AllFreeNovel
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“Kids?” I coughed as I lowered the weights. “What the fuck?”
“From what I’m reading here, you guys are hot and heavy. I mean, the way she looks at you in these pictures… It isn’t platonic.”
I pushed out another rep. “She’s a good actress.”
“Right. So what are you doing with her next week?”
“More of the same, I think.”
He circled the rowing machine. “Ya know, Page Six thinks you’ll be going out with that jewelry sales girl again for the third time pretty soon. Wow, was she hot.”
“Natalia? They can think whatever they want. I’ll be happy to prove them wrong. And her sister worked at the jewelry store. Natalia was a model.”
“Whatever. When you get her horizontal, what she does during the day doesn’t matter, am I right?” He sat down on the rowing machine. “How does this thing work.”
“A wimp like you can’t handle it.”
He put his feet up on the plates. “It can’t be that hard.”
“Grab the handle and pull while you also push with your legs. The seat will slide back.”
He did a stroke and then dropped the handle. “Are you going to keep up this charade with Alexa as your—” He made air quotes. “—long-term, respectable girlfriend?”
“Yup,” I grunted with another press. “You can’t stop after one on that machine.”
He did another stroke.
“The distance on the screen is in meters. Keep it up until it says you’ve gone a thousand.”
As I expected, he quit after only a few strokes. “I don’t have time right now.”
“Right.”
“Did I tell you about Ursula?”
I didn’t bother answering. It wouldn’t do any good.
“She was German. Very organized and disciplined, those Germans. She had like a timeline and checklist for everything. She even typed out her recipes.”
I moved to the bicep-curl machine.
“Well, she broke up with me very suddenly. No notice. None.”
“Maybe the German girls are smarter than you thought,” I quipped.
Noah acted like he didn’t hear me. “I mean, we were having a good time and all—very good, actually. I even tried her recipes. Typed or not, they didn’t make any sense—grams and shit—but she still liked my cooking. At least she said she did. And showers with her were something else. She had this stroke she’d do with—”
“Is this going somewhere?”
“—with her hands and a bar of soap, and it was to die for. Like literally the best thing ever.”
“I get it,” I said, shaking my head.
“But she snored. And then all of a sudden it was over. I’d been a dumb fuck and hadn’t caught on. Call me clueless.”
“Okay, you’re clueless.” I moved the selector pin on the machine to add another five pounds.
“Real relationships are like pushing a rock up a hill. There’s no standing still. You gotta make progress until you get to the top, or splat.”
