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Twenty-six-point-two fucking miles.
Alex’s calves are burning. And his thighs. Also his chest a little, and the arch of his left foot. Whatever. He’s sure it’s fine.
It’s not his first time running this distance. He’s been training for months, building up to it. It’s been the escape he needed – taking himself off on a Saturday morning while Henry worked on his book had been stress relief at first. There has, after all, never been a problem that Alex hadn’t thought he could outrun. Somewhere along the way though, it became less about outrunning things and more about just… running. Because once he stopped running away, he realised that he kind of loves the way his feet feel pounding the pavement, and how he can start in one place and be anywhere else by lunchtime without anybody having to drive him, without having to rely on anyone but himself. He can just start and go. Although, he’s pretty sure Cash isn’t too happy with the number of accidental half-marathons Alex has taken him on over the past few months.
The roar of the crowd echoes in his ears. He can’t look up – can’t take his eyes off that end goal, not now – but he knows there are signs. He can hear his own name and the screams growing louder and louder.
One foot in front of the other.
His legs are like jello. He’s not entirely sure how he’s still upright. He’s running on fumes and the energy gel he’d been handed about forty minutes ago by one of the secret service as he’d passed by. Fumes, energy gel pouches, the roar of the crowd against New York streets, and pure adrenaline because he can see the finish line. He knows what’s there: June and Nora and Henry.
Henry. The reason Alex is doing this whole damn thing in the first place.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
Alex chokes on his drink. ‘Sorry, hold up. What?’
Pez, sitting next to Henry in a soft lilac sweater, looks up. ‘Henry did a half-marathon.’
Henry groans. ‘Pez.'
Alex turns to look at Henry, whose cheeks are flushed pink. ‘How did I not know about this? When the fuck did you run a half-marathon?’
Henry smiles coyly. ‘I did have a life before you, you know.’
‘Yes, but dearest Alexander here stalked you like you were going to be his specialist subject on Mastermind.’
Alex rolls his eyes, unfortunately far too familiar with boring British quiz shows these days to miss the reference. ‘I did not.’
Pez arches his eyebrow at him and scoffs. ‘That’s not what my sources tell me.’
‘Your sources are full of shit,’ Alex mutters. ‘Anyway,’ he says louder. ‘When? How?’
Henry sighs. ‘I don’t know. When I was twenty or so? In Oxford. I tried to be discreet about it. We had to do quite a lot of work security-wise and so I didn’t exactly draw attention to the fact that I was going to be there. Then after, I just… I don’t know, I didn’t want it to be in all the papers. I just wanted to run it to see if I could.’
Of course. Because a half-marathon is exactly what everyone does just to see if they can do it.
‘I don’t think I’d be able to do it now,’ Henry says. ‘I’m not twenty anymore. Besides, I don’t particularly enjoy running, I just needed an outlet for all the frustrations I had at the time I suppose.’
Alex nods slowly, cogs still whirring in his brain when Pez pipes up again, deliberating whether his Mastermind specialist subject would be the work of Botticelli, the Nigerian independence movement in the 20th century, or the discography of Cher.
‘Did you know Henry’s done a half-marathon?’
June looks up from her pancakes with a shrug. ‘No.’
‘Like, an actual half-marathon. When he was in college.’
She shrugs again. ‘What’s such a big deal about that? You run 10k before breakfast some days. It’s not that much more.’
‘Yeah but like—’ Alex stops. He can’t put it into words, why it’s bothering him. He doesn’t even know if bothering is the right word. It’s just that Henry isn’t the runner of the two of them. Sure, he’ll join Alex every now and again, but he doesn’t need it in the same way. He rows and swims, he plays polo and real tennis, which Alex recently discovered is not the same as normal tennis, but Henry definitely plays that too. Henry doesn’t run. Not anymore.
And yet, Henry is the one who’s done a half-marathon. It doesn’t sit right.
June sighs. ‘This is a Henry’s-done-something-you-haven’t thing, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ Alex answers quickly. Too quickly. Nora snorts as she sips from her Bloody Mary. ‘It’s not.’
June rolls her eyes, mutters something about ‘boys’ and then flags down the waiter for another round of drinks.
‘What was your time?’
Henry looks up at him, eyebrow arched, paperwork for the shelter balanced on his knee. It’s a Sunday, and Henry is catching up on work while Alex fields messages from his various group chats and Instagram comments about his latest cover shoot for GQ.
‘Your half-marathon time,’ Alex clarifies, not looking up as he responds to Nora’s comment spam of ‘💦🥵🍆’ on a photo of him in black and white, on a bed, hair slicked back and stripped down to his underwear. ‘What was it?’
Henry lets out an amused huff of laughter. ‘What if I don’t want to tell you.’
