Chapter Twenty-Three
Zoe
Teague does not want to go to the gym.
She has made this clear through a series of escalating objections delivered from the couch in her apartment while I stand by the door in leggings and a tank top with my gym bag over my shoulder, ready, caffeinated, and unmoved.
"I don't work out."
"You carry kegs."
"That's labor. That's different."
"It's literally lifting heavy things repeatedly."
"It has a purpose. Lifting heavy things in a room full of mirrors so you can watch yourself lift heavy things is a different activity."
"You don't have to watch yourself."
"The mirrors are everywhere, Zoe. You can't not watch."
I wait. She's sitting with her coffee, still in the shorts and tank she slept in, her hair flat on one side from the pillow. The mohawk needs maintenance. She looks like a person who has recently lost an argument but hasn't admitted it yet.
"I already signed us up for a guest pass," I say. "For you. I joined last week."
"You joined a gym without telling me?"
"I told you a few days ago. You said 'cool' and then played the Buzzcocks."
She squints. She's trying to remember if this happened. It happened.
"One hour," I say. "We go, we do some stuff, you make fun of the mirrors, we leave. I'll buy you a breakfast sandwich after."
"What kind?"
"Egg and cheese on a roll." I know I'm getting to her now. She's not going to say no to good food.
"From where?"
"Nico's."
She purses her lips. Her argument is failing. "Nico's uses real butter on the roll."
"I know."
She looks at me. I look at her. The negotiation is over and we both know it, but Teague needs to pretend the breakfast sandwich was the deciding factor because admitting she'd go anywhere I asked just because I asked would require a level of emotional honesty she's still figuring out.
I don't need to take that long. I already know I want to spend all my time with her.
Maybe I should be scared of that. But honestly? I'm not.
"One hour," she says. "And I'm not wearing spandex."
"Nobody asked you to wear spandex."
"I'm preemptively refusing."
She gets dressed. Black jeans that she rolls at the ankle, a band shirt I don't recognize, her boots. She looks at the gym bag I packed for her, which contains sneakers, shorts, and a t-shirt, and picks up the whole bag with the expression of someone accepting a prison sentence.
We walk. Foundation Fitness is twelve blocks south, past the Haverford bus stop and the hardware store where Dad buys his hinges and the bakery that smells like cinnamon at seven AM and diesel at noon.
It's Saturday morning and the neighborhood is waking up slowly, people on stoops, someone hosing down a sidewalk, a dog tied to a parking meter looking bored about it while his person goes into the store.
Teague walks the way she always walks, hands in her jacket pockets, chin down, seeing everything.
She identifies three things on the way: a sticker on a lamppost for a band called Burnt Offering that she saw in 2023, a crack in the sidewalk shaped like Florida, and a cat in a second-floor window that she nods to like they have an understanding.
"That cat's been there every time I walk this block," she says.
"You walk this block?"
"Sometimes." She doesn't elaborate. Teague's geography is private. She has routes and reasons and she doesn't share the map.
Foundation Fitness is on the corner of Barlow and Ninth. Brick building, big windows, a place that looks more like a physical therapy office than a regular gym. The sign out front says FOUNDATION FITNESS in clean black letters, and underneath, smaller: RECOVERY SERVICES.
Inside, it's bright and open. Equipment along the far wall, a treatment area visible through glass doors on the right, and a front desk where a woman with dark hair is sorting through a stack of membership cards while a little boy sits on the floor behind the counter drawing on graph paper with a red marker.
"Hi," I say. "I'm Zoe Kimball, I just joined last week? And this is my guest, Teague."
The woman looks up. She's pretty, warm face, a smile that arrives before she decides to give it.
"Zoe, right. I remember. Welcome back." She glances at Teague, taking in the mohawk and the jacket and the boots and the general posture of someone who would rather be anywhere else.
"And welcome. Guest passes are free for the first visit. I just need a signature."
Teague signs. She holds the pen like she's signing a lease.
"I'm Liz," the woman says. "If you need anything, I'm here all day. The main floor is through those doors. Locker rooms are on the left."
The boy on the floor looks up from his drawing. He's maybe seven, round face, focused. "Are you a firefighter?" he asks me.
I blink. "How did you know that?"
"You're wearing Station 11 shorts."
I look down. He's right. I'm wearing the training shorts Hayes gave me, gray with the station number on the hip. I didn't even think about it when I got dressed.
"Yeah," I say. "I am. Probationary."
"My mom's girlfriend is a firefighter. Torres. She drives the engine."
My brain does a fast, bright calculation. Liz. Charlie. Torres drives the engine. This is Torres's Liz. This is Torres's Charlie, the kid from the volcano project, the one Torres talks about at lunch with a specificity that means love.
"Torres is on my crew," I say, and my voice comes out a little too excited because this is a crossover and I love crossovers. "She's amazing."
Charlie nods seriously. "She lets me sit in the engine sometimes. But only when it's parked."
"Smart rule."
Liz is watching this exchange with a look I recognize from my own mother: the quiet assessment of whether someone is safe for her kid to talk to. Whatever she sees passes the test, because her posture relaxes.
"Maria talks about the new probie," Liz says. "You're the one with the cookies."
"That's me."
Liz smiles. "She says you're good."
Pride spreads through my chest. Torres said I'm good. Torres told Liz, who is telling me, and the gossip pipeline that runs through this crew and their partners is apparently also a compliment pipeline and I'm inside it.
"Okay." Teague shifts her weight beside me before putting a careful hand on my hip. "Can we go lift things now? Before the feelings multiply?"
Liz grins. She likes Teague. I can tell because the grin has surprise in it, the kind that happens when someone isn't what you expected and you're pleased about it.
