The morning air had that particular bite to it that made Leo's lungs feel scrubbed clean. He liked it. Always had, even back when he was six and the body was new and everything felt like a rental he hadn't figured out yet. Seven years of this. The routine had changed shape over time but the early mornings had stayed constant.
Alex walked beside him, arms loose, breathing settled. Quiet street, sprinklers going, a dog somewhere losing its mind about something.
"Your left elbow was drifting on the last set," he said.
"I know. I corrected it."
"On rep four."
"Yes, thank you, I was there."
He almost smiled.
They walked another half block. Easy silence. This was something that had developed gradually — the comfortable nothing, the stretches where neither of them needed to fill the space. Alex always had something to say, which was fine, but the fact that she'd learned to turn it off around him felt like a particular kind of trust.
"Five unassisted pullups though," he said.
She didn't say anything.
"That's not nothing."
"I didn't say it was nothing."
"You didn't say anything."
"I was processing the compliment."
He glanced at her. She was looking at the pavement, and the tips of her ears were a shade they didn't usually are. Leo filed that away and said absolutely nothing about it.
"Well," he said. "Process faster."
"You complimented me and now you're rushing me."
"Multitasking."
She made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh but lived nearby.
They turned onto the residential stretch, sprinklers clicking, birds loud, morning doing its morning thing. He was rolling his shoulders, feeling the good ache settling into his lats, when he saw her.
She was jogging in a sports bra and leggings. Leo knew her , the hot milf that slept with the 2 school dads , Desiree. In the space of about one second his brain quietly vacated the premises.
Oh.
Oh no.
He knew, academically, that the teenage body was an unreliable machine. He was a grown man in a thirteen year old's frame and he'd assumed that knowledge would buy him some immunity. It did not. The hormones did not care about past lives or philosophical detachment. They simply acted.
A certain structural situation began developing that he had not authorized.
Stand down. Stand DOWN—
"Leo."
He kept walking. Casual. Fine. Everything fine.
"Leo."
"Mm."
"You have been staring at that woman for approximately four seconds which in public-staring time is an eternity." Alex's voice was a flat surface with no features on it.
"I was just—"
The elbow found his ribs. Not hard enough to cause damage. Precisely hard enough to communicate a complete paragraph.
"Ow—"
Alex was already walking faster, arms crossed, chin up, the posture of someone who has decided to be somewhere else.
Leo followed, rubbing his side, eyes now pointed very safely at the pavement.
Half a block of silence.
"I wasn't staring," he said.
"You were vibrating."
"I wasn't vibrating."
"You had the face."
"There's no face."
"There is absolutely a face." A sideways look. "Same face Michael makes when someone mentions prime numbers. Completely gone."
"That is not the same thing."
"It is the exact same thing. Your brain left your body."
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Walked another half block.
"She was objectively—"
"Don't."
"I was going to say conventionally attractive—"
"Don't."
He shut up. The birds were loud. The sprinkler clicked. This was enough.
They almost made it home clean.
The other Dunphys materialized from a side street like a weather event — bikes, noise, the particular contained chaos of a family that generates its own atmosphere wherever it goes. Luke nearly clipped a mailbox. Claire had the look of a woman who had made her peace with this. Phil was looking back for some reason.
The usual pleasantries happened. Phil asked about the workout with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely wanted to know. Claire complimented Alex's determination. Luke said something that wasn't quite a full sentence but had good energy.
Jay came in his black open roof two seater .
He looked at Luke's bike.
It was pink. Streamers on the handles. A small basket on the front with a plastic flower on it. Clearly Haley's, or had been at some point, now requisitioned by Luke for reasons that probably hadn't involved much forethought.
Jay looked at it. Looked at Luke. The eyebrow went up.
"Nice bike, sally," he said.
Claire tries to retort,"Daad!!"
Jay not letting her continue says, "Come on he looks like a boo peet at that bike"
Phil says ,"Actually not long , he is getting a new bike this evening"
Luke and Claire both astonished asked "Really?"
Leo said, "At least he's riding."
Jay looked at him.
"Most kids his age are on a couch," Leo said. "He's up at seven in the morning on a bike. Pink or not, that's more than most."
A beat. Jay Pritchett was not a man who got corrected on sidewalks before breakfast. His expression didn't shift exactly, but something behind it did — a small recalibration, the look of a man taking a second measurement.
He looked at Leo properly. The posture. The build that was unusual for thirteen. The fact that Leo was standing like the outcome of this moment didn't concern him.
Jay just drove away after a moment.
He appreciated that about her.
Goodbyes happened. The bikes rolled on. Leo and Alex walked the remaining block and a half and didn't feel the need to debrief.
His room was exactly as he'd left it. The small equipment rack in the corner. The whiteboard with the monthly programming written out. His dad's camera on the desk.
Alfred had given it to him on his eleventh birthday — a proper camera, not a toy, not a gesture. He'd handed it over with that slightly uncertain look he sometimes had with Leo, like he wasn't entirely sure of the protocol for a son who already seemed to know what he wanted.
"You're always filming things in your head," he'd said. "Thought you might as well actually film them."
Leo had said thank you and meant it and spent that evening learning every setting.
The birthday parties had become a thing in the Hofstadter household — his mom had started them when Leo was nine, with the energy of someone correcting a long-standing wrong. They'd done Angelina's eighteenth two years ago. Proper, catered, Angelina in a dress she'd chosen herself. Leo had chosen not to tease her about it.
His own parties had stopped at twelve.
