Dream of You (17 page)

             
“I don’t mind being the first.”

             
She glanced away again, another blush rising in her cheeks, and he wondered if she’d interpreted that more than one way.

             
“Let me take you out. For real this time.”

             
More lip chewing was accompanied by a disbelieving glance. “You’re asking me out on a date?”

             
“What do you think ‘let me take you out’ means?” he asked with a chuckle.

             
“I think it means you’re putting me in a bad situation.”

             
“Why’s that?”

             
“I really want to say ‘yes.’”

             
“So do.”

             
Ellie sighed, one of those nervous, holding-her-breath-beforehand sighs. Her eyes latched onto his and were, he guessed, more vulnerable than she would have liked for them to be. “Are we going to do this? Teacher and student and…oh my God,” she said in an undertone, “are we?”

             
“You’re exhausting,” he told her, not unkindly, and saw a grin threaten. “I’ll leave it up to you, since you aren’t ‘tryst material’ after all. Friday night. Your call.”

             
She mulled it over longer than she should have, but somehow, that made it more worthwhile when she squared up her shoulders and said, “Yes.”

             
Jordan wanted to do a hundred other things besides letting her walk away without so much as a handshake, but he did anyway.

             
Friday
, he reminded himself, and signed a death warrant for his career that he couldn’t be bothered to worry about.

14

             
A
ll day Tuesday, Ellie walked around with three dozen butterflies beating their wings against her stomach lining. She had a date. As Jordan had said, a “real” one, and not an accidental circumstance.

             
When Paige had set her up with Dan the grocery bagger from Publix, she’d gritted her teeth and forced fake smiles through their dinner, and she hadn’t taken any of his calls since. When Jackson from her high school chem class had asked her out for coffee over the summer, she’d nodded off in her chair as he’d talked ad nauseam about the cruise to Mexico he’d taken the month before. She had a cousin who wanted her to link up with someone from her church via Facebook. All of those possibilities had one thing in common: no butterflies.

             
But thinking about Jordan, she was choking on the things. In the best way possible.             

             
He’d said Friday, but Wednesday was another class-required workout. Too anxious to sleep until the alarm woke her, too preoccupied to write, she arrived at school earlier than she had to. The sun was a deep fissure of crimson dividing the gray of heaven and earth. The dew was so heavy on the grass of the track’s infield it looked like snow, glittering and white, and coiling tendrils of fog licked up toward a morning sky that was cold and not yet touched by morning.

             
But it was light out, the watery, colorless hue of just after seven, and Ellie spread her jacket over a dew-slick section of bleacher, sat, and dug
Pride and Prejudice
out of her bag.

             
She’d read it a hundred times, but the words were familiar that way, the equivalent of a favorite old sweatshirt for her brain. Comforting. She’d read fifty pages and the sun had risen golden like baked bread when something
thumped
down at her feet.

             
She snapped the book shut, eyes bouncing up with a quick, startled gasp. Jordan stood in front of her dressed to run in a blue tank top and matching, second-skin shorts that went down to his knees. As ridiculous-looking as it was practical, the getup also showcased a long and lean, tightly muscled athlete’s body that she more and more wanted to get her hands all over. She felt her brows lift and couldn’t bring them back down.

             
“You don’t make any noise when you walk,” she said, rather than deliver the compliment she’d wanted to.

             
“Like a cat,” he deadpanned, bending to retrieve his stopwatch from the bag he’d dropped at her feet – the sound that had startled her. When he straightened, the first rays of newborn eastern sun highlighted the thin shadows of stress grooves around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes. He turned and glanced into the sun, eyes flaring sea foam and gold. He looked, if she dared think it, nervous, his mostly bare shoulders tight, cords standing out in his neck.

             
“Do I dare ask about the outfit?” she asked, teasingly.

             
“You forgot?” He faced her and she could watch his features smooth, his mask of perfect calm and indifference sliding into place. “Lucky me, I get to play ringer today.”

             
“Oh, I did forget!” She smiled, now understanding the energy coursing through him. “And you’re nervous. That’s really cute.”

