Chapter 431 | For Fuck’s Sake, Kyle

Chapter 431: 431 | For Fuck’s Sake, Kyle

The bar came down clean on the sixth rep, touched his chest, and went back up. Jordan’s arms burned from shoulder to wrist but the weight moved because the weight had to move. One-eighty-five. Three weeks ago he couldn’t bench the empty bar without shaking like a Chihuahua in a thunderstorm. Now Kyle stood behind the rack with his hands hovering beneath the bar and his mouth running about a protein powder sale at GNC that Jordan did not care about even slightly.

"I’m telling you, bro. Vanilla peanut butter. Twenty-four grams per scoop. They had a BOGO thing last Tuesday and I grabbed six tubs."

"Kyle."

"Six tubs, Jordan. That’s like four months of gains sitting in my closet right now."

"Kyle, I need you to stop talking about peanut butter while I’m holding a hundred and eighty-five pounds above my sternum."

Kyle grinned down at him from behind the rack. "Fair."

Rep seven went up slower. Jordan’s pecs screamed and his triceps joined the protest somewhere around lockout. The rec center hummed with its usual Monday morning energy, thirty or forty students scattered across the floor in various states of athletic commitment. A girl on the cable machine had been watching Jordan since he walked in. He’d caught her twice in the mirror, which meant she’d been looking at least four additional times he hadn’t caught. ℴ

He didn’t care. He had bigger problems.

His phone sat face down on the bench beside his water bottle, and even though the screen pointed at the rubber flooring, Jordan could feel Cassie’s text burning through the aluminum casing like a signal flare. She wanted coffee Thursday at three-thirty. She wanted to poke around his life with the same forensic intensity she brought to quarterly earnings reports. She wanted to sit across from him in some overpriced Newport Beach cafe and dissect every lie he’d told her on Saturday with the surgical patience of someone who got paid six figures to find the number that didn’t belong.

Rep eight. The bar wobbled. Kyle’s hands closed around the shaft an inch above Jordan’s grip.

"I got it," Jordan grunted.

"You don’t got it."

"I got it."

Kyle let go. The bar went up. Jordan racked it with a clang that rang across the weight room and sat up on the bench, his chest heaving and his shirt dark with sweat down the center. He grabbed his phone before his brain could stop his hand.

Cassie’s message stared back at him. does 3:30 work better? have class until 3:15.

He’d already responded with a thumbs up emoji twenty minutes ago. Nothing since. But now his mother had sent four additional texts that he could see in the notification preview, all of them about Pinterest boards and grandbaby rooms and whether Chloe preferred sage green or dusty rose for the nursery walls.

Jordan locked the phone and shoved it into his gym bag.

"You good?" Kyle stood over him with a towel draped across one shoulder and concern folded into the creases around his eyes.

"My sister’s coming Thursday."

Kyle’s face went through recognition, understanding, and then a wince that said everything words couldn’t. Kyle had met Cassie once, at a barbecue the previous summer, and had described the experience afterward as being interviewed by a very pretty federal agent who already had his confession but wanted to watch him lie about it anyway.

"The sister who works in finance?"

"The sister who dissects human beings for entertainment and calls it relationship management."

"That one." Kyle handed Jordan a water bottle. "You bringing Chloe?"

"Chloe’s not coming. This is a one-on-one. Cassie wants to run a background check on my soul."

Kyle considered this for a moment, then clapped Jordan on the shoulder. "Burpees?"

"Why would burpees help with my sister?"

"They won’t. But I have a set of twenty that’ll keep your brain too busy to spiral. You want to think about Cassie for the next three hours, or do you want to think about not dying during burpees?"

Jordan looked at the clock on the wall. 7:14 AM. Maya’s class started at seven-thirty. He had sixteen minutes to either spiral about his sister’s investigation into his finances, his mother’s ninety-four-pin Pinterest board, the Platinum gacha he still hadn’t pulled, the Eliza quest ticking down with fifteen days remaining, Alexis’s four AM text that he still hadn’t answered, or the fact that Chloe’s pregnancy would become visible to the entire campus within eight weeks.

Or burpees.

"Burpees," Jordan said.

He made it through fourteen before his phone vibrated again inside the gym bag. The sound was muffled by his hand wraps and water bottle but his ear caught it anyway because his nervous system had been trained over six weeks to register that specific frequency the way a dog registers the crinkle of a treat bag. Jordan’s eyes flicked toward the bag on rep fifteen and his left foot landed a half-inch too far forward on the jump, throwing his balance wide enough that he stumbled on the descent and caught himself with his palms on the rubber matting.

"Phone’s in the bag, bro." Kyle’s voice carried amusement and zero sympathy.

"I know where the phone is."

"Your brain doesn’t. Your brain just left the building to check your notifications."

Jordan finished rep sixteen with his jaw locked. Seventeen. Eighteen. His quads burned and his lungs felt like someone had filled them with heated sand. Nineteen.

The phone buzzed again.

Jordan’s head turned.

"Oh for fuck’s sake." Kyle picked up the gym bag and carried it to the far wall, setting it on a shelf between a roll of athletic tape and someone’s abandoned shaker bottle. "Twenty. Go."

Jordan completed the final burpee and collapsed flat on his back on the rubber floor, staring at the rec center’s industrial ceiling while his cardiovascular system filed a formal grievance. Sweat ran from his temples into his ears. His tank top had given up on being a separate entity from his skin.

The clock read 7:27.

Three minutes until Maya’s class.

Jordan peeled himself off the floor and walked to the shelf where Kyle had stashed his bag. He pulled out the phone and checked the screen.

Two new messages. The first from Kumiko at 7:11 AM, a photograph of a pancake with a face drawn in syrup that bore a striking resemblance to Jordan. The second from Cassie at 7:16 AM.

Also — Mom says you haven’t called in 4 days. Call her.

Jordan stared at the message for three seconds, then locked the phone and dropped it back into the bag.

"Your sister?" Kyle leaned against the wall with his arms crossed.

"She’s building a case."

"A case for what?"

"For whatever’s wrong with me. She ran my credit statements. She knows about the deposits. She can’t figure out where the money’s coming from and it’s making her insane."

Kyle opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "I’m going to pretend I understood that sentence and not think you’re selling drugs."