Kindred Crush(ers) (Liesmith)

[Winter]

"Ehhh Ariel? You already did your fifteen."

Arlise Christiaens stopped mid-squat and looked over her shoulder, her body straining to keep the bar on her shoulders aloft. She blinked in confusion at the woman at the next station - an evidently Japanese woman with green hair and pigtails who wore more muscles and curves than clothes - who seemed to split time between admiring her ass and looking mildly concerned. "Wh..." She choked on the word before breathing and attempting it again. "What?"

The woman fiddled with her earbuds while she leaned on her own squat bar. "I was checking out your form - closely - and you did fifteen squats your first two sets. Then you started looking liiiiike you were off in that ruined castle under the moon this set and kept going and going and gooooooooing~"

...No wonder Arlise's thighs burned hotter than a bonfire. She tensed and forced her way up, and the woman scooted over to grasp it and pull it into place on the rack with one arm. "Thank you... for noticing and telling me. How many was it this set?" "Lost count at twenty-one... but let me tell you, beibī, they were working wonders~" The woman's eyes squarely landed on her ass again, and Arlise, flirting with embarrassment about the situation, lightly snickered.

"Thanks?"

"Yeeeep!"

She went her way with a wink, and Arlise turned to her towel, promptly burying her face in it as she wicked the sweat from her skin. Her somewhat clearer head had not wandered so readily lately, but monotonous tasks like lifting sometimes pulled her deeply into thought. Frankly, for all that had improved for her over past weeks... the situation with her sister had come back to rear its ugly head yet again. It served as the one storm that remained over her head, and just when she had started to view her other problems as nothing but passing clouds.

Having finished her workout, she gathered her belongings and started to trudge across the gym, eager to strip her sweaty black gymwear and freshen up in the showers after a cooldown. She continued to dab away at her hair, trying to look presentable even after such a hard workout. The gym had filled in the past half-hour, and she did not wish for so many eyes to see her looking like a slob. She kept with the halfhearted beauty routine until she found the gym's one track so she could finish her workout with a couple of walking laps.

"Geez, those legs..."

Arlise, having only just been ogled and frankly accustomed to comments about her legs, lifted her head with a sly smile to greet whoever had noticed her. However, only one man a few steps away looked in her direction, and that feminine voice had not belonged to him. She almost brushed it off and carried on, but she spotted them - two women with their backs turned to her, watching another woman on the nearby mats.

A woman in a leotard. A woman in a leotard worthy of comments such as geez, those legs.

Arlise could not quite see her yet, but she spotted her in snapshots as she seemingly twisted and turned and tumbled with grace - a glimpse of her head here, a leg there, her whole figure in the air for a moment before she descended again. Nathalie, damn her, could move with such agility, but Nathalie had a ballet dancer's or runner's figure - lithe and lean. As Arlise whirled around the two women to step on the mats and outright ogle the woman in the midst of her routine, she could call the woman many lovely things, but "lithe and lean" did not qualify for a figure thicker than her own in all the most important places.

The redhead's eyes never wandered, and her tongue moved faster than her brain. "No woman with a body like yours should be able to move that nimbly!"