“Have you seen my yoga pants?” I say.

“What?” comes Jane’s sleepy reply. She’s my roommate, my best friend, and I love her to death, but she really has a problem with getting up on time. Not to mention being coherent when she wakes up.

“My yoga pants!” I say, exasperated and frantic. “I need them, Jane. Didn’t you borrow them and wash them?”

“Wash them?” says Jane.

I groan.

“You borrowed them and didn’t wash them?” I say.

“Maybe,” says Jane, mumbling something unintelligible.

“I’m taking yours,” I say, moving over to her side of the dorm room. I flip through her drawers until I find a pair of tight athletic work out pants. “I don’t know why you didn’t just wear your own, instead of borrowing mine.”

I pull the pants up, and check out my ass in the mirror. I’ve never been confident about my looks, but recently I’ve been excited to see that I’m finally starting to fill out. Others noticed it first, giving me strange compliments, and a lot of looks from a certain gender. Somehow, I was the last to notice.

“See you later,” I say to Jane, as I grab my bag.

I rush through the dorm room hallway that’s filled with event posters. Outside, I drop myself into the stream of foot traffic, students headed every which way.

It’s my first day interning at the student physical therapy center. It’s a huge campus, with over 40,000 undergrads alone, so we have every kind of medical facility you could imagine. It’s part of my work study program, a necessary step if I want to pursue my PhD in physical therapy and get my license.

I pause briefly outside the huge, intimidating building, with the other students streaming by me. Someone jostles me, and I stumble for a moment, but I catch myself before falling down. That wouldn’t be a good way to make a first impression—arriving on my first day bruised, with pants torn from a brush with the concrete.

I take a deep breath and enter the building.

“I’m Lia Horton,” I say to the secretary. “I’m starting the first day of my work study program.”

“Jamie told me you were coming,” she says. She’s a big woman with a beehive sort of hairdo that I haven’t seen in years. “Follow me.”

I follow her through a maze of exercise equipment. Students and professors are there, along with a healthy amount of community members. They’re lifting free weights, using the machines, running on treadmills.

I immediately feel self-conscious. The last time I worked out was… maybe when I was 18, and I rode my bike around the block a couple times. That was four years ago, and unless you count rushing to the vending machines when I’m hungry, I’m definitely not a workout sort of girl.

I know, that’s not what you’d expect from someone going into physical therapy. Basically, I’m a huge nerd. I love learning about how the human body works, and physical therapy will give me a way to apply my knowledge of body mechanics. It’ll allow me to turn my knowledge into something that will actually help people.

“Here you go,” says the large secretary, stopping in front of a hugely muscular man with longish hair tied up behind his head. “Shane’s been trying to rehabilitate his shoulder. You know what to do, right?”

I pause in front of the muscled man resembling a Greek God. He’s wearing a tight t-shirt that shows off his bulging, dense muscles. He’s doing squats, lifting a huge quantity of weight up and down. The metal bar rests above the small of his back, below his neck. I’m at his side, and I watch his muscular ass stick out as he squats down impossibly low with the weight. He breathes in and out slowly. Somehow it sounds impossibly sexy.

It’s the three of us stuck in the corner of this large room filled with exercise equipment.

The muscular Shane ignores us completely, staring straight ahead intently as he works out.

The secretary is staring at me, waiting for a reply.

My heart’s pounding in my chest. I’m supposed to work with this Greek God, this Adonis? I can barely get out a couple of intelligent words to any guy who’s vaguely attractive. How am I going to coach this man, let alone talk to him?

“You do know what to do, right?” says the secretary, watching me expectantly.

“Uh,” I mumble. “I thought I was going to be like tagging along with a physical therapist or something?”

The secretary laughs.

“Honey, you’re in your last year of school, right?”

I nod my head.

“It’s time you figure something out on your own. The physical therapists here have real problems to deal with. They’re insanely busy right now, especially after that bus full of lacrosse players crashed.”

I nod my head as if I understand.

“You’re just going to have to do the best you can.”

The secretary walks off, weaving her way through a group of men lifting kettle bells.

I stand, frozen, staring at the muscular monster in front of me, who doesn’t stop doing squats even for a moment.

This is not how I thought my work study program would start.

At first, I try to keep my eyes off Shane. It seems impossible to not just stare at him, to admire his body longingly.

But I can’t exactly find a good place to look. I end up staring at the blank wall, and then I realize that this is even more awkward.

After all, I’m supposed to be helping him rehabilitate his shoulder. I’m supposed to be watching him.

So I purposefully direct my gaze back to him.

I take in his seriously impressive body. I feel a slight tingling down there.

I try to watch his shoulder, but it’s not moving much during squats.

Shane grunts as he finishes his set, dropping the bar onto the metal rack with a crash. He stands up and moves his arms back and forth in front of him, trying to get his muscles to loosen up.

Finally, he looks at me.

“Hey,” he says, flashing me a grin. “So you’re my new trainer?”

I nod shyly.

He looks me up and down and his grin grows, his gaze hanging for an eternity on my breasts and my hips.

“You look familiar,” I say. “Were you in a class with me or something?”

He laughs.

“I look familiar?” he says. “I’m the quarterback.”

Oh! Now I feel like an idiot.

That’s who Shane is. Shane Demmers, the famous starting quarterback. He’s my year, and his picture has been plastered all over campus for as long as I can remember. Sometimes, it feels like the entire population of our 40,000 students simply won’t shut up about Shane Demmers and how far he can throw the ball, or how sexy he is.

I laugh, to cover up my embarrassment.

“Well,” I say. “Let’s take a look at that shoulder, shall we. What’s going on with it?”

Shane chuckles. “No offense,” he says. “But I think I need a real physical therapist. They’re going to draft me this summer, you know. I don’t need some amateur messing me up even more.”

Frankly, I couldn’t agree more.

If there’s one thing I know right now, it’s that I am definitely not qualified to treat the shoulder of a huge football star.