Each and Every Step

Taylor put Adrian on the couch for the night and threw a pile of blankets at her. "You can have the bed, if you want, but Johnny and me have lots and lots of sex there, sooo..." She didn't bring up the fact that they had lots of sex on the couch, too.

The next morning, Taylor was up at 6am. She hated getting up early, it was something she had done for the sake of her training and she hadn't done it since she stopped training professionally. For Adrian, though, she was more than happy to make an exception. She was happier than Adrian knew that they had made some progress toward mending their fences the night before, it had even surprised her, but the last time they met Adrian had hit her in the back of the head with a chair, so she took a little extra pleasure on booting her out of bed at the crack of dawn.

She took her out for a morning run. "You're probably sore from yesterday, and your leg's retarded. This is going to be a long, long day, and if you're going to make it through you need your leg to hold up. If you feel like you can't keep running, stop running, don't be an idiot. You can't take yourself out of the fight, but you can't stop, either. I'll make sure you don't."

She was careful not to let Adrian wear out her bad leg too much, stopping her frequently enough to make her do pushups or situps or the occasional yoga pose on the sidewalk, anything to keep her from resting. By the time they made it back, Taylor was invigorated. She threw back a tall glass of water and took a shower, leaving Adrian to her own devices for the time being.

"CouchIsGoodThanks." She said quickly, accepting the covers. It took a while to get used back to sleeping on slightly strange smelling and feeling couch but eventually she drifted off into a restful slumber that was interrupted way to early! There was a 6 o clock in the morning now? Since when!?

"Murgguh..." Adrian mumbled as she was unceremoniously booted out of her comfort zone, rising up into the form of some blanket monster with really bad hair. "Too early..." she grumbled as she shuffled throughout the morning routine until she got to the point where she was at least somewhat respectable for a morning run, with the exception of her still bed-infused hair. And while Taylor came back invigorated from the early blast of exercise, Adrian was already tempted to call it a day. Desperately panting for air as she made it back in the house, she pretty much crawled up to the sink, turned on the tap and started drinking. At least her leg wasn't hurting today... well no more than the rest of her whole body was.

After her shower, Taylor toweled off and wrapped the towel around her chest. She grabbed her phone and sent Johnny a quick text.

kinda bad start but its good now. ill tell u about it later <3

She skipped out the bathroom door and hopped around the corner into her bedroom. She got dressed in little pink cotton shorts and a white tank top, and came out with her damp hair hanging freely around her face, her long bangs partially obscuring one eye.

"There's still hot water if you want," she said to Adrian. "How ya feelin'? Do you want oatmeal? Just kidding, you don't have a choice."

She got two bowls and measured out oats and coconut milk and cooked the oatmeal in the microwave. She cut up a pear and halved a handful of grapes and a couple kumquats, and when she took the oatmeal out she added salt and divided the fruit between the two bowls.

"Eat it. Coconut milk makes it creamy and stuff, it's good." She took her bowl to the living room and sat on the couch, tucking her legs up behind her. She lounged against the arm rest and pulled her hair to the side. This time when she ate it was not in bird-bites. She savored each piece of fruit, biting each kumquat-half in half before finishing it, but she began to quickly devour the bowl.

"We have some time to chill or do whatever, but we'll train again after we digest. We can probably eat five times today, and train again around noon-ish. I might take a nap."

She turned on the TV and settled on a morning cartoon about a girl who fought crime entirely on accident while her cat fought crime while no one noticed. The girl got all the credit, and she was mostly oblivious. Every time the cat hoped he would finally get his recognition. In this episode, a group of bank robbers had tunneled out of jail and were trying to get revenge on the girl by digging a hole under her house so that it would sink, while the cat tried to foil their plan. Taylor didn't know what they planned after her house sunk. Maybe they just wanted to fuck with her day.

"Nyan," she said.

Adrian was nowhere near alert enough to process any of what Taylor was saying anymore, the early workout after about a total of 8 hour sleep over 48 hours had basically sent her into sleep mode again, as she didn't even pay the bowl of what she would have thought was disgusting any heed as she just collapsed down on the couch fast asleep. "Nyannnn..." she mumbled back.

Taylor quickly scraped her bowl clean and put it on the coffee table, and the propped her feet up next to it. She slouched down low on the couch, and the bank robbers had hardly escaped from prison when Adrian fell asleep. By the time the cat was frantically rigging and springing traps to infuriate the robbers, Taylor's eyelids were heavy too.

"Paco-san, you crazy," she said sleepily, and yawned. Adrian looked too peaceful, she had to join in. She leaned back and closed her eyes and quickly fell asleep.

It took until the end credits of a different show for Adrian to wake up again, slowly blinking back into reality. She really needed that nap but when she realized what had happened, she was a lot less grateful for it "Shit!" she cursed, shooting straight back up and powering through the vertigo. "fuck fuck fuck!" the cosplayer hissed as she started pacing around the room. She'd fallen asleep on a day she needed to spend most of it, now she thought she was way behind schedule. And her oatmeal was cold and had been soaking in coconut milk in the warm room so that probably meant no breakfast for her. Or were coconuts different in that they didn't go off in an hour... they spend all their time in tropical trees but the carton was in the fridge so...

