Infinite Cashback: My Wealth Rebate System

Jason set his bag down by the bench and pulled his tracksuit top over his head, tossing it aside, left in just the fitted gym singlet he’d dug out that morning.

Ben, mid-sentence about grip width, just stopped talking.

Jason didn’t notice immediately, too busy adjusting the strap of the singlet where it had ridden up, and it wasn’t until the silence stretched a beat too long that he looked up and found Ben staring at him with the specific, slack-jawed expression of a man whose brain had briefly stopped processing input.

"What," Jason said.

"What do you mean ’what’." Ben’s eyes moved over him, slow, cataloguing, like he was doing inventory. "Jason. What the hell."

"What."

"You look like you’ve been coming here for eight months. I would know. I would’ve noticed if you’d been coming here for eight months, because I come here five days a week and I have never once seen you."

Ben took a step closer, actually reaching out and grabbing Jason’s shoulder like he needed to confirm it wasn’t some kind of gym-lighting illusion. "This is real. This isn’t padding. What is this."

Right

Jason felt the specific, familiar sinking sensation of a problem he should have seen coming from a mile away and somehow hadn’t.

I spent this entire morning rehearsing a lie about why I randomly decided to start going to the gym. Did not once think about the follow-up question of why I already look like I’ve been going for months. Incredible planning. Truly elite level foresight.

"It’s, uh." He scrambled, and came up empty, because there wasn’t a version of this that made sense, no gym routine explained overnight, no supplement did this, nothing he could actually say passed even the loosest sniff test.

"It’s a new thing I’ve been doing. At home."

"At home." Ben’s eyebrows climbed. "You’ve had a home gym this whole time and never told me."

"Not a gym. Just. Bodyweight stuff. Intense bodyweight stuff."

This is genuinely the worst lie I have ever constructed in real time, and I have lied to my landlord about a security deposit before.

"Bodyweight stuff got you looking like that in what, a week? Since I last saw you shirtless, which admittedly was a while ago, but still."

Jason opened his mouth, closed it again, and then just settled on the truth wearing a very thin disguise.

"Honestly? I don’t fully understand it myself. Something’s clicked. I don’t really want to overthink it."

Ben studied him for a long second, clearly unsatisfied, clearly aware there was a real answer somewhere underneath that one, but Jason was his friend, had been his friend for years, and after a while something in Ben’s face shifted from suspicion into the specific, generous shrug of a man deciding some mysteries weren’t worth the argument.

"Fine," Ben said, releasing his shoulder. "Keep your secrets. But if you show up next week looking like a Greek statue, I’m staging an intervention."

"Deal."

"Also I hate you a little bit now. For the record."

"Noted."

Ben clapped his hands together, apparently deciding the questioning portion of the morning was over, and gestured Jason toward the machine beside them, a wide, angled bench with a bar mounted overhead.

"Alright. Since you picked arms, we’re starting with biceps, because it’s the one thing every beginner actually wants and I’m not gonna pretend otherwise." He patted the padded bench. "Preacher curl. Sit."

Jason sat, adjusting until his arms rested along the angled pad the way Ben gestured for him to.

"Grip here, shoulder width, not wider, guys always go wider thinking it helps and it just recruits your shoulders instead of your arms, which defeats the whole point."

Ben crouched slightly, checking Jason’s elbow position with the easy authority of someone who’d clearly done this for other people plenty of times.

"Curl up slow, don’t swing it, don’t use momentum, control the weight both ways. Up is only half the rep. Down matters just as much."

He’s actually good at this. Assisting torture that is

Jason thought, mildly surprised, adjusting his grip.

Didn’t expect Ben to have an actual coaching voice buried under all the parking lot crying jokes.

"Start light," Ben added, sliding a modest weight onto the bar before Jason could reach for anything heavier.

"I know you probably feel like a superhero right now given whatever’s happening with your arms, but form first. Ego later."

"I wasn’t going to go heavy."

"You were absolutely going to go heavy. Everyone goes heavy on day one. It’s a rite of passage." Ben stepped back, arms crossed, watching. "Go."

