Chapter One
RUTH
I have orchestrated multi-million dollar business deals and have butted heads with Fortune 500 CEOs and some of the biggest corporate lawyers in the country, but my biggest challenge by far was trying to remove a monster wedgie during my spinning class without the gorgeous guy behind me noticing.
Casually turning my head to the right, I checked my periphery, confident I looked like some halfwit who was thinking of changing lanes on a stationary bike.
I couldn’t tell if the man had his eyes focused on me or on the instructor in front of the class, but it didn’t matter at this point. I had real-world issues here and needed to solve the dilemma before my butt sucked all my clothes inside my body and turned me inside out.
With every revolution of my bike’s spinning wheel, the wedgie seemed determined to go deeper, like a burrowing squirrel who hadn’t found a suitable place for habitation.
I got up at five in the morning for this torture?
To make matters worse, the instructor—Manson, Mussolini, or whatever his name was—appeared to be on a mission to send us all into cardiac arrest. And don’t even get me started on the chafing from a bike seat that was obviously manufactured with materials excavated from the surface of Mars.
I needed a distraction for the extraction.
Glancing down at my water bottle in the drink holder, I came up with the perfect plan. I would wait for the instructor to get us up off our seats again for the next sprint, then drop my water bottle on the floor to create a ruckus.
If the man behind me was a gentleman—no wagers, please—he would get off his bike and get the water bottle for me, thus taking any attention away from my derrière long enough for me to perform the embarrassing and delicate wedgie-removing procedure without him seeing.
Ironically, the song changed to “Shake Your Booty” by KC and the Sunshine Band.
“Off your butts!” the instructor barked out like a psychotic sea lion with Tourette’s. “Take it up to level five for a sprint. Thirty seconds. Go! Go! Go!”
Perfect timing.
I slammed my water bottle to the floor behind me for the distraction.
It crashed against the back wall with a loud BOOM.
Never let it be said I did anything half-assed.
No pun intended.
I checked my periphery again to see if the guy fell for the trap.
Bingo.
He slowed his pedaling and glanced behind him at my bottle on the floor.
After he made a move to get off his bike, I lifted my butt off the seat, leaned forward on the handlebars, shifted all my body weight over to my left hand, and used my right hand to reach behind me and remove the mother of all wedgies.
Oh, no.
Completing the task was proving to be difficult since it was almost impossible to pedal while standing up on the bike with only one hand gripping the handlebars.
I used one finger, then two, then three, but still couldn’t dig out the wedgie that must have been halfway to China by now.
Losing confidence with every second that passed, I wobbled back and forth like the Elvis bobblehead doll on the dashboard of my dad’s 1977 Cadillac Coupe deVille.
Things were heading south in a hurry.
There was a sharp pain in my left wrist.
My elbow buckled.
Timber!
The fall to the floor was not graceful.
I banged my shoulder on the handlebars on the way down, slid off the bike sideways, and hooked my foot on top of the pedal. My other leg flew over my head and got wedged in between the bike seat and the drink holder.
Great.
Now, I had two wedgies.
Before I had a chance to untangle and upright myself, two hands gripped me from under my armpits and lifted me to my feet in one swift motion.
I looked up, dazed, confused, blinking a few times.
It was the guy who had been on the bike behind me. “Are you okay?”
There was genuine concern in his voice, but I was a big girl and could take care of myself.
Flustered, I said the first thing I could think of. “I do that all the time.”
A smile tugged at the corner of his lips. “Of course.” He chuckled and grabbed my water bottle from the floor, sticking it back in the drink holder on my bike.
“Thank you.” I opened and closed my left hand, wincing from the pain.
He pointed to my wrist. “Get some ice on that.”
“Okay . . .”
It was good advice since my schedule was full today and a swollen wrist would throw everything out of whack.
I grabbed my towel hanging from the handlebars and wiped my forehead, preparing to leave the class early.
“Okay, bring it back down to level two as we start the cool down.” The instructor got off his bike and rushed over. “What happened?”
“Don’t worry about it. Everything is fine.” I took a step toward the door.
“Hang on—I need to fill out an accident report. It’s gym protocol.”
I stopped and turned back. “There was no accident.”
The instructor pointed to the wedgie maker. “I saw you fall off the bike.”
“You saw me get off the bike.”
“Head first?”
I crossed my arms and winced from the pain. “Who wants to get off the bike like a normal person? Not me, I’ll tell you that much.”
He shook his head. “A report is necessary. Especially since it looks like you hurt yourself.”
This guy had no idea who he was dealing with.
I had an MBA from UCLA and have brought a conference room of testosterone-loaded men to their knees. This spinning class instructor was small potatoes on the way to becoming mashed.
“Fine.” I placed my hands on my hips and felt another bolt of pain from my wrist. “But just be forewarned that I will have a lot to say in that report of yours. We’ll need to discuss the class in general, your song choices, the specifications, aerodynamics, and comfort of the bikes, and your skills as a teacher and how they may or may not attribute to accidents and the likelihood of death.”
He just stared at me.
“Don’t worry, we should be able to avoid a lawsuit here and there’s a fifty-percent chance you’ll still have a job when all is said and done. So! Let’s get to that report. If we start now, it shouldn’t take more than four hours.” I crinkled my nose. “I’m a perfectionist and a little long-winded.”
More staring from him, but now his mouth was slightly open.
“I mean, unless we can both agree that there was no accident, which there wasn’t.”
He blinked and could finally form words. “What accident? I just came over to tell you to have a great day. Good job in class today.” He returned to his bike in front of the class.
I felt a smidgen of guilt for scaring the instructor like that, but what else was I going to do?
The man was trying to kill us, plus I just needed to get out of there.
I turned to thank the man who helped me off the floor, but oddly he was nowhere in sight. It was better that way since I was already embarrassed enough. And luckily, I would never see him again since this wasn’t my regular gym and I wouldn’t be returning before the turn of the next century.
Two hours later, I had showered, eaten breakfast, popped eight hundred milligrams of Ibuprofen, iced my injury, and walked to the pharmacy on the corner to buy a compression sleeve for my wrist.