It took me embarrassingly long to work out that my personal trainer wasn't human. In my defense, she was very good at the parts that looked human, and I was very busy looking at them.
But that's later. This is the Tuesday it started, and on the Tuesday it started I was on the B Line, looking at a different woman entirely and having opinions about my life.
The B Line runs underground from Vermont/Beverly to 7th Street in about thirty minutes, give or take how long it sits between stops. I take it when I can — faster than driving, and I can read or look at people instead of spending forty-five minutes behind a Prius on Wilshire. Tuesday morning I was doing the looking. The car had the early-eight rush, full enough that the standing passengers had already worked out the half-inch concessions about elbow space and the careful not-quite-looking at anyone. The overhead lights threw the green-leaning white the B Line cars do, the one that makes everyone's skin look subterranean. Coffee off somebody's takeaway cup, the metal-and-rubber smell of the train, a cold draft from the doors at every stop, and the canned announcement about the elevator being out at Wilshire/Western.
The woman by the doors had a thin black top on with nothing under it. The fabric was knit close enough that her nipples were sharply visible, dark through the dark, the cold of the platform having had its way with her on the way in. Her tits pressed against the knit. I was looking before I decided to. I redirected to the overhead map like I had genuine opinions about the Expo Line.
Then I looked back.
Dark hair past her shoulders. Long legs under jeans that were the kind of tight where the denim's fight with the body is part of the design, and when she shifted her weight one hip cocked out and the seam over her thigh went taut. Her face when I got to it was already on me. Dark eyes set wide, dark brows, a full mouth that wasn't smiling but was about to maybe. Not surprised. She held the look a second and one corner of her mouth lifted. I produced the smoothest response available to me, which was to look at my phone and keep my eyes there until 7th Street.
I thought about the look for two blocks after I came up out of the ground. Then the workday started and I forgot about it.
Hartwell Solutions occupies the sixth and seventh floors of a mid-rise on 6th Street that the building's marketing materials describe as "creative-class office space" and that in practice is open-plan with frosted-glass partitions and a coffee bar nobody maintains. I've been there six months, which is longer than I planned, which is how it goes. IT Support sits at the far end of the floor nearest the printer because whoever designs offices understands IT and the printer are going to develop a relationship, and proximity beats distance. My desk faces the partition that separates IT from facilities. There is a yucca plant on the partition. The yucca is in a state of perpetual late-stage decline that no one has the standing to address. The chair is destroying my lower back. I've submitted three facilities tickets about it. They remain open.
At twenty-one I had plans that didn't involve this chair. At twenty-three I have a ticket queue. I can reconstruct the series of reasonable decisions that got me here. I don't reconstruct it often. It ends in the same place every time.
Fourteen tickets in the queue Tuesday morning.
The good one was a guy in accounting, balding, mid-forties, the kind of person who wears the same green polo every Thursday. He'd reformatted his own hard drive on a Thursday trying to fix a browser issue. He wasn't entirely sure how he'd gotten from browser issue to reformat. I sat at his desk for forty-five minutes restoring from backup and walking him through what was gone for good. He thanked me with the energy of someone who knows they made a choice they can't take back. I see that energy a lot. It's the one IT interaction that makes me feel briefly fine about my own decisions.
Eleven tickets closed by eleven. Then lunch.
My lunch place has a sign I've never read.
It's in Korean, like most of the signage on this block. Two blocks from Hartwell on 6th. A narrow storefront between a tax office and a place that sells dried squid by the pound. Red awning faded into the color of an old brick, glass door that never quite closes flush against its frame. Inside: six four-tops along one wall, a counter and a register along the other, a kitchen pass at the back where you can see the cooks moving in the steam. The fluorescent panels in the ceiling buzz audibly when the door is closed and almost nobody is talking. The food is excellent. I've been coming here since my first week. I know what's inside.
Mia was already moving when I came through the door.
Not when I reached the counter. When I walked in. She looked up from behind the register, her hand went to the order pad, and I was still on the far side of the room. Galbi combo, soup on the side, barley tea not water. Thirty-something Tuesdays and she had me down.
I paid at the counter. She rang me up without looking at the screen and waved me toward the tables. Sit, she'd bring the tea over.
