Page 50 of Things We Hide from the Light
“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.Eighttimes.”
“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. Wecando this. Wewilldo 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.
This time, my knees buckling had nothing to do with muscle fatigue.
