“Dude, seriously? She’s kinda fat, don’t you think? She needs to spend a little less time behind that desk and a little more time on this treadmill,” his companion replied with a laugh.
Logan could feel the pulse in his ears pounding in time with his feet on his treadmill, only harder. Fucking jerk-off, he thought as his jaw started to clench. Try saying that to her face; you’d be spitting your teeth out like Chiclets.
The man laughed. “You’re crazy. Have you seen the muscle on her? You could bounce a quarter off her butt. Say what you want. Fat or no fat, I would wreck that chick. When I was done tapping that ass, she’d be walking like a cowboy for a week.”
His friend scoffed. “As long as you don’t lose your dick in her.”
Logan, summoning every scrap of self-control he possessed, stopped and jumped off the treadmill. Retrieving his towel and his water bottle, he marched back up to the front of the gym to where Holly was standing, this time chatting with two middle-aged women. He pointed his finger directly at her as he stomped out the door.
“You are quitting this job!” he shouted, never breaking stride and vacating the building, leaving Holly and her customers to stare openmouthed after him.
“Who the heck was that?” one of the women asked as Holly, completely perplexed, looked from Logan’s retreating form into the gym and back again, trying to figure out what had occurred to warrant such an outburst. She turned her attention back to the ladies in front of the counter.
“Ummm,” Holly replied, feeling no joy at the fact that she was saying the words for the first time aloud. “I think that was my boyfriend.”
“You think?” The other woman laughed. “Honey, if I had someone who looked like that ordering me around, I’d have the decency to be sure. Bravo, darling, bravo!”
Logan got into his car and took a deep breath, staggered by his own reaction, which was nothing short of rage. It was so sudden and all-encompassing. He had trouble deciding who had incensed him more—the jackass who’d cruelly made fun of Holly, or the jerk who wanted to leave her bowlegged. He pounded his steering wheel. Reacting at that level to either scenario didn’t make any sense. It had always been a given in his mind that men fantasized about his other girlfriends. For Christ’s sake, he’d dated several Playboy models. Men masturbated to their pictures with his blessing.
It was then that Logan realized why he was so furious. The woman Logan couldn’t stop thinking about was fat. Maybe not to the well-experienced eye, but to society as a whole. Logan didn’t jump off his treadmill to kick the shit out of that guy to defend both Holly’s honor and his own. And he didn’t laugh it off or ignore it as the immature malice of a nameless miserable jack-off. Instead, he stormed out of the gym in self-righteous anger, demanding that she go back to hiding within her house so he could satisfy his lust unfettered and undisturbed.
Logan laid his head on the steering wheel and released a broken sigh. He had been trying to convince himself that hiding Holly had been for her benefit. The reality was he wasn’t yet willing to subject either of them to the possible judgment that would accompany the news of his making a commitment to her and settling down, especially when it was discovered she was one of his clients. This one woman had him forsaking all his prior reliable standards and ideals. All the positive thinking in the world wasn’t going to change that. This was the same woman who had been perfectly fine to have tagging along with him everywhere before they were dating. Now she was supposed to be kept hidden in order for him to enjoy her company. He wanted to shake loose from his brain the idea that she was beneath him. Those two men had spoken so freely; it had never even dawned on them that the man next to them would even know her, much less be sleeping with her. This wasn’t about Holly, and it wasn’t about society—it was about Logan. That he was still leery of stepping away from his preconceived notions of who he should and shouldn’t be seen with and attached to. He had let himself be guided by what he thought would look best on his arm to promote what he did for a living. He swallowed the sickening feeling that he had just spent the majority of his life as one big marketing ploy, one that worked.
He leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. He didn’t even recognize himself anymore. He used to be balanced and detached, relaxed and easygoing. Now it seemed he was regularly clawing his way out of a constant landslide of emotion, one he was intent on hiding from Holly. If he kept it up, he would end up not only losing Holly, but losing himself as well. Sitting back up, he reached into his glove compartment and pulled out his phone.
Quickly, Logan sent out a text:
YOU AWAKE?
After a minute, he got a text in return:
I AM NOW.
Logan wrote back:
YOU IN THE MOOD FOR A WORKOUT? I COULD USE A SPOTTER.
Logan started his car and sped out of the parking lot after receiving:
COME TO THE HOUSE.
The cleaning lady opened the front door, instantly recognizing him.
“Good morning, Mr. Logan.”
Logan stepped into the mansion, made a quick left turn at the living room, and hurriedly walked through the house to the back. Chase was seated at the kitchen table, fully dressed with coffee in hand, casually perusing the morning paper. He glanced up as soon as he heard Logan come into the room.
“Morning,” Chase said. “Wanna hear your horoscope?”
Logan felt the pulse beat at his temple and his left eye twitch. “No thanks. I want to lift heavy stuff. Where’s Amanda?”
Chase raised an eyebrow. “Sleeping. When you gave us the morning off, she felt like she’d just been paroled from prison. You okay?”
Logan tried not to express his overwhelming relief at the news that he would have his friend’s undivided attention. He let out a rush of air. “I’m fine. I just need to pump some iron.”
