Going the Distance Read online

  Before today he’d glimpsed her from afar on a couple of occasions, just the glint of that long blond hair as she came or went from the gym trailer, and of course he’d heard the men at the site talking about her. There weren’t many female foreigners in town, not slim blondes in their twenties with legs that went on for miles and breasts he’d struggled not to ogle as she’d run on that damn treadmill for far too long. She was prettier than Dale’s lewd descriptions had implied; he’d gotten the impression she was the kind of blonde you saw in a men’s magazine, but in reality she was more of the fitness model-type. Tan skin, big blue eyes, no makeup.

  Jarek had spent much of his adult life working overseas; he’d been to more places than he could count, certainly more than he’d care to remember. Unlike the Dales of the world, he didn’t take advantage of being a white male in a second or third world country; he didn’t take advantage of young women desperate for a chance to marry into a better life. It made things difficult, on a personal level, especially when he was abroad for months or years at a time, or when he spent half an hour running next to someone whose hair smelled like apples every time her ponytail swung his way.

  Despite the fact that she was American and of age, Olivia wasn’t Jarek’s type. She was too…wholesome. She’d no doubt grown up surrounded by cornfields, with a family that had a flagpole in the front yard and said grace before every meal. He preferred his women a little more jaded, the kind he met in dark bars and took home to dark rooms, the kind who didn’t expect him to be there in the morning, the kind he didn’t disappoint. He didn’t do second dates; hell, he didn’t do first dates. They got everything they needed in the span of a few hours, and then everybody moved on. That was how he liked it.

  If it hadn’t been for that faint white line on her finger and the strange sadness in her smile, he wouldn’t have asked her to meet him tomorrow night. He may have left his old line of work behind, but he couldn’t shake it completely. If someone had a secret, he needed to know what it was. And Olivia Clarke had a secret.

  “Back already?”

  Jarek turned at the sound of Dale’s faintly southern drawl. Pushing forty, he was a beefy guy with a dutiful wife and a couple of children back at home, family he promptly put out of his mind when he was out of the country. Jarek hadn’t known him long, but he didn’t like him. He’d already assessed that the guy was harmless, but he was an asshole—the kind of guy who used his hands instead of his words to describe women. He’d given Olivia an hourglass shape with heavy emphasis on the curves.

  “Yeah.”

  They walked the remaining minute to the apartment building that housed the workers, a new construction that still smelled like paint and metal. They each had their own apartment, and Jarek lived across the hall from Dale. They stepped into the elevator and Dale looked over meaningfully. “Thought you’d be gone longer,” he remarked, prying.

  Jarek shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Not your type?”

  “Not interested.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Jarek glanced at him as the doors opened on the fifth floor. “She your type?”

  Dale laughed, cheeks red from the beer he’d chugged as soon as he finished working out. “I already tried, man.”

  “No luck?”

  “Just takes some work, I guess.”

  Jarek reached his apartment and stepped inside. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Night.”

  He closed and locked the door, then kicked off his sneakers and dropped his coat on a chair before walking into the bathroom to strip out of his sticky clothes. He turned on the hot water and climbed into the shower, doing his best to keep Olivia out of his thoughts. He’d only been in China four weeks; prior to that he’d stayed with his brother in Virginia for two months. He’d hooked up twice while he was there, and this certainly wasn’t the first time he’d gone more than a month without sex. But standing here now, with the hot water sluicing down his chest, he could only see Olivia on the treadmill, sweat trickling between her slightly bouncing breasts.

  He washed his hair and willed away the image, but then imaginary Olivia smiled at him, and he saw her nipples harden when Dale opened the trailer door, the ones she’d tried to hide behind her towel. He smelled her hair and the faint tang of her sweat, then he gave up the fight and reached between his legs, determined to get her out of his head.

  Chapter Two

  “…FISH LIKES TO SWIM, the fish likes to swim. The fish can swim all day long, the fish likes to swim!”

