AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I grabbed two mats and set us up on the other side of the room. Then I sat and waited for the instructor and other participants to arrive.
“Why are we here?” Hunter asked sitting next to me as a woman with noticeable shrapnel scars entered.
“Yoga is excellent in helping veterans,” I said.
He frowned. “If touching my toes could fix me, I’d have been better a long time ago.” He impressed me by extending his legs and, indeed, he was able to touch his toes.
“It’s not the stretching alone. It’s the breathing. Veterans like you live in a constant state of fight or flight, which wreaks havoc on your body and nervous system. Breathing is a way to calm it down.”
“I breathe every day,” he quipped.
“Not like this you don’t. It can also help you reconnect with your body.”
He arched a brow.
“Often, to avoid the feelings, people will disassociate from their body. Not like an out of body experience but blocking off feeling connected to it. This will help you reconnect. It’s about mind-body wholeness.” I reached over and set my hand on his arm. “It could lead to flashbacks—”
He tensed. “Fuck—”
“But everyone here is in the same boat, Hunter. They’re all veterans of war.” By then, several men and women, some with visible injuries from war and others without, were in the class. Some were spouses or friends of the vets, like I was to Hunter.
I saw the tension escalate in him and wondered if I should have withheld that last piece of information. I didn’t want him to worry about it, and yet, it felt dishonest not to prepare him that his emotions could be let loose.
He lay back and scrapped his hands over his face. I leaned over him, and he set his hand on my ass.
“You can do this, Hunter.”
“Will you move in front of me, so I can see how you do it?”
When his hand squeezed my butt, I knew he had ulterior motives, but I figured I liked watching him, and if he liked watching me and it helped him calm down, what was the harm?
“Sure.” I moved my mat so I was in front of him. I stood on it and turned my head to look at him over my shoulder. “Okay?”
His gaze dropped to my ass. “Very nice.”
I rolled my eyes and turned forward as the instructor started the class.
Somehow, we got through the class, and I even convinced him to return to it with me. By the following Tuesday, he’d been to two more VA groups and was now entering the yoga class again. He said he was only coming because he liked watching me move. I didn’t doubt it, but he had taken the class, and in particular, the breathing exercises seriously, so if I had to let him ogle me to come to class, I was okay with that. Of course, that was my own ego speaking. I’d never felt ugly, but I’d never felt sexy either until Hunter.
Not giving into having sex with him was very hard, but so was not asking him about whether or not he was trolling for women at night, or having nightmares, or how the VA group was going. I was dying to know how he was doing beyond our friendship, but I fought asking. I wasn’t his therapist. There needed to be boundaries, and his mental health was now in someone else’s hands.
The good news was that except for innuendo and sexy comments, Hunter abided by my no-touch rule. He was a man with control, that was for sure. It was a good thing, because if he kissed me or touched me, I was sure I’d give in, just as I had the first time. That was one area he had more control than I did.
A part of me wondered if his sexy banter was just a game for him. Like he was just teasing me. Not that he didn’t find me attractive, but I was sure it was not to the extent that I found him sexy. He could take me or leave me, which was why he could so easily abide by my no-touch rule. I knew that was my own insecurities talking. Therapists knew psychology and human behavior, but that didn’t mean we had our shit together.
The thing I focused on was that Hunter was doing what needed to be done, and while I didn’t know what was going on in his head, or in his bed at night, I could see that he was less tense and less prone to striking out verbally than he had been when I first met him. That was progress.
17
Hunter
Tuesday
To be honest, I thought all that breathing and mind-body shit Grace was spouting the week before was a bunch of woo hoo. Seriously, how could breathing fix anything? I was breathing every minute of every day. And when she said it could trigger a flashback, it was all I could do to keep from walking out. But I wasn’t going to let yoga and breathing scare me, so I stayed. By the end, I’d felt more relaxed than I’d ever thought I could and nearly fell asleep at the end when we were laying on the floor in something the instructor called corpse pose.
