Page 45 of Your Pace or Mine (Running for the Romance #1)

Jamie glared at him. “I stopped because I was convinced I was in love.”

Darius’s footsteps slowed to a walk.

“Keep up, I need to tell you this,” Jamie snarked.

With a mumbled sorry, Darius was beside him again. They ran slowly, barely faster than a walk, but Jamie needed to get this out, to lay everything on the line.

“It had started like any other hook up, I mean, mutually beneficial, I got an audition that I fucking nailed, and landed on tour with the director that—“

“I get it,” Darius barked out. “I don’t need to hear the details.”

Jamie bit back a laugh. There was something oddly cute about a huffy, jealous Darius.

“Anyway, we were on tour together for months, and it sort of evolved. I thought, I thought I was in love.” Jamie nearly laughed.

What he’d had with Stephen hadn’t been love.

Now that he knew what real love could feel like, that time with Stephen, even before the curtain had been ripped back, well, it paled in comparison.

“It was Stephen. He told me we had to keep things quiet, for the sake of the show. And I agreed, because of course I did. Then his fiancée showed up at our Leicester show, and he introduced me to her as the kid he’d discovered.

I wanted to die, Darius. I still let him into my dressing room after that show, though.

I cried, and he told me I was being embarrassing and to pull myself together,“ Jamie sighed. It was both painful and mortifying to recall his lowest moment. “I left the tour early, got myself blacklisted in loads of theatres, lost most of my industry friends, and had to crawl my way back in, but I couldn’t do it the way that had always worked for me before. I couldn’t let any of them touch me, and I lost work, a lot of it. ”

“Jamie, I…” Darius hung his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, Darius,” he replied with a shrug. “I don’t want you to feel bad for me. I just wanted you to understand. Showing up with you felt like I’d finally got one over on him. I was fine after everything he did. I was winning.”

“And I ruined that for you,” Darius replied dejectedly. “Because I didn’t believe you when you said you loved me. I didn’t think it was possible, Jamie. It seemed so much more likely that you were using me, because that’s what everyone does.”

Twenty miles had passed, and Jamie was barely able to respond to Darius; his body was rebelling against him so much. Somehow anticipating the need, Darius pulled a gel out of one of the five hundred pockets on his running vest. Birthday cake flavour. Jamie knew it was his favourite.

“I should’ve stayed and talked to you about what bothered me about the whole…” Darius waved his hand like he couldn’t quite say it.

“Casting couch thing?” Jamie offered.

Darius snorted, looking startled that he’d laughed at that. “Yeah, that.”

“It was.” Darius sighed. “Did you Google my family like I told you to? When we first met?”

Jamie wasn’t sure where this was going. “Cressida did, a while back. Mostly just to check out your net worth,” he cringed.

“Yeah, that’s a thing.” Darius rolled his eyes.

“So my parents, though, do you not know? I can’t imagine you were really following the society pages as a teenager, but my mother was an artist ,“ he said it with a sort of derision that would normally have got Jamie’s back up, but he could see there was more to this.

“There was this gallery that was always taking her work. Father humoured her, funded her supplies, tours, whatever she wanted, while Selena and I were raised by a rotating army of nannies and au pairs,” he continued.

“When I was about fifteen, the gallery owner sold his story to the press about how she’d been sleeping with him for years.

Him and anyone she wanted to convince to buy her shitty work. ”

“Fuck,” Jamie whispered.

“It destroyed my father, he stopped public appearances almost overnight and I was left to pick up the slack. Mother, though, fucked right off to Spain with her newest fling, and her share of the family estate. We never heard from her again until her sister reached out to me a few years ago to let me know she’d passed away. Breast cancer.”

“Oh my God, Darius,” Jamie replied.

“So, I, I lashed out, but it wasn’t about you, not really.”

Jamie tripped over his own feet. “How do you not hate me?”

Darius grabbed Jamie’s hand to steady him, then kept their fingers laced together as they ran. “I could never hate you, Jamie. Never.”

They ran the next few miles in silence. Only the sound of their feet on the pavement and the cheers of the crowd around them interrupted Jamie’s defeatist thoughts.

“I, I want to try again, Darius, for real,” Jamie said eventually. “I just don’t know how we can be together, especially now that my whole life has become tabloid fodder.”

“I think we can figure it out together, Jamie. I really do,” Darius whispered. “Can we at least give us a chance? For real this time?”

Despite everything, Jamie found himself nodding. The grin that took over Darius’s face felt like a reward for everything he’d put his mind, body and heart through to get to this place.

“The press will be horrible, Darius.”

“I know,” Darius replied, but there was a strange light in his eyes. “I think we can handle it, though, don’t you?”

Jamie looked down at their intertwined hands, and he did. For the first time, he thought that maybe he could hold on to something good in his life. No matter how difficult it was. He nodded.

“Now let’s finish this bloody marathon.”

Jamie nodded resolutely and let himself fall silent as he ran beside the man who believed in him. Believed in them. Together.

They ran past the Houses of Parliament together and past Buckingham Palace, pieces of history passing by barely noticed.

Just when Jamie was sure his body would give out, they were in the final stretch, running towards the finish line on the Mall.

He gave it everything he had for those final minutes.

His mind blanked out as his body took over.

The only thought looping in his head was a single-minded fixation on getting over that damn line.

He crossed, nearly collapsing as the announcer called out his name and finish time.

The finish line was mad. People just kept handing him things. His medal went around his neck right away, but then his arms filled up with a pack of cupcakes, protein bars, packets of electrolytes and gels, and finally, a banana.

His hands were ridiculously full, and he kept dropping things while being ushered forward to make room for the runners finishing behind him. You’d think one of the goodies could have been a tote bag or something.

Sharp pain had unsurprisingly erupted in his knee and hip, and he grimaced as he continued to walk through the throng.

Darius took some of the random items from his hands so he could focus on moving forward, but there was something important he had to do.

Jamie pulled his phone out and snapped a selfie as he planted a kiss on Darius’s cheek.

His free arm wrapped around Darius’s neck as he checked the photo.

They looked happy, like they fit perfectly together—he wanted to bottle the feeling and keep it forever.