she did, I’d call her expression “shocked.” She turned and began to run backward, then said, “All right. Tell me why.” Her breath was coming pretty hard. She was going to get her clean clothes sweaty, and she was also going to need another shower and not have anything to wear afterwards. I quite enjoyed thinking about it. I wouldn’t share that.
“Why what?” I turned and ran backward myself, moving up beside her. Just the two of us, jogging along. Backward. I kept an eye out behind us all the same. There was proving a point, and then there was mowing down some old lady walking her Miniature Schnauzer.
“Why you can run as fast as me,” she said. “At least for a little while. And why you can run backward while looking behind you. Anybody else would be crashing into a tree right now.”
“I can run faster than you forever,” I said. “Though that’s not saying much, as I’m head and shoulders taller than you. Stride length, eh.”
She bristled. Not like a whippet. Whippets were timid. Like a … ferret. Another thing I wouldn’t be sharing. “Want to bet?” she asked, like, yes, a ferret.
I shouldn’t do this. It would go nowhere good. I settled for saying, “You don’t have anything to bet with.”
“Well, not here, I don’t,” she said. “We could settle up later. Or we could bet services.”
“Services. My mind’s boggling. I’m trying not to be dirty here, that gentlemanly thing and all, but …”
“Oh? I thought you only liked dogs.”
I stopped running, and she called out from behind me, “I’m winning.” Still running backward.
I caught up. “I may not be a gentleman, but how ladylike was that? You were meant to blush and look away.”
“Nah. Nurse. My blushing days are over. But no, I don’t normally offer to trade sexual services with a man I met less than twenty-four hours ago.”
“Not swiping right, then,” I said. “No eggplant emojis. Pity.”
“No. I don’t do that.” She’d gone a little stiff, emergency nurse or no. I got the feeling that her inside could be pretty different from her outside, but then, people’s insides aren’t always easy to see.
I said, “I don’t do as much swiping as I used to, either. Sorry. A joke I shouldn’t have made.”
“Well,” she said, “to be fair, I made the one about the dog. Can we turn around and run forward now, or do I have to run backward the whole way to show you I can?”
“Nah,” I said. “We can run forward.”
“Let’s race, then,” she said. “Betting nothing but bragging rights. To the end of the Millennium Walkway.”
“That’s a good five kilometers from here.”
“What’s the matter?” She glanced at me sidelong. It was a cute look. “You scared?”
I gave up. “Just one question. Do you want me to go flat to the boards? Or would you rather I pretend it’s close?”
“You’d better be going flat to the boards, boy,” she said. “Otherwise, you’d tell me you weren’t, and that was why you lost.”
I laughed, and she said, “Ready, steady … go!”
I left her in the dust.
Possibly not the most productive approach in terms of my love life. But then, she wasn’t the only one with a competitive streak. Not to mention no off switch.
16
That Wanaka Tree
Daisy
He left me in the dust.
At first, I thought there must be something wrong with my lungs. River water, maybe. It wasn’t like nobody was ever faster than me, and there had been all that athleticism, jumping into the bed of the truck and all, but he was too big to be fast.
Big men were never fast. They just thought they were.
Except that he was, and it wasn’t my lungs. I knew my pace, even in jeans and non-athletic trainers. I was running at my pace, or not too far off it. It was just that he was running so much faster.
When I rounded the last corner, some kilometers later, he was standing by the water, skipping stones across the lake. I put on my best burst of speed—no point in sulking—stopped a couple meters from him, and said, “That’s just insulting. You could at least have the grace to be stretching.”
“Nah. You wouldn’t respect me in the morning.”
I laughed. What else could I do? “Do you race, then?”
“No,” he said. “Do you?”
He was that fast, and he didn’t race? That computed even less. “Yes,” I said. “It’s a thing I like. Triathlons.”
“Ah.” He skipped another stone. It skipped five times. “Explains so much. It may have saved