‘I’ll ask Bea. She’ll tell me.’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘No reason.’
Henry, not for the first time, looks at Alex like he sees right through him. It makes him feel translucent, like tracing paper. ‘You want to know if you can beat me, don’t you?’
Alex sighs. He’s been with Henry for so long now, spent so much time with him that Henry really does see straight through him. It’s both incredible and mortifying, the concept of being known.
‘No.’ Alex pauses, then he rolls his eyes. ‘Fine. Yes.’
‘I mean, I don’t think you’d have much trouble beating it. It was respectable but hardly record breaking.’
‘Lemme guess, because you didn’t train for it and you could have gone faster if you did?’
Henry looks at him carefully. ‘No,’ he says simply. ‘Because you’re faster than me. You’re just better at running than I am. I don’t really enjoy it but you— you’re good at it, love.’ He laughs slightly. ‘It does make sense. You do love a competition.’
Alex grins. ‘Especially against you.’
‘Yes,’ Henry says dryly, a grin edging onto his lips. ‘Especially against me. What are you going to do about it then? Beat my time?’
Alex leans forward. ‘No,’ he says, with a shrug, leaning back and smiling wide. ‘I’m gonna run a marathon.’
Alex has so many fucking regrets.
It’s not that he thought running a marathon would be easy, but he’s twenty-five, fit, healthy. He runs multiple times a week and spends a lot of time in their home gym. He’s in good shape. He has to be.
Still.
He hadn’t thought the step up to marathon training would be this fucking hard.
He doesn’t exactly want to tell Henry that though.
Somehow though – because he’s the perfect specimen of a human being – Henry always seems to know. He keeps the house stocked with ice and energy gels and attempts to prepare overnight oats and heaped bowls of pasta. He clears his evening to massage Alex’s cramping calves and talks him through countless failed runs, where he tires out before the finish and becomes convinced that this entire exercise is doomed to fail. He listens patiently while Alex lies on the floor complaining that the only things he likes about running are the carbs, the comfortable shoes and being cheered from the sidelines. He pushes Alex to rest, then nudges him back out the door again the next day and joins him for a light five miles.
The whole concept of running is torture. Alex kind of loves it.
It gives him time to think and process everything. Life is busy, and even when things are good, there’s still so much noise, so much to think about. There’s wedding planning and the fact that he’s in his final year of Law School and he needs to work out what the fuck he wants to do, what he wants to dedicate his time and his life to. There’s the fact that it’s an election year and he’s spending every spare minute on voter registration drives and posting on social media about turnout and policy, doing speeches. He’s exhausted and there’s a voice at the back of his mind telling him that running a marathon now, with everything else that’s going on, was a fucking stupid idea.
But then there’s Henry, putting chicken and rice and avocado in front of him, reminding him why he chose to do this – for himself. It’s the first time in years Alex has just decided to do something because he wants to, because he enjoys it, because it gives him a sense of freedom and time to spend on and with himself.
Like, it’s also to beat Henry, but that’s besides the point. It’s mostly for himself.
Mostly.
‘Hey, you got a sec?’ Alex asks, lingering in the doorway to the study.
It’s a Thursday evening – a designated rest day on the official, colour-coded Alex Claremont-Diaz marathon training plan – and Henry is holed up working on some stuff for the shelter. He’s scrolling furiously through an intense looking spreadsheet, one hand gripping his hair, looking like he’s being subjected to a new and inhumane form of torture.
‘Oh God, please,’ Henry says, exiting out of the tab quickly and swivelling round in his chair. He’s got a pained look on his face. ‘Nora created this new spreadsheet for the accounts. I don’t understand it and I don’t want to.’
Alex grins at him. ‘I’m sure she could talk you through it.’
Henry looks at him, eyes panicked. He shakes his head furiously. ‘Alex, I cannot admit to her I don’t know how to use it. The last time I talked to Nora about Excel, and I told her I didn’t know what a VLOOKUP was, she looked at me with a level of disappointment I’ve not seen since I last took David to the vet. Please don’t make me open the spreadsheet again.’
Alex purses his lips in a smile. ‘Okay,’ he says. Henry rolls back in the chair, just enough to let Alex slide in front of him and drop down into his lap. He’s got a piece of paper, folded between his fingers. He turns it, again and again.
‘What’s up?’
‘Okay, so you know I’m doing the marathon—’
Henry nods seriously. ‘I had heard something to that effect, yes.’
‘Fuck off.’
Henry grins and curls his arms around his waist. ‘Go on.’
‘So, I’ve been thinking about which charity I wanna pick.’
‘Okay.’
