Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 106797 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 534(@200wpm)___ 427(@250wpm)___ 356(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106797 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 534(@200wpm)___ 427(@250wpm)___ 356(@300wpm)
“Lo,” I cut her off. “It’s fine. I promise. I’m good.”
“What happened?”
Sighing, I gave her the cliff note version in the five minutes I had left before I would pull into the club. She cursed the entire time and vowed to strangle Shay the next time she saw her, which made me laugh more.
“So did you just go home? Did you call Dale? Or your mom?”
I hesitated. “Um…”
Willow waited a moment before speaking again. “What? What is it?”
“Well, don’t freak out, but I may or may not have gone home with Rhodes.”
“Oh. My God.” She said the first word with a punch and the second two altogether. “Shut up.”
I cringed. “Well, he kind of found me. And—”
Willow squeaked, drowning out my explanation. “I need details. Now. All of them.”
This time I laughed. “You’re going to have to wait. I’m pulling up to the club for my training session. But,” I started just as she began whining. “My mom wants to go shopping this evening. Come with us?”
“Like that’s even a question. Call me when you’re on your way. And I better get every single detail with you making me wait like this.”
With that, Willow ended the call and I tossed my phone in my gym bag and trudged into the gym. When I entered through the double glass doors and saw Rhodes running on the treadmill, sweat pouring down his face and drenching the top of his shirt, the nerves I was feeling earlier rushed back in full force. His eyes lifted as soon as I entered and he killed the machine, wiping himself with a small white towel as he made his way toward me.
“You’re late.”
“Sorry,” I murmured. “My parents were… well, it doesn’t matter. I’m here.”
He nodded, and I waited for him to rip into me. About last night, about being late — anything to get him to just get it over with before we started. But, surprisingly, he didn’t.
“Do you know how to check your heart rate?”
I scrunched my nose. “I mean, I watch it when I’m on the treadmill or the Stairmaster.”
“But do you know how to check it without a machine?”
I shook my head.
“Okay,” he started, moving closer to me. “You know how I tell you to get your heart rate up to at least one-hundred-and-sixty beats per minute when we’re doing treadmill drills?” I nodded. “That’s because at that rate, you’re in the hard-core cardio zone. If you’re between one-forty and one-sixty, you’re in cardio. One-twenty to one-forty, fat burn. Anything over one-eighty is max effort and anything less than one-twenty is warm up.”
I was looking at him like he’d just told me I have a thigh gap.
He chuckled. “I’ll get you a chart. But, the point I’m trying to make is that you should be able to do this on your own, without a machine. You should always monitor your heart rate to know what zone you’re in, regardless of if you’re working out outside or on a treadmill.”
“Okay, so how do I do that?”
Rhodes took my wrist and my stomach dropped, but I didn’t let it show. Turning my arm so that my palm faced upward, he pressed two fingers into my skin on the thumb side of my wrist. “Using two fingers, push hard between the bone and the tendon over your radial artery right here. Then, count how many beats you feel in fifteen seconds and multiply by four to get your heart rate.”
“You can feel my heart right now?”
His eyes lifted to mine and the slightest smile curled on his lips. “Yeah. Yeah I can feel your heart.” For a moment, he stayed staring at me like that, but then he cleared his throat and dropped my wrist. “You can check it on your neck, too, but I like the wrist way myself. Try it.”
I did, and I was embarrassed by how fast my heart was beating while we were just standing there. I knew he had felt it too, which only deepened that embarrassment further.
“Got it?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Good. I don’t want you to have to depend on the machine.” He paused, then pulled something from his pocket. “That being said, I got you something.”
He opened his hand and revealed a small white box with a watch depicted on the packaging. It was kind of bulky, but it was pink and feminine at the same time. “What is it?”
“It’s a lot of things. It’s a heart rate monitor, a watch, and a GPS system. It can log how far you run when you run outside. It’s waterproof, so even if it’s raining, you can still wear it. And it has a voice-memo feature so you can record how you’re feeling at certain times during your workout. You can track your workouts each day and look at data that compares how many calories you burned over the weeks and months and what your average heart rate was. And you can even toggle a setting for it to coach you while you train.” He shrugged. “It’s kind of like a mini me on your wrist.”