I jumped at the knock. Which was dumb, because I'd ordered the delivery, and was expecting it to arrive today. They'd even given me a fairly narrow window of expected arrival, into which they'd landed neatly.
"Coming!" I yelled at my apartment door, mentally adding a star to the online review for the timely arrival. I hopped up and headed there, double checking as I went to make sure my preparations were all in order. None of the furniture had rearranged itself when I wasn't looking--one can never be too careful--and opened the door.
The first thing I noticed was how green his eyes were. Vivid bottle green, not the more typical hazel. The kind of green that you'd associate with a rainforest, not a human. It took me a second to even recognize that he was trying to talk to me.
"I'm sorry, what?" I managed. Smooth, Chris. As ever, you epitomize smooth.
He gave me a little smile that managed to straddle the line between I-am-a-polite-professional and are-you-serious-right-now. It was kind of impressive.
"I asked if you'd ordered the FitPro X-12. Are you Chris?"
Oh yeah, the delivery. That would explain the giant crate he had on a handcart. "Yes, that's me. You're in the right place. Please, come in." I opened the door to its widest and stepped aside, pointing him toward the destination room. "I tried to clear a path for you," I said, as he deftly navigated the cart through the door, "You're headed for that room, there." Once he and his cargo were fully inside, I closed the door and hastened ahead of him to make sure the crate would fit through the channel I'd opened in the furniture.
"Appreciate it," he said. "You'd be surprised how often people order something like this and never consider how to get the thing where they want it. And then they complain about me having to move furniture. So thanks for thinking ahead." I guided him into what had originally been the never-used guest room, and then the hardly-used home office, and was now the constantly-used home gym. There wasn't a ton of space, with the other equipment I had in there, but I'd pushed everything against the walls to make as much room as I could.
"You can just put it anywhere on that end of the room," I said. "I can always reposition it when I set it up." I'd pressed myself against the wall, too, to make way for the big crate. The delivery guy--he wore a little nametag on his uniform shirt that read "Owen"--maneuvered his cart with the expertise of long practice. With the crate largely between us until now, I hadn't gotten a good look at him aside from those captivating green eyes, but as he passed me with his burden, I had the perfect opportunity.
He was a compact block of muscle, a bit shorter than my own six feet but broad in the chest and shoulders. A chest and shoulders, I might add, that strained the cotton of his uniform. The sleeves seemed to barely contain his biceps. And the khaki shorts...oh my. Let's just say the view from behind was almost as good as the front, even with those remarkable eyes.
"No can do," Owen grunted, as he pushed the crate off the cart onto the floor at the end of the room. I blinked. Had he been talking that whole time?
"No can do what?" I asked. "Did I miss something?"
"Setup," he replied, straightening up. "And it's you that can't do it."
"I'm confused." And a little irritated. I wasn't an engineer or anything, and granted my first impression on Owen hadn't been one of towering intellect, but I was pretty sure I could unpack an exercise machine.
He shrugged. "It's company policy. The FitPro X-12 is a complicated machine. People try to set these up, do it wrong, get hurt, try to sue...better for everyone if somebody trained does it from the get-go." He gestured at the space around the crate. "This is a pretty good spot; you'll want the clearance to make sure nothing starts knocking into walls." He had a clipped, brisk manner of speech that was really clashing with my naturally verbose brain.
He stared at me for a moment, as though waiting for a response. I hadn't heard a question, so I raised my eyebrows in silent inquiry. With a nearly-suppressed sigh, he said, "Is this location acceptable? Should I move it?"
I could only shrug. "You're the one trained for this. If that's where you think it'll fit best, sure." With a sharp nod, he turned and bent over to open the crate...and my mild annoyance drained away. Whoever gave him those shorts deserved a medal.
The crate was designed to come apart around the machine, and Owen soon had it dismantled and set aside. The device itself, packed for travel, was a cube of intermingled struts and bars that resembled one of those nightmarish hand puzzles with all the curving metal bits twisted together. How that would transform into the sleekly designed all-in-one exercise machine featured in the photos and videos I'd seen, I could not imagine. Maybe having someone set it up for me was not such a bad plan after all.
Owen fished something out and tossed it to me. "Owner's manual," he said as I caught it. "You'll want to study that." Obediently, I opened the booklet. 'The FitPro X-12 got its name because its modular design includes twelve distinct configurations, allowing you to exercise any part of your body any way you choose. The simple, user-friendly structure makes it quick and easy to switch from one arrangement to another, so you can have the healthy, fit body you've always wanted without leaving your own home.' Seemed more like marketing than instructions for operation.
Fortunately, the subsequent pages actually did have directions for configuring the machine into its various forms, but I found it hard to focus on reading. Owen was efficiently putting the FitPro together, and watching him bending over and lifting things was much more compelling than the manual. As I watched, he went up on his toes to fiddle with something on the top of the machine--when had it gotten so tall?--and reaching over his head made his shirt ride up, flashing me a set of washboard abs. Most distracting.
"You seem to know a lot about this thing," I said slowly, hardly believing my own daring. "Do you have one yourself?"