I’d come to a decision: if I was go

I’d come to a decision: if I was going to monopolize Will’s time and insist on training with him, then I would have to actually . . . you know . . . train for something.
I’d decided to get serious, to stop thinking of it as a game and start really treating it like an experiment. I started going to bed at a decent hour so I could get up and run with him and still get to the lab early enough for a full day of work at the bench. I expanded my running wardrobe to include some quality workout gear and an extra pair of shoes. I stopped thinking of Starbucks as a food group and cut back on the complaining. And with much flailing on my part and much reassurance on his—we signed up for a half-marathon in mid-April. I was terrified.
But it turned out Will was right: it did get easier. Just a few weeks in and my lungs had stopped burning, my shins had stopped feeling like they were made of brittle sticks, and I no longer felt like vomiting by the time we reached the end of the trail. In fact, we’d actually been able to increase our distance and move to his normal trail along the outer loop. Will said if I could handle the six miles a day and get up to eight-mile runs twice a week, he wouldn’t need to train additionally without me.
It wasn’t just that it started to feel good. I’d started to see a difference, too. Thanks to genetics, I’d always been relatively thin, but never what you’d call fit. My stomach was a tad soft, my arms did that weird jiggle thing when I waved, and there was always this damn little pooch over the top of my jeans if I didn’t keep that shit sucked in. But now . . . things were changing, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
“So what’s happening here?” Chloe asked, eyeing me from inside my closet. She pointed a finger at me and swept it around. “You look . . . different.”
“Different?” I asked.
The point of Project Ziggy actually wasn’t to spend as much time as possible with Will—even though he was quickly becoming my favorite person—but to help me find balance, to have a life outside the lab. In the past couple of weeks, Chloe and Sara had become an important part of the effort, dragging me out for dinner or coming over to just hang for a few hours at my apartment.
This particular Thursday evening they’d brought takeout and we’d somehow migrated into my room, where Chloe had taken it upon herself to go through my closet, deciding what could stay and what absolutely had to go.
“Different good,” she clarified, and then turned to Sara, who was stretched across my bed, thumbing through some sort of financial file for work. “Don’t you think so?”
Sara looked up, eyes narrowing as she considered me. “Definitely good. Happy, maybe?”
Chloe was already nodding. “Was just going to say that. There’s definitely some kind of glowy thing happening in your cheeks. And your ass looks amazing in those pants.”
I looked at my reflection, checked out the front and turned to see the back. My ass did look pretty happy. My front wasn’t too bad, either. “My pants are a little loose,” I noted, checking the size. “And look, no muffin top!”
“Well, that’s always a plus,” Sara said with a laugh, shaking her head, then going back to her documents.
Chloe started putting things on hangers, shoving others into plastic bags. “You’re toning up. What have you been doing?”
“Just running. And lots of stretching. Will is big on the stretching. He added sit-ups to our routine last week, and let me be clear on how much I hate those.” I continued to study my reflection, adding, “I can’t remember the last time I had a cookie, and that feels like a crime.”
“Still training with Will, huh?” Chloe asked, and I couldn’t miss the look that passed between her and Sara. The look that said I’d just dropped a giant nugget of awesome in their lap and they were going to talk it to death and then dissect it until I begged for mercy.
“Yeah, every morning.”
“Will trains with you every morning?” Chloe asked. Another look exchanged.
I nodded, moved to pick up a few errant things lying around. “We meet at the park. Did you know he does triathlons? He’s in great shape.” I snapped my mouth shut, realizing it probably wasn’t safe to be as obliviously unfiltered with Chloe as it was with Will. I knew her well enough at this point to know she didn’t let very many things slide.
And indeed, she lifted a brow and reached up, pushing a thick wave of dark hair behind her shoulder. “So, about William.”
I hummed, folding a pair of socks together.
“Do you see him outside of this daily running date?”
I could feel their attention like heated laser beams on the side of my face so I nodded, not looking over at either of them.
“He’s very handsome,” Chloe added.
Danger danger, my brain warned. “He is.”
“Have you seen each other naked?”
My eyes shot to Chloe’s. “What?”
“Chloe,” Sara groaned.
“No,” I insisted. “We’re just friends.”
Chloe snorted, moving to the closet with a handful of clothes draped over her arms. “Right.”