Alex pauses. He’s been thinking about it for weeks. In between all the conversations to see if it would even be feasible – on the most basic security level – for him to do this, he’s been thinking about why he wants it so bad, who for. There are so many options: any of the charities they’ve supported over the years for the Balls-Out Bananas New Years Eve Party; any of the charities that work tirelessly to make the lives of queer people better; every charity for undocumented immigrants he’s supported; the legal aid clinic he worked at; the shelter. Really though, he keeps coming back to one thing: Henry. Henry and all the work he does, all the pieces of himself he’s learned to give away, and all the ones he still holds close.
‘You don’t have to say yes,’ he finally says, holding out the piece of paper.
Henry takes it gingerly, his eyebrows knitting into a tight ‘v’ formation. ‘What’s—?’ He unfolds it and pauses, eyes scanning the page. Alex waits.
Alex is weirdly used to silence. He spent half his childhood listening to long, drawn out shouting matches and then the longer, heavy silences that followed. His teenage years were filled with noise, but also with empty houses and evenings spent alone. He’s had to get used to the way Henry needs time to himself sometimes too.
He’s used to silence. That doesn’t mean he likes it.
His teeth dig into his bottom lip as he watches Henry read. He scans Henry’s face, watching for any hint of movement – the pinch at the corner of his mouth, a flickering of tightness in his cheeks, the movement of his eyes. Anything.
‘Alex,’ is all Henry says.
And well, Alex doesn’t know what the fuck that means. He chews at the inside of his cheek. ‘Say more,’ he mumbles. ‘I don’t have to if you don’t want me to or you think it’s a terrible idea or—’
‘No,’ Henry says quickly, then he swallows. He shakes his head, and looks up at Alex. ‘It’s just… unexpected, that’s all. I—’ He exhales slowly.
Henry looks back down. His eyes scan over the words on the page. ‘Alex,’ he says again. His voice is shaky. This time he looks up and his eyes are bottomless blue. ‘Why? I mean, Christ, of course, but why?’
And simply, Alex tells him. He doesn’t want anyone else to go through what Henry has. That, if they’d been able to catch it earlier, maybe they could have had years with Arthur Fox – him teasing Alex and Henry, him fighting their corner, joining them for Christmas, front row at their wedding. Maybe Henry wouldn’t have felt so alone and wouldn’t have spent years with a gaping cavern in his chest. Maybe he’d still have a dad here, and maybe thousands of other families would too. Maybe there are a thousand Arthur Fox shaped holes in the world. This can’t mend those gaps, but maybe it can help stop more forming.
‘You really are something else,’ Henry murmurs. ‘Thank you.’
‘Is that a yes?’
Henry shakes his head in something like disbelief, grinning wide. ‘Yes.’
Alex’s feet are already aching. They started in Staten Island and ran up through Brooklyn, down streets he knows like the back of his hand now – past his favourite taquería in Sunset Park, all the way up to Henry’s favourite bookstore in Williamsburg. The crowds thin out for a painful period around mile eleven as they run through the quiet city streets, and there’s nothing to keep him going but his own sheer stubbornness and determination to finish. For a few, horrible moments Alex thinks that he’s going to end up giving up not even half way round, but then the cheers envelop him again as he reaches North Williamsburg and people line the streets. He picks up water and gatorade and an energy bar from an agent and carries on. He lets himself soak into being just another part of the crowd that’s thinned out as everyone adjusts their pace and falls into a steady rhythm. He does the same, loses himself to the surroundings of the city, all the bits he knows and the parts of it he’s never seen before.
He runs over the bridges in Queens and up First Avenue, where the crowd picks up again, streets lined with people six rows deep in East Harlem. The noise roars around him; it’s the thing that keeps him going until he’s able to swipe another snack. The music picks up during the quick trip to the Bronx – mile twenty and he’s surrounded by salsa and hip hop and people screaming. It’s all just noise and chaos as he turns south back towards Central Park. Before he gets there, there’s a brutal stretch down Museum Mile, alongside the park, and he knows there’s only a couple of miles to go. His legs are aching, limp and elastic.
He just needs to keep going.
He’s in Central Park, and he thinks of June forcing him to go see all the sites from Gossip Girl when they were teenagers, and meeting Henry on the steps of the Met. He runs past bare trees and the wide open expanse of grass, taking the slight rise after the boathouse in his stride; through the trees is the finish line.
It’s so fucking close, but there’s another hill. Of course there’s another fucking hill, but this one is more obnoxious than painful. A slight incline that’s in his way. He lets the wall of noise wash over him and focuses on the end goal. He grimaces through a twinge in his foot.
One last turn, the home stretch and then it’s over.
Alex is so close to the finish line he can almost taste it. Well, he can taste something, anyway – iron, salt, and the heaviness of the fall city air. The sun shines brightly through the trees, catching on the bare branches. It’s November – a cool chill in the air, but Alex can feel the sweat on the back of his neck and his forehead. He’s discarded a whole load of layers on the way.
