shock of the loud wake-up washed away, I realized it was Noah. We were both slumped in the chairs that we’d fallen asleep in last night, watching Game of Thrones together, at around three in the morning. We kept saying, “Last one, last one,” but after saying that at least five times, we both passed out at some stage.
“Gym, guys,” Maxine said, with so much damn enthusiasm, as if she’d been drinking straight out of the enthusiasm chalice and was now drunk and giddy on the stuff.
I dragged my eyes to where she was standing and gave her the once-over, top to bottom. She looked perky as hell in her luminous gym gear and big smile, protein shake in one hand, gym bag in the other. I blinked at my watch a few times and then moaned.
“It’s waaay too early,” I said.
“I caaaan’t,” Noah moaned next to me, his voice deep and croaky.
“Me neither,” I said, massaging the base of my neck. It felt stiff. Not surprising. I’d fallen asleep in some awkward position, my neck hanging over the back of the chair, my leg over an arm, slight drool pooling in the corner of my mouth.
“You’re not getting out of it,” Maxine said, looking full of the joys of early mornings and protein shakes.
I rolled over and covered my face. “I don’t have any gym clothes,” I said, hoping this would end the conversation. Of course, it didn’t, because twenty minutes, one borrowed set of gym clothes and two cups of coffee to wake up later, I found myself standing inside a gym. I’d walked around aimlessly at first, while Noah and Maxine had started doing regimental boot-camp-like exercises that almost looked inhuman. Vigorous jumping, and lunging and lifting and . . .
My goodness, Noah looked like he could bench-press an entire ship, he was that strong. A cruise ship, full of thousands of people, who weighed extra because they’d all been eating five complimentary meals a day and having free soft drinks . . .
A cruise ship?
An image of a cruise-ship brochure flashed through my mind, and then disappeared back out again before I could even inspect the memory. After following Maxine and Noah around for a while, orientating myself with everything, we found ourselves standing in front of an interesting-looking contraption.
I looked up at the pyramid-shaped rope climber. A big steel structure with a spiderweb mesh of ropes crisscrossing it. A man had just scaled it all the way to the top, like bloody Spider-Man. And then, he’d turned around and come back down, face first, crawling on it as if crawling down the side of a building. He made it look so effortless.
“Wow!” I said as he disembarked. “That looks like fun.”
“That’s actually pretty advanced,” Maxine said.
“Nooooo, it looks so easy.” I walked up to it and pushed the web of ropes with my hands. It wasn’t as tight as I thought it would be and moved around much more than I’d anticipated.
“Don’t let it fool you, just because you see those in children’s playgrounds. This is an adult version.”
“Psssshhh!” I tsked and flipped my head back. I knew I could do this. Much like I knew I could eat a chili. I knew I could climb.
“Well, go for it,” Maxine said, “you’ll never know until you try.”
“Exactly!” I gripped the ropes in my hands.
“Are you going to do that?” Noah asked, coming around the corner. I only turned around to reply to him briefly. That had been the intention, anyway. But it didn’t pan out that way, because when my eyes caught sight of him I found it a little hard to prise them away.
He was sweaty. Wet shirt clinging to him like a second skin. His muscles looked bigger and bulgier than before. Probably from all those jumpy, lungey whatevers he’d been doing. He had these sexy lines of veins that ran up his arms and into the back of his hands and . . .
Look away! I turned my head quickly and focused my attention on the ropes, trying to hide the smile that had swept across my face, quite against my will, I might add. I had not given that smile permission to take up residence on my face like that, but it had. And it was very inconvenient.
I felt a kind of hot flutter in my stomach, another completely new sensation to me. In all my few days of consciousness, I’d never experienced anything like it. It was a little like