Jennifer Lohmann - Winning Ruby Heart

Had she really changed from that attention-seeking girl she’d been? She’d turned down an interview, but Ruby was a runner, and she might also be the kind of person who liked to be chased. Which was fine; Micah still enjoyed a good hunt.

One thing was certain, she still had the same glorious body. Her T-shirt and gym shorts meant there had been plenty of bare skin for him to appreciate. When she’d moved her arms, her biceps had expanded and collapsed and he wished he’d managed to make her take a step toward him. With so little body fat, her legs were a lesson in muscle anatomy, and they rippled when she moved.

Micah had always been a leg man, and his tastes hadn’t changed just because his own legs were now the downstairs neighbor he waved at but who never waved in return. Calves made shapely by high heels were not the legs he fantasized about. He liked the condensed power in a female athlete’s thighs—a ham man, his teammates had said. His college girlfriend had played tennis, but her thighs in that swinging white skirt had nothing on Ruby in gym shorts. All that power in a sleek, racing version.

Micah rubbed his face, then squeezed the bridge of his nose, forcing himself to remember why Ruby was in that hotel room and not fresh off another Olympic triumph. Pigtails were as much a costume as the red lipstick had been. She needed no pity. And she didn’t deserve his admiration of her body. She’d been given the opportunity to compete on the greatest stage the world offered her sport and she’d responded by filling her veins with the blood of another person. Blood doping was a gruesome way to cheat, making a mockery of both the sport and the people for whom that blood meant the difference between life and death. A vampire, draining the sport and the athlete of all its integrity. A monster.

And, after her interview, she’d had the audacity to expect pity from him.

He put his hands back on the wheels of his chair and refused to think of Ruby’s thighs in any way other than belonging on the hot seat while Amir filmed the interview of Micah’s career. He would show the world how little a doping athlete changed, no matter the tears they produced in a confessional. And then he’d take the promotion NSN offered.

CHAPTER THREE

MICAH HAD ARRIVED back in Chicago late Tuesday night and wasn’t expected in the studio until after lunch on Wednesday, so he stopped at his favorite restaurant for a bite to eat before work. The lunch hour meant Micah had to force his way through the other regulars, all of whom greeted him, to get his wheelchair to a table. But Sheila, the hostess, always took special care of him and got him a table for four, which was great until King showed up. “Is this seat taken?” the other reporter asked while pulling out a chair and sitting down. Micah didn’t bother to say no; King would only pretend that the restaurant was too noisy to hear.

After asking the waitress, Patty, for a beer, King turned to Micah with the manly joie de vivre that could lure inexperienced athletes into ignoring the cameras and pretending they were in a high school locker room. Savvy athletes, however, treated the wink-wink, nudge-nudge with the same distant professionalism they offered reporters in the locker room after a game, making the majority of King’s interviews some of the most boring two minutes of sports reporting on television. The man kept his job only because the few times he got an athlete to confide, internet GIF memes were sparked and YouTube hits records set. Often, those athletes didn’t have long careers. Micah tapped his fingers against his chair and waited for the inevitable intrusion that would come after the small talk.

King took a long pull on his beer and set the bottle down with a thunk. “Amir says you spent the entire race in your room and then the night in a runner’s room.” Micah didn’t believe Amir would sell him out, especially after King turned his head to one side, as if offering up his left ear for girlish intimacies, and nodded knowingly.

“I think,” King said, tapping his index finger against his lips, “that you knew this runner before you met her at the race.”

Micah threw the man a bone, since King didn’t have the investigative skills to do anything with this conversation. “I did know her before.”

“From college?”

“No.”

King lifted his brow for an elaboration, but Micah didn’t offer one. The other reporter shrugged off the small insult, took another long pull of his beer and then signaled for another. “A friend, then. Your connection to the elusive Currito?”

Micah had long since stopped being amazed that King couldn’t conceive of a nonplatonic reason for Micah to interact with a woman. In an industry dominated by men who didn’t even bother looking to see whose dick hung the lowest—because, of course, they would win—Micah knew his supposed celibacy was a curiosity. He had heard all the rumored reasons for why he never had a date at office parties, ranging from some sort of self-imposed sexual exile out of a dislike of women with strange kinks to the ongoing question of how well his plumbing worked. The folks in the first camp would probably be disappointed to learn that there weren’t hundreds of women lined up outside hotel rooms across America with fetishes for men who couldn’t wiggle their toes. The one woman with such a kink who’d found Micah had been strange in bed. It was not an encounter he wanted to repeat.

Lack of imagination generally meant his coworkers credited Micah’s physical body for his sparse sex life instead of recognizing that Micah worked too damn much. At least, that was the reason most of his girlfriends never made it far enough past “short-term” for his coworkers to meet them.

King, Micah knew, fell firmly into the camp that believed Micah couldn’t get it up anymore. Much to Micah’s amusement—and many women’s disappointment, he was sure—King didn’t seem to understand how a woman could find sexual pleasure unless a man stuck an erect penis into her vagina and then bounced his ass up and down in the air. Once, after ten hours of drinking on a flight to Sydney, King had told Micah that lesbians had to use “accessories.” Micah had yet to decide if King’s indirect approach was better or worse than the strangers who flat out asked intrusive questions.

The memory of the conversation reminded Micah that he didn’t want to be sitting in public with King and alcohol. Unfortunately, Micah had talked himself into a King-created corner. Denying now that he hadn’t spent the night in Ruby’s bedroom would only push King and his beers into asking what Micah hadn’t been doing when he hadn’t been in the room—wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Saying that Ruby hadn’t been his connection to Currito would also stretch King’s imagination to the breaking point.

“A friend,” Micah said simply, before pulling his cell phone out of his pocket and checking the time.

“You are a mysterious man, Micah Blackwell.”

Micah nodded, the statement overwhelmingly true from King’s point of view. “And, given that I overestimated how much time I have for lunch, I’m likely to stay that way.” When the waitress arrived at his signal, he asked for his lunch to go.

King peered across the small table at Micah and harrumphed. “You think you can keep this a secret.” The ensuing silence would almost have been suspenseful if King hadn’t been flicking his index finger from his lips to point at Micah and back again, over and over and over in some falsity of a knowing gesture. “Now I am interested and on your trail.”

“Okay.” Micah backed his chair away from the table and swore under his breath when he hit the chair behind him. The benefit of King moving the chairs out of his way as he navigated through the restaurant was overshadowed by the exaggerated way in which the man drew attention to what a stand-up guy he was by “helping.”