Chapter 404 | The Man, The Myth, The Shirtless Legend

Chapter 404: 404 | The Man, The Myth, The Shirtless Legend

The rec center smelled like rubber and questionable life choices by the time they hit the bench press. Jordan lay flat on the padded bench and stared at the empty bar suspended above his chest like a forty-five-pound judgment. His reflection in the overhead lights showed a guy who had walked twenty-two miles, carried a four-year-old through Disneyland, and had sex with two girls in forty-eight hours. The bar looked heavier than it had any right to.

"Just the bar," Kyle said, standing at the spotter position with his arms crossed. "No ego. No heroics. Just press it fifteen times and try not to embarrass yourself."

"I could do two plates."

"You could die. Different outcomes. Press the bar."

Jordan wrapped his hands around the cold metal and lifted it off the rack. His shoulders screamed immediately, a high-pitched internal scream that his brain registered and chose to ignore because ignoring pain was free. The first rep felt fine. The second rep felt fine. The third rep felt like his arms had been replaced with pool noodles that somebody had left in the sun too long.

By rep eight, his right elbow started shaking.

By rep twelve, both arms had unionized and were threatening to strike.

Kyle watched him struggle through rep fifteen with the expression of a man watching a nature documentary where the gazelle definitely doesn’t make it.

"Rack it."

Jordan racked it. The bar clanged against the hooks louder than it should have, and every head in the weight room turned to see who was benching the empty bar and making it sound like a car crash.

"Recovery volume," Kyle announced to no one. "He’s coming back from injury."

"What injury?" some guy on the squat rack called over.

"Hip flexor strain," Kyle said, without missing a beat. "Plus overtraining. Plus dehydration. Plus he’s an idiot. Four separate conditions."

Jordan sat up and his vision did a fun little shimmy where the room tilted three degrees left before correcting. His phone buzzed in his gym bag across the bench. Probably Kumiko sending him another message about missing him, or Chloe telling him to drink water, or Alexis informing him that his Instagram aesthetic was trash and he should feel bad about his life choices.

He loved all three of them in completely different ways that would require a Venn diagram he didn’t have the energy to draw.

"Water," Kyle said, shoving a bottle at him.

Jordan drank half of it in four swallows. The cold hit his stomach and sat there like a small blessing.

They moved to the cable machine next. Lat pulldowns, which Jordan could actually do because they didn’t require his body to hold itself together through pure spite. Kyle loaded the pin at ninety pounds, which was embarrassing, but also Jordan’s arms had stopped taking requests around rep thirteen of the bench press.

"So," Kyle said, leaning against the machine. "You want to talk about the bite mark, or are we pretending Maya didn’t see it and make a whole comment about temper?"

"We’re pretending."

"Cool. Just checking." Kyle grabbed his own water bottle and drank. His gym shirt had a stain on it that might have been protein shake or might have been a crime. "Because from where I was standing, it looked like she noticed, said something loaded, and then walked away before you could respond, which my girlfriend says is a power move."

"Your girlfriend doesn’t know Maya."

"My girlfriend knows women."

Jordan pulled the bar down. Ninety pounds felt like nine hundred pounds, which meant his back was at about thirty percent too. Everything was at thirty percent. His whole body had become a clearance sale.

"Maya doesn’t do power moves," he said between reps. "She just says things and walks away because she’s done talking. It’s not strategy. It’s efficiency."

"Uh huh." Kyle sounded unconvinced in the specific way people sounded unconvinced when they were absolutely right and waiting for you to figure it out. "And the fact that she specifically mentioned somebody having a temper, while looking at a bite mark on your chest, and then left before you could explain who gave you the bite mark, that’s just coincidence."

"Yes."

"You’re lying to yourself."

"Yep."

They ran through three sets in silence. Well, silence punctuated by the clang of weight stacks and some guy in the corner doing bicep curls with his whole body while grunting like he was moving furniture. Jordan’s back started to remember it was attached to a human and not a mannequin filled with sand.

His phone buzzed again. Then twice more in rapid succession.

"You going to check that?" Kyle asked.

"No."

"Could be important."

"It’s Kumiko telling me she misses me, or Chloe telling me to stop ignoring Kumiko, or Alexis telling me I’m smug. None of those require immediate response."

Kyle laughed. "Man, I don’t know how you do it. I can barely manage texting one girl back. You’ve got three running and they all know about each other and nobody’s set your car on fire."

"Chloe’s pregnant."

The weight stack crashed down so hard the whole machine rattled. Kyle’s water bottle hit the floor and rolled under the leg press. Across the gym, Protein Shake Guy stopped mid-curl and stared at them like they’d announced a bomb threat.

"What."

"Chloe’s pregnant," Jordan repeated. "Due in September. It’s mine. We’re keeping it."

Kyle’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. No sound came out. His brain was doing the math, the calendar math, the timeline math, all of it arriving at the same place which was holy shit Jordan McKnight is going to be somebody’s father.

"You’re eighteen."

"Yep."

"She’s eighteen."

"Also yep."

"And you’re keeping it."

"That’s the plan."

Kyle sat down on the bench next to the cable machine. His face had gone through several colors in rapid succession and was currently settling on a pale green that suggested his breakfast was reconsidering its housing situation.

"Does your dad know?"

"Not yet."

"Does her dad know?"

"She doesn’t have a dad. It’s complicated." Jordan grabbed his water bottle and drank. "But yeah. I’m going to be a dad. Probably should have led with that instead of dropping it in the middle of lat pulldowns."

"You think?"

Leo chose that exact moment to walk through the gym doors. He wore a Balenciaga hoodie that cost more than Jordan’s rent and pristine white sneakers that had never seen a treadmill. His expression said he’d been up since five and had already made six bad decisions before breakfast.

"There he is!" Leo called across the gym. "The man, the myth, the shirtless legend in mouse ears!" He crossed the floor in eight strides and clapped Jordan on the shoulder hard enough to rattle teeth. "Bro. Bro. Everyone saw that photo. Everyone. I got three texts from girls I haven’t talked to since sophomore year asking if I knew you and if you were single."

"I’m not single."

"I know that. You know that. They don’t care." Leo pulled out his phone and started scrolling with the manic energy of someone who’d had four espressos and a prayer. "Ashley from Intro to Marketing wants to know if you have tattoos. Becca from my apartment complex asked if you do modeling. And Madison, I don’t even know a Madison, she DMed me asking if you were going to Kyle’s birthday party next month because she wants to bring a friend."

"Kyle’s birthday isn’t until May."

"Women plan ahead!" Leo gestured wildly with his phone. "This is what I’ve been telling you! You get hot, you post one photo, and suddenly you’re infrastructure. You’re a whole economy. Girls are using you as social currency and you’re not even monetizing it."