There it was again. That vague warning that gave me a little shiver up the spine.
35
Jonah
“Ten more burpees,” I said, dropping down into a push-up position.
“I really fucking hate you right now,” George groaned next to me.
“No, you don’t. You hate that you have to go through this,” I said, gritting my teeth through the push-up and hopping back on my feet.
“That, too. And burpees. I fucking loathe burpees,” he said, climbing to his feet.
“Where’s that jump and clap?”
I was practically begging to get punched in the face. But training George, a professional athlete, was pretty freaking awesome. The man’s strength was circus-freak level. And his muscle had already burned off six unwanted pounds since we started working together.
He gave a lackluster bounce on his toes, a sloppy clap.
“Nine more. Let’s go.”
“I could punch you for these or the fact that you’re sleeping with my sister and didn’t tell me,” he wheezed.
“Yeah, you could,” I agreed.
“I want points for my self-control,” George said, eyeing me before dropping down to the ground again.
“Consider points awarded.”
We bitched and busted our way through them, and when it was over, we both lay down in the grass. Chugging water and swiping sweat out of our eyes.
“You’re meaner than any trainer I had when I played,” he complained.
“They have to be nice to you in the league. Can’t have a bunch of three-hundred-pound babies crying about drills and sit-ups.”
“So you and my sister?” George said, picking up the thread I’d let drop.
“Yeah,” I said.
“As long as you’re good to her, I won’t plow my fists into your face,” he said.
“Understood.” I sat up, grabbed a foam roller, and tossed it to him. “Here, this will help you hate me less in the morning.”
He leaned forward and rubbed at the scars on his leg. One bad tendon had brought his career to a screeching halt. “I gotta ask Shelby what she used on her scars to help them heal,” he muttered.
I remembered the scar on her chest, the jagged one on her leg.
“How did she get them?” I asked. I’d noticed them, but their origin had never come up in conversation.
He studied me. “She doesn’t like to talk about it,” he said, taking another swig of water before shoving the foam roller under his hamstrings.
For a minute, I thought that would be the end of it.
“Since you’re sleeping with her, living with her, I’d feel better if you knew. Sometimes she still has nightmares about it.”
Despite the heat, the sweat, the hair on my arms stood up.
“This was back when she was fresh out of college. A family Shelby was working with called her one night, late. They had a lot of issues, but the main one was their teenage son. Big sonofabitch, unstable. More than just impulse control shit. He’d taken a shine to Shelby. She could get through to him sometimes when others couldn’t. But he kept going off his meds,” George said, swiping a hand over his face. “He’d show up at her favorite coffee shop. The grocery store in her neighborhood. She made light of it. Like it was no big deal.”
I felt the tension in him as he recalled it.
“She didn’t listen to me. I was the overprotective big brother. She had it all under control. She just wanted to help.”
“That sounds like Shelby,” I said.
He nodded. “She cares too much. Thinks she can fix everything, and there are just some things, some people, you can’t fix.”
He rubbed his palms together slowly as he worked through his memories.
“One night, he showed up at her apartment. She didn’t let him in, and he tried to kick in the door until one of the neighbors called the cops.”
“Shit,” I said, clenching my fists.
“Yeah. Her supervisor reassigned her. They’d seen shit like this before. The kid was obsessing. He’d do things just to get Shelby to show up at his place. Anything for her attention. So they tried to take her out of the equation. Assigned the family to a guy social worker.”
“How did Shelby feel about it?” I asked.
George shrugged. “She keeps stuff private a lot. She doesn’t like people worrying about her. But from what I could gather, she thought she failed him. Like somehow she should have convinced him to stay on his meds. They helped when he took them. But he’d forget, or he’d pretend to take them, and then he’d just lose control.”
He got up and paced restlessly now. A brother who loved his sister.