Turn 4 of 21

Turn around and look at him

MC turns around.

It's not a decision so much as a surrender to the thing her body has been doing for the last thirty seconds, which is orienting itself back toward the center of the room, back toward him, back toward the source of that heat that presses between her shoulder blades like a palm. Her sneakers pivot on the rubber flooring with a soft, defeated squeak, and she faces him across ten feet of empty gym, her hand still resting on the push bar behind her, fingers curled loosely around cold metal.

Valko hasn't moved. He's standing where she left him, arms at his sides, feet planted shoulder-width apart on the black mat, and he's looking at her. Not at her face, exactly. At her reflection in the frosted glass behind her, which means he's been watching her the whole time she was watching the door, and the knowledge of that lands in MC's chest like a stone dropped into still water. He knew she'd stop. He knew before she did.

The overhead panels catch the gold of his irises and hold it, and in the unforgiving light she can see the thing she's been refusing to look at directly since the first session, the thing she's been explaining away as contact lenses or a trick of the gym's lighting rig. His pupils are vertical. Not round. Thin black slits bisecting that amber gold, and they're wider than they should be in a room this bright, as though the iris is designed to open far beyond human parameters, to gather light from places the sun doesn't reach.

"You're still here," Valko says. His voice has dropped below the register she recognizes from their training sessions, below the professional baritone he uses when counting reps or correcting her form. This is something older, rougher, scraped raw at the edges, and it vibrates in the space between them in a way that has nothing to do with volume.

MC's hand slips off the push bar. The metal is warm where her palm was, and she doesn't remember gripping it that hard. She stands there with her gym bag cutting a diagonal line across her chest, her pulse visible in the hollow of her throat, and she doesn't say anything, because every response she can think of sounds like an excuse, and neither of them is interested in excuses right now.

Valko's chest rises and falls with a slow, deep rhythm, the kind of breathing that belongs to something with a ribcage larger than it should be, lungs built for distances and altitudes that have nothing to do with a private gym in a near-future city. The compression shirt shifts with each breath, the green fabric pulling taut across shoulders that are broader than any trainer she's worked with, and the heat coming off him is visible now, a faint shimmer in the air between them, like asphalt on a summer day.

"The mat's still there," he says. "The offer's still there. Fifty burpees, and then we train." He pauses, and the corner of his mouth moves again, that private almost-smile that touches only one side of his face.

"Clock's still running."

The digital readout on the mirrored wall ticks from 19:34 to 19:35, and the small red change feels like a mark against a ledger that's already running deeper than either of them is willing to name.