Tristan snorted.
“You laugh,” I muttered, “but I’m one hamstring twinge from joining a monastery.”
He leaned against the wall and folded his arms.
“That dramatic?”
“Yes.”
He smiled lazily.
“Good.”
Mira split us into back-to-back sessions in the same room, so while one of us was on the table the other could stretch, hydrate, or sit there looking unfairly good in a robe.
I went first.
And somewhere between the first long press of her forearm into my right calf and the deep, clinical agony of her working through my shoulder blade, my soul briefly left my body.
“Breathe,” she said.
“I am breathing.”
“No,” she said calmly, digging into a knot that had apparently formed sometime during the Obama administration, “you are bargaining.”
I gripped the edge of the table.
Across the room, Tristan laughed.
I lifted my face from the cradle just enough to glare at him.
“I hate you.”
His grin flashed.
“No, you don’t.”
I dropped my face back down.
Unfortunately, he was right.
Even more unfortunately, after forty minutes under Mira’s hands, my body felt like something had been untied from the inside.
Loose.
Heavy.
Warm.
Human again.
I staggered off the table in the robe they gave me and Tristan took my place.
Watching him get worked over should not have been as fascinating as it was.
He was all hard planes and bruised masculinity even half-undressed, built with the sort of violent athletic grace that made everything he wore look temporary. When Mira started in on one of his shoulders, he hissed once through his teeth and muttered, “That’s personal.”
I sat cross-legged on the recovery mat with a bottle of water and watched him be humbled by sports medicine.
