Chapter 14
The Workout
JONAH
The home gym is the one room in this house I actually built for me.
Rubber mats. Mirrors on two walls because my trainer made me, not because I like watching myself suffer.
A rack, a bench, a treadmill that cost way too much, and the kind of soundproofing that turns every dropped plate into a little thud.
It is, by design, a quiet room. A place where I can hit something padded and not have to explain it to anyone.
Zoe walks in and the quiet goes out the window.
Not because she’s loud. She isn’t. She just appears in the doorway in a black sports bra and bike shorts that end about three inches above her knee, hair scraped up into a knot, glasses gone, and proceeds to set a water bottle down on the bench like she’s done it a hundred times. Like this is normal.
It’s not normal.
I turn around and pretend to be concerned with the speed settings on the treadmill, which I’ve used one thousand times and could operate blindfolded.
I stab at buttons. I adjust an incline I don’t need adjusted.
I’m a grown-ass man in his own house hiding from a five-foot-four production assistant in spandex.
“You good over there, Holt?”
“Fine.”
“Mm-hmm.”
I turn back. She’s watching me with a sideways smile that says she caught me. She has, of course. She knows she has. She doesn’t say it. She just picks up her water and climbs onto the treadmill next to mine and starts it up at a walking pace.
That smile is worse than if she’d called me out. That smile says I see you, and I’m not going to do anything with it, and you’re going to suffer. That smile is a weapon, and she knows it, and she’s using it on me in the room I built specifically to feel in control of things.
Cool cool cool, as she would say.
I bump my speed up to a jog. She matches me.
The first quarter mile is the pad-pad-pad of feet on belts and the hum of the machines. I stare straight ahead at the mirror. It’s a real-time broadcast of Zoe Lane on a treadmill, which is not a problem I anticipated when I had it installed.
“You run like a swan,” she says.
“What?”
“It’s weird.”
I almost trip on the belt. “Are you—I’m an NHL player.”
“I know.”
“I have trainers.”
“I know.”
“My form is professionally maintained.”
“Right. Which is what makes it weird.” She stares at her own mirror, very serious, lips twitching.
“Your form,” I say, “is the form of a woman who’d rather be eaten by the tiger she’s running away from.”
She laughs. A real one, surprised out of her, the kind that comes from somewhere lower than her throat. “You’re not wrong.”
It hits me sideways.
In no time, the mirrors are fogging at the edges, Zoe’s breathing has gone from conversational to huffing and puffing, and I’m pretending I’m not at all curious how long she can hold this. As it turns out, longer than I’d have guessed for a woman who’s publicly declared cardio self-induced torture.
“Shin splints,” she announces, slapping the slow-down button. “Calling it. I have a body, not a contract.”
“Quitter.”
“Survivor.”
She walks it out, hands on her hips, chest heaving, and I will, for the rest of my life, have the image of her in this exact moment burned into the back of my eyelids. I look away. I look back. I look away again. I’m a thirty-year-old behaving like a teenager.
I kill my own treadmill, grab a towel, and try to remember what I came in here to do.
Right. Burn it off. That was Zoe’s plan that involved me doing my body’s worth of feelings until I was too tired to feel them.
It was a solid plan which has evolved into less of a solid plan because now I’m full of an entirely different kind of adrenaline, and no padded thing in this room is going to fix it.
“Free weights,” she says, like she’s reading my mind, and walks past me.
She pulls a set of dumbbells off the rack that are smaller than what I drink water out of, then rushes through her own routine like a person who doesn’t really give a shit. Bicep curls. Shoulder presses. A series of lunges that have me suddenly very interested in the stitching on my towel.
I get under the bar at the squat rack and try to do the same, but my eyes keep going where my eyes should not go, which is the line of her shoulder when she lifts, the flex in her forearm, the bead of sweat that makes its way down the side of her neck and disappears into the strap of the sports bra and—
She catches me looking.
She doesn’t say anything. Again.
I rack the bar and add weight. I get back under it and tell myself to focus, and I do focus, for about forty-five seconds, and then I look up and she’s bent over a kettlebell, and I’m gone again.
She catches me… yet again, and this has turned into silliness.
The not-saying-anything is sitting in my chest, and every time she doesn’t comment, it gets bigger, and at some point it’s going to be so big it’ll burst out, and when it does, I’m not responsible.
I should leave the gym and go shower. I should call Olivia Gardner, my new family lawyer, and make sure she has everything she needs. Put my brain on something useful, like the bitch in pearls trying to take my kid.
Instead, I hear myself say, “You want a spot?”
She straightens up. Looks at the bench. Looks at me. Looks at the bar, which is loaded with about half of what I’d put on it for a warmup.
The corner of her mouth does the sideways thing. “You want to spot me on a weight that you could probably bench with one arm.”
“I’m being polite.”
“You’re being something.”
