Chapter 19
Peyton
After dinner Thursday evening, I got to be taskmaster one last time. This was the end of March’s forty-eight hours of concussion checks, conducted by me. “One more check, March. Heel, toe, you know the drill.” Getting to boss the big SEAL around had been a kick.
March crossed his arms and sighed. “I’m just fine, and you know it.”
Karla had my back. “Stop dragging your feet, Ruppie, or are you going to ring the bell?”
I’d learned that ringing the bell referred to the humiliation of washing out of SEAL training, and it was the worst possible insult to hurl at one of these warriors. She got away with it because she was his mother.
March stood and completed his walk, eyes closed this time, and with perfect balance.
Did I watch his ass more than his feet? Maybe.
Karla had been worried out of her mind when she heard about March’s concussion and had been nearly a constant presence for the past two days. I’m not sure she’d made many of her meetings at the airport.
But her presence had provided the buffer I’d needed to stick to my no-men rule and put off any thoughts of kissing March again.
The SEAL followed up his balance walk by reciting the entire alphabet backwards. “Do I pass?”
“Perfectly,” I responded.
“Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Karla asked in probably the same way she had when she’d tried to get him to eat his peas as a toddler. “Ruppie?” she prodded when he didn’t answer.
“Annoying, not hard.”
“Now that we know you’re going to be okay, I’ll be heading home tomorrow,” Karla announced as she picked up her plate and glass. “But I’ll be back. In and out, because they keep changing the days on me.”
“You know you’re always welcome,” Zane said.
“You’re so sweet.” She kissed her son on the cheek.
“What’s the schedule on my condo door?” I asked. Without her here as a buffer, things between me and March would get sticky.
“I’ll have to check,” he mumbled and pulled out his phone.
He wasn’t thrilled with me returning to the condo, but it would be safe enough with the new door. They’d determined that Frankie had gone to Santa Monica the day of my break-in and not back to our building.
I followed Karla into the kitchen with my dishes and March’s.
Karla turned on the water in the sink. It was her way of getting a little privacy. “I can see it in your eyes.”
“What?” She had better not be talking about the attraction to March I was fighting. I was not ready for the mother-to-potential-girlfriend talk.
“You’ve been running from something, and you’re preparing yourself to run again.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” That was the first thing that came to mind.
“Ever watch the Nature Channel?”
That came out of left field. I nodded as I passed her the plates. “Some.”
“They call it the fight-or-flight response. The gazelle always chooses flight. She doesn’t know anything else.
Do you ever see scenes of her playing with her family and lounging around in the grass, lying down soaking up the sun?
No. She spends her entire life eating dry grass and getting ready to run.
She can’t live because she knows nothing but fear, so you know what happens? ”
I shook my head. “No.”
“One day she gets caught by the lion and eaten. End of story. The running only put off the inevitable.” She looked me in the eye. “Don’t be the gazelle.”
I squirmed. The inevitable sounded bad.
“Now take the lioness,” Karla continued. “She may choose flight when she’s alone and faced by a pack of twenty hyenas, because running is the smart thing to do for the moment.” She loaded the plates into the dishwasher.
I passed her the glasses to rinse.
“But when she has her pride behind her, she chooses to fight. You see plenty of scenes of her on the Nature Channel, lounging around in the sun and playing with her cubs. Be the lioness, flight when smart, fight when you have support.” She touched my arm.
“Ruppie and the rest of them have your back.”
March interrupted the moment. “What’s for dessert?”