AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“She’s a fucking cutie,” Sean said. “No wonder you’re into her.”
“What?” Billy pulled a face. “I’m—” Not into her.
At least, those were the words he’d meant to say. But they wouldn’t come. They wouldn’t pass between his lips. Because they weren’t true, were they? He’d been into her almost from day one. Hell, minute one. When she’d had a gun pulled on her, dropped her towel, and proceeded to make jokes about it.
“I’m not after her, Riddick.”
Sean held up his hands as Colby guided them through a variety of stretches. “Whatever you sa
y, man.”
Billy forced himself to think about the stretches, his breathing, how his beat-to-hell body felt as he forced it to move. Truth was, he felt like shit. Clearly his body was registering its protest that nearly a week with little sleep and almost no horizontal time in an actual bed was all kinds of unsatisfactory.
To be thirty-three and feel this fucking old was a bitch. But he was never going to be the man he’d been before, was he? At this point, that wasn’t really a newsflash, though it was never fun having that reality driven home in yet another new way…
That was one of the reasons he made a point of attending WFC almost religiously. People here got it. They lived it. Many of them had it worse.
The day he’d met Noah, Billy had asked him what his damage was. It wasn’t a question of whether someone here was damaged in some way, it was a matter of how damaged they were. And in what ways.
Because war…hell…war damaged you even if your body came back whole. There was absolutely no way to experience crisis, trauma, and violence—or even the threat of it—without it changing the way you viewed the world.
PTSD didn’t just happen to those who’d been physically injured, it could happen to anybody whose situation constantly forced them to confront the fragility of life and the capriciousness of death. As all soldiers had to do. That fragility, that capriciousness…it became a warrior’s reality. And most civilians’ real world where everyone was safe and people were good and you could protect the ones you loved—that became the fantasy world.
Even if you had enough insight into your own head to know your thinking wasn’t fully rational, there was no convincing a central nervous system that’d been trained to survive threats that those threats were now gone.
So the veterans who came to WFC were scarred, all right. In ways that were both visible and invisible. For Billy, it was some of both. His PTSD was nowhere near as bad as some, but he still had nightmares and that nearly suffocating survivor’s guilt, and he didn’t fucking like fire. No big surprise there.
All of which had him thinking about Shayna again. What was her damage? And fuck, it killed him to think she had any at all.
“All right,” Hawk said, taking over the lead when they finished stretching. “Everyone into child’s pose.” Yoga as part of WFC had seemed strange to Billy at first but was old hat to him now, and he had even occasionally worked on some more demanding yoga positions on his own time to stretch out his stubborn scar tissue.
The point of WFC wasn’t to teach you to fight, it was to provide an emotional outlet, offer community, and teach people to think, not just react, in stressful situations. It put club members in a controlled situation of being attacked, and through the rigor and training of various mixed martial arts, made you realize the value of using your head before you used your hands.
As with so fucking much else, fighting was a head game. And yoga helped teach all of them how to slow down, take a breath, and think.
Billy breathed into the position and, face to the mat, let his grimace show when he felt the pull at his muscles and back.
Because fuck. He was raw in all kinds of ways, wasn’t he?
After moving through a few more poses, they got paired off to practice technical skills. And because they were pretty evenly matched, Coach put Billy and Noah together to run through kicking drills.
“Start with handshakes,” Coach yelled as people began putting on their shin guards and spreading out over the mats.
“You can go first,” Billy offered, squaring off in front of Noah.
The guy went from zero to focused in no time flat, assuming a fighting stance—hands up, elbows close, lead leg forward. This drill was meant to improve accuracy of the roundhouse kick, which meant that Noah directed his leg in a controlled slow-mo against Billy’s ribs, and Billy caught it so the other man could assess where the ‘hit’ had landed. Noah did a number of handshakes with his right leg against Billy’s left side, and then he switched.
On the fifth practice kick against his scarred right side, Noah’s foot landed with a little more pressure. Billy sucked in a breath through his teeth.
“Shit, man. What happened?” Noah asked.
Billy rolled his shoulders. “Nothing. You’re good.” He gestured for him to keep going.
Noah crossed his arms and nailed him with a dark-eyed stare. “You gonna bullshit a bullshitter?”
“I’m just achy. Pulled a week of surveillance and haven’t seen a real bed all week until last night. I’m good. Let’s go.”
Eyes narrowed, Noah didn’t push him, but the roundhouse kicks that followed were so controlled that the guy stopped his rotation before his shin came anywhere near Billy’s body.