But she walks over to the bench anyway, and she lies down, settling her hands at the right grip width. I take my position behind her head with my hands hovering an inch under the bar, and I look down at her and regret every choice that led me to this spatial configuration.
The view from here is bad. By which I mean: very, extremely good.
By which I mean: I shouldn’t be allowed to look at her from this angle, ever, in this lifetime or any other.
The rise and fall of her chest as she breathes.
The little smirk at the corner of her mouth that says she’s completely aware of where I’m standing, what I’m doing, and what it’s costing me.
“Three sets of eight,” she says, like she’s not currently dismantling me.
“Three sets of eight.”
We both know she doesn’t need me. The weight goes up like it’s nothing, comes down with control, goes up again. I am, technically, doing my job.
On the eighth rep of the third set, I lean in a hair, just to “steady” the bar, and my fingers brush hers on the return.
Neither of us pulls away.
It’s a half-second, maybe less. But in the time that exists between her hand and mine, it’s approximately a year.
And before my brain can get a vote, my mouth says, “I should’ve kissed you.”
She freezes. “At Christmas?”
“Yes.” I clear my throat. The room is suddenly the size of a postage stamp. “Or any other time in the last four years we’ve known each other.”
The thing about Zoe is that she has, like, eleven faces, and she rotates through nine of them in any given moment. But right now, there’s one face on, and I’ve never seen it before. It’s so much surprise, her jaw goes slack and her eyes pop before she can school it.
“Why didn’t you?” she says.
There are a hundred answers to that question, and I’ve spent the better part of four years cycling through them, mostly at three a.m. in hotel rooms in cities I can’t remember. “Because just a touch of you made me feel too damn good.”
“Afraid it’d be a mistake?”
“Maybe. But it would’ve been the best mistake I ever made.”
The gym is still.
Outside, a delivery truck reverses and beeps. The A/C kicks on. Normal house sounds. Normal life sounds. Normal Wednesday morning in Dickens sounds, while I stand four feet from a woman in a sports bra who I’ve just told, out loud, that I’ve wanted to kiss for four years.
She looks at me a second longer, then walks toward the door.
I should take it back, say I didn’t mean it, except I did. Maybe I should apologize anyway.
But I don’t say anything because she stops walking and turns. She stands with the bottle of water tucked into her elbow, looking at me with a gaze so direct it spikes every last nerve ending I have.
It’s the look of a person recalculating. The look of someone who’s been running every simulation, every risk, every possible outcome, and just decided to fuck it.
She takes one step closer, then another.
The distance between us is a thousand miles and also two feet, and it’s closing like a pressure change.
I cannot, under any circumstances, move first. So I just stand there, watching her, hands still braced on the weight rack, body so full of adrenaline and want my hands shake.
She’s a full head shorter than me, but she stops close enough I can see the texture of her skin, the way a barely-there scar runs through her left eyebrow, the way her pupils are dilated and focused on me.
It’s not how I pictured it. Not at all.
I thought if this ever happened, it’d be a crash.
Years of unsaid shit detonating at once, teeth and tongue.
But for the longest time, nothing happens.
Just a long stare. The kind that lives in the throat, not the eyes.
Her lips are parted, and she’s breathing in that way you do when you’re trying not to pass out. I’m still not moving.
Then, with an exhale, Zoe tilts her chin. Just barely. Like a dare, and I don’t know what to do with that. I lower my head, like this is a game of chicken we’re both determined to lose.
Our lips are a breath apart. And then they’re not.
The kiss starts so soft it barely qualifies—more an accident, a brush of two people who both know exactly how much this might cost. Her mouth tastes like mountain spring water and mint and also like every fucking thing I’ve missed in my life.
She kisses me slow, like she’s not sure I’ll let her, and that alone nearly does me in.
It’s slow for a long time.
Until it’s not.
The angle of her jaw, the set of her shoulders, the way her fingers knot into the cotton of my T-shirt.
She pulls me down, properly this time, her hands come up to my face, and the kiss turns sharp and hungry.
I lean into it, into her, my whole body pressed against hers.
She makes a sound, low and furious, and it ends me.
Now comes the desperate collision.
I’ve been kissed before. I’ve been kissed against lockers and in bars and in the backs of Ubers and once on the floor of an Airbnb in Madrid.
This is not like any of those. It’s like boiling water.
Like every word we haven’t said is burning its way out of us.
If I could live here, in this moment, I would.
She breaks away first.
She steps back, breathing hard, her hairline damp and her cheeks full of color, and for a second neither of us can look at each other.
When our eyes finally meet, her mouth curves up in a way I can’t read.
Then she walks to the door, turning back to say, “This didn’t happen.”
I stand with one hand braced on the weight rack, and I watch the door click shut behind her.
My gym, the room I built specifically to feel in control of things, has never felt so out of control.
I’m a wreck of a man with no plan, no strategy, no playbook, and absolutely no chance of getting any of this back into the box where it came from.