RUSH

Ch. 21: Attaboy

-Mason-

"You want me to leave, don't you?" Eric bemoaned, though he didn't sound all that troubled by the implications. Not that I could really tell.

I furrowed my brows in concern, releasing a harsh breath before carefully allowing the barbell to settle back onto the rack's hooks. Eric had already wandered away from behind the bench I was laying on, neglecting his spotter duties halfway through my set.

"What are you doing?" I inquired while sitting up, immediately noticing Eric messing around with the weights on the nearby squat rack's barbell. I grunted in disapproval as he added another hundred pounds to each side, immediately crossing the limit of how much weight the barbell was even meant to handle.

There was no way in hell he could actually lift the six hundred pounds he'd managed to accumulate on the sleeves, not when he didn't even weight train in the first place. I stared in halting disbelief, wondering if Eric was serious or not. He had to be joking, right?

"What if I'm a natural?"

"You're not... hey," I called out as Eric silently hyped himself up. And he was so evidently considering actually trying to lift the barbell, his hands already eagerly curling around the bar, that I immediately shot up to my feet and sprinted over to him.

"You've thrown your back out doing less," I reminded my reckless friend while gripping onto the center of the bar, genuinely conflicted as to whether he'd even be able to lift the barbell off the rack in the first place.

He was lucky I wasn't in the mood to find out.

Eric scoffed, but I didn't really care if he was vexed by my meddling. "Let's try fifty and see where you go from there... how does that sound?"

"But what if—"

"Eric."

"Fifty on each side?"

"Twenty-five on each side; the bar already weighs like forty-five pounds, so it's almost a hundred. Sounds good?"

"But I think—"

"I'm begging you to stop thinking, then."

Eric scoffed. "I'm not an idiot, you jerk," he retorted indignantly, like I needed any convincing in that matter. As if this wasn't the same man who managed to maintain a perfect GPA every single semester despite taking primarily honor courses and only showing up most of the time.

"I know you're not," I acknowledged. "But just listen to me about this, alright?"

Nevertheless, intelligence could only take Eric so far, especially when he suffered from such a diminished sense of self-preservation that actively wavered the more that he wanted something. This was the same tryhard that often neglected his own basic needs every single time finals season came around, which meant I had to periodically force him to drink water, eat meals and sometimes even remind him to shower whenever things got too chaotically busy.

When it came to common sense, there were quite a few times when I'd been forced to drag Eric, quite physically, out of harm's way. My dear friend was quite intelligent, but he could also be such an impulsive asshole. In those moments, not a single one of his brain cells could save him from himself.

"I'd argue that I'm smarter than you."

"And yet you're the one who's had his arm stuck in a claw machine before," I muttered warily, because I had hundreds of ridiculous examples at my disposal.