Dane and I were well matched for pacing, our feet striking the pavement almost simultaneously. But whereas I was methodical in my approach, matching breaths with steps, Dane was talking like he wouldn’t need his breath later. And, I couldn’t help but notice, scanning the crowd like a hunter on the prowl.
I wanted to shake my head. Dane always thought with his cock and then joked it up later. It sucked, because I sometimes got the impression it was all show for Dane. That beneath his constant laughs and jabs and the casual way he picked up men, he was actually desperate for something more. Yet here he was again, eyes set on some poor soul who’d just be discarded at the end.
Suddenly out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dane go down.
“Fuck!” Dane cursed as he hit the ground, hard enough for me to hear the crack of kneecap on pavement. Dodging some other runners, I helped him scoot off of the main road and out of the way of the racers.
“What happened?” I asked as I struggled to control my breathing now that we were no longer running.
“Twisted my damned ankle,” Dane said through gritted teeth. He had his knee, bloody from where it had hit the pavement, tucked near his chin, his foot in the air. He stared at the sky and cursed up a blue streak while I looked around for a medical tent.
But I needn’t have looked. To my surprise—and, I was sure, Dane’s delight—the first person to reach us was Christian. Gordo followed, weaving Giuliana’s stroller to try and stay out of other racers’ ways.
“I’m a doctor,” Christian stated as he dropped beside Dane’s sprawled-out form. “What happened?”
Dane managed to look both in pain and in thrall simultaneously. He turned puppy dog eyes on Christian, and it was all I could do to keep a straight face. “I twisted my ankle,” he said.
When he told me, he’d sounded angry. Now he sounded like butter.
Christian pulled the leg toward himself, using a gentle, probing touch to test Dane’s ankle. “How does this feel?”
“It… it hurts.” Now Dane was laying it on thick, and I began to wonder if he truly hurt himself at all, or if he’d been hoping for this. The coincidence of Christian being close enough to notice his fall was becoming suspect.
“Let’s get you to the medical tent,” Christian said, not noticing Dane’s overkill performance. “Gordo,” he called over his shoulder, “Go ahead and finish the race. I’ll help out here.”
“Do you want me to come with?” I signed to Dane when he looked at me. He shot me a look that had hell no written all over it.
Gordo elbowed me in the ribs, light and teasing, but it was enough of a touch to make my breath catch anyway. “Care to finish with me, neighbor?”
I knew he meant the race. But my mind played an image of finishing in a very different, very naked way with him, and I was forced to shut my eyes to keep from moaning. Take it easy, Javi. “Yeah...okay.”
We merged into the race together. We were pretty far behind the quicker racers, and instead of trying to catch up, Gordo set a slower pace than I was used to. Looking at Giuliana, I imagined pushing her wasn’t conducive to fast runs. “If you want, I c-can push her s-s-some.”
Gordo’s smile almost sent me stumbling over my own feet, but I managed to keep it together as we traded places. As soon as the stroller was in my control, my heart squeezed, overfull with the responsibility of having an infant’s safety in my hands—literally—while running. And also with Gordo’s trust in me to push his baby girl.
And damned if it didn’t feel good to do it for me, too. Bittersweet. Another taste of something I’d wanted for so long.
“I think your friend just suckered mine into helping him,” Gordo said in a casual way. Perhaps he was fishing for information on Dane.
My stutter was a fickle fucker, appearing often and at random, but most reliably when I felt stressed or tense. But because I had grown up hyper-aware of it, mocked for it, occasionally beaten for it, I was almost always tense. Between my need to focus and excel at work, and the doubt that always niggled at me about, well, me, stress was a constant companion.
It went without saying that around Gordo, smack-in-the-face good-looking, smart, successful Gordo, I should have been wound tighter than