Buns

by Alice Clayton

  Chad shivered on cue, and I pushed him toward the bus, laughing. Archie swung down from the steps, eyes dancing. “You ready to go roll around in the mud?”

  I heard Natalie’s voice float across the air, still complaining about how filthy she’d be getting. I waggled my eyebrows. “One hundred percent ready.”

  It was a little over a three-hour drive through some beautiful country up to Syracuse. Once we were on the road and everyone had had their coffee, the natural road-trip rules took over and everyone got into it. Beef jerky was consumed, Def Leppard songs were sung—loud and bad as nature intended—and the jokes just got raunchier as the day went by.

  Archie drove, I sat shotgun up near him, and everyone else spread out. The gang was chatting, talking, laughing, it was a little like what I imagined traveling with the Partridge Family must be like. About an hour away from Syracuse, Roxie made her way up front, sitting down across from me.

  “So how hard will this race be? Be honest,” she asked, looking a little nervous.

  “It’s tough,” I admitted, thinking back on some of the courses I’d done over the years. “Not everyone makes it, and not because they’re pussies and just give up, it’s just a really hard race to complete.”

  “Great, that’s just great. Leo will finish and I’ll be drowning in the mud with Nat.”

  “Not necessarily, there’s tons of guys who don’t finish. Fit guys, super-in-shape guys. Women finish all the time, and there are men just strewn across the course behind them. I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen today, but you shouldn’t go into it assuming you won’t finish. Go in assuming you will, otherwise you might as well just sit on the sidelines and eat hot dogs.”

  “I like hot dogs,” she mused.

  “They’ll taste better when you’re eating them afterward, covered in mud,” I said, “and victory.”

  “You don’t quit, do you?”

  “No,” I answered truthfully. I caught Archie’s eyes on me in the rearview mirror.

  “Somehow just the thought that there’ll be a wiener waiting for me at the finish line makes me want it all the more,” Roxie said, and Archie choked back a laugh.

  “Wieners are good,” I agreed.

  “I wonder if I could get away with having them at the wedding,” she mused, and I tore my eyes away from Archie’s.

  “At the wedding? Why in the world?”

  “For exactly that reason. It’s the last thing you’d expect at the wedding, which is why it’s kind of terrific.”

  “Your mother-in-law’s head will literally blow off her body if you serve hot dogs at your wedding,” I warned. As down to earth and cool as Leo was, his mom was the exact opposite. Blue-blooded, and a little bit cold-blooded from what I’d been told, she was hardly the picture of hippie-style warmth that was Trudy. Roxie had made inroads with Leo’s mom, true enough, but there was still a distance there. A distance that hot dogs would hardly breach.

  “Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m thinking about it. I mean, I’d make sure they were really good hot dogs for goodness’ sake, there’s a butcher over in Hyde Park who makes incredible homemade sausage, but I kind of like the idea of having food like that served in that fancy house.”

  “So you’re definitely having it on the farm?” I asked. Leo’s farm was located within the grounds of what I liked to call a compound. An enormous old Hudson River estate, the farm fit easily into the hundreds of acres owned by his family, and included a huge and high-up-on-the-bluff stone mansion. Which Leo pointedly didn’t live in, instead opting for a house he’d built himself on the other side of the property.

  “I think so, I mean it makes sense. We both love Maxwell Farms, the barn is incredible, and hey, guess what, it’s free.”

  “It is beautiful up there,” I agreed.

  “But?”

  “No buts. It’s beautiful. It’ll be a beautiful day for a beautiful bride and groom and we’ll all eat beautiful wieners.” I felt a strange tug on my heart. I’d of course be back for the wedding, I was in it for goodness’ sake, but I wouldn’t be here anymore. Depending on when they decided to tie the knot, I’d have packed my bags and headed down the mountain by then, off to another hotel, another property, another town, possibly even another country.

