” he says, staring right at me.
I smile at him uncomfortably and turn away. Absolutely? I flip this word over in my mind as I head back up the driveway. What does he mean by that? He didn’t try to get my number, despite not knowing I don’t have one. He didn’t ask if I wanted to run with him again. But he said absolutely like he was certain; and I sort of hope he is.
“Sky, wait.” The way his voice wraps around my name makes me wish the only word in his entire vocabulary was Sky. I spin around and pray he’s about to come up with another cheesy pick-up line. I would totally fall for it now.
“Do me a favor?”
Anything. I’ll do anything you ask me to, so long as you’re shirtless.
“Yeah?”
He tosses me his bottle of water. I catch it and look down at the empty bottle, feeling guilty that I didn’t think to offer him a refill myself. I shake it in the air and nod, then jog up the steps and into the house. Karen is loading the dishwasher when I run into the kitchen. As soon as the front door closes behind me, I gasp for the air my lungs have been begging for.
“My God, Sky. You look like you’re about to pass out. Sit down.” She takes the bottle from my hands and forces me into a chair. I let her refill it while I breathe in through my nose and out my mouth. She turns around and hands it to me and I put the lid on it, then stand up and run it back outside to him.
“Thanks,” he says. I stand and watch as he presses those same full lips to the opening of the water bottle.
We’re practically kissing again.
I can’t distinguish between the affect my near five-mile run has had on me and the affect Holder is having on me. Both of them make me feel like I’m about to pass out from lack of oxygen. Holder closes the lid on his water bottle and his eyes roam over my body, pausing at my bare midriff for a beat too long before he reaches my eyes. “Do you run track?”
I cover my stomach with my left arm and clasp my hands at my waist. “No. I’m thinking about trying out, though.”
“You should. You’re barely out of breath and you just ran close to five miles,” he says. “Are you a senior?”
He has no idea how much effort it’s taking on my behalf not to fall onto the pavement and wheeze from lack of air. I’ve never ran this far in one shot before, and it’s taking everything I have to come across like it’s not a big deal. Apparently it’s working.
“Shouldn’t you already know if I’m a senior? You’re slacking on your stalking skills.”
When his dimples make a reappearance, I want to high-five myself.
“Well, you make it sort of difficult to stalk you,” he says. “I couldn’t even find you on Facebook.”
He just admitted to looking me up on Facebook. I met him less than two hours ago, so the fact that he went straight home and looked me up on Facebook is a little bit flattering. An involuntary smile breaks out on my face, and I want to punch this pathetic excuse for a girl that has taken over my normally indifferent self.
“I’m not on Facebook. I don’t have internet access,” I explain.
He cuts his eyes to me and smirks like he doesn’t believe a thing I’m saying. He pushes the hair back from his forehead. “What about your phone? You can’t get internet on your phone?”
“No phone. My mother isn’t a fan of modern technology. No TV, either.”
“Shit,” he laughs. “You’re serious? What do you do for fun?”
I smile back at him and shrug. “I run.”
Holder studies me again, dropping his attention briefly to my stomach. I’ll think twice from now on before I decide to wear a sports bra outside.
“Well in that case, you wouldn’t happen to know what time a certain someone gets up for her morning runs, would you?” He looks back up at me and I don’t see the person Six described to me in him at all. The only thing I see is a guy, flirting with a girl, with a semi-nervous, endearing gleam in his eye.
“I don’t know if you’d want to get up that early,” I say. The way he’s looking at me coupled with the Texas heat is suddenly causing my vision to blur, so I inhale a deep breath, wanting to appear anything but exhausted and flustered right now.
He tilts his head toward mine and narrows his eyes. “You have no idea how bad I want to get up that early.” He flashes me his dimple-laden grin, and I faint.
No…literally. I fainted.
And based on the ache in my shoulder and the dirt and gravel embedded in my cheek, it wasn’t a beautiful, graceful fall. I blacked out and smacked the pavement before he even had a chance to catch me. So unlike the heroes in the books.
I’m flat on the couch, presumably where he laid me after carrying me inside. Karen is standing over me with a glass of water and Holder is behind her, watching the aftermath of the most embarrassing moment of my life.
“Sky, drink some water,” Karen says, lifting the back of my neck, pressing me toward the cup. I take a sip, then lean back on the pillow and close my eyes, hoping more than anything that I black out again.
“I’ll get you a cold rag,” Karen says. I open my eyes, hoping Holder decided to sneak out once Karen left the room, but he’s still here. And he’s closer now. He kneels down on the floor beside me and reaches his hand to my hair, pulling out what I assume is either dirt or gravel.
“You sure you’re okay? That was a pretty nasty fall.” His eyes are full of concern and he wipes something from my cheek with his thumb, then rests his hand on the couch beside me.
“Oh, God,” I say, covering my eyes with my arm. “I’m so sorry. This is so embarrassing.”
Holder grabs my wrist and pulls my arm away from my face. “Shh.” The concern in his eyes eases and a playful grin takes over his features. “I’m sort of enjoying it.”
