You clipped me into the pedals at six in the morning and I thought, finally, a chase. Something is after us. Good. This is what the legs are for, this is the oldest thing I know, the burning in the thighs and the great bellows of you drawing air like your life turns on it.
Nothing was after us.
The room was dark and loud and a person on a raised platform kept promising a hill that never came, a finish line painted on the inside of a wall. I gave you everything anyway. I flooded the blood with the good fire, I opened every gate, I sent the heart up to a hundred and seventy and held it there, faithful, because you asked and I do not ask why.
The sweat I made was real. The salt on your lip was real. The forty minutes of pure, roaring aliveness I built for you, that was real too, even with the road going nowhere under us.
Then you unclipped, and stood, and the legs remembered they weigh something. You walked out into the cold with the heart slowing down like a dog told to settle.
I felt you reach, in the mind, for the word for what we'd done. Progress, maybe. A number.
I only kept the warmth of it. The loose shoulders. The hum still going in the long muscles, hours after.
You forgot to drink the whole ride. I can wait. But the mouth is dry, and there's a glass by the sink, and I would carry you all the way back to it gladly if you'd just point us that way.