  A chorus of high-pitched swims! rang out, and Olivia smiled at the sea of giddy six-year-old faces staring back. “Good job, everybody. Take a seat, please.” Familiar with the start of class song and dance routine, the kids sat down, gazing at Olivia expectantly. “You’re getting too good at that one,” she said, popping the disc from the ancient CD player and sliding it into its case. “It might be time for a new song.”

  No response, which was expected. To date their vocabulary spanned the alphabet (sort of), the numbers one through ten, a variety of fruits and vegetables, a few methods of transportation, and classroom items.

  “Liv, Liv,” a little girl in the front row whispered loudly. “Okay. Okay. Me. Okay?” Her tiny hand was extended, fingers opening and closing, desperate to hold the CD.

  Olivia shot her a smile. “I’ve got it this time, Rose. Thank you.” All of the students at the school had English names, as did most of the teachers. It was common practice for people to have both a Chinese name and an English name, and the way the names were picked varied. Some parents chose the name, some asked the teachers to do the choosing. Some students were named after popular book and movie characters (Nemo, Harry Potter), but most had something simple and easy to pronounce. The school teemed with Johns and Leos and Sunnys and Judys.

  Rose, understanding “thank you” and the polite rejection, sat back, dejected, with an obedient, “You’re welcome.” Rose had abundant amounts of energy, good intentions, and little to no self-control. After a split second to absorb the setback, she proceeded to tie her own shoelaces together.

  Olivia wiped her hands on her jeans and picked up the stack of well-worn flashcards she’d inherited when she’d taken over the classroom upon her arrival in January. The only class in the school with a foreign teacher, the Australian woman who’d been teaching there since September had opted not to return after the holidays, leaving the school with a vacancy and Olivia with the opportunity to hop on a plane with little to no preparation for life abroad.

  “Okay, everyone,” she began. “Today we’re going to learn some new words. Are you ready?”

  Half the kids heartily chorused, “Ready!” as they’d purportedly learned the year prior, but half just stared back, perplexed. Though she’d turned up for every day of work since she’d started, a good number of students, teachers and parents still stared at Olivia as though it were her first day all over again. And like she had a second head.

  “Good enough,” she said, holding up the first flashcard. “Who knows what this is?” It was a chicken, which she had to assume was the word they all cried in Mandarin. “That’s probably right. In English we say ‘chicken.’” She paused, but only one kid started to try to repeat the word, and he quickly gave up when no one else moved. “Come on, guys. It’s been three months. Repeat after me, please. Chicken.”

  “Chicken,” Rose parroted politely.

  “Thank you, Rose,” Olivia said. “That was excellent. For that you get a sticker.” She approached the small box she kept on her desk, and extracted a shiny heart sticker. Immediately the students sat up and took notice. Rose beamed and held out the back of her hand so Olivia could affix her prize.

  Garbled shouts that sounded vaguely like “chicken” mixed with a bunch of expletives rang out. “Too late!” Olivia interrupted, holding up a hand. “Rose repeated it first, so she’s the only one getting a sticker.” She wasn’t above bribery, but she didn’t have that many stickers left, either. “Now pleas
e repeat after me: chicken.”

  “Chicken!” they chorused.

  “Excellent. What sound does a chicken make?”

  Dead silence.

  “Does a chicken meow?” Olivia meowed, and the kids cackled and cried, “No!”

  “Does a chicken moo?” Olivia mooed, and they killed themselves laughing.

  “No?” she asked, scratching her head. “What sound does a chicken make?”

  The room filled with thirty clucking chickens, complete with arm flapping.

  “Ohh!” she exclaimed. “I think you’re right. Chickens cluck!” She copied the sounds and arm movements, and the kids giggled helplessly. “Well. I think you’re familiar with chickens. Are you ready to learn the next word?”

  “Ready!” Rose shouted.

  “READY!” everyone else hollered, eyes on the sticker box.

