AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Easy,” he murmured.
“It’s only the warm-up.”
“I’m already warm. I’ve been on here for ten minutes.”
“Big, tough man,” I said in a baby voice, and I didn’t need to see his eye roll. I could feel it.
Three minutes later, I increased my speed to a fast jog, so Dean did the same.
“I ran cross-country in high school,” I told him conversationally. “Were you an athlete?”
“Nope.”
I angled my head ever so slightly to check out his form. It was crap. “I can tell.”
“Fuck off,” he said, fighting a smile.
After a few minutes, I upped the speed once more, finding my rhythm now. I gave myself over to the reverberation of the strides, sank into my breaths, and let the tension drain from my body. From my mind.
“I needed to find something else for my stress,” Dean said after a while. “Before, I would work on my house and play music and…”
I was curious about the dangling thought but was too scared to know the answer. Fearful it would be the same as mine. That he fucked his stress away.
“The past few months, it hasn’t been enough,” he went on. “My sister talked me into yoga, but that wasn’t for me.”
“Me either,” I agreed. “It’s too slow for me.”
“I need something loud and hard to get me out of my head.”
I almost tripped over my feet when my focus darted toward him. He needed somethingloudandhard.
Oh god, my mind was in the gutter.
I swept thoughts of echoing moans and stinging thrusts out of my mind. “So you’re here at the gym?”
“Apparently trying to race you.” He turned his eyes on me and grinned.
I raised my brows then increased my speed and incline to a full-out run, and Dean followed, although I could immediately tell he couldn’t keep up.
“Jesus, woman,” he panted after a minute. “What are…what are you trying to do to me?”
“You give up?”
He pressed his index finger into the button to decrease the speed to a walk and bent his head, breathing heavily. When I laughed, he muttered, “Fuck off.”
I decreased my speed to a jog. “You have to build up your stamina.”
I didn’t miss the way his eyes raked over me. “Guess so.”
“It’ll take a few weeks.”
“You gonna train me?” he asked, and even though I could tell he was joking, I lifted a shoulder.
“I’m here every night after work until it gets warmer out. Then I run outside.”
He merely nodded.
And that was how we started running together every day.
