1
Samantha Fox proudly surveys the layout of their new gym. The place she and Brian rented used to be a tropical-themed restaurant. Ceiling-to-floor windows surround almost every façade of the area, and the building itself is oddly shaped – with rooms sticking out everywhere like sore appendages from a misused mannequin.
Sam jokingly calls it an octadecahexagon. Whatever that means.
Presently, the restaurant turned exercise mecca is filled with rows and rows of leased gym equipment. The treadmills line four spacious windows, followed by a layer of elliptical cross-trainers and exercise bikes. In another section, the weight-lifting MultiGyms rub shoulders with the rowing machines. Racks of shining new dumbbells stack against several inner walls, and there are FitBalls and skipping ropes and exercise charts paraded everywhere in carefully arranged hegemony.
The shiny new staff they hired comprises of twenty young men and women – all fit, all nicely built, all attractive, all almost tanned. The men are muscle bound without appearing steroid-amped. The women are smooth-skinned, radiant and slim.
Brian Morton curls around an elliptical trainer, watching Sam with a strange light in his eyes. Watching her. Not the glowing younger women. This makes her proud as hell, and she beams even more radiantly than her workers. He wears a black wife beater over faded blue jeans, but there’s no doubt from the way he carries himself that he’s the boss in this place.
Or co-boss, since he’s letting her call the shots.
“I’ll remain a silent partner,” he teased her earlier.
“Oooh, how silent?” she asked him.
He grinned as he shimmied down her naked, prone body. He parted her thighs.
“As silent as I will be while doing this.”
He lowered his mouth onto her wet pu**y, and started to lave her clit and inner labia. Her fists bunched the sheets as she closed her eyes to savor his wicked tongue. He took her clit in between his lips and nibbled the burning piece of flesh gently.
Ohhhhh, she wanted to cry out. But silence had to be maintained if she wanted to prove a point to him.
They were in his new bedroom. He had bought an apartment in another part of Chicago. Although it was still roomy and comfortable, it was a downsize from his previous luxury penthouse.
She had been anxious about him. “Are you OK?”
“I still have all my hair and teeth, and last I checked, my balls are still descended. So yeah, I’m OK.”
She punched his arm. “I mean financially.”
“I had to give up the ten thousand dollar hookers and the Dom Perignon-laced orgies,” he deadpanned, “but other than that, I’m OK.”
“You sure the funding for our gym came from the loan your bank manager friend gave you?”
“Absolutely, positively, one hundred percent as sure as the fact I have an oversized penis. We can do lunch with Harold and he’ll let you see the documents yourself if you don’t trust me.” He managed to look miffed.
“I trust you.” She didn’t want him to put out in any way to help her. She was glad he seemed to have recovered his ribald spirits. It was nice to listen to his snark again, which had been muted for so long.
And now, here they are – in a gym they co-own.
Sam takes in all the eager faces of her new staff. My new staff, she proudly thinks. She has never run a company or even a division in her entire life. She has never managed people before, at least not directly under her. She’s as nervous as a bird with a fractured wing.
What if I f**k up?
“You won’t f**k up,” Brian had assured her. “I’ve managed plenty of people in my time. I’ll show you the ropes, though for my consultation fee, you’d have to put out.”
“Put out?”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “Sex four times a day.”
It’s amazing how much he has helped her, even though his own situation is grim.
She faces the staff – the receptionist, the trainers, the recruiters, the cleaners . . . hell, whatever it says on their business cards. She beams.
“So, guys, have we delivered the flyers to every home and apartment in the vicinity?” she says.
“They all went out last week,” the receptionist confirms.
“Then tomorrow we officially open,” Sam says. “Bring on the bubbly!”
Everyone claps and cheers. Champagne bottles pop. Brian smiles at her, and she experiences tingles all over. He’s letting her run the gym completely, and she hopes she won’t let him down.
2
It has been three months since ‘the incident’, as Brian refers to it. He is aware that after the court case, his freedom might be taken away from him for a good ten years or so – if he is convicted. And there’s nothing the hell he can do about it.
Because you deserve it. You are your father’s son.
No, don’t even think about that. Live in the moment. That’s right.
He takes a deep breath and concentrates on the present. He takes in his surroundings. Their new gym. They had named it ‘SHAPE’.
Sam is briefing everyone and she is just about finished.
He has been having post-traumatic stress disorder, which has caused him to ‘hang out’ permanently with Sam, and not any other woman who gives him the once over.
And there have been plenty of women who have made known to him that they are willing to spread their legs for him anytime. Waitresses. Real estate agents, especially during the time he was hunting for a new, downgraded apartment. But he can never be sure if they are checking him out for his looks and suave sophistication, or because they recognized his face in a newspaper. Hell, if they recognized his face, they should be running away from him, screaming – not toward him.
Anyhow, he’s hesitant to pursue those longing, come-hither glances – just in case one of those women might sue him for eye contact.
This is the main reason why he has managed to remain monogamous to Sam, he tells himself. He has not been mono-amorous since he started having sex in the tenth grade. Not that he had told Sam he was sleeping only with her. It would ruin his reputation, and he has to preserve it where Sam is concerned lest she gets ideas.
Something in his chest squirms when he thinks of her. Something he doesn’t want to (is afraid to) acknowledge. He’s happy when he’s with her, even with the weight of the world straddled upon his shoulders.
It’s almost as though she’s enough for him. And all the trappings the world has once offered – money, unlimited sex with anonymous strangers – seem to fade into obscurity. He wonders why he needed them in the first place.