Page 46 of Cut Off
The Workout
JONAH
The home gym is the one room in this house I actually built for me. Rubber mats. Mirrors on two walls because my trainer made me, not because I like watching myself suffer. A rack, a bench, a treadmill that cost way too much, and the kind of soundproofing that turns every dropped plate into a little thud. It is, by design, a quiet room. A place where I can hit something padded and not have to explain it to anyone.
Zoe walks in and the quiet goes out the window.
Not because she’s loud. She isn’t. She just appears in the doorway in a black sports bra and bike shorts that end about three inches above her knee, hair scraped up into a knot, glasses gone, and proceeds to set a water bottle down on the bench like she’s done it a hundred times. Like this is normal.
It’s not normal.
I turn around and pretend to be concerned with the speed settings on the treadmill, which I’ve used one thousandtimes and could operate blindfolded. I stab at buttons. I adjust an incline I don’t need adjusted. I’m a grown-ass man in his own house hiding from a five-foot-four production assistant in spandex.
“You good over there, Holt?”
“Fine.”
“Mm-hmm.”
I turn back. She’s watching me with a sideways smile that says she caught me. She has, of course. She knows she has. She doesn’t say it. She just picks up her water and climbs onto the treadmill next to mine and starts it up at a walking pace.
That smile is worse than if she’d called me out. That smile says I see you, and I’m not going to do anything with it, and you’re going to suffer. That smile is a weapon, and she knows it, and she’s using it on me in the room I built specifically to feel in control of things.
Cool cool cool, as she would say.
I bump my speed up to a jog. She matches me.
The first quarter mile is the pad-pad-pad of feet on belts and the hum of the machines. I stare straight ahead at the mirror. It’s a real-time broadcast of Zoe Lane on a treadmill, which is not a problem I anticipated when I had it installed.
“You run like a swan,” she says.
“What?”
“It’s weird.”
I almost trip on the belt. “Are you—I’m an NHL player.”
“I know.”
“I have trainers.”
“I know.”
“My form is professionally maintained.”
“Right. Which is what makes it weird.” She stares at her own mirror, very serious, lips twitching.
“Your form,” I say, “is the form of a woman who’d rather be eaten by the tiger she’s running away from.”
She laughs. A real one, surprised out of her, the kind that comes from somewhere lower than her throat. “You’re not wrong.”
It hits me sideways.
In no time, the mirrors are fogging at the edges, Zoe’s breathing has gone from conversational to huffing and puffing, and I’m pretending I’m not at all curious how long she can hold this. As it turns out, longer than I’d have guessed for a woman who’s publicly declared cardio self-induced torture.
“Shin splints,” she announces, slapping the slow-down button. “Calling it. I have a body, not a contract.”
“Quitter.”
