Page 14 of Isolated
I was met with silence as my friends looked at me like I’d grown three heads. Kasey was the one who finally broke that silence. “I’m not sure there will ever be anything you can say to me that’ll convince me to drag myself out of bed early enough to be able to go to the gym first thing in the morning when I need to leave my place by no later than 8:30 a.m. to get here with a few minutes to spare.”
Laughter spilled out of me. Kasey was a lot like my sister, Eleni. But where my sister was rather mindful of how she ate, Kasey was the opposite. She ate anything and everything, and despite never going to the gym, she managed to maintain a beautiful figure. She was a stunning woman, with her long blonde hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and perfect body. Add in her wonderful personality, and she was the complete package.
After sipping from my water and giving myself some time to breathe between bites of my lunch, I teased, “That’s the reason you need to go to the gym. It might be tough at first, but if you give it two or three weeks, you’ll be practically jumping out of bed. I woke up this morning before my alarm even went off.”
“That’s insane,” Steph muttered, shoving her fork into her chicken salad. “Didn’t you spend time celebrating your birthday this weekend? I thought you went home to visit with your family for the occasion.”
Steph was very much the opposite of Kasey, particularly when it came to meals and physical appearance. She counted calories and avoided carbs like the plague, granting herself a cheat meal and a dessert only once aweek. Of course, her healthy lifestyle led to her brown skin being utterly flawless. Her hairstyle changed frequently, and this week she had a tight coil afro bob. It was my favorite way she wore her hair. And although Steph didn’t like going to the gym, she was very much into keeping herself fit and healthy. So, she played pickleball all the time, having once convinced Kasey and me to join her. That had been an absolute disaster, and she never asked us again.
“I did go home to celebrate. I had a great time.”
“So, you should be exhausted. Or, at the very least, you should have needed several cups of coffee to get through the morning.”
In an instant, my thoughts drifted back to my morning with Landen. Even he thought I was crazy for not needing caffeine to fuel myself each day. The way he often teased me about it, believing I was making it all up, warmed my heart. Maybe that was why he’d tossed out a few additional motivational comments during this morning’s workout. Even when I had moved on to exercises that didn’t require him to spot me, he pushed me to go harder. And like a love-struck fool, I allowed it to push me into doing an extra round of walking lunges. I didn’t doubt I’d need to wheel myself into the gym tomorrow morning as a result.
With a smile tugging at one corner of my mouth, I said, “You sound just like Landen.”
“Landen? Who’s that?”
I beamed at them. “The guy I work out with at the gym. He can’t seem to wrap his head around the idea that I’m this energetic without a drop of coffee.”
Kasey’s mouth fell open as Steph spoke. “The guy youwork out with at the gym? How long have you been doing that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Almost as long as I’ve been going there.”
“And why haven’t you ever told us about him?”
My eyes darted between the two of them as I took another bite of my food. I knew exactly why I hadn’t brought him up to them. Steph and Kasey weren’t exactly interested in hearing about my time at the gym—at least as much as it pertained to the exercising I did—and I felt no need to share details about the guy who put a bit of a pep in my step every one of those mornings. If they knew how I crushed on him, they’d encourage me to go after him. I’d never be able to bring myself to do it, and then I’d spend the rest of my life simply pining away for a guy who didn’t want me.
“There’s nothing to tell. He’s just a guy who works out as early as I do, so we take advantage of that and spot each other whenever needed. It’s not a big deal.”
“It could be a big deal,” Steph insisted. “Don’t forget that I met Sam on the pickleball court.”
She did have a point. Steph met Sam about a year ago while they were both playing pickleball. He’d swept her off her feet, and they’d been playing together—in more ways than one—ever since.
“This isn’t like that. Landen isn’t interested in me the way Sam was interested in you. We’re just…” I didn’t even want to say the words. “We’re just gym buddies.”
Steph shot me an unimpressed look.
Kasey let out a sigh of exasperation. “Well, I’ll take anything I can get. It has to be better than what I dealt with this weekend on my date. What a disaster!”
“Oh, no. It didn’t go well?”
Kasey was a woman on a mission. She had recently decided that any time someone asked her out, she would agree to at least one date with them, even if she didn’t feel that initial physical attraction. She’d been feeling frustrated for a while now, wanting to meet her special guy, and nothing had worked out lately. The way she saw it, she couldn’t continue to turn men down that didn’t fit the image she had in her head of what that perfect guy would look like. So, while I was celebrating my birthday with my family on Saturday, Kasey was out on her second of these dates, the first with this particular guy.
“It was awful.” Her voice was so downtrodden.
“What happened?” Steph asked.
Kasey pulled out a pack of cookies—a full-sized pack meant for eating two or three at a time and having them in your kitchen cupboard for a week or two. She held one up in front of her. “Enough to make me want to drown my sorrows in Oreos. I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. Maybe I’m putting out the wrong vibe.”
It figured that I’d be the one who was eating a normal lunch and got all the odd looks, but when one of my closest friends pulled out a package of Oreos, not one person batted an eyelash. Maybe it was that my actions weren’t typical for me, whereas Kasey doing something like she had was completely normal for her. A few days before her period, it wasn’t unheard of to see her walk in with a huge family-sized bag of salt and vinegar potato chips.
Feeling alarmed at how her date had gone, I pressed for more information. “Did the guy do something?”
Laughter spilled out of her, and she bit another cookie in half. “If only that had been the case.”
“I don’t understand. Did you two have nothing to talk about?”
