(LB1) Shakespeare's Champion Read Online Free PDF Page B

chunky woman with dark brown hair and eyes who’d had a crush on Marshall ever since I’d met her; Brian Gruber, silver-haired and attractive, the president of a mattress manufacturing plant; Jerri Sizemore, former wife of Dr. John Sizemore, a local dentist; and Darcy Orchard, who worked at the sporting goods store, as Del had. Darcy usually worked out with Jim Box, another store employee, but today Jim was absent—probably home with the flu; he’d been sneezing yesterday. I wondered who Darcy’s new partner was. Eventually Darcy’s companion, whom I dimly recognized as someone I’d seen around the Shakespeare Garden Apartments, left. But Darcy lingered on.
    Darcy was on the calf extension machine, which was my next station, so I watched as he did his second set. He had the pin pushed in at the two-hundred-pound mark, and as I waited he adjusted the shoulder pressure. Darcy, who was about six feet tall, had the rippling pectorals and ridged biceps of a workout fanatic. I thought there might be an ounce of subcutaneous fat on his body. He was wearing one of the ripped-up sweatshirts—arms chopped off, neck binding torn out—that were the mark of the committed, and his sweatpants were probably the same ones he’d worn in high school.
    “Be through in a minute,” he panted, doing a set of twelve. He stepped down and walked around for a minute, relaxing the calf muscles that were taking such a beating. Darcy gathered himself, moved the pin down two more notches to add forty more pounds to his load, and stepped up on the narrow bar, his toes bearing his weight. Down went his heels, then up, for twelve more reps. “Ow!” he said, getting off. “Ow!” Staring at the floor with a scowl, Darcy relaxed the protesting muscles in his legs. “Let me just burn out now,” he said, and moved the pin up to a more reasonable weight. He stepped back on the ledge and did twenty-four reps very rapidly, until the grimace of concentration on his face became a rictus of pain.
    All together this took only minutes, and I was glad of the rest.
    “How you doing, Lily?” Darcy asked, walking in place to work off the strain. He grabbed up a beige towel and patted his acne-pitted cheeks with it.
    “Fine.” I wondered if he’d say anything about Raphael’s exit. But Darcy had something else on his mind.
    “Hear you found ole Del.” His small brown eyes scanned my face.
    “Yeah.”
    “Del was a good guy,” Darcy said slowly. It was a kind of elegy. “Del was always smiling. That guy that was here with me a minute ago, that’s the guy Howell hired to replace him. He’s a big change.”
    “Local fella?” I asked politely, as I adjusted the shoulder bars down for my five feet, five inches.
    “Nope, from Little Rock, I think. He’s one tough son of a bitch, ’scuse my language.”
    I moved the pin up to eighty pounds. I stepped onto a narrow ledge, came up under the padded shoulder bars to take the weight, and dropped my heels down. I pushed up twenty times, very quick reps.
    I stepped down to walk it off and shift the pin to a higher weight.
    “You dating anybody now, Lily? I heard you and Marshall weren’t such an item anymore.”
    I looked up in surprise. Darcy was still there. Though Darcy had a wonderful body, it was the only thing about him that I found remotely interesting, and that wasn’t enough basis for an evening together. Darcy’s conversation bored me, and something about him made me wary. I never ignore feelings like that.
    “I don’t want to,” I said.
    He smiled a little, like someone who was sure he’d misunderstood. “Don’t want to…?” he asked.
    “Date anyone.”
    “Whoa, Lily! A fine woman like you doesn’t want a man to take her out?”
    “As of now, right.” I stepped up, took the hundred pounds on my shoulders, and did another set of twenty. The last five were something of a challenge.
    “How come? You like women instead?” Darcy was sneering, as though he felt obliged to look