Page 22 of Meet Me in a Mile

Twenty-Two

Lydia

L ydia threw her phone down on her bed as Luke’s number went to voicemail again. How in the hell had everything gone sideways in one day? She’d missed her run, finished the proposal by the skin of her teeth, kissed Jack, and then whatever the hell that was with Luke. She flopped onto her bed. She was trying not to let the overwhelming torrent of emotion free, wanting to get her thoughts straight, but she didn’t know what else to do. It had been almost two hours since Luke had stumbled upon her and Jack, and she’d lost count of how many calls she’d made since. All she wanted to do was explain that she hadn’t blown off their run for a night on the town with Jack, which was probably what it looked like, but besides showing up to Luke’s apartment and banging on the door until he answered, she didn’t know what else to do.

She couldn’t even imagine what he thought of her right now. She hadn’t realized he was trying to get ahold of her until she’d walked upstairs and charged her phone enough for his voicemail to come through. If only she’d heard that voicemail before letting Jack walk her home, this all could have been prevented. She didn’t want Luke to think she’d purposely been wasting his time today. Why wouldn’t he just answer his phone?

She scrubbed at her face. What made everything worse was the fact he’d probably seen her kiss Jack, and to Luke’s eyes, that had turned the day—the evening—from an averted work crisis to something romantic. But it wasn’t that... At least, it hadn’t started like that.

Lydia didn’t even know why she’d kissed Jack when he leaned in.

Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Some small part of her had wanted to know, once and for all, if there was anything between them. And to her surprise, she’d felt nothing. No spark. No overwhelming sense of desire. After the shock of it, the realization that this paltry crush she’d been harboring meant nothing had come as sort of a...relief, and she’d broken off the kiss as quickly as it had started. But what did that mean for everything else? For her life’s plan? When she dreamed of her future, when she thought about how she wanted her life to turn out, wasn’t Jack the one standing there, smiling back at her? Lydia replayed the evening in her head. The celebratory drink, the awkward, stilted conversation.

By the time they’d sat down in the pub, Lydia had run out of things to talk about. It was harder to feel connected out in the real world and the conversation lagged. She didn’t know why. So, she’d politely sipped her beer and peppered Jack with questions about work to keep the awkwardness at bay.

She was frustrated with herself, partly because she’d bailed on Luke and wasted his time today, only to have him turn up and see her on something that likely looked like the tail end of a date, and partly because in that hazy image of her future, Jack had disappeared. Or been replaced. Or... She didn’t know. Was the middle of the night really the right time to be having an existential crisis? And how was she supposed to sort things out with Luke if he refused to answer her calls? Lydia stripped out of her clothes and took the quickest shower of her life, popping the curtain open every ten seconds to see if she could hear her phone ringing.

She changed into her pajamas and got into bed, but anxiety filled her as she lay down, and when she closed her eyes all she could think about was the phone call that had started it all. The call where Jack had admitted the proposal wasn’t ready to be submitted. A stab of anger surged through her and all her frustrations surfaced at once—Luke ignoring her, Jack flaking out on the proposal and making her do most of the work—and the anxious beat in her heart was almost enough to make her nauseous.

Eventually, she picked up her phone and dialed.

“You know it’s midnight, right?” Ashley croaked after the second ring. “You better be dying because I just fell asleep.”

“My life is a mess,” Lydia said, her voice small and pathetic as she stared at her popcorn ceiling.

“On a scale of one to Armageddon?” Ashley asked immediately. Lydia could hear her getting out of bed.

“Definitely the apocalypse,” Lydia said.

Ashley snorted. “Tell me what happened.”

Lydia huffed. Ashley always wanted the facts. The problem was, Lydia didn’t know where to start, so she blubbered her way through everything, ending with that stupid kiss and Luke running down the street.

When she finished talking, Ashley was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “Do you want comfort or do you want the truth?”

Lydia already felt like crap so Ashley might as well keep piling it on. “The truth.”

“Jack used you for your work. That’s why you feel so...unsettled. I think some part of you knows that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Think about it. You team up to create a partnered proposal and once again you’re there doing twice the work to get noticed. You’re rescheduling your commitments outside of work hours. You’re bailing on Luke. I know things come up at work, trust me. I know that sometimes you get surprised with new information or tasks and you just have to power through it. But that’s not what this situation was. You both knew what you committed to, and you both knew when the deadline was.”

The confusion in Lydia’s chest began to uncoil, only to be replaced with the dreaded feeling that Ashley was right. Why were older sisters always right?

