Chapter 8
Max
Iexercise every single day, because if I don’t stretch and use my leg muscles, everything hurts more. The car accident that killed both my parents also shattered my sacrum and my acetabulum. There are some breaks even the best surgeons in the world can’t repair, but keeping my muscles strong helps. I have a series of Tae Kwon Do forms I do every evening and a rowing machine I use every morning after warming up with yoga. This morning, I do my exercises back to back and I push myself. Probably harder than I should.
The workout I do today is brutal. I’ll regret it tomorrow when my muscles ache. That’s okay—I need the distraction. I want the distraction.
The distraction from her. Holly fucking Dolinsky.
I shouldn’t be putting “Holly Dolinsky” and “fucking” in the same sentence, even in my head.
Unfortunately, they are already together in my thoughts. Worse still, when they are linked in my mind, “fucking” is not in the form of the descriptive adjective I usually use, but rather the verb I almost never use. The verb I have never used in the same sentence with a colleague’s name before. Especially not a sentence like, “Last night in the shower, I jerked off as I imagined fucking Holly Dolinsky.”
Not that I actually did that last night.
No. I did that the night after we first met. And again on Monday night after she came into my lab.
But not last night. Because now that I know just how fucking gorgeous Holly Dolinsky is, it didn’t seem . . . right somehow.
It was one thing to stand in the shower stroking my cock while I imagine fucking a woman who is plain, but smells amazing. Or a woman who smells amazing and has the sheer guts to stomp into my clean room and go toe-to-toe with me.
It’s another thing entirely to do so now that I know how beautiful she is. Now that I know she didn’t actually want me to know she’s beautiful.
So now that I know, it’s not happening again. Which is why this morning’s workout was so completely grueling.
I’m nearly done on my rowing machine when my cell phone rings. I don’t recognize the number, but answer it anyway. The name attached to the number is Charlene and the avatar on my phone shows a picture of a busty blonde.
Sometimes Tavey calls me from unfamiliar numbers because she thinks it keeps me on my toes. I have no idea how she hacks my phone like that. I keep that filed under Questions About My Sister I Don’t Want the Answer To.
“What do you think?” she asks as soon as I answer.
“About what?” I ask.
“About the gift. Did you get the gift?”
“No. What gift?”
“Go look on your front porch.”
I pull the phone away from my face and glare at it, tempted to hang up on her.
I’m sweaty and tired. My leg is aching. I want a shower and some ice.
I exercise because I have to, not because I like it, but because the combination keeps my leg muscles from seizing up. But, yeah, sometimes it makes my leg hurt like a bitch. And sometimes it makes me even more of an asshole.
“Just tell me what it is and I’ll pretend to like it,” I grumble.
She laughs. Tavey is always laughing. Most days, her perennial good mood is forty-five percent annoying and fifty-five percent lovable.
Today isn’t most days.
“Go get the package,” she coaxes.
I grab the towel and water bottle from the chair by the door, wiping off my face and chest as I walk. “There better actually be a package on my front porch,” I grumble.
“It’s there,” she assures me.
“Let me guess, you hacked my doorbell camera again?”
