BEAST (5 page)

Again the same man was on the treadmill. Again he was wearing all black with a hood concealing him pretty well. She pretended not to watch the way he made running the treadmill look effortless. She almost fell off the thing when she’d done it the day before.

Today she wore navy sweatpants and an oversized shirt. She did her stretching, or tried to. Her muscles were so tight that she could barely bend. She plopped down on the floor and stretched her legs, and tried to reach for her feet. Well that wasn’t going to happen. She lay on her back and pulled one leg than the other up against her body. She peeked over at the sexy guy. He just stared straight ahead and didn’t look at her once.
Hmph
.
She guessed
that
was good. She didn’t need to worry about some guy checking her out while she was straining just to touch her feet!

It took her about seven minutes to get loosened up enough to hit the elliptical machine. Ten minutes in to it and Ashleigh was asking herself,
‘Why am I torturing myself like this? Who really cares…?

And then she thought about DeAngelo and Shaunda and the woman’s perfect body. Her throat tightened. Ashleigh’s eyes glazed but this time not with tears but with determination. She pushed herself when she wanted to stop—when she would have stopped she jus
t kept going. One day at a time
she said this to herself when the stitch formed in her side.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step…

~***~

After leaving the gym and showering Christopher returned to the monitoring room. A few of the guys were there watching the lady workout but they weren’t hooping and hawing because they didn’t want to attract Bruce’s attention. With a sigh, Christopher joined them.

“Dude, look at her go.”
Roddy
said.

“We’re taking bets that she’s going to black out.”

Christopher watched the woman pushing herself. She was on the treadmill again and this time she was going at a run. After a few more minutes she finally stopped and the
hooping
and hollering grew a bit louder as money passed hands.

“Fifteen minutes!” Someone said loudly. “That’s my girl.” They disbanded and went about their duties. Christopher lingered. She’d dropped down on the mat on her back. She was breathing hard. Shit, she was going to seize up doing that. Her arm was across her face. He leaned in closer.

She was crying.

Christopher’s back straightened. Did she hurt herself? Should he go check on her? He was contemplating this when she pulled herself back up to her feet. She moved stiffly back to the treadmill. She started it again and got back on it!

Christopher placed his hands on his hips and watched. She was going to walk it out, he thought. That was good. But then he saw her pushing up the speed and she began running again. Damn…

Christopher tapped the controls and zoomed in on her face. Sweat and tears were evident but he could see that her brow was drawn and he saw that she wasn’t going to stop until she met her own personal goal. He heard Carlos come up behind him and he quickly flipped the screen to the corridors. He didn’t want any of the guys seeing her cry.

~***~

Ashleigh hurt so bad that even though she knew she shouldn’t, she
came
straight home, popped ibuprofen, took a hot bath and then crawled into bed without dinner.

The next day when she went to the gym she was walking stiffly. Blues music was playing this time.
How apropos.
She looked at the giant on the treadmill. Did he even know she was there? He never even flinched when she came in through the door. He never even turned to look in her direction. Well today she planned to keep her eyes on him. She just wanted to know what he looked like. He had to be fine with a body like that.

He generally left at six so while she was on the curling machine she kept her eyes on him. He didn’t look tired even though his dark clothes were made even darker with his sweat. But his gait was steady. Six came and she saw him switch off the machine. His head was down when he headed straight for the
boombox
and removed the CD. She finally saw him do it. Generally the music stopped and he was half out the door before she looked up.

He must have sensed her looking because he glanced at her; just a glance. And in that one brief second Ashleigh’s light brown face paled even lighter. Her eyes widened as her brain tried to make sense of what she saw. The man’s face was split in half.

Jesus, she’d never seen anything like it. It was as if someone had taken a machete to him and then someone else had tried
to sew the pieces back together.
There was a visible seam that ran from his chin, over his lip up into one nostril. His nose was flattened and flared crookedly. The seam continued up between his brows and then ran a crooked pattern to disappear beneath the hood.

They called it a cleft palate but she’d never seen one so bad. The two halves of his face had seemed to shift; the bone structure beneath the flesh, causing his face to sink in slightly giving him a gorilla–like appearance. He also had no color. He was as white as an albino. His grey eyes were fringed in reddish lashes that looked almost non-existent. His upper lip seemed to have three distinct sections that she couldn’t quite understand. He was by far the scariest looking man she’d ever seen.

He was out the door before she realized that she’d stared. She felt herself blushing and hoped that she hadn’t made him feel like a monster. But he’d shocked her. She rubbed her face in chagrin. Tomorrow she would make a point of not looking disgusted. If the opportunity arose she would speak.

~***~

Christopher’s keys broadcast his arrival as he unlocked his front door. Maggie quickly jumped down from where she was perched on the back of the couch, and wrapped her sinewy body around his feet. He reached down and quickly scratched beneath her chin and then put his things away. He had stopped and got carry-out on the way home and after feeding her he sat down with the newspaper and ate his meal.