  I’d be involved in the wedding, as involved as I could be through texting and FaceTime and emails and doing anything and everything I could do to be the best bridesmaid possible. Except for the day-to-day squealing and stressing and laughing and crying that Natalie would be doing with Roxie because she’d be here and I’d be there and unable to fully immerse.

  Fully immerse in the wedding?

  Fuck it. No. I’ll say it. Unable to fully immerse in this life, the life that the universe was picking up by the fistful and flinging toward me with a metric ton of squealing and stressing and laughing and crying and Archie.

  But I couldn’t immerse. I had my own life, I couldn’t just swoop in and piggyback off this one. I’d worked my ass off my entire adult life to make something of myself, to stand on my own and be really good at what I did. I didn’t let anything stop me, or slow me down, or change who I was. I would be there for Roxie, and celebrate her and Leo and the life they’d chosen to live together. But I’d go back to mine at some point.

  And suddenly, for the first time ever, I wasn’t so thrilled at the prospect. And that was more dangerous than anything.

  I swallowed hard, then forced a smile. “So wieners it is. Are we doing chicken wings too?”

  Mud. Icy mud. Icy water. Freezing cold bits of grass and grubby things raining down and coating my skin, weighing it down, threatening to take me out like so many others. My legs were on fire, my thighs felt like molten lava, absolute burn and absolute quivery shaky exhaustion. But I pushed through.

  The thing about a race like Tough Mudder is that it doesn’t matter if you’re there by yourself or with an entire group of friends. There are challenges you simply cannot do alone. Everest, a dead climb up a curved wall with a watery ditch at the bottom. Not possible to do unless someone is already up at the top waiting to grab your hand and pull your ass over. Or at the bottom, sacrificing themselves to stand in the mud and muck and let people climb all over them, standing on their shoulders, your shoes dripping all over them, as they boost you up to waiting hands.

  We lost Oscar at Everest. The tallest one of all, he let every single one of us crawl up his ridiculous body to get up and over. Once we were all at the top, we turned to help him up, but he stayed behind, the line of people behind us asking if he could help them as well. A teammate his entire life, he’d grinned bigger than I’d ever seen him, waved us on, and continued to boost strangers up the wall.

  We lost Natalie at the Arctic Enema, where Dumpsters full of water and ice cubes waited. She took one look at the people cannonballing into the water, then popping up cold to the bone, their muscles locked and barely moving, a silent scream lodged in their throats, and said, “Fuck this shit,” and headed for the beer truck. Always a wise one, that Natalie.

  Leo and Roxie stayed with Archie and me until Fire in the Hole, an obstacle where you literally go down a waterslide to a ring of fire waiting at the bottom. A mind-fucker if ever there was one, you can’t think about this too long or you’ll never do it. Covered in mud and on the verge of tears, Roxie balked at the top and couldn’t talk herself into going any farther. Leo stayed with her. Logan and Chad both took the opportunity to call it a day, realizing that if they were also helping to “comfort” Roxie they could comfort themselves right into some dry clothes and hot toddy.

  Archie and I stuck it out, and he gave as good as he got. I was used to doing these races on my own, relying on strangers to help me out, to give me a hand when I needed it. I’d never been through this with someone, and it was a totally different experience. Good . . . and bad.

  I spent the entire race looking over my shoulder, making sure he was okay. Which was ludicrous, because the man’s strength and overall athletici
sm were remarkable. He didn’t need anyone making sure he was okay. But I felt like I needed to watch out, to make sure, and that took me out of my game entirely. I had to work harder on this course, go faster, push further, than I’d ever had before. And mentally, I was exhausted.

  Do you have any idea how hard it is to let someone help you when you’ve spent a lifetime making sure people know you don’t need them? Strangers could help me, that was part of it. But Archie trying to help me? It pissed me off royally, and what the hell kind of a person gets mad at their boyfriend for helping them?

  The kind who’d rather go down a waterslide into a ring of fire than admit she just called someone her boyfriend.

