Chapter 18: Gym
The list he'd been mentally drafting on the walk home had three items on it by the time he reached his block.
Health exam. Driver's license. Money.
In that order, more or less, though the third one was less a step and more a condition that had to be true before any of the other steps meant anything. He turned it over for another half block and then gave up. It was the kind of planning that felt productive and wasn't — the junior high school version of making decisions, where you spent an hour deciding between two options you couldn't afford either of.
He'd figure it out when he had something to actually figure it out with.
"Andrew."
He turned. Ross was standing outside a sporting goods store two storefronts down, holding a bag and looking like a man who had been hoping to run into someone he knew.
"Ross — I thought you were in Cleveland."
"Got back this morning." Ross fell into step beside him naturally, with the energy of someone who'd been looking for a reason to not go home. "The specimen turned out to be a mosasaur vertebra, which is genuinely exciting, but the university's field team had it covered so—" He stopped himself. "Anyway. What are you doing out here?"
"Walking. Thinking." Andrew shrugged. "Nothing, mostly."
"Andrew." A woman's voice. She came out of the sporting goods store behind Ross — tall, dark-haired, athletic build, a jacket Andrew recognized from the show before his brain had time to catch up to the recognition. Carol. Ross's wife. Current wife, still, which meant they were somewhere in the window before things unraveled — the specific miserable window where Ross knew something was wrong but hadn't yet named what it was.
"Carol, this is Andrew — I've mentioned him, he plays at Central Perk on weeknights. Andrew, my wife Carol."
Carol smiled and extended her hand. It was a warm smile, open, the smile of someone who was good at meeting people. Andrew shook it — firm, brief, normal — and said it was good to meet her.
"Likewise." She looked at him with a kind of relaxed appraisal that had nothing predatory in it, just genuine curiosity. "Ross talks about you. He says you're good."
"Ross is generous."
"He really isn't, actually," Carol said pleasantly. "So you must be."
Ross looked between them with the expression of a man who was glad the introduction was going well and also didn't entirely know why it was going well.
"We were just heading to check out the gym on 74th," Carol said. "We've been talking about getting memberships for months and somehow never doing it. Come with us."
Andrew glanced at Ross, who nodded with the barely-concealed enthusiasm of a man who wanted company as a buffer and wasn't trying very hard to hide it.
"I don't want to get in the way of—"
"It's not a couple thing," Carol said, and the lightness in her voice was real, not performative. "Ross and I are not exactly in a couple's afternoon phase right now." She said it without bitterness, just matter-of-factly, the way you'd mention the weather. "I've been cooped up and my body feels like it's turning to concrete. Come look at the gym with us, then we'll get lunch."
Andrew looked at Ross again. Ross looked back at him with an expression that said please.
"Sure," Andrew said. "Why not."
The three of them walked the four blocks to the gym — Carol setting the pace, Ross keeping up, Andrew falling into the natural rhythm of two people whose dynamic he was navigating in real time rather than from the comfortable distance of a television screen.
He'd known, in the abstract, that this period of Ross and Carol's marriage was not good. But abstract knowledge and the actual texture of it were different things. Carol was not unkind to Ross — that was what struck Andrew, walking beside them. She wasn't cold or sharp. She laughed at things he said.
She touched his arm once when she was making a point. But there was a quality to her attention, a fundamental direction to it, that didn't quite land on him. Ross felt it. Andrew could see him feeling it, the way you could see someone trying not to look at a thing they couldn't stop thinking about.
This is not my business, Andrew reminded himself. This is not something I can fix or should try to.
He focused on the gym.
It was a good facility — better than he'd expected for the price point. Three floors, which the woman at the front desk walked them through with practiced efficiency: cardio equipment and spin bikes on the first floor, full weight floor and machines on the second, and a dedicated space on the third for martial arts and combat training.
Each floor had its own locker rooms. There was even a small café near the entrance that did protein plates and smoothies, with a nutritionist on staff three days a week if you wanted a consultation.
The membership was seventeen dollars a month on an annual contract.
Andrew did the math automatically: two hundred and four dollars a year, which was real money but wasn't unreasonable money, especially measured against what he was trying to build toward.
Physical conditioning fed directly into his system — not as a skill itself, but as the substrate that everything else ran on. The martial arts floor on the third level caught his eye in particular. Boxing, jiu-jitsu, a kickboxing class that ran Tuesday and Thursday evenings.
Private coaching in boxing ran five hundred for a three-month course. He declined that immediately — not because the skill wasn't worth having, but because five hundred dollars spent on a coach was five hundred dollars he could put toward something with a longer payoff.
The proficiency system didn't require a trainer to make progress. It required repetition and correct form, and correct form he could get from books and video and his own increasingly calibrated sense of what his body was doing. The city library had a sports science section he hadn't touched yet.
He asked the woman at the front desk a few questions. She answered all of them without upselling, which he appreciated.
There were framed photos on the wall near the entrance — members who'd competed at various levels, a few names he half-recognized. The place had been here a while. That meant something about how it was run.
Ross was examining the rowing machines with genuine interest. Carol was chatting easily with a woman near the free weights, already comfortable in the space, already moving through it like she belonged there.
Andrew signed up for the annual membership. Ross and Carol did the same, Ross with the cheerful optimism of a man who believed a shared gym membership might mean something it probably didn't.
Andrew said nothing about that.
Outside on the sidewalk, Carol suggested lunch.
"There's a good Greek place two blocks over," she said. "Ross is buying."
"I didn't agree to—" Ross began.
"Ross is buying," Carol confirmed.
Andrew was genuinely tempted. He hadn't eaten since the eggs he'd made at seven. But there were two people back at his apartment who also hadn't eaten, and becoming a third wheel to Ross and Carol's complicated afternoon felt like enough of an imposition on everyone involved.
"I've got people at home," he said. "Rain check."
Carol looked at him with an expression that was hard to read — something between understanding and mild disappointment. "Bring them next time."
"Maybe," Andrew said, which was true enough.
"See you at the gym," she said. And then, to Ross, with the tone of someone closing a chapter: "Come on."
Ross glanced back at Andrew once as they walked away — a look that contained several things Andrew didn't have the standing to address — and then turned and fell into step beside his wife.
Andrew watched them for a moment. Then he turned and headed home to make lunch.
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