Chapter 5: The Gym's New Routine
The gym was supposed to be a bunker. His bunker. Marcus clung to that idea as he wiped down a bench press bar, the sterile scent of disinfectant cutting through the air. He’d worked with Derek for three years. The routine was armor: count the reps, correct the form, bark encouragement. For an hour, he could pretend he was still the guy in the mirrors—the one with the defined shoulders and the set jaw.
Derek was grunting through a set of heavy squats, his face tomato-red. “C’mon, two more! Drive through the heels!” Marcus’s voice was his old voice, the trainer’s bark. It almost convinced him.
Then the door hissed open on its pneumatic hinge.
She walked in like she owned the reflection. Her yoga outfit was black and impossibly thin, a second skin that traced every contour and seemed to absorb the harsh fluorescent light. Her hair was in a sleek ponytail. She carried a mat under her arm, a small, polite smile on her face.
Marcus’s heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic animal in a cage. His mouth went dry.
“Don’t mind me,” Hypnotica said, her voice a cool melody in the room of grunts and clanging metal. “Just getting a stretch in.” She unfurled her mat in a corner, near the mirrored wall, and began a series of slow, deliberate motions. She was a spectacle of controlled fluidity.
Derek racked the bar with a loud clang and stood up, breathing hard. He wiped his forehead with his arm and grinned at Marcus. “Who’s your friend, Coach?”
“No one,” Marcus said, too quickly. He cleared his throat. “A client. From a while back.”
“Lucky client,” Derek chuckled, grabbing his water bottle. He didn’t notice the fine tremor in Marcus’s hands as he handed him a towel.
“Okay, moving to dumbbell lunges. Let’s go.” Marcus tried to focus on Derek’s form, on the angle of his knee. But his periphery was filled with her. She was in a deep runner’s lunge now, back arched, head tilted. Her eyes in the mirror found his.
As Derek lowered into the lunge, Marcus pointed. “Keep your chest up, don’t lean forward—”
Hypnotica, still holding her stretch, parted her lips soundlessly in the mirror.
Release.
The pleasure was a violent, electric shock. It erupted from his chest with a force that stole his breath. His nipples, already sensitive, hardened into twin points of raw, screaming sensation under his tight athletic tank. A wave of dizzying heat flooded his face, his groin. His knees literally buckled. He took a stumbling half-step backward, his hand flailing out to catch himself on a weight rack.
The clatter was deafening. A twenty-pound dumbbell, knocked from its perch, hit the rubber floor with a thunderous bang and rolled.
Derek jumped, straightening up. “Whoa, you okay, man? You look like you’re gonna pass out.”
Marcus was gripping the rack, his knuckles white. He was panting. The sweet, phantom ache from the restaurant hollowed him out again, syncing with the throbbing in his chest. He couldn’t speak. He just nodded, a jerky, frantic motion.
From her mat, Hypnotica moved into a cobra stretch, serene. She didn’t look at him.
The rest of the session was a blur. Marcus heard his own voice giving instructions from a great distance. He flinched every time metal clanged. Derek kept shooting him concerned looks, but didn’t ask again. When the hour was finally up, Marcus felt scraped raw, every nerve ending exposed.
“See you Thursday, Coach,” Derek said, clapping him on a shoulder that instinctively tensed.
The door hissed shut behind him. The silence of the empty gym was worse than the noise.
Hypnotica rose from her mat in one smooth motion and rolled it up. She walked toward him, her sneakers silent on the mats. He stood frozen by the bench press, a prisoner awaiting sentencing.
“You’re distracted,” she said, not unkindly. It was a clinical observation. “The work here is important. It requires focus. Let me help you.”
“I don’t need help.” The words were ash in his mouth.
“Of course you do.” She placed a hand on his sternum. He shuddered at the touch. “Lie down.”
His body obeyed before his mind could formulate a protest. He lay back on the cool vinyl of the bench, staring at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling. She stood behind him, near his head. He could smell her now, that faint, expensive perfume cutting through the gym’s sweat and cleaner.
“Close your eyes. Listen to my voice. Follow your breath.” Her voice changed. It lost its casual edge and became a low, resonant hum, a physical thing that seemed to vibrate in his bones. “In… and out. Feel the tension leaving your fingers. Your toes. You are safe here. You are open here.”
He was sinking. The fight was too hard, the water too deep. Her voice was the only anchor, pulling him down into the dark.
“This place is a temple of transformation,” she murmured, her words weaving into the rhythm she was building in his skull. “It’s where we make changes. Where we build new shapes. From now on, when you hear the word ‘gym,’ you will feel a wave of peaceful submission. Your body will soften. It will yearn for the right changes. It will crave the beautiful transformation… for me. Do you understand?”
A part of him screamed. The rest of him, the part connected to his lungs and his pulse, whispered a silent, desperate yes.
“Good.” She let the silence hang for a moment, letting the new trigger bury its roots. Then she moved.
He heard the faint zip of a small bag. He opened his eyes. She was holding a soft, yellow cloth tape measure. “We need a baseline,” she said, all business.
“No.”
“Hush.” She looped the tape around the widest part of his chest, under his arms. Her fingers brushed his sensitized skin and he gasped. She noted the number on her phone with a tap. Then his waist, just above the hips. Her touch was impersonal, like a tailor’s. It was degrading.
She measured his hips next, the tape settling over the curve of his glutes. She clucked her tongue softly. “See? Narrow. Boyish. We have work to do, Marcus. A real woman’s body has curves. Softness. We need to encourage that.”
He turned his head away, heat flooding his cheeks. The mirrors reflected his shame back at him from a dozen angles.
From her bag, she produced a small, unlabeled bottle of opaque white plastic. It was full of pale, pinkish capsules. She placed it on his stomach, just above his navel. The plastic was warm from her bag.
“These will help. Herbal supplements. Phytoestrogens. They’ll tell your body to start making the right adjustments. One with breakfast, one with dinner. Every day.”
He stared at the bottle. It was poison. It was the physical key to a lock he didn’t want opened. He knew it. Every shred of his old self recoiled.
His hand, moving as if through syrup, came up. His fingers closed around the bottle. The plastic made a faint crinkling sound.
Hypnotica smiled. It was a real smile, full of genuine, chilling delight. She leaned down, her lips close to his ear. “Good boy,” she whispered.
The words seeped into him, warm and horribly validating. He held the bottle to his chest, a perverse token. As she gathered her things and walked toward the door, he lay there on the bench, listening to the hum of the fans, already feeling the first imaginary shifts deep in his marrow. The word echoed in the empty space she left behind.
Gym.