Chapter Eleven

The next day, Ornette was met at the gym by a company stylist who fixed her up with five outfits to wear at the gym. The last set of exercise clothes was the one she would wear for the commercial.

Then she met with an assistant who gave her a list of the places in the gym where a woman was likely to be harassed.

The dumbbells.

The juice stand.

The treadmills.

The cafeteria.

The spin room.

The pool.

The entrances into the changerooms.

Ornette was to spend an hour at each location for five days. Occasionally, she’d see someone with a camera filming her. She was introduced to the photographer and told to expect him because he wasn’t harassing her. He was doing his job.

Ornette was bored going through the routine. She was painfully bored. She moved slowly as she did the sets on the weights the sheets recommended. Other people at the gym saw her and from what she was doing, how often she was looking at her sheets, and the bored look on her face, they knew she didn’t really belong. On the first day, a few women came up to ask her if she needed help. She smiled and said no.

Which was a shame. She was really bored and she would have loved to talk to someone, but she worried it would ruin the experiment, so she refrained.

She sat in the cafeteria and read literature published by the gym to stop her time there from being utterly pointless. At the very least, she’d be able to answer five hundred questions about Joel and his gym.

On day three, she was approached by a man who had all the muscles on top and not enough on the bottom.

Ornette scoffed. Even she knew about leg day.

He came up to her at the juice stand and sat on the bar stool next to her. “I’ve been watching you. You don’t seem to know the ropes. I was hoping I could help.”

“What’s your name?” Ornette asked, spotting her photographer buddy over the guy’s shoulder.

“Bruce. What’s yours?”

“Ornette.”

He laughed into his overly large beard. “I’ve never heard that name before.”

“Yeah?” she said, flapping her company magazine closed and giving him all her attention.

“You don’t seem like you want to work out. What are you doing here?” he asked, his eyes mostly hidden by a pair of mirrored sunglasses.

“I’m hiding out,” she said drolly, taking her juice off the table and sucking the straw. “You’re right. I don’t really care about working out, so I don’t need any help to make it better.”

“But if you’re going to be here anyway, why not let me make it fun?” he suggested.

“I’m not available,” Ornette volunteered. “If your offer to help me work out has anything to do with a date or something romantic in the possible future, I have to tell you I’m not available. I’m the least available woman you’ll ever meet.”

“Where’s your ring if you’re married?” he asked.

“I’m not married. I didn’t say I was. I said I was unavailable.” She gave him a screw-off look before drinking from her straw again. “I’m the most unavailable woman on Venus.”

“Can’t we be friends?” he offered, trying with all his heart not to sound like a sexual predator because she was staring him down like he was one.

Ornette needed to keep her experiment clean, so she said the only thing she had left. “Bruce,” she said, leaning forward. “Before you came over to talk to me, we had a beautiful relationship. You watched me, I knew you were watching me because you’re not the only man watching me in this gym, and I didn’t mind. You could look at me and that was fine. But now that you’ve come over and said hello, that great relationship we had has come to an end. Please don’t mind me. I have a whole host of problems you don’t need right now. You should walk away from me and if you ever see me again, please smile and wave. I’ll do the same, but then it’s time to move on. Do you get my drift?”

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He nodded and stepped away. Then he smiled and waved.

Ornette did the same.

When he was gone, Ornette started to get worried she hadn’t scared him off by herself. She needed to scare him off by herself. Had he seen the cameraman or had he seen Desmond?

She had kind of expected Desmond to pop up somewhere soon since she’d seen him a couple times during the previous week with Fen. She really liked the clothes the fitness stylist at the gym had given her and she wouldn’t have minded Desmond seeing her in them, but he was nowhere around.

For the rest of her week, she kept looking over her shoulder and every time she saw a man with white hair, she craned her neck to see if it was him. It never was. The whole thing was like looking for your missing cat. Every cat looked like yours until he turned around. It was like a cruel joke the Cheshire Cat did not mean to play on a little blonde girl.

