Chapter 1 #2
That touch is barely anything, but it lights something up in me I had forgotten I even had.
“Relax here,” he says softly, guiding my shoulder down.
The warmth of his hand makes my breath catch. I hate that I’m so starved for human touch. Incredible, really, in a city with this many millions of people.
He definitely notices.
I straighten too fast. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for,” he says gently. “Just getting your body used to the movement. You wrote on the intake form you’re cool with slight touching. That still okay?”
“Oh, yeah…touch away, honestly.” Touch away? Are you serious, Elena?
My face is on fire.
“Okay,” Colt says, stepping behind me as I hinge forward with the dumbbells. “Pull the elbows back, not out. Like you’re trying to tuck them into your back pockets.”
“That’s…very anatomically confusing,” I say, pulling anyway.
He laughs under his breath. “You’re doing great. Keep going.”
I do another rep, and for some reason, my mouth starts running like it’s late for a train.
“Honestly? Dating’s been weird lately,” I hear myself say.
Why am I talking?
Why am I talking to the hottest twenty-seven-year-old in Manhattan about dating?
But it’s too late. The floodgates have opened and Harper has possessed my body. I keep my arms moving with the weights.
“How is it weird?” Colt asks, genuinely curious.
“You know,” I say, adjusting my grip, “the usual. Men who say they’re ‘emotionally intelligent’ because they’ve been to therapy for two straight weeks. Guys who order for you on a first date without asking you what you like. One man spent the entire dinner describing his fantasy football lineup.”
Colt snorts. “Sounds rough.”
“Oh, and my ex,” I add, because somehow we are here now, “acted like foreplay was…I don’t know…an optional side quest in a video game.”
I want to facepalm. Really? Foreplay talk? I really need to get with it.
Colt stops adjusting my posture.
Just…completely stops.
Slowly, I turn my head. He’s biting the inside of his cheek, like he’s trying very, very hard not to react.
“Optional…side quest?” he repeats, voice strangled in the most attractive way.
“I mean,” I rush on, “he didn’t exactly speedrun to the boss level, if you know what I mean.”
Colt loses it.
His laugh is big, warm and chest-shaking. The kind of laugh that makes you feel like you said the funniest thing alive.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says, wiping his eyes. “I just…yeah, okay, that’s a new one.”
I groan and drop the dumbbells. “I don’t know why I said that to you. This is mortifying. I seem to be word vomiting tonight.”
“Don’t be,” he says, recovering. “Seriously. I hear a lot of stuff. But that one’s going in my mental Hall of Fame.”
I cover my face. “Please delete my existence.”
“Nope. Too late. You’re the ‘foreplay is a side quest’ woman now.”
“I hate this,” I mumble.
“You’re doing great,” he says, gently nudging my elbow back into position. He hands me a heavier dumbbell than the one I had. “Row.”
I row, muttering curses under my breath.
“And what about work?” Colt asks, as if he’s interviewing me for a documentary called Elena: A Tragic Tale.
“Oh,” I say dramatically. “Work is worse.”
“How so?”
“Well, my job expects me to be superhuman. Like, I answer emails during Pilates. I negotiate contracts while chewing salad. I’ve taken conference calls while on dates.
I skip breakfast because I just forget, and I don’t have time.
And I have way too much responsibility considering my paycheck.
But still, my dates are intimidated by me. ”
“On dates?” Colt arches a brow. “Plural?”
“Plural,” I confirm, pulling another rep. “Most men find it… humbling.”
He laughs again. “I bet.”
“And if I’m not perfect, or efficient, or emotionally sterile, apparently I’m ‘off my game.’ Which—” I pause, panting, “—is ironic, because my game is mostly pretending I have my life together.”
Colt’s smile shifts. He’s less amused, more something like…softness?
“You seem pretty together to me,” he says simply. “I think they’d be lucky to date someone like you.”
I freeze mid-row.
“Don’t do that,” I whisper.
“Do what?”
“Say things like that.”
“Why?” he asks, genuinely confused.
Because you’re twenty-seven and you say things like that very… convincingly.
“Because you don’t even know me.”
He gives a half-grin. “I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
I look away, picking up the weights again. “Well. Don’t start meaning them.”
“I admit I don’t know you, sure. I’m a pretty good gauge of vibe, though,” he grins. “And I like yours. You can pick up a lot from non verbal cues.”
“I have a date tonight,” I add.
“Do you?” he asks, his voice light but something flickering beneath it.
“Yes,” I say. “At eight.”
He nods once. “Good.”
“Good?”
“Yeah,” he says, returning to trainer mode, even though his eyes linger a second longer than they should. “You deserve someone who doesn’t think foreplay is optional.”
