Chapter Text
Cal didn’t raise a quitter.
Well. To be fair, she didn’t raise you, either. But within the four walls of the gym downtown, she might as well have.
Maybe it’s better to say that she cultivated you. Yeah, that’s more like it. And the curiosity did, too. She made it so simple, you know? All it took was one encounter in the weight room for her to stick to you like glue. Not that you had any business being in the weight room, oh, no. And you certainly didn’t have any business being at a gym, either. It was all a just-so-happening sort of thing. Your boss just so happened to go over your company’s insurance benefits, and there just so happened to be a discount for an annual membership for the gym on your route home from work, and they just so happened to be holding an evening class that looked somewhat interesting.
And then, of course, it was pure coincidence that the weight room was just off the aerobics room, and of course you would end up wandering through there while trying to find the exit. And the curiosity kicked in again, in spite of the debilitating awareness of all the working, rippling bodies around you, and you found yourself face to face with some contraption you wouldn't even know how to mount, let alone USE.
And then there was, just behind you, a chirping, clipped tone of voice. Exactly the kind you'd hear from a coach, or a personal trainer, or maybe someone whose entire personality was a gym and all its facilities. The sort you wouldn't want to hear at your door at six in the morning, but felt like a well-deserved pick-me-up twelve hours later.
"You need a hand? I can spot you."
You didn't realize how close she was to you until you turned around, startled. It stopped mattering, though, once you really took her in. Black baseball cap, chin-length hair with a wave to it, a tank top that so unapologetically betrayed the sports bra underneath. The sort of smile that at once looked out for you and sparked like a drink sliding down the bar or past your lips. And—loveliest, most telling of all—the tone of her muscles in her left arm.
You didn't mean to stare. At the muscles. At the bra strap. But it could have been worse. You could have stared at the other arm. The one that took you a double-take to realize was a prosthetic. The only thing that stopped you from thinking she looked a little too familiar.
(But it couldn’t be her. She didn’t have a prosthetic.)
You hoped that when you laughed nervously the stranger took it to mean you were intimidated by the machine. And, well, you were. And by her. Two things could definitely be true. You tried to tell her you were just passing through, you were looking for the exit, really, but what trickled out instead was a meek, too-casual, "I don't even know what this thing is."
She laughed then, anchoring herself to the monstrosity. “It's a hip thrust machine.”
Well, shit. You didn't know what was worse: not knowing what it was, not knowing how to use it, or imagining her showing you. They all were, you decided, in their own degrees. But the last was the worst of all. Really? Thinking like this about a stranger? An extremely cute, extremely sweaty stranger? You were better than that, weren't you?
She gestured toward the machine, offered to demonstrate, and well, she was already taking position. What were you supposed to do? Refuse? All you could do was stand there, watch her as she set up the weights, slid down the machine and planted her feet so easily. Rocked her hips up, again, and again, and again.
All this, and you didn't even know her name yet. Shouldn't she take you to dinner first before showing you this kind of finesse?
"Oh," you said, your mouth far too dry. It was the most intelligible thing you could manage, and even that sounded stiff. "That's, uh. That's how you use it."
“Sure is. You wanna try?”
"Maybe next time." You didn't realize there would even be a next time until you said it. “I guess I didn’t realize you could do this kind of thing.”
She grinned proudly from where she sat. “Human body’s amazing, isn’t it?”
It was. You were already thinking about hers.
“You usually come here after work?” She was studying you, like there was something about you that she couldn’t quite place. Maybe she was starting to come to terms that you weren’t exactly supposed to be here.
“Not, uh. Not usually,” you said. “I’m kind of new to this.” If it weren’t already obvious. Hip thrust machine.
That only drew out a smile fit to split her face in two. Teeth showing and everything. “Come back tomorrow,” she said, patting the machine affectionately. “I’ll teach you how to use this thing.”
“Why?”
“Why should you come back?”
“Why do you want to teach me?”
She shrugged. “Better when you have a buddy, right?”
She was right. You didn’t realize it until you’d already walked out the door. Right around the same time you realized you still didn’t know her name. Just that she had a smile you swore you could have placed somewhere.
