by Elodie Colt
I tried very hard to stop laughing, but now that I was on a roll, I couldn’t hold it back when looking at Chris’ sour face and started to snort with laughter once again. It infected Chris, and we both laughed so hard the other students around us threw us what-the-fuck looks again.
Dylan took exactly that moment to pass us throwing Chris a deadly glare. Our laughter died down immediately, but Chris kept his smile in place staring holes at Dylan’s back until he vanished through the door. It seemed Chris was siding with the enemy in Dylan’s opinion.
Chris cast me a glance. I quickly changed my thoughtful expression to a cheerful one, but the look on Chris’ face told me I hadn’t been quick enough.
He leaned forward, arms folded on the table. “It’s nice to see you in a good mood. It suits you better than fear and sadness,” he commented, making me smile again. Damn, he knew how to wrap women around his finger. I didn’t question his abilities as a womanizer for a second. “You have such a beautiful laugh,” he mused in a much lower voice, his gaze dropping to my lips.
There were a few seconds of awkward silence until Chris snapped out of his reverie, cleared his throat, and leaned back again.
“You should go to class. It starts in a few minutes,” he said, his voice suddenly husky.
I hid my smile when I packed my things and stood up. Good to know I still had the power to intimidate the male gender. I thought back to what Lauren had said to me. “You are seen, Haylie… it’s you who has to see.”
I looked at Chris in awe. He couldn’t read my expression at first and stared back questioningly.
“Thank you,” I said in honesty. I didn’t need to elaborate why I was thanking him. The warm smile he gave me told me he understood.
When I undressed, I put on the sportswear Scott gave me on my way to the main hall where I should turn up for my first training lesson. The gear was made of an elastic, shimmering black material that fit tightly. I was glad I’d gotten rid of the tiny fat roll on my hips over the last few years, or I’d look like the Michelin guy in the tight top.
Taking off my bracelets, I wrapped the bandages that came with the sportswear set around my wrists draping them carefully over the cut on my left arm that was still sore. They concealed my scars just enough so nobody would notice them.
As jewelry and all other kinds of metal or sharp objects were forbidden during training, I braided my hair and left the clip in my bag. Good thing I always kept a few hairbands in reserve.
The snickering and giggling of the girls in the room made my ears ring. They hadn’t dignified me with one glance quickly showing me how outsiders were treated here.
I frowned. Why did I decide to come here again? Ah yes, to run from a bunch of psychopaths who wanted me dead because I sported a different eye color. Oh, and also to find out about a magical ability I should have.
“Freshmen, time to move.” Scott’s voice resounded from outside, and he clapped his hands to urge us on. The girls left the changing room, and I followed them inconspicuously. “Don’t sleepwalk over there,” Scott called again and waited until everyone had clustered around.
I wasn’t surprised that males and females were mixed in this class. I guessed there were not enough teachers available to train us separately.
“I’ve got some news for you,” Scott announced when he had everyone’s attention. “From now on, Dylan will take over half of my courses.”
I glanced in the direction Scott was pointing as my heart slowly but surely took center in my belly. At the same moment, the person of interest strode toward us, his face stoic and blank. He wore black training pants and a tight, black tank top that gave a good view of his broad shoulders and defined upper arms. Damn, that man had a body like a fitness trainer—well, I guess in a way he was.
Whereas Chris was cute, flirtatious, and angel-like, Dylan was the epitome of pure, hard, and dangerous masculinity. His height and intimidating aura would be enough to make enemies run in fear.
And he would be one of my trainers from now on. Damn my luck. This couldn’t end well. I was responsible for his brother’s death. He loathed me, and he’d witnessed my pathetic breakdown the day before. How would he react? Shit. I hoped I’d somehow find a way to regain my dignity. I tried not to panic and wiped my sweaty hands on my pants. He would make sure to bring hell down on me.
Dylan passed the group of waiting students ignoring everyone except Scott. He stopped in front of a bench dropping his training bag with a loud crash. The girls started to snicker and clapped their hands in anticipation, loud enough for everyone to hear their girly outbursts and make the guys roll their eyes in annoyance. Not surprisingly, Dylan seemed to be a more favored trainer than Scott, at least for the female audience. But when he turned around, he was completely unfazed by their attention, maybe even a little bit annoyed.
His gaze swept over each one swiftly only to stop at… me.
He eyed me for a few seconds, his expression unreadable, then his eyes raked down my braid. I was used to that look. As I never wore my hair down, no one would ever guess how long it was under the hair clip I never took off.
And then his gaze darted down my body.
I blinked in surprise. Had he just checked me out? No way. He’d made his revulsion toward me clear.
I looked down myself to see what had drawn his eye. Granted, the leggings were a little tight for my taste. My gaze swept back to Dylan, but his eyes were averted. Great, now I was imagining things.
