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“The gym. Because you look like you need to beat the hell out of something, and I need a workout anyway.”
Evelyn was safe in her house, the property was secure, and there was nothing I could do until I got the footage. If I kept all this energy inside my body, I was going to explode. This was better than nothing. “Fine.”
We had a gym on the property behind the lodge, a huge building with state-of-the-art equipment and a space where we could do exactly what we were about to do: whale on each other. I grabbed an extra pair of clothes from my locker and taped my hands. But each movement was in a daze.
I couldn’t do anything to help Evelyn until she told me what she was running from. But why would she do that? I was nothing to her. She had no reason to trust me beyond not making her life miserable the past week. Why should she trust me? I was a stranger who’d shown her the sky and accidentally seen her scars.
But it didn’t feel that way to me. I felt like I knew her, even though that was utterly impossible. I wanted to save her. I needed to save her. Since I hadn’t been able to save my mother. And I hadn’t been able to save—
Harlan came at me, and I had to duck under the force of his blow. I didn’t need to warm up, I was already too warm with the intensity and the roaring in my ears.
This wasn’t a graceful sparring match. It was raw and elemental. Pure instinct and exactly what Harlan had said I needed: beating the hell out of something.
Thoughts about how I needed to save Evelyn to make up for my past kept rising up, and I kept punching them down. This wasn’t the time to deal with my own pain. It lived in me all the time; it could wait a goddamn minute for me to figure this out. Evelyn was more important than my failures. I couldn’t fail her.
I landed a punch to Harlan’s side. He grunted but took it in stride before he came at me again. We weren’t the most equally matched partners. I had a good four inches in height and probably thirty pounds on him. But that didn’t stop him from putting me on my ass regularly when we sparred. He was fast, and determined, and right now he was holding back.
“You don’t want to hit me?”
Harlan shook his head while bouncing on his toes. “The whole point is to let you hit something. I hit you plenty.”
“If all I wanted to do was hit something, Harlan, we have five fucking punching bags twenty feet that way. Fight me.”
“This is about her. Isn’t it?”
I grit my teeth and swung. The blow went wide as he ducked and spun behind me, tapping me on the shoulder to show me that he could hit me, and wasn’t.
“The woman staying in the Bitterroot House.”
We circled each other, and I glared at him. “Her name is Evelyn.”
“Good to know. This is about her?”
I pressed my lips together. “Nothing’s changed in the past half hour, Harlan. It’s not mine to tell right now.”
He nodded and stepped closer, looking for an opening. “Well, at least I know it’s about her.”
“Mind your own business and fucking hit me.”
He swung, and I jumped back out of the way. “I’m not trying to overstep. All I’m trying to do is figure out if you’re in over your head. You know we’re here for you.”
I landed two more glancing blows before he dodged, and I nearly stumbled from my momentum. “I’m fine.”
“Really? You don’t look fine.”
“I’m fucking fine,” I growled.
Or I would be. I had to be. I’d let Evelyn stay here. I’d helped her get the job at Deja Brew, and that was on me. If I hadn’t done those things, maybe I wouldn’t have seen that terror in her eyes or the way she’d crumpled to the floor.
And then she wouldn’t be here, and I’d never have shown her the stars.
But it was my fault that she was here, and triggered, and I needed to fix it. Because if I didn’t, if it happened again—
Light flashed behind my eyes, pain slamming through my jaw. I hit the mat like dead weight, nearly knocked out with the force of Harlan’s punch. At least the ceiling I was staring at right now wasn’t the one in my bedroom.
Harlan chuckled. “You said to hit you. But I thought you’d block it.”
“Distracted,” I said, still lying on the floor. Normally after a blow like that, I’d be nursing my ego, but my mind was still racing too much for me to care.
