I found myself walking next to Mavis who was muttering under her breath.
“What was that?” I asked as I reached I into the side pocket of my bag.
“I said, I hope that I don’t pee on myself,” she repeated.
“Same, girl. Same,” another member whom I didn’t know grumbled.
I didn’t spare her a glance.
Instead, I kept my gaze on my rope handles as I thought.
“Nothing to say to that?” she wondered.
I shrugged. “Not really. Incontinence really has nothing interesting about it.”
She snickered and unfurled her rope.
Then we preceded to have double-under practice for a full five minutes before moving into some dynamic stretching.
Good news: Mavis didn’t pee herself.
Bad news: Mavis was in front of me during our downward dog stretch.
“All right,” Madden called ten minutes later. “Those that are running, head to the bay door. Those that are rowing, find a rower.”
We did, and I found myself being sandwiched between Soren and Mavis.
Mavis who was grumbling under her breath as she waited for the screen to cooperate.
Soren who was shaking the wet out of his hair and hitting my calves with it.
“Do you mind?” I asked.
Soren grinned at me.
I reached down and shucked the shirt off my top half, tossing it to the floor near my bottle of water.
My screen finally began to cooperate, along with Mavis’s, and together we watched with amusement as Soren bitched about the damper, the amount of time the screen was taking to load, the units that the screen was displaying, and finally about rowing in general.
“You okay over there, Doc?” Mavis laughed.
“Fine,” he grumbled.
“Go!”
We all started rowing, and I realized rather quick that I was going to suck.
I was tired from my workout this morning, not to mention the amount of work I’d put in underneath a car today.
Needless to say, ten minutes in, I was dying.
Luckily, I wasn’t the only one.
Unluckily, it was the woman at my side that was struggling.
I watched, slightly mesmerized, as Mavis tore her shirt off and threw it to the ground, her face pouring sweat.
“So hot,” she groaned as she got back to rowing.
I grunted out a reply, trying not to stutter in my own row at the sight of her.
It was hot.
In fact, with the rain, the humidity was downright unbearable.
The only thing that felt like it was saving us was the air that came out of the rower’s fan.
I could feel a slight disturbance in the air from Mavis’s machine.
“It’s disgustingly hot,” Soren agreed.
I looked over at my friend, the ER doctor.
“Where the hell have you been?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you in forever.”
“Work,” he grunted as he pulled again. “So fucking tired.”
“So much for being a newlywed,” Mavis called. “Are you two even spending any time together?”
Soren had recently married another doctor, Nola.
Nola was an obstetrician who’d just moved to the area a few months before I’d moved back.
She was adorably cute, pregnant just like Mavis, and so busy that I swore they never saw each other unless they passed in the halls of the hospital.
Soren and Nola both routinely came to the early morning classes, most of the time without each other, and I got to hear all kinds of juicy details about everything.
I liked them a lot, and I was happy to call them friends.
Obviously, Mavis felt much the same way.
“I had the day off yesterday, and every intention of spending the day with her, but she had a mom go into labor. I played with the dog, then went to work at PP because I was bored.” Soren panted.
My own breathing was getting labored, but I continued to dig my heels in and push through the lethargy with only sheer determination.
“What’s PP?” Mavis wondered.
I answered for Soren. “PP is Parsons Parcel. Soren and his brother, Johan, purchased it a while back.”
Mavis’s eyes widened.
Parsons Parcel had been a failing business a few years ago.
This year it was the fastest growing business in the area.
But instead of saying anything, she hung the handles of the rower up, then reached down for her water bottle.
She couldn’t get it due to the roundness of her belly, and the angle that the bottle was at, without taking her feet from the straps at the front of the machine.
So I stopped, reached for it, and handed it to her.
“Thanks,” she rolled her eyes.
My lips almost twitched.
“Don’t think that this means I like you,” I grumbled under my breath.
Soren, obviously listening, scoffed.
I looked over at him to see his eyebrows raised.
He lowered his voice so only I could hear before saying, “You have the biggest damn crush I’ve ever seen. You’re not even hiding it. I haven’t seen you take your eyes off of her since I got here.”
I started rowing again without answering.
But he was right.
Throughout the rest of the workout, I contemplated my situation.
At thirty-one, I was single for a reason.