Someone had made a fake Dancing with the Stars poster and superimposed his face and red suspenders on it. Nice. Jill had found immense joy from that picture, and it pleased him now to remember how her laughter had pealed like church bells on the somber oncology ward, how the video of his antics made her day.
“I could teach you how, Murph,” he said after a long silence on the phone, shaking himself out of his memories. “You could surprise your wife. Give her the full monty.”
Murph let out a bellowing howl. “I walk into the bedroom half naked wearing my uniform pants, dancing like a stripper, my wife’s gonna think I overdosed on something from the police evidence room, not get all ready for sex. Out—see ya in a few.”
Click.
Dylan tossed the phone on the bed and sprinted to the bathroom, shower on and clothes off in seconds. If he’d learned nothing else in a decade or so of firefighting, it was how to take a one-minute shower.
He looked down as the water soaked him. Damn it. Hard as rock and pointing up with an accusing eye.
Make that a two minute shower.
If he showed up at work with a boner like this he might as well paint it neon green and tie a red ribbon on it.
The second he touched himself his mind flashed—for the first time, ever—not to Jill, but to the mysterious woman in his dream last night.
Blond, wavy hair and creamy skin. That’s all he remembered. The warm, enveloping love of her touch, the air tinged with compassion and passion, too. With excitement and comfort and—everything.
But not Jill.
A few strokes and he was close, remembering how he’d nuzzled the woman’s neck, how Mike’s hand appeared across her generous ass, palms memorizing the planes of this new, unexplored, lush land.
Her breath had come out in little moans that—
“Oh,” he grunted.
And he was done.
Spent. Spurted. Like a thirteen-year-old boy with a lingerie catalog.
The rest of the shower went quickly, but his skin warmed at the thought of the dream woman. Something all-pervasive invaded his thoughts, his flesh, his sense of self.
As he toweled off, he gave his mirror reflection a half smile. Maybe she was a manifestation of hope. If he wasn’t dreaming about Jill, finally, with every waking second he could spare, then perhaps the grief counselors at the oncology ward of the hospital had been right.
You really do move on. Eventually. And you can find love again, too.
He threw on an old Star Wars t-shirt and jeans, stuffing his feet in brown loafers, hair still wet as he marched into the kitchen, grabbed a bottled water and an apple, and snaked his keys off the hook next to the door.
“Where are you going?” Mike asked, incredulous, as Dylan snapped the front door open with ruthless efficiency.
“Work.” He had to get out, get away, go do something with people who didn’t look at him with the kind of pain Mike carried in his eyes nonstop. Rescuing people from fires, working on car accident victims, helping old ladies with chest pain was better than this.
Better than looking at his partner's despair.
That made him feel like a jackass.
But it was true.
Chapter 3
Running a 10K was a lot like just ordering an appetizer plate for lunch. It was enough to make the gnawing need inside you stop, but not nearly satisfying.
He’d entered this race to please one of his coworkers, whose daughter had the disease that this charity was raising money for, and Mike felt bad. Plus, it was the off season from skiing. Might as well meet up with his running friends and have a quickie.
A quickie run.
The only quickie he’d had in forever.
A smattering of texts later and he found his running club, a group of guys all lean and lanky like him who were less a “club” and more just a bunch of individuals too socially stunted to do more than run together and—on rare occasions, now that more of the guys had kids—grab a smoothie after.
No beer for this crowd. Everyone ate clean, lived clean, and focused on purifying the soul by keeping the body as whole and energized as possible.
They were kind of boring, now that he thought about it.
So are you, Dylan’s voice whispered in his head as the race began and the throng of runners shuffled out of the starting line. Being part of a mega-organism made up of individuals was exactly what Mike needed right now.
No thoughts. No feelings. No decisions. No deliberations.
Just the thump-thump, thump-thump of rubber soles on concrete and the unremitting thousand-mile stare of the six-plus miles ahead of him that he could whip off in under half an hour.
Blissfully not thinking.
Or feeling.
Or so he told himself.
Jill used to run with him, more often than not. It was how they bonded without talking, without the endless babble of words that never seemed to come close to explaining how his soul screamed into the void of the world. Mike wasn’t good with words. He expressed himself in movement. Acts of kindness and love. In deliberation and in being a presence, someone who was just there when you needed them.
For most people, that wasn’t enough. Being there was inadequate.
Then again, most people were never fully present.
In the rush rush rush of daily life, where being busy was like a badge to shine every day, Mike’s friends and acquaintances seemed to consider his silence to be a deficit, as if he were somehow lesser because he didn’t express himself the same way they did.
On the slopes, in a race, though – he sang. Motion was his language, and as the runners thinned out, each taking the pace they had decided for themselves, he pulled away from the pack. In any given race he would start out strong, trying to meter out his body’s reserves but failing. Impulse control with the blood pounding through him and the heady rush of endorphins was damn near impossible.
He’d pull back only later, when it was clear he needed to, and even then it would be a grudging acknowledgment that being the size of a small telephone pole meant other runners were faster. They were built for this. He wasn’t.
In body, at least. In spirit, he was the king.
Jill.
Jill.
Jill.
Her name became a mantra, invasive and insistent, popping into his subconscious whenever it damn well liked, an errant pet with no boundaries.
Intrusive thoughts slammed through his mind as he ran, images of Jill as she sat in the oncologist’s office, flanked by him and Dylan, the news indescribably bad. How she’d sobbed into his chest until his t-shirt was so soaked a tiny cut on his chest had burned from the salt of her tears. Her call to her parents, gut-wrenchingly real, and their desire that she fly home and let them find the best specialists in the world. The moment her hair began to fall out and how she’d shaved it, laughing as long strands of hair had fallen to the floor like autumn leaves.
How he’d shaved his head in solidarity, Dylan unable to join him because of a rare modeling contract. How Mike had felt a bond there with Jill, his head a big dare to the world.
Don’t say a word.
Not one damn word.
Something close to tears threatened to pour out of the back of his throat, thick and viscous, not quite salty. Like vinegar, it left a bitter taste, like words he’d swallowed over the years coming back to life, tickling and teasing, tormenting and taking over.
“You okay?” a runner to his right grunted, not breaking pace. “You need an orange.”