by Elle Casey
“More like no gain, no gain.” He waved me over. “Come on. Have a seat. This one will be easy. I have a feeling you have strong legs.”
I looked down at what I new to be bright white, somewhat sausagey, cottage-cheesey-looking legs hiding beneath my yoga pants and frowned. “And what, pray tell, is leading you to that conclusion?”
“Just get over here and sit down, would ya? Jesus, this is like working out with an eighty-year-old lady.”
“Hey! I take exception to that.” I walked over and sat down, hating the fact that he was probably right. I felt like an old lady. More like ninety years old, though. An eighty year old could have kicked my ass with one wrinkled hand tied behind her Quasimodo-hunched back.
Why did I hate this exercise thing so much? I wasn’t really sure. My muscles probably appreciated it, if all the articles I’d read on Yahoo were true. I suppose the issue was that I was a firm believer in losing weight by reading about weight loss, and not actually doing any physical activity to get there. Plus, there was that whole sweating thing. Ew.
“Okay, so hook your feet under that cushioned bar down there and lift the bar up using your thigh muscles. Hang onto these handles if you need to so you don’t pop off the seat.”
He took my left hand and guided it down past my thigh to a spot below the seat where there was indeed a handle. My heart did a little shuck and jive at his touch, which pissed me off at myself. It fueled my inner beast and had that bar flying up.
“Whoa, easy now. I don’t want you pulling something.”
I dropped my legs and the bar and weights attached to it banged down loudly.
“Lower them sloooowly. You get more than half the workout on the lowering not the lifting.”
“Why?”
“Gravity, maybe. I don’t know. Try this.”
He’d added weights that made it hard for my legs to lift the bar at all. “Too much,” I grunted out.
“No, it’s just right. Do as many as you can.” He rested his hand on my shoulder as he leaned in. “Come on, you can do it.”
Maybe it was him touching me or the fact that he seemed so excited about me just being there and trying, but whatever the cause, I felt suddenly inspired. I finished eight lifts before my legs refused to budge again.
“That was awesome, Katy! You did it!” He held up his hand for a high-five and I was barely able to participate. Not because I didn’t want to, but because all that gripping-of-the-handles under my fat butt had been a workout in and of itself. My arm muscles were trembling right along with my legs.
“Time for a popsicle?” I asked, hope flavoring my tone.
“Nope. Time for bicep curls. Popsicles are for losers. Curls are for winners. Be a winner, Katy, not a loser.”
I looked up at him ready to give him shit for being such a goofy pep-talker, but the expression on his face stopped me.
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked.
He turned away, his voice suddenly rough. “No. Nothing at all. Just … let’s go have a popsicle.”
He started to leave the room.
I tried to leap up after him but my legs were not cooperating. I got two steps before they reminded me that they’d recently turned into rubber bands. “Wait!”
He was almost to the hallway.
“Wait, Jason! My legs won’t work.” I hobbled over to him as he paused.
Whatever was going on in his head, I wanted it to stop. He’d gone from totally excited about my leg lifts to depressed in, like, two seconds. Whatever was happening wasn’t good.
“I need to do those curls. Like you said, my arms are like noodles.” He didn’t turn around so I went for my last ditch effort. “Look!”
Giving him a double bicep pose, I waited for him to turn around, which he finally did.
A ghost of a smile appeared on his face. “That’s seriously pitiful, you know that right?”
“Yes!” I pointed at him in my excitement.
Tragedy averted!
“See? Show me how to curl. I’m ready to do like fifty reps. Right now.” I did some miming of the exercise like I expected he’d tell me to do it. I was looking pretty good, if I do say so myself. It was an excellent distraction.
He came back into the room and slowly walked over to a rack of weights on tiny bars. “See if you can lift this.”
I joined him and took the seemingly tiny thing from him. It fell to my thigh as it pulled my arm down.
“Too much?” he asked. He was just a foot away, and I could swear from his tone and expression that he was asking me about something other than the weight in my hand.
Too much? Was all of this too much for me?
“Nope. I can handle it,” I said, also not talking about the weights.
“I don’t think so.” He took it away from me and gave me something much lighter.
I started pumping it up and down. “I can, you know. Handle whatever you give me. I have spirit like that. You can ask Bobby.”
Jason gave me a courtesy laugh. “I don’t need to ask him. I can see it for myself.”
“Check this out,” I said, exaggerating the strength it took to lift the weights. “Errrghh! Booyah. Feel that burn, baby.”
He put his hand on it to stop me. “You’re doing it wrong. Go nice and easy, don’t totally flex your arm at the top and go slower on the way down.”
“Like this?” I looked up at him for approval.
He was staring at my arm. “Yeah, like that.”
I pumped a few more reps, trying to figure out how to bring up that awkward moment that had just happened a couple minutes earlier. I’m a bulldog like that sometimes, with serious lockjaw, not able to let certain things go; and anything that was going to get me closer to Jason’s true story was definitely something I was hanging onto.
“Sooo …,” I said, trying to sound all casual, “…winners and losers. Be a winner not a loser.”
He froze in the middle of picking up another, bigger weight. “What’d you say?”
