“For sure,” he said. “It’ll be great to have company.”
The following morning, after waking up way too early, I put on my jacket and rode to Bryce’s house. He was stretching out front and he jogged toward me, Daisy at his side. As he leaned in to kiss me, I suddenly realized I hadn’t brushed my teeth, but I kissed him anyway and he didn’t seem to mind.
“You ready?”
I thought it would be easy since he was running and I was on a bike, but I was wrong. I did okay for the first couple of miles, but after that, my thighs started to burn. Even worse, Bryce kept trying to have a conversation, which wasn’t easy since I was huffing and puffing. Just when I thought I couldn’t go any farther, he stopped near a gravel road that led toward the canals and said that he had to do sprints.
I rested on my bike seat, one foot on the ground, and watched as he sprinted away from me. Even Daisy had trouble keeping up, and I watched his image grow smaller in the distance. He stopped, rested for a short bit, then sprinted toward me again. He went up and back five times, and even though he was breathing a lot harder than I’d been and Daisy’s tongue almost reached her legs, he immediately started jogging again after he’d finished, this time in the direction of his house. I thought we were done, but I was wrong again. Bryce did push-ups, sit-ups, and then jumped up and down from the picnic table in his yard before finally doing multiple sets of pull-ups using a pipe hung beneath his house, his muscles flexing against his shirt. Daisy, meanwhile, lay in place, panting. When I checked my watch after he’d finished, he’d been going nonstop for almost ninety minutes. Despite the cool morning air, his face was shiny with sweat and there were wet circles on his T-shirt as he approached.
“You do this every morning?”
“Six days a week,” he said. “But I vary it. Sometimes the run is shorter and I do more sprints or whatever. I want to be ready for West Point.”
“So every time you arrive to tutor me, you’ve already done all of this?”
“Pretty much.”
“I’m impressed,” I said, and not just because I’d enjoyed the sight of his muscles. It was impressive, and it made me wish that I could be more like him.
*
Despite the addition of regular morning exercise, the pounds kept coming and my tummy kept growing. Gwen continually reminded me that was normal—she began dropping by the house regularly to check my blood pressure and listen to the baby with a stethoscope—but it still didn’t make me feel better. By the middle of March, I was up twenty-two pounds. By the end of the month, I was up twenty-four, and it was pretty much impossible to hide the bulge no matter how baggy the sweatshirt. I began to resemble a character from a Dr. Seuss book: small head and skinny legs with a bulging torso, but without the cute look of Cindy-Lou Who.
Not that Bryce seemed to mind. We still kissed, he still held my hand, and he always told me I was beautiful, but as the month wore on, I began to feel pregnant almost all the time. I had to balance just right when I sat down to keep from plopping into the seat, and getting up from the sofa required momentary planning and concentration. I still went to the bathroom practically every hour, and once, when I sneezed on the ferry, my bladder actually seemed to spit, which was absolutely mortifying and left me feeling wet and gross until we got back to Ocracoke. I felt the baby moving a lot more, especially whenever I lay down—I could also watch it moving, which was really trippy—and I had to start sleeping on my back, which wasn’t comfortable at all. My Braxton Hicks contractions were coming more regularly, and like Dr. Huge Hands, Gwen said it was a good thing. I, on the other hand, still thought it was a bad thing because my whole stomach tightened and I felt all crampy, but Gwen ignored my complaint. About the only terrible things that hadn’t happened were hemorrhoids or a sudden starburst of acne on my face. I still had the occasional extra pimple or two, but my makeup skills kept it from being all that noticeable and Bryce never said a word about it.
I also did pretty well on my midterms, not that either of my parents seemed all that impressed. My aunt, though, was pleased, and it was around that time that I began to notice that she kept her own counsel when it came to my relationship with Bryce. When I’d mentioned that I was going to start exercising in the mornings, all she’d said was “Please be careful.” On those nights Bryce stayed for dinner, she and he chatted as amiably as ever. If I told her that I would be taking photographs on Saturday, she would simply ask what time I thought I would be back, so she would know what time to have dinner ready. At night, when it was just Aunt Linda and me, we talked about my parents or Gwen or what was going on with my studies or at the shop before she’d pick up a novel while I perused books on photography. And yet, I couldn’t shake the sense that something had grown up between us, some kind of distance.