“Oh, there you are. I was just finishing up.”
I wheel around. Tohr is coming out of the weight room. He’s got Under Armour all over him, and a pair of black Brooks on his feet. A white towel is around his neck, and he looks vital, powerful, strong. He smells good, too. Cologne? Laundry detergent? His natural scent?
Most likely the latter.
“Good workout?” I ask.
“Always. It was leg day. I never skip leg day.”
Given the width of his shoulders and the heft of his arms, he never skips any day. And it’s funny, Tohr isnotthe one I thinkof when it comes to sexiness. He’s the widower, the sensible, levelheaded second-in-command, the calm and reasonable.
And all I have to do is look at the white stripe in the front of his dark fade and I’m viscerally reminded of all that he lost.
But I have to say, post-workout? He looks…um, very nice. Very good. Yuuuuup.
“I need to take a shower.” He nods over his shoulder to the males’ locker room. “Z’s down there. You want to go talk to him while I wash up?”
“Ah…” I glance in that direction. “Yeah. Sure. That’s a fine idea.”
Tohr’s smile is open and accepting. But he’s not uncomplicated for me. The specter of Wellsie will always be between us, even if he’s not thinking about it as I am right now. What a heartbreaker. When Wrath showed up in my head, he showed me the Brothers—and I knew, instantly, that Tohr’s mate wasn’t going to make it.
He was the only one among them that didn’t have an obvious weakness. No, he had a mate he loved very much…who was pregnant.
Oh, shit, I recall thinking.
And I also knew that he was going to get a book that was his own. After his shattering loss, there was something else, another life, with a different sun to warm his days.
It was important to show that. God knew he’d earned an HEA after his hardship.
As he nods and walks off, I think about the nature of survivors. It isn’t so much that they get over their pain. They just find a way to connect with things around their suffering. After all, some scars are permanent, and broken bones don’t always heal correctly, and your faculties can be irrevocably diminished by injury. In fact, I’ve often thought that hearts and souls are the same as the body in that regard. Depending on the wound,our emotions and our minds may never fully recover or may be forever different. But the people in these books keep going, and as I’ve said, so many folks in the real world have honored me with their stories of how they’ve done similarly.
And speaking of pain…
I look down to the sound of the basketball.
Instead of heading in that direction, I go the opposite way and walk past the locker and weight rooms. When I get to the clinical section of the facility, I have to smile. It was V’s engagement/mating present to Jane, and over the years, it’s just gotten more specialized, more advanced…more used.
One of the patient rooms is open, and I stop in between the jambs. The hospital bed is off against the right wall, and the wooden headboard behind it splits to expose all manner of monitoring equipment. There’s also a couple of comfortable chairs. A TV that can be pulled down from overhead. A beautiful oil painting of a field of wildflowers.
It’s just like a human clinic. Except it’s an actual Monet over there.
There are a lot of medical scenes in the books, and aside from the fact that fighters in a war often get hurt in big ways, I suppose I’m a wannabe doctor myself. I would have gone to med school instead of taking the law route if I could have, but back when I was getting out of college, I fainted at the sight of blood. Kind of a rate limiter if you want to wear one of those white coats.
I’m better about that sort of thing now, by the way. I only pass out if I’m getting my own blood drawn. #progress
I think about how Beth came here to give birth. And Luchas laid in the room next door while he was an inpatient. And Wrath recovered from a gunshot in the throat (Lover Reborn) and Rhage has gotten over his beast eating things (often) and—
“That was quick.”
I jump-scare and wrench over my shoulder. Tohr’s reemerged from the locker room, and he’s clad in leather, his jacket in his hands along with several holsters of weapons. This checks out. Though he’s supposed to be here for a social reason, he never goes anywhere unarmed.
I glance down to the sound of that dribbling ball. “I, ah, I haven’t talked to Z yet. I was just—you know, here, anyway…”
I drift off and feel like I’m floating off into outer space again. Funny, how the tether of our feet on the ground sometimes fails, and the disassociation gets worse as I realize that if I look through Tohr, I can see the cracks in the concrete wall behind him. They were created when the Brotherhood came to tell him about Wellsie and the baby, and they’re as obvious to me as a scream in a silent room.
Another scene I wish I hadn’t seen.
To help me ignore them, I make sure my eyes stay fixed on his handsome, military-esque face. There’s no way I’m bringing up that part of his past. It’s there anyway, hovering over his head like a thought balloon that never goes away, and what do you know. As a dark shadow crosses his expression, I know that he’s doing his own tripping through memory lane. But he hides his response quickly, the containment of emotion a muscle very well used.
