I blinked down to my beer in front of me, turned it in little circles on the coaster. Of course she was right, and so many women I knew had sex for reasons other than getting off. Kitty once told me she felt close to me after we f**ked. She said it right as I’d begun mentally cataloging my fridge. I felt so much closer to Hanna right now than I’d ever felt to Kitty before, during, or after sex.

Something about her made me feel hungry, like I wanted to be as honest and calm about everything in my life as she was. I wanted to know Hanna, to hear her thoughts on everything.

I paused, my fresh beer partway to my lips, and registered that I’d thought of her as Hanna. It sort of felt like letting out a long-held breath.

Ziggy was Jensen’s sister. Ziggy was the kid I never knew.

Hanna was this uninhibited, self-possessed woman in front of me who I was pretty sure was going to effectively wreck my world.

Chapter Five

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.