The locker room routine is practiced now. End stall, bag on the hook, change in under two minutes. Mark is already on the floor, because Mark is always already on the floor - changed in thirty seconds in the open bay, the way he always does, because Mark has never had a reason to think about changing in a locker room.

I find him at the dumbbell rack, mid-warm-up.

"You're late."

"Two minutes."

"Two minutes is late." He racks the weight. "Biceps first."

---

The upper body is unchanged. Arms, shoulders, back exactly where I left them - same weight, same rep range, muscle memory running clean. Whatever happened below the waist stayed below the waist.

We work through the standing curls efficiently. Alternating dumbbells, hammer curls, cables. Mark gives another update on the finance woman - the dog again, a second date somewhere in the city, a detail about her apartment that he seems to think is significant. I ask the right questions. It washes over me the way these conversations always have, two guys at the gym with nothing required of either of them except showing up and lifting.

"Emily good?" he asks between cable sets.

"Yeah."

"Still on the Hartley case?"

"Wrapping up."

He nods. "She's solid." Complete sentence. High praise from Mark.

---

We move to the preacher curl bench.

I've done this exercise a thousand times. The setup is automatic: straddle the seat, lean into the angled pad, upper arms flat, curl. I settle in and look at the mirror and everything looks the way it always looks from the waist up.

The seat is narrow. Straddling it means the inner thighs press against both sides of the frame, and the structural bar running up the center sits directly against the crotch - a located pressure, the lips separating against the metal the way they did in the wide-stance squat last week, the whole area registering contact without asking permission.

I do the first rep. The curl is fine. The bicep loads correctly. The warmth is already there and with it, almost immediately, the dampness - the liner doing its job in a way I'm now aware of.

Second rep. Third. The exercise is exactly what it should be. Everything else is its own separate event that I am not participating in by choice but cannot stop. The bar where it is, the warmth building, the dampness accumulating in a way that has nothing to do with exertion.

I watch my arm in the mirror. I think about the cable curls we just finished.

"Good," Mark says. "Keep the elbow planted."

"Yeah."

Fourth rep. Fifth. The curl is clean. I finish the set, stand up, drink half my water bottle without stopping. The boxer briefs are damp. The liner has earned its keep today in ways I didn't anticipate when I put it in this morning.

"Move to shoulders?"

"One more set."

I get back on the bench. The bar is where it was. I finish the set and get off and don't get back on it.

"Shoulders," I say.

Mark looks at me. "Yeah, okay."

---

Lateral raises, overhead press. The overhead press requires a wide stance, and wide stance means the familiar shift - weight loading through a pelvis that's tilted differently than it was, the lower body making itself known even in exercises that have nothing to do with it. I adjust slightly, find the position that works, move through the sets.

Mark thinks out loud between sets. Biomechanics, form cues, something he read. I listen and it occurs to me that this is what these sessions have always been, not just the workout. I'm a guy at the gym with his friend. The body something to be trained rather than managed.

He's known something is off. Two weeks of watching me recalibrate without pushing on it, which is its own kind of generosity. He's shown up and loaded the bar and counted the reps and told me when my form was wrong. I don't have a way to tell him what that's been worth.

---

We finish the tricep work and I'm sweating properly, arms pumped, and for an hour I've been primarily a person doing a workout.

In the locker room Mark changes in the open bay. I take my stall. Two minutes, practiced.

Outside he's already by the door. "Beer?"

"Yeah. One."

He grins.

The parking lot air is cool after the gym heat. Mark pays for the first round, I get the second, and we're out by eight-thirty - the right length for a beer with Mark. Long enough, no longer. He talks about the finance woman. I contribute the minimum required and it's easy the way it's always been easy, and I drive home feeling approximately like myself.

---

Emily is in the kitchen when I get in, laptop open, case files across the counter. She looks up.

"How was it?"

"Good. Arms. Beer after."

She nods and goes back to her laptop. I brush my teeth at the bathroom sink, the same mirror I've been looking at for six years. She appears in the doorway and leans against the frame, watching me the way she does sometimes - that quality of attention that means she's been waiting to be in the same room.

I rinse and turn around.

She crosses to me and puts her arms around me, her face against my neck, hands flat on my back. The familiar weight of her. I've been distant, the account renewal pulling at my attention in ways that have left less of it for everything else. She hasn't said anything about it directly, but I feel it in how she holds on slightly longer than usual.

Her hair is down. She smells like herself. From the waist up nothing has changed - same shoulders, same height and reach, the whole geography of twelve years together intact. She tilts her face up and I kiss her and for a moment it's just the two of us in the bathroom the way we've been hundreds of times, and it almost works.

Then the warmth comes.

