Page 37 of Your Pace or Mine
“It is, I promise.” Darius smiled.
Jamie allowed himself to relax into the mattress, the world fading away as he listened to the soft elegance of Darius’s voice, the stretched vowels and clipped consonants washing over him.
“This is going back, like, quite a bit, but when I was about thirteen, this club my parents were part of had a sort of family sports day. Selena was only around four, and she insisted on entering the three-legged race with me.”
Jamie let out a soft laugh. “Let me guess, she was a natural, and you were a total dead weight?”
“Not exactly, don’t get me wrong, she’s an athlete in her own right now, but unsurprisingly, it was disastrous,” Darius said, grinning now. “We were both pretty terrible at it. They tied our legs together, and we couldn’t agree on which foot to start with. I was obviously way taller than her. We must’ve fallen over three times before even crossing the start line. The other kids were halfway down the field, and we were still arguing about who was ‘messing it up.’”
Jamie laughed. “Even as a teenager, you were so headstrong you’d argue with a four-year-old.”
“So obviously,” Darius continued. “I was ready to give up. I mean, we were dead last. So embarrassing. But Selena? She didn’t care. She just started laughing, like full-on belly laughs, the way only a four-year-old can, and she said, ‘Let’s go, Darius! We’re going to win!’ And somehow, that made it fun again, and we did eventually finish.”
“So, is that when you caught the running bug?” Jamie asked.
“Oh, I’d fallen victim to it well before that day,” Darius admitted. “But it stuck with me. Even if you’re not the fastest or you mess up, you keep going. You enjoy it for what it is. Selenaalways reminds me of that whenever I start taking things too seriously… which is often.”
“You? Never?”
“Oh sure, laugh it up,” Darius replied. “You feeling ok for Saturday?”
Jamie shifted, phantom pain returning to his knee as if Darius had summoned it by merely questioning its status. “I’ll be fine.”
“Have you been to see someone about it?”
Jamie sighed. “Darius, I can’t afford that.”
“Why didn’t you just say that before?”
“You hate when we complain about money.”
“I hate when Mark hassles me to cover the thousand pounds he still needs to raise for his charity,” Darius countered. “You’re different.”
“Because I’m your pretend boyfriend?”
“Not just that, Jamie,” Darius sighed.
Jamie wanted to ask what he meant, but Darius was still talking, and honestly, he wasn’t sure if he was ready to ask anyway. “I have a physio I see regularly, he’d probably be willing to take a quick look if you piggyback on my appointment.”
“I couldn’t ask someone to work for free,” Jamie argued.
“He’s a friend, and he’d probably just bill me for the extra time.”
Jamie narrowed his eyes. “I don’t need you to pay my way.”
“Jamie.” Darius shifted. “Just come over tomorrow afternoon and he’ll take a look, okay?”
“I’ll think about it.”
He was on the fucking district line, again. Darius had texted Jamie an address in Chelsea, near Sloane Square, because, of course, he’d live in the poshest part of London possible. As muchas Jamie wanted to dig his heels in and refuse, his knee still fucking hurt, and he was starting to panic about the marathon. If Darius was to be believed (and like every article he’d read about running a marathon), then Jamie only had about five weeks left to work up to his longest run before he’d need to rest up for the race. There was something terrifying about thinking that the 10-mile run he’d done last week wasn’t even half of the distance he’d be running on race day.
It was a short walk from Sloane Square station to the address Darius had given him. He arrived at a Georgian-style townhouse with a black door framed by white pillars. The house was four stories of well-maintained brick with white framed windows and a wrought-iron railing wrapped around a small balcony off the front. There were no plants, though ivy crawled up the front of the two houses on either side.
Jamie walked up the black and white tiled path, trying not to mentally assess what a place like this would cost. He rang the buzzer and waited.
It took a moment for Darius to open the door, and when he did, Jamie was treated to the sight of a barefoot Darius, dressed only in low-slung grey joggers with a towel draped around his neck. He stood gaping at him for a moment, watching the little rivulets of water drip from Darius’s short hair down his elegant neck to the curve of his collarbone, before Darius ushered him inside.
It wasn’t just that he was hot.