Jason curled the bar up, slow, the movement easier than he expected, barely any resistance where he’d braced for a genuine fight.

He caught Ben’s eyebrows twitch slightly at that, filing it away without comment, and lowered it back down with the same control.

"Okay, that was clean," Ben said, sounding almost begrudging about it. "Annoyingly clean for a first rep."

Would you look at that.

Jason felt something close to quiet satisfaction settle in his chest, unrelated to any system notification, just the plain, uncomplicated kind that came from doing a thing correctly on the first try. "Guess I’m a natural."

"Don’t get comfortable. Do eleven more of those and then we’ll talk about whether you’re a natural or whether that first one was a fluke."

Jason curled again, and again, settling into a rhythm, Ben’s occasional corrections, slower, don’t let your elbow drift, squeeze at the top threading through the set like background noise he was actually, for once, paying attention to.

Somewhere around rep eight, Ben went quiet, just watching, and Jason caught the exact moment his friend’s expression shifted from casual supervision into something more assessing, more genuinely puzzled, like a man doing math that wasn’t adding up no matter how many times he ran it.

Yeah Jason thought, finishing the set. Get in line. I’ve got the same question, and even I don’t have the answer.

They finished the set somewhere past rep forty, Ben finally calling it with a satisfied nod, and Jason sat back on the bench, arms hanging loose at his sides, chest rising and falling harder than he expected given how easy the actual reps had felt in the moment.

Okay. Retracting every smug thought I had ten minutes ago. His arms weren’t sore exactly, not yet, but there was a deep, unfamiliar heaviness in them now, the specific feeling of muscles that had been asked to do actual work for the first time in longer than he wanted to admit.

This is genuinely awful. People do this on purpose and repeatedly. For fun.

"You good?" Ben asked, tossing him a towel.

"I hate this," Jason said, wiping his face, entirely sincere. "I want that on the record. Whatever I said this morning about wanting to feel productive, I take it back. I want to lie down somewhere quiet and reconsider every choice that led me here."

"That’s the spirit."

Ben grinned, clearly enjoying this more than a good friend probably should. "Day one always feels like betrayal. Wait till tomorrow. You’re gonna hate me specifically."

"I already hate you specifically."

This is going to be a problem tomorrow Jason thought, flexing his fingers slightly, testing the fatigue settling into his forearms.

And the day after. And probably several days after that, if what Ben’s been threatening me with all morning is even half true. Whatever the system’s giving me for free, apparently the maintenance side of the deal still runs on regular human suffering.

He was mid-thought, mentally drafting a complaint to file against his own decision-making, when Ben suddenly straightened, glancing past Jason’s shoulder toward the entrance, and a slow, entirely too-pleased grin spread across his face.

"Yo," Ben said, tapping Jason’s arm. "Guess who’s here today."

Jason didn’t look up right away, still catching his breath. "I genuinely don’t have the energy to guess. Just tell me."

"Nah, come on. Guess." Ben’s grin widened, clearly enjoying withholding it more than the information itself warranted.

"Ben. My arms are on fire. I am not doing trivia right now."

"Fine, fine." Ben straightened up, lifting one hand and pointing casually toward the far side of the gym, past the rows of cardio machines. "You wouldn’t expect it, though. Look."

Jason sighed, pushed himself upright off the bench, and followed the line of Ben’s arm across the gym floor, more out of obligation than actual curiosity.

It took him a second to find who Ben meant among the scattered mid-morning crowd, and when he did, whatever mild irritation he’d been carrying evaporated instantly, replaced by something closer to quiet, genuine surprise.

It was Vivian.

Huh Jason blinked, making sure he wasn’t just imagining it out of sheer exhaustion.

Did not expect to see her here. Of all the places.

She hadn’t noticed them yet, focused on something across the room, and Jason found himself staring a beat longer than the moment strictly required, mind briefly abandoning arm soreness and system rewards alike in favor of the small, specific puzzle of Vivian, here, of all mornings. Today

"Yeah," Ben said, watching Jason’s face with open amusement. "Didn’t see that coming, did you."

"No," Jason admitted. "No, I really didn’t."

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