4 - Hunter
Hunter
I was in love.
Deep, completely unhinged, hopeless love. It had hit me the exact second Jessica Seymore walked through the heavy glass doors of the lobby, looking like a beautiful, panicked deer trying to navigate a minefield of high-end chrome and screaming muscles.
"Hey, Maya," I said, leaning against the smooth, polished white quartz counter of the Nutrition Nook. I forced my voice into its most casual, breezy register, flashing her a look that I hoped screamed charitable coworker rather than stalker with a target lock. "Why don’t you head into the breakroom? Take fifteen. Grab a coffee or scroll through TikTok. I’ve got the counter covered. "
Maya paused, a half-empty tub of vanilla whey isolate clutched in her hand. She cut her gaze to the digital order screen, which was currently empty, then blinked up at me. A slow, deeply cynical eyebrow crept toward her hairline.
"Hunter, it’s 2:15 on a Saturday. The post-spin class rush doesn't hit for another twenty minutes. Why on earth are you volunteering to wipe down blenders?"
"Just trying to be a team player," I lied smoothly, already reaching across the barrier to snag the damp microfiber cloth from her fingers. "You’ve been on your feet since eight. Go. Rest. Treat yourself before I change my mind."
She didn't need to be told twice. With a knowing smirk that suggested she didn't buy my sudden burst of altruism for a single second, Maya dropped the protein tub and vanished down the hallway toward the staff lounge.
The instant the door hissed shut behind her, I threw the rag over my shoulder and shifted my weight. I gripped the edge of the bar, leaning forward just enough to gain a completely unobstructed diagonal view straight through the wide double doors of the Sweat Sanctuary.
And there she was.
Jess.
Stationed on an elliptical in the very back row, right where the green turf flooring met the rubberized cardio mats.
She’d tucked herself away in the furthest corner, clearly hoping the shadows of the gym would swallow her whole.
From my vantage point, her positioning was practically a gift from the universe.
I had a flawless, direct sightline right to her, perfectly framed between a row of stationary bikes and the glass-fronted refrigerators holding the pre-workout drinks.
She had her AirPods in, her head bobbing in a rhythmic cadence and if I had to guess by the look of her, it was probably some high-tempo pop track.
Her baggy hoodie hid whatever shape lay beneath, but my imagination was more than happy to fill in the blanks.
It was a total defensive shield she didn’t need.
Most of the women who came here walked in wearing matching, pastel-colored compression sets that looked like they cost more than my monthly car payment, moving through the lobby with a chilly, calculated D.C.
precision. But Jess looked like she’d crawled out of a cozy, dusty library and accidentally wandered onto a runway.
She was delightfully, devastatingly gorgeous.
Her small hands gripped the moving handles of the machine a little too tightly, knuckles turning a pale, stressed white as she pumped her legs.
She was already flushed, a few loose, dark curls escaping her messy bun and sticking to the damp skin of her temples.
A ridiculous, completely involuntary tug right in the center of my chest happened out of nowhere.
I wanted to walk over there, pull those headphones out of her ears, and tell her she didn't have to push herself so hard.
"If you stare any harder, you’re going to shatter the glass on the coolers."
Brock’s low, gravelly baritone vibrated right through the floorboards before I even heard the heavy tread of his sneakers.
I didn't turn around. I’d known that specific, slow-moving avalanche of a stride since we were fifteen years old, back when we were surviving two-a-day football practices in the humid Virginia summers.
He was a walking block of tactical, military-grade muscle, his shoulders easily twice the width of mine, stretching the seams of his black staff tank top until the logo over his heart looked warped.
He didn't look at me. Instead, he coolly crossed his thick arms over his chest and followed my exact line of sight straight into the Sweat Sanctuary.
"I'm not staring," I muttered, half-heartedly using the cloth to wipe down an already pristine chrome blender base. "I'm monitoring the floor. It's part of the front-desk supervisor's job description."
"Right. And I’m a competitive ballroom dancer," Brock said dryly.
He reached over the counter, plucked a clean shaker cup from the rack, and tapped the plastic rim against his calloused knuckles.
