PsyCop 6: GhosTV by Jordan Castillo Price Read Free Book Online Page A

pull or gyrate your way to a spectacular six-pack. Even though I knew they were probably crap, the before and after pictures did give me pause.
    But I figured that if any of these things did work, we’d already have one downstairs. In the basement.
    Hitting the gym is as much a social thing for Jacob as it is about keeping up his hugeness, but since he was now a homeowner and he had his very own basement, he’d collected a few basic pieces of equipment for those days when his job kept him from his normal routine.
    Since I didn’t trust the overhead light not to sputter into oblivion the second I was smack-dab in the middle of the basement, I grabbed my pocket flashlight, just in case, and headed downstairs.
    Jacob had worked hard to make the space respectable—half of it, anyway. The now-finished portion of the basement had a fresh, white acoustic drop-ceiling and a smooth concrete floor he’d fussed over for hours, only to cover it with interlocking rubber gym tiles once it was absolutely perfect.
    I walked around the weight bench to size it up, and from the far end, caught a glimpse of the other half of the basement. A couple of folding screens separated it from Jacob’s home gym; he hadn’t quite figured out if he should build some walls and divide the space into rooms, or have the big ancient canning equipment hauled to a junkyard and expand the finished area into a giant rec room. So for now, his solution was to not look at the part he didn’t know what to do with.
    Who was I to criticize?
    It was pretty creepy, though. Darkness lurked behind the screens, and hulks of big metal machinery. The unfinished ceiling absorbed all the light, until all that was left were dozens of shifting shadows.

    I looked down at the barbell and counted up the metal discs. Over a hundred and fifty pounds on one end alone. I stared at it stupidly as I realized he bench-pressed two of me. On a regular basis.
    The dumbbells, then. There they were, colorful and rubberized, stacked on their unassuming metal pyramid. The weights were printed ever so helpfully on the ends. I took the second-smallest weight, a green 12-pounder, and wondered what to do with it. I tried a curl and thought, seriously, is this how guys get buff?
    I put it back before I hurt myself.
    The clear course of action was to ask Jacob for advice. So naturally I wanted to do that least of all. Did I think he would look down at me, think I was a wimp because I couldn’t press and squat and lift what he could? He already knew that. Heck, he thought I couldn’t even handle him sitting on my lap.
    Maybe I thought he’d push me harder than I was ready to go. That’s what trainers did, wasn’t it? Though Jacob was so notorious for cutting me slack, I couldn’t really fathom him telling me to drop and give him fifty. Not unless we were naked, and role-playing, and he’d only make me do about ten before he spread me open and showed me who was boss.
    I visited that pleasant daydream for a few seconds, then turned and headed upstairs. I suspected what I was really scared of was that as disgusted as I was with my scrawniness, I didn’t have the motivation to do anything about it. It was bad enough Jacob had to live with the protruding hipbones. He didn’t need my personality flaws highlighted, too.
    My laptop was still open to the latest miracle piece of plastic, so I decided to see if there might be a legitimate-looking site that would tell me how to use something we already owned. I grabbed a banana and a fresh cup of coffee, and I started poking around for dumbbell workouts. I quickly saw they were now called free weights. Fine. Free weights, then. I found a simple routine, went to print it out, and got a message that my printer was out of ink.
    Why did everything always need to be so complicated?
    Sure, I could go to the store, buy ink, come back, try to install it and find I’d somehow managed to get the wrong cartridge—but was it worth it? Who was to say I