Down, up, down, up, down, up. The rhythm of her push-ups was constant, steady. A short pause at the bottom before exploding back to the top. A longer pause there before lowering herself back down with the smooth precision of a highly engineered machine.
Down, up, down, up, down, up. Four hundred and ninety-eight… Four hundred and ninety-nine… Five hundred.
Angel held the position, her knuckles – taking most of her weight – on fire, her legs quivering, big globules of sweat dripping from her brow and to the carpet below. After a few seconds, every muscle in her body burned and screamed for mercy. She still held the high plank position longer, as long as she could until her muscles rather than her willpower gave in and she collapsed to the floor. She rolled over, staring up at the ceiling, panting heavy breaths to suck in as much oxygen as she could while endorphins rushed through her blood and through her brain. A natural high? Fuck that. The feeling didn’t even come close to the highs brought on by external chemicals. But this type of high… The reward was good, yet the punishment, the atonement, and more than anything the relief that it was over made it all the more powerful.
A knock on the bedroom door. Gentle. Like everything in this place. Light touch.
She really didn’t fit in at all.
‘Angel, we’re going to the woods soon.’
‘Got it,’ she shouted out.
She rolled forward onto her heels and bounced upright sending a renewed rush of blood to her head. She looked out of the grimy little window. A room with a view? Yeah, it was nice. If she pressed her right cheek up against the right-hand side of the glass she had the smallest glimpse of the edge of Lake Windermere about a mile in the distance. Only visible at this time of year because the trees had now lost all their leaves. So yeah, the view was OK even if in winter it all looked a little barren, and she’d been here for nearly two weeks and still hadn’t seen any sunshine. Every day that went by with nothing more than dull gray all around her it took away another small part of her soul.
This place was supposed to be for recovery, but if she was to set up competition she’d put her retreat on a white sand beach in the Caribbean and have everyone sip on frozen margaritas all day long. Virgin margaritas, obviously.
Well, maybe anyway.
At least it had finally stopped raining, although she knew that once again she’d need her Wellington boots for this ‘adventure’ as the ground all around here had turned to thick mud and likely would stay that way now until some dry and warm weather returned in several months’ time.
Angel sighed and tried to push the downtrodden thoughts away, but turning around and looking at the poky room and the poky bed and the tired furniture didn’t exactly make her feel any more positive about being here.
Still, it was a lot better than what she’d had to become used to over recent years. She’d spent way too long confined to spaces much smaller and worse than this one. Which was one very big reason why she’d started her grueling routine of push-ups, sit-ups, squats, burpees, anything she could do in a small space and with nothing more than her body as equipment. To keep fit. To fill time. To make her feel something at all other than hate and regret.
Another knock on the door.
‘Angel, we’re going in five minutes.’ A different but no less gratingly gentle and pleasant voice this time.
‘I know!’ she shouted. ‘Give me some fucking peace, will you?’
No response to that.
She headed to the bathroom and stared at her reflection in the mirror for a few seconds. Her face was beetroot red, she was covered in sweat, her hair sodden. She should shower but within half an hour she’d be sat by the smoky campfire, stinking anyway.
Screw it.
She washed her face with cold water, stripped off her leggings and sports bra, and used a damp towel to at least absorb some of the sweat from her body. Which kind of worked, until more sweat rippled along her skin.
Whatever.
She put on some jogging bottoms and a big hoodie. She tied her damp, scraggy hair into a tight bun and pulled her hood over her head. Then she put on her boots and went to the door.
She paused. Sniffed. She didn’t know whether it was the clothes, or the boots, or just her but… That wasn’t a good odor. She rushed back to the bathroom and dug into her toiletry bag and right at the bottom found the perfume bottle. Coco Chanel. Her mom had bought it for her eight years ago this Christmas. A strange gift as Angel had never been much into wearing perfume, and she’d hardly ever used it even before… all that. Yet it remained a regular fixture in her toiletry bag wherever she went. In fact, it usually stayed in the bag, the bag in the cupboard when she was at home.
She sprayed ten squirts all about her and spun around trying to catch every last molecule. She sniffed then coughed when the fragrance caught in her nose. She scrunched her face and rubbed at her nose but the smell, the taste at the back of her throat remained.
‘At least you can’t smell yourself anymore,’ she said, looking at herself in the mirror with a wry smile.
Then she finally headed out, down the creaky stairs of the old and poorly kept building to the shoddy reception area where thirteen people were already waiting, a few chatting quietly, but most standing alone and looking somber.
‘Ah, Angel, you’re here,’ said Lee, a big false smile plastered on his nerdy face as he strode over and patted her on the shoulder. The smile faltered a little. ‘You look—’
‘Like she’s run a marathon through some prickly bushes,’ said Deidre – a grumpy sort who’d taken a disliking to Angel immediately. Or was it the other way around? Either way, they weren’t compatible.
‘Running?’ said Jason – a worm of a man who only spoke if he had something snide to say about others. ‘Not with all that grunting and moaning I keep on hearing. Something else, I think.’
He smirked and looked around as though expecting others to find him funny. As usual, no one did.
