Page 73 of See You at the Finish Line

He swallows and stares at me hard. “I don’t know,” he whispers, and the disappointment hits me like a truck. The cloud of lust and dreams vanishes, again, and my spine straightens. How many chances am I going to give him?

“Then I don’t know what else there is to say.” It’s not as harsh as I want it to be, but I can see in his eyes that it stings. I want to scream, ask him why he never texted me back, but the words don’t come. I don’t think I can bear to hear the answer anyway.

He doesn’t want me. He can weave all the beautiful words he wants, but when it comes down to it, he doesn’t know what he wants. He’s not the only one to blame. I can’t say the words either. It shouldn’t be this hard.

And I can’t handle giving him any more time, any more of my heart, so I open the door again. When he’s in the hallway he turns back, uncertainty written all over his face.

“See you at the finish line.” His face transforms when he gives me a small smile before he walks away, and my heart can barely handle it. I don’t answer—my body is buzzing with so many conflicting emotions.

I shut the door softly and snuggle with Q.

“You want to tell me what it’s like to be in his arms?” I whisper to her. She licks my face. “Thought so,” I mumble. I lie sprawled on the floor, an existential crisis crushing me like a weight dropped from the ceiling. What am I even doing? Who have I become?

Running again has woken me up. Cleared my vision. Now I can see how much of myself I’ve lost. I’m not the same person Adam met two years ago, and even if he remembers me, he doesn’t know me anymore—too much has happened.

I wish I could go back and do things differently. I wish I had called him instead of texted. I wish I had fought harder to keep him in my life, to apologize for the race.

I wish I had spent more time with my mom.

I wish and wish and wish, but there’s no point. I can’t change anything. And I know my mom is looking down on me right now telling me to get my skinny ass off the floor and stop wallowing

“My ass is not skinny, thank you very much,” I’d tell her.

Then she would say, “Fine, I was trying to be nice, get your fat ass off the ground.”

“My ass is not fat. It’s toned and looking better than ever,” I’d argue.

“You’re so conceited,” she’d say, and if I close my eyes, I can see the face she’d make. My mom and I go back and forth in my mind, and it brings a smile to my face.

I listen to my mom and scrape my perfectly toned ass off the floor to get Q ready for our walk. It’s a beautifully chilly day out and the new jacket I bought is perfect for the weather. It’d better be—I blew my monthly grocery budget on it, but I’m not about to freeze my perfect ass off.

Q is living her best life here, and I feel guilty for making her live her puppy years in the desert when she’s clearly Canadian—it’s in her breed. Wrong coast, but better than the desert, I suppose.

I climb into bedand proceed to fall asleep immediately. I’m wiped and hopeful for a deep and dreamless sleep.

I do not get my wish, waking in the middle of the night from the dirtiest sex dream I’ve had in a long time. Guess who my star player is?

None other than Adam Ashford himself. I’m hot and sweaty and severely turned on. I blindly reach into my nightstand, almost knocking over my glass of water to grab the closest vibrator.

It’s my small bullet and it does the trick to take the edge off, but I need more. So I root around the drawer, eyes still closed to hold on to the dream, to the feel of him, until I find what I’m looking for.

It was my sister’s parting gift to me, and if you’re wondering if my sister giving me my new favourite dildo is weird, the answer is yes. But I push that thought from my mind.

With no one in my bed—a specific no one who I picture pinning me deep into this mattress—I insert the dildo and imagine him stretching me, sliding in so slowly it’s torture.

His jaw clenches as he restrains himself, letting me adjust. With his face in my mind, the two-year-old memory of his mouth on mine, I make myself come over and over until I physically can’t anymore.

I’m going to be so sore while running tomorrow, but I don’t care. All I care about is the fact that I just wrung five orgasms out of myself and still want more. It wasn’t enough.

Nothing is ever enough.

Race day.

It’s a 5k so it’ll take all of twenty minutes, but I’m so nervous I might throw up. I’ve never been this nervous for a race before, not even when I was trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon (which I did on my third try).

If I’m being completely honest, I don’t know where my relationship with Paige stands after yesterday. There was a moment where I thought that maybe I should kiss her, that she wanted me to, there was hope that we could be together, but something seemed to hold her back. I didn’t want to overstep.

I guess I have more work to do.

---