Completely Smitten

by Kristine Grayson

  “Besides the ankle, how did it go?” he asked.

  “It went all right,” she said. “I have a lot of work to do to get back into shape, but I can do it. I’ve done it before.”

  He smiled at her. “So you’ll still need a sponsor.”

  She shook her head, and he felt his smile fade. “I can train for a marathon on my own time. This job will pay for all my needs. I have most of the equipment.”

  “But running while you’re standing all day—don’t you think that’ll be harmful—?”

  “I couldn’t hold this job and train for an Ironman, but I can train for a marathon. People do that all the time. Not that I don’t appreciate your offer. I do. Really. But I would be cheating you if I told you I needed it, and not having a sponsor takes some of the pressure off me.”

  “But what about rehabilitation for the ankle? Weight training, all the prep that goes into modern athletics?”

  “My ankle is rehabilitated, according to my doctors. It’s just weak. And I can fit in the training around this job. It’s not like there’s much else for me to do.”

  Then she bit her lower lip, as if she hadn’t meant that last sentence to come out.

  She still didn’t want his help. But she was determined to return to her calling. He had done that much.

  “Thank you for telling me,” he said, wondering where that cool polite voice had come from.

  She looked down at her hands. Her hair shone in the thin light. “I guess I owe you for pointing me in the right direction.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.” Then he rethought the statement. “Except that you’ll come to me first if you change your mind about sponsorship.”

  She nodded, then raised her head and smiled at him. It seemed like a rehearsed move, as if he still made her nervous.

  “I’ll do that,” she said quietly. “I won’t make you regret that you asked.”

  And then she was gone, leaving a faint scent of soap and woman in her wake.

  He stared after her for a long time. Being near her was going to be a lot harder than he had thought.

  FAMILIAR THINGS

  (March)

  FIFTEEN

  ARIEL HAD FORGOTTEN the way exercise made her feel. She had forgotten the pleasant ache in her muscles, the expansion in her chest as she used her lungs to their fullest capacity. She had forgotten that exercise put color in her cheeks and confidence in her walk.

  She had forgotten how it lifted her spirits and made her feel strong.

  In the weeks since she had started running, she had not spent much time thinking about Darius at all. One morning, she had awakened to find that she had dreamed of him. She felt odd, as if she were a recovering alcoholic who had relapsed. Instead of falling back to sleep, she had crawled out of her warm bed, pulled on her sweats, and run her three-mile circuit. That had cleared her mind and taken away the uncertain, queasy feeling she had had when she woke up.

  These days, she thought mostly about running. Every Sunday, she outlined the week’s workouts and posted them on the refrigerator. Her goal was to hit the marathon length by the beginning of April. But she was adding in splits and track workouts of a type she had never done before.

  She also designated her courses—some days running hills, other days making certain she stayed on flat ground. And once a week, she timed herself.

  When she had started triathlons, she had worked her way to the Ironman—starting with sprint tris, moving up until she hit Olympic length, and finally, after about two years of training, planning for her first Ironman.

  She wasn’t going to take two years to get to her first marathon, but she was going to take her time on striving to win her first. Since she hadn’t worked the kinds of strategy it took to win running events, she had to concentrate on that, and, she believed, small victories would encourage her to continue.

  Small failures wouldn’t set her back. They would just make her work harder.

  Even though she was now running ten miles on her longest days, she planned her first race to be a 5K. Three miles would test her strategic planning—her first instinct, she knew, would be to run flat out because, to her tri-geek brain, three miles was nothing. But in her condition, it was long enough, and she had to treat the distance with respect.

  Maybe that was what she was working for the most: learning respect for a sport she had once considered too easy.

  It wasn’t easy at all. It was just different from what she had done.

  Running, and running-related activities, such as her weight workouts and weekly cross-training (which she did in the pool so that she wasn’t riding her bike on Portland’s rain-covered streets) took up her free time. The rest of her life centered around Quixotic.

  She had learned the job quickly. Sofia had gone to the weekends and then, as Andrew Vari had predicted, had quit a few weeks later, after another incident.

  In addition to Sofia, that incident had cost the restaurant two busboys and the relief bartender. They all believed that they had finally seen the ghost.

  Ariel had never gotten a coherent story from any of them, but what she had been able to piece together was that a short balding man wearing polyester pants and smoking a stinky cigar had come into the restaurant in search of a friend. When it turned out that no one had heard of his friend, the short man had vanished.

  Literally. One moment he was standing in front of Sofia. In the next moment, he cursed, waved his arms, and disappeared.

  Most of the customers didn’t seem to notice. Those who did talked with Blackstone, who had calmed them down. But Sofia, the busboys, and the bartender, all of whom had been standing close to the man when he disappeared, could not be calmed. Sofia claimed that her outfit smelled of cigar smoke and that there was ash on the floor.

  Ariel had thought the incident curious, but she hadn’t taken a lot of interest in it. Sofia had proven herself superstitious, the bus boys were young and impressionable, and Ariel suspected the relief bartender had been sampling the wares long before he saw the so-called ghost.

