My Secret Family

Jogging Memory

Max

96 kg and falling

As I was waiting for Sophie I noticed someone else, a muscular man with a baseball cap and a tribal tattoo down one arm, talking on his phone. I recognized him because I had seen him arguing with another girl here yesterday, someone he had been holding hands with.

As Sophie approached him her face lit up, she reached up to his face and kissed him on the lips and rubbed his tattooed arm. If they were just friends they were damn close ones, I tried to convince myself. The sinking feeling in my stomach told me otherwise. I felt like a private investigator following an affair, which in a way I think I was. Sophie rubbed his arm again several times and received no response from him, I swear I saw him shrug her off and instantly felt like there was some crack here that could be pried open. The slight hatred for myself faded quickly when I saw her argue with him. After a few minutes of heated exchange they logged off in different directions.

I left her alone for a while and things seemed to get back on track. There were moments of eye contact that did not seem hostile, like coaxing a frightened animal from the trees I would just need to give her time and space.

Sophie ran on and I followed her, my gasping attempt at catching up failing miserably to leave me stricken on the side of the pathway. She ran in her own world, headphones tuned in to some other universe. When she stopped at a water fountain I tried to calm my breathing, put on an air of nonchalance, and jogged up to her. "Hey, how are you?" I asked, out of breath. She looked up from the fountain letting the jet of water spray into her face.

"Oh, hi." She wiped her face on her shirt, flashing her sunken ribs before the shirt fell down loose against her stomach. "I'm fine. So you're a jogger too, huh?" She said, eyeing my orange shorts. She had clearly penetrated my ruse, my fake jogger disguise, but I continued nonetheless.

"Sure, jog here all the time. Got to work out the lats, you know. " I performed a fake stretching exercise, suddenly realizing I had put on two mismatched leg-warmers, really just woolly socks with the feet cut off.

"I see. " She brushed her hands through her hair, shaking the water out. "Yeah, keeping those lats on the road is very important."

"Exactly. Hey, sorry to ask you this, but are you and that guy dating?"

"That guy? You mean Luke? I'm surprised you know about him. Are you following me?"

I went white, but she smiled again, her smile starting not from her mouth but from her eyes. It was a joke.

Whew.

"He is my boyfriend, yes."

"It's just, I see him around a lot, you know, with other people."

"Do you?" Sophie's expression changed, she finished her final stretch and looked me in the eye. "Okay, take care."

I had scared her. She jogged off faster than before. I tried to catch up but she had already disappeared among the crowd of joggers on the path.

Man, she ran fast. I wanted to jog at least one hundred meters after her but collapsed on the grass after what was less than fifty, my chest pounding as I struggled to catch my breath.