Chapter 18
I REST A HIP AGAINST the counter in the break room later that morning, watching the steady trickle of the coffee into the carafe. I close my left eye, focusing with my right: The vision’s hazy, courtesy of my standard workout fog, but there’s no question that my sight is otherwise back to normal.
Smiling, I turn to face the room.
“Do you think that we can request more of those muffins from Built Box?” Grant asks. “They were amazing!” He lies on his side on the floor beside Penny, who assembles something with Legos. All of the other childcare kiddos have been retrieved.
I nod. “I don’t know how Diego managed it. I was sure they were going to taste like dirt.”
“Talking about Diego’s muffins?” Helen asks, leaning in from the doorway. Penny turns at the sound of her voice, proudly holding up her work in progress. Helen gives her a thumbs-up— “Looking good, kiddo”—then points to Grant. “You sure you’re okay back here for another fifteen? I’ll shower quick.”
“Take your time!” he says. “My personal training client won’t be in ’til ten.”
“Thank you!” She slumps against the doorframe, eyeing me warily. “Have we been forgiven for this morning yet?”
“We’re good,” I assure her.
She smiles, miming wiping her brow, and freezes, hand still raised, as Alistair passes her on his way into the room.
Her eyes follow his shirtless form seemingly unconsciously, tracking him as he crosses the space.
He opens the door of the fridge, leaning over to look inside, and as he’s cut off from her line of sight, the compulsion to watch him is severed, and she drops her hand.
“Still could have gone without the ‘Ellie seduces Ian into letting Tom file his taxes’ angle,” I say, just on principle. Helen laughs.
Alistair closes the fridge, shaking a premade protein drink. “Really?” He uncaps the shake. “I didn’t think that’d be a big deal, since you two keep making out.”
The silence that follows is so complete, I flinch at the click of Penny’s Legos.
Alistair takes a drink, then screws the cap back on.
His brow furrows as he takes in the three people staring at him.
“What? You and Ian?” He crosses toward the door, shaking the bottle.
“Like, that first night you showed up? And this weekend? The elevator?” he presses, as though trying to jog my memory.
I stare back, incredulous, but his attention has shifted to the only person in the room unfazed by the bomb he just dropped.
“Yo, Penny! How ’bout some knuckles?” He extends his fist toward Penny, who does the same, bumping hers to his. “This kid rules,” he says to no one in particular, and excuses himself as he walks past Helen and out of the room, oblivious to the wreckage left in his wake.
Grant stares at me, slack-jawed, and then busts out a huge smile. I’m unwilling to go there, so I look to Helen.
She shrugs, decidedly not shocked by Alistair’s revelation. “Babs and I were here that first Saturday morning. We noticed your reaction to Ian. We figured there was a story there.”
“There’s no story—” I start, but Helen taps her neck, pressing just below her jawbone.
“The man had a”—she glances quickly at her daughter, then mouths—“hickey.”
“I—” My denial gets caught in my throat as a memory unfurls. A quick flash of nuzzling into that tender spot, an experimental lick, then a suck, and the groan it pulled from him that had me going full sexy leech.
My silence speaks for me.
“Congrats, by the way.” Helen’s smiling now. “You’ve succeeded where many have failed.”
“With my brother!” Grant brays out a laugh. “Gross.”
“And this is common knowledge?” I ask.
“No!” Helen’s assurance comes quickly. “Mostly five a.m. Due to Babs’s rallying efforts. So, Maggie. And Tom. And…”
“So there’s a not-insignificant number of gym members who are comfortable with the idea of me employing my feminine wiles to get Ian to upgrade the pro shop?”
“Whatever gets the job done,” Helen offers. “All right, I gotta shower. Penny, love, see you in a few!” Her daughter gives a thumbs-up in acknowledgment, and Helen departs.
When I look at Grant, I expect to find him still reveling in the new, apparently gross news of my dalliances with his brother. Instead, he’s frowning, eyes distant before meeting mine.
“Did we ever tell you what happened to his knee?” he asks. “How he was injured?”
“Your summary was enough to keep me from watching the video.”
He grimaces. “Have you noticed how, whenever folks grab extra plates, we stack them in the center of the rig until we need them?” he asks.
It takes me a moment to visualize, but I nod.
“It’s because of that. Ian was warming up his back squat at a competition and, dumped his bar, but the guy behind him had his plates in Ian’s space.
