When I exited to the gym, the lights were down except for the one we needed, and Callie lounged on the end of the rod floor with her legs extended in front of her and crossed at the ankles with the weight of her trim body settled into her forearms behind her back.

My bag hit the ground just in time to set off her giggles.

Hunched and pressed into herself, her stomach muscles contracted with each peal, and her toes curled until they folded backwards into the floor.

“What?” I asked, knowing the object of her laughter had to be me, but at a loss for the exact reason why.

“Nothing,” she avoided.

“What?” I persisted.

She rolled her eyes and gave in, sitting up slowly as she did.

“It’s just…your hair. It’s…well, it’s—”

“Funny,” I finished for her.

That didn’t stop her from getting the last word, a cute scrunch of her nose cushioning the effect of her words. “Looking. It’s funny looking.”

“Thanks?”

“Oh,” she said in realization, squealing her laughter to an immediate halt. “Sorry.”

I didn’t want to make her feel bad. It wasn’t like this was the in-style and I’d perfectly crafted it to look this way. It was just a convenient fact like a million other things I hadn’t bothered to change.

“No worries. I’m not particularly fond of it or anything. Just haven’t put any effort in to cut it in the last six months or so.”

“And the headband?” she questioned with a flick of her dainty chin.

My eyes rolled up as though I could see it atop my head. “It’s just practical.” I shrugged. “Messes with my tumbling if it gets in my eyes.”

Her cheeks pinked as she nodded in reply. The rosy color softened her eyes again, and I had to turn to my phone to keep from getting distracted by them.

Finding the song more easily than the night before, I turned up the volume, dropped it to my bag, pulled my shirt over my head and walked over to the end of the floor with Callie.

She scrambled up quickly, moving out of my way as though too close of a proximity would result in an electric shock.

And hell, maybe she was right.

“Metallica?” she asked with surprising musical knowledge. I, on the other hand, knew very little. I only knew this music because it had been ingrained in me from the time I could listen.

“Yeah,” I confirmed before admitting, “My dad’s favorite band.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” I chuckled, the memory of my mom yelling at my dad to listen to something with an actual melody making me smile. “My mom hated it too.”

I could picture her face so perfectly in my mind, the way she nagged and nagged at my dad to find something better to love. He always told her he already had. And, as their child, I normally left the room thoroughly grossed out.

“I don’t hate it,” Callie qualified. “It’s just intense. Kind of makes my heart feel like it’s going to beat out of my chest.”

I pulled myself out of my nostalgia and focused fully on her and her explanation.

“Funny. That’s what makes me like it.”

The dichotomy of our opinions of the same visceral reaction astonished me.

“Really?” she asked, putting a hand flat to her chest to feel the effect the music had on each beat.

“Definitely,” I confirmed, putting a single hand to my own chest and harnessing it. “It’s perfect tumbling music.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. To me, the reasoning was simple. “Music feeds power, and tumbling thrives off of it.” I searched my brain quickly and came up empty. “I can’t think of a more symbiotic relationship actually.”

“Not even peanut butter and jelly?”

“No way,” I denied. “Compared to music and tumbling, it’s like peanut butter fucking hates jelly.”

A small laugh of disbelief bounded out of her throat like a cough, but the tide of consideration rolled in slowly and changed it to interested acceptance.

“Teach me your ways,” she offered easily, a smile curving the corners of her mouth fully this time and completely transforming her face while one hand gestured gallantly to the floor.

This.

God, I’d have to recreate it. Every night if I could.

Her personality morphed into a less structured version of itself and her figurative hair came down.

She was—

Relaxed.

It went that way for the next three weeks straight. Workouts swung from high to low as he criticized or praised, and my favorite time to be in the gym stayed very much the same.

But the company was oh so different than it had been for the majority of my life.

Sometimes we meshed and sometimes we didn’t, but we found a rhythm and routine. And I finally admitted to myself that I was happy to have him there—no matter how mixed up and jumbled he had my emotions.

He pushed, and I pushed back.

Somehow though, we managed to do it without knocking one another down.

Every night when we walked out of the building together, sweaty with laughter and endorphins buzzing deliriously from the exercise, he asked me to go somewhere with him.

Every night I said no.

But as he turned to me with hope in his handsome blue eyes, his stupid hair tucked away beneath his backward hat, I felt my tongue change direction. I fought it tooth and nail, scrapping and scraping and scratching at the image of my fleeting sanity.

I had my obsession with him managed at this point, but it carved a very tenuous edge. One I knew could be sharpened to the point of irreparable damage with just one night of recklessness.

“Callie.”

“Nik—” I started to say, very much knowing where he was going and needing to fight myself for conviction.

His eyes widened just slightly, the sad look of a puppy at the pound begging for a savior, weakening me at the knees and threatening to display all of my carefully hidden goo.

“Come with me. Please.”

The “please” sealed my coffin, each succulent letter driving in like an individual nail intending to secure my capture.

As the first syllable of my answer left my lips his face reacted minutely, hard jaws flanking a set of pinched pillow-like lips, but it wasn’t to the word I said.

It was to the one he expected.

“Alright.”

He nodded, forcing a gulp through his frustrated throat.

“One day you’re going to say…wait…did you just say alright?” he replied, stumbling over the words in a messy mix of confusion and excitement and screeching his upset nod to a halt.

“I did,” I confirmed with a smirk.

His entire body came alive, kind of how it did before a tumbling pass, energy passing through his fingers and toes and shooting plainly out of his anything-but-plain eyes.

It was boy-like in nature but mature in appearance, and with each second I soaked it in, I knew that the anticipation of my constant ‘nos’ had made a one time ‘yes’ that much better.

For him and for me.

“Good. Good, that’s good,” he stuttered some more, making my smile deepen.

In fact, it was so enthralling, it kind of made me want to drag out every decision and discussion I ever had, making the other party suffer if only for the good of the outcome.

“Don’t even think about it,” he warned, reading the illicit intent in my eyes and the mischief in the line of my mouth.

Normally I kept a vise-like grip on my emotions, but I seemed to defy all normality and logic around him. Emotion bled through not only the bone and the flesh within me, but seeped out the pores in my skin and covered him with their sweat.

Any appeal he might find in it I supposed rested in the circumstances of the situation, much how actual sweat garnered magnetism, during a passionate romp, and repugnance, after a vigorous workout, in equal measure.