I frowned. “I haven’t talked to you about him, like, at all. I don’t let myself think about him during the day. I focus on me during the day.”
He rolled his eyes. “I hope you don’t think you’re good at hiding your feelings, Cassie-Lassie, cuz you ain’t.” He just laughed. “I’ve watched you shake him out of your head at least once an hour every single day for the last month.”
I laughed. “You are far too observant for a barely sentient gorilla.”
He snorted. “You just wear your entire self on your sleeve.” A gentle smile. “It’s a good thing.”
I let silence wreathe between us—he had quickly become one of my best friends, which was weird because I’d always thought it was impossible to have a real and truly platonic friendship with a heterosexual member of the opposite sex. But then I’d met his wife, and I understood. Not only was she one of the most ridiculously, extravagantly, absurdly voluptuous women I’d ever seen in person in my life, she was breathtakingly beautiful in a classic, early Hollywood sort of way, and was also the sweetest and most genuinely kind person I’d ever met.
I simply understood that I could never hold a candle to her, and I understood that that was okay, that I didn’t have to feel like less of a woman because of that. He loved her absolutely, and she him, and she trusted him. Of course, she still made a point to come by the gym a few times a day to say hi and kiss him and let him rub her round pregnant belly, and to chat with me.
So we were friends, Bax and I.
It was a friendship I valued, and appreciated. He’d helped me find myself again. Helped me center my life. I was running again, slow and not far, but running. Dancing, gently and carefully.
He’d helped me, but I’d done the work.
Now it was time to put Ink back into my life.
Bax was eyeing me, and I recognized the thoughtful look on his face. “Uh-oh,” I said. “You’re thinking.”
He shrugged. “Been thinking.”
“About what?”
He set his feet on the floor, waved at the plate glass window and the gym on the other side. “Expansion. Adding another trainer.” A glance at me. “Adding classes.”
“Classes?” I asked, a pit opening in my stomach, one filled with butterflies and possibilities.
“Yeah. There’s a market for…” he paused, chewing on the right phrasing. “A certain kind of fitness instructor. Which I am not. Lots of tourists around here, lots of younger women and certain kinds of men, too.”
“Quit waffling and say it, bonehead.”
He grinned; he truly did respond best to good-natured but brutal teasing. “Dance classes.”
I sighed. “You’re creating something to throw me a bone.”
He ignored that, rifling in a drawer and coming up with a notebook, battered, dog-eared, filled with Post-It Notes and folded down page corners. He opened it, flipped toward the front. “This is my ideas book. Like a journal sort of, but for shit I want to do and how to get there.”
“Okay.”
“I date each page, each entry. So I can refer to when I had the idea, because usually there’s other shit I’m thinking about related to it, and I need to reference it.”
I nodded. “Following you so far. What’s your point?”
He rotated the book and slid it to me. “Look at the date.”
I did—it was dated six months before I ever met him. “Okay.”
He tapped a line item, scrawled in messy, barely legible handwriting that was a mix of all-caps and cursive: Expansion ideas—classes. Boxing? MMA? Self-defense martial arts. Anti-rape defense skills for women. Dance fitness? Find dance instructor, I don’t fucking dance. Zumba or some shit. Women love that shit.
I laughed. “Okay, okay. You were thinking about it before you met me.” I rolled my eyes at him. “What’s your point?”
A shrug. “I’m just laying out a possibility. I’ve not found the right person, someone who I get along with, who represents the mentality my gym is built around. Someone who can dance, and who understands fitness. My thought was, the classes would use dance to teach flexibility, movement, whole-body understanding, provide aerobic conditioning, strength. But it has to be the right person teaching.”
I swallowed. “Bax.”
He closed the notebook. “You could do it. I’d like it, personally, if you did it. One class a week to start. You create it—it’d be your baby. We could do a thing where people can take just the classes by themselves for one fee, per class or a group of classes, or get a discount if they join the gym to use the weight equipment and get one free training session per month with me, along with access to your classes, and we’d split those fees down the middle.”
I shifted on my chair. “I feel like the injured dancer who takes up teaching is such a cliché, though.”
He blew a raspberry. “Yeah, and? You love to dance. You’re out of the professional world, the competitive world. This lets you dance.” An arched eyebrow. “Plus, you’re hella fit. You clearly enjoy fitness, being active, being strong. Get certified as a personal trainer, put your shingle out next to mine.”
I dragged my hair out of the ponytail, finger-combed it, rebound it. “I’ve been doing a lot of yoga with my mom since I moved here,” I said, letting myself conjecture out loud. “I’m really good at yoga, and I love it. I’ve been thinking of getting licensed to teach that.”
He nodded. “Do it.” A wave. “Do the yoga cert, the trainer cert, and while you’re getting those, start up the dance class and, as you build a clientele, add more services.”
I felt a little giddy. “I would love to teach yoga.” I couldn’t help grinning, letting excitement bubble over. “When I lived in Paris, at least once a week I had someone at the gym mistake me for a personal trainer and ask me for advice, and I remember thinking, if I ever stop dancing, I should be a personal trainer.”
He nodded. “You’ll kill at it.”
I eyed the gym space. “Where would the classes go, though? All your floor space is dedicated.”
He grinned and opened the folder that he had been working on. “The warehouse next to this one is about half this size, but they’re separated by only about twenty feet. That warehouse is for sale for wicked cheap. I put in an offer, super lowball, and they took it. It’s, like, a steal. Legit. Anyway. I had a contractor take a look, and he said I—we—could connect the two super easy. Wall off the empty space between each building at either end, roof it over, insulate everything, put in doors, connect the electrical and shit, and bam, I’ve got two connected warehouses, with a new twenty-by-one-hundred-foot space between them. More lockers. Changing rooms. Some chairs, a TV. Then the new warehouse becomes class space. It could be designed with flexible instruction spaces that could even be rented out to independent teachers, you know like, tap or ballet, meditation, whatever.”
My mind was buzzing, and I felt an excitement I hadn’t felt since the last time I stepped on stage.
“You know, when I was dancing I made good money. Saved most of it, as my ex-fiancé and I lived in an apartment his parents owned, so I had super low living expenses. Meaning, I’ve got a good bit saved, since I’ve been living with Mom and she won’t let me help with money. Plus, there was an insurance settlement payout, which wasn’t anything to sneeze at.”