  Olivia held up the next card. “This is a gorilla…”

  Two and a half hours later, Olivia was finally alone in the classroom. The kids were shuttled off to eat in the cafeteria where the school employed several older women to feed and control them. She’d made the mistake of venturing into the cafeteria during mealtime once, and the combined cries of discovery, shock, and horror had her backing out, gesturing guiltily to the women minding them. Later that night she’d found a tiny prawn in the back pocket of her jeans.

  Across the courtyard Olivia could hear the Chinese teachers laughing in an empty classroom as they ate and played mah-jongg, a tile game she’d learned had nothing in common with the simple version she’d played online a couple of times. She’d been invited to play on her first day, then promptly cast out of the game when it became obvious she had no idea what she was doing.

  A few of the teachers spoke a little English, but those that did were too shy to try, so Olivia was treated like a fragile princess, waved to from afar but never approached. Or, more often, ignored. As the only foreign teacher at the school, she’d been shocked to learn she made six times more than the Chinese teachers for doing half the work, and many understandably resented her for it. So while people were polite, they were distant, and in a country with a population of a billion, Olivia felt, for all intents and purposes, alone.

  She sighed and continued to color in the alphabet chart she’d been making. The school had been repaired after the flood, but the classes were woefully lacking in visual aids and supplies—it had taken the full three months of her tenure to get her hands on the flashcards she’d used this morning. She lacked pretty much any artistic talent, but with time on her hands, Olivia had taken to making up her own materials. She carefully filled in the letter J with a red marker, then ate a forkful of the instant noodles she’d had for lunch forty-eight times since arriving.

  Jarek had been distracted all day. He’d spent the morning working alone in the carpentry trailer, his preferred activity, but after he’d mis-measured the same piece of wood three times, he’d given up and tracked down Ritchie, helping him mix and pour concrete for two hours. Every now and then he’d glance over at the other guy, who was undoubtedly scribbling something on the notepad he kept in his coat pocket. It was uncanny how much Ritchie resembled a scrawny Clark Kent, right down to the firmly gelled dark hair and black-rimmed glasses. They didn’t have much in common, but he talked less than Dale, and that was all Jarek was really looking for.

  He took a break to eat one of the leftover steamed buns that had been brought in for lunch, and gave up trying to identify the mystery meat inside. He wasn’t a picky eater, never had been. Unlike Olivia, with her strange aversion to the humble green pepper. Fuck. There he went again. He couldn’t keep her name out of his head, her face from his thoughts. He’d woken up this morning with a hard-on that wouldn’t quit, and found himself jerking off for the second time in twelve hours, like he was a teenager. And then, like a teenager, he’d been unable to focus on anything all day, thinking about tonight, when all they were going to do was bundle up in winter wear and run side by side for an hour.

  “How’d you meet Olivia?” he asked Ritchie before he could stop himself. The younger man selected a bun and took a bite, brown filling dripping down his chin.

  “Um…Shoot. Sorry. One second.” He looked away to clean himself up, then turned back. “Olivia. I met her in town a couple months ago. You know Jolly Mart? The grocery store?”

  Jarek shook his head, and Ritchie shrugged. “Well, anyway, we both happened to be there, and she said hi.”

  “She approached you?”

  “Yeah. I’d never seen her before, which was strange, since she kind of stands out, but…Anyway, she’d been here a month and hadn’t met anyone and was pretty bored, so I told her we had a gym and whatever and she could come by, and she did.”

  “You know much about her?”

  “A bit. Like, she’s a kindergarten teacher at the school down the street and isn’t really sure she likes it here.”

  Jarek nodded and finished the bun. He had to force himself not to keep asking questions; his previous line of work wasn’t a secret, but he didn’t like to get into it if he could help it. Too bad he was a nosy bastard, and where Olivia was concerned, he couldn’t stop the steady stream of questions running through his head. Or the lewd pictures that kept popping up at the most inconvenient moments. Like now. Which made him feel like a dick, since the woman was obviously lost and lonely, and sad, and all he could think about were the hundred and one ways he wanted to fuck her, even though she wasn’t his type and would likely expect more from him than he wanted to give.