  It wasn’t until Sofia came to Quixotic to pick up her final check that the incident took a new significance in Ariel’s eyes.

  Sofia had refused to come inside the restaurant. Instead, she had parked out front and signaled Ariel through the door, asking her to send Blackstone or Andrew Vari outside with the check. Ariel, in turn, sent one of waiters back for Blackstone, who had been working lunch that day.

  She wanted to talk to Sofia, to see if she could get Sofia to return just for the weekends. Since Sofia had quit so quickly, no one at Quixotic had had time to hire a new weekend hostess, and the extra work (which Ariel was splitting with one of the waiters) was cutting into Ariel’s training time.

  Ariel had stepped out into the warm afternoon, reveling in the early spring sunshine. Sofia stood by the curb and wouldn’t listen to Ariel’s arguments about returning to work. Somewhere in the entire discussion, Sofia had started telling Ariel the story of the ghost.

  Ariel mostly tuned it out. She had heard the story from the other sources and she was getting tired of it. The cigar smoke, the ash, the sudden disappearance felt like a rehearsed script to her. But this time, Sofia added something Ariel had never heard before:

  “He was nasty,” she was saying. “He kept shouting for his friend Darius and telling me that I was protecting him. As if I know anyone with that name. And the more I denied it, the angrier this man got. Then he said something about the fact that this Darius had caused him to have trouble with the little folk, which I thought particularly offensive, given Mr. Vari, and—”

  “Darius?” Ariel felt her entire body stiffen. “Are you sure?”

  Sofia looked annoyed. “Of course I’m sure. But no one knows who he is. Mr. Blackstone had never heard of a Darius, and Mr. Vari seemed very upset when I mentioned it, probably because of that little folk comment.”

  “Probably,” Ariel said absently. “Did the man say why he thought someone named Darius would be in the restaurant?
”

  Sofia frowned. “Why? Do you know a Darius?”

  “I met a man with that name in Idaho.”

  Sofia grunted. “It couldn’t be the same man. Besides, the man who asked the question was a ghost. He vanished, Ariel, or weren’t you paying attention?”

  Ariel had forgotten that part. It made the request even stranger. She had been about to ask more questions when Blackstone had come out front with Sofia’s final check. He had asked Ariel to excuse them, and she had, leaving Blackstone to try to convince Sofia to return.

  But Ariel had seen Sofia’s shaking fingers and had known that Sofia would never enter the restaurant again.

  Ariel wasn’t certain why she wasn’t afraid of the so-called ghost. She had seen a number of strange things at Quixotic herself since the day the lights had flashed all over the building.

  One afternoon, a customer had complained that he had the wrong meal while Blackstone walked past. Then the customer squealed and pointed to his dish, exclaiming, “It was different a moment ago.”

  Blackstone, to Ariel’s surprise, had smiled.

  Then there had been the bills that had been mysteriously paid, even though Ariel, who handled the money on her shift, hadn’t taken cash from anyone. And there was the one day when a customer had started screaming for no reason, his apologetic wife trying to hustle him out of the restaurant.

  The man had been pointing at Andrew Vari at the time, saying he looked just like a man who had cursed his father fifty years before.

  Vari had seemed quite calm about it, and Blackstone had shaken his head. It had been the employees who were unsettled by it, even Ariel.

  She thought about that moment often when she ran, and wondered about Vari’s family. The appearance must have gone down through the generations. The man she’d seen pictured with Hemingway had looked just like Vari as well.

  At first she tried to put Vari out of her mind, but he seemed to creep in at the oddest moments. When she was running. When she was cooking. When she was reading.

  And those blue eyes of his were mesmerizing. She found herself thinking about them most of all.

  He was the first human being she’d ever met who intrigued her like this. He was a puzzle, an intricate puzzle that she felt she might never find the key to.

  But she was searching. The man was simply too interesting to ignore.

  * * *

  Darius shouldn’t have come to the race.

  He dressed down for it—a white bowler hat, a blue shirt with a white collar, and faded blue jeans, which he’d had to conjure up because Andrew Vari didn’t own a pair that wasn’t crisp and perfect. He wore deck shoes to complete the outfit, and felt, oddly, like a crusty elderly man who was heading out on his daily constitutional.

  He’d spent another fifteen minutes in front of his closet, trying to rethink the outfit. He didn’t want to be noticed. He didn’t want Ariel to know he was there at all.

  Which created a problem. Because in order to see, he would have to stand in front of the crowd, or sit up high on something, or use some magic. He didn’t want to use the magic.

  His abilities were getting shakier and shakier, and he still hadn’t found a proper familiar. He’d even gone to the local pound with Blackstone, hoping to find some creature that would suit him and his abilities, but none seemed right. On his own, Darius had tried a few pet stores and, other than spell the animals so that nice people would take them, he did nothing.

  He did, however, buy a hundred-gallon fish tank and fill it with interesting fish. But fish, Blackstone told him with great authority, did not count as familiars. It seemed that Houdini had substituted an aquarium full of fish for the mouse he kept carefully hidden from his friends and compatriots (after the mouse died, of course), and it was that aquarium, Blackstone believed, that caused Houdini’s untimely demise.

