Allison Parr - Running Back

“He’s not that old.”

Lauren’s eyes caught mine, and I made a face. “And no, I’m not, and that’s not what we argued about.”

Anna just scoffed. “It’s totally ridiculous anyway. But it’s probably good to make Mike worry a little. He’s way too sure of himself.”

Obviously a family trait. “I should head out. Work to do.”

“Wait.” Anna bolted to her feet. “I’m coming with, just let me grab my stuff.” She was out the door.

Lauren raised her brows. “You’re going without eating?”

“Well.” I gestured at the soggy mess. “I have a banana and sandwich in my bag.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh!” And then I fled too.

I stayed in a mood all week.

This sucked. The O’Connors were off touring Ireland, and even if Lauren had been here, she wasn’t exactly prime material for discussing my romance problems. Cam was in California for a conference, which meant the sun always set on the Camille-Natalie Empire. I shot her off an email that night, after a fairly cool goodbye from Mike. It’s not like I was saying I didn’t want to date him! Is it my fault that I think biology is a bigger factor than cultural pretenses?

I’d woken with a response in my inbox, which said: Maybe you shouldn’t TELL A DUDE YOU’RE DOOMED TO BREAK UP AND YOU’D BE BETTER OFF WITH ANOTHER GUY.

Huh.

At least I could kill my energy shoveling units and throwing buckets full of dirt through the sifting screen. Simon Daly, the eighteen-year-old holding the other side of the screen, looked at me cautiously. “You all right, Professor Sullivan?”

Slightly better now that he’d called me professor. “I’m fine.”

“Bad luck with Mike?”

I stopped sifting. “Excuse me?”

“My great-aunt Eileen told me you’re back in your own room.”

There were so many things wrong with that. Particularly—why the hell did Eileen have to spill our beans? “Who else knows that?”

He shrugged. “Everyone, I suppose.”

Great. Just great. All of Kilkarten knew about my sex life.

“Thought he was supposed to propose to you here.”

I almost wrenched the screen completely out of his grasp. “ What? ”

“Just talk I heard.”

“Well, don’t. Anymore. No more talk.”

He looked at me like I was crazy and gently began to push and pull the screen again. “All right.”

I took a deep breath. “All right.”

We broke for lunch around noon, settling down in circles and pulling bags out of backpacks. A bottle of sanitizer was passed around, so the amount of dirt we consumed would be slightly lessened. I generally attempted to hold my PB&Js by their tinfoil wrappers, but by this point eating dirt just didn’t faze me.

Jeremy stopped by later as I violently scooped dirt from the unit into a heap beside it. “Are you okay, Natalie?”

I paused to suck in some air, leaning against my shovel as I squinted up at him. The sun glinted white and sharp behind him. “I’m fine! Don’t worry about me.”

“Err. Did you have a fight? With...” He hesitated. “With Michael?”

“What? No. No! What would give you that idea?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, like he always did when something was bothering him. “I just wanted to make sure—as your advisor, I feel responsible—that it’s not a bad situation.”

I wiped my arm across my brow, trying to get rid of some of the ever-present sweat, and hauled myself out of the unit and over to my pile for another water bottle. “Please, Jeremy, don’t worry about it. It’s not a situation.”

“Okay. Just—know you can come to me, if you ever need to.”

Poor, uncomfortable Jeremy, trying to do the right thing. I grinned before consuming half a pint of water. “Thanks.”

Of course, as we packed up for the day, Harry Gunner asked, “When’s your man coming back?”

And I immediately answered, “Next Tuesday.”

And Jeremy kind of gave me a look.

Okay. So we were maybe a situation.

For the next week, we dug and sifted and hoped. There had to be something here, but for some reason, we kept missing it. None of the units yielded anything other than the usual cattle bones and litter, and the spike the specialist had found turned out to be nothing more than unusual bedrock, and another was just a type of soil that stunted the voltage measurement. It was hard to keep from widening the units, from thinking maybe we just missed it.

At least it was good for my body. I could feel my muscles coming back to form, biceps and triceps building, thighs sculpted into pillars of strength. I felt like my lungs were so strong I could run a marathon.

Most evenings, we piled into the trucks and headed down to the pub for a couple hours of beer and pool and darts. Sometimes we were invited into someone’s home for dinner. Life would have been perfect, except for the lack of finding anything. And the lack of Mike.

On Friday, Jeremy and I ended up at our own little corner table. I watched him for a long while. I’d always been so happy around Jeremy, so comfortable. That was probably why I’d had a crush on him in undergrad. Because he was safe. Because he would never return my affection, and so my emotions weren’t in danger. But they’d barely been emotions at all. He’d never made me heady with desire; I’d never craved him. My daydreams of Jeremy had all skipped from him realizing my utter brilliance to us gallivanting around the globe, uncovering lost cities and presenting at conferences.

And that had sounded fine, because I knew love didn’t really last, so falling into it was just asking for disaster. But that had been a lot easier to say when I wasn’t caught up in a swirl of emotions. When I didn’t miss someone so badly my chest ached.

Goddamn. I didn’t particularly want to end up on the it’s better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all side of the argument. I’d better check what Yeats had to say about it when I went home.

I put down my fork and took a deep breath. “Jeremy, do you have a girlfriend?’

He started coughing, and I waited patiently for him to recover. He took another sip for fortification. “I do.”

I couldn’t decide if I was surprised or not. “How come you never mention her?”

Not that I expected him to spill every detail of his personal life, but we spent a lot of time together. I knew his favorite dish was mushroom paprikash and he knew about my parents. I could cheer him up when he was tense and he always brought me Hobnobs back from the UK. He didn’t owe me details of his personal life, I just already knew them in every category other than romantic.

A touch of color stained his cheekbones, and he settled his glasses more firmly on his nose. “I suppose because...” He trailed off, then valiantly rallied again. “You never talk about your own personal life.”

I looked out the window at the cobblestones and brightly painted houses. “I’m thinking of dating Mike.”

He looked ready to start coughing again. “But I thought...”

Oh, right. “That we were already dating? Actually—”

“No, that—” He stopped, flustered once again. This was fascinating. I’d never seen Jeremy so embarrassed. “I thought maybe you had a—deal.”

My mouth dropped open. What, like I’d sleep with Mike for Kilkarten kind of deal? For God’s sake, if he’d suspected that why wouldn’t he say something?

Wait. Maybe he meant a friends-with-benefits deal.

“Well, I think we might try it, for real.” I smiled, more pleased than I’d imagined to be telling Jeremy this. “So tell me about your girlfriend. Where’s she live?”

“London. She works at the National Archives. We’ve only been seeing each other for around six months.”