‘Anyway,’ Lee said, tilting his head forward to look at Angel like a parent would with a child they were trying to convince of something they knew the child wouldn’t like to hear. ‘I’m glad you decided to come with us. I wasn’t sure if you would again. After… You know.’
‘After she smacked Clive around the head with a burning stick?’ Jason said, still smirking.
‘An appropriate response given what he said to me,’ Angel countered.
‘OK, OK,’ Lee said, turning and using his best authoritative tone. Which wasn’t really very authoritative. ‘I don’t think we need to revisit old ground. As everyone here knows, Clive has been sent home because of what happened. What he said was horribly inappropriate and, while we never condone violence, I just hope we can all move on now.’
He turned back to Angel with an imploring look, as though asking her to be on her best behavior. If only he knew how much restraint it had taken to just smack Clive one time with that log. She’d wanted to force the flaming end down his throat.
She rubbed her fingers across her palms, the rawness from the burns still there. A reminder of sorts.
‘OK, then,’ said Gloria, striding out of the office with purpose, and a similarly giddy smile on her face which she shared with Lee, her underling. Did the two of them practice it together? ‘Shall we get going?’
So they all did. A nearly two-mile trek across muddy fields, through muddy woodland trails, until finally, they came to a clearing where soaked-through wooden trunks had been arranged as benches around a small circle of stones that would become the boundaries for their campfire.
‘It’s a bit… wet,’ Jason said while slopping his foot down into one of several pools of standing water around them. ‘Is this going to work?’
‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail,’ Lee said, undeterred in spirit as he strode across to the small shelter a few yards away. ‘Someone come and help me,’ he shouted out, head inside, his ass sticking out which Angel found herself laughing at… It reminded her of… something. She couldn’t remember what.
‘Shall we get this place looking nice?’ Gloria said in her loud matronly voice.
She received some murmurs of acknowledgment and roughly half of the party joined her in the fruitless task of mopping down the logs and trying to cover the pools of water with leaves and other mulch.
Angel helped a little, but not exactly enthusiastically. She still had her eye on the new guy. She’d first spotted him in the reception area, talking to Jenn – a young woman who all the guys had shown an interest in at some point. Was she pretty? Maybe not in the middle of the city with lots of competition, but out here she was clearly the pick of the bunch with her sparkling green eyes, blemish-free skin, and her dyed blonde hair. Anyway, the point wasn’t about her, but about the man. Angel didn’t know him but something about his face, his serious but commanding manner, put her on the back foot. Perhaps because he reminded her so much of—
‘I thought this sort of thing would be right up your street,’ Jason said, his tone less than friendly as he walked past lugging some wood and making a real meal of it as though it was a huge strain to carry a few logs.
‘My street being?’ Angel said as he dumped the logs next to the fire pit.
‘Girl of adventure. Tomboy. You know.’
She glared at him, waiting to see if he had anything else to add and he shrank a little as though well aware she wasn’t impressed with whatever insinuation he’d been trying to make.
‘It’s just… You’re not a… girly girl. Are you?’
‘I’m thirty-freaking-one, Jason.’ She caught herself just in time from saying the actual f-word. Not allowed here, and she did at least try to follow the rules. ‘I’m not any kind of girl. So please stop projecting your own depraved preferences my way.’
He looked like he’d swallowed several wasps and he stuttered and glanced around him as though embarrassed someone else might have heard.
‘That’s not… That’s…’
Angel turned away from him and went and sat down on one of the logs that Gloria had hastily covered with a blanket, which at least partly helped to keep the moisture away.
While Lee and some of the other wannabe alphas – or maybe just helpful souls – got the fire going, Angel sat and watched the people around her, contemplating where she fit into it all, how being here really had become the sum total of her life. As the fire took hold, the not-quite-dry enough wood spitting and fizzling and sending thick plumes of smoke upward, everyone eventually settled down on the trunks. Nearly everyone. Lee remained by the fire. His fire. The new guy remained talking to and giggling with Jenn. And as the two of them were ushered over Angel was sure they’d find a seat together. Or, at least, the guy would follow Jenn wherever she was going. But instead, Gloria stuck her hand out to guide Jenn toward her – a deliberate attempt to break up the flirting? – and the next moment the guy locked eyes with Angel and she kind of froze.
Damn embarrassing. But the way he looked at her…
He smiled and she didn’t move as he came over to her and sat down on her trunk.
‘Hi,’ he whispered as Lee began his spiel about what he had planned for the night. How it’d make them all feel wonderful and aid their recoveries and provide a safe environment for blah, blah, blah.
‘I said hi,’ the guy said, leaning in a little. ‘Don’t I know you?’
‘No,’ Angel said. ‘You don’t.’
He kind of laughed. ‘Hopefully, I will soon enough.’ He leaned further over and nudged her shoulder a little.
Angel didn’t react. The guy straightened up and Lee carried on addressing the group, but Angel blocked out his words. Her brain was too busy as she stared at the swirling flames of the fire. She rubbed at the sore spots in her palms again, eyes focused on the red-hot, glowing logs, the smooth and confident voice of the man sitting next to her reverberating uneasily in her mind.