Like everyone else in the neighborhood, he simultaneously felt deep reverence for the event and an underlying horror at how it had touched his life so closely.
The gym where he and Vince worked out didn’t even have a sign. It barely had a ceiling, but the brick warehouse had space. Lots of space, two bathrooms, two locker rooms, and plenty of muscle.
Who needed more than that?
Vince was already in the open gym area, lifting two-hundred-pound sandbags. Three old semi truck tires littered the ground around him. Add in two long, thick ropes and a few kettlebells, and the guy was in his element.
Give him a twelve-foot wall to scale and he would have been giddy.
If Vince did giddy.
“Wimp!” he shouted, drawing a few curious sets of eyes. Vince stood at about six foot four and weighed three hundred pounds, all muscle, bone and sinew. His body was an inverted triangle on top of two thick tree-trunk legs. Covered in tattoos with a long, thick, black braid that hung down the middle of his back like a rope you climbed to get to him, Vince was a mountain.
“Wuss!” Vince called back, working on finding a way to shoulder a sandbag on each shoulder. He hadn’t broken a sweat.
Gerald felt the love.
“Get your ass on the rowing machine and warm up. Then get in here and push shit around from one spot to the other.” Vince paused and glared. “Bring my coconut oil?”
“I brought you KY jelly. Tastes better.”
“Quit talking about sex. That’s like dangling a piece of yarn in front of a kitten and never letting them play with it.”
“Since when did you start comparing yourself to a kitten, Vince?”
“Since I started dreaming about pussy nonstop.”
The comment caught Gerald off guard, his stone face rippling briefly as his heart sped up with the misplaced notion that Vince somehow knew why he was already awake when the text had come in.
“You, too? Man, we’re fucking monks, aren’t we?”
“You may be fucking monks, Vince, but I don’t swing that way.”
The guy grunted. “Warm up. Quit talking about your pecker.” He frowned. “You got a new woman?”
“An old one.” He regretted the words instantly.
“You’re sleeping with elderly women now?”
“Ha ha.”
“What do you mean, ‘an old one’?”
“Nothing.”
Vince had a way of stopping and staring at you until it wasn’t so much that he pried the truth out of you. Those eyes made the truth cry Uncle and flee.
“I saw an ex of mine.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Not Suzanne?” He’d mentioned her over the years.
“Yep.”
“How in the hell did that happen?”
“She lives here. In Boston.”
“And you just happened to run into her in a city full of hundreds of thousands of people? You’re a walking coincidence. Buy a lottery ticket today, man.”
“She delivered inheritance papers to me.”
Shocking Vince wasn’t easy. His face was damn near comical with surprise. “You? Inherit what?”
“Long story.”
“I got all day, man.”
“Don’t want to talk about what I’m inheriting.”
“You about to be rich?”
He snorted.
“Then let’s talk about Suzanne,” Vince continued. “You back together?”
“No.”
“You want to be?”
The short inhale, then hitched breath, that took over his body was unscripted.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Vince said dryly. “You gonna tell her the truth this time?”
“Fuck off.”
“Gerald, man, you gotta tell her.”
“We’re done.” Before Vince could respond, Gerald shoved earbuds in and jumped on the old rowing machine. Within two minutes, he was in the zone.
The zone where he couldn’t hear Vince.
Old Jorgen, the guy who owned the place, limped between two truck tires and said something to Vince, who paused and turned to give Jorgen his complete attention. Vince would eat a mountain for the guy. Old Jorg was about ninety, with the kind of near-perfect posture in old men that made them pigeon-chested. His hips couldn’t hide his age, and he walked a little bowlegged, but otherwise had the stature of a twenty year old.
Jorg had let Vince live in the office when his step-dad kicked him out at fifteen. Gerald hadn’t known Vince then. Just knew the tale. Vince had become a personal trainer the old-fashioned way: by being a towel boy for the crazy boxers who came in here. Step by step, he’d fought his way up.
That was literally all Gerald knew about Vince’s past.
And Vince seemed to like it that way.
Fine. Gerald wasn’t exactly the spill-your-guts type, either. They bonded over torn muscle fibers.
The more, the better.
As Gerald raced through his warm-up, he tore his eyes away from the old man and the beast, listening to the heavy metal pounding through his earbuds. If he closed his eyes, he could recall the image of Suzanne’s gloriously nude body.
Hey, there.
Bad idea. The rowing machine suddenly became unbearably uncomfortable.
He looked at Old Jorg and imagined the locker room toilet.
Better.
Understanding why he’d had that dream wasn’t exactly rocket science. Stimulus, response.
See Suzanne, dream about her.
But truly grasping why he kissed her—and why she let him—was a puzzle.
He hadn’t even opened those damn inheritance papers. Tucked away in his gym bag, he’d thrown them in on a lark. Vince had a keen way of cutting through bullshit to get to the down-and-dirty heart of an issue.