“It sounds like Jack slapped his name on a dressed-up version of your original design. Which means your design would have stood on its own merits if the leadership team had given it a proper chance. Whether he meant to or not, Jack used you. And it sounds like you’ve been letting your desire to prove yourself get confused with how you really feel about him.”

Ashley’s words stung, meaning she’d struck at some spark of truth. Lydia’s clear vision of her future dissolved a little more.

“I think you need to figure out if you ever really liked Jack, or if you just liked the idea of him.”

Lydia swallowed hard. Was that the root of her confusion? Had she only ever liked Jack in theory? Had she really let Jack use her work because of some misguided belief that they were supposed to be partners? It was too embarrassing to think about, never mind admit out loud.

“Lydia?”

“I guess I just always wanted something like what you and Kurt had,” she whispered.

Ashley spluttered. “Me and Kurt?”

“Yeah.” It felt strange saying the words, but she’d always looked up to Ashley in everything. “You two just fit from the start. You went to school together. You’re partners in work. In life. Now you’re married. It’s all worked out sort of perfectly.”

“We’re far from perfect, Lyds.”

“Please. I used to listen to the two of you sit around and discuss case law for hours.” Lydia shoved down the glob of emotion that had lodged in her throat. “I guess I put all this pressure on myself to find something like that. Someone who worked in my field. That was chasing the same career path, the same dreams. That would support me and listen to me ramble about projects for hours.”

“And you thought that person was Jack?” Ashley said.

Lydia hummed. “It sounds ridiculous now.”

“It’s not ridiculous, you’re just... I don’t know. Remember when I told you that you sometimes rush into things without thinking them all the way through?”

Lydia shook her head, the corner of her mouth twitching. “Yeah.”

“Well, I think that sort of applies here,” Ashley said. “I think you have to ask yourself what you really want out of this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jack. The proposal. Poletti’s. It sounds like you’ve been struggling for a while with figuring out your place there. Even before this whole youth center thing. What do you want?”

Lydia didn’t have to think about it long. She’d wanted to be given a fair shot at the youth center competition, but that opportunity had come and gone. The only thing she could do now was talk to Jack about it, because what she wanted more than that was a job that truly recognized her ability. Ashley was right. She’d forced herself to jump through hoops—the marathon, the partnership with Jack—just for a chance at being noticed. She’d let herself deviate too far from believing in herself and fighting for what she deserved. It was time to fix that.

Lydia had slept restlessly, her phone clutched in her hand, still hoping Luke would call or text and let her explain that she hadn’t bailed on their training schedule just to spend the evening with Jack. She’d woken to no new texts, no sign that Luke had even received her calls, and it had taken everything inside her not to bombard him with another series of messages.

If he didn’t want to talk to her now, that was fine, but he couldn’t avoid her forever. She might not have slept well, but at least she’d had time to figure out what she wanted to do about Jack and Poletti’s.

On the subway to work, she tried to build herself up for the conversation she was about to have. She might have resolved to have this talk with Jack, but that didn’t make it easy. It was one thing to think she deserved more but it was an entirely different thing to say it out loud. By the time she walked into the office, it felt like there were hot stones rattling between her ribs.

She stopped by Kirsten’s desk. “Hey, if you see Jack, could you send him my way?”

“Sure,” Kirsten said. “You okay? Sorta looks like you want to throw up.”

“I’m fine. I just didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Doesn’t sound like it was for a fun reason.”

Lydia mustered a smile. “Definitely not.”

“Well, I’m here if you want to talk.”

“Later,” she promised, then headed straight to her office and sat down. Since her conversation with Ashley, there was a measure of clarity to her thoughts that she hadn’t had before, but now everything felt sort of surreal. Almost like she was a visitor, peeking in at her life, waiting to see how the ending played out. Lydia busied herself with checking her emails, trying to distract herself until a knock drew her attention to the doorway.

Jack stood there, a sheepish smile on his face. “I was informed that I’d been summoned?”

A flutter of nerves kicked off in her gut, lodging themselves in her throat. “Yeah, come in,” she said. “Mind getting the door?”

Jack closed it softly behind him. When he turned around, he started talking before she could even ask if he wanted to sit down. “I sort of figured this is about what happened last night. And I just wanted to say that I really hope I didn’t cause you any problems. That was never my intention.”

