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A familiar dark ponytail made my entire body freeze in place, fingers still squeezing my bottle and squirting water into my mouth.

I swallowed hastily, almost choking. Was that actually Anita? Anita who never replied to my email yesterday?

She straightened after wiping down the leg press machine and gave a brief smile to the guy waiting to use it. Holy shit, it was her. In… very tight workout clothes. Not that I noticed.

I glanced around in disbelief, almost as if I was expecting someone to come up to me and say, ‘Holy crap, dude, are you seeing this?’

Had she been here the whole time? Had she already noticed me? If she had, why hadn’t she come over to say hello? First no response to my email yesterday and now this. Was I being ghosted by my fucking event planner?

Not sure why I was so offended, I watched her walk over to the hack squat machine and start loading on weights. When she leaned over to grab one, and her ass was just suddenly right there, I coughed awkwardly and looked away. My face spikes gave a weak flex around my hairline.

Anita hadn’t looked over once, so maybe she hadn’t noticed me. That kind of offended me even more. I was a noticeable guy. I was in grey sweats and a skin-tight moisture-wicking shirt, for fuck’s sake. I was pretty sure she was just pretending not to have noticed me.

“You waiting to use the weights?” A guy appeared in front of me, making me jump.

“What? Oh, no, you’re good, dude.” I shuffled back a few steps then stopped again.

Should I go over and say hello? We were acquainted. It seemed like the polite thing to do. But then again, I hated people interrupting my workouts, so maybe she did too.

I found myself wandering over to the dumbbell rack and picking one up, even though my workout was done. And it wasn’t arm day, so I really shouldn’t be doing any bicep curls. It would mess up my whole routine. But I started half-heartedly lifting the weight, furtively watching her.

Her form was good, I begrudgingly noted. And she was using a decent amount of weight. I hadn’t let myself pay attention to her body before, but I allowed myself to now, purely in a one-gym-goer-assessing-another way.

Her arms were slender but toned as fuck. Her abs looked strong. And her legs looked ridiculously long in those leggings.

My insides went all weird again. I needed to eat some long-chain carbs soon or all my hard work would go to waste.

I remembered to switch arms after a while, but I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was doing. I was barely doing anything—just lifting the dumbbell over and over, not even focusing on using the right muscle groups.

When she eventually climbed off the machine and grabbed her towel to wipe it down, I hurriedly shoved the dumbbell back onto the rack and power walked over. I had no idea what I was doing. My body had a mind of its own.

Before I reached her, I forced myself to slow to a casual saunter and nonchalantly smoothed back my hair. After dabbing my forehead with my towel so I wasn’t too shiny with sweat, I plastered a smirk on my face.

“Well, this is a surprise,” I drawled as I stopped in front of her, trying not to be too obvious about how hard I was tensing my pecs to make them pop.

She jolted and looked up, blinking at me. My ears went crazy when she reached up and tugged out an earphone.

“Oh. Hi. Sorry, what did you say?”

“I—Nothing.” My ears fluttered as I shifted from foot to foot, feeling infuriatingly flustered. God, she was so annoying. Why did she have to have earphones that weren’t immediately obvious? Now I looked like an idiot. “I was just… I didn’t know you came here.”

That didn’t really make sense, because it wasn’t like this was my gym. Anita cocked a brow and shrugged. “Yep. Been coming here for a few years now. It’s close to the office.”

Was it? That was interesting to know. In a purely professional sense.

When she didn’t say anything else, I found myself blurting, “Yeah, well, my gym is being renovated so I’m coming here in the meantime.”

She nodded politely, slinging her towel over her shoulder so she could take a drink from her bottle.

“Got here just before six,” I said airily, even though it had been more like ten past. “Just finishing up.”

She recapped her bottle. “Impressive.”

“I’ve been coming here all week and I haven’t seen you,” I said, seeing as she was giving me nothing in this conversation. “Do you only come, like, once a week? I come every day,” I couldn’t help but add to try and get a rise out of her.

Seeing as apparently my email yesterday wasn’t even worth replying to.

She gave me a flat look as she patted the sweat off her neck. “During the week I do pilates, spin class and swimming. Sometimes I’ll come for cardio or weights after work.”