So when Ian bailed, the plates on one end of his bar hit the stack, bounced off them, and collided with the back of his right knee. ”
He holds his hands up, just as Diego had during the original telling, and, also like Diego, and Tom this morning, jerks his hands to one side.
I am never watching that footage.
“Took him out. Ended his career. And, I dunno. Maybe he’s super controlling because of it. Since something someone else did screwed up his life, he wants to call all the shots here.”
“That’s pretty insightful,” I say, impressed. “If you put that theory in an essay, with that support, I’d give you full points.”
He smiles, and it’s quiet for a moment as we watch Penny’s fastidious work with the Legos.
“I know he’s a hardhead, but have you brought up anything to him?” I ask. “Any ideas?”
Grant shakes his head. “He’s my big brother, y’know? He’s already done so much for me, so, like, it feels weird to tell him I think he’s not getting something right.”
“I get it. It can be hard to confront a superior about anything. But when that person is also family, and the business is theirs, it’s probably too close to home.”
“He worked so hard to put this together. And after the way things shook out with Denny, his mentor?” Grant pauses, watching me until I nod that I recognize the name.
“I know he wants to prove himself. He…” Grant grimaces.
“I’m sorry. That’s Ian’s thing. It feels like a”—he mouths dick—“move for me to go off about it. It’s not mine to share, y’know? ”
“If it’s not your story to tell, it’s not your story to tell,” I say, though my curiosity is piqued.
“But…” I try to decide how I want to ask the next question.
“Is your only concern that he’s sensitive, or…
” It feels wrong to even allude to aggression, but I haven’t even been on the scene for two weeks.
Who knows what might be in the background. “Does he get…mean?”
It takes Grant a moment to cut through my vagaries, but when he does, he laughs; I am awash with relief. “You know better than that! Ian’s not some rage monster. He can be grumpy, but it’s Ian. He cried at Inside Out.” His eyes widen. “Oh, dude, do not tell him I told you that!”
I mime locking my lips and throwing away the key, but God, is that inconveniently hot.
“Cool. So, yeah. We don’t want to hurt his feelings. He’s a softie.”
“Who cried at Inside Out,” says Penny. Grant lets out an affronted gasp. “He watched it with us,” she says, deadpan. “We were at your house.”
“Dude,” he warns. She just smiles. This kid does rule.
“Was it Bing Bong?” I ask her.
“He’s not really gone, you know,” she says, deeply serious. “We remember him.”
“Penny, I love that. Thank you,” I say, and smile.
And keep smiling. At her cleverness, at the thought of Ian, crying at the demise of an imaginary friend in a kids’ movie.
At Grant’s earnestness and the excessive but charming dedication of the members of this gym, how wickedly sore I’m going to be later from today’s workout, and I don’t know…
The generally bonkers direction my life has taken, I guess.
For now, I remind myself. This is my life, but not really. Not forever. Because that would demand more hope than I can afford.
“Did you ever work with little kids?” Grant asks, rousing me from the ugly thought.
I shake my head in an emphatic no. “I chose secondary ed for a reason. In my experience, that demographic tends to be sticky.”
Penny meets my eyes and presses two Legos together with an admonishing click.
“Present company excepted, of course.”
She nods and gets back to work.
Grant laughs. “I like ’em. I miss them when they leave, like, when they’re old enough for school.
Kids are so lucky, getting to go learn. Every day they find out something totally new.
Can you imagine, being this little nothing blob of a baby person, and then learning, bam!
Sharks! There are giant fish that can eat you and also they die if they stop moving.
Did you know that?” he asks me, eyes alight.
“They have to keep water moving over their gills to breathe,” says Penny.
Grant beams. “Yeah, they do!”
“They probably won’t eat you,” she drones. “More people die every year from falling coconuts than from shark attacks.”
“We looked that up. But I’m the one who told you about the gills,” he reminds her.
Penny waves him off. “I need a red two by three,” she says, fishing through the bricks.
Grant grins, joining in the hunt. “That’s gotta be a fun thing about teaching, right?” He passes Penny her desired brick. “Like, sharing all the stuff you know? Or discovering things along with them? Seeing what they come up with?”
“The sharing was the best part,” I admit.
“When my heart wasn’t being broken by how little they actually cared about what I was trying to introduce them to.
