He broke the tape, and then his coach was hugging him, shouting an unbelievable number in his ear. Andy looked up at the Jumbotron to confirm it, and there were TV cameras swinging toward his face, and there was Maisie, Maisie looking lovelier than he remembered, and he reached for her without thinking and pulled her into his arms.
Of course the pictures had ended up on the Runner’s World website. Of course Rachel saw them. When he picked up his phone he saw that she’d called six times, and when he got back to the hotel to call her back she hadn’t wasted a second before she’d started in on him.
“Rachel, it’s nothing. It’s just some girl. I met her in the gym, she’s a runner, too, and she asked if she could come to the race, and I had no idea any of that was going to happen.” This was technically mostly true, even if it left out several salient facts, including their dinner together the night before.
“So, what, someone shoved her into your arms and made you hug her?”
Once he’d started running he’d never been interested in ball sports, but he knew what they told the guys on the football team—the best defense is a good offense. “If you’re so worried, then why didn’t you come out here with me?”
She made a disgusted noise. “So I could sit in a hotel room all day, then watch you run for eight minutes, then spend all night at a party listening to people talk about how their eight minutes of running went?”
Andy was hurt. “I haven’t run a three thousand in over eight minutes since my junior year at Oregon.”
“Who cares?” Rachel shrieked. “And stop changing the subject! I don’t care how fast you can run the three thousand. I care about you hugging random women!”
“Nothing happened,” he said, already starting to regret that it was true.
“Do you even know her name?” Rachel demanded.
“Maisie,” he’d said. “Maisie Guthrie.” And then some impulse he didn’t understand made him blurt, “She’s a model.”
“Oh, a model,” she said. “Well, I guess you’ve hit the big time now.”
Andy, who’d expected to at least get some congratulations on his personal record, was getting angry. “Would you let it go? She’s someone I met, and she came there to watch me, to cheer for me, which was nice, so I hugged her. End of story.”
There was a seething, crackling pause. “Are you saying,” Rachel began, “that if I came to cheer for you, you wouldn’t have felt the need to embrace models at the finish line?”
“Maybe!” Andy yelled. “I don’t know! It’s not like I’ve had a lot of experience with you coming to cheer for me!”
Instead of yelling back, Rachel spoke even more softly. “You want me to be the bad guy, don’t you?” she asked. “You want me to be the bitch who won’t go to your races so you’ll have an excuse to be with Cindy Crawford. Only guess what?” Her voice was a poisonous whisper. “I’m not your mother. I actually do go to your races.”
“You come and you sit there with a book. You barely look up. You barely look at me.”
Another icy pause ensued. Finally Rachel said, speaking softly, “I am not your cheering squad.”
“I know that,” he muttered.
“I’m my own person.”
If you keep eating the way you do, you’ll be your own two people, Andy thought, but all he said was, “I know.”
“I think that maybe moving in with you was a mistake.”
He felt her words like a hard shove in the chest . . . but, if he was honest, there was also the tiniest undercurrent of relief. “It wasn’t a mistake. I want you with me.”
“But we’re not on equal footing, are we? You’re working. Quote-unquote. You’re making money. I’m not doing anything.”
“But once you get your degree, you’ll get a job.” Rachel had been taking classes toward a social work degree at Portland State and had just started working at FAS’s new West Coast office. “I hate not having my own money,” she’d say when he’d buy them dinner or she’d use his credit card to shop for clothes. She did have money—her parents had paid for college, and she’d saved every birthday check and bat mitzvah gift—but it wasn’t money she’d earned, and she felt that acutely.
“I think I need to go back to New York. Amy said she’s got a job for me. There’s work there I should be doing.”
“Rachel.” This was all happening too fast, like he’d pulled a loose shingle off a roof and now the whole house was falling down. “I don’t want you to leave. I’m sorry I got mad.”