Page 12 of Resistance Training

brAD

I don’t like this feeling I have in my chest.

This is not delayed-onset muscle soreness related to hypertrophy of the pectoralis major and minor.

This is not an inflammatory response caused by microscopic tears in the muscle fibers.

This is originating from the muscle that is no longer supposed to respond to Vivian Sparks, and there is no recovery strategy I can employ aside from not thinking about her—or only thinking about how much caring about her hurts.

But fuck.

She still wears that thin gold chain necklace that’s so dainty you only notice it when the light hits it. I wonder if it’s the same one she wore in high school or if she got another one. I wonder if she wears it in the shower. I wonder if she’s taking a shower right now…

Nope.

Not thinking about that.

Thinking about my goals.

Thinking about what fires me up.

I can’t believe she kept calling me Brad.

That’s not who I am at the gym. I don’t show up at her work calling her Sparky and telling everyone about our two-person book club and how we’d hang out on a big rock and a log in the cove by my house and once she fell asleep on my shoulder while we were reading The Martian and I couldn’t breathe because I didn’t want to wake her up and because I thought maybe I was the one who was dreaming.

Such a turd.

Vivian, of all people, should understand why I don’t identify with the name Brad in my new life here.

In my new body here. Vivian, of all people, because she’s the one who went to prom with the dickhead who dominated the Brads at school from kindergarten through senior year.

The shitbag who bestowed the moniker of Fat Brad upon me when we were eight.

The fuckwit who carved the words Fat Brad into my locker on the first day of school every year that I had a locker.

The douche-ass-dickwad who shoved me into a ditch when he saw me out running junior year because I was trying to get in shape.

There’s only one Hot Brad at this school, fattie.

Brad Turner.

Such a dick.

She should understand. Yes, I incorporated my origin story into my brand as a personal trainer even though I call myself Mitch here. No, I don’t talk about the Fat Brad piece of it. Yes, that’s my fire. My motivation. Ever since I moved to Portland nearly eight years ago.

But fuck.

It may be true that I didn’t tell her everything about how he treated me because I was so ashamed.

I mean, why would I tell the only girl who wanted to hang out with me that the most popular guy at our school treated me like shit because we had the same name?

Why would I waste our precious time together talking about him ?

She knew he got all his asshat friends to call me Fat Brad all through school—that should have been enough.

Fuck.

Now I’m thinking about it.

All of it.

I wonder if she still dresses a little bit hippie-dippie and likes to walk around barefoot.

I wonder if she still listens to Fleetwood Mac and picks wildflowers and places them behind her ear.

I wonder if she still likes to read, and if she does I wonder if she still thinks of me when she reads a book she likes because I never stopped thinking of her.

That’s not true.

I stopped myself from thinking about her when I realized I was thinking about her.

I can still do that.

This was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have taken her on as a client. I’ll give her to Gwen.

Except if Gwen’s her trainer and she’s still going to my gym and I see her, there isn’t as much of an excuse for me to not hang out with her. If I hang out with her I will definitely fuck her.

Fuck.

I go to my bedroom, open the top-right drawer in my dresser, and reach toward the back of it. There it is. My old phone. And the charger.

The best thing to do right now would be to face this head-on. To revisit that last conversation. Not to reopen the wound—that scarred over years ago. To remember and to know and to have clarity. Wondering leads to obsession, and clarity is the end of wondering.

I plug that old phone in. The screen doesn’t light up, but it will. It’s been eight years since I used this phone.

I’ll do ten minutes of burpees—forty seconds on, twenty seconds off—until the battery gets enough juice.

I’ll film it for an IG reel. This is work. This is staying focused on me and the business I’m building.

If she happens to find my Instagram account and see it, well, she’ll know I’m busy living my life and not thinking about that ponytail or the heat in her eyes when I pulled her up off the floor or the scent of her shampoo—the same shampoo she used in high school.

This I know. Because that time she went to Orcas Island with her family for a week in the summer between junior and senior year, I missed her so much I went to the drugstore and sniffed every bottle of shampoo I could open.

And I bought that bottle of shampoo with shea butter, and I absolutely punished my aching heart and cock at the same time while smelling it when my parents were out.

I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t in love with her all the way up until the second I saw her again when she returned and hugged me and I buried my face in her thick, dark hair and inhaled and I realized— Shit. I’m in love with her.

And the last thing I needed to do was tell her and ruin my friendship with the only person at my school that I really liked. The only one who really liked me. So I threw away that bottle of shampoo and I forced myself to picture the actress from The Mummy when I jerked it instead.

Not a hardship.

But I still loved Vivian.

I loved her so fucking much it hurt more than that time a client dropped a twenty-pound weight on my foot.

Landed right on my metatarsals, but it was only from a few feet up.

Every time I looked at her it felt like I was slowly dying from not telling her how I felt.

Like every cell in my body was giving up on me for being so lame.

Like I knew without a doubt that I would never have her the way I wanted her, and that was so much worse.

But it was also fine.

Until it wasn’t.

My ten-minute timer goes off. I check the video, do a quick edit to speed it up, and post it to my Instagram before checking my old phone.

It’s alive. The past has come back to life in the palm of my hand.

The phone that connected me to Vivian for nearly four years is ready to give me the clarity I need so I can get back to being the guy who can live without the girl.

Any girl. But mostly the girl who is now the woman who wants me to work on her booty.

And there it is. The texts between me and Vivian. From eight years ago, going back three and a half years, maybe. But I need to see the final texts, from those last few weeks of high school.

I scroll up, up, up. To the night before the day that will live in infamy.

She made me read Twilight for ABC. Our two-person book club was called Asshole Book Club, and the first rule of Asshole Book Club was you couldn’t just say It was great—I loved it!

you had to be an asshole even if you really did love the book.

I came up with that rule. Vivian came up with the second rule, which was that we had to read whatever book the other person chose and even if we hated it we had to say three things we liked about it.

And then we started coming up with so many ridiculous rules we couldn’t remember any of them.

The one rule we never came up with was how to handle being a guy and a girl who were best friends.

Especially when it was coming to the end of high school and I was planning to go to Princeton in a few months.