  That night he was deliberately late arriving at her apartment. He wanted to see if she was the kind of woman who’d tap her watch and point out his tardiness, or the kind that would smile, just grateful that he’d turned up. Knowing what he did about her loneliness, Jarek figured Olivia would fall into the latter category. And he kind of hoped she would smile, not just so he could see it to satisfy some perverse sort of self-torture, but so he could confirm that she’d be the clingy type, and turn these lustful feelings down to a simmer instead of a rolling boil.

  But when he showed up outside her seedy-looking apartment building, she wasn’t waiting out front, and he didn’t know her buzzer number. Not that the panel of buttons next to the now-locked green door was actually numbered. Jarek glanced at his watch and looked around: seven ten. He knew people, and he was pretty damn confident a kindergarten teacher didn’t make a habit of standing up her dates.

  He rubbed his hands together and peered up and down the street in case she was nearby, but there was no blond hair to be seen. He blew on his fingers, his breath coming out in thick white bursts. Lazhou was freezing when the sun went down, and still not much warmer during the day. He was used to uncomfortable environments, but all this cold was really fucking frustrating.

  “Hey.”

  Jarek stepped away from the green door as it swung open and Olivia emerged, clad in a red down jacket, running pants and sneakers. Her hair was hidden beneath a bright blue wool hat and her expression was neutral. He didn’t bother to hide his once-over, and she didn’t pretend not to notice.

  “I saw you coming down the street,” she said, explaining her timing. “It was too cold to wait outside. It’s actually not much warmer inside, but at least I don’t feel like a freak show. Sort of. Anyway, ready?”

  Jarek blinked, unprepared for the sudden slew of words. He was pretty sure no one had said that much to him all day. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, this way. There’s a path by the water. Should be empty now.”

  “Sure. I know it.”

  The street and sidewalk were too crowded to run, so they strode briskly through the throng of people and vehicles, Olivia standing out in her colorful gear, Jarek drawing attention because he was the man with her. If she noticed the looks it didn’t show, so she didn’t catch him staring at her ass and legs in the tight black pants. They crossed a second street, passed a row of tiny trees planted in large urns, and emerged onto the broad paved path that lined the murky river.

>   They started to run. Olivia was in shape, but Jarek still slowed his pace to match hers, catching the occasional glimpse of her face when they passed beneath a lamp post. The path was almost completely empty given the dark and the cold, and they ran quietly for almost twenty minutes, just their twin breaths and even footsteps to keep them company.

  “Why’d your fiancé move in with your parents?” Jarek asked abruptly.

  Olivia glanced over at him, her expression curiously bland. “He didn’t want to live with me anymore.”

  “His own parents?”

  “Dead.”

  “You close with your parents?”

  A split second pause. “Yes.”

  “But?”

  She shot him a small smile. “But now I live in China. How old are you?”

  He wasn’t prepared for the question, as simple as it was, but reasoned there was no harm in answering. He figured her for mid to late twenties if she’d gone to college, gotten a degree, and taught for a couple of years in the States. His own age shouldn’t scare her off, though perhaps he should wish it would. “Thirty-four.”

  “You ask more questions than my students.”

  He smiled, hoping to lower her guard. She didn’t look angry, though she didn’t smile back. She might be lonely, but she wasn’t clingy, either. “Guilty.”

  “And you’re not a cop.”

  “You have a thing against cops?”

  She turned and jogged backward so she could face him. “What are you, then?”

  “A carpenter. A laborer. Whatever Brant asks.”

  He had to slow so he wouldn’t run into her, but kept just a foot of space between them. He could tell the closeness unnerved her, but didn’t let up. She could turn around if it made her too uncomfortable. He let his eyes drift down her body for a second, taking in her flushed cheeks, parted lips, torso covered by that damn quilted jacket. He wanted to run outside to get away from the trailer, like he’d said, but also to get away from Dale’s knowing looks and obvious eavesdropping. He’d wanted to get her alone.