I want to touch it, just to see if the muscle is as hard as it looks, but instead I keep my hands at the ready, performative, like an actor who’s researched the part too well.
Between sets, I towel off and pretend to stretch, but really I’m watching him through the bent glass of the wall mirror.
He’s never caught me before, not until today. He looks up, meets my eyes dead-on, and doesn’t look away. He just holds it, like a draw, like he’s waiting for me to blink first. My heart goes full-throttle.
After a second, he returns to his reps, but the space between us is now a live wire, humming at a frequency that makes my teeth itch.
We move to the bench press.
He loads the bar for me, doesn’t ask if the weight’s too much, just expects I’ll do it. When I slide onto the bench, he stands over my head, hands braced on the bar, ready to spot.
I wrap my fingers around the knurled steel and unhook, slow and steady.
The first three reps are fine. At four, my arms start to wobble. “Push,” Darius says, the word a command.
I lock out the fifth, but on the sixth my left arm fails and the bar dips. Instantly, he grabs it, guides it back into the hooks. His palm lands square in the middle of my chest, stabilizing me.
The pressure is firm, not rough, and it stays there for a beat too long. My skin remembers every second of it, like a bruise that knows it’s coming before it happens.
“Don’t forget to breathe,” he says, and the corners of his mouth flicker up, just for a flash.
He helps me sit up, hand on my shoulder blade, fingers splayed wide, and I swear he drags them along my spine as he lets go.
I keep a running ledger of these moments. Last Tuesday, his thumb grazed my collarbone when he said I was “getting soft up top.”
Thursday, his hand lingered on my shoulder a whole breath after he should have let go. Sometimes it’s accidental, sometimes I think he does it just to see if I’ll flinch. I never do.
Between sets, the banter is light, but charged. We talk hockey, food, sleep, the safe topics that teammates use to avoid emotional bleed.
He asks how my knee is holding up, and I make a joke about being held together with tape and spite.
He actually laughs, not the polite kind but the real thing, and it catches me off guard, because for a split second I think this is what it feels like to be seen, to matter.
I shut that down immediately. He has a girlfriend. A beautiful, brilliant, ex-D1-volleyball girlfriend. I’ve seen the couple photo on his phone when he was setting a timer.
They look incredible together, like a commercial for designer water. There’s no universe where he wants this, whatever this is.
There’s only the fucked-up little world inside my own head, and the empty spaces I keep trying to fill with gym routines and late-night memes.
The rest of the circuit is a blur.
We do deadlifts, then kettlebell swings, then some god-awful ab exercise he insists is “good for goalie core.” I’m so winded I can barely speak, but every time he says “one more,” I do it, because I can’t stand the idea of letting him down.
Every so often, he’ll nudge me in the ribs, or tap my shoulder, little reminders that we’re here, together, alive.
I pretend I don’t notice, but my body keeps a tally, every microtouch scored like a game I’m destined to lose.
After, we sit on the mats, stretching.
Darius props himself up with his elbows, head back, eyes closed, sweat darkening the collar of his shirt.
His chest rises and falls, slow and heavy. I risk a look, really look, and for a second I want nothing more than to crawl overand lay my head in his lap, just to see if I could fall asleep like that, safe for once, not haunted.
Instead, I clear my throat and say, “Weird question: you ever get lightheaded after squats?”
He opens his eyes, meets mine. “Yeah. All the time. It’s normal.”
There’s a beat of silence, and then, “You want to hit the steam room?” he asks.
