“It seems to me that they’re giving you a second chance.”
“Yeah.” Keeping my head down, because nobody likes looking their shortcomings in the face, I smoothed my hand over the cross-stitched cushion in my lap. “Look, I know I should be happy. I still have a job, but…”
“But how can you work with the supernaturals when you’ve got some strong feelings against them?” I grunted. Damn her and her Ivy League education. She pressed on, “Perhaps we can spend some time in the next session to discuss these feelings and how you’ve transferred them to your father’s death in more detail?”
Oh, yes, let’s rehash that one. I glanced at the clock on the wall above Joanna’s head, relieved to see we’d reached the half hour. “Time’s up.” Discarding the cushion, I rose from the couch and stretched. “I have a kickboxing class to get to. It starts in an hour.”
“You’re still going? That’s great.” She smiled. “Well, I won’t keep you. I’ll see you next week.”
“Thanks.”
I wiped the sweat from my brow as I swung up into another crunch. The coach was a fucking demon tonight—figuratively, not literally. The class grunted out their count, but I couldn’t find the spare oxygen needed to spit out the number.
“This guy needs to get laid,” Sasha panted beside me as she pulled up into her next crunch. “I call dibs.”
I managed a grin. In between a grimace and a colorful swear word. “You’re welcome to him,” I replied, exhaling sharply through my mouth and wondering why I put myself through this torture.
“Come on…you can’t tell me…you don’t want to…fucking ride him…hard.” Sasha had her hair piled up on top of her head like a poodle’s, the tight, black curls holding their shape, despite the humidity in the gym.
“I’d rather his…head between my legs,” I shot back, grinning when Sasha actually purred.
“Alright, burpees!” Mike yelled in that sexy British accent he had. Sasha let out an erotic moan.
I did those burpees, and I did them with a fucking smile on my face. When Mike felt like he’d whipped us into enough of a moaning, aching heap, he asked one of his students to run a cool down and stretch session. As I lay in child’s pose, stretching out my lower back, I leaned my head against the tacky blue mat and shut my eyes.
The opal necklace I’d been given by my dad, just after my mother died fourteen years ago, lay warm from my body heat against the underside of my chin, a comforting weight and a steady constant. I never took it off, even when I did this punishing class, because my dad had told me that it would always protect me.
I wasn’t an idiot. I knew it didn’t have magical powers. It was just that this was the last thing that he gave me and, stupidly, I felt connected to him through it.
With nothing else left to do, my mind began to work, the cogs twisting as I replayed all the horrible things that had happened today. Keeping my job was probably the least of the offensive things, but working with PIG? How in the hell was I supposed to pretend that I even liked these guys? In my head, they were the boogey man, that killer in the backseat, and Bloody Mary all rolled up into one. I was terrified of them, the irrational fear probably stemming from my father’s gruesome and unsolved murder. His death had hit me hard, making me re-evaluate the art degree I’d been working toward at college and switching over to a BA in Law Enforcement.
Adding to my arsenic-laced shit sundae? Joanna Wong. How could she think this was going to be a good thing for me? For fuck’s sake, I had a burning distrust of these beings, but if I was being honest with myself—let’s face it, that’s really no fun—then I also had an immense fear of the supernaturals. I’d seen first-hand what they were capable of doing, and if that incident put me into therapy, what would working with them every single day and investigating their crimes do to me?
Humans had long been the top of the food chain, or at least, we thought so. We had no natural predators, other than high cholesterol and cancer, but with supes on the scene now? Humanity certainly got knocked down a few fucking pegs. Fear was a heathy part of human evolution—that’s how we’d survived for so long. But my fear had been amplified tenfold by my experiences of supernaturals, even before we knew they were real and not just monsters in the stories we were told.
As I pulled out of child’s pose, I turned my head to find Sasha smiling at me.
“Want to go get pizza?”
I shook my head, shoving some of my loose aqua green hair from my eyes. “Not tonight. I had a shit day, and I was hoping an endorphin rush would help…”
Sasha huffed. “Please, girl. Looking at Mike in his tight MMA shorts helps every damn time.”
I looked over at our instructor and found him smiling at me. I glanced away. “He’ll be starring in my fantasies tonight.”
“Girl, same.” Sasha held out her fist for me to bump. “See you tomorrow?”
“Yup. I’m a glutton for punishment.”
“Hashtag Masochist.”
I laughed and stood up, stretching my arms above my head. “Hashtag You-Know-It.”
Sasha sauntered away, and I went to retrieve my gloves and wraps from the edge of the mat.
“You’re getting better.”
I yelped, turning around with a hand resting against my lurching chest. “Fuck me, Mike. I’m going to have to put a fucking bell on you. You can’t creep up on people like that.”
More so because I was a cop and I was supposed to be aware of my environment at all times.
“Sorry.” He grinned at me, popping a dimple I was helpless against.
