I keep my hair up at the gym, and even then it is too much hair. The ponytail starts high and falls almost to the small of my back, black and heavy, and I walk between the machines like I have somewhere more serious to be. I am thirty-two. I train like a woman who did not come there to be looked at. Leggings, a fitted top, no smiling at strangers. When I bend to rerack a plate I feel the hem ride up, and I know the pale lines of my bikini are showing against my skin, narrow at the hip, lower across the top of my ass. I do not fix the top right away. I tell myself that is nothing. It is not nothing. Not after him.

He trains at the rack beside mine on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then on Saturdays too, because I said once, drying my neck, that Saturday mornings were quiet, and he started coming. Rafael is twenty-eight, Black, a body built for the work and not the mirror, skin so dark the gym lights sit on it like heat. We talk…