The idea of either Donovan or Rick getting fat was almost laughable. But Bridget was being intense about something other than me fucking her two best friends, so I was not about derail the conversation.
“You still have to win a race,” she repeated between breaths. “I still want to get my qualification times up into the top heats at the New Englands. So we run. Hard.”
Unfortunately, she punctuated that last word by picking up the pace further. I didn’t respond at first, and she started to pull ahead of me. She glared back at me, and I caught back up, but with ill grace.
“Do we have to make this a race to get you into it?” she growled at me.
For a moment, I forgot about the gorilla out there on the course with us and reacted like we were the same old friends. “You want to race me? On the Big Box?”
“Afraid?”
“Bridget, I’ll kill you,” I laughed quite sincerely, even though it cost me a few cubic inches oxygen.
“Bullshit,” she said almost angrily, but it seemed to be pretty much friendly anger about the matter at hand. “When have you ever beaten me in any race, moron?”
“Two times last fall in Cross-Country,” I said promptly. “My time was two seconds better than yours in the meet here against Choate, and I beat you by three when we were at Taft.”
“You hang onto those times, dreamer. Both races, it rained after you ran and while I did,” Bridget scoffed. That was true, but immaterial. I had run better times those days. I had cherished those times ever since.
“In the 800, which is your best event and my worst, your personal best is five full seconds better than me. In the 1, 500, it is also only five seconds better than mine,” I went on. “In the 3, 000, I’m only seven seconds back.”
She looked at me.
“And if you compare our times from the same meet to the same meet, I’m usually at least that close, if not closer,” I added.
“You still have never beaten me.”
“Sure, and that is because you are close to being an Ivy-League level collegiate women’s athlete, and I am a barely-varsity high school scrub,” I said, really not wanting to actually work hard enough to race. “But I’m a guy and you are a girl,” I went on.
“Glad you got that figured out.”
“Aaaand,” I said, overriding her before we drifted back to dangerous territory, “I have six inches of height and more than a foot of stride length over you, even with your superior form. I have more muscle, and more lung capacity. You cannot beat me at six and a half god-damned miles, Bridget! Why are you trying to make me put in the effort to show you?”
“Do I have to bet you, to get you to take this seriously?” Bridget asked.
“A bet?” I asked, a bit incredulously. We had never been betting kind of friends. That was me and Adam, or me and Chris back home.
“Yeah, a bet, loser. You. Lazy. Loser,” Bridget taunted. Taunting was not her strength, I noted, though it was still annoying. And I still did not want to race this morning. “What do you want to bet that you can win this race?” she snapped
Alright kids, hold onto your ass, because your are about to see me do something spectacularly stupid here.
I had been on a five week bender of pushing my way through awkward situations through sexual bluff, sexual self-confidence, and usually self-confident sexual bluffing. It was becoming my default first draft response. The lesson I had not yet learned at that moment was that those had been sexual situations, for which that set of tools were appropriate solutions.
This was an attempt to avoid a fucking impromptu road race… against a friend who was mad about me… about sex, so I at least had that last, incredibly unhelpful bit. Introducing sex at this point was a Bad Idea.
But I did not think better of it until I was almost finished speaking.
“If I win, show me your tits,” I said. Then I winced.
“What the actual fuck?” Bridget yelled, never slowing her stride.
And, still stupid, and since bluff had become a big part of my repertoire, I said, “Yeah. If you are gonna make me win, you have to show me your tits. Or are you ready to admit the truth? Maybe it just isn’t worth it to you to run this dumbass race idea?”
Bridget shouted wordlessly at the sky, then added. “Done, if you win, I’ll show you my tits.”
Fuck. But at least she hadn’t asked for stakes on my part. That had been my real worry. God knows what…
“But you have to have stakes too,” she went on. “When I win, you drop your pants.”
“What?”
“I want to see what is causing everybody to piss me off,” Bridget growled.
And I had thought this might be a healing run. Here we were with seven and a half kilometers to go, and we were picking at fresh scabs. Damn her. It’s not like any of us had done anything actually wrong. We had just gone about it in a shitty way.
“Deal,” I said. “The rest of the way, back to the bridge.”
“Done,” agreed Bridget, and picked up the pace. I just let her go. I’m not a great runner, but I do know pace. She was suddenly moving faster than her best 3K pace. The more she pushed too hard like that, the better I was going to come out in this. “We are already racing, you know,” she called back, once she had put 200 yards and growing between us. It was dead quiet and we were just heading onto the only straight, flat stretch of the entire course. Her voice carried back easily to me.
“Yep,” was all I called back, and waved. When I race, I don’t waste oxygen shouting.
And now that we were doing this fucking thing, I was sure as hell in it to win it.
And I was in it to rub it in Bridget’s unwarrantedly superior face. I freely admitted that I had neither her form, nor her grit, nor her natural speed. But fucking-a, I had not killed myself for four god-damned years, making myself the best runner my body could become, to have her thinking that I couldn’t beat a girl my own age over almost seven miles! Bridget held a lot of moral high ground at the moment, but damn it, I still deserved at least this much respect.
And…
Yeah, and. And, now that the subject had been broached, I found that I was rather interested in seeing Bridgets breasts. I was, in fact, looking forward to it. A lot. It was, in fact… motivational.