Personal Trainer

by Mia Carson

  The meal was fantastic. It was one of those typically overpriced places where the portions were tiny and the presentation was everything, but I couldn’t fault the quality of the food, the wine, or the companionship.

  As we enjoyed our courses, we talked softly about her next step. She wanted to call it quits, at least for a while. She’d tried to get someone at April’s company to comment on the case they’d won against HSU Effects, but everyone was completely closed-lipped. Because she had no clear path forward, she wanted to wait until she had something more to work with. I finally convinced her, over a delicious whole pear that had been soaked in spiced red wine and apple juice, to give me another forty hours, though I had to agree that she would work the case between other, more pressing, commitments.

  I drove her home and walked her to her door. I hated to see the evening end. She unlocked her door and turned to face me.

  “You’re not coming in, but give me a good night kiss?”

  I smiled. “You sure? What about our mutual professionalism?”

  Her lips twisted into that sideways grin she had that I found so appealing. “Screw it. It’s just a good night kiss, and after a meal like that, you deserve one.”

  “Then forget it. You don’t owe me anything.”

  Her grin spread. “Okay, how about because I want one?”

  “Better.”

  I stepped in, took her face softly in my hands, and kissed her as I had last night, a slow, gentle taking of her lips. I could feel my desire spooling up, but the kiss was intentionally innocent. I slowly pulled back and smiled.

  “Nice,” she whispered.

  “Very nice,” I agreed as I released her face.

  “I’ll keep you updated on what I find, if I find anything. Are you sure you want to waste your money on this?”

  “It’s mine to waste. At least if you’re working on it, I’ll feel like I’m doing something and not just sitting around twiddling my thumbs.”

  She held my gaze a moment. I wanted to kiss her again. I wanted to kiss her badly, but I kept my distance.

  “Good night. I had a lovely evening. Thank you.”

  I smiled and nodded. “So did I.”

  She didn’t move, and neither did I. She slowly licked her lips then smiled. “I’m still not inviting you in, but one more kiss like that last one, then you have to go.”

  My smile joined hers as I took her face in my hands again and kissed her. It was a little more heated than the first one, and I held it until I felt her start to pull away.

  “That’s enough,” she whispered, “or I’ll change my mind.”

  “I understand. Good night,” I said before I turned walked back to my car.

  She was still standing on her tiny porch as I dropped into my car, so I gave her a small wave as I shut the door. I acted like I wasn’t bothered, but I was. I wanted her, wanted her like I hadn’t wanted a woman in a long, long time.

  Tanya

  I drove through Los Angeles traffic in my rented Toyota Camry, following the silver Lexus SUV, keeping at least one car, but never more than two, between our vehicles. The Toyota was a rich red, and though it was an attractive color, I felt like a whore in church driving the thing. I didn’t get to choose the color when I rented the car, and I knew, logically, nobody was paying attention to me or my car, but I always chose either a white or silver car because they blended in so well.

  I’d agreed to continue working on Neil’s problem, but it was going to have to take a back seat to other commitments for a couple of days. I’d been putting off working my other case as I gave his the ol’ college try, but I couldn’t put off my other commitments any longer.

  So I was back to chasing cheating spouses. I was on the tail of Mr. Richard Gerryson, forty-two, investment broker, married with three kids, from West Hollywood. He claimed to be going out for a beer with his buddies, but when Carol, his wife, had casually mentioned it to one of his friend’s wives, she didn’t know anything about it. When Carol had talked to Dick, he’d laughed it off as a misunderstanding. He’d laid low for a couple of weeks, but he was back to meeting his buddies for beers. Carol hadn’t bought it for a second and had contacted me last week, as I worked Neil’s case, and asked me to find out where her husband was going. She’d stopped by my office, signed the paperwork, and paid her deposit.

  So, here I was, at eight o’clock at night, chasing down some asshole who likely couldn’t keep it in his pants. Why couldn’t there be more people like Neil?

