If looks could kill, I’d be burning in hell right now.
“My clothes are fine,” she says. I glance at her sweatpants and shirt. The sweatpants are heavy. She’s likely wearing a regular bra under her shirt. It’s going to be a pain in the ass for her.
So be it.
“Fine,” I say. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Kingston Trail is in Konkiel Park, tucked away on the west side. I keep my breathing steady as I push forward. Allison is somewhere close behind me. She appears a couple of inches to my right side, her breathing labored and her hands clinging to her sweatpants that keep sliding down her hips.
I told her not to wear them and now they’re distracting us both.
“It’s your turn,” I remind her.
“Uh.” She sucks in a deep breath. “I don’t know. You’ve shot down half of my questions.”
“They’re things you don’t need to know about me,” I tell her. “We just need to know enough about each other that we can convince people we’ve been dating for the last six months. Ask me something.”
“What was your first job?” she asks.
“A waiter. Is rum and Coke your favorite drink?”
“Uh, no,” she says. “I just order that now because I’m familiar with it. My father used to love it.”
I stop running. She nearly trips, surprised by the abrupt change in pace. She turns to face me.
“You need to tell me more. You can’t just tell me that something isn’t your favorite drink.” I wipe sweat off my face with my arm. “Tell me what your favorite drink is.”
“You’ve barely told me anything. Why am I the one who has to tell you everything?”
“Because you only need to know the basics, so we’re not giving different answers to the same question. It’s just a precaution for you to know facts about my life, but I need to know everything about you. Julia, your parents, and all these policemen are going to know random pieces of information about you that I should know if I’ve been dating you for six months. Your parents are also going to be motivated to test my knowledge about you to see if I genuinely care about you, so we need to be prepared. Tell me what your favorite drink is.”
“It’s …” She swats a fly off her arm. “It doesn’t matter. Nobody there is going to know what my favorite drink is.”
“Your parents are going to know what your favorite drink is.”
“No. They aren’t,” she says. “It’s stupid. My father used to make me this cinnamon chai tea, but he stopped making it for me when I was in my teens. He must have thought I outgrew it, but I crave it all the time.”
“Your favorite drink has no alcohol in it.”
“Yes. It’s not that crazy.” Her hands rest on her hips. She gazes down the length of the trail. My eyes trace down her body. Sweat has sunk through her shirt and I can see the outline of her breasts. They’re not as big as the fake tits I normally go for, but they’re still worthy of some attention. As her breathing slows to a moderate tempo, she looks back at me. She’s caught me staring. I smile at her. She crosses her arms over her chest, which just causes her sweatpants to settle lower on her hips. She adjusts her sweatpants again and turns her back to me.
Most city girls look out of place in the woods, but she looks out of place everywhere. It just makes me want to crack her open wide and figure out exactly how her mind works.
Her body, too.
“It’s your turn to ask me something,” I say. She looks over her shoulder at me.
“Do you ever get tired of being an ass?” she asks.
“No.” I take off running again. After the short rest, she’s able to keep up with me now. “We need to decide on a reason for why we didn’t tell people we were dating.”
“That’s easy,” she says. “We’ll tell them that you wanted me to keep it a secret, so you could keep sleeping with other women.”
“No. You’re not going to paint your future fiancé as a womanizer. We’ll say that I didn’t want my negative reputation to affect you.”
“Do you mean your womanizing reputation?”
I shake my head. The less she knows, the better. The more time that passes since Jeffrey Douglas’ death, the more she will be inclined to stay silent.
“Well, I don’t like that,” she says, tugging on her sweatpants again.
“I don’t care what you like or don’t like.”
“It’s not just my preference. People are going to be able to tell from a mile away that you’re an asshole who would never keep something a secret for the sake of another person. We need something different.”
I pick up my pace. She runs harder too.
“Fine. We’ll say that we kept it a secret because I was too busy to deal with you and the fact that I was too busy meant that we weren’t certain if we should commit to each other.”
“We were both too busy.”
“Fine.” I force a smile as we pass a couple jogging in the opposite direction. I look over my shoulder, waiting for them to disappear around the corner. “We also need a story for how we met. I already know you’re going to disagree, but my plan was that you spilled coffee on me at a coffee house. You helped me clean it up, we started talking, and we had our first date that night.”
“Not a chance in hell,” she says, her breathing getting ragged again. God, that sound would be an aphrodisiac in bed.
“I knew you were going to say that.” I have to turn my head to talk to her because she’s falling behind again. “Why? Because I made you look clumsy?”
“No, that part is completely believable,” she says. “The unbelievable part is that the whole scenario sounds like every romance movie in existence. And that makes me a little suspicious. Are you
