So what if his hands on me made me feel melty and decadent like a gourmet grilled cheese? This was one challenge I didn’t need to meet. One mystery that didn’t need solving. The smart thing would be to avoid him. Just stay out of his way, get the job done, and be on my way.
Inside, the music was hard-driving classic rock instead of the usual peppy pop mix most gyms preferred. There were no tanning beds or massage chairs, just rows of machines, free weights, and sweaty people.
“You new?” The girl behind the corrugated metal front desk had a nose piercing, a neck tattoo, and the body of a yoga goddess.
“Yeah. I’m meeting Mrs. Tweedy and her friends.”
She flashed a quick grin. “Have fun with that. And definitely sign this.” She slid a clipboard with a waiver toward me.
Wondering just how bad a workout with septuagenarians could possibly be, I scrawled my name at the bottom and handed it back.
“Try not to hurt yourself keeping up,” she warned. “Locker rooms are behind me. Your crew is down there.” She pointed toward the far end of the gym.
“Thanks,” I said and headed in that direction.
The center of the space was occupied by a few dozen cardio machines. Treadmills, ellipticals, rowing machines, bikes. There was a large studio in the back where some kind of boot camp class was in progress. Someone was throwing up in a trash can and another person was lying flat on their back with a towel over their face while the instructor led the rest of the class through an excessive number of burpees.
The crowd was a melting pot of horse people in their Lululemon and high-tech gadget watches mixed with the biker crowd flexing their tattoos in ripped tank tops and bandannas. Running full out on neighboring treadmills were a lean twentysomething white guy in head-to-toe Under Armour and a Black woman with silver box braids and a Harley tank top that had seen its own mileage. His face was contorted from effort. She was grinning.
Agatha and Blaze, middle-aged biker babe lesbians who frequented Knox’s Honky Tonk, threw me a salute from their side-by-side stair-climbers.
“Lina!”
Mrs. Tweedy waved from the free weights section. The half dozen elderly folks in matching track suits behind her eyed me as I approached.
“Morning,” I said.
“Gang, this is my new neighbor and bestie, Lina. Lina, this is the gang,” she said.
“Hi, Lina,” they said as one.
“Hi, gang.” They were a motley crew if I’d ever seen one. Best guess, their ages ranged from midsixties to eighties. There were wrinkles and gray hair but also muscles and top-of-the-line athletic shoes.
“You ready to work?” Mrs. Tweedy twanged.
“Sure.” I’d stuck mostly to running since arriving in town. A nice, easy weight workout would be a good way to ease back into strength training.
“Don’t start without me!” Stef jogged up in designer gym threads.
“We meet again,” I said to him.
“About time, Steffy,” the woman on Mrs. Tweedy’s right said. Her jet-black hair was streaked with silver, and her T-shirt said My Warm-Up Is Your Workout.
“I was in the parking lot giving myself a pep talk,” he said. He looked at me. “You sure you’re up for this?”
I scoffed. “I run five miles a day. I think I can keep up.”
Mrs. Tweedy clapped her hands. “Let’s get these old bones warmed up, y’all.”
“Oh God. I’m dying. Save yourself. Go on without me,” I begged Stef.
He reached down and hauled me off the long strip of mat that ran along one wall of the gym. My knees buckled. I was a dehydrated husk of a human being. My muscles were too weak to hold me up. Miraculously, my heart had stayed in the safe zone through the workout from hell, but the rest of my body had given up.
“Pull yourself together, woman. If you quit now, they’ll never let you forget it,” Stef wheezed. Sweat dripped off his chin. His usually perfectly styled hair stood up in damp black tufts all over his head.
I sucked in a breath. “I don’t understand how a seventy-year-old can go so hard on the battle ropes. Does that mustache give him superpowers?”
Stef squeezed his water bottle over his face. “Vernon was a Marine. Retirement bored him so he took up training for Iron Man events. He’s not human.”
I leaned against the wall next to the water fountain and used the hem of my tank to wipe the sweat out of my eyes. “What about Mrs. Bannerjee? She just dead-lifted two hundred pounds. Eight times.”
“Aditi started lifting weights in her fifties. She has three decades of experience.”
“Let’s go! You can rest when you’re dead,” Mrs. Tweedy bellowed.
“I can’t do it,” I moaned.
Stef put his hands on my shoulders, but the sweat made me too slippery too hold on to. He gave up and leaned against the wall next to me. “Listen to me. We can do this. We will do this. And when we’re done, we’ll go to Café Rev, order Red Line Lattes, and eat our weight in pastry.”
“I need more motivation than pastry.”
“Shit.” He pushed away from the wall and faced me, looking ill.
“Shit what? Did they just add more wall balls? I hit myself in the face last round.” Wall balls were a special kind of hell that involved squatting with a heavy exercise ball and then explosively launching out of the squat to throw the ball several feet above your head. They were worse than burpees. I hated them.
Stef shoved both hands through his hair, then with a grimace wiped his palms on his shorts. “How do I look?”
“Like you were just dragged into the deep end of the pool by handsy mermen.”
“Damn it!”
“But in a totally handsome, Henry Golding kind of way,” I amended.
“Maybe I should take off my shirt?”
“What’s happening right now?” I demanded, snatching the water bottle out of his hands and aiming for my mouth.
“Jeremiah just strutted his fine ass in here to do bicep curls.”
I didn’t stop sucking down water, but I did peer over Stef’s shoulder. The gorgeous barber wasn’t hard to spot, curling forty-fives in front of the mirror…next to Nash Morgan.
I choked and nearly drowned.
“Shit!” I yanked off my headband and soaked it with water before putting it back on.
Stef elbowed me. “Excuse me! You can’t have him. He’s mine. If I ever get up the nerve to actually ask him out.”
“I’m not ‘shitting’ about Jeremiah, dummy. I’m shitting about Nash ‘Dat Ass’ Morgan,” I hissed.
A flutter in my chest had me glancing down at my watch. My heart was steadily thumping along. Now the flutter was moving into my stomach. Apparently this wasn’t a structural defect. This was worse.
Stef glanced over his shoulder, then whipped his head back in my direction, sending a shower of sweat in all directions. “Somebody’s got a crush,” he sang.
“First of all, gross. I have your sweat in my eyes. Second, it’s not a crush,” I argued. “It’s…an awareness.”
My awareness went into roller-coaster-plummet mode when Nash’s gaze locked on me as he stood over a bar loaded with weight plates. There was nothing friendly about the way his eyes roamed me. It was all hunger.