“Fair enough,” Chase said mildly, putting down his coffee cup and rising from the table. “Let’s get to it.”
Chase led the way with Logan following closely behind through the remainder of the house to the Walkers’ extensive gym room. Logan immediately set about the business of choosing the heaviest barbells and pounded out set after set of chest presses, the surest sign of pent-up aggression. He went from chest presses to the leg-press machine to dead lifts, followed by curl after curl, then crunch after crunch. Chase said nothing, even after it became apparent that he was going to be doing more spotting than lifting of his own. After twenty minutes, when Logan was fully lathered and fatigue had set in, he spoke.
“What would you do if Amanda gained a lot of weight?” Logan asked, wiping the sweat off his face with the front of his shirt.
Chase held back his smile, walked over to a nearby closet, and pulled out a towel, tossing it in Logan’s direction. He appeared to give the question serious thought. “How much weight are we talking about here?”
Logan caught the towel and wiped his face again before coming up with a figure. “Let’s say, fifty pounds.”
Chase scoffed. “Shit. I plan to start packing that much on her the minute she tells me she’s having my baby.”
Logan was momentarily stunned. “Come on. I’m being serious here.”
“So am I,” Chase said seriously.
In exasperation, Logan tried a different tactic. “Okay, what if she wasn’t getting ready to birth your fully grown linebacker and gained that much?”
“Just woke up one morning fifty pounds heavier?” Chase asked.
“Yes.”
“Like she went to bed and her thyroid exploded and she gained it all overnight?”
“Yes. I mean no!” Logan tried to backtrack, realizing how ridiculous the whole matter was sounding. “Her thyroid exploding would kill her.”
Chase pressed on. “I’m just trying to get some parameters here. So she’s basically healthy? Like she gained it all gradually?”
“Yeah,” Logan finally said, feeling his friend’s overly indulgent stare bearing down on him.
Chase took a minute, his lips tightly drawn together, and considered the question before responding. “As long as she was truly healthy and it wasn’t the result of a real illness or something traumatic that sent her spiraling, and she could still do all the things we enjoy doing together, I don’t think I would care.”
“You really mean that, don’t you?” Logan asked his friend, even though he already knew the answer was genuine.
Chase smiled. “My wife is not a small girl. Chances are it could actually happen,” he said honestly and without apprehension.
“And it really wouldn’t bother you?”
“When I fell in love with her, I fell in love with all of her. I’ve yet to meet her equal as far as beauty goes.”
“You’re a high-profile guy with a pretty big image to protect,” Logan stated bluntly. “What about what other people might think?”
“Since when did I ever give a fuck about what other people think?” Chase laughed. “I’m rich.”
“What if what they said really hurt her feelings though?” Logan asked, still probing.
Chase instantly sobered and crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s an entirely different ball of wax. I would be devastated. It was the only thing about that whole video mess that I didn’t think I could handle. Are you going to tell me any time soon what this is really about? You’re starting to depress me.”
“Holly.”
Chase dropped his arms and asked, “What about her?”
“I don’t know,” Logan said hesitantly.
Chase smiled again. “Well, I don’t know how much help I can be if you don’t even know what’s wrong.”
“I know,” Logan replied. He ran his hand through his hair and exhaled in frustration.
“Would this by any chance have anything to do with your ‘morning appointment’ that had you shifting all your clients around?”
Logan confirmed it miserably. “Yes.”
“You went to that gym to spy on her? All covert-like?”
This time Logan could only nod before leaning his face into his hand and shaking his head.
“You still don’t want people to know you’re together, do you?”
“No,” Logan mumbled into his own chest, still holding his head, suddenly remembering that Holly didn’t make one person in Bodyssey privy to the fact that they were seeing each other. Had she done it to protect him or herself?
“You do realize this has nothing to do with Holly or her weight, don’t you?”
“Yes!” Logan snapped, straightening back up. “Go ahead. Tell me it has everything to do with me being an asshole.”
Chase shook his head. “I wasn’t going to say that either. But I do think this is all about you.”
Logan, tired of Chase’s game of twenty questions and his mind-reading act, settled his hands on his hips and demanded, “Are you going to lay your knowledge on me or what?”
Chase went over to a minifridge and pulled out two bottles of water, handing one to Logan and opening the other. He tossed the cap basketball style, aiming for a small wastebasket on the other side of the room, and missed. “The way I see it, this isn’t about Holly and her weight, although it’s what you’ve chosen to hide behind. It’s not about how you’ve deviated from your lifelong attraction to six-foot-tall blondes or the monthlong underground sex fest you’ve been preoccupied with. It’s not even about the fact that you went to that gym and found out that at five o’clock in the morning, she’s probably having a ball without you. It’s about how scared you are that you’ve finally let somebody in. That there’s someone out there you care about more than yourself.”
Logan went over to Chase’s bottle cap and picked it up from the floor, dropping it into the garbage can. He took a minute to fully digest Chase’s theory. “You think that’s it?”
“I think I’m close at any rate,” Chase replied. “Everything about this relationship with Holly is a departure for you, and I’m not just talking about her looks. There was no wham-bam whirlwind involved. It was a slow building of trust and respect and finally chemistry and attraction. Sounds like the perfect setup to me.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Logan interjected, feeling defensive, although he wasn’t sure why. “You said that the minute you set eyes on Amanda, it was all over for you.”