His thoughts moved to the lady at the gym and he lost his appetite for the third burger and tossed it in the trash. He didn’t like the shocked look in her eyes when she caught a glimpse of his face. Not that he blamed
her,
just that he wished someone could see him for the first time without grimacing in horror. His parent’s had been too poor to get his bilateral cleft palate fixed for a long time.  By the time that he was three years old it became critical as his breathing and lack of nutrition began to affect his life. The state took over and the surgery was performed for free. Unfortunately his was a very complex situation handled by surgeons not experienced in his extreme case.

After three corrective surgeries his mother could take no more and he’d been left with bad scars though his palate was now closed. Yet his teeth were cro
oked and several were missing. Although his hearing had been affected, it wasn’t enough to keep him out of the military. And normally speech problems occurred with his condition
but his voice was
fine—although not often used. Christopher
was pale,
but
not because he was albino. He was
just
a pale skinned red-head
. He
kept his hair
cut
short in a military fade. He was the epitome of a jarhead. He even had
semper
fi
tattooed across his bicep. H
e had planned to
get it tatted on his neck because he would never be anything but a jarhead, but his mother had objected and so he hadn’t done it.

Christopher did a load of laundry, and changed
Mag
’
s
litter
box
. Then he pulled out his guitar and played for a while. He wanted to perform tomorrow and hadn’t practiced all week. Friday was Karaoke at The
Madd
Crab and he generally brought his guitar
whenever he sang. He liked the
music
selection
there a
s well as
the people. They were a bunch of rednecks but it was a neighborhood bar with the same
rednecks
. Sometimes a dumb asshole would come in or a drunk
en
girl
. B
ut most knew to leave him alone. And if they didn’t learn it the easy way they learned it the hard way. His cousin had introduced him to the place
because she had
wanted him to sing. She used to be a bartender but had quit for a better paying job at a different redneck bar. He’d stuck around
;
people knew him already and they liked his singing. Plus they tended to warn the newcomers not pick fight
s
with him.

As he ran the treadmill that night he was pretty certain that he’d gotten back down into the two hundred weight range. But he
decided that he
would continue to go to the subbasement gym
in the mornings--
and it had nothing to do with the lady who smelled like pink flowers even after she was dripping with sweat.

Christopher heard the door to the gym open. He was surprised. He half expected her to change her workout time though he no longer expected her to give up. It hadn’t been a week yet but there was something in her face that drove her and somehow he didn’t think she’d be easily swayed from her unknown goal.

He still wore the hood but he didn’t allow it to cover his face as completely. He glimpsed her through the mirror going through her stretching. She was moving very gingerly. He hoped she understood that her muscles had to tear down in order to rebuild themselves even stronger. He hoped she didn’t take the pain as a sign to give up when it was actually a sign that her efforts were working for her.

He saw her get on to the recumbent bike. She was wearing grey sweats and a t-shirt that was too big. Her hair was concealed by a cap but he was willing to bet that she hadn’t combed it this morning. He liked that she didn’t come in wearing make-up, though that could just be an indication that he wasn’t counted into a category of someone that she would wear make-up for.  Crap, why would he even care about
that?

Aerosmith’s Janie’s Got
A
G
un was playing. When he was selecting the music to play this morning he wondered what she thought of the music. He wondered if she wished he would cut it down. Well she could wear a headset if she didn’t like it…but she never did.

Ashleigh placed her hands on her knees and concentrated. Don’t stop, girl. Keep going, girl.  But she couldn’t. Her butt muscle hurt! And then Bad Reputation by Joan Jett began playing and Ashleigh made a squeak of pleasure.
Ooo
! That was her song! She grit her teeth and squinted her eyes into slits and she kept pushing as she listened to the words sang by the
baddest
girl in Rock and Roll!

She got to the end of her rep and collapsed
with her back against the seat, head tilted back
. The song suddenly stopped and she looked up quickly.

“Good song,
” She said quickly as the man moved to the door. He hesitated and glanced at her.

“It is.” He put his hand on the door and then stopped. “If…you can listen to it if you want. Just leave it in the
boombox
.”

“Yeah.
Thanks.” He returned it to the
boombox
, pressed rewind and started the song from the beginning.

“Thank you,
”
s
he said as he walked out the door. He raised his hand briefly in acknowledgement.

When Beast reached the monitoring room TK punched him playfully in the arm but it still hurt a little.

“What the hell was that for?”

“Making me loose ten bucks.
The fat girl came back AND she talked to your ugly ass.”

He shrugged and hoped he had hidden his smile. “Oh…well I didn’t scare her off, that’s for sure.” TK clapped him on his back to show that he was just kidding. Christopher felt kind of good. When everyone had returned to their work he flipped the monitor back to the gym.