Page 36 of Your Pace or Mine
The line had fallen silent as Jamie’s thoughts raced. He searched around to fill it. “What did you get up to today? Run a couple hundred miles?”
“Changing the subject?” Darius replied with a laugh, his crisp accent accentuating the syllables. “I had Sunday dinner with my family.”
“Sounds thrilling.”
“It was an experience.”
“Tell me about them?”
Darius smiled. “I’ve got a little sister, Selena. She’s the best. Also, my worst fucking enemy, but I’ve been led to believe that’s standard for siblings.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Jamie replied.
“Only child?”
“And spoiled rotten.” Jamie grinned.
“It shows,” Darius retorted.
Jamie laughed at the deadpan tone of his response. “You’re funny. How come I didn’t know you could be funny?”
“I hide it very well,” Darius replied. “Or maybe you’re just easy to please, you are my boyfriend now.”
A little thrill ran up Jamie’s spine. That sounded good coming from Darius. “I’m definitely easy to please,” he replied, the quip punctuated by a yawn.
Darius grinned, and there was that fucking dimple again. Too fucking adorable.
“Get some sleep, Jamie. You need to be well-rested for training next weekend.”
“I will be, don’t worry.”
They said goodnight and hung up, but Jamie didn’t fall asleep. He felt like something had shifted inside of him. Instead of arestless night listening to the sounds of the city, he spent the night replaying the turns of their conversation and analysing the timbre of Darius Hewitt’s laugh.
The next few days passed by in a blur of activity. If he wasn’t teaching, he was practising. And if he wasn’t doing either of those, he was grafting to try to get his fundraising target closed. He was more than halfway there now, but the marathon was coming up so quickly, and the idea of going into debt over a charity fundraiser was utterly horrifying.
Despite his busy schedule, he continued his text exchange with Darius. He mostly just sent him random nonsense about his day. He’d taken to sending photos of things that reminded him of the stoic runner— a greyhound that he swore could have been Darius’s twin, a selfie in front of an ad for trainers that Darius featured in, a Scrabble board. He also peppered in suggestions of things they could try to soft-launch their fake dating scheme. Then, every night, just after Jamie had settled in his bed, leaving the chaos of the day behind, Darius would ring. They would talk until one of them started to nod off. It was nice, having someone to tell about his day every night, to fall asleep knowing that someone was thinking of him.
Part of Jamie was concerned that those late-night conversations were just Darius humouring him. He had a tendency to jump around from topic to topic, and he knew he’d spent too long ranting last night about the government’s failure to meet its climate goals, but he’d never been great at keeping quiet about the things he cared about. Darius seemed genuinely interested, though. He didn’t just nod along, like most people did when Jamie got on one. Darius engaged. He asked questions and offered his opinions back, even on sillier topics like Jamie’soutrage at his fellow Scouser, John Hulley, not getting the recognition he deserved as the true founder of the modern Olympics.
They hadn’t even been on a single fake date yet, and Jamie was starting to worry he was already in too deep. Darius was just so much more than he’d expected. He was funny and kind, making Jamie laugh with his stories of childhood antics and races gone wrong. He was supportive, too. Jamie had lost count of how many times he’d offered to cover his fundraising target, but Jamie resisted.
He already felt guilty about hiding the extent of his motives for this fake relationship from Darius—throwing money into the mix seemed like a recipe for disaster.
Darius was still hassling him pretty regularly about seeing a physio, but they’d mostly moved past talking about Jamie’s injury now. The main focus was developing a plan to love-bomb the Olympic selection committee with examples of how Darius was the team playeriest of team players around.
On Thursday, after a long day of teaching and very little movement on his fundraiser, Jamie was in a melancholy mood.
“Tell me a story?” he asked. There was a vulnerability to his voice that he couldn’t quite hide, but Darius seemed to be humouring him tonight. He didn’t call it out.
“A bedtime story?”
Jamie nodded.
“Of course, love,” Darius replied softly, as if he were speaking to a pet or a small child. It was obviously just a turn of phrase. Jamie used it himself all the time, pretty much everyone from North of the M25 did—but coming from Darius’s lips, that little word felt like it meant something. Jamie didn’t want to get his hopes up, though; it wasn’t like he had anything special he could offer someone like Darius. Someone with the world literally at their feet.
“Do you want to hear about my worst race?”
“Is it a happy story?”