Maybe you shouldn’t have been surprised when she was there the next evening; she certainly seemed the type to go to the gym every day, to think that even a light workout was a workout worth doing. She was already using some other contraption by the time you stumbled into the weight room—caught sight of you in the middle of a set and everything. She had enough sense to finish it before she came up to you, but she wore that face-splitting smile all the same. Maybe there was a part of her that really thought you wouldn’t come back.
She asked if you were ready, and you supposed you were as ready as you’d ever be. You offered to make a deal with her then—you’d do a full set if she told you her name—and she laughed like it was the most ridiculous thing anyone had ever told her.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “I’ll just tell you. You can call me Cal. Everyone does.”
That was it. It all made sense now. Scheming eyes, tomboy smile, buddy talk. You did know her. Grew up right next door to her—didn’t even know her name the first time you met her, but she’d already decided you were going to be best friends forever. You were practically inseparable as kids, all sidewalk chalk and scraped knees and running through sprinklers with the popsicle juice running down your wrists. She was over so much that she practically called your grandma “Gran.” Stumbling into the kitchen, kicking her dirty tennis shoes by the slamming screen door, whatcha makin’ for dinner, Gran? Smiling sheepishly in your living room with a muddy rip in the knee of her jeans, Gran, can you mend this for me? She’d been summer itself back then; that was why you remembered them. That was why you remembered her now. You saw the summer in her.
(But what about…?)
“Your last name,” you said. “Is it Xia?”
She had that delightedly confused look on her face, among the muffled rock music and the clinking of the weights. “Yeah,” she said. “How’d you know that?”
You smiled stiffly, jerking a thumb at your chest as you balanced on your heels. “‘Pipsqueak.’ Remember?”
She tilted her head, studying you from another angle, maybe looking for that pigeon-toed baseball cap kid who could never beat her in a race to the streetlight. She must have found them, because confusion became surprise became understanding, gleaming like the sweat on her skin and the mischief in her crooked brow. “I thought I knew you,” she said, and she didn’t even care about the sweat when she scooped you up into a hug.
You weren’t sure if you were supposed to feel better or worse that you knew her. On the one hand, maybe it was a little less weird to react so… viscerally to someone more familiar. On the other, maybe the familiarity would be your undoing. And more than that, it told you the thing you dreaded the most:
You’d never really gotten over her.
Not that she knew she was ever under you. You kept the whole thing under lock and key. Tried to be fleeting when you glanced her way and got an eyeful of her skin through the armhole in her tank top, because she never felt the need to wear a bra. All that watering, she said, and nothing ever sprouted, so what was the point? You tried, too, to ignore the lurch in your stomach when boys clapped her on the shoulder after an impromptu three-on-three on the basketball court, or worse, when the unsuspecting girls made eyes at her. (You’d think they would’ve stopped mistaking her for a boy when she hit sixteen, but maybe it was on her for keeping her hair cropped short and insisting on wearing the boy’s uniform to school.) It was just easier that way. To pretend it was a silly little thing to entertain while you still had a -teen tacked to your age, to laugh about when you were older and reminiscing on the first love you never had.
Besides, you didn’t even know if she liked girls. That kind of thing never came up during risky bike rides to the library or during snack-riddled tutoring sessions. You couldn’t just come out of left field with the question or the thought. Not that you considered it a bad thing. You never had a problem with liking girls. But sometimes the girls did. So it was better to just keep quiet about it. To keep so quiet about it that by the time the last summer ended and she was packing up her whole life for university, you still hadn’t said a thing. You just sat there, on her bedroom floor, watching her decide what parts of her to take and what parts to leave behind. You let a shift in the world feel like the earthquake that it was. Everything is like that when you’re fifteen.
There were more earthquakes after that. Cal filling up her breaks with anything but coming home. Classes and charity and “alternative breaks.” The sort of things that happen when you’re too young and your friends are too old. When you realize when a friendship only existed because of proximity instead of kindred spirits. Smoke and mirrors and all that. You wondered, when Cal stopped coming over, when you kept being the one to text first, if you did something wrong. If it wasn’t cool to have a high school friend when you had a major and a dorm room and your whole life in a suitcase, big cities and whole worlds ahead of you, infinite forked roads and miles to go. If, maybe, you hadn’t been clever enough, and she picked up on more of you than you thought.