  I didn’t feel the whispers of flame kiss my skin as I rocketed down the mud-laced slide. Didn’t feel the icy water at the bottom, splashing over me, filling my eyes with muck and goo. Didn’t feel the rocks digging into my kneecaps, or the plastic scraping my elbow, but fuck me if I didn’t feel his hand on mine, asking me if I was okay and did I want to finish.

  Did I want to finish?

  I looked up at Archie’s sweet face, covered in the same mud as I was covered in, and I glared. “Of course I do,” I heard myself bark, and then I was off again. I pretended not to see his hurt face, the freckles I love so much now indistinguishable from the dirt he’d—we’d—been peppered with since beginning this endurance race.

  I ran faster, moved quicker, splashed through puddles and conquered hills. I saw obstacles and quickly assessed the best way through, never around because around was weak. I celebrated with strangers, watched them battle their own personal trials and overcome them. But when Archie offered me his hand going over the last obstacle, The Wall, I averted my eyes, pretended I didn’t see it, and grabbed hold of someone else who was dangling over the top, helping everyone up and over just like Oscar had done at the beginning of the race.

  When I say pretended not to see his hand, I mean pretend in the most generous sense of the word. Because there wasn’t anyone on the wall who didn’t see exactly what I’d done. When given the chance to reach for someone who loved me, I deliberately chose a hand I’d likely never see again.

  Again, I say, what the hell does that say about me?

  I jumped down from The Wall, now just fifty yards from the finish line. There was a crowd gathered there made up of everyone who had already finished, everyone who had gotten out of the race early, but was still delirious with excitement and pride that they’d managed any of the course, and the people who had come to cheer on their loved ones as they navigated through this most difficult of activities.

  I took one last look over my shoulder, almost without meaning to—it had just become natural at this point. And there he was. Archie. Running just as fast as I was but letting me lead. He didn’t look hurt, even though he had a nasty goose egg already forming on his forehead from a bad fall off a rope bridge. He didn’t look tired, even though the frown lines that’d been there when I’d first met him and had seemed to have disappeared recently were back and looking deeper by the second as the dirt and mud settled.

  If I were a grown-up, I’d reach back for his hand this time, acknowledge that we’d done this together and accomplished something tangible and incredible, and cross the finish line together.

  If I were a stubborn asshole child, I’d face forward, run like hell, and beat him to the finish line, then turn around and pretend I hadn’t pretended and hope to God he’d buy it, embrace me anyway, and we’d continue on fucking but not feeling.

  I wanted to run. Jesus Christ, I wanted to run. Which is why I knew that was the absolute wrong thing to do.

  I reached back, took his hand, and we crossed the finish line together.

  The sun was shining. But it was nothing compared with the ear-to-ear smile on his face when I held his hand. And I couldn’t help but smile back.

  We finished strong, his long legs and my short ones somehow matching stride for stride as we pushed ourselves to the limit, adrenaline kicking into overdrive as we passed under the arch.

  “That was amazing,” Archie cried, tugging me against him as we melted into the crowd of other tough mudders. “Incredible!”

  Giddy, I laughed along with him as I felt our sloppy sweaty bodies crush together, happy to have finished, happy to have reached out for him, happy to have taken that small step that, although seemingly easy as pie, was impossibly hard for me to do. I grinned up at him, reaching to smooth back his messy hair.

  Grinning, he gazed down at me, a sense of deep and pure satisfaction apparent in his expression.

  “Aren’t you glad you did it?” I asked, panting from exertion but feeling that crazy high that came when you pushed your body further than you thought was possible.

  He nodded as someone popped a bottle of champagne and sprayed it down over the lot of us, smelly and disgusting and awesome. “I love you.”

  I froze. He felt it. The world went away. Everything went away. It was me and Archie standing together in a vacuum of white noise and static. My heart stopped, my lungs stopped, and I became aware that the grin on my face began to feel painted on.

  But before I could respond, before I could even think how I could respond, the world crashed back in.

  “You filthy motherfuckers, I knew you’d finish!”

  Natalie, running full tilt and smashing into both of us, picked me up and congratulated me on being the toughest asshole she’d ever known.