I shrugged as best I could with my arm about to fall off. “I said … be a winner … why does that piss you off so much?”
“It doesn’t piss me off. It’s just an expression.” He picked up a huge set of weights and started doing curls with me. It was kind of ridiculous how much bigger his barbell was than mine, but that wasn’t what really caught my eye. It was the sight of his bicep bulging out and sliding up and down his arm, practically growing before my eyes that had me instantly distracted. I had to look at the wall to stop the drool from appearing and embarrassing me.
“I’ve never heard it before. Is it from Coach Fielding?”
Jason sighed heavily before answering me. “Yeah. He was full of that stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Shit. He was full of shit.” Jason’s lifts got more frantic, faster.
“Hey,” I paused on my eighth rep and pointed at Jason’s arm, “you need to lower it sloooowly. You’re going too fast.”
Jason’s face was getting redder, and the sweat was starting to bead up on his forehead. He didn’t respond and he didn’t slow down.
I put my weights back on the rack and placed my hand on his arm. “Stop for a second.”
Jason practically threw his barbell on the ground, making my ears ring with the loud clang of it.
“Fuck!” He stood there staring at the wall and gritting his teeth, making his jaw pump out over and over. When it finally stopped, his Adam’s apple began going up and down, like he was trying not to cry.
“It’s okay to be upset, you know.” I didn’t know what else to say. It probably wasn’t the best thing either, since he didn’t reply. My verbal diarrhea problem got away from me again, and I couldn’t stop.
“What happened was bad, and he’s gone, and a lot of people are very sad or mad about it. But you are a good person and you have a life to live and now you just have to find a way to move on from it. To face what’s coming and keep your head up. You made a mistake. A mistake. It was a huge, awful
one, but it wasn’t on purpose. It was a mistake.”
Maybe I thought if I said it enough times, it would finally mean something, but we both new differently. Some mistakes were too big to ever go away, to ever be forgiven.
His head whipped sideways so he could glare at me. “I’m not a good person. I’m a fraud. A fucking fake. You shouldn’t even be here.” He started to back away, but I stopped him in his tracks by grabbing his hand. I didn’t even have time to think about what I was doing and then it was done.
We both stared at our joined hands as I spoke. “Listen, Jason, I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. Unless you don’t want me around and then all you have to do is say it and I’ll be gone. But don’t shove me away because you think that’s what’s good for me or out of some misplaced sense of honor or whatever. I’m your friend and I’m sticking by you, no matter what.”
The silence was deafening. I never knew what that meant until it happened to us, standing there in his workout room like that. His not talking was like a weight pressing down on us. I felt like I was waiting for a jury verdict in the most important trial of my life, and I wasn’t even the one who’d killed someone.
“This is going to ruin both our lives,” he finally said, his voice a shadow of its normal self.
I squeezed his hand. “This is going to change our lives, but it’s not going to ruin them. I won’t let it, and neither will you.”
He and I looked up at the same time, our eyes meeting.
“Why are you my friend?” he asked, his eyes shining with unshed tears. “I don’t deserve to have friends, so why you? Why now?”
I sighed heavily and tried to come up with an eloquent answer. When one didn’t appear in my brain I just said what I was thinking. “Because it’s easy to be friends with people who don’t need them, and I was never very good at doing things the easy way. Besides, it’s not right that everyone turned their backs on you without knowing the whole story. You’re a good person, Jason.”
“What if there is no story?” Jason asked, sounding very vulnerable. “What if you’ve already heard all of it? What then?”
“Are you asking me if I’ll stop being your friend?”
He nodded.
I shrugged, acting like he wasn’t asking me something stupendously, horrifically, amazingly huge. “Like I said … I’m not going anywhere. Friends for life.” In my head I heard the closing of a jail door and the turning of a very large lock, like I’d just sealed both our fates inside a very scary prison. It was seriously creepy and deep all at the same time.
He swallowed several times in quick succession. I could hear the noise of his throat working and see it too, so close to me. The warmth in the room increased substantially.
“I don’t think I deserve to have you here. In my life, I mean.”
I let his hand go and crossed my arms over my chest. “Well, I do, so deal with it.”
His face morphed from one expression to another in rapid succession. First he seemed sad, then confused, than surprised and finally, maybe, happy.
“You’re stubborn,” he finally said. “I didn’t know that about you before.”
“There’s a lot you didn’t know about me before. Like for example how much I hate sweating.”
“I know that now.”
I smiled. “Yes. Now you know.” Why that made me feel awesome, I don’t know.
He readjusted his feet to face me more fully. “And I also know you’re forgiving, funny, dedicated, creative, sneaky, and pretty.” He reached up and pushed an errant piece of hair out of my face over towards my ear.
My ears, by the way, started burning like they were on fire. Never before had any guy other than Bobby come right out and said I was pretty, and never in a million years would I have expected it to come out of Jason’s mouth.
“I’m not pretty. Shut up.” I suddenly couldn’t take my eyes off the carpet. It was very important and interesting carpet that needed all of my attention.
Jason took a step towards me and put both of his hands on my upper arms. “Yes, you are. You’re really pretty. I don’t know why I didn’t notice that about you before.”
