'Sacmis' (formerly 'Alien Abduction')

Chapter 27: Running

Sweat trickled off Kate as her feet pounded the treadmill. She couldn’t figure out the alien characters on the machine’s screen, but her watch told her she’d been running for nearly 30 minutes which, at her normal pace, would be around 9 km.

Turning to her left - and not for the first time - she watched Matias running on a treadmill next to hers, with hardly a trace of effort. The sight of him was hypnotic.

Before they’d come to the gym, he’d taken her back to her quarters to find something suitable to wear. She had been relieved to find a pair of shorts and a vest.

“I’ll see you back in the gym,” he’d said, leaving her to change.

Returning to the gym a few minutes later, she had been surprised to see that he, too, had changed. And despite every effort at self-control, she couldn’t stop herself gawping. 

The black coveralls had gone, replaced by black shorts and some kind of body-hugging tee shirt. The skin of his bare arms and legs shone like gold in the brighter glare of the gym’s lights, etching to a darker bronze in the hollows between his muscles. She couldn’t avoid the cliché: he looked like an antique Greek or Roman statue come to life, graceful, even godlike.

“Need to do my stretches,” she’d said hurriedly, in an effort to regain her composure.

For a few minutes she went through her routine, aware of his eyes on her as she did so. Mischievously, she threw in a couple of quite unnecessary extras, first arching her body backwards in a way that showed off her long, slim legs and offered a clear view of her firm belly as her vest rode up, then bending double to place her hands flat on the floor, her bum tightly stretched and raised.

As she had straightened up, she had been pleased to see he had been paying attention, judging by the look on his face.

“So how does this thing work?” she asked.  

 “Speed control is here,” he said, showing her a dial on the treadmill’s control panel. “but it also senses when you want to go faster or slower and automatically matches your pace.”

To start with, she had set off at a slow jogging pace as her muscles loosened up, surprised to see that he had chosen to run alongside her on the neighbouring machine.

Now, well into her usual stride, she glanced across at him again and caught him watching her. Refusing to drop her gaze, she locked her green eyes on his golden ones and began steadily to increase the cadence of her running, the treadmill responding automatically to the new speed. 

There is a kind of synch that two well-matched runners can fall into, a perfect matching of one body to another - and Kate felt that now. As her feet struck the rolling surface, so did his. As his arms swung forward and back, so did hers. He matched her stride for stride, breath for breath.  As she held his gaze and he held hers, it felt to her as if they were merged into one body, driven by one tempo. It felt like…she knew exactly what it felt like and despite the urge to continue, she tore her gaze away and switched off her machine, stepping neatly to the floor.

He did the same and turned to face her, his chest rising and falling.

“Not bad for an amateur,” she said to him. “Keep on like that and you might make the Olympics, too.”

He smiled, once again locking eyes with hers, then - slowly and very deliberately - reached out and took both her hands in his.

The jolt that leaped from his body to hers was much stronger than the brief tingle she had felt the day before. It was as if an electric current leaped from him to her, running over the surface of her skin then sinking deeper into her tissues. It was at once terrifying and exciting, a merging similar to what she’d just felt on the treadmill. And then just as quickly  it was gone.

As the sensation drained away, she felt a sense of loss, as if part of her had been taken away.

“How…what…how did you do that?” she gasped.

“I shouldn’t have,” he replied, “I took advantage.”

“But what happened?” she said.

“It’s something that occurs naturally with us, a transfer of…energy…of identity…a closeness that goes beyond the physical.”

“Get on!” she said, anxious to reduce the strength of her reaction by being flippant. 

He smiled.

“Whatever it did for you,” he said, “was only a fraction of what it did for me.”

© Adriana Nicolas 2014