Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 102781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 514(@200wpm)___ 411(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 102781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 514(@200wpm)___ 411(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
Until today.
I had no idea what possessed me to pick today of all days to go back to the gym, especially since it had been nearly one in the morning by the time I got home from work last night. But I arrived at five fifty, wanting to be already on the treadmill by the time Andrew walked in…if he walked in. We hadn’t seen each other in more than two months, since the wedding of a mutual friend from college, and it had been almost three weeks since we’d even exchanged texts.
Picking a treadmill in the corner—one with a straight view to the locker room exit as well as the front door—I popped in my earbuds and hit shuffle on Pandora on my iPhone. The first five minutes were rough. Maybe avoiding exercise all together hadn’t been that good of an idea after all. I huffed and puffed like a two-pack-a-day smoker until eventually my adrenaline kicked in, and I found my groove with the pace I’d set.
Although finding my groove didn’t stop me from staring at the doors like I was waiting for Ryan Reynolds to walk through at any second.
At ten after six, I felt my shoulders start to relax. Andrew was never late. Unlike me, he was a stickler for time. He must not be coming today. For all I knew, he could be away, or had even changed gyms. Although the latter wasn’t too likely. Andrew didn’t do change—he ate the same whole wheat toast with two spoonfuls of organic peanut butter at five fifteen every morning and walked into the door at the gym at six. By seven, he sat in front of the computer at his desk to start his daily writing.
With the anxiety of anticipating his arrival dissipating, I upped my speed to six miles an hour and made the mental decision to not stop until I’d run a full three miles. It was probably better that he didn’t show up and find me since I was feeling so out of sorts lately, anyway.
After I hit the three-mile marker, I did a ten-minute cool down walk and then wiped off the machine. I hadn’t brought clothes to shower, but I needed to pick up my purse from the locker and stop in the ladies’ room before heading home to get ready for work. I’d made it halfway to the locker room when the front door opened and two people walked in, Andrew being the second person. My heart raced faster than it had on the treadmill. And that was before the woman who’d walked in right before him turned to laugh at whatever he’d just said.
They’d come together.
I stopped in place about two seconds before Andrew looked up and saw me. I must’ve looked like a deer in the headlights about to get creamed by a Mack truck. He said something I couldn’t hear to the woman he’d walked in with, and she looked up at me, frowned, and headed toward the elliptical machines.
Andrew took a few hesitant steps toward me.
“Hey. How are you? I didn’t expect to see you here.”
Obviously.
I nodded and swallowed back the taste of salt in my throat. “You’re late.”
“I changed up my routine. Writing later in the day. Even at night sometimes.”
I forced a fake smile. “That’s great.”
“I heard about Wren. How are things going with the merger?”
“It’s tough.”
Small talk was killing me. I looked over my shoulder and found the woman he’d walked in with watching us. She turned her head away immediately. My pride wanted me to not mention her and escape with my head held high.
But I couldn’t help myself. “New workout partner?”
“We didn’t arrive together, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I couldn’t hold back my emotions any longer. My lip started to tremble, so I bit down. The taste of metal flooded my mouth as I sucked in blood.
“I need to get to work. It was nice seeing you.” I walked away before he could say anything. But he never even made an attempt to stop me.
***
To say I’d been distracted this morning was an understatement. I’d spent three hours answering half-a-dozen emails and staring at copy that needed approval by noon, but I still couldn’t get past the first two sentences. I also mustn’t have heard Bennett walk into my office or even begin to speak.
“Earth to Texas.”
I looked up.
He waved his hands in my line of vision. “Are you in there?”
I blinked a few times and shook my head. “Sorry. I was daydreaming on a campaign.”
Bennett squinted like he knew I was full of shit, but surprisingly, he let it go. “Come with me.” He nodded his head back toward my office door.
“Where?”
“Just come. I want to show you something.”
The fight had been sucked out of me today. So I sighed and got up. I followed him over to an alcove down the hall that held a file cabinet with closed accounts. He opened it and took out a random file. “Check out Marina.”