So you stopped texting. You didn’t know when. It just wasn’t worth it to keep the scores. You finished school, tutored yourself, tried to figure out what you wanted to do with your life among studies and snack wrappers. Waited for the crush to fizzle out and go flat. Tried to like other girls instead, even if you never did anything about it. Tried to forget that maybe life would have been a little easier if the gnawing, burning hole in your heart was filled. If it had never opened up in the first place.
It felt like it was opening up again then, in the weight room, in spite of Cal holding you together. Maybe you were just foolish enough to give her another chance.
Then Cal rested her hand on your head, bent down to meet your eyes, and said, “Wow. Now that I look at you, you haven’t really changed much, huh?”
And she smiled. And there was the split. The turn in your stomach.
(Here you go again.)
It unfolded like that, over the months. Five times a week you’d trek out to the gym downtown, four days after work and early Sunday mornings, and you’d put that discount to good use. Cal showed you around the machines, started you small and slow, because you’d never get anywhere if you took it all on at once. She praised you for running, praised you for walking, praised you for ten minutes instead of thirty because the worst workout you could do was no workout at all. She’d show you the right form, and she’d let you try it out, and she’d put her hands on you without so much as thinking, just to make sure your muscles set themselves in all the right places. And Cal, she knew all about muscles in all the right places. She had them. It took everything in you to concentrate on yourself, to keep yourself from literally breaking under the pressure, but it was worth it to see her smile at the end
That was the thing about Cal, wasn’t it. She always built you up. Even when you couldn’t do it yourself.
Especially when you couldn’t do it yourself.
———
“Grandma still talks about you sometimes,” you tell her in between sit-ups one Tuesday evening, sometime when the days started to get shorter, colder. The days when you feel a little luckier to have your own summer to carry you. “You should come with me to see her. She’d cook for you, you know she would.”
“Yeah?” Cal grins. “She still remember my favorite?”
“Duh. Who could forget your whole thing about spicy wontons?”
She pauses you, holds you by your ribs, corrects your form before she lets you back down. Maybe she’s even a little impressed by how well you can hold yourself up. Core strength and all that. She’s got her eye on a nearby foam cylinder like she means to use it next. “That’s not actually my favorite, y’know. That’s just what you wanted to eat on your period all the time.”
“Because you kept bringing it up!” You wrench your feet from her grip, start ticking them off on your fingers. “Spicy wontons, fruit salad, burgers, pizza, meatballs. Every month, you asked if that was what I wanted to eat!”
Cal’s face takes a turn for the warm. Flattered, affectionate. “You remember all that?”
“Well.” You shrug as your back hits the mat; it keeps your shoulders from sticking to it. “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”
Something in her expression falters when you sit up again. There’s some strange, paradoxical glimmer of guilt and reminiscence in the shadow of the brim of her hat. “I’m sorry,” she says. Just out of nowhere.
Your brow pinches together. “Sorry? For what?”
She waves her hand, faraway but not dismissive. Casting a reel toward the past, almost. “Before. I… had a lot goin’ on, I guess. I didn’t mean for us to drift apart like that. I wish I could make it up to you, you know?”
“Oh. Uh. I mean. It’s okay?” You guess you never really expected an apology, even though maybe you should have. As far as you were concerned, it was water under the bridge. There was no point in holding onto the resentment. You wanted to at first. Wanted to curse and cry and ask why she did that. Maybe it was still there, inside you, waiting for a fissure in the numbness to finally seep through.
(It’s funny, isn’t it? How you pretend to feel nothing and call yourself mature for it?)
“Cal?” you say. For all the creeping, indecent thoughts you’ve been beating back about her muscles, it’s actually adorable how she jolts to attention when you call her name. “Can I ask you something weird?”
She folds her arms on propped up knees, rests her chin on them like you’re something to be fawned over. “I might regret it, but it’s the least I can do. Shoot.”
There’s no way to say it but to say it. “Is that why you’ve wanted me to come to the gym so much? And… is that why you keep insisting on helping me?”
Cal’s teeth sink into her lip, and she jerks her head like she’s been caught. “Yeah,” she finally says. “I guess that’s part of it.”