“I didn’t know Dylan was still a trainer,” one girl whispered to her companion in front of me.
“He isn’t, and as far as I know, he’s never trained Freshmen before,” the other whispered back.
“Why is he training us now, then?”
“I heard rumors that he had a fight with Jimmy, and Jimmy gave him training sessions as a punishment.”
“Well, good for us,” the other said with a huge grin on her face.
Was it true? That Jimmy had punished Dylan by letting him train the Freshmen? I had the uneasy feeling this was what Jimmy had meant with ‘there will be consequences for him’ even if I’d begged him to go easy on Dylan. Awesome. Another reason for him to hate me. I was a dead woman…
Scott cleared his throat to regain the girls’ attention and stop their chitchat. “You’ll train in the gym today as we did last time, but I want to see ten rounds for warm-up. Go, go, go!” he shouted, and a few students started to jog following the laid-out path surrounding the main hall.
I fell into line. This should be an easy task for me, I hoped.
We all jogged along to pep up our muscles. After five rounds, I could lap some of the students in front of me. One of the girls was already panting so hard I feared she wouldn’t make it to the last round.
On my sixth round, I threw a glance at the two teachers who currently had their heads bent low in a silent conversation. They didn’t talk much but spoke more with their eyes and hands. I supposed they were trying to keep their conversation from nearby Catchers. Suddenly, Scott threw a calculating gaze in my direction followed by Dylan whose jaw clenched.
I quickly refocused on the task at hand. I could have guessed I was the center of attention again.
On my eighth round, I had to puff the air out of my lungs at every second step, but gathering from the red faces of the other students, I seemed to be in better shape than the average.
Just as I was about to pass a girl, I tripped over a sudden barrier catching myself at the last moment. Had that been my foot or had somebody just tripped me up?
The girls to my side snickered which immediately gave them away, and when I turned my head back to them, they quickly attempted to erase their laughter. A shrill whistle resounded that made all of us jerk our heads in Dylan’s direction.
“Make another move like that, and you’re out for the rest of the day, Amber,” Dylan condemned in a calm voice, but the underlying warning was hard to miss.
Amber’s face got bright red. Apparently, she hadn’t
counted on getting caught. She gave me an icy glare as if I were the one responsible for Dylan’s reprimand, but I passed her in a jog not dignifying the bitch with a comment and determined to make the last two rounds faster than her.
When I finally made the last round, I put my hands on my knees and took a moment to catch my breath. Glancing up, I realized that I was one of the first five to reach the goal—not including Amber, much to my satisfaction.
Not a bad time for my first day. Scott smiled at me in encouragement and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Follow me,” Dylan instructed us in an austere voice.
The complaints that came up earlier when Scott had been trying to motivate us failed to appear. It was clear who was the more authoritarian trainer of them both.
Dylan didn’t give the last ones time to recover, and from the looks of it, they had a hard time suppressing their moans. I searched for Scott, but he’d already left. Oh no. Scott was my secret anchor here. Now I was left alone with Dylan. Did Jimmy want to torture me? No way would he go easy on me, that was for sure.
Dylan didn’t look back to check if the others were following him, but all of them obeyed. When I entered the huge hall Dylan was leading us to, my mouth dropped open in amazement. It was at least three times the size of the gym at my last high school.
All kinds of obstacles were strategically positioned—ropes, bars, mats, tires, and objects that looked like machines, although I couldn’t identify their purpose. The whole area was designed for a big obstacle course. My heart fell slightly. I had enough experience with parkour, but chances were high I’d lag behind the others.
Dylan turned to us, spread his stance, and crossed his arms over his chest making his biceps bulge in the process. As this hall was better lit than the main hall, I recognized a tattoo coming out from under his tank top. Black swirls were trailing over his neck and shoulders following an invisible line to a bigger drawing on his back. I wondered how the entire piece of art looked without his shirt hiding it. It only enhanced his bad-guy appearance.
Damn him. I’d always had a thing for tattoos. Why was the one guy I desperately tried to avoid the hottest of them all?
“I hope you all remember how the obstacle course works.” His deep voice rumbled through the hall. “Try to find ways to conquer the barriers in the most efficient way. In the first round, your goal is to run the course with as few mistakes as possible rather than to concentrate on speed. I want you to make clean and determined moves, understand?” He paused gauging the reaction of his student’s, but no heads nodded.
“We’ll do a warm-up round. Jared, you’re first. Bryceland, you’re last. Watch the others and then fall in line,” he directed me without worshiping me with another glance. Okay, we seemed to be on a last-name basis here. Fine by me.
I watched as Jared jogged forward and began the obstacle course. He jumped up the first horizontal bar, crossed it in a quick jog, and jumped off. He jogged over to two rows of tires on the floor and hopped through them, but his foot caught in one, and he nearly tripped.
