Chapter 22: Minding Your Own Business and Stepping in It
Andrew had barely made it to the weight floor when the situation behind him apparently escalated.
He found out about it ten minutes later when Carol appeared at his elbow, slightly flushed and trying not to laugh.
"What happened to Ross?" she asked.
"What did he do?"
"He basically sprinted out of the building." She pressed her lips together. "He looked like he'd seen a ghost."
Andrew thought about the two guys who'd set up next to them on the treadmills, and the note he'd half-noticed being slipped into Ross's hand, and the very specific expression on Ross's face in the seconds before Andrew had walked away.
"Ross's charm finally got recognized," Andrew said, keeping his face neutral.
Carol processed this for a moment, then understood completely. She laughed — a real one, caught off guard. "I told him not to wear that shirt."
"He defended it pretty thoroughly."
"He would." She shook her head. "He's exactly like Monica."
"That's the impression I'm getting."
They fell into an easy rhythm after that, moving between machines, talking in the comfortable way of two people who'd found an unexpected common frequency.
The Geller siblings made for good conversational material — Carol had her own history with Monica's particular brand of intensity, and Andrew had the fresh receipts from the restaurant disaster. They traded observations without any real malice behind them.
"Monica's a good person though," Andrew said eventually, because it was true and he felt like it needed to be said. She'd made his life genuinely harder twice in the span of a week, and he still couldn't honestly say he disliked her.
She was competitive and controlling and had strong feelings about the correct way to load a dishwasher, but she was also the kind of person who showed up when things got hard and meant everything she said. You could work with that. "She just comes at you pretty full force."
Carol made a neutral sound that suggested she'd reached her own conclusions about Monica and wasn't looking to revisit them.
Andrew let it go.
A few minutes later, a woman approached them from across the floor. She was put-together in the way that looked effortless but wasn't — good posture, easy confidence, the kind of person who'd clearly been comfortable in gym environments for a long time.
"Hey — are you two new here?" she asked, with a friendly smile.
"Carol."
"Andrew."
"Susan." She glanced between them, then let her attention settle on Carol in a way that was warm and direct without being aggressive. "I've been coming here for three years, basically every day. I'd remember if I'd seen you before."
Carol smiled. "That's very sweet."
They fell into conversation easily — the kind that happens between people who are naturally good at it. Andrew watched Susan position herself with the casual precision of someone who knew exactly what she was doing. She wasn't rude about him. She just made him geometrically irrelevant.
"Are you two—?" Susan let the question hang.
"Carol's husband and I are friends," Andrew said. It seemed useful to put Ross on the board, even in absentia.
"We're friends too," Carol added, in a tone that left the definition of that open.
Susan's expression shifted — not dramatically, just a small recalibration. She'd clearly been working her way toward this conversation for longer than today. The mention of a husband landed somewhere between noted and not particularly relevant.
Andrew picked up his water bottle. "I'll leave you two to it."
He meant it simply. This was not his situation to be in the middle of, and he had actual work to do.
He found a bench, loaded a bar, and let his mind run while his body worked.
The thing was — and this was the part that started nagging at him — he knew how this story went. Susan and Carol meeting wasn't just a gym coincidence.
It was a chapter opening. He'd watched the show enough times to know the rough shape of the timeline: Carol and Susan, the marriage unraveling slowly over the course of a year or more, the eventual conversation with Ross, the divorce. Ben somewhere in the middle of all of it.
He ran it backward, trying to fix the dates.
Friends had started filming in early '94, premiered that fall. The show picked up with Ross's marriage already over, with him already a divorced dad. Which meant the events that ended it — Carol meeting Susan, things going sideways — had to be happening now, or close to now. A year, give or take, before the show's timeline kicked in.
Which meant something else was also about to happen.
The bar.
He sat up.
In the show, the Central Perk coffee house opened in the space that had been a bar — his bar, the one he played at four nights a week. It happened before the main storyline began. Joey joining the group, the renovation, the whole transition — that was all pre-pilot.
If Carol meeting Susan was the marker he thought it was—
His job was about to not exist.
He set the bar down a little too hard. The guy on the next bench glanced over. Andrew nodded apologetically and stared at the ceiling.
This was the problem with knowing how things turned out. Most of the time it was useful. Occasionally you followed the thread all the way to its end and found it attached to your own foot.
He'd been so entertained by the Ross situation — the shirt, the treadmill guys, the whole thing — that he'd watched Susan walk through the door and thought oh, interesting instead of oh, this is the clock starting.
The bar could close for renovations in a month. It could close in three months. It could, theoretically, close tomorrow.
He did not have enough saved to absorb that.
He thought about the gym membership he'd signed just two days ago and felt it slightly differently now.
Finding another bar gig wasn't a weekend project. Most places didn't need a house musician — they had speakers and a playlist and that was fine with them. The job he had now had taken real luck to land. He couldn't count on duplicating it quickly.
Give me two months, he thought, in no particular direction. Two months and I can have the food truck money. Then it doesn't matter.
He should probably also start looking at restaurant kitchens. Not as a chef — he wasn't there yet — but prep work, line work, anything that got him in the building and let him learn the environment from the inside.
He finished his sets, showered, and collected his things.
On the way out he passed Susan and Carol, still talking by the stretching mats, fully absorbed in whatever they were saying.
He didn't interrupt.
Some things were going to happen the way they were going to happen. His job was to make sure he wasn't standing in the wrong place when they did.