  Yep. I really was.

  Once again I was riding home with Archie, avoiding meeting his eyes or talking about anything of substance beyond how well everyone did in the race. We’d stayed for a while, celebrating with all the other participants, drinking a few beers, enjoying a few actual hot dogs after all that wiener talk. Leo volunteered to drive back so Archie could have a beer or two, but that made it all the more difficult to continually keep someone else inside our conversation, preventing an actual conversation where I’d be in over my head and completely out of my depth.

  No one in my entire life had ever told me they loved me. And I didn’t really know quite how to take it in. Roxie and Natalie loved me, this I knew. Technically they’d told me, but usually in the vein of I love you but you cannot wear those pants, or I love you but quit stealing all the popcorn, or I love you but there’s no way on earth Henry Cavill isn’t the sexiest man on the planet. All joking aside, no one had ever looked into my eyes, punched through my chest and wrapped their hands around my heart and said I love you.

  But then what happens next? I know the romance-novel version. I say it back, there are two or three more paragraphs of schmaltz and then poof, the end. I know the rom-com version, usually starring a Julia or a Sandra. The music swells, very often a song written expressly for the movie, there’s some laughing followed by some kissing and very often every single problem these two people have been experiencing for the last ninety minutes is blasted away by love conquering all blah blah blah feelings.

  What the hell are you supposed to do when you hear these words for the first time and your first instinct is to vomit? This is why romance heroines were never as fucked up as I was, because, my God, what a terrible story that would make.

  The bottom line was I was terrified to get off this bus when we got back to the Mountain House because then I’d be alone with Archie and this time there was no way he was going to let me off the hook. I’d avoided Archie the entire way back, sitting with my girls or with everyone in a big group, drinking beer out of the pony keg Oscar had thoughtfully provided, passing around sloppy Solo cups and congratulating ourselves on being tough mudders. But now it was getting quiet. Everyone was pairing off, taking a nap or playing games on their phones, the interference our friends had been unknowingly running was disappearing. And here he comes, sitting down across from me at the back of the bus, alone at last.

  Would he want to talk about what he said? Would I need to say it back? Could I say it back?

  “Hey, Clara, quit working yourself over so much, you’re off the h
ook, okay?”

  Whoa. What?

  I blinked and looked up at Archie, smiling ruefully.

  “How’d you do that?” I asked, eyes wide and more than a little terrified. Was I cracking up?

  “Not hard to tell what’s going on in there,” he said, tapping my temple. “Just don’t let it freak you out too much, okay?”

  “Okay?” I squeaked. “I can’t, you know, I mean . . . I—”

  He shrugged. “I said what I needed to say. You can say nothing. For now. Okay?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t get it. What’s the catch?”

  “Silly girl,” he murmured, scooching across the aisle and sitting with me in my seat. “No catch. Just sort through whatever is going on in there, and we can talk later.”

  I didn’t deserve this guy. I mean it, I really didn’t deserve someone this understanding. And actually, not to put too fine a point on it, but how in the hell could he understand me so well when for the first time, I didn’t even understand me?

  Chapter 20

  The email came in at 4:37 p.m. on a Friday with a company-wide header. “Excited to announce blah blah blah merging with The Empire Group blah blah blah leading the industry in blah blah blah a partnership for the ages blah blah blah some senior-level positions have been combined blah blah blah . . .”

  Wait a minute. What senior-level positions? With my heart stuck in my throat, my eyes scanned the rest of the email quickly, searching for information that would tell me whether or not Barbara had been—

  My phone rang. Her name popped up on the screen.

  “Not you,” I said, by way of greeting.

  “Yes, me,” she answered with a watery sigh.

  “The hell?” I sat down hard on the chair I was near, not caring that I was in the middle of the lobby or that a few guests walking by heard me and raised an eyebrow. I was ready to raze this mountain if what I was afraid of was really true. “They can’t do this! How could anyone ever think you of all people are replaceable?”