Ornette was kind of mad at herself for that. She was breaking her own rules by not forgetting him every single time she saw him.

After all, she had already forgotten all about Bruce.

***

On the last day Ornette was working out, Joel came to join her while she was doing laps in the pool.

She laughed when she saw him coming and pulled herself up to the edge of the pool. “You know,” she said playfully. “I’m not supposed to be attracting men and if I’m not supposed to be bothered by any men, you coming to see me is a little iffy.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, “but if I don’t spend a little time with you, I can’t report on what you were like to work with. So, I’m here.” He pulled his shirt over his head in a practiced motion and tore away his track pants, revealing very posh swimwear. He sat on the edge of the pool with his calves dangling in the water.

Actually, from a physical perspective, he was Ornette’s type far more than Fen had been. Though Joel had muscles to spare, he had a slighter skeleton, and he didn’t look like his hobby was chucking women against walls.

“Do you rock climb?” she asked, thinking that his skeleton looked as light as a bird’s.

“Yeah.”

She nodded. “Your body looks like you do.”

He looked down at his chest, pleased at his accomplishment. “And what did you do while you were working out?”

“I did the things on the list your assistant gave me,” she replied while she waited for him to lower himself into the water.

“Only those things?”

Ornette nodded. “Of course, I did the things your assistant told me to do. Exactly.”

“Did you get to take a yoga class then?” He was concerned. His eyebrows were pulled together.

“No. Women are not usually harassed during a yoga class. I was in high-risk areas all week.”

He pushed the water out of his way in a futile effort as he walked closer to her swim lane, so they could talk without raising their voices. “What happened? Were you harassed?”

“Well, I wasn’t harassed, but multiple men spoke to me.”

Joel looked alarmed.

Ornette rushed to defuse him. “Please relax. Nothing happened. I wouldn’t be able to hold my head up as a Sleeping Beauty Inc. model if I didn’t get approached in public. I have to be pretty enough to be worth approaching, but I also can't let random men take advantage of me. I can take care of myself.”

“Hmm…” he said, regarding her carefully. “Why is one of your hands a different color than the other?” he suddenly asked.

“Uh!” Ornette dropped her hand into the water. “Sorry. You weren’t meant to see that. Normally, I wear makeup to cover it but it comes off in the pool and if your boy films me, I need to have my hands as close to the same color as possible. I can’t remove the makeup. I have to add more.”

“So your hand is much darker than what I saw?” Joel asked, turning his attention to the ceiling instead of at her.

Ornette didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Surely, he understood what it meant for a Sleeping Beauty Inc. model to have a blackened hand.

She was about to suggest that they do some laps when he asked another question. “Did you have an unreasonable boss or is that par for the course?”

“Unreasonable bosses are par for the course when you work for Sleeping Beauty Inc.,” she replied softly.

“Then why do you do it?” he asked, his gaze personal and in her face.

“I haven’t had great opportunities,” she confided.

“Until now?” he challenged.

Ornette looked every which way. She wanted to lie. She wanted to fudge it over. She wanted to do laps, but her body was aching from all the sudden exercise of the past five days. She would rather do that lap and feel the pain that was squeezed out of her muscles at every stroke, but if she evaded him, he wouldn’t like it. For all intents and purposes, he was her master and her masters did not usually ask her those kinds of questions.

She got a little closer to Joel in the pool and whispered, “I didn’t sign up for this. You know that. You saw the footage of us waking up in the cryochambers and the big surprise they had for us. I was surprised. I’m still surprised, but even though the format for this gig is different from my other jobs, I don’t know that it will actually be different in the end.”

Joel nodded as if he understood, but Ornette knew he didn’t. He lived in a different world than her. He had opportunities and probably money to begin with.

“Shall we do a few laps?” Ornette asked lightly, hoping to brighten the mood.

“I want to ask you more questions,” he said, stopping her from swimming away with his voice. “I’m going to take you to dinner tonight.”

Ornette nodded. She couldn’t refuse.