It’s seven Gay-M at the Fitness Time gym, and JT is stuck in a time loop. But he doesn’t know it yet. He is a man on a mission. He bundled up to brave the snow on his work-from-home day. Now he plans to pump some iron with his bros and take full advantage of the crowded steam room. At this hour, the gym is packed with ripped, sweaty men who make having abs their entire personality, and JT knows with his backwards pink hat that he’ll fit right in.
Tall, lanky, and bespectacled Noel begrudgingly attends the gym at this hour as well. He’s dressed in his favorite comic book T-shirt and garish yellow track pants. The gym bros treat him like he’s invisible or unworthy of taking up space. But he doesn’t despair. He’s not here for the scene, only for the health benefits. That is, until his path crosses with JT.
At first, JT treats Noel as poorly as all the other jocks. The question is whether JT will realize that’s why he’s stuck in a time loop.
Can JT overcome his past to rediscover himself? Will he find a way to not only appreciate Noel but also to prove himself worthy of Noel’s affection? Or will he continue down his lonely path of pumping iron while denying his true interests only to end up alone or stuck in this loop forever?
“Enjoy your workout,” said the college kid behind the front desk. She didn’t even look up from her phone to greet JT as he stepped inside the Fitness Time lobby. She never would have noticed if he hadn’t cleaned off the snow from his hat and boots, but he did so anyway.
It was Seven Gay-M, but for some reason JT could not explain, he was less thrilled about this opportunity to work out and get worked out than he had expected. He had this nagging sense that something was out of place. That he was not supposed to be here. Or that he had made a terrible mistake he had to correct.
As he walked toward the locker room, he had a hard time naming this sensation. He didn’t quite feel trapped. No, that was the wrong word for it. The situation felt inverted. As if all the other hot men in this gym were repeating the exact same workout, the exact same movements, always lifting the exact same amount of weight on every set and every rep. There seemed to be no progress here at all. No modifications that led toward growth. To JT, the gym bros appeared to be trapped in an eternal recurrence of the same.
JT, however, felt like he was intruding upon a routine that was not meant for him. One in which his mere presence threw the general timeline out of balance.
Get over yourself, he thought. For as much as he had worked to transform from the scrawny kid who played videogames and collected action figures into the mature twenty-five-year-old who could score with the hottest men, he was pretty sure new abs and a perky butt could not alter the space-time continuum.
Regardless, JT was in a funk. He changed into his gym clothes reluctantly. He was annoyed he had mistakenly brought a warmer outfit. The gym was ridiculously hot today. The heaters must have broken, or they were overcompensating for the snowstorm. Either way, this was not how he wanted to present himself to the contingent of sexy muscle bros who, in a good forty minutes, would be headed for the showers, sauna, and his favorite, the steam room, to suck and fuck before the workday began.
JT sighed heavily as a couple squeezed past him on their way to play in the shower. He adjusted his pink baseball hat, barely paying them any attention at all.
Outside the locker room, he stopped at the rubber mats for a quick stretch. He was lackadaisical about his cat-cows, and then he skipped the rest of his warm-up routine. The old inner saboteur reared its ugly head, telling him he was not hot enough to score during seven Gay-M. Not among the upper echelons at least. Maybe he could snag a mid-tier outlier, like a snowy owl who targets an unattended baby mouse on the forest floor.
JT despised this inner voice. He reminded himself that this was not a representation of reality. It was simply a manifestation of lingering insecurities. Ones he had mostly bid adieu through years of pumping iron and crafting a new aesthetic. He could tamp down this voice before it ruined his work-from-home snow day.
It was wild to him how he his mind could swing through these ups and downs in such a short interval. One minute he thinks he’s broken the timeline. The next he’s convinced he’s so unappealing that no man could possibly be interested in touching him. All the more reason to remind himself to quiet his inner saboteur.
As he made the rounds through the weightlifting room, he noticed a few of the guys checking out his butt and bulge. The attention stabilized his mood somewhere in the middle, but he still felt a tremendous amount of exhaustion at the effort to which the gays went to have sex with one another. It could all be so much easier, he thought as he made his second loop through the packed room. He had forgotten the need to arrive well before seven to secure a workstation.
JT had resigned himself to doing nothing but cardio, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.
“Would you like to work in with me?” asked a stranger with a warm, inviting tone.
JT turned around. The first thing he noticed about this guy was his long-sleeve T-shirt emblazoned with the Crossing Rayguns space pirates. “I used to be really into that series,” he said reflexively.
“This?” inquired the polite stranger. He looked down and tugged at his shirt. “Me too. I was mildly obsessed in high school. Makes for a good gym shirt these days at least.”
“It’s bold of you to wear that at this hour,” said JT. He would rather die than walk around in such a dorky old shirt in this gym.
“You’d be surprised how many guys are into it,” he said with a smirk. “I’m Noel, by the way.”
“JT,” he replied and shook Noel’s hand.
