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Adam loaded up the shoulder-shrug machine with weights—had to make it look respectably heavy—tried it…couldn’t budge it…had to take a lot of weights off…mortified at the thought of the brutes’ no doubt mounting scorn…finally reduced the weight enough to do three sets…ten, eight, and a final puny five repetitions. Between sets he took deep breaths, looked down at the floor with his face set in a terribly manly grimace, rolled his shoulders, and walked with a straddle in the accepted apelike fashion.
After an hour of lifting, Adam felt gratifyingly pumped up, and he headed downstairs, stealing glimpses of his traps where they were visible at the extra-big neck of his T-shirt as he passed mirrors, and wondering if they really did look a bit bigger or if it was just his imagination. No…they did look bigger.
He was enjoying that temporary high the male feels when his muscles, no matter what size they may be, are gorged with blood. He feels…more of a man.
The Farquhar Fitness Center had elevators, but it also had a wide, well-lit stairway, and Adam, high on muscle building, chose the scenic route. On each floor’s stairway landing you could look through a pair of big plate-glass doors and see what was going on within. One floor down, the sign above the double doors said CARDIOVASCULAR, which struck Adam as a pathetically medical term co
Just beyond the StairMasters were rows and rows of treadmills, an extraordinary number of treadmills…wide black keyboards…green and orange diode lights. The noise was almost deafening. Row after row of boys and girls were ru
He started to turn back to the StairMasters when a mane of long brown hair caught his eye. The girl was ru
How to approach her, though. She was flying on that treadmill—looked as if she were ru
Adam got up on the treadmill and looked at the girl, hoping she would notice him before he had to do any ru
“Are you all right? What happened?”
Her face, framed by the flowing brown hair, was not only young and angelic but also, somehow, maternal. He was torn between the ignominy of a hopeless fool and the impulse to rise up on one elbow and press his cheek against hers and embrace her and say, “Thank you!” He settled for just propping himself up, smiling, shaking his head self-deprecatingly, and saying, “Wow…thank you.”
“What happened?”
In a daze: “I don’t know…My feet went out from under me…”
He started to get up, and a pain shot through his hip, and he winced—“Oooo!”—and settled back down.
“What’s wrong?” She had to shout to be heard over the ruckus of the machines.
“I did something to my hip!” He shook his head again to indicate that this wasn’t serious, merely stupid.