Aiden made a sound that could’ve been a laugh, but I wasn’t quite sure. “How old were you?”
“Twelve.” I shook my head. “Maybe it won’t work for Anya. But I know, for us, it was just enough of a distraction.”
“From what?” he asked quietly.
“Everything.”
Aiden was quiet, and in that quiet, I felt naked.
“I’ll see if my mom can find one,” he said after a moment. “Thank you.”
“Do you drink coffee?” I asked suddenly. My eyes pinched shut in mortification.
“I don’t,” he answered, and I heard the confusion clear in his voice.
My hand found the bottom of the cup, still sitting on my desk. “I was … I got you coffee on my way in this morning.”
Again, Aiden was silent. Oh, silence was bad for me when I wasn’t sure how to proceed. It made for all sorts of awkward babbling impulses.
“I mean, I got some for me and Emily too,” I said. “I just … I wanted to repay the favor. Because I shouldn’t have dumped the one you got me. That was rude.”
He hummed, low in his throat. I found that I liked the sound. A lot.
“Forgiven,” he replied. There was a smile in his voice, and I wished I could see it.
But that was it. Nothing further. It wasn’t the first time that Aiden didn’t react the way that I expected him to. Maybe, like Paige said, he was just as much of a mystery to me as I was to him.
I exhaled lightly. “Good luck with the stickers.”
He said my name by way of a goodbye, and even if it wasn’t much of an olive branch … it was something.
The next morning, I had an iced tea sitting on the edge of the front desk when his truck pulled in. There was no way I was capable of breathing normally when he approached.
Maybe it was because I’d only known him—the real him—for such a short amount of time, but the four days without seeing him seemed like a month. In his absence, the old gym signage had been removed from the building, and watching him pause to stare up at the blank space with an inscrutable expression on his face, I desperately wished to know what was going on in his head.
With one last look at the area where the new lighted sign would go, he pulled open the door.
“Ward,” he said in greeting. But he was slower to speak, his voice lower in pitch, and his eye contact was … a vibe all of its own. The phone call had been such meager practice. This was the real test after our sparring match.
His eyes landed on the cup, and one side of his lips quirked up.
Slowly, Aiden picked it up, studying the contents before he took a sip.
“Still not it,” he said. “Good guess, though.”
Not a single word came out of my mouth when he finally severed that eye contact and walked back to his office.
Not coffee. Not iced tea.
I caught myself watching him throughout the day. Sometimes his gaze tangled with mine, and sometimes it seemed like he was oblivious to my attention.
Like when he opened the first box of new merch and he held up one of the T-shirts for a long minute and just stared at it.
My head tilted from where I absently wiped down some bags with Kelly after her class.
“He really likes that shirt,” she whispered.
I smiled. “Seems so.”
“You know,” she said, “for as much crap as I gave him at the beginning, he’s an awesome boss. I figured he’d be … I don’t know … one of those asshole prima donna fighters.”
“He’s definitely not that,” I murmured.
He bought sticker books for his sick daughter and kept a low profile. He got in my face when he thought I was being reckless with my safety and didn’t flinch at my anger. He bought coffees and wiped down weight benches. One moment, he looked like he was going to back me up against a wall, and the next, he was maintaining a polite professional distance.
“If you stare any harder, you’re going to burn a hole in his skin,” Kelly commented lightly.
“Just trying to figure him out.”
“Uh-huh.”
I rolled my eyes.
“You two have been circling each other since the day he started. It’s like watching the two most flirt-avoidant people in the universe trying to figure out how to speak to each other.”
I tossed a used wipe at her, and she laughed.
Aiden’s attention moved in our direction, and with the T-shirt folded in his hand, I felt a little like he was studying me in the same way I was studying him.
The next day, I was off.
And the one after that, I added Kombucha to the list of drinks that Aiden did not drink in the morning.
It wasn’t matcha either, which tasted like dirt, according to him.
The routine we settled into over the next week held a strange sort of tension, different than it had been at the beginning. Maybe because we were on more equal footing, or maybe because I wasn’t doing my very best to avoid him anymore.
And what I found, as I watched him interact with his growing list of clients, with the new trainers we hired, with the rest of us, was that I liked him as much as I wanted him.
His sense of humor was there, hidden underneath the reserve.
“Lemon water?” he asked. He held the cup up and gave it a dirty look.
“Apparently I’m not very good at this.” I watched him over the edge of the computer monitor.
“Tastes like I’m drinking Pledge.”
I rolled my eyes, and Aiden watched me carefully.
“Do you want some help with that?” he asked, nodding at all the boxes I was still unpacking.