  The proof, Blackstone would say whenever he saw Darius’s aquarium, was in the method of death: Houdini, always arrogant, had tempted the Fates by revealing himself as a magician, and the moment he slipped up, they got their revenge—by drowning him.

  Darius knew he was tempting the Fates by going so long without a familiar when he so desperately needed one, but his old mentor Bacchus had told him that a familiar could not be summoned. It had to appear in its own good time.

  Darius felt like time was running out.

  He had arrived at the race grounds late, barely finding a place to park. The athletes were already milling near the starting area. All of them were wearing shorts and t-shirts despite the chill March morning, and they were jumping on one leg, then the other, like children trying to keep warm.

  The race was being held in Tom McCall Waterfront Park, with its lovely view of the rivers and bridges. It was a new race—called the In Like a Lion 5K (which, if they had known where that phrase actually came from, they would have changed the race’s name)—and was going to be an annual on March 1 of every year.

  He could tell the serious runners from the weekend warriors. The serious runners were lean and focused. They stood closest to the starting point, their low singlet numbers revealing their quick 5K times.

  The weekend warriors, as a group, were not lean. They were becoming lean. They milled around each other, talking, or getting encouragement from friends on the sidelines. Most of them clutched their water bottles like lifelines, and they all wore watches the size of sundials. The watches probably had more features and alarms than his computer—set to run a few minutes, walk a few minutes, pant a few minutes.

  He shook his head. The old arrogance was hard to shake, especially when it came to sports that allowed amateurs. He loved sports, but he still had trouble dealing with the folks who didn’t commit to them heart and soul.

  When he finally fulfilled his sentence, he would have to be careful about restarting his own athletic career. The last thing he wanted to do was rekindle the arrogance that had gotten him into trouble in the first place.

  It took him a while to find Ariel. She was standing on the sidelines, looking extremely calm. A water bottle dangled from her hand as she listened to a tall rangy man talk to her.

  She watched the man with rapt attention, a smile on her face. Darius’s mouth went dry. In all of his concern for her obsession, he had forgotten what he had learned so painfully in the mountains—she had a soul mate, one she hadn’t met yet.

  Perhaps this man was him.

  As if confirming Darius’s thought, the man leaned forward and brushed Ariel’s lips with his own. She reached her arms around his neck and pulled him close.

  They held each other for a long moment, rocking back and forth together as if they were attuned to the same rhythm. Then the man stepped back, held Ariel by the upper arms, and smiled at her. He seemed to be encouraging her.

  She certainly didn’t need Darius.

  Not that she would have known he was there anyway. He wasn’t about to tell her. When he had overheard her mention the race to one of the waiters, he had vowed to come. He wanted to see how her new obsession was working.

  Obviously, it was working just fine.

  He pushed his way through the knot of people that had formed behind them. Most of them acted like trees—immobile, ignoring him. The rest seemed to think he was a weird, overdressed child who had wandered into the wrong place.

  He had almost made it through the knot when he heard one of the organizers tell everyone to get into position. They had to line up, fastest runners up front, the laggers behind.

  In spite of himself, Darius turned around, wondering if people were really that cooperative. They seemed to be. Ariel was right up front, her body ready, her face a mask of concentration.

  She had never looked more beautiful.

  The man who had talked with her was sitting behind a nearby table, writing down figures. He wasn’t even looking at her, and she didn’t seem to be thinking about him either.

  Her entire body was poised at the edge of something—a moment that might change her forever.

&nb
sp; Then the starting gun went off, and she lit out, immediately ahead of the pack.

  Darius walked back toward the starting area, willing her to slow down. She had to pace. He knew she thought of this as a sprint, but it wasn’t. Even though she was used to the five kilometers—it was the three miles she had told him she had started with—she didn’t dare take it for granted.

  Not at all.

  If she burned up all at once, she’d be disappointed by the end.

  Almost without thinking about it, he wrapped his hand into a fist as he started a spell. He’d slow her down. He’d keep her ahead of the pack but paced, so that she didn’t burn out, so that she didn’t get disappointed—

  And then he realized what he was doing. He was taking away her opportunity to succeed or fail. He was taking away her opportunity to learn from her experience, to set her expectations properly, and to react to them with the strength that he knew she had.

  He unclenched his fist and let his hand fall to his side. He couldn’t see her anymore. The runners were still fanning out along the course, but she was long gone, not even a cloud of dust rising behind her.

  He could spell himself to the turn-around point, but he didn’t dare. If he did something wrong, then he would interfere with the race as surely as he would have if he had cast the spell.

  Darius sighed. He was hooked now. He couldn’t go home if he wanted to. He walked toward the starting area—which was now being converted into the finish line by the man who had hugged Ariel—and watched as the man strung the ribbon between two poles.

  Around Darius, the small crowd talked nervously. He caught snatches of conversation: how Suzy had lost fifty pounds and thought she was ready for running; how Dan felt he was ready to try a real race; how Julia had always dreamed of winning something. The real athletes didn’t seem to be a topic of conversation—maybe they didn’t bring supporters. Or maybe there were no real athletes in this race aside from Ariel.