Tori
WHAT. IS. GOING. On?
A small crowd greets me in Hard Core’s reception area this morning. It’s not an unusual sight—getting everyone’s ID through the scanners can cause a logjam during high-usage times—but I can tell from the camera in one of the loiterer’s hands that this is a different situation.
“Tori! Tori!” they yell.
“What’s your relationship with Carter Stone?” a woman with a small recorder in her hand asks.
“Are you and Carter feuding?” asks another.
As I’m bombarded with questions, I fish in my purse for my club card, my mind struggling to make sense of what’s prompted this frenzy.
Darryl takes my ID in a rush, his fingers fumbling to fit the card in the slot so he can swipe it.
“They’ve been here all morning?” I ask him.
“Yes,” he says. He rubs the back of his neck and glances at the journalists, although I suspect that term might be more generous than they deserve.
“Do you have any idea what this is about?”
“Not sure. Something about Carter Stone retweeting you?”
Oh, for goodness’ sake. So what if Carter Stone retweeted me? I can’t believe there are journos chasing this nonstory down. Must be a very slow news day in Philly.
Then again, The Philadelphia Inquirer once reported that a film actor had slapped the butt of a San Antonio Spurs player at a Sixers game. My reaction then was: And this is news why? I suppose this explains the commotion I’m dealing with now. Philly is a city that craves celebrity gossip even though there are hardly any celebrities making news here. Yay, me.
“Should I call someone?” Darryl asks.
“Is Nate around? He’ll know how to handle it.”
Darryl nods and picks up the phone.
I turn back to the three gossip peddlers still asking me questions. “I’m not sure what this is about, folks. Carter Stone and I aren’t feuding. Period.”
My announcement snuffs out their collective energy, and one of them stamps his foot in annoyance. I wave good-bye and pass through the turnstile.
One of Hard Core’s owners, Ben, greets me at the stairs. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.” He chuckles to himself. “You know Carter Stone?”
I take the stairs two steps at a time with Ben at my side. “I don’t know him, Ben. Just a silly thing on Twitter, apparently.”
“That’s not what Darryl says,” he singsongs. “He says he walked up on a heated exchange between you two a couple of days ago.”
Technically, Ben’s my boss, but he’s not adept at maintaining clear boundaries. Says he’s not into “labels.” That works for me, too. Hence, this conversation.
“I checked out that Twitter beef,” Ben continues.
I halt midstep and turn around. “What Twitter beef?”
Ben shakes his head in confusion. “The Twitter exchange yesterday. Am I missing something?”
A simple retweet does not a Twitter beef make. “I think I’m missing something, too,” I mutter to myself. After I meet with Ben and Nate, I’ll check the Internet and try to figure out what’s going on.
Ben follows me into the staff room and surveys me as I take items out of my gym bag and place them in my locker. “So how do you know Carter Stone?”
He’s not going to let this go. Dammit. I throw my head back. “Okay, fine. I met him on vacation. We chatted for like two seconds.” To emphasize my point, I hold up two fingers. “I didn’t know he was Carter Stone. He never told me, either. That’s the story. End of.” Yes, I know it’s not exactly how it all went down, but what happened in Aruba is none of Ben’s business.
“The bastard,” Ben says as though this information has scandalized him. Ben is a muscle-bound giant, his light brown hair styled in a crew cut that makes him look like he recently completed a stint in the armed forces. The idea that he’d be scandalized by anything is laughable.
I slam the locker closed with more force than necessary. “It wasn’t that deep, Ben.”
He precedes me into the gym’s small conference room, where Nate, my other boss, is fussing with the high-tech coffee and tea machine that Ben insisted was a “must-buy.”
Nate’s muttering is more pronounced than usual. “You know,” he says over his shoulder, “you have to be alert to operate this machine, but I can’t be alert if I don’t have my coffee. Do you see the problem here?”
Ben bumps Nate out of the way, his hands flying over the buttons. After one last flick of a switch and a pointed glare at Nate, Ben walks away with the resulting sound of brewing coffee serving as his “screw you.”
Just a typical day in our workplace.
Four years ago, Ben and Nate opened this tiny gym with a combination of savings, borrowed funds, and wild dreams. Six months after that, they brought me on as an employee, and I took on a management position two years later. Since then, they’ve expanded the gym to two floors and we’ve settled on a distribution of labor that works for us: Ben uses his business acumen to keep the books straight, Nate uses his excellent interpersonal skills to handle staff issues, and I focus on running the gym’s day-to-day operations.
We also needle each other at every opportunity.
I grab one of the stapled packets in the center of the table. “Children, can we get on with it? Nate has a staff meeting at ten.”
Nate furrows his brows, twists his lips to one side, and rubs his brown, bald head. “Ah, damn, I forgot. You’re indispensable, Tori.”
“This is true,” I reply with a broad smile.
Ben, the informal leader of our three-person management team, scoots his chair in and flips through the pages in front of him. “Okay, let’s get to it. The first item is just a heads-up. I’m working on renegotiating our lease—”
“Before we get to that,” Nate says—he takes a sip of his coffee—“can we talk about actor Carter Stone and that helluva fortuitous Twitter exchange?”
I groan. “What Twitter exchange?”
Nate waggles his brows. “Stone and I had a bit of a conversation after he tweeted a link to your daily motivational tip.”
Nate on Twitter? This I must see. I point to his laptop. “Show me, please.”
Ben chimes in, too. “Yeah, Nate, what have you been up to?”
Nate opens the Twitter app and scrolls through the gym’s tweets until he finds the exchange. “Here, take a look.”
