Turn 5 of 21
MC's bag hits the floor.
She doesn't remember deciding to drop it. One moment her fingers are curled around the strap, and the next the weight is gone from her shoulder and the bag is slumped against the base of the wall with a dull thud, and she is walking toward the mat. Her sneakers count off the distance in sharp, precise sounds — eight feet, six, four — and then she steps onto the black surface and it gives slightly under her weight, and she is standing in front of Valko for the first time without the buffer of professional distance between them.
He is taller than she accounted for. In motion, across the gym, he'd always seemed large but manageable, a big man in a room built to make big men feel ordinary. Up close, with her head tilted back to meet his eyes, he is something else entirely. The heat pours off him in waves that she can feel pressing through her tank top, warming the skin of her arms and collarbone, and the shimmer she'd noticed from fifteen feet away is almost invisible at this range because the air between them is so uniformly warm that there's no contrast left to bend the light.
"Fifty burpees," Valko says. He doesn't step back. He is close enough that she can see the texture of his skin, the fine grain of it, the way the tendons in his forearms stand out like cables under the fluorescent light. His pupils are still slits, still wrong, still catching the overhead glow and holding it in gold, and he is looking at her directly now, not through a reflection, not through glass.
MC drops into the first burpee. Her chest hits the mat, she pushes up, jumps, and lands, and the motion is automatic, drilled into her body by months of sessions in rooms exactly like this one. Valko watches without speaking. He counts in his head — she can tell because his lips move silently, a habit she's noticed before — and his eyes track her form with an intensity that has nothing clinical about it. On the fourth burpee, her form breaks, her back arching on the push-up phase, and he's there, two steps closer, his hand hovering an inch from the curve of her spine without touching.
"Flat," he says. That single word, spoken at a volume meant only for her, at a distance meant only for her, carries a weight that fifty professional corrections haven't. MC corrects. The next rep is clean. The heat from his palm radiates against her lower back through the thin fabric of her shirt, and she can feel the space where his hand isn't touching her like a brand.
By rep twelve, she's sweating. By rep twenty, her muscles are burning. Valko has drifted closer with each set, and somewhere around rep fifteen he stopped retreating after corrections, so that now, every time she rises from the mat and jumps, she is jumping in front of a man whose chest is close enough to feel the displaced air from her motion, whose breathing has shifted from that deep, slow rhythm to something faster, something that hitches on the inhale when her shirt rides up on the extension. She is acutely, intolerably aware of him, and the burpees have stopped being punishment and started being something else, a ritual of proximity that neither of them is pretending isn't happening.
"Thirty," Valko says aloud. His voice cracks on the syllable, a rough break in the baritone that he clears with a swallow, and MC is on her knees on the mat, breathing hard, and she looks up at him and finds that he is looking down at her, and the distance between them has collapsed to something that could be closed by either of them leaning forward.