He’s so fucking close.
The colours blur around him as he tries to keep pace. His heart is pounding, his feet just the same. Every inch of his body is burning, there’s pain in places he didn’t know could feel pain.He’s had to slow his pace slightly to make sure he actually makes it over the finish line and his legs don’t buckle beneath him on the uphill finish. But beneath the pain, there’s a sense of sheer exhilaration, an impossible lightness. There’s a dull fire in his calves, but there’s a bigger one in his heart.
It’s loud – the streets are lined with cheering faces, signs raised, and Alex knows that at the end, Henry is waiting for him. His red vest is sticking to his back as his feet carry him towards the finish line. One in front of the other, just as they have been for twenty-six-point-two goddamn miles. A woman in front of him looks back sweaty-faced and laughs in disbelief. He tips his head, and smiles back. Then her eyes bug wide.
‘Oh my God,’ she gasps. He beams back at her, delirious and happy and so fucking close to the finish. ‘I don’t wanna screw up your time but… can we?’ She gestures to the phone she’s pulling out of her belt. And well, Alex is pretty sure his time is going to be respectable at this stage. For once, this isn’t really a race anymore. He’s not trying to beat anyone’s time. He’s almost finished a fucking marathon. He can take a selfie.
So he does. The woman holds up her phone and takes a selfie of the pair of them, still jogging slowly. Alex throws up a peace sign and doesn’t care that he probably looks sweaty and disgusting, his hair pushed back by a hairband. He waves goodbye to her as he picks up his pace.
One foot, then the next. One, two. Same as he’s been doing the whole way round, just like everyone else. The noise picks up. He can hear his name and see the finish line edging closer and closer and somewhere, someone says his name on a microphone and draws attention to him crossing the finish line and it picks up again.
One foot, then the next, and Alex raises his arms as finally, finally, he crosses the thick band at the finish line.
It’s done. His heart his thundering in his chest, his ears ringing a little.
He wobbles to a walk.
There’s a photographer in front of him, catching the moment that he crosses the line, arms outstretched to the sky and proudly wearing the charity vest for the Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund. He lets the guy take as many fucking pictures as he wants. That is, after all, the whole fucking point.
Alex spots him on the other side, clambering out of a penned off VIP area with Nora and June. Blonde hair ruffled and holding a silver blanket ready to wrap Alex in, Henry makes his way towards him. Alex’s heart lifts in relief and soars into another stratosphere.
His legs are wobbly as he crosses over towards them, his feet carrying him slowly. He knows there’s a drop coming, but right now, he just reaches out towards Henry, grabbing against his shirt and tugging him towards him.
Henry catches him easily, wrapping him in the silver blanket in one smooth movement and simultaneously pulling him in for a hug. Alex shakes his head, pulls back and tilts his head, bringing his lips towards Henry. Henry winds his hand behind Alex’s neck, pushing into his sweat-matted hair, and kisses him softly. Alex lets the adrenaline take over and kisses Henry with every ounce of energy he has left.
He kisses Henry lazily, like he’s floating on air – and towards the end, it’s more Alex grinning into Henry’s mouth than kissing. He doesn’t care.
‘You were incredible,’ Henry tells him. ‘I am so proud of you. You’re amazing.’
Alex preens under the compliment.
‘You should keep moving,’ Henry reminds him.
Alex nods. He’s right. He should keep walking for a little while more.
One thing first though. ‘Hey,’ he whispers in Henry’s ear, ‘guess what?’
He pulls back, just in time to register the flicker of realisation on Henry’s face.
Alex grins wide. ‘Beat you.’
A post: [An image of a dark haired woman in her early thirties, smiling as she takes a selfie with Alex, who is grinning, holding up a peace sign]
so picture the scene: she’s just about to cross the finish line at the New York fucking MARATHON. It is IN SIGHT. She’s basking in the glory, taking in the scene, thriving, when she turns and grins at the guy next to her. She’s gonna make a joke. For a second she wonders if this is how she meets her soulmate – covered in sweat, looking like a tomato, crossing the finish line of the New York Marathon???? A story to tell the grandkids about. The guy grins back and it’s ALEX CLAREMONT-DIAZ. so, not her soulmate (sorry for trying to steal yo man @PrinceHenry, please don’t lock me in the tower) Thank you for allowing me to take a pic @agcd!!! Now to rest for 2374956 years. (Still fundraising for dementia care—link in my bio!)
A comment: !!!!!!!!! Oh my god
A comment: ANNA WHAT
A comment: man looks like that after 26 miles holy fuck
A comment: @acgd congrats!!!!!
A comment: ANNA HOLY FUCK HE DONATED TO YOUR GOFUNDME