I started to snicker.
“Oh, that would be funny,” I admitted, my heart feeling lighter than it had in an hour. “What’s the second thing?”
“Try out for the Olympics,” he suggested. “Your grandfather mentioned that you’d tried to once. Start training like you mean it again. Get there without them. You certainly haven’t needed them for most of your life, so don’t act like you need them now.”
With that, he left me standing on my front porch.
He was halfway down the driveway when a thought occurred to me.
A brazenness I didn’t often show started to course through me.
“Hey, Zach?” I called loudly so he could hear me over the loud motor of his bike.
He turned to survey me as he once again placed his feet on the ground and waited for me to speak. “Yeah?”
“Do you want to go to a wedding with me?” I asked.
He flashed me a grin that had my heart hammering and my hopes getting up.
“Is that woman going to be there?” he asked.
I nodded, my heart in my throat.
“Then hell no, I do not want to go to a wedding with you.”
With that parting comment, he rode off into the setting sun, not realizing what his answer did to me.
I’d done everything that I could to get a date over the years. I was just too awkward. And there I went, putting myself out there because I’d thought I felt a connection, and he’d shot me down.
Obviously that connection was all in my stupid head.
I walked inside and slammed the door closed behind me.
Shit, I couldn’t even get a date from a man that pitied me.
What did that say about me?
CHAPTER 6
What I really want in a Hallmark movie is where a woman finds her one true love while also hunting a serial killer.
-Crockett to Six
CROCKETT
“Hey, you okay?”
I knew that voice.
I’d been thinking about it for seven and a half days.
I turned, tears still streaming down my face, and blinked at the man that occupied way too many of my thoughts.
“Zach,” I said softly. “How are you?”
His sexy eyes took in my face, tracing a tear as it streaked down the length of my cheeks.
I swiped the tears away from my face and sat up from where I was laying panting, sprawled out on the track.
I’d just had a training run that was called a ‘fartlek.’ Fartlek is actually a Swedish word that means ‘speed play.’ Unlike tempo and interval work, fartlek runs vary between moderate to hard efforts with easy efforts throughout the run.
Essentially, you run faster for shorter periods of time followed by easy-effort running to recover.
I hadn’t run sprints or a fartlek in years, and it was currently showing on my body at that particular moment in time.
Hence the reason I was currently lying on the track with no plans on getting up anytime soon.
And, while I’d been lying where I was, I’d started thinking about everything that I had to do.
“I’m… having a moment,” I admitted. “I started eating better a week ago, and with that came extreme hunger. Which then comes extreme mood swings. Which then turn into… this.”
He grinned and dropped down onto the track next to me, bending to the side so that he could stretch out his right leg.
I watched as the muscles in his quads bunched with his effort.
Luckily, though, my tears were now dry.
“How’s the running going?” he asked.
I suppressed a groan.
“It’s going,” I admitted. “I need more time in my day, though.”
I then went on to explain how busy I was, told him about Murphy’s stroke a few months ago that’d led to me quitting my job, and then coming home to help with the corner store. Then I explained that my car was toast and I would need to look into getting a new one soon so that I could get around town.
I then went off and explained how I just didn’t have time to get back to race shape. There wasn’t enough time in the day to do everything that I needed to do.
“I run at the track every day,” he said as he listened to me all but blurt out my entire life story to him in one long, rambling stream of words. “Start there. Start running again. Get back into a routine. Then, when you’re done with that, start training. From there, get back to where you were. Do it for you, not for him. And, who the hell is to say that y’all can’t hire someone else to work the store? From what Murphy tells me… there’s plenty of money after he won the lottery.”
Get back to where I was.
It’d been three years since I’d put any effort whatsoever into my running.
Sure, I ran, but running to train for something, and running just to run, were two completely different beasts.
I felt my stomach tighten.