Chapter 16
“ELLIE?”
I let out a yip, tumbling back from my crouched position beside the laundry basket. I’m flat on my butt, heart racing from the start as I look up at Helen and, at eye level, her daughter, Penny.
Penny steps closer, reaching out a kiddie travel cup of Goldfish crackers.
“Thank you,” I say, and she shakes a few onto my palm.
“What are you doing?” Helen asks.
I munch the Goldfish and consider my response.
“I officially moved out of my old place this weekend. I ended up with an extra laundry basket and thought we could use it for the lost and found stuff,” I say, not mentioning that I’d been expressly forbidden from upgrading from the decrepit box.
I’d been transferring items from the semisolid cardboard and into the basket when Helen found me.
Ian hasn’t been downstairs since I started my shift, and I’m hoping to get everything moved over and the box disposed of before he shows.
The laundry basket plot came to me as I lay in bed last night, stewing over today’s inevitable awkwardness.
If Ian responds poorly to my defiance, then I can be indignant at his rejection of my good deed and use it to combat any weirdness.
The same goes for if he fails to notice it or is generally indifferent.
And if he actively ignores the new addition, then I can ignore the butterflies I’ve been grappling with, thinking about the graze of his tongue and that gentle touch he placed at the side of my jaw.
There is a chance that this is self-sabotage on my part.
And while I’ve never employed mild insubordination to combat an inconvenient sexual attraction, I’ve had enough “helper” moments backfire to know that this could generate a response that would take the shine off Ian, gentle touches and all.
Like when I was teaching and recommended that the vice principal try a lavender rinse to neutralize the brassy tone of his beard.
We’d been friendly up to that point, but my next performance review had been scathing.
He was not invited to my happy hour sendoff.
Self-sabotage cuts both ways, however, and my imagination was more than happy to provide.
The last and least likely outcome is that Ian is so taken with the improvement that he gives me carte blanche to attend to everything on my list of suggestions, culminating in the moment I reveal to him the stunningly appointed pro shop, at which point he sweeps me into his arms and we bang it out on one of the weight-lifting benches.
Entertaining this outcome became its own source of sleeplessness. Fortunately, having been reunited with the contents of the top drawer of my bedside table, I was able to release myself from the scenario and fall into contented sleep.
Helen nods. “Good call. I hate fishing through that thing. I always think I’m going to encounter something…” She wrinkles her nose, shaking her head. “Yielding.”
I laugh and get back to moving items over. It pains me, but I’m no longer folding them, for expedience. “And what are you up to today? You coming to eight thirty?”
“Nope. It’s Monday, so no childcare. We’re on a walk. Penny wanted to come by to see her beloved.”
I toss the last orphaned water bottle into the laundry basket, then rise, grimacing at the crackle of my knees. “Her what?”
“Penny!” Grant trots over with a smile. “How you doing, Monster?” He kneels in front of her, one arm curled in a flex, bicep straining against the sleeve of his T-shirt. “You wanna kettlebell?”
In answer, she hands her Goldfish container to her mother, then curls her arms and legs around Grant’s forearm. He pulls her toward his shoulder, like he would a weight, then drives her up and overhead, his arm fully extended.
Penny giggles madly. “Again!”
“We’re not doing this right, hold up,” he says.
With the help of his free hand, he pushes up to standing, child still suspended.
“There we go! How’s the view?” he asks. He lowers her to shoulder height.
“Better here? Or—” He dips his knees, then drives his Penny-weighted arm to full extension. “Up high?”
“Up high!” she calls, smile brilliant.
Helen bumps me with her shoulder. “Her beloved. Grant’s ruined her on sitters.”
Still dip-driving the preschooler, Grant lifts his chin at me. “Do you have a sec? We want to try something. If it works, maybe we can add it to warm-ups. If you could take a video—please?” he adds. “Ian’s lying low for once, and I don’t want to bug him to come down.”
“Sure,” I say, turning to glance at the box I still need to dump. “Will it be quick?”
“Oh, totally! Yo, Penny, we gotta even out. How many times up was that?” he asks, and offers Penny his unoccupied arm.
She frowns in thought as she switches sides, a little wrinkle appearing between her barely there brows. “Seven reps?”
“Seven it is!” He heads to the floor, walking and launching at the same time, Penny again a ball of giggles, Helen and me trailing behind.
There are still a few minutes before Diego’s class starts, and members mill around, most congratulating Diego on the livestream, but some have broken off to linger close to the middle of the gym, where Alistair stands with his phone.
He’s in a circle formed by one of the big bands we use for assisted stretches.
A second band has been looped through the first, linking the two to create a figure eight.
Grant steps into the empty band, then squats to let Penny dismount.
“Here’s what we’re going for,” he says, and shows me his phone.
On the screen, two beefy men have arranged themselves in bands like the guys have laid out.
They bring the far sides of their respective bands to about waist level and assume a high, four-legged position, facing opposite one another.
An unseen person counts down from three, at which point each man scrambles forward, creating a tug-of-war with the bands. Much grunting ensues.
“They go at it forever,” Grant explains, scrubbing the video forward.
The men are sent into overdrive, but even sped up, they don’t make much progress; the bands stretch only so far.
The showdown ends when one man loses his footing and slingshots backward several feet, his partner staggering forward with the sudden slack.
I grimace.
“It doesn’t always work out that way,” Grant says, and flicks to another video. This time, it’s one man-beast with a much smaller guy. It’s no contest; the beast ends up towing the scrapper out of frame. “That one was probably staged, though.”
“And this would be for warm-ups?” Helen asks, looking over my shoulder.
“If it’s effective. Could be great for hammies ’n’ glutes, but maybe quads, too?”
“We also wanna see who’d win,” Alistair adds. He’s wearing a shirt for once. Kind of. It’s been cut into a crop, his abs still exposed.
“Ah.” I open the camera app on Grant’s phone. Alistair puts his away before both men situate their bands then assume the bear-crawl position from the videos.
“Everybody, circle up,” Diego calls, gesturing the class our way. “We’ll enjoy the show, then start our warm-up!” They form a spread-out oval around the guys, settling in to watch.
I start recording. “We’re rolling. Ready when you are.”
“Cool! Penny?” Grant asks. “Wanna start us? Just do ready, set, go!”
Penny stands straighter at the assignment. “Ready, set… go!”
Grant and Alistair charge in opposite directions, clambering on all fours. The bands go taut in seconds, and the struggle begins. As in the video, there is much grunting, but the guys are well-matched; neither gives the other an inch. From here on out, it’s all endurance.
“Come on, guys, let’s go!” bellows Russ, clapping his hands and eliciting a few more cheers from the crowd. But seconds pass and the guys remain at a stalemate. The time on the video creeps up; a minute in, and nothing has happened—
Then Alistair gains a few inches.
A moment later, he eases forward more. But when I look at Grant, he doesn’t appear to have lost any ground. A flash of color below his shirt catches my eye, the black of a waistband, and bright blue below…
Helen gasps. “Oh, no! Are his—”
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 my nuts are in my throat,” Alistair wheezes. His voice comes out high and thin, his eyes watering as he lies curled on his side, hands cupped between his legs. “For real. That band shot my nuts through my body and into my throat.”
“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 is gnarly.” 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.