Page 48 of Waking Olivia

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Olivia

Holy shit.

Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

Will Langstrom is standing in front of me, shirtless.

I'm gawking, and that probably needs to stop. It's not like I didn'tassumehe'd look fan-freaking-tastic without a shirt, but he exceeds anything I was previously capable of imagining. Yeah, fine, I admit it, I occasionally imagine things with him, and they’re usually R-rated. Except when I imagine him there isn’t an alarm going off in the background and he doesn’t have a pillow clutched to his stomach or a panicked look on his face like he has right now.

"Why are you in my room?" I ask.

His expression grows surly. "Waking your ass up," he growls.

"Good morning to you too," I snap, rolling over and putting the pillow over my head. "And I've seen you in shorts before, dummy. What's with the sudden modesty?"

He makes a testy noise that I ignore and heads toward his room.

“Did she run?” asks Dorothy, passing Will as she comes in.

"She never left the bed," he replies, hurrying away with that pillow still clutched against him. There's something about his phrasing that I find suspect, but I let it go. I didn't run. Before a big meet. Before a meet I was sick with nerves over.

“Wait. Why were you just coming in from Will’s room?” I ask Dorothy. “Did you sleep in there?”

Her eyes widen. “He was worried about you, so he took my bed and I took his.”

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I remember the feel of his arms around me, of curling into a warm chest in the middle of the night.

Maybe another dream …

Or maybe not.

When we arriveon the course, Will walks with me through the back field and gives me his standard pep talk, which, being tailored to me, is less “pep” and more “stop being insane.” He does this despite the fact that at this very moment he has a thousand other things to do and people to deal with, despite the fact that a young male coach wandering off with one particular female student is bound to draw suspicion.

I know it looks bad that he spends so much time with me. I know he’s put his job on the line again and again when I’ve done nothing but give him grief in return.

Today I want to give him the only thing I’m capable of giving. I’m going to win.

I take off too fast at the sound of the gun, feel that itching in my chest far too early, yet I keep going. I will win for him if it kills me. That voice in the back of my head tells me I’m going to lose if I keep going like this, that I’ll never make it, but I silently tell her to shut the fuck up.

I cross the finish line going so fast that I run an extra 20 feet trying to stop, like a car with bad brakes. This time it's him, not Peter, who catches me, holding me by the shoulders so I don't collapse. "Another record, Liv," he whispers, just as Peter runs over.

I'm happy, but this time my happiness is entirely for him.

Ateam takes firstby weighting the scores of its runners. Today we manage to place, coming in second for the first time in a decade. Everyone is ecstatic. Brofton picks me up on his shoulder and spins me around and I actually laugh without threatening to hit him. He sets me down as we line up to climb on the bus, and I’m so dizzy I stumble into Erin.

“Watch it,” she says to Brofton. “She’s our ticket to regionals. I want you treating her like a delicate flower from now on.”

“Yeah,” I laugh, “that’s me. A fragile little flower.”

Betsy pushes forward, looking oddly annoyed given that we just placed. "Ifsomeonehadn't come in sixteenth,” she sneers at Erin, “we might have taken first today."

I hate the way her words have leached all the joy from Erin’s face. "We'd have won if you'd placed better too," I snap.

What happens next occurs so quickly that I have little memory of it. One minute I am speaking, and the next she’s pushed me so hard that when my face hits the side of the bus, I’m blinded momentarily by the pain. And then I’m on the ground, with Betsy pinned beneath me. There’s blood pouring from her nose and someone’s arms tight around me from behind, a straitjacket.

"Liv!" shouts Will. "Stop!"

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