but you have the wrong room.”
“Shut the door, Ruby.” He sounded exasperated, with a tinge of disgust. “I assume you don’t want people to realize who you are.” No disarming interview face for her. Instead, his mouth was pursed and his blue-gray eyes hidden in the shadows of the room’s poor lighting. That this was her hotel room with her sweaty running clothes on the bed didn’t matter; with his broad shoulders and expectant gaze, he commanded the room as he’d once commanded entire college football stadiums. The spell he’d cast over her through the television danced about on her skin, tempting her to dump all her secrets onto the floor for him to rummage through and find wanting.
The crunch of her teeth slamming together when she snapped her mouth closed reverberated through her head.
Ruby stood, her hand on the door handle, debating her options. Sadly, Micah was right. She would prefer him in her room to the entire hotel learning that Diana Heart was a poorly constructed alias for Ruby Heart. It was unlikely that anyone other than Micah cared who Ruby Heart was, but unlikely wasn’t the same thing as impossible. She shut the door and looked at the reporter who had forced her to look at the ugliness of herself.
You didn’t have your passion taken from you. You had someone shove your failure into your arm and then you pissed your dreams away. Five years later the scorn was as fresh as rotted meat. The sensation of being both mud on the bottom of someone’s shoe and the most fascinating thing in the world was as strange now as it had been back then.
The television flickered. Ruby stood by the door, watching Micah watch the end of his interview with Currito. The runner talked about joy, about blasting past personal limits and about purity. After a short mention of some special on ultra running, the interview cut to a commercial. Micah backed his wheelchair up to the bed, grabbed the remote and turned off the television. “Interesting man, Currito.” Micah rolled his r’s when he said the man’s name. He’d grown up in Arizona, she remembered, and had learned Spanish as a child. “He’s got a compelling background, the kind that makes for good interviews and inspires Americans to root for him. A fighting spirit—constantly pulling himself up with his bootstraps. And he still believes in the purity of the sport.”
Ruby heard the condemnation in what Micah left unsaid. Currito hadn’t grown up in an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago. He hadn’t gotten a scholarship to the University of Illinois and he hadn’t had a mother standing behind him, providing for him, seeing to his every need so that all he had to think about was racing. Currito worked for a living; he raced for fun. And Currito hadn’t cheated.
“Yes. He’s a very nice man.” She didn’t need to be told what advantages she’d had and what gifts she’d thrown away. Micah may have been the first to explain this to her, but he hadn’t been the last. “Did you come here just to talk about Currito?”
“Why are you running?”
Because she’d seen the Christmas letter her mother had put together with glowing reports of her brother Josh’s engagement to the perfect Christine and her sister Roxanne’s appointment as editor of a top economics journal—“an honor at any age, but especially when she’s so young.” At the bottom of the letter had been that one sentence, “Ruby is doing well and still at home.” She’d read that one line over and over, wishing her mother had found something else to say about her youngest child. Then Ruby had realized she didn’t have anything else to say about her life, either.
She could continue to define herself by her sins or do something else.
But Micah’s velvet voice couldn’t fool her into any more confessions, so she said only, “It’s good exercise.” She’d had plenty of one-liners ready to tell a curious person if someone realized who she was, but none of them were appropriate for the man who’d barged into her hotel room. She hadn’t seen the cameraman, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t waiting around some corner. Cameras flashing. Microphones shoved in her face again. Her mom’s nerves sending her back to the hospital. And the never-ending stream of comments from people judging her. Not just her doping, which deserved judgment, but her hair and her lack of breasts and her thighs and the way she smiled.
Male athletes who slip and repent seemed to receive forgiveness from the American public fairly easily. Maybe it was her perspective, but Ruby had never seen a famous woman forgiven, only hounded.
In her irritated state, she couldn’t resist uttering her next statement. “It’s very meditative,” she said. “You should try it.”
Her parting shot hung in the air above Micah’s head. If she reached out, could she snatch the words back? No such luck.
He chuckled, which made her feel worse. “Running isn’t really the sport for me anymore, though you’re right, it was meditative. Wheelchair marathons serve a similar purpose for me now.”
“I’m sorry. That wasn’t, well...” She knew about his marathons. Four years ago, she’d been in Grant Park during the Chicago Marathon, pretending she was enjoying a day in the city. The wheelchair marathoners had flown by in a blur of wheels, helmets and arms. One in particular had caught her eye and she’d stood at the top of the bleachers to watch him speed to the finish.
The marathoner had been so full of movement, so alive, and she hadn’t been sure if the need that had filled her body had been desire for movement or desire for the man. Until he’d taken off his helmet and she’d realized the surge of lust had been for a man who hated her.
“It’s wasn’t a nice thing to say,” she finished lamely. It’s not a nice thing for you to be here, her fear whined in her head, but that was an excuse, and she had been done with excuses for five years.
“No, it wasn’t.” His biceps bulged when he crossed his arms over his chest.
“I’ve seen you. At the marathons.” Her voice hitched, dammit.
The brief flicker of openness on his face disappeared. “You didn’t answer my question. What are you doing here, Ruby?”
“You asked why I was running. I did answer that question.”
His face remained impassive, though his arms tightened about his chest, the line between his biceps and triceps clear. He had good definition, and she wanted to know what lifts he did and how he did them.
How would that ridge where the deltoid led into the biceps feel under the pads of my fingers? And down the arm, where the brachialis meets the brachioradialis. She had to shut down those thoughts immediately. Wondering about his exercise routine could be justified as an athlete’s curiosity. The other...well, the other wouldn’t and couldn’t happen.
Her head jerked up from his arms to his face when she realized he was talking and she hadn’t heard a word. She could tell by the raise of his eyebrows that he hadn’t missed her singular focus on his arms, though he didn’t say anything. To her relief, he repeated his question. “Why did you compete in a race?”
Ruby is doing well and still at home. “I get sick of running by myself.”
His sigh was heavy, disgusted. “That’s not an answer.”
“If you have questions that you want answers to, ask me for an interview.”
The way he seemed to grow taller in his chair could be a trick of the eyes, but she didn’t mistake the way his dimples deepened, beckoning her into his sphere. Come into my lair, my pretty. “Since you conveniently raised the subject, NSN is actually working on a series about ultra runners—and I would like to interview you. Amir is down the hall and the hotel would be happy to provide us with an appropriate space, I’m sure.”
Of course they would. The clerk downstairs was a woman, and she knew how quickly female defenses fell at the siege of Micah’s charms.
For those athletes still enjoying their glory, Micah’s interviews were probably warm, intimate experiences. For her, it would be a poison-filled trap.
“No,” she said, certain of this one thing, if only this one thing.
He