“We run in the mornings, meet up for coffee sometimes. Maybe breakfast,” I said, shrugging and ignoring the way my honesty meter seemed to flare into the red zone. Lately we’d been having breakfast together almost every morning, and talked at least one other time during the day. I’d even started to call him for advice on my experiments when Liemacki was traveling or just busy . . . or just because I valued his scientific opinion. “Just friends.” I glanced at Sara. Her eyes were trained on her papers but she was smiling, shaking her head.
“Bullshit,” Chloe all but sang. “Will Sumner doesn’t have any women in his life that are just friends, outside of family and the two of us.”
“This is true,” Sara reluctantly agreed.
I didn’t say anything, just turned and began searching through my drawers for a sweater. I could feel Chloe watching me, though, could feel the pressure of her gaze against the back of my head. I’d never had a lot of female friends—and I’d definitely never had one like Chloe Mills—but even I was smart enough to be a little afraid of her. I got the distinct impression that even Bennett was a little afraid of her.
I found the cardigan I’d been hunting for and slipped it over my favorite Firefly T-shirt, doing my best to keep my expression neutral and my head free of anything Will-related that ventured outside of the friend zone. Something told me these two would see through that in a second.
“How long have you guys known each other?” Sara asked. “He and Max go way back, but I’ve only known him since I moved to New York.”
“Same here,” Chloe added. “Spill, Bergstrom. He’s too smug and we need some ammo.”
I laughed, grateful for the semi-shift in topic. “What do you want to know?”
“Well, you knew him when he was in college. Was he a giant dork? Please say he was in the chess club or something,” Chloe said, hopeful.
“Ha, no. I’m pretty sure he was the guy who turned eighteen and all of the moms wanted to bang.” I frowned, considering. “Actually, I think I might have heard that exact story from Jensen. . . .”
“Max said something about him dating your sister?” Sara asked.
I chewed on my lip and shook my head. “They hooked up once over a holiday, but I think they just made out. He met my oldest brother, Jensen, on their first day of college, and then he lived with us and worked with my dad after graduation. I’m the youngest, so I didn’t really hang around with them that much other than at meals.”
“Stop evading,” Chloe said, narrowing her eyes. “You have to know more.”
I laughed. “Let’s see, he’s the youngest, too. He has two sisters who are way older than him, but I’ve never met them. I get the feeling he was sort of mothered a lot. I remember hearing him talk one time about how his parents are both physicians, and they divorced long before he was born. Years later, they met up at a medical conference, got drunk, and reconnected for one night . . .”
“And boom. Will,” Sara guessed.
I nodded slowly. “Yeah. But his mom raised him. So, his sisters are twelve and fourteen years older than he is. He was their little baby.”
“Well, that would explain why he thinks women were put on this earth to cater to him,” Chloe added, flopping on the bed next to Sara.
That didn’t sit right with me, and I sat down, shaking my head. “I don’t know if it’s that. I think he just really, really likes women. And they seem to like him, too,” I added. “He grew up surrounded by women so he knows how they think, what they want to hear.”
“He definitely knows how to play the game,” Sara said. “God, some of the stuff Max has told me.”
I thought back to Jensen’s wedding and watching Will slip off, otherwise unnoticed, with two women at once. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the first or last time something like that had happened.
“Women have always loved him,” I said. “I can remember overhearing some of my mom’s friends talk about him when he worked for Dad. Jesus, the things they would have done to that boy.”
“Cougars!” Chloe squealed, delighted. “I love it.”
“God, every girl was in love with him.” I pulled a pillow to my chest, remembering. “I had a few girlfriends in school—I was twelve the first time he came home with Jensen—and they would find all these crazy reasons to need to come over. One of them pretended like she had to return my sweater on Christmas Eve, and it was her sweater she gave me. I mean, picture Will now but as a nineteen-year-old guy, playful, clearly wise to the ways of the female body, and with that damn cheeky smile. He was in a band, had tattoos . . . he was walking sex. Then when he lived with us over the summer? He was twenty-four and I was sixteen. It was unbearable. It was like it offended him to wear a shirt in the house and he had to show off all that smooth, perfect man skin.”
I broke out of my memory to see both of them grinning at me.
“What?”