My Gym Trainer Counted Every Rep and Then Counted Me In novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Tempe Town Lake

Rudy's POV

The finish line was on the last bridge over Tempe Town Lake, a hundred yards of orange cones and a white inflatable arch.

I stood on the left-hand side of the chute with my hands in my pockets, in a Sonoran Strength T-shirt, in the sun.

Next to me stood the retired cop and both nurses and the girl with the braid.

The owner stood with her whistle on its lanyard.

The banner hung off the rail behind us.

GO MARISOL.

Forty minutes ago the horn had gone off at the far end of the lake.

A thousand runners had come off the line in a long bright wave.

I had watched her go.

She had her ponytail tight and her glasses on top of her head, and she did not look back.

I had not run it with her.

She had told me no, very plainly, on Thursday, with a finger against my breastbone.

"You'll be at the finish," she said. "You'll stand there. You'll say nothing."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Nothing, Villalobos. Not a number."

I had said yes.

I was now finding out what it cost.

The first runners came through the chute in the sixty-first minute, thin and fast.

Then more of them, in clumps, with their arms up.

The announcer called names off a clipboard.

I looked at every woman in a gray hat.

At the sixty-eighth minute the nurse beside me grabbed my arm.

"There," she said. "Is that her?"

It was.

She came up out of the underpass at the end of the bridge, a long way off, in a black tank top and gray shorts.

I knew her from her walk before I knew her face.

She was running.

It wasn't pretty.

Her stride had gone short, and her head hung forward, and her left arm had stopped swinging.

She was drenched.

I could see her chest working from a hundred yards.

"Come on," said the girl with the braid. "Come on, come on."

"Mile six," the cop said, quietly. "That's the last two-tenths."

She came down the bridge.

The crowd on either side had grown, and they were yelling in a solid roar, strangers' voices, saying her bib number and saying go.

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