The Runner (Patreon)

Author’s note: All my characters are consenting adults (18+). All sexual acts depicted are consensual between the adult characters.

The Runner

I started the trail because of the winter.

Five extra pounds and a neighborhood loop that had started to feel like a parade of people I didn’t want to wave at. The trail sat behind the last street, a dirt cut through pines that almost nobody used after four. Late afternoon. Heat coming off the day. I ran it ugly and slow and told myself that was the point.

He was there the first week.

Not every minute. Enough that my body learned him before my head did. Average height. Early thirties. Curly hair dark with sweat. Clean-shaven, mouth set like the run was a job. Full tattoos across the chest and down the stomach — faces, letters, a word I only caught once when he passed close: CREEPER. Black running tights. White crew socks. A white shirt knotted at his hip. Purple mirrored running glasses that ate his eyes. Earbuds in. He never waved. He never moved aside. He just ran the same direction I did, a little faster, and the pine shade made the ink look wet.

I started timing myself so I’d see him.

That’s the part I don’t say out loud.

The day I fell I was already watching.

He’d stopped off the path, a few yards into the trees, facing a pine. One hand on the trunk. The other doing what men do when they think the trail is empty. I should have kept moving. I didn’t. I slowed to a walk and looked through the branches like a coward. He was still wearing the glasses. Still silent. The tights were shoved down just far enough. I saw the ink on his hip. I saw his hand. I took one step for a better angle and the pine straw went out from under my shoe.

I hit the ground on my side. Loud. Stupid.

He turned his head.

He didn’t speak. He tucked himself away with the same calm he’d used to start, pulled the tights up, and walked over. Earbuds still in. Glasses still on. I couldn’t see his eyes. I saw my own face in the lenses, red and ashamed.

He put a hand out.

I took it. He pulled. He was stronger than the average height suggested. Up close the tattoos were glossy with sweat. A drop left his chest and landed on my forearm, hot. Another hit the collar of my shirt. He smelled like the run — salty sweat, pine, a body that had been moving for an hour and didn’t care who knew.

“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t— I tripped.”

He didn’t answer. He checked that I was standing. Then he let go and went back to the path and started running again, like I was a root he’d stepped over.

I ran home with his sweat drying on my skin and didn’t eat dinner. I was too excited.

The next afternoon he was at the same tree.

Same time. Same pine. Same hand on the bark. He looked over his shoulder when my steps hit the dirt, just once, the glasses flashing, and went back to what he was doing. I kept walking. My face burned. I finished the loop with my pulse in my throat.

It became a schedule I didn’t write down.

Every day, late. The trail empty. Him at the tree. Me coming around the bend like I hadn’t learned the shape of that pine. He always looked back. Not a wave. Not a smile. Just the turn of the head that said he knew I was there and he wasn’t going to stop.

I started passing in front.

Not close at first. Then closer. Close enough to see he wasn’t just pissing. Close enough to see he was hard, the tights slightly shoved down, his fist moving slow while he watched me over his shoulder. The glasses still hid everything. The mouth didn’t move. The earbuds stayed in. A quiet man jerking off against a tree because a chubby-from-winter stranger on a dirt path had fallen once and come back.

I should have changed trails.

I didn’t.

A week of that. Maybe more. The extra pounds were coming off and I wasn’t thinking about the pounds. I was thinking about the drop of sweat on my arm and the way he never said a word.

The day I stopped walking past, my hands were already shaking.

He was there. Tree. Tights down. Hard. Watching the path for me like I was the last mile. When I left the dirt and stepped into the needles he didn’t look surprised. He looked at me through the purple futuristic lenses and nodded once. Down.

That was the whole conversation.

I went to my knees in the pine straw. Up close he didn’t look like a man on a trail. He looked like something that should have been behind rope in a cold room, a work of art, a body someone had spent years putting ink on and then left in the heat to shine. I lifted my hands without asking. He didn’t stop me. My palms hit the wet plane of his stomach first — the letters, the faces, the slick ridges of muscle under a film of sweat that made the tattoos look varnished. I dragged my hands up. Slow. The way you’d touch marble if the guard had turned his back. Sweat ran over my wrists. 

His skin was hot from the run, almost fevered, and the ink moved when he breathed. I found his chest, the full spread of it, and spread my fingers over the art like I could read it by touch. His nipples were tight from air and motion; I passed my thumbs over them and felt him twitch once, silent, the only answer I was going to get. I went for his arms next. The biceps were swollen from training, hard under my hands, a vein standing out along the right one, sweat in the crease. I held on there like the statue might step off the pedestal. Pine around us. Purple glasses looking down at me. A man who still hadn’t said a word while I worshipped the sweat off him like the Louvre had opened a wing in the woods and forgotten to charge admission.

He didn’t take the glasses off. He didn’t take the earbuds out. He put his hand on the back of my head the way he’d put it on the trunk — practical, certain — and fed himself into my mouth. Thick. Hot. The taste of skin and the run. I made a sound. He didn’t. He used my throat against the bark, short strokes at first, then deeper when I didn’t pull off. Bark bit the nape of my neck. His other hand stayed on the tree. Sweat fell off his stomach onto my hair. The tattoos flexed when he pushed in.

I said nothing because he said nothing.

He fucked my mouth the way he ran: steady, quiet, professional, like talking would ruin the pace. When I gagged he waited half a second and kept going. When my eyes watered the glasses just looked at the wet. 

No good boy. No take it. Just breath through his nose and the wet sound of me on him and a jay somewhere deeper in the pines.

He came without a noise.

One hard press to the root, a shake through his stomach, heat flooding my throat in thick pulses he didn’t warn me about. He held me there until it was done. Then he pulled out, tucked himself into the tights, and stood over me for a second like he was checking a split time.

He nodded again. Smaller.

Then he was back on the path, earbuds in, glasses on, the white shirt still knotted at his hip, already running the next stretch like my mouth had been a piss stop.

I stayed on my knees until I could stand.

Pine straw on my shins. His taste in my throat. The trail empty both ways.

I ran home to masturbate while I still had the taste of his dick in my mouth.

The next afternoon I went back to the same bend, slower than I needed to, and the pine was already throwing his shadow across the dirt.

He was waiting.

He didn’t wave.

He just looked over his shoulder through the yellow glasses, and I already knew I was going to leave the path again.