"Give me a double scoop of the high-stim pre-mix. Blue raspberry. I’ve got a back-to-back personal training block with a K Street lobbyist who thinks a barbell is a type of legal brief. "
I reached for the plastic tub of pre-workout, twisting the cap off while keeping my eyes firmly glued to the back row of the cardio room. "I'm serious, Brock. I think—no, I know—I'm totally, completely in love with her."
He let out a rumbling chuckle that sounded like stones grinding together in a blender. “Another one?”
“She’s nothing like the others.” I tried not to be too offended by his reaction. He’d heard me declare my undying love for about three different women in as many months. “She’s… she’s…”
"You've got a problem, Golden Boy," he murmured, watching me measure out the neon powder. "Who even is she? I saw you walking her past the training rooms earlier. She looked like she wanted to sprint out the emergency exit."
"Her name’s Jess," I said, dropping my voice to a conspiratorial whisper as I poured cold, filtered water into his shaker cup. "Came in on a voucher from a friend to check it out. But I’m telling you, man. She’s something else.
I tried to do my usual routine, the whole 'welcome to the family' bit, and she just called me out on sounding like an infomercial.”
“I like her already,” he chuckled, stealing one more glance in her direction.
“She’s got this wedding coming up in a few months,” I said, unable to derail the excited rambling of my brain. “Some old college drama. She thinks she’s let herself go, which is an absolute crime because she’s the most breathtaking specimen of a human I’ve ever seen."
Brock’s eyebrows shot up. “How about you tell me how you really feel about her?”
I snapped the lid onto the shaker and agitated it with a sudden, aggressive burst of energy, my eyes tracking right back to the green turf section of the Sweat Sanctuary.
He took the drink from my hand, popping the cap and taking a long, slow swallow. He wasn't much of a romantic. A ladies’ man, sure, but he was so much cooler about it than I’d ever been. Too cool to make a fool of himself.
Back in our high school football days, while I was writing terrible poetry in the back of the team bus and trying to figure out how to talk to the cheerleaders, Brock was memorizing defensive playbooks and studying film.
He viewed the human body as if it were a machine, and he was the engineer. Clean lines, torque, efficiency.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his gray eyes narrowing as they locked onto Jess’s silhouette.
"Her form is a disaster," he noted, a little less clinically than usual. It caught me off guard, but I didn’t have time to say anything about it. "She’s gripping the guide bars like she’s trying to choke them to death.
Her weight is shifted entirely into her toes instead of driving through her heels.
Her lower back is going to be screaming by tomorrow morning. "
"Can you please turn off your PT brain for five seconds?" Then, to get him to move his gaze from the love of my life, I added, "Look who’s got the machine next to hers."
Brock’s posture hardened just a fraction.
The towering, broad-shouldered silhouette of our favorite local corporate crisis manager was now firmly entrenched on the elliptical directly adjacent to Jess.
He’d slammed a huge pair of over-ear, noise-canceling headphones onto his head, effectively walling himself off from the rest of the universe.
We’d known Dane for three years, ever since he rolled into our Penn Quarter branch looking like a walking ulcer.
The guy worked some high-profile, high-stress job downtown, fixing political disasters and corporate nightmares.
He used our weight room like an anger-management clinic, lifting heavy enough to snap ordinary tendons just to blow off steam.
Usually, he kept to the shredding side of the Muscle Mansion, completely ignoring the rest of humanity.
But today, for whatever twisted reason, he had marched straight into the Sweat Sanctuary at the same time as Jess.
Even from across the lobby, through two sets of open double doors, the sudden spike in atmospheric tension was palpable.
I clocked the exact second the friction hit them.
Jess’s entire body went rigid on her machine, her shoulders snapping back into a defensive stance despite herself.
She ripped one of her buds out, her mouth moving in a furious twist as she sneered something directly at him.
Dane didn't even blink. He was too desensitized for any of that shit.
He just tilted his head, his face a mask of cold, unyielding arrogance as he threw some venomous retort right back into her face.
"I’m going over there," I muttered. My feet were already moving, my body tensing to vault around the side of the bar. "Dane is a shark on a good day, but when he’s in one of his corporate-crisis moods, he doesn't care who he tears to pieces. She doesn't know him. She’s going to get chewed up."