*Note -- This is part of a longer erotic series with a slow build, and the following few chapters do not contain explicit sex.
7
My thighs were on fire. Sweat glistened on my brow, and dripped its way down the small of my back. My breath was heavy, almost panting.
Five more.
I winced.
You can take it, Penny
.
It wasn't often that I tagged along with Marie in her workouts. Compared to my usual light cardio and crunches, the pace she kept up was downright manic. Beside me, I could see her long, taut torso, bending gracefully in a leg press that would have snapped my flyweight frame in two. My knees began to quiver, and I bit my lip, counting down the last three reps aloud.
I went along that night mostly because I wanted to be wiped out. I'd become accustomed the last few years to living in varied degrees of uncertainty. But the last two days were another animal entirely. I didn't want to think about it anymore. I didn't want to worry. All I wanted to do was to run my body ragged, until it collapsed in deep and dreamless sleep. Of course, I'd also come along because a Sunday ration of chocolate crepes and a whipped cream-covered mocha was enough to guilt anyone into hitting the gym.
With a whimper I hit my breaking point, and slid myself off the draconian contraption. Marie was still going strong, her body pulsating like a piston. I shook my head, marveling as I mounted a treadmill near the back. I wasn't the only one taking notice. A little gaggle of guys near the free weights had paused, craning their necks to ogle and nudge each other with their elbows.
'Et il y a du monde au balcon, no?'
I blushed and slipped in my earbuds, hoping to drown out their ugly innuendos.
I won't say we were asking for it. We weren't.
At all
. But much as I hate to admit it, Mr. Caine's concerns about Saint-Michel weren't entirely unfounded. The clientele here skewed heavily male, most with more biceps than brains. It was basically an old boxing gym, with just a few mismatched machines thrown in along one side of the ring. Marie liked it because it was close by, and because they stayed open past midnight. I liked it because it was dirt cheap. Just once, and only once, I'd let her seduce me into sparring with her, and just about got my molars knocked out. For the most part though, both of us just kept to the periphery, carefully minding our own business. And I guess apart from the stares and occasional catcalls, we'd never yet had any serious issues.
A blue bubble popped up as I skimmed down my playlist. Three missed calls and three voicemails, every one of them from my Mother. My brow furrowed
. Starting early this year, isn't she?
I tapped 'ignore', and started walking.
I typically talked to her about twice a month, and it was same conversation every time. She'd ramble on for ten or twenty minutes about the weather down in Nags Head, and pass along some stale news about neighbors whose names I scarcely recognized. So-and-so was moving, divorcing, married again, or dead. Then came the sigh, and the contemptuous question.
'Penelope, wouldn't it be
nice
to have the whole family home this year?
The question cropped up every holiday, and in her desperation, 'holiday' had come to encompass such second-rate affairs as the Fourth of July, Beggar's Night, and probably Boxing Day with the way things were headed. Usually I could parry with some half-baked excuse about buckling down in the library for midterms. If she ever got wise about why I had another final exam every six weeks, I figured I could just blame it on the metric system. It would have worked on me.
Don't get me wrong. I felt plenty guilty, even without her dumping fuel on the fire. I think it broke her heart a little that first year I didn't come home for Christmas. The way I heard it later, she spent the whole morning expecting me to show up out of the blue, with an apology and an over-stuffed suitcase, like some cloying bit of Rockwell Americana. This past year she'd been a bit more crafty, putting together a sort of telethon three or four weeks beforehand. In a twenty-four-hour period, I got calls from every last one of my brothers, each dutifully delivering to me their share of her passive-aggressive grief. Even then, it wasn't too difficult to deflect them. There was a reason, after all, they'd nicknamed their stubborn kid sister '
the immovable object
.'
Least convincing of all was the call from my Father. His appeal lacked heart, I think, not because he didn't care about me being away, but because he understood better than any that I wasn't ready to come back. Even before I left, Doctor Foster was best at loving from a distance. Whenever we spoke now, it was always under the pretext of telling me about some new women's health study he'd read, or to ask how my arm was doing.
At that point, he was still the only one back home who knew I'd dropped out. I told him because I knew he wouldn't ask any questions. All he did was offer some money to help me get by. I told him 'no,' and made him swear not to tell Mom. Most of the family already thought I was crazy for coming up here in the first place. They thought that I'd cracked, or that I was just chasing some childish dream. No one understood why I was running away.
No.
I shut my eyes.
One would've known.
A dark blue shadow fell over me. I heard a rumble of a thunder, a man's snarl and squall—distant at first, as if echoing down a tunnel—then roaring like an icy gale. A crunch of timbers, and shattering glass. I smelled the salt spray. Felt it sting, and choke. I smelled the smoke. Felt the fire. And something—something burning. Burning. And
black
...
I pressed a red arrow on the treadmill, and the speed increased.
I ran, counting out my steps like the stations of the cross. It's funny, in a way. Before, numbers never really were my forte. But there were times now when I found it queerly comforting to solve for
X
.
One and a half strides per second
.
Ninety-two beats per minute. Twenty-six breaths. Eleven minutes. Thirty-two feet per second per second. Six hundred sixty-six steps—double that. Two hundred eighty-six breaths. How many heartbeats? How hard is your heart..?
I took my pulse, and felt it racing out of control. I couldn't keep up. And with a flash of horror, I saw my body's internal clock spinning like the blade of a propeller, hurdling me forward through time.
One week
, I panted.
Six days. Some five hundred twenty-thousand seconds... It's not enough. Not nearly, Penny.
I wiped the sweat from my brow
. If he'd just given me twice that. Another day, even. Four or five weeks to really do right. But, by then...
I pressed the arrow again, and picked up the pace.