I took my usual two-top by the window. A minute later she came out from behind the counter with the tea on a small tray.
Fit frame, dark hair up in a knot held by a yellow pencil, the long line of her neck visible where the work shirt was open at the collar. Tits her work shirt was losing an argument with, buttons straining, the white of her bra showing through the gaps between them. Mixed Korean-American: the cheekbones from one side and a fuller mouth and softer jaw from the other, a small dimple at the left corner of her mouth that came in when she smiled and not before. She set the tea down in front of me and the lean pulled the shirt taut across her chest and widened the gap between her buttons. I focused on the tea. Then she straightened up and looked at me. Brown eyes, wide-set, the corners crinkling the way some people's do at twenty-six. The smile she gave me had more in it than the one she gave the door.
I told myself friendly. She does this with everyone. It's her job. I kept that version because the alternative meant sitting with how many times I'd thought about her counter. Bending her over it. Hands flat on the surface, fucking her from behind while she tried to stay quiet during the lunch rush. Whether she'd be loud anyway. Her on her knees after, that mouth, what she'd do with it. I'd had opinions about this for months. A lot of Tuesdays is a lot of time to think.
Friendly. She was being friendly.
She brought the galbi out a few minutes later, set the plates down between us like she had time to sit, then went back to the register because she didn't. I ate.
Wednesday and Thursday passed. Seventeen tickets across the two days. Thursday morning I made it to the gym because I'd missed Tuesday. Not intentionally. It just hadn't happened.
PeakForm is two blocks from the Metro stop, between a smoothie place that doesn't open until ten and a dry cleaner that's been there since the 1990s and still has the original cardboard sign in the window. The gym takes the second floor of a corner building above the dry cleaner, reached by a glass door at street level and a flight of stairs that smell faintly of bleach. The room above is one big high-ceilinged box with a wall of mirrors along the long side, the kind of fluorescent fixtures that make everyone look like they slept poorly, and the specific gym-smell of rubber flooring and sweat-warmed towel laundry and the industrial citrus cleaning spray the staff use after every machine. The music is early-2010s hip-hop at a low gym-volume, on a playlist nobody has updated in years. I've been going three mornings a week for three months. After the chair started rearranging the base of my spine my doctor said "L4" and paused for a beat before he moved on. I joined the following week. My back hasn't gotten worse. I'm calling that a win.
The squat rack was open and I loaded the bar.
My form has been broken for six weeks. At the bottom of the movement my knees track inward and my lower back rounds, which undoes most of what the exercise is supposed to do. I can watch it happen. The mirror is right there. I did three sets and watched my knees do the wrong thing three times. Knowing has not produced fixing.
I racked the bar and sat down on the bench with a towel over my neck. Across the room two women were doing some kind of partner squat with a kettlebell I couldn't see the weight on, both of them easy in the way of people whose bodies know what to do without being asked. I looked at the ceiling. The ceiling tiles had a watermark in the corner above the squat rack that had grown maybe an inch since I'd started coming here.
The session was in two days.
Two weeks back the PeakForm app had pushed me a notification while I was at my desk.
*Amber has offered you a complimentary session.*
Not assigned. Offered. PeakForm has a thing where trainers flag members with form issues and reach out directly. Marketing. Get people into the free session, sell them a package. I know this. The signs are near the front desk.
What I also knew: she could have flagged anyone in the gym. The room is not short of people with bad form. She flagged me.
I'd tapped her profile right there at my desk, ticket queue forgotten. Gym shot, waist up, sports bra, weights behind her. Pale blonde, almost white, the kind of platinum that doesn't come from a bottle. High cheekbones, clean jaw, full mouth. Tanned skin, visible abs, and tits the sports bra was working overtime to contain, round and high and straining the fabric. I looked at the photo longer than I needed to evaluate her qualifications as a personal trainer.
She was smiling in the photo. Not the big fitness-influencer smile. Something smaller, like she knew something about the person looking at the picture. Deep blue eyes straight into the camera, and I had the brief stupid feeling she was looking at me specifically.
I'd looked at the photo for a while.
Then I'd booked it before I could talk myself out of it.
Saturday morning. Nine AM. Two days away. Trainer: Amber. The squat was getting fixed. That was what this was about.