Reluctantly, the dog obeyed, seating herself on the rubberized floor at Dar's side.
Kerry was probably busy doing what it was ILS paid her for-- taking care of details and putting her plan into effect with her typical detail oriented style. While it never matched her own, Dar appreciated her partner's very disciplined operating mode.
It matched her usual schedule in the gym. While Dar tended to wander from machine to machine, using whichever one struck her fancy at the moment, Kerry always followed one or two or three routines, studiously using all the machines in it until she either finished or exhausted herself.
Dar kept the image of her partner in her mind as she got up off the leg press and switched to an abdominal machine, lying flat on her back and taking hold of the handles before she started her sit ups. She enjoyed the exercise, though this one was a little harder for her than it was for Kerry due to her longer torso.
For a while after they'd gotten together, Dar had strongly suspected that Kerry was doing gym work more to fit in with her lifestyle than because she really enjoyed it, and it had made her feel a touch guilty even though she'd called Kerry on it more than once.
After all, Kerry had been forced into doing things she didn't really want to do for so long, was it fair that she escape from her family life only to feel obligated to change again to meet what she felt were Dar's expectations?
Except they really weren't her expectations. Dar didn't honestly care if Kerry worked out or not, and she'd tried really hard to convince her of that until Kerry finally just told her she really liked it. Or, actually, she didn't fanatically enjoy it, but she very much liked the results so she was willing to put the work in to get them.
Dar paused to add a little more weight to the machine's resistance and continued her sets. That had finally made sense to Dar, since taking control over her looks had been a big part of Kerry shrugging off her past.
Of course, now it meant that for the first time in a long time, Dar was concerned about what her body looked like, but it seemed a small enough price to pay for having found the most amazing love of her life.
Probably, though, Dar almost chuckled at herself, Kerry would tell her she didn't care what Dar looked like just as insistently as Dar had told her. Both of them probably wondered if the other really meant it, and neither wanted to find out for sure.
So her life was now complicated. Dar exhaled and let her eyes close, her thoughts wandering elsewhere as her body went through the motions. But it was a nice kind of complication and she had no desire to get rid of it, so hell with it all anyway.
Instead, she imagined herself underwater, in the peaceful blue of a dive doing lazy somersaults as Kerry floated nearby taking pictures of sea urchins. She loved watching Kerry take pictures because she'd get herself into the nuttiest positions doing it, usually standing on her head to be closer and get a tight focus on the tiny creatures.
Her hair would float around her head in a halo and she'd cross her ankles, her fins fluttering lightly to keep herself in position. Dar would sometimes get herself horizontal in the water and rest her chin on her clasped wrists, just hanging there and watching the show.
She could almost hear the bubbles of her own breathing.
So a warm, solid weight settling over her lower body nearly scared the shorts off her until she managed to get her eyes open and her hands untangled from the machine and found Kerry sitting on top of her dressed out for the gym and looking amused. "Bah!" She yelped in surprise, dropping flat on her back again.
"Hi there." Green eyes twinkled. "You didn't wait for me, you punk!"
Dar blinked, trying to get her tongue to work properly after having bitten it. "Abu." She cleared her throat. "Wait for you when? I had no idea you were coming home this fast." She protested. "I thought you'd be later at the port." Jerked so quickly out of her peaceful day dream, her body now didn't know whether to jump or completely relax and she felt like hiccupping.
"I answered your last note." Kerry replied. "I didn't realize when I was in the bowels of the ship my signal was cut off. I got topside and saw I had messages from you." She wiggled the fingers she had laying on Dar's stomach, giving her a friendly scratch. "So I answered them right there on the gangway, and annoyed the heck out of some really big guys trying to move wood onboard."
"Oh." Now that Kerry was here and more than paying attention to her, Dar felt a little abashed. "No problem. I figured you got tied up in details. Thought I'd come over here for a while then grab us some dinner." She looked around. "My PDA's in the locker."
"Details." Kerry eased herself up and off her living bench. "Oh, my god did I get details. I got introduced into the world of people who live on ships." She paused and adjusted one of her wristbands. "Please, please don't tell me the Navy is like this, because if it is, I can't believe your dad survived in it as long as he did."
"Eh." Dar watched as her partner went to the first machine, the bicep curl, and sat down in it, carefully adjusting the weight stack before she fit her hands to the handles and began her exercise. "People. Politics. Can't have one without the other. You know that."
"Hmm." Kerry grunted a little with the effort of bringing the weighted bar up. "More I see people, more I love Chino."
"Gruff." Chino trotted over and licked her knee.
Dar got up and decided she'd had enough of the crunches. She went over to the pull down machine and sat under the bar, sticking the pin into a fairly significant amount of iron plates. Fitting her hands over the handles of the bar, she carefully pulled it downward, wedging her knees under the supports as she tested out how her shoulder was feeling about the weight.
So far so good. Dar flexed her arms slowly and brought the bar down, glad the ache had finally faded from her injury. It had taken a long time, though Kerry had probably been right in telling her it would have been shorter if she'd done the physical therapy she'd been told to.
"How's that feel?" Kerry asked.
"Good." Dar straightened her arms and let the weight up. She pulled it down again, a little faster this time.
"You look great when you sweat."
Dar opened one eye and peered at the triceps machine. Kerry winked at her, and stuck her tongue out. "Everything going alright at the pier?"
"Yeah, it's coming together." Kerry straightened her arms out, forcing the machine lever down. "You find the hacker?"
Dar grunted, and released a little snort. "No, but if he comes back, he'll have a surprise waiting." She said. "But I spent some time in our gateways today and I gotta admit, Ker. I'm a little worried."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
Kerry sighed. "Well, to be honest, I'm a little worried about how I'm going to pull off this project competitively, so we're even."
They were both silent for a few minutes, concentrating on their respective exercises. Finally, Dar let her bar up and sighed. "Know what I think?"
"What?"
"Ice cream." Dar got up from her bench and picked her towel up, extending a hand toward Kerry. "We can finish this later."
Kerry got up and took her hand without hesitation. "You're on. Let's go." She followed Dar out the door, not giving the room a single backward glance.
ICE CREAM ACTUALLY turned into dinner on the beach club's ocean facing deck. A nice breeze made it very comfortable sitting outside.
Kerry let her head rest against one of the roof supports, her eyes lazily taking in the waving palm fronds down the beach. "I don't know, honey," she said, "maybe it's a blessing in disguise. If you hadn't issued that challenge, you'd have never found the weaknesses you just told me about."
"Maybe we--maybe I--should have been looking for them before now." Dar was also leaning against the wall supports, one long leg slung over the chair arm.