I looked up at him and crossed my eyes. “Seriously, Jason? Did you just say that?” I shook my head. “So not smooth.”
He smiled his most charming smile. “Sorry. What I meant to say was that I always thought you were cute there in your garden with those big gardening gloves on and that floppy hat, but I never realized just how cute you were until I saw you pumping iron here in my room.”
The space between us became positively electric. I’m not big on physics or chemistry, but something was for sure happening to electrons and protons and neurons or whatever. I was about to have a heart attack with how close he was and that look he was getting in his eye.
“What are you doing?” I asked in a near-whisper.
“I’m thinking about kissing you,” he said, equally quietly. It was like we were afraid we’d be caught or that speaking in normal tones would wake us up to the reality that this was just not supposed to be happening.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I said, my brain on auto-pilot.
“Me neither,” he said, just before lowering his head down to mine and pressing his lips against my mouth.
Chapter Thirty-Three
MY LIPS STARTED TO TREMBLE the very second they sensed his mouth there. His touch was feather-light, but that didn’t matter. It was like the weight of the entire world accompanied that kiss.
I backed away.
“Too much?” he asked, looking chagrined.
I nodded, refusing to allow my fingers to come up and touch my lips. I wanted to do that so badly, to make the tingling go away, or maybe to hold in the feeling and enjoy it for another second.
“I just think … it’s not a good idea right now,” I said.
Lie! It felt like a lie, but I had to say it. Things were just too complicated for me. I needed time to figure things out. I didn’t want to believe I was here just for that kiss. I wanted to be a good friend, a real friend, not a stupid girl sucked in by his pretty face or his dark situation.
He took a step back. “I get it. Really, I do.” He bent over and picked up a small towel that was on the floor.
I felt terrible. He was acting like I’d rejected him for being a murderer and that wasn’t really what had happened, even if it probably should have.
“Jason, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
“Hey, it’s cool.” He tried to laugh but it sounded strained. “Trust me, I wouldn’t want to get involved with me either if I were in your shoes. It’s fine.”
He started to leave the room, so I took a few big steps on shaky legs and grabbed him by the arm. “That’s not it.”
He stopped and turned towards me. “Okay, so what is it?” He was understandably frustrated; I wasn’t sending the clearest signals. “You just want to be friends? I promise, it’s fine. Pretend I didn’t … do anything.”
“No, it’s not that. Okay, it is that, but not in the way you’re thinking.” My head was spinning with all the disjointed thoughts and disconnected feelings. Nothing made sense.
He lifted an eyebrow and waited. It was impossible to tell whether he was mad, sad, or a combination of the two. One thing he wasn’t, was happy.
I crossed my arms over my chest to hide the fact that my shirt was plastered to me in a very unflattering way and my hands were still shaking. “I … I want to explain myself to you.”
“Go for it.” He wiped the sweat from his neck and glanced down at me as he did it.
I chewed my lip as I tried to figure out where to start, what to reveal, and what to keep hidden. I wasn’t the best at sharing my feelings, especially with a guy like Jason. The only male person in the world who’d heard what went on in my head was Bobby and he was different. Way different. He didn’t judge and I’d never wanted to kiss him on the mouth.
“You and I are like that Hootie song.”
Jason f
rowned, obviously confused. “What?”
“That Hootie song. Two different worlds.”
“How so? We live on the same street and go to the same school. We’ve practically grown up together.”
Thank goodness he knew what I meant with that feeble explanation, because my brain obviously wasn’t working on all cylinders today. That kiss seriously messed me up.
“No. We’ve grown up around each other. Bobby and I have grown up together. It’s not the same thing.”
“I don’t see why that makes any difference.” Jason dropped down onto a bench and looked up at me, waiting for me to start making sense.
“You know we move in different circles at school.”
“So? Doesn’t everyone, pretty much? So we have different friends, what difference does that make?”
I shook my head, frustrated with his ignorance. “I hate to be the one to break the news to you, Jason, but our friends, our circles, do not mix, okay? Someone from your circle does not mix with someone from my circle. It just doesn’t happen. Pretty In Pink proves it.”
He frowned, getting pissed maybe. “Circles? Pretty In Pink? What are you talking about? We’re just people going to school.”
“No, we’re not! We’re kids trying to figure out where we belong in a world that judges us by our looks, our bodies, our clothes, the cars we drive, the type of cell phones we have and purses we carry … circles, Jason. Circles.” I glared at him.
He lifted a brow, definitely mocking me. “Are you saying I’m one of the cool kids and you’re not?”
I grabbed the nearest thing that wasn’t a weight and threw it at him. “Jerk.” The sweat-warped leather glove with the fingers cut off hit him right in the face.
I tried to storm by him and leave the room, but he grabbed me by the hand and held me back.
“Wait.”
“Let go.”
“No, don’t go. Stay with me. Just for a minute. I want to apologize.”
“Don’t bother. It doesn’t matter anyway.” I refused to look at him. Not because he did anything wrong, but because I felt stupid. I’d gotten caught up in a teen movie drama that was playing in my head and forgotten that we were real people living a completely different life than Sam and Ducky had in that iconic but hopelessly unrealistic movie.