Not a decision. My body responding to her hands and her proximity the way it responds to things now - the dampness starting, the arousal building, and without meaning to my hips shift forward, looking for something.

I stop. Step back. My hands drop from her waist.

Emily doesn't move. Her expression is careful - the prosecutor's read, taking in everything, committing to nothing.

"Sorry," I say. It comes out flat.

She looks at me for a moment. Then she turns and goes back to the kitchen, back to the case files, and I stand at the sink looking at the mirror and the empty doorway.

---

I wake before the alarm. The room is grey. I lie there a moment. There's a low ache in my back, dull and persistent, the kind that doesn't care what position I'm in.

Bathroom. Sit, wipe, flush. The discharge minimal, just the liner doing its work.

I pull on jeans and reach for the button and it won't close. I pull the waistband together harder. It closes, barely - the denim straining across the abdomen, the button already cutting in before I've moved anywhere. Maybe last night's shrimp was off. I leave the shirt untucked and go downstairs.

Emily is at the counter with coffee and her laptop, already dressed, already elsewhere in her head. She looks up.

"Coffee's ready."

"Thanks."

I pour a cup. We exist in the kitchen together in the way we've been existing - present, careful, the bathroom moment from three nights ago still somewhere in the room. She hasn't brought it up. Neither have I. The space around it has become a kind of furniture.

She closes the laptop. "I'll be late. Hartley closing arguments."

"Okay."

She picks up her bag. Pauses. "Eat something today. You've been skipping lunch."

She looks like she's already thinking about the courtroom. There's something else in there too, some weight she's been carrying the last few days that she hasn't offered up and I haven't pushed on - both of us with our hands full, both of us managing.

Then she's gone and I'm standing in the kitchen with the jeans digging into my abdomen and the ache in my back and the quiet house.

---

Sarah's assistant emails at nine. Apologies for the delay - board meeting ran long. Sarah can do Thursday at two.

I confirm and close it.

Dave appears at nine-thirty with a question about the Aldermere trafficking specs. Something about sizing - Sarah's team sent three versions when the spec calls for four.

"Do I go back to them or just run with the three?"

"Go back to them."

"It's just one size, though-"

"Go back to them, Dave."

He looks at me. I look at the screen. He goes.

---

By eleven the jeans are unbuttoned under the desk. I button them when I stand, forget when I sit back down. The ache has migrated - lower back into the abdomen now, dull and persistent in a way that ibuprofen is managing but not solving. I've taken two. I could take a third.

In the break room I pour a second coffee and Dave is at the counter making the small talk he makes when he's decided something needs to be acknowledged. He says something about Atlanta numbers. I answer. He says something about the Thursday call. I answer that too, and then he glances down and his eyes go to my waistband and I look down - the jeans are unbuttoned, the shirt having ridden up when I reached for the pot.

I button them at the counter while Dave finds something to look at in the middle distance.

"Thursday's going to be good," he says, to the coffee machine.

"Yeah. It is."

I take my coffee back to my desk and unbutton the jeans the moment I sit down.

---

Linda stops by mid-morning with a folder - updated competitive data, Atlanta market, the numbers I'll want cold for Thursday.

"How are you doing," she says.

"Fine."

She waits.

"The call got pushed. I know you saw the email."

She looks at the ibuprofen on the desk. Then at me. "Have you eaten?"

"I'll eat at lunch."

"It's eleven-forty," she says, and picks up her coffee and leaves.

I go get something. She's right; it helps marginally. I eat at my desk and don't taste most of it.

---

The afternoon moves. I work through the deck again - Atlanta numbers, distributor data, the arguments Linda suggested keeping variable. The work is good. I know it's good. The jeans are unbuttoned and the ache is a continuous background note and the ibuprofen isn't quite keeping up, and none of that is the deck, which is solid, which is the thing I can control.

Mark stops by at three. Takes one look.

"You look terrible."

"Thanks."

"Legs today."

"Thursday prep."

He does the assessment, the way he does - quick, clinical. "You're holding tension through your whole upper back. You'd actually do better Thursday if you moved."

"Tomorrow."

"Yeah." He raps the cubicle wall. "Don't bail three times."

"I won't."

He goes. I stand at my desk for the rest of the afternoon, one fist in the small of my back, the untucked shirt covering the unbuttoned jeans, the deck open in front of me. Somewhere around four I notice I've been standing with my jaw clenched for an indeterminate amount of time for no reason I can locate.

---

At five I shut the laptop, button the jeans for the lobby, and walk out.

The house is empty - Emily still at Hartley. I make dinner and eat standing at the counter and put the plate in the sink and stand there for a moment in the quiet. Outside it's dark already.

I go to bed before Emily gets home, the ache lingering, low and settled.

---

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