Page 47 of Cut Off
“Survivor.”
She walks it out, hands on her hips, chest heaving, and I will, for the rest of my life, have the image of her in this exact moment burned into the back of my eyelids. I look away. I look back. I look away again. I’m a thirty-year-old behaving like a teenager.
I kill my own treadmill, grab a towel, and try to remember what I came in here to do.
Right. Burn it off. That was Zoe’s plan that involved me doing my body’s worth of feelings until I was too tired to feel them. It was a solid plan which has evolved into less of a solid plan because now I’m full of an entirely different kind of adrenaline, and no padded thing in this room is going to fix it.
“Free weights,” she says, like she’s reading my mind, and walks past me.
She pulls a set of dumbbells off the rack that are smaller than what I drink water out of, then rushes through her own routine like a person who doesn’t really give a shit. Bicep curls.Shoulder presses. A series of lunges that have me suddenly very interested in the stitching on my towel.
I get under the bar at the squat rack and try to do the same, but my eyes keep going where my eyes should not go, which is the line of her shoulder when she lifts, the flex in her forearm, the bead of sweat that makes its way down the side of her neck and disappears into the strap of the sports bra and—
She catches me looking.
She doesn’t say anything. Again.
I rack the bar and add weight. I get back under it and tell myself to focus, and I do focus, for about forty-five seconds, and then I look up and she’s bent over a kettlebell, and I’m gone again.
She catches me… yet again, and this has turned into silliness.
The not-saying-anything is sitting in my chest, and every time she doesn’t comment, it gets bigger, and at some point it’s going to be so big it’ll burst out, and when it does, I’m not responsible.
I should leave the gym and go shower. I should call Olivia Gardner, my new family lawyer, and make sure she has everything she needs. Put my brain on something useful, like the bitch in pearls trying to take my kid.
Instead, I hear myself say, “You want a spot?”
She straightens up. Looks at the bench. Looks at me. Looks at the bar, which is loaded with about half of what I’d put on it for a warmup.
The corner of her mouth does the sideways thing. “You want to spot me on a weight that you could probably bench with one arm.”
“I’m being polite.”
“You’re being something.”
But she walks over to the bench anyway, and she lies down, settling her hands at the right grip width. I take myposition behind her head with my hands hovering an inch under the bar, and I look down at her and regret every choice that led me to this spatial configuration.
The view from here is bad. By which I mean: very, extremely good. By which I mean: I shouldn’t be allowed to look at her from this angle, ever, in this lifetime or any other. The rise and fall of her chest as she breathes. The little smirk at the corner of her mouth that says she’s completely aware of where I’m standing, what I’m doing, and what it’s costing me.
“Three sets of eight,” she says, like she’s not currently dismantling me.
“Three sets of eight.”
We both know she doesn’t need me. The weight goes up like it’s nothing, comes down with control, goes up again. I am, technically, doing my job.
On the eighth rep of the third set, I lean in a hair, just to “steady” the bar, and my fingers brush hers on the return.
Neither of us pulls away.
It’s a half-second, maybe less. But in the time that exists between her hand and mine, it’s approximately a year.
And before my brain can get a vote, my mouth says, “I should’ve kissed you.”
She freezes. “At Christmas?”
“Yes.” I clear my throat. The room is suddenly the size of a postage stamp. “Or any other time in the last four years we’ve known each other.”
The thing about Zoe is that she has, like, eleven faces, and she rotates through nine of them in any given moment. But right now, there’s one face on, and I’ve never seen it before. It’s so much surprise, her jaw goes slack and her eyes pop before she can school it.
