I've been going to Apex for two years, and I swear the adaptive rigs know things about you that you don't know about yourself yet.
Dara figured that out before I did.
---
We'd been training partners for six months — Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, 9 PM, when the floor mostly clears out and you can actually get a rack. She's a powerlifter with a biomechanics degree and zero patience for ego-lifting, which is exactly why I trusted her hands. When she repositioned me, it wasn't flirtatious. It was clinical. *Hip hinge here. Lats engaged, not shrugged. Feel the difference.* I felt the difference. The gravity plates would hum lower, resistance redistributing, confirming correct muscle recruitment with that soft green pulse along the bar.
That Thursday, we were the last two people in the building.
I was benching — not heavy, just moving — when she came around behind the rack the way she always does, fingers light on my wrists to check my path. Standard. Except her thumb dragged along the inside of my forearm when she corrected my grip, and something in my chest went *oh.*
The plates shifted. Not because my pectorals changed their recruitment pattern.
I reracked and said, "Did the rig just—"
"Yeah," she said. Her voice was careful, watching me. "It does that."
*She knew. She's been watching it happen.*
"How long have you known?" I asked.
"That you're attracted to me? A while." She came around to the side of the rack, not touching me yet, giving me room to think. "That I'm attracted to you? About three weeks ago when you spotted my squats and put your hands on my hips and I almost dropped the bar."
I laughed — actually laughed — and the tension broke into something better, something charged and deliberate. I sat up. She was close enough that I could see the pulse at her throat.
"We should probably talk about this," I said.
"We are talking about it."
"Dara."
"I want to," she said plainly. "Do you?"
---
What followed was nothing like I'd imagined it, which is to say it was better. We moved to the stretching mats — less equipment to accidentally recalibrate — and she kissed me first, hands on my jaw, unhurried. I pulled her down and she went willingly, straddling my hips, her palms sliding under my shirt with the same focused attention she gave to everything. *She touches like she spots. Like she actually wants to know what's there.*
I got her shirt off. She got mine. Her mouth moved down my neck and I said, somewhat breathlessly, "Still good?" and she said, "Ask me again in an hour," which I took as enthusiastic confirmation.
We were slow about it. She told me what she wanted in specific, unambiguous language that I found extraordinarily attractive. I told her the same. Her fingers were careful and then not careful. I pulled her hips against mine and she made a sound I'd been thinking about, I realized, for longer than I'd admitted to myself.
Afterward we lay on the mats and the overhead lights had dimmed to their idle setting, and somewhere across the floor one of the unloaded bars glowed faintly green, its sensors still reading the room.
"The rig knew before we did," I said.
Dara propped her chin on my shoulder. "The rig always knows. That's why I stopped benching alone."
