I looked over to see him staring at Mavis and me.
My brows rose.
He looked at Mavis, then at me, then at Mavis again, clearly saying something I couldn’t comprehend with his eyes.
I ignored him and turned slightly away from Mavis.
She glared hard at me, something in which I caught out of the corner of my eye, and then sighed long and loud before turning to face Madden.
“Today we’re going to do thirty solid minutes of rowing or running,” he looked outside. “I’m going to assume that the majority of you will be rowing.”
I looked over my shoulder to the bank of windows that looked toward the parking lot, then snorted. “I don’t know why you would think that.”
Mavis snickered at my words.
The front door banged, and we all turned to look just as another member all but stumbled through the door.
“Goddamn,” Soren snarled as he tossed his shit on the ground. “It’s fucking tornadoing outside.”
“Tornadoing isn’t a word, Soren,” I called.
Soren flipped me off and stripped out of his sopping wet shirt.
He tossed it to the ground and then moved to his pants at the same time as he stepped out of his navy-blue Crocs.
I chuckled as all the ladies in the room all but moaned in excitement.
Turning away, I looked out of the corner of my eye to see if Mavis was looking and got irrationally pissed when I saw she was.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I felt the anger rise.
“Everybody grab a jump rope!” Madden called.
Those of us that had our own walked to our bags. Those that didn’t walked to the opposite wall and grabbed a gym one.
I found myself walking next to Mavis who was muttering under her breath.
“What was that?” I asked as I reached I into the side pocket of my bag.
“I said, I hope that I don’t pee on myself,” she repeated.
“Same, girl. Same,” another member whom I didn’t know grumbled.
I didn’t spare her a glance.
Instead, I kept my gaze on my rope handles as I thought.
“Nothing to say to that?” she wondered.
I shrugged. “Not really. Incontinence really has nothing interesting about it.”
She snickered and unfurled her rope.
Then we preceded to have double-under practice for a full five minutes before moving into some dynamic stretching.
Good news: Mavis didn’t pee herself.
Bad news: Mavis was in front of me during our downward dog stretch.
“All right,” Madden called ten minutes later. “Those that are running, head to the bay door. Those that are rowing, find a rower.”
We did, and I found myself being sandwiched between Soren and Mavis.
Mavis who was grumbling under her breath as she waited for the screen to cooperate.
Soren who was shaking the wet out of his hair and hitting my calves with it.
“Do you mind?” I asked.
Soren grinned at me.
I reached down and shucked the shirt off my top half, tossing it to the floor near my bottle of water.
My screen finally began to cooperate, along with Mavis’s, and together we watched with amusement as Soren bitched about the damper, the amount of time the screen was taking to load, the units that the screen was displaying, and finally about rowing in general.
“You okay over there, Doc?” Mavis laughed.
“Fine,” he grumbled.
“Go!”
We all started rowing, and I realized rather quick that I was going to suck.
I was tired from my workout this morning, not to mention the amount of work I’d put in underneath a car today.
Needless to say, ten minutes in, I was dying.
Luckily, I wasn’t the only one.
Unluckily, it was the woman at my side that was struggling.
I watched, slightly mesmerized, as Mavis tore her shirt off and threw it to the ground, her face pouring sweat.
“So hot,” she groaned as she got back to rowing.
I grunted out a reply, trying not to stutter in my own row at the sight of her.
It was hot.
In fact, with the rain, the humidity was downright unbearable.
The only thing that felt like it was saving us was the air that came out of the rower’s fan.
I could feel a slight disturbance in the air from Mavis’s machine.
“It’s disgustingly hot,” Soren agreed.
I looked over at my friend, the ER doctor.
“Where the hell have you been?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you in forever.”
“Work,” he grunted as he pulled again. “So fucking tired.”
“So much for being a newlywed,” Mavis called. “Are you two even spending any time together?”
Soren had recently married another doctor, Nola.
Nola was an obstetrician who’d just moved to the area a few months before I’d moved back.
She was adorably cute, pregnant just like Mavis, and so busy that I swore they never saw each other unless they passed in the halls of the hospital.
Soren and Nola both routinely came to the early morning classes, most of the time without each other, and I got to hear all kinds of juicy details about everything.
I liked them a lot, and I was happy to call them friends.
Obviously, Mavis felt much the same way.
“I had the day off yesterday, and every intention of spending the day with her, but she had a mom go into labor. I played with the dog, then went to work at PP because I was bored.” Soren panted.
My own breathing was getting labored, but I continued to dig my heels in and push through the lethargy with only sheer determination.
“What’s PP?” Mavis wondered.
I answered for Soren. “PP is Parsons Parcel. Soren and his brother, Johan, purchased it a while back.”
Mavis’s eyes widened.
Parsons Parcel had been a failing business a few years ago.
This year it was the fastest growing business in the area.
But instead of saying anything, she hung the handles of the rower up, then reached down for her water bottle.
She couldn’t get it due to the roundness of her belly, and the angle that the bottle was at, without taking her feet from the straps at the front of the machine.
So I stopped, reached for it, and handed it to her.
“Thanks,” she rolled her eyes.
My lips almost twitched.
“Don’t think that this means I like you,” I grumbled under my breath.
Soren, obviously listening, scoffed.
I looked over at him to see his eyebrows raised.
He lowered his voice so only I could hear before saying, “You have the biggest damn crush I’ve ever seen. You’re not even hiding it. I haven’t seen you take your eyes off of her since I got here.”
I started rowing again without answering.
But he was right.
Throughout the rest of the workout, I contemplated my situation.
At thirty-one, I was single for a reason.
That reason being that, any day could easily be my last.
Which only put me in a dark mood.
Next month I had a doctor’s appointment, and I wasn’t holding out hope.
I rowed harder as I tried to ignore my wayward thoughts, but the sad thing was, shit always caught up to me.
I never got to live my life, because the moment that things started to go well for me, I was always slammed into place and shown that things weren’t ever going to be okay for me.