Karen makes her way back into the living room. “Here’s you a rag, sweetie. Do you want something for the pain? Are you nauseous?” Rather than hand the rag to me, she hands it to Holder and walks back to the kitchen. “I might have some Calendula or Burdock root.”
Great. If I wasn’t already embarrassed enough, she’s about to make it even worse by forcing me to down her homemade tinctures right in front of him.
“I’m fine, Mom. Nothing hurts.”
Holder gently places the rag on my cheek and wipes at it. “You might not be sore now, but you will be,” he says, too quiet for Karen to hear him. He looks away from examining my cheek and locks eyes with me. “You should take something, just in case.”
I don’t know why the suggestion sounds more appealing coming out of his mouth than Karen’s, but I nod. And gulp. And hold my breath. And squeeze my thighs together. And attempt to sit up, because me lying on the couch with him hovering over me is about to make me faint again.
When he sees my effort to sit up, he takes my elbow and assists me. Karen walks back into the living room and hands me a small glass of orange juice. Her tinctures are so bitter, I have to down them with juice in order to avoid spitting it back out. I take it from her hand and down it faster than I’ve ever downed one before, then immediately hand her back the glass. I just want her to go back to the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” she says, extending her hand to Holder. “I’m Karen Davis.”
Holder stands up and shakes her hand in return. “Dean Holder. My friends call me Holder.”
I’m jealous she’s getting to touch his hand. I want to take a number and get in line. “
Sky know each other?” she asks.
He looks down at me at the same time I look up at him. His lip barely curls up in a smile, but I notice. “We don’t, actually,” he says, looking back at her. “Just in the right place at the right time, I guess.”
“Well, thank you for helping her. I don’t know why she fainted. She’s never fainted.” She looks down at me. “Did you eat anything today?”
“A bite of chicken for lunch,” I say, not admitting to the Snickers I had before my run. “Cafeteria food sucks ass.”
She rolls her eyes and throws her hands up in the air. “Why were you running without eating first?”
I shrug. “I forgot. I don’t usually run in the evenings.”
She walks back to the kitchen with the glass and sighs heavily. “I don’t want you running anymore, Sky. What would have happened if you would have been by yourself? You run too much, anyway.”
She’s got to be kidding me. There is no way I can stop running.
“Listen,” Holder says, watching as the rest of the color drains from my face. He looks back toward the kitchen at Karen. “I live right over on Ricker and I run by here every day on my afternoon runs.” (He’s lying. I would have noticed.) “If you’d feel more comfortable, I’d be happy to run with her for the next week or so in the mornings. I usually run the track at school, but it’s not a big deal. You know, just to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Ah. Light bulb. No wonder those abs looked familiar.
Karen walks back to the living room and looks at me, then back at him. She knows how much I enjoy my solitary running breaks, but I can see in her eyes that she would feel more comfortable if I had a running partner.
“I’m okay with that,” she says, looking back at me. “If Sky thinks it’s a good idea.”
Yes. Yes, I do. But only if my new running partner is shirtless.
“It’s fine.” I stand up, and when I do, I get light headed again. I guess my face goes pale, because Holder has his hand on my shoulder in less than a second, lowering me back to the couch. “Easy,” he says. He looks up at Karen. “Do you have any crackers she can eat? That might help.”
Karen walks away to the kitchen and Holder looks back down at me, his eyes full of concern again. “You sure you’re okay?” He brushes his thumb across my cheek.
I shiver.
A devilish grin creeps across his face when he sees me attempt to cover the chill bumps on my arms. He glances behind me at Karen in the kitchen, then refocuses his gaze to mine.
“What time should I come stalk you tomorrow?” he whispers.
“Six-thirty?” I breathe, looking up at him helplessly.
“Six-thirty sounds good.”
“Holder, you don’t have to do this.”
His hypnotizing blue eyes study my face for several quiet seconds and I can’t help but stare at his equally hypnotizing mouth while he speaks. “I know I don’t have to do this, Sky. I do what I want.” He leans in toward my ear and lowers his voice to a whisper. “And I want to run with you.” He pulls back and studies me. Due to all the chaos parading through my head and stomach, I fail to muster a reply.
Karen is back with the crackers. “Eat,” she says, placing them in my hand.
Holder stands up and says goodbye to Karen, then turns back to me. “Take care of yourself. I’ll see you in the morning?”
I nod and watch him as he turns to leave. I can’t tear my eyes away from the front door after it shuts behind him. I’m losing it. I’ve completely lost any form of self-control. So this is what Six loves? This is lust?
I hate it. I absolutely, positively hate this beautiful, magical feeling.
“He was so nice,” Karen says. “And handsome.” She turns to face me. “You don’t know him?”
I shrug. “I know of him,” I say. And that’s all I say. If she only knew what kind of hopeless boy she just assigned as my “running partner,” she’d have a conniption. The less she knows about Dean Holder, the better it’ll be for both of us.
