Page 17 of The Best Worst Thing

Runner’s High

November, Four Years Ago

Oh, hey,” Logan said, looking up from the espresso machine as Nicole walked into the break room. “Good run today?”

They’d bumped into each other on the Greenbelt earlier this morning. As usual, they’d chatted for a few minutes, then gone their separate ways.

“Not really,” she said, rummaging through the dishwasher for her mug. “Lead legs again. You know, slow people problems.”

“Oh, come on. Happens to the best of us.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “You’ve run, what, a hundred marathons?”

“The trick,” he said as he reached for his drink, then pulled the half-and-half out of the fridge, “is to save up enough intrusive thoughts that you never get bored. Also, foam rolling.”

She shoved a pod in the machine. “You forgot the ability to run twenty-six point two miles. Which I cannot.”

“Sure you could. You already run, have disposable income, are very organized, live in a temperate climate at sea level, are likely to take stretching and hydration seriously …”

Nicole rolled her eyes as he handed her the milk carton. Logan was just full of facts. He could talk about anything for as long as you’d let him. It was both very entertaining and a little concerning, how much he had to say about things that did not matter.

“But you ran in college, right? So you’re, like, programmed to do this.”

“Nope.” He dropped an elbow onto the kitchen island.

Above them, a maze of exposed pipes was coated in the agency’s signature shade of cobalt blue.

“I went to a D1 school, remember? And I run an eight-minute mile. What would they have done with me? Let me blow the little horn? Let me hand out orange slices?”

Nicole laughed. She forgot, sometimes, that other schools had actual sports programs. Not just rehabilitated child stars and people who didn’t get into Brown putting on spontaneous reinterpretations of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s earliest works.

“And you really don’t get bored?” she said. “Even after an hour or two?”

“Lots of questions today, huh?”

“Sorry, I—”

“I’m kidding,” he said as they moseyed down the corridor.

“Honestly, it’s just my thing. Plus, I really need the dopamine.

Six days a week, I wake up and go. No phone, no music.

Everything else in my life is so last minute, you know?

But I guess I run when I’m traveling, or when I lose a deal, or when my mom’s in town, or—”

“Your mom comes to town?”

“Yes, Nicole,” he said. “People have mothers. Even me.”

“I’d die to meet your mother.”

“What?”

“Um, I … I didn’t mean …”

But just when Nicole had decided to quit her job, change her name, and relocate to Panama City to live out the rest of her years in peace, Logan laughed.

“Oh, she’d adore you,” he said. “You guys could just sit around and eat vegetables and talk about all the reasons I’m thirty-five and nobody loves me.”

Nicole raised an eyebrow as they neared his office but make no mistake: Panama beckoned. “I mean, have you tried changing … everything?”

Logan glared at her, leaning against the edge of his propped-open glass door.

Next to him, framed posters of the creative that had put Porter Sloane on the map.

A print ad for a swanky hotel in Vegas. A couple of stills from a sixty-second BMW spot.

A legitimately not-suitable-for-work triptych of bruised, misshapen, and highly sexualized pieces of fruit posing above taglines like Come on, take a bite; Good enough to eat; and You never forget your first time.

“So, what about you?” he said. “Why do you run?”

“I don’t know, really. I guess, by the end of it, I just want to feel like I’ve had the shit kicked out of me.”

Logan smirked, then took a long sip of his coffee.

“Funny,” he said. “That’s exactly why I go on dates.”

Nicole laughed.

Logan laughed.

And then, for the rest of the day, they barely looked at each other.