“Part of it? What’s the other part?”
She shrugs. She knows. She just won’t tell you. You still know her as well as you used to.
“Don’t worry about it,” is all she says as she gets up to grab that foam cylinder. “Here. Let’s take things up a notch. I’ll show you how to use this when you do sit-ups.”
It’s a distraction—you’re almost certain of it—but you can’t bring yourself much to care when the sight of her demonstration is equally distracting. You don’t know how she even does it. How she manages to make every little thing look so effortless. She was always like that, wasn’t she? Straight A’s in school, top three in every race, a star on the basketball team. You didn’t doubt that she put the work in; it’s just that you never saw the work. You only ever saw the payoff, right up there with a big grin on her face.
Maybe that’s why you’ve always admired her. She never lets the work show. Not a wrinkle of hardship on her body or in her aura.
She walks you through the steps. It’s not much different from the sit-ups you’ve been doing with her; it’s just that now you’ll hold the cylinder above your head, bring it up with you, pull it down behind your head, and all the way back again. It’s to engage more of your body, she says. Your core, your thighs, the muscles in your shoulders. She corrects your form with a demo and her hands gliding over your arms—always so touchy—and when you manage to do five without her guidance she rewards you with applause. It’s only hers, but it feels like a stadium’s worth.
“Attagirl,” she says, nudging your shoulder. “I knew you could do it.”
It sets you on fire. The praise. The nickname.
(Well. That’s new.)
You try to brush it off with a nervous laugh, but you’re not sure if it actually worked. You’re still caught with your shorts down, metaphorically speaking. Still creating tense silences with your knees hugged to your chest and your eyes on her. (Does she notice it? Is there a sparkle there? Does she see that, too?)
“I got it,” you tell her. “I know how you can make it up to me.”
“What?”
“You said you wished you could make it up to me. I know how.”
Cal smiles, resting all her weight on one hand, taking her hat off with the other to briefly card her fingers through her hair. More effortless things. More beautiful things.“All right. I’ll bite. How?”
You shrug, try to make it nonchalant. You’re probably the opposite of nonchalant. Still reeling from the attagirl and all that. “Come with me.”
She tilts her head, something mischievously amused in her expression. “You wanna run that one by me again?”
“To Grandma’s house,” you tell her, chucking the foam cylinder at her. “Are you serious?”
She’s laughing, catching the cylinder instead of dodging it, because of course she can. She’s joking, she says, but you can’t help the uncomfortable shift in your body. Can’t help but wonder if she’s laughing at you. At how ridiculous the undertone might be.
You never did get around to coming out to Cal. It just never came up. You were satisfied with what little conversations you had about relationships, even though they always amounted to the same thing. She would tell you not to get caught up with boys—they’d only ever make trouble for you, and you had your studies to finish and a career to bag—and you’d nod along with her, tell her it really wasn’t a problem for you. She wouldn’t have it, would make you pinky swear that you wouldn’t get a boyfriend until at least college, no, until your first salary raise—and you’d give her some crooked schoolbook smile and promise, again and again. No boys. Just her.
Maybe she didn’t realize exactly how you meant that. Not that you’d tell her. Maybe she’d put two and two together if you so much as told her you liked girls instead of boys, and the inference would be your undoing. She wouldn’t be disgusted by you, no. Not like others were. But something would shift. She wouldn’t be the same Cal she was before; she’d be a little more cautious with her touches or her lingering looks, just in case you got the wrong impression, or maybe she’d slip up sometime and let you down gently, tell you she was flattered but didn’t feel the same way. And that would be enough for the two of you to fall apart, to never cross paths again. All because of a few words. All because of a few feelings.
Well. That happened even without telling her, didn’t it.
And now you definitely can’t tell her. Why would you ruin a good thing you’ve only just gotten back?
“All right,” she says, snapping you out of the spiral. She’s had her fill—of laughing, moving, ribbing you. “All right, I’ll come. On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
She raises a knowing brow, leans back for the cylinder, and tosses it toward you. It knocks the wind right out of you, or maybe that’s just the abdomen she dares to show with her tank top tied off at her waist.
“Gimme five sets of ten,” she says. “Then we’ll talk.”