“Oh my god,” I groan, nearly dropping a dumbbell on my foot. “Please stop bringing that up.”
“No can do,” he says, grinning. “It’s too iconic.”
I glare at him.
“Row,” he says, still smiling.
I row.
And I swear his grin only gets wider.
Colt taps something on his tablet, glances at the screen, then at me.
“It looks like you booked ten sessions,” he says.
I nod, wiping sweat from my forehead. “Yeah. I figured if I’m doing this, I’m doing it all the way.”
His smile widens. Slow, impressed.
“Great. Ten sessions means we can actually make progress. So tell me…”
He leans against a rack of dumbbells, crossing his arms in a way I wish he wouldn’t.
“Is there anything in particular you want to focus on over the duration of our training together?”
My brain blanks.
Anything in particular?
Yes. I want to focus on you picking me up and throwing me against a wall.
No, no, no. I literally facepalm.
It’s just been way too long at this point.
After a deep breath, I go with the safer, more rational option:
“Uh, how can I get abs like yours? I feel like that might up my dating value.”
He laughs.
“That’s easy,” he says. “Play football every day until you’re twenty-five and then have a career-ending injury.”
My stomach drops, the heat gone. Guilt replaces it like ice water.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” I blurt. “I didn’t mean to bring it up.”
He shrugs, still smiling, but it’s softer now.
“It’s fine, not like you knew. Happens to athletes. I’m good.”
Then he adds, with that familiar spark of humor returning, “But seriously—abs? Totally doable.”
“Like how?” I ask, still trying to sound casual. Still trying too hard.
He drops into a lunge, eyes forward, form clean, shoulders steady. “Like this. Even when you’re doing non-ab exercises, you want to engage your core.” He taps just below his sternum. “Feel mine, here.”
I blink. There’s a perfect off-ramp here where I say no thanks.
I don’t take it.
My palm meets the cotton of his shirt. The contours are unmistakable even through fabric—strength I’ve been walking past for weeks pretending not to see. It’s absurd how much life can leak through something as innocent as a hand on a torso.
My body wakes up first, brain trailing behind. A slow fizz starts low in my stomach, rising warm and dizzying.
I pull back a little too late. “Anything else?” I ask, voice thinner than before. Hope and dread braided in the same breath.
He looks at me with a soft smile.
Not like my ex did—with checklists and silent sighs and polite avoidance.
But like he just saw me, standing in the light of my own hallway.
“Yeah, I say. There is.”
And it is an incredibly mortifying thing to admit to a man who looks like that.
I want a nice butt.
But saying “butt” to him feels…illegal.
So my brain picks the worst possible solution:
“I want to firm up my…uh…”
I swallow.
“Derrière.” I even throw some weird flair of an accent on the word. It’s not Parisian at all, unfortunately.
“Your…what?”
“Derrière,” I repeat, trying desperately to remember the French accent I learned in high school. “It’s French.”
Colt grins, utterly delighted.
“Oh. You want to have a nice butt.”
My heart slams so hard in my chest I’m surprised the fire alarm doesn’t go off.
“Uh. Is that what that is? Yeah.”
My voice cracks.
“Something like that. I want to get…snatched.”
“Snatched,” he grins, walking around to face me directly, “it seems like you’ve kept yourself up really well already.”
Heat floods my face.
“So we’ll just focus on getting you nice and strong.” He gives a tiny shrug, casual, confident. “The aesthetic effects, like a nice butt, will come as a result of of that. But it’s better if we just focus on strength.”
I snort before I can stop myself. “Did that sound dirty?”
As soon as I say it, I want to die.
“God, I’m sorry. You can cancel me as a client if you want.”
He laughs again—chest shaking, shoulders loose, like I’ve genuinely made his day.
“You’re hilarious, Elena. My last client was a sixty-seven year old corporate guy who wants to date women in their twenties. He has a beer belly. Trust me when I say I think I’m going to enjoy training you a whole lot more.”
Oh.
Oh no. Uh oh…
That was way worse than him calling me pretty.
“See you Thursday after work then?” he asks, tapping his tablet. “Two days from now?”
I nod mutely.
He backs up toward the door, walking away with the kind of easy swagger that makes me wonder if his joints are made of molten sunlight.
Before he leaves, he gives me a quick and effortless wink.
“Have a nice date tonight. Hope it goes well. And remember, if he thinks foreplay is an optional side quest, he’s not the one. Easy metric for you.”
“Ha. Right.”
He winks, and the door closes behind him.
And I stand there, rooted in place, wondering how in the hell I’m supposed to go on a date with anyone else after that.