Chapter 16
CHAPTER 16
C orinne. Thursday evening
It was at Diamond’s Gym that I saw Elijah out of business attire for the first time. For his workout, he wore a low-cut tank top that showed off how his chest was finely dusted with hair and very short shorts that could have doubled as a swimsuit, and sneakers.
The sight made my blood race around my body like it didn’t know where to go. Some of it collected in my nipples and turned them into marbles. I felt myself getting a little wetter in another, lower place as well.
I let Ben walk me through the gym, showing me all the devices made to enable people to pump themselves into whatever state of buffness they wanted. I went through a variety of low-impact sets on different machines, just enough to “feel the burn,” as they say. The burn that I felt the most, though, was from stealing looks at the spectacle of Elijah on his “arms and chest day.”
He was concentrating on what he was doing, but in the process, he was showing me just how he got that collection of muscles of his so hard and tight, so lean, so perfectly shaped.
He started on a bench where he leaned back, working his arms with free weights. With a weight in each hand, he went through his reps, raising first one arm and then the other, one arm and then the other. I watched those biceps bulge and relax, bulge and relax, and it was almost hypnotic. He worked up just the finest sheen of sweat, which played on his skin in the light, and he puffed just a bit, but he didn’t seem to be tiring himself out because he just never let up.
You must have to do that all the time , I thought, to be so accustomed to putting your body through that kind of effort .
He next seated himself at a contraption where he set the weights for a certain amount, then grabbed a handle in each hand and pulled his hands towards each other, then spread them back apart again, making the metal weights in the device go up and down as he went. This was for his chest.
I watched those muscles flex and relax repeatedly and saw him puff hard with the effort and concentration. The hairs of his chest were the only delicate thing about them; those pecs were as hard as they were beautiful, and they glistened as subtly in the light as his arms did.
I could imagine how he must be in a different kind of “workout” — one that he did in bed with a partner, humping and puffing away, flexing that chest while exerting the same kind of concentrated effort with a different part of his anatomy. Only Ben’s patient voice kept my attention on what I was doing.
The next part of Elijah’s workout was done lying on his back on another bench. Once again taking a free weight in each hand, he lifted them all the way up and lowered them again in succession. His whole physique was laid out like an exhibit as he worked, flexing and releasing those muscles time after time.
He looked so amazing, I thought Ben should charge admission to this place both for access to the machines and for the sight of Elijah going through his routine.
Once we were finished — Elijah having definitely put himself through much tougher paces than I had — we retired to a little juice bar at one end of the gym, where we sat and talked over cold drinks. Elijah draped a towel over his shoulders. His hair was tousled cutely, and it may have been just my imagination, but his gym-clothed body seemed to glow in the wake of his exercise routines. He didn’t seem at all tired, just satisfied; and I quietly thought to myself how much satisfaction that body was able to produce. It had to be quite a bit.
The conversation turned to an innocent question from Ben. “You never mentioned what made you pick Cincinnati as a place to move. What brought you here? Was it just the job?”
Elijah grinned when he said, “Out of all the Call Centers in all the IT firms in the world…”
It was an innocent question, and it wasn’t as if it were a state secret or anything. There was no reason not to want to tell them. So, I replied honestly, “Part of it was for the job. There was an offer, and it was a good one.” I flashed Elijah a little grin, and he twitched his eyebrows playfully at me. “And there was something else, a little more…personal.”
“Personal?” Elijah inquired.
“Wanting to make a break with another part of my life,” I explained. “There was something I wanted to put behind me — something you might call an investment that I made that didn’t pay off the way I thought it would, to put it in business terms.”
“What kind of investment?” Elijah wondered.
“A personal investment,” I said. “An investment of…myself, I guess you’d call it. An investment in a relationship. One that ended.”
With that, I had the rapt attention of both guys. I didn’t necessarily feel as if I were about to be hit on, by any means, but I guess it’s natural for great-looking guys to be intrigued when they hear that a girl is “on the market,” so to speak.
“Breakup with a boyfriend, then,” Ben guessed.
After a swallow of my mango juice, I nodded. “It wasn’t going where I thought it was, and there wasn’t any point in holding on. It was sad, but it had to end.” I thought of elaborating, telling them that Blake wanted to keep things as they were but I wanted to move our lives ahead to another stage. But, I stopped there. I was feeling good and didn’t want to cloud it with sad memories.
Ben, however, was intrigued. Nodding thoughtfully, he gave Elijah a little nudge and said, “Sounds like you two are kind of in the same boat.”
It was now my turn to be intrigued. “Girlfriend problems?” I inquired of Elijah, who got a funny look in his eyes.
“ Ex- girlfriend,” he answered quickly. “Didn’t work out, broke it off, long story.” He took a fast glance at his watch. “Will you look at the time? Gotta go over some papers for work tomorrow; I’d better hit the old shower. Corinne, thanks for joining me.” And with that, he was heading for the showers.
