Page 44 of Ellie Hayes and the Himbos
Before she can finish the statement, the band has pulled Grant’s loose workout shorts down his legs, pinning them to his shoes with its tension. Thank God for compression shorts; otherwise we’d be getting to know Grant even better than I’ve come to know Alistair.
Grant’s scrambling to maintain his position, blue-clad backside wriggling, band and shorts at his feet. The band goes tight again. Grant continues to struggle, but the movement just shifts the band farther down his shoes, until they grip only the toes of his sneakers. He holds himself in a tense plank, his body shaking from the effort, but the band slips anyway.
Without the resistance of the band, he staggers forward, splatting onto the gym floor. The band snaps back—
CRACK!
A shriek pierces the air, and Alistair drops.
“I think mynutsare in mythroat,” Alistair wheezes. His voice comes out high and thin, his eyes watering as he lies curled on hisside, hands cupped between his legs. “Forreal. That band shot my nuts through my body and into mythroat.”
“That can’t happen…” Diego turns worried eyes on me. “Can it?”
Alistair’s shriek had been followed by a collective cry of sympathetic pain from the onlookers, and the eight thirty class closed in on the felled model. Several of them share Diego’s troubled look.
“What if my balls are weird now?” he wails, voice still strained. “I got an underwear shoot coming up!”
“Y’all, this footage isgnarly.” Grant laughs, watching the recording as he walks back from the break room. Eyes not leaving the screen, he hands me the ice pack I’d asked him for.
I offer the pack to Alistair. “It should conform to the, ah…affected area.”
“Thank you,” he whimpers, drawing it back to his crotch. He sucks in a gasp, then sighs.
“Is there protocol for moving the victim of potential testicular trauma?” Helen asks.
“Too bad Maggie’s out,” says Russ, referring to another regular. “She’s a doctor.”
I nod, not sure what to do, either. “Diego, can your class work around him for now?”
“Way ahead of you!” Diego holds up a stack of the little orange cones we use to mark distances in running drills. “These will keep him safe. People here respect the cone,” he says, and busies himself outlining his fallen comrade. It looks like a crime scene.
He nods at his handiwork, then claps for the attention of his class. “All right! We will leave Alistair to recover. Let’s take thewarm-up to the turf outside! Follow me!” he hollers, and jogs out the open bay door, the class following him obediently.
Russ joins the departing ranks. “Good luck with your balls!”
Grant is still replaying the video. He holds it up so I can see, advancing to the final seconds, backtracking to when Alistair pulled ahead—
By literallypullingahead. I reach for the screen and expand the image of Alistair’s outstretched arms. The ends of his fingers appear to vanish just before his biceps bunch in a curl.
“The flooring!” I hop over Alistair’s crumpled form, finding the spot where a trace of the chalk I used to highlight it my first day still lingers. The corner is raised a little more now than it was then. I kneel down, wriggle my fingers into the space, and am able to wedge under it to gain purchase. “It was up just enough.”
“Dude!” Grant brays. “You cheated and gotwreckedfor it!”
“You lost your shorts,” Helen reminds him.
“Yeah, but, like,honestly.”
Alistair just groans. He’s rolled onto his back, ice pack still over his crotch. Poor guy.
“What’s going on?” Ian’s voice buzzes in my bones. “Is that Alistair?”
Ian strides toward us, brows low under the rim of his baseball cap. By the time he gets to us, no one has said a word, though I suspect that I’m alone in being gagged by the memory of having fantasized about him until battery-assisted completion last night.
Ian looks at us expectantly. Still silence.
Then Penny approaches him, cracker cup extended in offering.
His face relaxes, and he takes a knee, palm raised as she shakes out a few Goldfish. My heart gives a little flutter at the sight.“Thank you,” he says. Rising, he adds, “Is anyone going to tell me why Alistair is on the floor?”