  The Lexus turned into a bar, and I drove past before circling the block and parking in a restaurant’s parking lot across the street. I could see the door to the Pink Penguin and Dick’s Lexus. Twenty minutes later he emerged with a man. I sniffed in surprise as I lifted my camera. I snapped a couple shots in case the new guy was one of his friends. Maybe Dick wasn’t a slime-ball after all. It’d be nice to give a spouse some good news for a change.

  My opinion changed in a heartbeat when they kissed, and not the polite air kiss the Europeans used. Oh hell no. It was a full on, hands in the hair, lip lock. I popped my camera up and it clicked rapidly as I captured it all.

  “Well, that’s a new one,” I muttered to myself.

  At least he wasn’t cheating on her with another woman. I watched as they parted and walked to their separate cars. As they turned onto the road, I pulled in behind their little caravan and trailed them to a sleazy motel about twenty minutes away. By the time I turned around, came back, and parked, they were walking, hand in hand, across the second floor. Once again, my camera clicked rapidly as the other man opened the door and shoved Dick roughly into the room. When the door closed I lowered the camera and settled in to wait.

  A little more than an hour later, Dick emerged, the other man standing in the door shirtless. I grabbed some shots of that, then of the man grabbing Dick behind the neck and pulling him in for another torrid kiss as he pinned him to the door and ground into him with his hips.

  “Jesus Christ, take it back in the room,” I muttered as I clicked rapidly, getting photos of everything.

  The kiss dissolved, and Dick caressed the other man’s face and lips gently. Another quick kiss and he turned and hurried to the stairs. I grabbed a couple photos as he pounded down the steps so I had the sign for the motel in the shot to prove where he was. He looked very satisfied with himself, the ass.

  I waited until he left and started my car. I always tried to get more than one set of pictures to really drive the nails into their coffins. This guy was going to be easy. He didn’t take any precautions at all.

  As I drove home, I called Neil. Ostensibly it was to talk about his case, but really, I just wanted to talk to him. I’d only known him for ten days, but I was really growing to like him. I made it a point to do something, anything, on his case every day so I’d have an excuse to call. We’d spend five or ten minutes discussing the case, then we’d spend another hour or more just talking. I think he was wise to what I was doing, but he seemed to enjoy our conversations as much as I did.

  “Hey! What’ve you got for me today?” he said, answering his phone.

  “I do have something. I talked with one of April’s cast-off boy-toys today.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “Finding him was easy. All you have to do is read the gossip sheets. I called him and said I was doing a piece on April for hollywoodgossip.com and that I wanted to talk to him about April’s open marriage. I had to try several before I found one willing to talk. I finally found one who, like so many people in this town, was an attention whore. He was more than willing to spill his guts to see his name in print.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “I think April is the one doing this. According to Antonio, that’s my source, if she doesn’t get her way, she becomes vindictive as hell. He said one time her husband wouldn’t do something she wanted him to do, attend some movie opening or something with her, because he was off somewhere banging his latest bedmate. She had a screaming fit,
throwing and breaking stuff, and stormed out. He wasn’t sure what happened after that, but the next day her body was all scratched up and bruised, like she’d been in fight. The next time he saw Nelson, her husband, a couple of days later, he was banged up too.”

  “Jesus!”

  I smiled. “Yeah. That was the second time he’d seen them that way. Apparently, April and Nelson have some kind of weird, twisted, love/hate relationship. Antonio said Nelson was there one day and he heard them screaming at each other in the backyard. Antonio hadn’t been her lover very long at that point. He was going to break it up, but the staff warned him to stay out of it or there would be trouble. As he watched, April took a swing at Nelson. He hit her back, then they really started going at it. But this is where it gets weird. According to Antonio, they never hit each other in the face, and they seemed to intentionally try to rip each other’s clothes off as they beat the shit out of each other.”

  “Christ,” Neil muttered.

