Page 96 of The Locker Room

Amy Lane

“Better?” he asked sleepily.

“Uh-hm.” Chris always made him better.

“Then leave me alone, you sadist. We"re in the middle of

conditioning; do you think I want to go running around the lake with you

today?”

“You"re gonna get faa-aaat,” Xander taunted, the singsong of his

voice masking the fact that he was still not quite recovered from his

morning terror. Chris wasn"t fooled. He snagged Xander"s hand and

kissed the back of it.

“You"ll love me anyway,” he said softly.

Xander bumped temples with him and said, “Damned straight,”

before rolling out of bed and into his morning routine. In less than five

minutes, he"d brushed his teeth, thrown on his old, holey college sweats,

washed down 800 milligrams of ibuprofen with a Pepto-Bismol chaser,

put on his god-bless-me special-made, fully endorsed arch-supporting

running shoes, and gotten his tall bag of bones on the road.

They hadn"t really looked when they"d moved in, but Leo really

had chosen well for them. The entrance to the house was nearly a mile of

thinly paved private road, which bled into a trail that lined one of the

high hills that overlooked Folsom Lake in the foothills. Xander (and very

often Chris, in spite of his grumbling) would go running in the morning.

In the summer it was excruciating. Much of the time, the temperatures

reached the high eighties before eight in the morning, and the underbrush

was dry and brittle. Burrs and stickers would worm their way into the

boys" sweat socks and scratch their legs as they ran, and tan-colored dust

would puff up at every footfall.

In the winter it was chilly, sometimes cold enough for gloves and a

hat, and the grasses grew long enough to be slick if they lay across the

trail. They would also wrap around unwary ankles if Xander or Chris