I angle his screen in my and Ben’s direction. Oh my God. Why, why, why is this happening? I pin Nate with a murderous glare. “This makes it seem like I was responding to Carter.”
Nate frowns and repositions the laptop in front of him. “Does it? I said ‘our tip,’ not ‘my tip.’” He peers at the screen as though he’s contemplating his own question. “Why does that matter?”
“They have history,” Ben tells him.
I jab Ben in the side. “We do not have history. We met on my vacation.”
“That’s even better,” Nate says with a self-satisfied grin on his face. “We can capitalize on that.”
“No, no, we cannot capitalize on that. We’ll pretend this never happened and go about our regular business. ¿Mi intiendes?”
Nate shakes his head. “No, I don’t understand. It’s an opportunity, Tori.”
Ben nods.
“How so?” I ask.
“The guy practically challenged you to train him,” Ben says. “Do you know how impressive it would be to snag him as a client?”
“The guy practically challenged Nate to train him. That wasn’t me flirting in one hundred and forty characters.” I point an accusing finger at Nate. “That was you.”
“In any case, we could get a lot of marketing mileage out of this,” Nate explains. “People who’ve never heard of the gym might be curious to check us out. And if the training’s a success, which I know it would be, we could promote that everywhere.”
“Why can’t one of you do it?” I ask.
“You have fewer clients,” Ben says. “It’ll be easier to rework your schedule.”
Huh. Interesting. For weeks, I’ve been lobbying them to roll out a new class geared to people at any level of fitness. They claimed my schedule was too full given my management and personal training responsibilities. “So let me get this straight. There’s enough time in my schedule to train Carter Stone, but not enough time for me to teach a class on a trial basis?”
Nate and Ben glance at each other.
What is it with these two?
Nate clears his throat. “We just don’t think the class fits with the gym’s brand, Tori. We’re selling gym membership, equipment, locker rooms. Your class says all that’s unnecessary.”
“So you’ve been giving me the runaround and hoping I’d just forget about it?”
“It’s not like that, To—”
“No, it’s fine. I get it.” I give them a dismissive wave. “I just wish you would have said this when I first proposed it.” I’ve been holding the class at a community center in my old neighborhood, hoping to get the guys on board and move it here soon. I guess it’s time to find a permanent home for it elsewhere.
“We should have said something sooner,” Ben says as he glances at Nate.
Given the pinched expression on Ben’s face, I’ll bet Nate was tasked with telling me and never got around to it. He’s a forgetful man.
“Getting back to Carter Stone,” Nate says. “It’s not a big deal. Now that I’ve reeled him in, all you’ll have to do is get him in shape. He won’t be able to deny the fantastic job we’ve done for him, and then we can exploit that everywhere.”
I chew on my lip as I contemplate what’s a very big deal to me. I mean, there’s so much wrong with this scenario I don’t even know where to begin. It’s all a jumbled mess in my head.
The idea that I’d have to work with Carter for the gym’s benefit and for what likely amounts to shits and giggles for him literally makes my skin hot. If his latest weight loss is any guide, he takes his apparently healthy body for granted, taxing it unnecessarily to fit whatever role he’s playing. Oh, and hey, there, Grudge. I see you haven’t gone away yet. Yes, I’m still annoyed about what happened in Aruba. He did all the things to make me like him except disclose the one fact that would have stopped me from doing so. And I won’t even venture into an analysis of the implications of that kiss. We’d be here forever. I sigh loudly. “It’s not a bad idea.”
Nate pumps his fist. “I’m glad you—”
“It’s a terrible idea,” I say. “No way. N. O.”
Ben huffs. “Why the hell not? This is pure marketing gold.”
“I don’t like the guy.”
Which is technically true. I liked the guy I met in Aruba, when he was just Carter Williamson. Carter Stone is an unknown. “That Twitter exchange was a blip in the social media universe. You’re trying to make something out of nothing. Let’s forget about trying to capitalize on my brief acquaintance with Carter Stone and focus on the kind of marketing that will bring in new clients.”
“Too late,” Nate says. “Things kind of escalated overnight.”
My stomach drops. Leave it to impulsive Nate to do something without consulting us first. “What did you do?”
He gives me a wide smile, waggles his eyebrows, and turns his laptop to face me. The screen shows the gym’s Twitter account. Dammit, dammit, dammit. He responded to Carter’s #bringit missive last night. The tweet said:
Show up or shut up. We’re open seven days a week. #notscared
I turn to Ben. “We need to disable his access to the Twitter account.”
Nate laughs. “Oh, c’mon. I thought I was flexing my social media skills. Isn’t that what the account is for? You’re always saying I should run the account sometimes, so I did. Plus, I didn’t know then that you two have”—he makes air quotes—“history.”
Ben blows out a long breath. “Listen, we’re talking in circles. If this guy wants to hire us, we’ll make it happen, okay? We’d be crazy not to. We’ll worry about the whos and why-nots if and when we need to.”
I’m sure my pout is super attractive. “Fine.”
Nate smiles. “Okay, then. Besides, Stone was probably bluffing.”
Ben straightens the sheets of paper in his hands. “Getting back to the lease—”
The speakerphone in the middle of the table beeps.
“What’s up, Darryl?” Nate asks.
Darryl’s disembodied voice fills the room. “Mr. Carter Stone is here to speak with a member of our personal training department.”
Ben and Nate grin at each other.
I drop my chin to my chest and let out a weary sigh. I’m done, I tell you. Done.