  “Yeah. I don’t know how much I believe this guy. It’s just too weird. According to Antonio, they were slapping, punching, and throwing each other around. They ended up wrestling naked in the grass, then started fucking right there in the yard, and it wasn’t makeup sex either. He called it hate fucking. According to him, they were choking and hitting each other, spitting in each other’s faces, pulling their hair, all that shit, while they were fucking. He said it was rape but wasn’t sure who was raping who, and both of them seemed to get off on it. After they were done, they split up and acted like it hadn’t happened.”

  “That’s just messed up.”

  “No kidding. He said he asked her about it afterwards, and she said she hated Nelson’s fucking guts, other times she would say she loved him. I don’t know what to believe. All I know is if Antonio is telling the truth, that chick is a few fries short of a happy meal and capable of anything. Anyway, when she was done with Antonio she gave him ten grand to go away and not cause any trouble, but she warned him if he tried anything, she would ruin him. After what he’d seen, he took the money and ran.”

  “He may be an attention whore, but he’s not stupid.”

  “No kidding.”

  “That’s really good news.”

  “Not really. All we have is more hearsay, and that doesn’t get us anywhere. We need something a lot more solid than what we’ve got.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  “I’m working on it. Tomorrow I have to track down some turkey and serve a summons for a law firm that has me on retainer, but after that I can spend a few hours working your case.”

  “How are we doing money-wise?” he asked.

  “I’ve only put in about ten hours. You want to call it off?”

  “Not at all! I just want to stay current on my bill.”

  “I’ll bill you at the end of the month. How’s that?”

  “That’s fine. What else are you working on when you’re not delving into the weird sex life of April Rumson?”

  I told him in general terms what I’d been doing for the last three hours, leaving out names because of client confidentiality. I didn’t even mention the guy was seeing another man because that was a little too case specific.

  “Don’t you get tired of following cheating spouses?” he asked.

  “You have no idea, but it pays the bills. If I only took interesting cases, like yours, I’d starve.”

  “Man, doing what you do would depress me.”

  “You get used to it after a while. It does tend to make a person cynical, though.”

  “I imagine.”

  We talked for another forty minutes until I arrived home, then we said our goodbyes. I hadn’t eaten yet, so I threw together a quick chicken stir-fry using frozen chicken, quick thawed in the microwave, frozen mixed vegetables, and boil-in-the-package rice. Neil might be willing to spend an hour preparing a fresh, healthy meal, but I wasn’t, especially not at nine at night.

  As I ate, I couldn’t decide if I was in Carol’s shoes, whether I’d be more upset that my husband was having an affair with a man or a woman. Any affair sucked for the party cheated on, but I wondered if it would sting as much losing your spouse to a member of the same sex. It wasn’t like Dick had chosen a younger, better looking, more sexually adventuresome woman. If his tastes ran towards men, how could any woman compete with that? That’d be like me finding another woman sexually appealing. Like Harker, for example. I could acknowledge she was stunningly beautiful, but she didn’t do a thing for me sexually. I shook my head. I guess it took all kinds, and in my profession, I couldn’t afford to be judgmental.

  For example, I didn’t like April Rumson. I didn’t even know the woman, but I’d done enough digging on her to know I probably wouldn’t care much for her. I didn’t approve of her open marriage, I didn’t approve of her threatening or suing people to get her way, and her sexual peculiarities were too off the charts weird for me. She had all the personality traits to motivate her to do something to Neil because he’d brushed her off, but my personal feelings for her weren’t proof. I needed something incontrovertible to show she was guilty of what I suspected.

  I needed her to threaten him in some way. Something I could take to the police that would carry enough weight to get a warrant. But what? And how?

  I pushed my meal around on my plate as I thought. A sting was necessary here, that much was certain. She needed to get mad about something that would get under her skin in a big way so hopefully she would say something without thinking. Half my job was pretending to be someone I wasn’t to get someone to say or do something they otherwise wouldn’t. I was no Meryl Streep, but for a quick con, making it up as I went, I was pretty good.

