Chapter 7: Thursday
654 Words
The second time she saw Lucien that week, nobody had engineered it.
Aria ran every morning — had for years, long before Crestwood, a habit built around the meditative quality of sustained movement and the specific pleasure of earning the day before it properly began. Her route took her through the park at the west edge of town, along the river path, back through the residential blocks, and home.
Lucien was on the river path.
He was already running, moving at the long unhurried pace of someone for whom physical exertion was more maintenance than effort. He didn't see her until she came around the curve and they were ten feet apart and it was too late for either of them to pretend.
They both stopped.
The river moved past them. Birds argued in the trees overhead. The morning light did complicated things to the water surface.
"I'm not following you," he said immediately.
"I know your car isn't here." She'd been aware of whether his car was in the vicinity for two weeks now, in a way she resented bitterly. "You run this route?"
"Every Thursday since February."
She'd moved hers to Thursday six weeks ago when her work schedule changed. She absorbed this with the quiet frustration of someone outmaneuvered by coincidence.
"Fine," she said.
"We can run in opposite directions."
"The loop only makes sense going west."
"Then we run in the same direction," he said, with no triumph in it. Just logistics. He gestured ahead. "I don't bite, Aria."
She gave him a look.
Something crossed his face — brief, disarmed, as if the joke had surprised him as much as it surprised her.
She started running. He fell into pace beside her.
They ran in silence for half a mile. The bond was quieter when she was moving — or maybe movement gave her somewhere to put the energy the bond generated, something to do with the awareness that lived at the edges of her nervous system like a signal she couldn't tune out.
"Your brother came to see me," she said.
"I heard." A muscle in his jaw moved. "I'm sorry. I told him—"
"He was honest. I didn't mind."
A beat. "What did he say?"
She thought about telling him. Decided he'd be embarrassed and she wasn't cruel. "That he was trying to understand me."
"That's Silas."
"Your brother loves you," she said.
"Yes." No hesitation. "I know."
She glanced sideways. "Do you love him back?"
He looked at her. "What kind of question is that?"
"A straightforward one."
"Of course I do."
"You might try showing it occasionally. He carries things for you that you probably don't know about."
Lucien was quiet for a moment. "How would you know that?"
"I watched his face when he talked about you." Simply. "I'm good at reading people."
They reached the end of the river path where it opened back into the residential blocks — the natural decision point, the place where they'd go back to their separate mornings and separate lives and the careful distance that was all she had to offer.
Lucien slowed to a stop. So did she, without meaning to.
He turned to look at her. In full morning light he was more difficult — not intimidating, just more present. The controlled remoteness of him softened slightly by exertion and something else she couldn't name.
"You rejected me," he said. Not accusation. Inventory. "And you're still giving me information about how to be better."
"Your relationship with your brother isn't about me."
"No," he agreed. He watched her in that complete, still way he had. "But you didn't have to say it."
She didn't answer. She turned and ran the last stretch home.
She spent the rest of the morning failing, comprehensively, to stop thinking about the way his footsteps had matched hers on the path without either of them working for it.
- Writer
