Page 48 of Gym With Benefits

He collapsed against me, out of breath, his face buried in the crook of my neck as our breathing gradually slowed to match the drone of the computer tower.

Minutes later, the room felt normal again, the light tubes casting a cold reality over the scattered manila folders we’d fucked off the desk. We pulled our clothes back on with shaky, uncoordinated fingers, the synthetic fabric of my gym tights sticking to my damp skin as I wrestled back into my crop top.

Hunter hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t looked at me.

“Does it bother you that I'm into Brock too?” I asked, my throat dry from all the moaning. It made it hard to sound nonchalant, which I totally wasn’t. But that was neither here nor there.

He finished lacing his sneakers and looked up, an easy smile curving his lips. “Does it look like it bothers me?”

17

Jess

My white cotton gloves left faint, circular tracks across the steel surface of the examination table as I lifted the next item from Box 14. Life outside the basement hadn’t existed for several hours thanks to Constance.

According to the ledger, she’d spent the winter of 1922 organizing rallies in upstate New York, surviving on lukewarm tea and the righteous indignation that keeps a woman from noticing her boots are leaking.

Her journals were riveting, but it was the love letters tucked into various nooks and crannies that had become my lifeblood during this project.

“There she is,” I whispered to no one.

Folded three times into a tiny, tight square at the bottom of a bundle of dry receipts lay a piece of heavy vellum. The ink was iron gall, faded to a deep sepia that cut into the paper like a scar.

My dearest Constance,

The distance between us operates like an ache. I sit in the parlor while the family discusses the upcoming legislative session, and my mind remains obstinately in that drafty boarding house. With you. They speak of progress, ignorancemasking the fact that our very existence violates their legal framework.

Do you remember the frost on the windowpane in Albany? The way you refused to turn back even when the horses failed? Everyone else saw your defiance, but I saw the tremor in your fingers before you took the podium. I knew the cost of that courage. I know it still.

Some days I feel this devotion is a malady, a flaw in my construction that requires isolation. Most days I want to drown in it and never come up for air. Let them build their walls. I would rather burn in this quiet corner with you than survive in their cold world without your light. If the cost of holding your hand is the forfeiture of my inheritance and my name, then I sign the papers gladly.

Yours in the dark,R.

A single teardrop threatened and I pulled back right before it fell, saving the document from ruin.

The prose possessed a terrible gravity. ‘R’ had given up a name, a family, and an entire social architecture just to inhabit the same zip code as a woman who organized tenant unions. It was the greatest love story in the history of ever, preserved in a subterranean bunker beneath Pennsylvania Avenue while the world outside bought overpriced lattes.

My mind looped back, landing squarely on the smoking ruins of my relationship with Carter. For years after his evacuation, I convinced myself that absolute devotion was a linguistic myth invented by nineteenth-century poets to sell ink. He’d cheated on me, and disappeared from my life with the efficiency of a corporate restructuring plan.

I looked back down at ‘R’s’ handwriting.I know the cost of that courage.

The thought arrived with the force of an unprovoked slap: Should I have fought harder? When Carter groveled and explained and swore to never hurt me again, I’d ignored him. He was a liar, and liars lie. I packed my things and faded away without so much as raising my voice. I assumed the exit was inevitable. I assumed everyone eventually traded the high-wire act for a girl with a mutual fund and a predictable haircut.

But this ghost from 1922 was sitting in the dark, proving my cynical worldview wrong one paragraph at a time.

The basement walls felt like they were contracting, the scent of decomposing wood pulp clogging my throat. I stripped the gloves off my fingers, and grabbed my jacket.

My phone illuminated the gloom of the elevator shaft as it rose toward the lobby. David was the only one who could pull me out of this funk.

Lunch at the place with the raw wood tables and the twenty-dollar salads on 7th?

I barely replaced my phone in my pocket when it pinged.

David:Who’s this? I don’t know anyone who randomly suggests dining at trendy restaurants.

I smiled at the screen as I typed a hurried reply:Meet me in fifteen minutes.

Three dots appeared, then:You haven’t initiated a spontaneous social encounter since the Obama administration. Should I be worried?