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Not that I’d have been able to tell him the truth, about Brayden and his situation, but apparently Coach didn’t even care enough to ask.
The whistle pierced through my thoughts, shrill and demanding.
“Come on, let’s pick up the pace,” Coach bellowed.
Donny crossed his eyes, giving me a goofy look before he released me.
“You gonna try harder this time, freshman?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. Funny, how you could know you were being taunted, know that by reacting you were giving someone exactly what they wanted, and yet willingly go hurtling into it anyway.
He raised an eyebrow. I grit my teeth, and leapt at his chest.
#
Routine was the thing. Drilled into me from the very first days I’d started working out; back when I didn’t have a trainer of my own, just a high school coach who saw how focused on wrestling I was. Who figured I could do with a few pointers, and the first - and most important - of those was that you did it, and kept doing it, until it was second nature. Not just learned, but knowledge baked into your muscles. There was no time to think, to plan, out there on the mat. Only to react, and to trust that your body knew what your brain would only understand in hindsight.
Jefferson described it as instinct, though I wasn’t always sure we were talking about the same thing. After all, the senior was a special breed, even among his peers on the team. Built for wrestling and sparring, from the DNA up, sure, but it was more than that. Some innate grasp of the physics of it all - the way a body levered, and rotated, and the shift of mass and gravity’s incessant hunger for it - that you could see at play, if only you looked beyond the prodigious muscles and overall scale.
I’d watched Jefferson compete with guys about his equal in terms of weight and size, and seen him take them down in seconds. Somehow intuiting exactly where to hit, lift, tip them, with what seemed to be the barest exertion of time and effort.
I didn’t have that, that cell-level comprehension. Could only trust in the process: the repetition, and the repetition, and then some more repetition on top. Until it was all mindless, that second-guessing organ cut out of the loop because it took too long, introduced too much doubt.
You acted, you did what felt right, and any post-mortem on that came later.
Chapter Sixteen
I had Harvey’s number saved in my phone, back from when Brayden had first asked me if I’d dance on his behalf. Now I chewed the edge of my tongue as I waited for the manager to answer.
I’d loitered in the doorway to the weights room as Brayden lifted. Taking advantage of the quiet, of his solicitous focus, to watch the muscles in his back flex. His arms swell, biceps smooth and round. A symphony of controlled motion, at odds with the wisecracking, flirtatious man I knew from regular life.
The dumbbells dropped with a faint clang. Brayden rubbed his hands together.
“You done looking, lil bro?”
The mirrors had given me away, of course.
“Just didn’t want to disturb you,” I protested.
He grinned at my reflection. Not quite the wolfish smirk I’d seen bring Adam to his knees - quite literally - but clearly its relation.
“You know I don’t mind it when you stare.”
I rolled my eyes, wishing my reddening cheeks weren’t betraying me. Not like it was a secret - not, indeed, like the whole team didn’t get off on looking at each other, and often at themselves - but that didn’t mean I had to enjoy getting called out on it.
“I... I’m sorry about... the club.”
He bent to pluck up a towel where it’d hung over the end of the bench. Wiped his hands and forearms on it as he eyed me across the room.
“It’s fine, Eoin. I’m sorry I got you in trouble with Coach.”
My shrug felt aspirational. Like I might be able to make myself feel blasé if I at least looked that way.
“Still. I promised I’d do it.”
Brayden smiled at me.
“You did, and I love you for that, lil bro. I know it was out of your comfort zone.”
