The laundry room is the one place in this building where nobody bothers me.
I come here on my breaks because it's the closest thing to privacy this facility offers. And today I need privacy for what I'm about to do.
I lean against the folding table, pull out my phone, and open my banking app. The balance hits me like a slap and I swipe past it before my brain can do the math on how many days that number represents.
I've already submitted two loan applications.
Two hundred thousand, medical emergency, every document I could scrape together attached like desperate little flags. The notifications are sitting there waiting, and I've been avoiding them the way you avoid a letter you already know contains bad news.
First lender. I tap it open and read the first line three times, like repetition might rearrange the words.
Application denied due to insufficient and unstable income history.
I close it and open the second. Same language, same verdict, same polite corporate way of saying ‘your son's life doesn't fit our risk profile.’ Denied.
I set the phone face-down on the table and press both hands flat against the surface until my knuckles go white. I don't cry — crying is a luxury that costs time I don't have. Instead I calculate.
Rent. Groceries. William's prescriptions. The insurance gap.
I rearrange the numbers like furniture in a room that's too small, trying to make them fit, and they don't. They never do. There is no version of my life where these numbers add up to saving my son.
I pick up the phone, shove it in my pocket, and walk out to start my shift.
My next task is the main gym. Gary told me the players finished their session twenty minutes ago.
Gary lied.
Jared is still here, alone and shirtless. Doing pull-ups on the bar at the far end of the room. Back muscles rolling under damp skin, the overhead lights turning him into something that belongs in a museum wing nobody lets me into.
His gym shorts hang low on his hips and every time he pulls up, the muscles in his abdomen contract in a way that should require a permit.
My feet stop in the doorway and for one traitorous, pathetic second I'm seventeen again, sitting in the bleachers with my sketchbook, tracing the line of his shoulders while Olivia pretended not to notice.
Then I remembered yesterday. Bleachers girl. The diary comment. Twenty men laughing. The way he turned my most private tenderness into a punchline and didn't even have the decency to look sorry about it.
I grab my supplies and start wiping down the nearest bench with my head down, scrubbing like the leather personally wronged me.
If I work fast enough maybe he won't… "Missed a spot."
I close my eyes and count to three before opening them again.
He's sitting on the bench I just cleaned. Right on the surface I just wiped, his shorts leaving a damp mark on the pristine leather. He looks up at me with that half-grin — eyes bright, posture open, every line of him arranged for maximum damage.
"You're sitting on the spot I just cleaned."
"Then I guess you'll have to clean it again." He leans back on his hands, the position pulling his chest open like an invitation to something I'm not accepting. "I'll wait."
His eyes stay locked on mine with an intensity that doesn't match the lazy words — something underneath the amusement, testing, pushing, measuring how far I'll bend.
The gym is empty and enormous around us but the only space that exists is the three feet between his body and mine, charged with something I refuse to name. A bead of sweat tracks down his collarbone and disappears below his clavicle and I hate myself for following it.
"You're going to have to move," I say, low and even.
"Ask nicely."
The silence stretches until I can hear both our breathing.
I can smell him — salt, sweat, and something expensive underneath that my lungs are cataloging without permission. My heartbeat has relocated to my throat and is doing something deeply embarrassing there.
I lean in, just slightly. Just enough that his grin falters for a fraction of a second.
"Move." A beat of silence. "Please."
The ‘please’ lands between us like a lit match.
His eyes drop to my mouth — one beat, barely a flicker — then back up. He stands slowly, unfolding to his full height. Close enough that I have to tilt my chin to hold eye contact. That the heat coming off his skin reaches mine across the quarter-inch of air between us.
"See?" His voice is lower than before. "Wasn't that hard."
When he walks past me, his arm brushes mine — bare skin against bare skin, a contact so brief it shouldn't register and yet every nerve ending in my body lights up like a switchboard.
I don't breathe until the gym door swings shut behind him. Then I wipe the bench again with hands that won't stay steady, telling myself the heat crawling up my neck is anger.
It's not entirely anger. I know that. And I hate that I know that.
I'm mopping near the entrance, focusing very hard on the floor and not on the ghost-sensation of his arm against mine. Jared hasn't left — he's back on the pull-up bar at the far end.
Because apparently one session isn't enough punishment for a body that already looks like that.
Then the door swings open and Anna walks in with her gym bag over one shoulder, eyes scanning the room like a surveillance camera. They find Jared instantly and her entire body language transforms.
Shoulders back. Smile recalibrated from predatory to sweet. Voice pitched into something that probably works on men with fewer brain cells. She crosses straight to him, puts her hand on his arm, and starts telling him about some event this weekend, leaning closer.
Jared glances past Anna as his eyes find me — mop in hand, polo damp, hair falling out of its knot — and then he looks back at the queen bee with that lazy, devastating grin.
"What's wrong, Anna?" He says it loud enough for me to hear. "Wanna be instead of her?"
He nods toward me and Anna's smile crystallizes. My mop stops moving as the gym goes very, very quiet.
"Careful," I say flatly, not looking up. "You're both standing on a wet floor. It's slippery."
The double meaning hangs in the air like smoke.
Jared lets out a short laugh — surprised, almost genuine, the kind of sound you make when something catches you off guard. Anna's eyes cut to me and I can feel myself being added to a list I never asked to be on.
He drops from the bar, grabs his towel and water bottle, winks at the room in general, and walks out with Anna following him like a puppy.
My pulse is hammering and I'm not sure if I just won something or signed my own death warrant.
Anna is not the kind of woman who forgets a slight — I could see that much in the three seconds her eyes held mine. She files things away. She waits. She strikes when your back is turned.
But the laugh — Jared's real laugh, the surprised one, the one that broke through whatever character he performs for the rest of the world — is still sitting in my chest like a warm coal I can't put down.
________________