Lap eight.
Everyone had stopped running.
Ruaan could hear them getting busy. He could hear the clank of equipment and organised training.
The entire grey uniform group had moved on, living their lives, breathing like humans.
Ruaan was still on lap eight.
His lungs had stopped filing complaints around lap six and moved directly to emergency notices. His legs were doing something that technically qualified as running if you were being generous with the definition. The sun was personal about it. The field was enormous in a way that felt specifically designed to break people.
He didn't stop.
He didn't know why he kept going, honestly. His body had submitted several formal requests to sit down and he had rejected all of them. What he did know — what he could feel with complete certainty without looking — was that Harolin's eyes hadn't left him.
The man hadn't moved from the edge of the group. He's just standing there, arms crossed, watching Ruaan go around and around like he had nothing better to do and nowhere better to be.
'Fine,' Ruaan thought, through the burning and the wobbling. 'Watch, then.'
Lap nine.
Lap ten.
He came around the final bend and crossed the finish point and looked up — Harolin had turned away, speaking quietly to Dex, not looking at him anymore — and Ruaan's legs gave up on him finally.
He went down.
Flat on his back on the packed earth, chest heaving, staring at the sky. The blue, indifferent and very far away sky.
He lay there and breathed and let the ground hold him.
'Ten fucking laps,' something in his chest said quietly. 'Done.'
He closed his eyes.
'Lesson learned,' he thought. 'Never — under any circumstances — open your mouth about anything Harolin Crowe says. Ever. Not twice. Not even internally where he somehow might hear it.'
.
.
Bandaged Arm crouched over him with a water bottle and a small white towel.
Ruaan sat up, took both, and drank half the bottle without stopping.
"Where did this come from?" he asked, looking at the towel.
Bandaged Arm nodded toward a cart at the edge of the field — a junior officer handing out identical towels to the grey group, each man receiving his with the specific reverence of someone who didn't get things often.
At the top of the cart, separated, a different section entirely. Protein powder. Sealed supplements. Small bottles of something that cost actual money.
"Let me guess, those are for the black rank?" Ruaan said.
"Top three," Bandaged Arm confirmed.
Across the field, a grey uniform was holding his towel up, examining it as if it had personally done something for him. His neighbour was already planning which part of the shower he'd use it on first.
Ruaan looked down at his own towel.
Then at himself.
He then recalled everything that happened yesterday — the arrest, the processing room, the cell, dinner, the conversation with Dominic, the ten laps — and somewhere in the middle of all of it, the very basic human activity he had completely skipped.
"Can I shower after this?" he asked.
Bandaged Arm's expression did something diplomatic. "Grey uniform gets three, maybe four showers a week. Depending on the schedule."
Ruaan stared at him.
"Three."
"Sometimes four."
"A week?"
"The hot water runs out fast. They don't—"
"Three showers a week," Ruaan said again, because it needed to be said a third time before his brain would accept it.
"You get used to it."
"I will not be getting used to it."
He looked up and caught the tail end of someone mentioning Finn's name in relation to showers, and opened his mouth to complain, and then closed it again. He already knew. He'd known before the sentence finished. Finn needed to wash up more than any of them.
He drank the rest of the water and said nothing.
.
.
Training continued.
His cellmates drifted back to their exercises, the three of them
Bandaged Arm said something funny... Maybe. Split Lip snorted. Bruised Jaw shook his head.
Ruaan watched them from where he was sitting and felt something he chose not to name.
He stood up.
He wasn't going to trail after them like he needed the supervision. He'd been dropped into their circle without asking and he was grateful for it in a way he wouldn't be saying out loud, but he could train on his own.
He was Ruaan Calder. He had used a gym consistently for three years and he did not need a trainer — and especially not 'that' trainer — to tell him what to do.
He found the weights at the far edge of the field, scanned them and selected one that looked about right.
He rolled his shoulders, positioned his feet, shot his hips back and bent down to grip it—
"That's too heavy for you."
Ruaan vibrated.
Not metaphorically. His whole body did a single, involuntary thing — and in the process of flinching backwards, he stepped back directly into Harolin Crowe.
And Harolin did not move.
So Ruaan's back was against his chest, and his shoulders were against those arms, and somewhere against the small of Ruaan's back was something that his brain immediately catalogued as— a baton? A holster? Some kind of regulatory equipment?
It was not small.
Ruaan stood very still.
He thought about breakfast and about the specific conversation he had been listening to when they talked about Harolin. About what the man near the end of the table had said with complete seriousness about communal showers three months ago—
He immediately stepped forward and turned around.
Harolin looked at him the way he always looked at him. Which was to say, like Ruaan was a mildly interesting administrative problem.
"Why are you here?" Ruaan asked.
"That weight is too heavy for you."
Ruaan blinked. Then tilted his head. Slowly. "Is Officer Crowe—" he let the words sit for a moment, tasting them "—'caring' for me?"
Something moved across Harolin's face. Brief and unfriendly. "Do you want another ten laps?"
Ruaan dropped it immediately. "I want to lift this weight."
"It'll pull your shoulder before tomorrow's game."
"I don't know what's going to happen in tomorrow's game," Ruaan said pleasantly. "Especially since 'someone' in this facility has personally promised to make my life miserable." He paused. Let his eyes land on Harolin with full, deliberate eye contact. "Oh. Hello. Funny seeing you here."
Harolin looked at him for one long moment.
Then he turned and walked away.
Ruaan watched him go. He turned back to the weight and smirked at it.
"'Tsk,'" he said, under his breath. "Pussy."
He bent down and gripped the bar.
Suddenly, something pressed against his lower back.
It was hard and unmistakable this time.
Ruaan froze, his knuckles white around the cold metal. It wasn't equipment. It was thick, heavy, and unmistakably alive—the hard ridge of Harolin's cock pressing firmly against the cleft of his ass through two layers of rough fabric. A low, involuntary sound caught in Ruaan's throat.
Harolin's large hands closed over his on the bar from behind. It was definitely not to help, but to trap Ruaan.
His chest was a solid wall against Ruaan's back, his arms caging him in. He leaned in, his mouth a breath away from Ruaan's ear.
"You talk too much," Harolin murmured, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that went straight to Ruaan's spine.
He shifted his hips, grinding himself against Ruaan. The pressure was obscene and a crude parody of an embrace. Ruaan could feel every inch of him—the formidable length, the heat bleeding through the uniforms, the slow, deliberate roll of Harolin's pelvis that had nothing to do with lifting and everything to do with dominance.
Ruaan's breath hitched. He stared at the dirt between his feet, humiliation and a traitorous spike of heat warring in his gut. He hated this. He hated him. He hated the way his own body tightened in response.
"Tomorrow's game," Harolin continued, "is going to be a nightmare for you, Ru." He punctuated the sentence with a harder press, making Ruaan's knees buckle slightly. "I'll make sure of it."
Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. Harolin let go of the bar and stepped back.
The weight took Ruaan straight down, the moment it pulled his grip forward since there were no hands behind him anymore, and then he was on the ground, knees in the dirt, the barbell rolling away from him.
Laughter broke across the field.
Harolin stepped back.
"Take something your size," he said, louder now, for the field, for everyone to hear.
Ruaan pushed himself off the ground.
Slowly, he dusted his palms off on his uniform and straightened to his full height and watched Harolin walk away without looking back.
He waited until those broad shoulders had cleared the distance.
"Ru," he said.
He said it again. "Ru."
He looked at the space where Harolin had been standing.
"Did that bastard—" his voice went up slightly "—just give me a 'nickname?' What the fuck is Ru? Who said — he gets to — that absolute piece of shit—"