Lydia nodded. “I didn’t think—”

“I didn’t want you to be confused,” he cut in, rocking up and down on his heels. “I know we sort of left things in an awkward spot last night after we were interrupted, and I know we’ve been working together recently, but that’s not why I kissed you. My feelings were real, so I acted on them.”

“Jack,” Lydia said, before he could cut her off again. “I...think it might have been a good thing that we were interrupted.”

“Oh?” His brow furrowed for a beat. “Oh. You didn’t feel—”

“No,” she said gently. “Which is why that won’t happen again.”

“Right. I didn’t mean to assume—”

“I also don’t think we should be partners on the youth center proposal,” she blurted out. She didn’t know how to smoothly drop it into the conversation. How to say that she wanted her work back. “I know you probably already gave it to the rest of the leadership team, but we’re going to have to pull the proposal.” She swallowed hard. “I want to pull the proposal.”

“Because of the kiss?”

“No, Jack,” she said, wishing she’d never mixed work and romance. Wishing she’d realized that her crush on Jack had...disappeared before she’d ever kissed him. She hated that he assumed she was asking to pull the project because she didn’t like him like that. “That’s not why. I need to do this because it matters to me how I get my foot in the door. I want to walk through it on my own merit, because my work is good enough. I don’t want to be dragged through it on someone else’s coattails.”

“Lydia,” he started, looking a bit bewildered. “That’s not what I was doing. Or, at least, I wasn’t trying to.”

“You were though, Jack,” she said softly but firmly. He might have been her way through the door, but in order to make that happen, she also had to be his stepping stone. Even if his intentions had never been malicious, she could see it now: Jack was still out to impress Marco to secure his spot as partner. Everything had been to win points. Running the marathon. Selecting the youth center as their charity. And now they were just repackaging her proposal and slapping his name on it—exactly what Ashley had said. “You might not have seen it that way, but some part of you recognized the opportunity to use my work and took it.”

The corner of her mouth quirked despite her words as all Ashley’s ranting about women in the workplace came rushing back. Even now she was working twice as hard to make sure that Jack understood her position. That he didn’t begrudge her for it.

Jack just looked at her, at a loss for words. Finally he said, “I’m sorry for everything.”

Lydia nodded. It felt like too soon to truly accept his apology, but what use was there in dragging this out? “I’m sorry things didn’t work out differently.”

“Me too,” he said. “I’ll go pull the proposal right now.”

Jack slipped out the door, and as he did, it felt like that faded image of her future, all the expectations she had for herself, was disappearing with him. She was letting go of what she’d thought her life was supposed to be, and as scary as that was, it was also sort of freeing. The coiled tension in her chest unwound bit by bit. There was only one thing left to deal with now—the marathon.

After work, she made her way across town. Luke still hadn’t responded to any of her messages, so she did the only thing she could do, the only thing she’d been doing for the past five months, and went to the gym.

It was Monday, technically a rest day, which was probably why Luke looked so surprised to see her when she walked into his office. “Hi.”

“Hi,” he said, turning away from his computer. “I didn’t expect to see you today.”

“I know. That’s why I came. Since you won’t respond to my calls.” She wasn’t harsh with her words, but she wasn’t going to try to pretend he hadn’t been ignoring her. And sure, maybe she deserved it after stringing him along all day yesterday before canceling, but soon he wasn’t going to have to worry about any of this.

“I’ve been busy.”

“All day?”

He cleared his throat. “Since you’re here,” he said, handing her a stack of papers.

“What’s this?”

“The rest of your training plan.”

Lydia looked down at the papers. Except for her missed twenty-mile run, each run was shorter than the last, building up to race day. “I don’t need this,” she said, trying to hand the training plan back, but he wouldn’t take it. “Look, about yesterday—”

“What do you mean you don’t need it?”

“I’m not doing the marathon. There’s no point.”

Luke blinked at her, like he was trying to decipher the words. “You can’t just...not do the marathon...”

“Yes, I can.” Once again she tried to give him back the training plan.

“After all the work you’ve already put in? Why?”

“Because I realized I’ve been tripping over myself to impress people at work who aren’t interested in being impressed by me. I asked Jack to pull our proposal, and leadership won’t notice whether I run the marathon or not.”

“Is that really what you think this has all been about? You really think you’ve dragged yourself here for the last five months to impress your firm?”

“That’s always been the case.”

“So you see absolutely no benefit to all the obstacles you’ve overcome, all the miles you’ve put in? Not one part of you thinks you should run this race for more than just your firm?” He was clearly frustrated, which was making her frustrated too.

