The Hardest Cut by Jamie Bennett (book club recommendations .TXT) 📕

Read More about Woodsmen Football: Defending the Rush

This had been a big mistake.  Like, huge.

“Help,” I said to the empty room, and waited for a response.  The only answer I had was the quiet hiss of the air conditioning.  “Help!” I called more firmly, then waited again.

Of course, no one answered.  The room was empty except for me and the giant exercise equipment.  The whole, enormous stadium was empty so early on a Saturday morning—eerily vacant and quiet for a place that should have teemed with fans there to cheer on the Woodsmen, northern Michigan’s one professional football team.  The emptiness was why I had come to the weight room now, so I wouldn’t run into anyone.  Great thinking, Meredith.

“Help?”  I asked it this time, kind of begging, and waited again.  “Help!  I’m stuck hanging upside down in the gym!  This isn’t a joke, I really mean it!”  Still no answer back.  Ok, no one was coming.

I tried once more to free myself, doing a partial curl in midair with my body to reach up to my ankles, to where I had hooked them on the exercise bar ten or so feet off the ground.  “Come on!” I yelled, exhorting myself, but for what seemed like the millionth time, I just couldn’t make it.  I flopped back down to dangling, panting and furious.  Unbelievable!  Was I seriously stuck like this, suspended here by these stupid boots?  I rattled my feet in the straps and then tried another curl.  Almost—almost—I held my breath and stretched—my fingertips brushed—no.  I hung upside down again, defeated.

I waited for a moment to gather my strength and calm myself down, but all the blood rushing to my head was making me dizzy.  Humans were just not meant to be inverted for so long and I was going to have to get myself out of this somehow, and fast.  First, I tried to reach my fingers out for the stool I had climbed on to get to the high bar, but it was just beyond my grasp.  Then I strained up again, gasping, clawing at my own legs to try to grab my feet.  I couldn’t get above my knees and I collapsed back down—again.  My hands hung uselessly about a yard above the floor.

Was I going to die this way, hanging like a bat by my ankles in the Woodsmen weight room?  Would I meet my maker in the spandex pants that I could now see had a hole in the crotch, with me all sweaty and red and angry-crying?  This was not the way I had thought I would go.  But did anyone think she would die like this, suspended by gravity boots from a bar in room that smelled like a thousand years of sweat and male hormones, just because her stomach muscles weren’t strong enough to pull up one last time to unhook and jump down?  I moaned a little, overcome with sadness for my wasted life and my weak abs.

“What are you doing?”

I had been so involved in the vision of my approaching demise, I hadn’t even heard this guy come in.  “Oh, thank God!” I said.  I reached out my hands toward him.  My vision was getting blurry from being the wrong way up for so long.  “I’m stuck hanging by my ankles from this bar!  I can’t get down!”

He stared at me.  “Do you need help or something?” he asked.

My mouth opened and closed.  Was he kidding?  “No, I’m really enjoying this.  I wanted stay upside down forever,” I answered sarcastically.

“All right.”

And he walked away, back toward the door.

“No, wait!” I yelled desperately.  “I do need help!  I really do!  Can you get me down?”

He ambled over, in no particular hurry.  “All right,” he said again.  He pushed aside the stool I had used to climb up on, apparently not needing the extra height himself.

My face smashed into the front of his shorts as he put his arms around me.  “What—” I yelped, but my words were muffled by his crotch.  He lifted me up so that the hooks on my ankles could detach from the bar, and then he spun me around like a pinwheel so my head was back pointing to the sky.  My face yanked free of his shorts and he put me on the ground and let go of me.

Blood rushed back out of my brain and arms and I lurched forward, my body smacking into his.  He didn’t reach for me, or steady me, but he did let me lean there, my forehead resting on his t-shirt.

I stood back up, blinking as I looked into his face.  “Thank you.”

“You’re all red,” the man pointed out.

“That’s what happens when you hang upside down for too long,” I explained.  I still felt a little dizzy and a lot like I was going to throw up, but that might have also been because he swung me around so fast.  I had been like a baton he twirled.  How had he picked me up like that?  I wasn’t exactly light.

I bent to get those boots off my feet and the man stepped away.  When he did, I realized that he was, by far, the biggest human being I had ever seen.  It looked to me like a fairy tale had lost its giant, that was how large he was—like a foot taller than I was, and I didn’t count myself as small.  But he wasn’t just extremely tall, he was also enormously broad across the chest where I had just been temporarily leaning.  His tattooed arms in the sleeves of his t-shirt were as large as my thighs, and I didn’t count those as small, either.  He had a bushy black beard, and crazy, long, wavy black hair, a sharp nose, and dark eyes, but I couldn’t tell the color because his baseball hat was pulled low, so that the top of his face was in its shadow.  He was obviously one of the