Who You Know by Theresa Alan Read Free Book Online

women characters. He was sick of women in TV shows always being young and pretty and stupid.
    Not only was he gorgeous and considerate, he also noticed how women in television were objectified. He was a perfect, perfect man.
    From the profile he’d filled out at the end of the discussion, I learned that Gideon was Single/Never Married and twenty-four years old, which was a year younger than I was at the time. It surprised me to see that he hadn’t gotten past high school. He spoke so eloquently I thought he must have had at least a master’s degree in something esoteric and highly intellectual.
    The profile said he worked at an art boutique and as a part-time model, and under hobbies and activities, he listed jogging and watching movies.
    The form also contained his address. He lived in my neighborhood, not far from me.
    I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Over the next few weeks, I started visiting all the art boutiques I knew of in Boulder. At first, I wasn’t conscious of what I was doing, but then I began going to boutiques as deliberately as a spy on a reconnaissance mission. In three weeks I’d covered all of them but hadn’t found him. It occurred to me that I might have gone to the boutique where he worked but on a day or at a time he wasn’t on the schedule. So I went to them all again, on different days at different times. I felt vaguely like a stalker, but I couldn’t help myself. For all I knew he could have had a girlfriend or been gay, but I hadn’t been so attracted to someone in a long time and visiting art galleries wasn’t a bad way to spend my time, so who was it hurting? Except I never did run into him.
    So then I got extreme.
    I devised a plan that involved me jogging in our neighborhood at different times of day, hoping to run into him. This plan had many flaws. For one thing, what were the chances I was going to run into him? For another thing, I hated jogging. I found it a monotonous way to work out.
    I began by jogging two miles a day, very slowly. I made sure I looked casually adorable whenever I jogged. For the first few weeks I kept looking for him and expecting to see him. Soon though, I stopped worrying so much about meeting Gideon, and I began to actually get into the running. I enjoyed feeling my endurance improve, and I began to push myself more and more. I hadn’t pushed myself physically like that since I’d danced in college. I had grown complacent with my yoga workouts, doing the same routine day after day, and I loved that I had found a workout that excited me again after such a long exercise rut.
    Three months after I first met Gideon, I almost never thought about him anymore. Then one Saturday I saw a man with long, shampoo-commercial beautiful hair jog past me. I sped up to get a better look—it was him!
    If I’d bumped into him right away after I’d begun jogging, I probably would have been too nervous to talk to him, but now I wasn’t particularly invested in getting to know him, and I didn’t feel any shyness. “You’re Gideon? Right?”
    He nodded.
    â€œMaybe you don’t remember me. I work at McKenna Marketing.”
    â€œYeah, sure, I remember you.”
    â€œSo you live around here?”
    He nodded again.
    â€œI’m Avery.”
    He gave me the slightest smile.
    We jogged in silence for a while. I was in decent shape, but keeping up with him wasn’t easy. Finally he stopped at a drinking fountain in the park. I waited, worrying that if I had kept on going that would have been rude, and worrying that waiting for him was presumptuous.
    â€œYou’re a dancer,” he said.
    â€œI was a dancer. Wait, how did you know that?”
    He pointed to my feet, which had gone to third position out of habit. “You carry yourself well. You’re very graceful.”
    â€œThank you.” I was suddenly very conscious of how I was standing. I shifted my feet