Page 2 of Bewitch

“Yes, honestly. Took a wrong turn on the way here? Meant to go to the bakery on the corner?”

There’s a bakery on the corner around here?

I swallow hard and try to ignore her biting, insulting tone. “I’m not lost. I’m just getting used to working out here, that’s all. Maybe I’ll see you around a lot.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” she says. She’s still swinging her arms to do those bicep curls.

I tilt my head to the side. I so badly want to ask, “Why? Because you aren’t going to be coming back?” but that’s not what she means at all, and we both know it.

“I work out alone,” she says after a moment, “so if you could move on already…”

Sure. If I were a hot guy, she would want me to stay here, but whatever. I get it.

To some extent, I get it, but for her to ask me if I’m lost… to mention a bakery…

What a bitch.

I look over to see if Lucas is watching, but he’s not. My arms are already killing me, but I just ignore the chick and walk away with the weights, trying not to look at anyone else, but there’s this one guy on a bench who has a bunch of guys around him. The number of plates on the bar is insane, and the guy’s face is already red, and he’s only just now reaching up to try to grab the bar. He pushes out a breath, the guys all cheering him on, and they’re crowding around so I can’t see, and I move on.

There are a fair number of girls on this side of the gym. It still feels a bit wrong to be here. Heather and I always stayed on the other side, with the cardio machines. That’s a lot more my speed, and I can’t. I can’t do this. The weights are shifting in my hand, and the heads of the dumbbells shift so that they’re digging into my palms instead of my fingers curling around the middle of the bar.

“Do you think you’ll stick with this or not?” Lucas asks, approaching me.

“Why wouldn’t I?” I snap, shaking my arms a bit, trying to ignore how heavy the weights are. I grit my teeth, not wanting to show weakness in front of him.

He thinks I’m pathetic. I can tell. It’s so obvious. He feels like I’m wasting his time.

Or maybe… could this be his stupid way of trying to motivate me? Yeah, right. If one of those perfectly gorgeous girls had him as their fitness trainer, you better believe he would’ve stood behind her and helped her by feeling her arms to get her to stop swinging her arms and have her do full, complete, correct reps of the dumbbell curls, instead of embarrassing the hell of them as he had me.

The weight’s too much for me. My fingers want me to just uncurl them so I can drop the weight, but I slowly bend down and try to place them on the ground but have to drop them. One falls onto my toes, and I let out a faint whimper.

“It’s a yes or no question,” he says, sounding bored. “Are you going to stick this out or not?”

“Yes,” I snap. “Don’t you want me to pay you?”

“I can find other clients,” he says.

“You’re not going to have time for them because you’re going to be working out with me every day.”

“Not every hour,” he corrects, “and not every day either. It’s not good for your muscles—”

“There is such a thing as active recovery days, isn’t there?” I ask smugly.

I might not be a massive gym nut, but I do know some things, and I love how he appraises me slightly differently.

“I don’t do yoga or pilates or any of that.”

“Why not?” I challenge, lifting my chin. “They can help with building muscle, too, can’t they? Flexibility might help you with—”

“Let’s not talk about how flexibility one of us is because I’m certain one of us is a lot more flexible than the other.”

I swallow hard past a lump in my chest. As much as I’ve thought about using Lucas as motivation to try to keep with it and working out to lose weight, I’m not sure I want to anymore. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I want to lose weight all right, but using him in any form might not be the smartest of ideas. I shouldn’t have challenged him like that because I should’ve realized he would have a retort like that, one that will make me feel even smaller and more insignificant than I already feel.

People say not to judge a book by its cover, but people do that, and people don’t stop there. They do that with a person’s looks, their clothes, their hair.

Their weight.

As a society, we measure a person’s worth based on so many things, but especially on two numbers—their bank account and their weight. Oh, and their looks based on a scale of one to ten.

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