Between that and the unrelenting bureaucratic bull—nonsense,” I say, catching myself from swearing in front of a preschooler.
“I ended up so discouraged after one year, I left.”
Grant frowns, and an echo of judgment crawls over my skin. “Whoa. It must have super sucked for you, then, if you decided to split. Cause you don’t do anything without really deciding to, you know?”
I appreciate his generous interpretation.
“There were moments. When they’d get really into an assignment or, like you said, come up with something on their own.
Near the end of the year, we covered Romeo and Juliet.
I had a student who hadn’t once spoken up go on a tear about how Romeo comparing his love to the moon wasn’t a good measure, because the moon changes size!
” I smile at the memory. “She was fired up about it after, too.”
“And with little kids, that’s what every day must be like!” He cocks his head. “What do they even do in school?”
“Other than learn that sharks exist?”
“Right? They’re getting introduced to everything around them, and themselves, too.
But also, not? I mean, beyond basics, and all the puberty stuff in middle school or whatever, do kids even learn about how their bodies work?
” He frowns, pausing, and I try to catch up to his stream of consciousness.
“Basic nutrition, maybe? Oh, man, don’t get me started on the food pyramid.
Diego was showing me what he’s learned about it.
It wasn’t even based on science! There were grain lobbies involved!
I didn’t know there were people working for, like, Big Grain, but they’re why there are crackers at the bottom of the pyramid. Those are garbage!”
He cocks his head. “Where was I going with that?”
“Kids learning about their bodies,” Penny supplies.
“Thanks. Yeah, bodies and stuff. So, I don’t think I learned anything beyond ‘muscles move you’ and ‘bones give you structure.’ Nerves—”
—are at risk of being betrayed by another system and corroded to debilitation—
“—relay information?” He shrugs. “Everything else I picked up from Ian. I’d watch him, and would try movements, but also learn how it all came together. It was cool, having that opportunity. Do you know if there’s anything like that in schools?”
“I have no idea,” I answer, increasingly curious about where he’s going with this. “But I could ask around. Heather played volleyball in college, and she’s the coach for the team at the school we worked at. She could probably ask.”
As I speak, I notice that Grant’s spine has straightened, his eyes bright. I continue, “Or… set you up to talk to the PE folks at the high school? Or one of the elementary schools?”
“You think? That would be sick. Maybe I could help out?”
“There would probably be a background check or paperwork to do, but…” I eye him. “Grant, do you want to teach phys ed?”
He rears back. “Oh, I don’t know that I could do that. I’m already so far into kinesiology, and switching would mean a lot more school…” He angles his head, warily. “Right?”
“There would be some for the teaching credential itself, but as far as content, I bet there would be a lot of overlap with your kinesiology courses.”
“Really?” His voice is bright with enthusiasm.
“No harm in asking.”
He nods, but his smile fades. “I dunno. It would still be more work, probably, and I don’t want to let Ian down, y’know?”
“No.” I frown. “Why would that let Ian down?”
“’Cause I’m taking after him? He insisted that I get a degree because Mom would have wanted it. And kinesiology made sense, since I’m training folks. Dude! This is teaching, too!”
“Totally,” I agree. “And you’re really good at it. For a twenty-one-year-old to manage a group of people who are two to three times his age, that’s no small thing. If you can do the same with a bunch of kids, you’d be golden.”
“What, like, here?” he asks. Before I can answer, his jaw drops. “I could do kids classes here! Maybe not ones as young as Penny, but elementary age? Or kids the age I started! Middle or high school? Like, off-season stuff! Sports conditioning!”
“That’s inspired,” I say, and mean it. “It could be a great opportunity for the gym.”
Grant is alight. His smile is huge, and his eyes have gone distant, head bobbing slightly like he’s trying to work out logistics.
“Float it to Ian,” I say. “He’d be more likely to consider the idea if he sees how excited you are about it.”
Grant nods but doesn’t look convinced. He sighs, but a moment later, a wry smile crosses his face. I suspect it’s the expression I’m supposed to look out for, the I’m-about-to-fuck-with-you face.
“Are you sure you can’t ask him? You know, ’cause of your special connection.”
I groan, and he barks a laugh.
“I’m done!” Penny hands Grant her brick creation. “I think it’s a fish. But also a car.”