I watched Elijah go, a bit flustered at the abruptness of his reaction and the speed of his departure. Ben just shook his head. I gave him a concerned look, and he simply told me, “Sore subject. Don’t worry about it.”
“I get it.” Whoever Elijah’s ex was, she was obviously as unhappy a subject for him as Blake was for me.
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I enjoyed my mango juice so much that I left the gym wanting more of that kind of taste. Which was what brought me to a little cafe between Diamond’s Gym and my apartment. It was a cute little place, clean and brightly lit, with cozy tables and a very friendly young woman behind the counter. When I walked up to the counter, she introduced herself.
“Hi, I’m Kathleen,” she said, smiling warmly. “What can I get you this evening?”
Looking at the menu on the wall over her head, I ordered a mango smoothie and decided to have a toasted ham and cheese croissant and a salad with it, my light workout having given me more of an appetite than I expected it would. Kathleen, who had billowy hair and looked as if she should be one of the models on The Price is Right, quickly got my order together, and I sat myself down near one of the windows after paying for it.
I happened to have a book with me. It was a breezy sort of novel, the kind of thing you’d take to the beach to read, and I sat sipping on my smoothie and nibbling on my croissant and salad, until in a playful sort of mood, I took out my phone and snapped a picture of my book and my little meal and sent it to Leanna with the simple message, Living the life in Cincinnati, ha-ha.
She texted back, JEALOUS, with a smiley, which made me laugh.
I began thinking about just what kind of life I’d started for myself and what kind of life I’d left back home. The only thing about Youngstown that had made me unhappy was Blake. Ahead of me were so many possibilities that I hadn’t even started to tap into yet.
Remembering my disappointment with Blake took me back to what I’d learned about the relationship that Elijah had ended with his own ex and how he hadn’t wanted to talk about it. I reasoned that Elijah probably processed disappointment in a different way than I did. Perhaps the conversation had gotten too intimate for him, which had made him cut out of there the way he did.
It was a shame , I thought. Who was the woman that it hadn’t worked out with, and had she actually been foolish enough to give him up?
Elijah was a little older than I was, and that and his status as a wealthy businessman meant that he and I were in very different places in life with very different experiences behind us. Elijah’s experience with the woman he didn’t want to discuss must have included what I had decided to postpone with Blake.
I couldn’t imagine that a modern woman from a different background than my own had been involved with Elijah Bennett and had not let him take her to bed. No way had this mysterious ex-girlfriend not helped herself to that body that I saw working out in Ben’s gym and what was in those short-shorts. That relationship, no matter what was wrong with it and no matter why it ended, must definitely have included sex — and lots of it. And yet…it hadn’t been enough to keep them together.
It made me reflect more on my relationship with Blake. I could easily have let him “show me what fucking was,” as he had so earnestly wanted to do. And, there’s no question that it would have been amazing.
I’d been swimming with Blake. I’d seen him get out of the shower at his apartment, tempting me with what was under his towel, and I hadn’t acted on the temptation. But, I knew how desirable Blake was physically. He was as lean and tight as Elijah, though not quite so defined. He could definitely make a girl happy in bed, as I was sure he could have made me. And yet…would it have been enough to sustain the kind of future that I wanted with him?
Looking back, I knew it probably would not have been enough. Some couples, I had no doubt, could sustain themselves on great sex. In fact, I was pretty sure that many couples had gotten together for sex and were pretty much about sex, and I made no judgements about that. But, I wanted my relationship to lead to so much more, and he just didn’t want to make that final commitment.
It was a painful realization that sex would not have made him want to commit any more. He would have wanted to stay in that holding pattern of being together and sleeping together forever. The whole thing would have stagnated, making me want out just the same. Things couldn’t have gone any other way for Blake and me than the way they did. And, that was what had kept me a virgin.
I wasn’t sorry that I was still a virgin. I was only sorry that giving Blake my virginity wouldn’t have given us a future. All in all, I’d done the right thing, even if it had left me without the kind of experiences that most women my age have usually had many times over.
Discreetly, I watched Kathleen at the counter, welcoming other customers and serving them in as friendly a manner as she’d done me. I wondered if there was a man in her life.
Looking the way she did, with the personality that she had, she probably knew the bodies of gorgeous men in a way that I never had. She must have given lots of enthusiastic blow jobs and been orally sexed with the same enthusiasm by some of the most bed-worthy men in the state of Ohio. And the screwing…
Gracious, the way Kathleen’s partners must have been on top of her, driving their dicks deep into her, making her love every stroke, probably even making her love them. How many men had she loved in her life, and how well must she have enjoyed them? When would I ever know what Kathleen must have known?
Sighing, I returned to my book and meal. I had to believe my day would come. With as much of life as I had ahead of me, my day would certainly arrive. Out there in Cincinnati right now, there had to be a man who would be everything for me that Blake was — and everything that he wasn’t.
I’d be patient, and it would happen.