“Yeee-haw,” I squeal as mister Harner looks up from the rosebush he’s trimming, giving me a confused look. I give him a little wave.
I didn’t expect Jonah to go along with my ridiculous plan, but instead of just walking home, he starts running home. There’s this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me something is up. He usually feels the need to kill himself with exercise if something is up. It might have a little something to do with the encounter of his womb bearer I had earlier that day.
“Joe?”
“Hm?” he answers as he breathes through his nose. Running with a full sized human on your back does count as a workout it seems.
“How are you dealing with your mom butting into your life?”
He grunts and the grip on my leg tightens. “I wish she’d just stay away. She hasn’t been my mom in forever, so what the hell does she want from me now?”
Before I saw her, I could’ve believed that maybe she had a change of heart in the time she’s been incarcerated, but now that I’ve met her I know that’s far from true.
That lady is just fucking freaky, and she doesn’t have a good bone in her body. Just thinking of her gives me the shivers. It does answer why Jonah is willingly putting himself through Ironman-like runs.
“Well, keep running like this and she’ll never find you.”
“My thoughts exactly. But to be honest, if you keep running like you run, she’ll probably catch you.”
The thought of that makes me a little ill. I do not want that.
“In that case,” I answer, “you keep on training with me on our back. Because this’ll be the only way I’ll be going from A to B in the near future.”
He snorts, squeezing my thighs. “Gimme another one.”
It takes me a second to register what he’s talking about, but when we run right besides Miss Frieda and Miss Patterson who are out walking the little dog, I yelp a loud ‘Yee-haw’.
Both ladies look up in surprise as Jonah runs past them, me clinging like a monkey to his back.
“You tell him, girl!” Miss Frieda yells.
“Oh, the beautiful days of being young and riding a man,” Miss Patterson says a little too loud.
It takes Jonah running all the way back home for us to stop laughing.