“There’s nothing,” I cut in. “Nothing but a completely normal trainer-client relationship. Colt walks by right then, and we make eye contact.
It is not boring.
That’s for sure.
Damien follows my gaze, sees the eye contact last half a second too long, and turns back to me slowly.
“Elena.”
“Yes?”
“Blink twice if you’re lying.”
I heave a sigh and finally decide I’ve had enough. I’ve been around the corporate block long enough to know exactly how these little “concerned conversations” work.
“Okay, you know what?” I say, folding my arms. “I pay four hundred dollars a month to voluntarily let your employees bully me into doing squats until my soul leaves my body. If Colt and I were doing anything inappropriate, trust me, I wouldn’t be dumb enough to conduct it three feet from the smoothie fridge.”
Damien opens his mouth, but nothing seems to come out, so I keep going.
“And respectfully? If this gym spent half as much energy fixing the broken rowing machine as it does monitoring eye contact, we’d all be thriving.”
A couple people nearby suddenly become very interested in wiping down equipment.
“I’m a grown woman,” I add. “Colt is a grown man. He tells me to do lunges, I complain about lunges, and then I go home and consider legal action against Bulgarian split squats. That is the extent of our relationship.”
He mutters something about early retirement and wanders off, possibly emotionally destroyed.
I turn to find Colt staring at me, wide-eyed.
“Well?” he asks carefully. “How bad was that?”
“I handled it,” I say proudly.
“Handled it how?”
“I told him we were Puritans. And that you were basically a professional monk.” I wink.
Colt groans into his hands. “Oh God.”
I walk past him, bumping his shoulder lightly.
“Relax, Coach Evans,” I whisper. “We’re totally subtle.”
He looks at me like I’ve just announced I’m going to juggle chainsaws.
“Elena,” he says weakly, “we arenotsubtle.”
I grin. “Then we should probably work on that.”
He stares at me, and the hint of a smile runs across his face.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “We probably should.”
Just then, as I see Damien head out the front door, my eyes spark with an idea.
“Hey, Colt…can you uh, show me something in the locker room.”
He raises an eyebrow, a hint of suspicion in his eyes. “Excuse me?”