             
He went stone-serious and aimed an index finger at her. “Cute, no. Nervous, hell no.”

             
But she wasn’t that easily fooled. “Oh, yes you are.” Her smile stretched so wide her face hurt. “All dressed up in your racing gear. That’s adorable.”

             
“’Adorable’,” he mimicked in a falsetto. “You sound like a cheerleader.”

             
“Impossible.”

             
Her spread-out hoodie didn’t exactly make for a seat for two, but he joined her on it anyway, their legs and arms pressed together, shoulders bumping, his sneaker butting up against hers. Ellie hadn’t expected him to just sit on the wet bleachers, but she hadn’t expected this either, and a fast, unbidden jolt of excitement went up her spine and left goose bumps in its wake. He smelled like pears and toothpaste, a faint undercurrent of shaving cream. He was looking at the stopwatch in his hand and his lashes were dark down against his cheeks, his mouth just inches from hers. He had narrow, masculine lips and she remembered exactly what they felt like against hers. If she leaned forward just a fraction –

             
“You don’t have to walk today,” he said, and reminded her that they were at school, that he had students coming, and that, sadly,
she
was one of his students. “You can time us.”

             
She let him show her how to work the stopwatch and demonstrated that, yes, as a human with opposable thumbs, she was capable of handling it without assistance. She lifted her eyes to his, planning to say as much, and he leaned in and kissed her.

             
It was a fast, suction cup sort of kiss, aggressive but clinging. Ellie’s eyes fluttered shut and opened slowly as he pulled away, her heart galloping behind her breastbone. All of Jordan’s seriousness was gone, his eyes dancing, his smile infectious.

             
“Sorry, I just really wanted to do that.”

             
“Glad you did.” She heard the breathy sound of her voice. Movement over his shoulder forced her eyes away from his and she saw his three track team members coming over the rise, just man-shaped figures through the fog. “For luck,” she said as she leaned back, hating the distance but knowing it was necessary. “Here come your guys.”

             
And back came the game face. “Don’t need luck for that.” But she saw the doubt in his eyes, even if he didn’t want her to.

**

              Jordan wasn’t nervous – he was petrified. He’d awakened with a strung-out stomach the likes of which he hadn’t experienced since his last meet back in high school. He pushed himself in his workouts, but hadn’t clocked a run in the past seven years and had no idea if he’d even be able to keep pace with his charges, much less move past them.
You’ve got this
, a voice in the back of his head kept reminding him, but an even louder voice said,
you don’t know that
. Knowing Ellie would watch made him almost jittery. Embarrassing himself in front of the girl he wanted to sleep with was not on the agenda.

             
“Coach?” Lane asked as they approached, forehead a maze of puzzled creases.

             
“You in a race?” Jonathan asked, and then he and Anton shared shoulder slugs and laughs.

             
Cute.

             
“Yeah,” Jordan said. “With you three idiots.”

             
They came to a collective halt, blinking. “What?” Anton asked. “Like, for real?”

             
“Like for real. Go warm up.”

             
This had the potential to be a disaster. If he didn’t win this, he’d prove two things. One: his speed had come and gone and now he was just some twenty-five-year-old washed up wannabe. Two: he made poor coaching decisions, was therefore a poor coach, and didn’t deserve to work with these losers. Why the hell had he agreed to Ellie’s uniformed idea without a fuss?

             
He glanced across the track toward her to where she stood at what would serve as the start line, his stopwatch around her neck, rubbing her bare arms to ward off the chill. She’d come dressed to walk in yoga capris and pale yellow tank, her hair in a messy topknot with loose tendrils curling against her ears. Between the cleavage, the tiny waist and ass to kill for, he didn’t understand her self-consciousness, but he knew why he’d agreed to her plan. Couple the physical exterior with the little smile she shot him, and he would have agreed to race barefoot through a gravel parking lot.

             
He took one last deep, steadying breath where the guys couldn’t see him, and then called them over.

