High Heels & Pink Glitter (the heavily edited version)

Effortlessly joining together

April 2016

As Nate had anticipated that in order to train Avril, he would need to travel to the spacious house she had rented on the outskirts of Glasgow rather than use his studio. When he'd turned up there three days after their first meeting at Mrs A's house for the first session, she answered the door herself, dressed in a cropped lilac top over the thick black and pink straps of a sports bra, leggings and state-of-the art trainers so shining white clean they must never have been worn outside.

As she led the way through to a vast, airy dining room cleared of furniture, she informed him that filming would begin in six weeks' time.

"What are you filming or can you no' tell me?" he asked, mindful of the six-page non-disclosure agreement he'd signed, filled with terrible threats of what would happen if he disclosed anything about their arrangement to anyone.

Avril swigged from her bottle of water. "It's a modern girl-about-town thing based on Melanie Faulkner's books. The City Girls series?"

She raised an eyebrow, obviously convinced he hadn't heard of it. Nate nodded, making her furrow her brow to squint at him.

One of his clients had once left behind a Melanie Faulkner novel in his studio, which he began reading on a quiet day. Her tales featured a young, twenty-something woman who headed up a group of other women as they sought to avenge themselves on the various men who had wronged them in imaginative ways.

The descriptions of their many vengeances were hilarious and far-fetched, but what also appealed to many readers, Nate included, were the plentiful, lurid and graphic sex scenes. The City Girls series was one of his guilty secrets.

"There's a lot of nudity in it." Avril shot him an apologetic look. "Topless, full frontal, backside shots—the whole shebang. Hence the training. You've got to make me look ripped."

Every one of Nate's other clients would have killed to look like Avril. And yet here she was, standing in front of him, begging him to transform her. Nate had learned many lessons while working as a personal trainer over the years, the principal ones being:

• One. Women who booked sessions with him arrived at his door, staggering under the weight of massive insecurities.

• Two. He could tell them until he was blue in the face, there's no' a fucking thing wrang wi' you. They wouldn't believe him.

He reiterated all of this to Avril, who nodded. "Sure. On an intellectual level, I understand that but try telling that to the studios. Not a single bit of my body can ripple, which is why I've hired you. Your job is to make me rock hard."

Nate shrugged. He devised a programme that concentrated on weights, callisthenics and flexibility. By the time their sixth session arrived, a late Thursday afternoon in April, they'd established a jokey, matey relationship, Avril rolling her eyes whenever he made a tactless remark and Nate taking the piss out of her for any Hollywood-type affectations.

Nate had worked as a personal trainer for nearly a decade. It didn't take long for women to start confiding in the man making them squat and sweat. He'd read somewhere that it was due to the effects of hard, physical work. The client talked to distract themselves from the aches and pains, and the aches and pains worked in tandem to open the psyche. The trainer who put them through this became both their tormentor and their comforter.

As he'd promised, Nate didn't train Avril to breaking point, but the exercises he got her to perform made her muscles tremble. When he asked her to do Swiss ball roll-outs to finish off their Thursday session, she groaned.

"You absolute shit."

"Aye, aye—those full frontals you mentioned? Just helping you out wi' your six-pack. Are ye too posh to call me a cunt these days?" He tipped his head to the side as he made the inquiry, hoping he hadn't gone too far. The see you next Tuesday word was verboten in some circles, but it was so casually used in Glasgow, and sometimes even meant as a compliment—he's a good cunt, him—that no-one batted an eyelid if you said it.