“I know it’s for charity,” Lydia said, rolling her eyes and crumpling the papers in her hand. “This won’t affect the firm’s donation.”

“I’m not talking about the charity here!”

“Then what are we arguing about?”

He stood. “I guess I just expected more from you. I never would have put all this extra time in if I didn’t think you were serious about your goal.”

“Look at it this way, your schedule has just opened up a lot, and now you have more time to work on your business plan.”

“That’s not what I was getting at.”

“Then I don’t get why you care so much! I hired you to help me with the marathon, the marathon is now off the table. So we can just...let it go.”

“And that’s it?”

“Yeah. That’s it. Everything goes back to normal.”

“Normal?” Luke shook his head. “You’re quitting because of Jack. You think you’re sticking it to the firm or reclaiming control or whatever, but you’re not. You’re letting him influence you. Again.”

“I don’t know what your hang-up is with Jack, but you need to get over it. Yesterday—”

“I don’t care about Jack.”

“You’re sure? Because you sound kind of jealous every time his name comes up,” she said without thinking. She wasn’t even sure what she was saying or why she was snapping; she just hadn’t expected Luke to question her decision like this, especially after ignoring her the way he had.

“Well, can you blame me?” he said, surging to the door and closing it as his voice pitched. When he turned back to her, his brow was furrowed, his chest heaving. “I have...feelings for you, Lydia. More than just sometimes-friends, casual-sex kind of feelings. I was trying to make it through to the end of the marathon before I said anything, to make sure I fulfilled my obligations to you as your trainer, but seeing as you think quitting is the answer to all your problems—”

“What?” she breathed as his confession sent her pulse racing. Everything inside her warred, somehow both hot and cold at once, making her shiver. “But we agreed...”

“When did we once follow the rules?” he asked.

“Luke—”

“I thought...maybe...but then I saw you with him.”

Lydia didn’t look at him, she couldn’t. That’s why he’d been so hurt. That’s why he’d practically run down the street, away from her, avoiding her texts, her calls. She hadn’t just bailed on training and wasted his entire day, she’d broken his heart. All for a kiss that meant nothing. Those coils of tension tightened in her chest once again. “Yesterday with Jack wasn’t anything. It was a mistake.”

“Sounds familiar,” Luke said under his breath.

She winced at that. Ashley’s words echoed in her head. She jumped into things, and that hurt people. She didn’t want to do that to Luke, or to herself. “This was supposed to be casual,” she found herself saying. This wasn’t what they were supposed to be talking about today. This was supposed to be about the marathon. “There were never supposed to be these kinds of feelings between us.”

Because these kinds of feelings would ruin this. Ruin them.

“What the hell did you think?” Luke continued. “That we kept stumbling into bed just because we couldn’t control ourselves? That this was only about sex?”

“Yes,” she said before she let herself think too hard about it. That’s what this was supposed to be, how it had started. To get it out of their systems. But had it worked? Her heart thundered in her chest. She didn’t know what she thought. It was all still such a mess in her mind: Jack, Luke, Poletti’s, the race. She was a mess! A mess who had just realized that everything she believed she wanted out of life was a lie. She couldn’t do this right now. She couldn’t think about what this all meant. What months of sleeping with Luke, and only Luke, meant. What her frigid reaction to Jack’s kiss meant. What the uneven, desperate beating of her heart meant. “I thought you understood what we agreed to...” Her voice trailed off.

“I know,” he said. “I never should have let myself catch feelings. I knew better. And I can handle that if that’s how you really feel. If you never once thought of wanting something more between us.”

She swallowed hard. Had she? Did she?

“I can walk myself back across that boundary line.” Luke’s voice grew softer. “But I can’t in good conscience let you quit this race without you really considering what you’re giving up.”

Lydia didn’t say anything, his words gnawing at her.

“Don’t run away from this because you’re scared.”

Now what was he talking about? The race or them?

“You’ve conquered this one mile at a time—”

“And I’m sick of focusing on the next mile,” she snapped before his words could pierce any deeper. Besides pulling the proposal and backing out of the race, she hadn’t even begun to figure out what she was supposed to do next. “I don’t want to run.”

“Then as your trainer, I can’t help but be disappointed that you’re giving up on yourself, because I really believed there was some part of you that was doing this for you.”

She looked at him then, meeting his gaze with the same steely determination she’d felt during their very first meeting in this office. “Well, get used to it. I quit.”