             
“We’re gonna run an eight hundred,” he said as they gathered. “Ellie’s gonna clock us.”

             
“
Clock
?” Lance said, sniggering. “Or do you mean co – ”

             
Jordan gave him a sharp look.

             
“What’s she even doing here?” Anton asked.

             
“She’s my coaching assistant,” he lied.

             
“Yeah,
ass
-istant,” Jonathan said and then burst into laughter at his own joke.

             
“Cut the shit,” Jordan snapped, hating how bitchy he sounded. “You beat me, you can bug me about the girl. Otherwise…”

             
“Shut up?” Lance suggested.

             
“Yeah.”

             
“It’s cool, Coach,” Anton said. “Get it young if you can, right?”

             
“Oh my God.” Jordan wiped a hand down his face. “Go get on your marks for the love of Christ.”

             
They did, and so did he, the four of them lining up at the bottom of the backstretch where Ellie waited with his stopwatch.

             
Jordan’s anxiety was an electrical current pulsing through him, tightening his stomach and throat, his fingers and toes twitching with the effort of containing it beneath his skin. What if he wasn’t in the shape he thought he was? What if he was slow? What if he lost? What if…

             
He crouched behind the line, fingertips on the cool, dew-damp surface of the track, inhaled, and his old friend Certainty came slamming into him.

             
His eyes zeroed in on the lane ahead of him, laser-focused. His lungs opened, his heart slowed. Everything that wasn’t track or the race he was about to run faded into an impressionist collage of color and meaningless sound.

             
“Ready,” Ellie said and he felt his body get flooded with positive, usable adrenaline.

             
“Set.”

             
He got up on the balls of his feet, every muscle loose and poised.

             
When she said, “Go,” it was like he’d never stopped competing, like he was eighteen and about to break the state record. He knew exactly which pace to set and when he would kick it into overdrive, the track laid out in his head like a computer programmed sequence.

             
He flew.

**

              Jordan took the lead straight off the line, but Ellie could tell he was coasting. He had this loose, long, unhurried stride that ate up the track. He was, as she’d thought before, a gazelle, and watching him run was nothing like viewing a sporting event – it was stealing a glimpse at all the mental, emotional, physical components that made Jordan Walker who he was. Ellie did not have a soft spot for athletes, she didn’t moon over men, but as her eyes followed him around the first turn, she felt all her logic and self-control turn to goo. She didn’t love him, but her chest was tight and her brain ached and her hand wanted to know his in an infuriating, embarrassing attack of girlish obsession and desire that she had absolutely no control over. She’d steeled herself against all her peers, friends of friends, customers at the restaurant; but she’d never once thought to put up barriers to warn against her professor, and now it was too late.

             
The blonde, the pretty one – Lane, she remembered – surged ahead of his two teammates, gunning for his coach. Ellie pulled her lower lip between her teeth and bit down hard as he caught Jordan, and then passed him.

             
“I’m a pace setter,”
she remembered Lane saying last week, and clearly, he meant it. As they went down the backstretch of the first lap, he had at least a six length lead and was amping up his speed with every stride, his face red, cheeks blotchy crimson.

             
Anton faded to the back of the pack.
“You hit your stride too late,”
Jordan had told him.

             
Jonathan settled in behind Jordan, but he didn’t look comfortable there. He was working twice as hard as his coach, arms and legs churning, veins popping along his temples.

             
By the time they passed in front of her, Lane had started to fade. At the top of the backstretch, Jordan made his move.

             
His stride lengthened and his pace seemed to double, like a Thoroughbred unfurling its body across the track as it didn’t race, but dominated its way toward home.

             
Go
, Ellie whispered in her head, willing him even faster. He was well out in front of his students. Anton was pouring on the speed, but as Jordan had told him, too late. He was going to win, but Ellie wanted him to do it so decisively that Jordan would have no excuse but talent to attribute to victory. He was not a coach because he was washed up; somewhere along the way, he’d lost his competitive edge. He’d thrown away what was, by all the accounts she’d read, shaping up to be a promising career on the track.