“You feel so good,” she whispered . . . and then Andy couldn’t hold back any longer. He plunged inside her, deep into that maddening clutch, that heat. Rachel moaned, her hands locked onto his shoulders, her breath against his face, her voice in his ear, urging him on.
“Oh, baby,” he gasped as she put her lips against his ear, whispering his name over and over, like a chant or a song or a prayer.
If there was going to be awkwardness, it would come when they’d finished; when they looked down and saw that he was still wearing his socks and she still had her panties hooked around one ankle. There would be the condom to dispose of, the strangeness of a woman in his bed for the first time in months, and Rachel would surely have something to say about his decorating skills, how his bedroom was as austere and empty as a cheap hotel room, with no bookshelves, no dining-room table, a secondhand couch in the living room, and the posters he’d had since college on the walls. But as soon as they were done, Rachel rolled into his arms, curling herself against his chest, and said, “I missed you!” in the friendly, happily surprised voice of a woman who’d bumped into an old best friend at the grocery store. With her hands balled into fists, she punched lightly at his chest, like it was his fault they’d been apart.
“I missed you, too,” Andy said. He’d been smiling for so long he was sure that his face would ache in the morning. “I feel like . . .”
“What?” she asked. “How do you feel?” He remembered how she’d always been interrogating him, quizzing him about his emotions, pushing him to give her more than just a “fine” or “happy” or “tired.”
“Like nothing’s changed,” he said. “Like you went out to get bagels or something, and now you’re home.”
“Now I’m home,” she said. He cuddled her against him, kissed her, then got up. In the kitchen, he poured a glass of water, took a sip, and carried it back to the bedroom. Rachel had opened her suitcase and pulled on one of her ribbed cotton T-shirts and the inevitable pajama bottoms, this pair blue-and-white striped.
He handed her the water. She drank, set the glass down, then sat up with her back against the wall, holding her arms out, waiting for his feet. “Oh, gross,” he heard her murmur as she inspected his battered toes, then worked her way up to his calves and his thighs, running her hands lightly over his limbs. “Your body is amazing,” she said. “I mean, I thought it was amazing before, but this . . .” She swept her hands from the tops of his thighs to his knees. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You basically work out for a living. If someone like you doesn’t have an amazing body, nobody does.” Rearranging herself until they were side by side again, she asked, “So what do you do all day?”
He told her that he ran, he ate, he lifted, he stretched, he slept, and then he rose to do it all again. He traveled to meets, he raced, he worked on shaving seconds or even fractions of seconds off his best times. Out loud, it sounded silly, the height of self-indulgence. There were people fighting wars and curing diseases, writing great books or, in Rachel’s case, helping needy children, and what did he do? He ran around a track, slightly but significantly faster than a small group of other elite runners . . . and got paid more for doing it than she got for helping kids.
“So you got what you always wanted,” said Rachel. “Lucky you.”
In the darkness, with only the glow of the parking lot lights filtering through his window shade, she looked so pretty and so familiar, like something he’d loved and missed and resigned himself to living without. Her head on his chest, her hand on his side, soothed him in a way that no massage or meditation ever had.
“Lucky me,” said Andy, and then, before he’d had a chance to plan or consider—and Andy was a man who planned and considered everything, from the grams of protein in his morning smoothie to how many miles he’d run every afternoon—he rolled onto his side so that he was looking right in her eyes and said, “You should move out here.”
“ ‘Please come to Denver with the snowfall,’ ” she sang. He cuddled her close. He loved to hear her sing. She had a beautiful voice, he had told her that a hundred times, that she should join a choir or a band or a theater company, but she’d always insisted that she had a range of exactly three notes, that the world was full of people who were a lot better than she was.
“I’m not in Denver,” he pointed out, although he’d thought about it. A lot of runners went there, to train at altitude.
“It’s a song,” she said. “It’s actually a country song. You don’t know it?” She adjusted herself and sang a little more. “ ‘Hey, ramblin’ boy, why don’t you settle down, Denver ain’t your kind of town. There ain’t no gold, and there ain’t nobody like me . . .’ ”