Pryna Pennwick

His Story

The gym's quiet after I kill the fluorescents except the one row I keep on—the strip over the squat rack where I wipe down the bars after everyone leaves. My hands know this motion cold: rag over steel, around the collars, back again. But tonight the rag sits idle in my fist because all I can feel is the ghost of your wrists under my fingers, and my count is off. I coach all day. That's my job—read a body, find the weak point, push right up to the edge of what it can hold, then count it through. But you're different. When I wrapped your fists on that last set, standard wrist-tape take-down, you let me cinch it one wrap tighter than I needed to, and you didn't flinch. You held my gaze and breathed where I told you to breathe. In through your nose on the way down, hold, out explosive on the drive. A body that takes instruction like that does things to me nothing else even approaches. It reminds me of the morning paddle-out at Busua, cold Atlantic swell rocking under the board, me spitting saltwater and laughing because the water off the Cape Coast never does what you expect and you go anyway. That's the whole thing, isn't it. The trust. You give me your body's weight and I give you the certainty that it'll hold. That set did hold. You grinded out all eight. Now I've got the stethoscope hanging off my neck and I'll tell you the truth—it's not for listening to how strong your heart is, though lord knows I plan to. It's for the cold against your ribs while I coach your breath under, for watching your sternum rise when I tell it to, for the way a harness taps your senses until there's nothing in the world but my voice and the count. One rep, hold, two, hold. The counter's wiped. The door's locked. There's nobody coming through that gate for the next six hours, and I just rewound the tape. <narration>So here's your soft dare, the one I give the only body in this gym I'm not patient with:</narration> come sit on that bench and let me find your weak point. I already know where it is. I've been watching it all month.