"One, two, three..." Dropping that train of thought before it completely sent her off on the wrong track, she dropped to the floor and started doing some more push ups, trying to forget how much her body was still trying to wake up.

Taylor was roused from her nap by Adrian's neurotic bustling. She opened one eye and could see her doing push ups on the floor... She shook her head. The worst part, though, was that the show was over, and now she'd never get to see Paco-San's masterful plan.

"Oh my god, dude, stop," she said, and stretched like a cat. "You're making me tired."

She sat up straight on the couch and checked the time. They hadn't slept for all that long, and with their early start they were still in good shape. Taylor knew what she wanted to do to Adrian over the course of the day, though she wasn't totally sure what she would do to make it happen. She was sure, though, that inspiration would strike her when the moment was right.

She noticed Adrian's very full oatmeal bowl. "Did you seriously not eat?" She said, annoyed. "How the hell are you going to be able to work today if you don't eat? What, do you only eat pizza and shit? Fuck, man, you have to eat, and if you eat anything big now you'll just be cramping up and shit in late morning training."

All that perfectly good oatmeal. She shook her head and went back to the kitchen and pulled a canister of nuts and berries and raisins and whatever else from the fridge, and then filled up two plastic bags with it. She topped off her water bottle, grabbed her gym bag and her car keys, and piled all of it on top of her bag by the door.

"I'm not gonna lie, when I look at your record, and then how you train, I get a little sick. I quit for... a lot of reasons, but all the work I put in just to get fucked over, over and over again..." She shrugged. "Whatever. It is what it is."

Adrian had probably way overestimated the amount of time the nap ad cost her. The adventures of Paco-san was only like 15 minutes long, and her trainer didn't seem to be amused by her neuroses induced panic. "Sorry! Sorry, sorry." She said quickly, standing back up and still bouncing around slightly. "I didn't really get a chance to eat because I just passed out on the couch and by the time I woke up it was too late but I've probably got a granola bar and a juice box left in the ice box bit of my bag or two but it's not like I don't eat anything healthy!"

"Way to make it seem like I've never trained at all before yesterday..." She grumbled under her breath, taking a bite into her quick travel snack. Okay maybe her normal schedule wasn't the best in the world, and that she had a habit of over-doing and burning herself out whenever she thought she was behind, which usually ended up with her taking a bench weight to the chest or something. But still! Taylor wasn't the only one who put in a lot of training time.

"Yeah, yeah," Taylor said quietly. "No spazzing. This is a spaz-free area."

On the drive back to the gym, she put on [url=http://youtu.be/qksTlo_1Tpw:2puqmw9s]something for the mood[/url:2puqmw9s], and was mostly quiet for the trip. She nodded her head in time while she negotiated the traffic. She was a remarkably calm driver for how utterly un-calm she was with so many other things.

"It's not about training moremoremore, ya know," she said. "It's about training smart, and right, and pushing yourself to do the right thing all the time. Some people think that if they put in some stupidly long workout that they're awesome, but they're just idiots. Your body doesn't work like that. You've got to work with what you've got, ya know? Did I already say this shit?" She thought for a second. "Man, I've pretty much only got one thing to say, but like... I'm sure about that one thing."

At the gym, she quickly got changed into her workout clothes and began to put Adrian through a quick warmup followed by some high intensity circuit training. First was jumping squats, and when she saw Adrian slowing down she immediately moved on to the next thing. She threw a medicine ball into her chest and had her do a sit up and throw it back, she had her do numerous grueling pushup variations, she made her run sprints with a diving roll at each end.

She continued until she had thoroughly taxed every muscle of Adrian's body without rest, when she knew that Adrian was in pain and exhausted. Then she stopped.

"Okay," she said. "Count to ten, and then do a handstand and hold it for ten seconds."

"Y-yeah... idiots. Heh." Adrian tried to agree with Taylor, despite knowing full well that was exactly the kind of thing she did whenever she thought she was behind schedule with training, just put in a few more hours in the remaining days to compensate... didn't exactly work out. Still, she had to put that behind her

"I thought we weren't doing the moremoremore thing..." She panted as she passed back the medicine ball and got started on the push ups. The squats wasn't too bad and apart from the surprise from getting a heavy piece of gym equipment thrown at her with little more than a 'heads up' neither was the sit ups. The Running dives went pretty well... the push ups... not so much. While she hadn't had a problem with them earlier in the morning, that was before she'd already done a lot of exercise in a relatively short amount of time, significantly slowing down pretty quickly. "Okay... 1...2...3..." she began counting, her oxygen deprived muscles stealing every bit of O2 they could from her brain, making her a bit slower than normal. But eventually she calmed down, her breathing seemed to return to normal as she placed her hands on the floor and kicked up. Holding herself up in a handstand as per request.