The Front Runner

to look to see his spike marks to make sure. His elbows and buttocks moved a little—
    rather, the rhythm suffused his whole body. After a little while, his shirt was soaked through in back, and his shorts had that dark line between the buttocks. Without missing a stride, he pulled the shirt over his head and tied the sleeves around his waist. Now I could watch the subtle play of muscle, spine and shoul-derblade in his back.
    I kept my eyes on him so hard that, a couple of times, I nearly stumbled over rocks or roots. He was not real. He was just a photograph, just a flickering phantom in a film. When the reel ran out, he would disappear.
    We ran softly for about three miles. We wended among the great silver beeches hazed with pink buds. Early violets and wood anemones poked up through the carpet of dead leaves. In the marshy spots, the skunk cabbages' bloom was long past and they were thrusting up their coarse green leaves. We leaped over logs fallen across the trail. We splashed over streams, where the witch hazel still bent its frail yellow sprays of bloom. We leaped up hills and floated down on the other side.
    Only once did Billy turn to speak to me. "Seven minutes," he said over his shoulder, grinning a little. "You have to be some kind of masochist."
    Then we came to a spot where a faint side trail forked off.
    "Billy," I said. He looked back. My stomach plunged with nervousness. "This way," I said.
    He fell in behind me this time. We followed the barely visible trail over the ridge and down along a slope through some stately, old, half-dead hemlocks, then up another slope and down along it into a little valley. The slope here was grown up with mountain laurel, shoulder high. At the bottom of the valley, a little stream noised along among the rocks. It slid in a shining sheet over a mossy rock shelf into a little pool, then wound on. I had slowed us down—we were barely more than jogging now. I wanted to warm us down as much as possible, and the trail was so rough here I didn't want Billy to trip and hurt himself.
    I stopped in a little clearing in the mountain laurel.
    and looked around. I knew this place already. It faced south, the sun would hit it in a few minutes, and we'd be warm here. It was secluded—the teams never took that side trail during their woods workouts. Surely nobody would come, especially at this hour. And if they did, the gnarled trunks and green leaves of the laurel would screen us. The crunching of leaves would warn us.
    I stood there, still breathing a little heavily. Billy was still coming down the slope through the mountain laurel. All around him, the laurel was putting out the buds that would bloom in June. His torso, arms and legs were laced with bright sweat. He looked at me questioningly. I couldn't speak. My eyes said that this was the place.
    Slowly he came on toward me, his spiked shoes crunching softly on the carpet of tan beech leaves. His eyes had the same intent look as in the movie last night, but less tortured now. He was that image of myself, which had been torn from me in my teens and sent off on a long lonely trip. Now he was coming back, to join with his own flesh again, with that body that had been kept waiting for him like a house rented to many tenants, but now swept out for its returning owner.
    He came up to me and laid his hand on my wet, hairy chest. I put my hand on his tattooed shoulder. It was that loaded gesture of two males touching each other. We destroyed the tabu in it, we made it clean.
    We stood lightly pressed together, breathing now less from running than from excitement. Suddenly we were free to caress each other. To caress him—how unbelievable that was after twenty years of starvation and paid grapplings. Do people really understand what it means to caress someone? We kissed and touched everything we could reach, tasted the salt of each other's skin. His sweat was sweeter than mine because of the no-salt diet.
    I buried my face in his damp hair and untied the sleeves of the red shirt from his waist, and it slipped to the leaves. Billy took off his glasses and let them lie on the sweatshirt. His hands were already sliding feverishly
    under the waistband of my shorts. There was no sound but the silence of the woods and the birds caroling senselessly, and the leaves crackling under our spikes.
    I went to my knees, sliding down against him and kissing his body all the way down. My hands shucked down his shorts and jock strap both at once. The