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run for ten minutes John, but then I’m done. You can finish your workout while I shower and change.”
    “Okay. I’m sure it takes you longer to get dressed anyway, so this way I won’t have to wait.”
    John increased the speed on his treadmill to 6.5 and I increased mine to 4.2. I was breathing heavily, but I was still breathing. Six minutes into it I didn’t think I could go on any longer, so I switched the display to countdown and started counting along with it. I only had a minute and thirty seconds to go when I noticed my shoelace had untied, but I didn’t want to stop when I was so close to finishing.
    The last time I looked at the clock I was down to fifty-three seconds. Then I was face down on the treadmill.
    “Julie, are you all right?” It was the woman from the reception desk. She was kneeling next to me. I read her name tag: TRACY. Then I looked up and saw John standing behind her. He didn’t look nearly as concerned as Tracy did, but at least he’d stopped jogging.
    I thought I was okay until I tried to move my left leg. My shoelace was still caught in the treadmill. Tracy removed my sneaker and untangled it from the machine. She’d had to cut the lace, but otherwise it was fine. It looked a lot better than I did. I had a bump on my forehead the size of a plum and, according to John, similarly colored, and my left ankle was swollen to twice its normal size.
    “I don’t think it’s broken,” Tracy said, “but you really should get it x-rayed.”
    “Do you know where the hospital is?” Tracy asked John.
    “No,” he said. “I just moved here.”
    “I know where it is,” I told her, “but we need to call a cab. We walked over from my place.”
    “That’s okay,” John said. “I’ll run back and get the car.”
    That was the first acceptable thing he’d said all night.

    Tracy helped me down the stairs and into the locker room. She brought me my dry clothes and waited for me while I changed. Then she helped me back to the lobby to wait for John.
    “What kind of car does your boyfriend drive?” Tracy asked as she wiped a circle onto the fogged-up glass entrance.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “This is our first date.”
    “He took you to the gym on a first date?”    
    “Thank you,” I said, grateful for her incredulous stare, “it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks that’s weird.”
    “Is he at least taking you to dinner afterwards?”
    “Only if I renew my membership and he gets the free gift certificate to the health food restaurant.”
    Tracy tried to stifle a laugh. “You can really pick ‘em.”
    I gave her a half smile. “He picked me.” But I won’t make that mistake again. Even proving Kaitlyn wrong wasn’t worth this.
    We heard a horn honking and Tracy helped me out to John’s car. John waited behind the wheel while Tracy maneuvered me into the passenger’s seat. I made a mental note to myself to send Tracy a thank-you gift. I didn’t need to make a mental note to lose John’s phone number.
    I directed him the four blocks to the Cedars-Sinai Hospital Emergency Room, where I was quickly becoming a regular.
    “If I knew it was this close, I wouldn’t have bothered with the car.”
    He’d just negated his one good deed.
    * * *
    Kaitlyn arrived at my house the next morning with a grande -sized Starbucks House Blend for her (she never went anywhere before noon without one) and a giant blueberry muffin for me. After taking off her shoes and promising me that this time she wouldn’t spill her coffee, and if she did, she’d pay to have the furniture cleaned, she settled herself on my white sofa.
    “So how did you leave it?” she asked.
    “You mean after he abandoned me in the emergency room because, unlike the gym, hospitals are packed on Friday nights, and he needed to get his beauty rest before his seven a.m. tee-time?”
    Kaitlyn smiled sheepishly. “I guess he wasn’t Prince Charming after all.”
    “No,” I said. “He wasn’t.