4. Chapter Four
Chapter Four
O ver my lunch break, I bought some bicycle shorts with a matching sports bra from the running store down the street. No more gym shorts that were old enough to vote. But planning to go straight from work to the gym, I realized I hadn’t packed a T-shirt and wasn’t comfortable enough in my gym journey to let myself hang out in bike shorts and a bra. I threw on the shop’s test T-shirt with every plastisol ink design from the past five years. It resembled a Jackson Pollock painting of tee ball leagues, bachelorette parties, and charity 5K-runs.
I arrived at the gym earlier than our agreed upon time. He was already waiting in his layered shorts and now green long-sleeved T-shirt. He had the biggest grin on his face and was practically shaking. “I was at the store today to get some toothpaste, and I found something for you that might really change your experience here.”
He handed me a pair of cheap, red-tinted sunglasses. Red and green were opposites on the color wheel. The red neutralized the green into brown. I put them on. “Ah yes. Much better.”
I followed him through the gym, past the weight room, and down the hall to the studios for class. “Your goals… just improving your fitness levels?” Beau called back to me.
“Sure. I’d love to go up a flight of stairs without losing my breath.”
He leaned against a door labeled Studio 2 . “Do you know your body fat composition?”
I wasn’t sure if I should be offended by the question. I rolled my shoulders back and put my hands on my hips, ready to argue about beauty standards and everything wrong with fitness culture. “Do you? ”
“Yeah, about thirteen percent.” He said it as if he was commenting on the color of the sky. Why yes, the sky is blue. Hi, I’m Beau. Yes, I am thirteen percent fat. Salads possess more fat than I have.
I quirked a speculative brow in his direction. “Is this the moment where you try to sell me a bunch of supplements and powders?”
“Do you want supplements and powders?”
“No.”
“Then eat whatever the fuck you want.” He donkey-kicked the door behind him open.
The sudden dirty mouth of his betrayed the cheerleader persona I had built around him. Or around any workout instructor. Had I found the hallowed safe place where I could say all the fucks I didn’t give?
Because the cycle studio had a class in session, we met in “the hot yoga room.” Thankfully, it was also at a normal room temperature and humidity levels, a few fitness tidbits I’d learned from Beau in the last five minutes.
He had carted in a couple of bikes into the room. Soon he showed me the billion ways the bike could be adjusted. With a few twists, slides, and adjustments, the bike fit my height and legs perfectly. Almost. Beau scowled a lot at the machine, making persnickety centimeter by centimeter adjustments .
I began pedaling and playing around with the numbers. At twenty resistance, I easily reached ninety RPMs, which, thanks to my enthusiastic instructor, I learned meant revolutions per minute. He told me to crank the resistance to forty-five and climb. I stood on the pedals and pumped.
“Reach your hips farther back.” He jumped on the bike next to me and hovered his butt over the seat. “Like this.”
Not gonna lie, I kind of enjoyed being instructed to look at his ass. Cycling did his body good.
“But keep your back flat—aim to have your sternum burst right through your chest.”
“Okay, it’s this shit—that instruction makes zero sense. No one can manipulate their sternum.”
He hopped off the bike. “Can I touch you?”
“Sure. Fine. Whatever.” Three words of mine that actually meant holy shit, yes .
With a graze of his fingers, he touched me on either side of my hips. He gently tugged them back, moving my butt closer to him. I shifted my grip.
“Don’t move your hands!”
Can you still say yes, daddy when a man is younger than you? I adjusted my hold on the handlebars.
“Feel that stretch in your hamstrings?”
And that nervous tingle in my panties? “Yup. ”
His fingers tapped a spot in the middle of my back. My shoulders automatically rolled back, moving my chest forward. “Good,” he said. “Now climb. Give me an RPM of sixty-five.”
I picked up pace.
“Don’t shift your hips from side to side. Keep yourself steady. Yes, like that.”
If I went through enough of this kind of training, I might develop a praise kink.
His gaze met mine in the gym mirror. “If you feel safe and steady, close your eyes.”
How could I not follow that order? I squeezed my eyes shut. My body vibrated as I sensed him watching me. “Feel how the power is coming from your glutes and not just your quads? This will give you more power for climbs.”
“I think so?” I popped one eye open.
“Getting the hang of it?”
I nodded.
“Unclip and step off.”
He nudged me out of the way and adjusted the handlebars and seat to the opposite of what he had carefully set them to. “Remember how the bike felt in a jog and climb. Adjust it to fit.”
I lowered the seat and slid it forward. I clipped in and stood up, getting a feel for where to adjust the handlebars. “Does this look good? ”
His puppy-dog gaze moved over me, and his mouth curled into a tiny smirk. “Move the handlebars up a scooch.”
I scooched as I was told. I arched an eyebrow to invite a bit more of those positive affirmations.
“Now we can take this up a notch.” A remote appeared in his hand. He pressed it, and Backstreet Boys blasted over the speakers.
When this song came out in middle school, I hated it because I was a contrarian little shit. Hearing it now gave those nostalgic, warm fuzzies. When the key change hit, the music compelled me to sing.
“It’s good to sing while riding. It ensures you’re breathing properly!” He joined in, his ski-slope hair flopped with every exaggerated move of his lips.
We sweat and bad karaoked our way through the greatest hits of my middle and high school years. Studying myself in the room-sized mirror, I probably needed to invest in some waterproof mascara because at the end of the session, I was a shiny, sloppy mess with black smudges around my blue eyes. Good thing someone gave me some red sunglasses to step out of the studio in.
As I changed my shoes and toweled the sweat off my face, he asked, “A better free class than last time?” He sprayed the bikes down and wiped the sweat off them. I had left an embarrassing wet spot on the seat.
“That was…” Don’t say something cheesy, don’t say something cheesy . “Exhilarating!” What did I say about not being cheesy?
“Would you be interested in seeing each other again?”
My body felt like the snowy channels on old-school televisions, fizzy and sparkling. Was this a date? I croaked out an “I would” and rubbed my lips together. When Chris and I were dating, he had told me he loved my sensuous lips. I was going to use them to my advantage. I cleared my throat. “There’s this cocktail place I’d like to try. We could—”
He blinked rapidly. “I meant for personal training. My rate is seventy-five dollars an hour.”
Like the moron I was, I thought he meant a date. “I was joking, of course. No, I’d be totally into some more personal training.” How could I stick the landing of this terrible, terrible dismount? “Seventy-five you say? What do you recommend? Five or six days a week? I was leaning more toward six, so—”
“Five sessions a week is plenty.”
“Great. See you…” I searched his gaze for the answer .
In unison, we said, “Monday.”
Blowing a healthy chunk of change on some personal training sessions under the duress of a lady boner wasn’t exactly the smartest move. I wasn't Ms. Moneybags, necessarily. I did, however, have a healthy sum of money after Chris and his new wife bought me out of my portion of what was once our home. And since I wasn’t the one who demolished a marriage under the pretense of falling in love with someone else, Chris offered me a healthy alimony to ameliorate the gaping wound in me caused by the betrayal. I guess burning through my ex-husband’s money was what society expected out of me, the scorned and crafty divorced woman.
Beau ran my credit card; the sessions were now prepaid. We were beginning our beautiful transactional relationship.