Michael's was coming up. Eleven this year. Leo thought about his brother and felt something that was close to pride. The kid's brain was a genuinely strange and wonderful machine — the kind of intelligence that showed up quietly, in the way he connected things, in the questions he asked that were always one step sideways from what you'd expect. And he wasn't sharp-edged about it. Didn't wield it. Their parents had been deliberate about that, quick to correct when Michael tried to use his intelligence as a weapon, which was rare enough that the corrections had stuck.
Leo picked the camera up off the desk.
He'd been thinking about this for a while.
The fitness content online was, from his past-life professional perspective, a disaster. Ab challenges. Detox teas. Before-and-afters that compressed years of consistency into a single dramatic image. The whole ecosystem ran on implication — do this thing and become this body — and it was, from a physiological standpoint, mostly mythology. He'd been correcting people in real life for two years. He might as well do it at scale.
He spent an hour on the setup. Room, natural light, whiteboard behind him. Tested audio twice. Clean shirt. Then he thought carefully about what he actually wanted to say, sat down in front of the camera, and hit record.
"Okay," he said. "Let's talk about abs."
He paused.
"Specifically let's talk about why ab workouts don't give you abs. And before anyone types something — yes, I know. Thirty day ab challenge. Six minutes a day. Eight pack by July. I've seen them. They're everywhere." He held up a hand. "They're also not really how it works."
He walked to the whiteboard. Two numbers. Caloric intake. Caloric output.
"Your abs exist right now. Everybody's do. They're a muscle group, they're there, they get worked every time you do anything involving your core. The question is whether you can see them. And that is a body fat question. Not an ab workout question."
He turned back to the camera.
"The six pack muscle — rectus abdominis — becomes visible at around fifteen to seventeen percent body fat for most people. The workouts build the muscle. The caloric deficit reveals it. They are two different mechanisms. Conflating them is how people spend six months doing crunches and then feel like they personally failed. You didn't fail. You were just solving the wrong problem."
He'd kept clips from his sessions over the past few months. Short ones, careful angles, focused on form rather than aesthetics. He cut them in roughly. Pullup progression. Ring support hold. Ten seconds of him explaining shoulder alignment to himself in the mirror, which he'd filmed as a form check and which actually played well.
The edit took longer than the filming. He didn't have fancy software, just what came on the computer, but this was a first video. The point was to exist.
He titled it: Why Ab Workouts Don't Give You Abs (a calorie explanation)
Thumbnail was him at the whiteboard pointing at the numbers. No shirt off. No dramatic expression. He uploaded it and sat for a moment looking at the channel page.
Zero subscribers. Zero views.
That was fine. Everything started at zero.
He closed the laptop.
His phone buzzed at 4:47 PM.
Alex: done with school. ready to destroy your understanding of object-oriented programming
Alex: come over or should I come there
Come here. I have a whiteboard.
Alex: ofc you do muscle head
He snorted and started clearing the desk.
She showed up seventeen minutes later, backpack over one shoulder, already wearing her default expression of mild preemptive irritation. She surveyed the room, clocked the whiteboard, dropped her bag on the chair.
"Okay," she said. "Where are you on Java."
"I know what Java is."
"That is the lowest possible bar."
"I also know it's not the coffee."
She stared at him. "Did you look at anything I sent you."
"I looked at the syntax page."
"The syntax page."
"For like forty minutes."
Alex pressed two fingers to her forehead in a way that aged her considerably. Then she pulled out her laptop, opened it, turned it toward him. "We're starting from the beginning. Don't argue, don't skip ahead, and if you say 'I already know this' before I finish a sentence I will leave."
"Understood."
"I mean it."
"I know you mean it."
She held the look another second, then started explaining variables.
He listened. She was good at this — not patient exactly, more precise, which suited him better anyway. She didn't over-explain. When he asked a question she answered it directly without making it a whole thing. When he made a connection she hadn't expected she paused, recalibrated, moved forward.
Twenty minutes in he said: "So the class is the blueprint and the object is the instance."
She pointed at him. "Yes."
"So a class called Workout — "
"The object is Tuesday's session. That specific instance." She was already typing. "Exactly right. You got that faster than I expected."
"You sound surprised."
"I had prepared to spend forty minutes on this."
"I'm not completely useless."
"Nobody said completely."
He leaned back. "You're meaner when you're teaching."
"I'm clearer when I'm teaching. You're interpreting precision as hostility."
"Mm." He looked at the screen. "Write me the Workout class."
"You write the Workout class. I'll tell you when it's wrong."
"You could just—"
"I could. I won't." She slid the keyboard toward him. "Go."
He went. Got the class structure mostly right, the constructor almost right, the method syntax wrong in exactly the way she'd predicted. She told him why without sounding triumphant about it, which he respected.
An hour passed before either of them noticed.
"Okay," Alex said, stretching her arms up. "Enough for day one."
"We barely covered anything."
"You barely covered anything. I'm fine." She started packing her bag. "Thursday?"
"Thursday works."
She stood, slung the bag over her shoulder, paused at the door. She was looking at the whiteboard — the calorie numbers, the muscle diagram still up from the video.
"What's all that."
"Posted a video today."
She raised her eyebrows. "About what."
"Fitness. The actual science of it."
She looked at the board for a moment with the expression she used when she was genuinely processing something and didn't want to show it. Then she looked at him.
"Was it accurate."
"I checked everything twice."
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"I'm not going to clap." She turned to the door. "See you Thursday, muscle head."
"See you Thursday, skinny—"
She stopped and turned.
"—Dunphy," he finished.
"I've been doing your workouts for two years."
"I know."
"So."
"You're right," he said. "Genuinely. The progress is there."
She looked at him for a beat, checking for sarcasm, finding none. Something in her expression settled.
"Yeah yeah," she said, and walked out.
He heard the front door. Turned back to the desk, to the laptop, to the channel page that still said zero views.