Chase laughed again. “Yeah, but I was always open to the possibility that it would happen like that for me. Actually, I was sure of it. But we’re talking about you here. Ever since I met you, you’ve had this attitude that women would only gum up the works for you. You’ve always kept your emotional barrier up. I would go as far as to say that they always had to be so one-dimensionally beautiful so that when they figured you out, you wouldn’t have to harbor any guilt that they wouldn’t be able to move on to someone else. Suddenly, you’re one step from becoming accountable to someone. The minute you take Holly out somewhere and make that first introduction that she’s your girlfriend, it’s going to be all over for you.”
“I’ve made the girlfriend introduction before,” Logan said, trying in vain to make what he thought was a valid point.
“Not contradicting a woman you’re screwing when she calls herself your girlfriend is hardly the same thing,” Chase replied.
“I did call Natalie my girlfriend before, and you know it.”
“Which one was Natalie again?” Chase asked with sarcasm. “Oh yeah, the one you brought along to Fiji last year. I figured you just said that to lull her into believing she wasn’t only your most recent plaything. We were halfway across the world. Her getting pissed would have ruined the trip for all of us.”
“I fucking hate you,” Logan groaned, unable to deny any part of the assertion.
“Hey, look,” Chase easily replied, “this heart-to-heart crap is no picnic for me either. I could have done without playing Dr. Phil at seven in the morning. But if you’re freaked out, I have to do what I can to help you get your head on straight. You’ve been spinning your wheels about this for weeks.”
“Why can’t I keep my hands off my female clients?” Logan asked, getting closer to the heart of the matter but not fully committing to it.
“Because this one isn’t just a client. And why are you getting so twisted up about this? If anything, it’ll look like you’ve finally taken your head out of your ass. She’s a great girl, probably better than you deserve,” Chase joked, picking up two dumbbells and pumping out a quick set of lateral lifts. “And you’re forgetting, you’re really not that important. People don’t give a shit about you; they give a shit about themselves. Once you let her keep her clothes on for more than five seconds and start taking her out, you’ll see that. You might even enjoy breaking free of your pretty-boy-stuck-on-blondes image. It was getting sort of tired anyway.”
“I made a total ass of myself in that gym this morning,” Logan confessed. “I left there basically telling her she has to quit her job.”
“That must have been fun to watch.” Chase switched to hammer curls, not terribly concerned. “I’m sorry I missed it. You’re going to have to turn that around, you know.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
Chase dropped the weights with a loud thud. “It is. You just tell her you had a fit of jealousy and you’re sorry. Girls become putty in your hands when they hear that kind of crap. Damn, love is making you stupid.”
“I never said I loved her.” Logan made one final grasp at the straws of his life as he used to know it.
“You never had to,” his friend replied. “But you might want to get it out of the way, so you can start to get your sanity back.”
Logan left the Walkers’ house only slightly less confused than before he got there, grateful that Amanda had not woken up. In his current state, he could never have withstood her taking a turn at him. He was already muddled.
Nobody knew him better than Chase did. All of this fighting what felt natural was only making Logan crazy for no good reason. He wasn’t being superficial, he was just in deeper emotionally t
han he had ever been before, and it was easier to project the discomfort onto Holly. So what if she wasn’t a Victoria’s Secret model? She was adorable and she excited him. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it. In hindsight, to think anyone would give a flying fig about who he chose to spend his time with was ludicrous.
Chase had been right about many of the things he said, but not all of them. Logan was not in love. Sure, he loved Holly; he liked to believe he loved everyone. But he wasn’t in love with her. He would never leave himself at that sort of disadvantage. Once said and out there in the airwaves, it was like some sort of noose that slowly strangled the fun out of everything. Love was an outdated concept that maybe worked for hopeless romantics like Chase, but his friend had always been the exception to every rule. Logan wasn’t about to start buying into the notion that just because he was infatuated with Holly, he was in love. The only reason he was so interested was because she respected his space. He was actually doing some of the pursuing for once. She wasn’t clinging to him, and it represented challenge. Good sex and common interests did not a lifetime commitment make, and Logan was not about to ruin either by taking that sort of leap. Holly didn’t seem ready to take it either. It was a nonissue.
Logan got home, showered, and dressed for work, thinking no more about anything except how to get their relationship back on track. With an hour to kill before his first client arrived, he got back in his car, and as if it had a will of its own, he found himself back at Bodyssey.
When her shift was over and Holly emerged, she found Logan leaning casually against the driver’s-side door of her car.
“Hi,” she said, looking as puzzled as she had when he last saw her. She leaned up against the car next to hers and looked down at the ground between them. “Care to explain what happened in there before?”
He shook his head and exhaled loudly. Then he reached over and grabbed hold of her shirt where it covered her belly. He gave a tug and pulled her away from the spot where she was leaning. It achieved his desired result—unbalancing her and bringing her crashing into the solid wall of his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and kept her there despite several people walking by them to enter or exit the gym.
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