Page 45 of The Weight Of It All
“How often do you do these?”
“Every couple of months.”
“You’re all crazy.”
“It’s pretty intense.”
“And it’s this Saturday?”
“Yep. At three o’clock.” He put his cup back on the table. “Did you have something else planned?”
“Nope. I don’t think so. I’ve renounced Anika’s best friend status, remember? Though I might take my mum out for a brunch. That’ll keep her happy for a while. I should be free in the afternoon.”
“Excellent!”
“And you’re really going to make me do the Bay Run?”
“Yep.”
“You don’t have to be so cheerful about trying to kill me.”
He chuckled. “You’ll be surprised how easy you’ll do it.”
“What? The dying part? Sure, that’s easy. It’s the running part that’s hard.”
He smiled as he leaned back in the sofa. “I’ll redo your training schedule. It was due to be redone soon anyway.”
“Why redo it? I was just getting the hang of it. I could just get through the whole session without wanting to die.”
“That’s why I need to change it.”
“So you are trying to kill me?”
Reed smiled warmly at me. “You’re improving. You need more of a challenge to push yourself.”
“Can’t I just plateau out at mediocre?”
He chuckled at that, then fell quiet, though he never took his eyes off me. “Nope. You’re far from mediocre,Henry.” His eyes were so intense, his gaze seemed to charge the air between us. The static surprised me. He shook his head a little and shot to his feet and quickly cleared the plates from the coffee table. “I’ll just take these…” he mumbled, disappearing into his kitchen.
I let out a slow and steady breath.What the fuck was that?If I didn’t know better, I could have sworn that was alook. But I did know better. He was popular, friends with everyone, gorgeous, with a body to die for. And I was… none of those things.
I’d been kicked off the couple train and left at the station for the old and overweight just three weeks ago. After eight years.
My head kept saying I wasn’t ready for this. I needed time to be myself again. I needed to rediscover who I was as an individual person, not as part of a couple. I needed to learn how to be alone and to be okay with that.
But my heart was pretty sure I’d spent most of the last eight years alone. My heart was yearning for something it had been deprived of for far too long.
And I didn’t know what to make of that.
How could I have spent the last eight years with someone and feel alone? How could I find myself suddenly single and there be no void where Graham had been? I didn’t even realise how alone I was until he was gone, because it was only after he’d left me that I realised my life wasn’t that much different.
The saying “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” was opposite for me. I was only now realising what I was missing out on, now that he was gone.
So maybe Graham saw that all along. We were so stagnant, so comfortable with each other, we were holding each other back. We were just numb with the status quo, and I could see that now. As hard as it was to admit, Graham had done the right thing.
So what did Reed have to do with that? I wasn’t sure…
“Want another coffee?” Reed’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts. He was standing in the doorway to his kitchen, putting a very deliberate distance between us.
