I taught the 6 a.m. spin class at Glenfrost Community Fitness three mornings a week, in a converted warehouse with fogged windows and a sound system that only worked properly on the left speaker. It was mostly the same twenty or so regulars, nurses coming off night shift, farmers’ wives, a handful of men who liked to sit at the back and pretend the class was about fitness rather than watching.
One of those men was Grant Okafor, who ran the hardware store on Miller Street and had, over several weeks, developed a habit of calling me over mid-class to “check his form,” an excuse that always seemed to end with him catching my wrist or my hip rather than actually fixing anything.
I’d brushed him off twice already, politely, the way women learn to be polite about things that shouldn’t require politeness at all. That day he didn’t take the hint.
The lights were still low for the warm-up when he waved me over, complaining his seat was too high, and the moment I leaned in to adjust it his hand came up and landed flat against my hip, fingers curling in a way that had nothing to do with bike posture, his voice low against my ear over the music. “You don’t need to fix the seat, Sarah. Just stay a bit closer. I like the view from here.”
I froze, the old, familiar freeze, the one that had nothing to do with strength and everything to do with how a body sometimes simply refuses to move when it matters most, and I didn’t hear the door at the back of the studio open.
I only heard a bike hit the floor, and Grant’s hand vanish from my hip so fast I stumbled backward, catching myself against the mirrored wall, and turned to find him pinned face-first against it beside me, his arm wrenched up behind his back, a blond boy I barely knew holding him there with an ease that made my stomach drop.
“Touch her again,” Damian said, very quietly, in a voice I hadn’t heard him use before, “and I will make sure you never lift that arm above your shoulder for the rest of your life.”
The whole class had gone still. Someone finally killed the music.
“Get your hands off me, you little…”
“I’m going to let go now,” Damian said, over him, as though Grant hadn’t spoken at all. “And you’re going to walk out that door and find a different gym. Understood?”
Grant understood. He left without his shoes.
It was only once the door swung shut behind him that I properly registered what I was looking at: Damian, in gym clothes that had nothing to do with basketball, at a spin class four hundred metres from the university at six in the morning.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, once the class had scattered into shaky, whispering knots and I’d finally found my voice.
He had the grace to look almost embarrassed, a rare, human crack in that unshakeable calm. “I skipped my eight o’clock lecture last week. And the week before that.” A pause. “I’ve been coming to watch your class for a month, Sarah. I told myself it was because I liked the music.”
“The music is terrible.”
“I know.” The corner of his mouth lifted, though his eyes were still dark with something that hadn’t fully cooled from what I’d just watched him do. “I still came.”
I didn’t know, then, that a boy I’d spoken to once, over a basketball he’d caught out of the air, had already rearranged his entire week around six mornings I didn’t know he was watching. I only knew that my hip still ached where Grant’s fingers had been, and that the ache was already being crowded out by something warmer, something that had absolutely no business existing between a widow and a boy who still had lectures to skip.
“Thank you,” I said, finally, quietly.
“Anytime,” he said, and I believed him more than I should have.