  I finished eating as a plan began to come together. I was going to need Neil’s help. He’d help sell it, plus he was the bait. I spent the next two hours refining the plan, working out responses and counter responses to April’s possible actions. My story had to be tight, and I had to act natural if I had any hope of goading her into a mistake.

  Satisfied I had a plan, I showered. I rolled my eyes as I heard the couple next door screwing their brains out in the shower again. They were running late tonight. I loved my little duplex, but it was times like these, when I was missing the caress of a man, that I wished there was a little more soundproofing between the units. I shouldn’t complain. The only time I heard them was when we were in the shower at the same time and only a few feet from each other.

  As I toweled off, still in the shower, I heard a muffled, ‘Ah, fuck, I’m coming!’ followed a moment later by the soft sounds of a woman caught in the teeth of a massive orgasm.

  “Lucky little bitch,” I muttered as I finished drying, stepped out of the enclosure, and hung my towel.

  The woman’s significant other, Demetri, was an average looking guy, but hearing her getting the hard one reminded me of how long it had been since I’d had a man between my legs.

  I pulled on my sleep shirt and flipped out the light as I returned to my bedroom. I wanted to sleep on my plan and give it a little time to digest before I checked with Neil to see if he was game to try it. I tumbled into bed and pulled my extra pillow to my chest with a sigh. I loved my life, I really did. But sometimes it would be nice to have someone around. I’d had a few relationships, but none had ever progressed much beyond the friends-with-benefits stage. I’d never had a live-in lover and wondered what it’d be like to have someone hold me as I fell asleep, even if we didn’t make love. It sounded wonderful, but I’d never found the right guy.

  That’s what I couldn’t understand about April’s relationship. Being married but fucking around. It made no sense to me. What made even less sense was being married to a guy you claimed to hate. Life was too short for that. If she was willing to be married to a guy she hated, screw around on the side, and punch her husband but still fuck him, that sounded like a woman that would be willing to do nearly anything.

  As I began the slow slide into sleep, I ran my plan over in my mind
one more time. I thought I knew which of April’s buttons to push, and with Neil as the prize, she might just be willing to go for it. The worst that could happen is nothing. But even that might not be a total loss. If she was willing to walk away without a fight, maybe she didn’t care enough to put the screws to Neil. I smiled in the darkness and pulled the pillow in a little more snuggly. No matter what April did, it would be another piece to the puzzle.

  Sleep began to take me. If, in the morning, my plan seemed like it would work, I’d call Neil and put him in the loop. I was looking forward to meeting Ms. April Rumson and seeing if my expectations matched the reality.

  Neil

  I hung up the phone. It had been three weeks since Tanya had approached me with her idea. Given what she’d dug up on April, it sounded good to me, but we had to be cagy. I had to wait for April to make the first move so I didn’t tip our hand. Good to her word, April had called me again to see if I’d changed my mind about giving her some private training. She was certainly tenacious.

  The three-week wait had been brutal. The rumors were starting to go viral. I’d put a statement up on the Neil Gibson Fitness Center website and NeilGibsonFitness.com categorically denying the rumors, which had fueled the controversy. I had a few people defending me, but the tide of public opinion was beginning to turn against me. The publisher called me and placed a hold on the book. They hadn’t canceled it, but they wanted to wait and see how the controversy played out, and then address it in book.

  Two days ago, I’d appeared on Lunch with Diane, a local puff news show, to address the rumors. Once again, I firmly denied any and all claims of harassment and had pointed out that all the rumors were from nameless, faceless individuals. I challenged whomever was making the claims to come forward and make their accusations public, but until they did, I’d argued they were exactly what they were, a smear campaign designed to tarnish my good name.

  The thing that hurt the most was Harker. She meant nothing to me, but having her dodge the kiss for the first time stung. After that, I’d stopped offering it, but I’d been offering her the kiss, and she’d gladly accepted it, for more than two years. Her rejection told me everything I needed to know. It wasn’t the fact she didn’t want my friendly little kiss anymore that bothered me; it was the fact she didn’t want my friendly little kiss anymore because her opinion of me was beginning to change.