We change in the locker room. Teague puts on the shorts and t-shirt I packed and looks at herself in the mirror with genuine confusion, like she's seeing a person she hasn't met.
Without the jacket and the boots and the rings, she looks younger.
The tattoos are more visible, the koi on her forearm, the geometric piece on her ribs showing under the shirt hem when she lifts her arms.
"I look like I teach spin class," she says.
"You look good."
"I look like I own a water bottle with a motivational quote on it."
"You look like my girlfriend who is at the gym with me because she likes me."
The word lands. Girlfriend. I said it without planning to, the way I say most things, and it's out there now, floating between us in the locker room with the fluorescent lights and the rubber floor mats and the faint smell of chlorine from somewhere.
Teague looks at me. Her face does the thing where she's processing something she didn't expect and she's choosing in real time what to do with it. The old Teague would have deflected. Made a joke. Said something dry about labels.
"Girlfriend," she says. Testing it.
"If you want."
"I didn't say I didn't want."
"So?"
She looks at herself in the mirror again. Band shirt, borrowed shorts, pink mohawk, septum ring. She looks back at me.
"Girlfriend," she says again, and this time it's not a test. It's a fact. She smiles.
I grin so wide my face hurts and she rolls her eyes but she's smiling, a real one, the kind she can't edit out in time, and we walk onto the main floor like two people who just decided something in a locker room and are trying to act normal about it.
The gym is half-full. Saturday morning crowd: a few older women on treadmills, a couple of guys at the free weights, a woman doing physical therapy exercises on a mat near the glass doors while a trainer guides her through hip rotations.
The trainer is tall, wears a ponytail, athletic build, focused.
There's a dog lying on a bed near the treatment area, a massive pit bull who watches the room with calm authority.
He's fat and lazy and I instantly love him without knowing a thing about him.
I show Teague the basic equipment. She approaches the leg press like it personally offended her. She does ten reps with minimal weight and then sits there looking at the ceiling.
"This is pointless."
"You just started."
"I can feel my body asking me why I'm doing this."
I smirk. I'm not much better. But I'm going to try. "Your body will thank you later."
"My body is filing a formal complaint."
I laugh. She's funny when she's uncomfortable, funnier than usual, because the discomfort strips away the cool and leaves the person underneath, the one who doesn't know what to do with a leg press or a label or a girl who calls her girlfriend in a locker room.
We move through the machines together. I show her the cable machine, the rowing station, the pull-up bar.
She's stronger than she thinks. Years of carrying kegs and crates and restocking top shelves have built muscle she doesn't notice because she's never looked for it.
She does a set of pull-ups and I watch the koi flex on her forearm and the muscles in her back move under the borrowed t-shirt and I have to look away because we're in public and I'm not doing this here.
But I can't look away for long and her muscles are moving and her stomach is exposed and I just want to put my mouth on her.
"Stop looking at me like that," she says, hanging from the bar.
"Like what?"
She rolls her eyes as she smiles at me. "Like you're thinking about things that aren't pull-ups."
"I'm always thinking about things that aren't pull-ups."
She drops from the bar. Lands light. Wipes her hands on the shorts. "You're a menace, Zoe Kimball. A gorgeous, sexy, funny menace."
I like when she calls me by my full name. It sounds like the station, like I'm one of the crew, and coming from her it's affection disguised as formality.
We finish the machines. Teague is sweating, which she seems personally offended by, and I'm warm and loose and happy in the specific way I get when my body has done something and my brain can shut up for five minutes.
We stretch on the mats near the window and I watch Teague try to touch her toes and fail and try again with the stubborn determination of someone who refuses to lose a fight with her own hamstrings.
"Teague."
"What?"
"Thank you for coming."
She sits up. Looks at me. She's flushed and her hair is damp at the temples and the borrowed shirt has a sweat mark on the back and she looks nothing like the person who poured me a Shirley Temple weeks ago and everything like the person I'm falling in love with.
"You owe me a sandwich," she says.
"I owe you a sandwich."
"With real butter."
I blow her a kiss. "Of course."
She stands up, offers me a hand, pulls me to my feet. Her grip is firm and her palm is warm and she holds on for a half-second longer than she needs to and that half-second is everything.
We shower and then change back. Teague puts on her jacket like she's putting on armor, settling back into herself, and I watch the transformation happen in reverse: gym Teague disappearing behind leather and patches and rings, the whole identity clicking back into place. She looks at me looking at her.
"What?"
"Nothing. I just like both versions."
She cocks her head. "There's only one version."
"There's the one with the jacket and the one without it."
"Same person."
"I know." I zip my gym bag. "That's why I like both."
We stop at the front desk on the way out. Liz is on the phone, but she waves. Charlie is still drawing. He holds up his graph paper masterpiece as we pass: a fire truck, red, with a figure on top that might be a firefighter or might be a very tall bird.
"That's amazing," I tell him.
"It's Engine 11," he says.
He goes back to drawing. Torres is going to hear about this, which means by next shift the entire crew will know I was at Foundation Fitness with my girlfriend and there will be questions and Teague is absolutely worth those questions and any awkwardness that comes with them.
We walk to Nico's. Teague gets her egg and cheese on a roll with real butter. I get the same because she's right, Nico's uses the good butter, and we eat on the bench outside and watch the neighborhood move and I lean into her shoulder and she lets me stay there.
"Girlfriend," I say into the leather of her jacket.
"You already said that."
"I know. I'm going to keep saying it."
"Figures." But she smiles and her arm comes around my shoulder, casual, like it's always been there, and we sit on the bench and eat our sandwiches and the morning is warm and ordinary and ours.