“Next,” Dylan ordered when Jared jumped on a high bar and made a full rotation backward over the pole.
The tricky part was to swing forward and then land on a mat positioned on unfixed rolling pipes which maneuvered the mat forward. You had to gauge your momentum and keep your balance so the impact would cause the mat to slide in the direction of the next obstacle. Jared managed the move, but the girl behind him—I remembered her as Marcy—was struggling with the rotation on the high bar. When I saw how awkward she swung up her leg, I immediately knew that Marcy wouldn’t gain enough momentum.
The mat was pulled back by cables for the next jumper to land on.
“Next.”
I tried to keep my eyes on Jared to watch him doing the entire routine. He seemed to be one of the few with enough motor function to move his body swiftly and efficiently. He climbed some ropes, swinging himself from one to the next.
Then came the part that required muscles—rolling a punching bag up a ramp to then make ten push-ups in a marked square on the floor. Jared struggled to get the last two push-ups done, already slightly drained, but the girl behind him only managed three before surrendering and staying put on the floor.
“Useless…”
My head snapped to Dylan who had clearly been the source of this comment. I couldn’t be sure if I’d heard him correctly, but his discontentment with the Freshmen’s training status was apparent.
Just wonderful. I could have guessed that Dylan would raise the bar higher which only resulted in heightening my tension.
Refocusing on the training course, I watched Jared jumping from one obstacle to the next, but the tricky part was the second obstacle. It was only a few inches wide and was leaning directly against a wall, therefore not providing much landing space. A regular jump would make you crash against the wall as the surface wasn’t wide enough to land with the whole sole of your foot which was exactly what happened to Jared.
His face connected with the wall before he fell to the floor with a dull thump. A collective “Oooh” echoed behind me as the others sympathized. Woah, did he break his nose?
“Fucking wall,” he complained, rubbing his nose. There was no blood on his face, so his nose seemed to be intact. Gathering from the string of curse words he let out, this wasn’t the first time the wall won one to zero against Jared.
The next two girls had similar problems, although the last one managed to get a grip at the last second bending her body awkwardly and flailing her arms to avoid slipping.
Jared was currently running over a bar while being shot at by red rubber balls. Ah, that was what the machines were for. Jared could hold his balance if only by luck, but the girl behind him got smashed by a ball in her face and fell from the bar onto the floor. Now the “Oooh” from before rolled through the students again, only much louder this time. The girl cursed and stood up to begin again.
The last obstacle was probably the hardest. You had to jump on a trampoline to get catapulted forward, and then grab handles on a wall that was at least seventeen feet high. The goal was to climb the top of the wall and then swing yourself over the top before landing on the mat below on the other side.
The swinging part didn’t work out well for the class. Most of the students swung only one leg over the top, clueless as to what to do next as they stared down helplessly, so all of them tumbled down the impressive height of the obstacle in a mass of limbs.
I risked a wary glance at our trainer. Bad idea. He was holding the bridge of his nose with two fingers, eyes closed as if praying for patience. His demeanor did the opposite of relaxing me.
I watched the remaining eight or nine students before it was my turn. As it was just a warm-up, I could take it slowly. I prayed to get through the course without giving the others a reason to laugh their asses off for the next few weeks. Or worse—a reason for Dylan to strangle me for real this time.
You can do this, you are trained in this, it should be a piece of cake…
Sprinting forward, I jumped and landed with my feet on a bar that was about fifteen feet long. I balanced without effort to then drop down and roll under another bar that was set up horizontally. Straightening, I hopped over the twenty tires on the floor, taking the left ones with my left foot, the right ones with the other.
After that, I crawled through a long pipe using my elbows and toes to push myself forward. It was so narrow, I bumped my head twice. How did Dylan make it through that one with his broad shoulders, I wondered?
Wrong time to think about muscled shoulders.
After I was out of the pipe, I took a few seconds to think about how to catch the mat below with enough momentum to make it slide in the right direction. I bounced on the high-bar, did the three-sixty rotation Marcy had failed to do, and landed on the mat, flailing with my arms a little bit to make it pivot forward on the thin metal pipes under it.
Then came five obstacles in a row consisting of wide horizontal poles wi
th the purpose to jump over. Each one was higher than the one before. Thanks to my parkour training, it was an easy feat swinging my legs over the barriers, although the last one was quite tricky.
Then came the climbing part. In front of me stood a climbing wall with ergonomic handles set apart in different distances, and therefore limiting the possibilities. I needed to climb the wall to the top to get to the ropes. My foot slipped once, but I could keep my grip with one hand and my toes.
Finally reaching the top, I reached for the first rope trying to do a decent swing to the next one. It worked better than expected until I caught the last rope. Sliding down wouldn’t be advisable, or I’d risk burning my hands, so I crossed my feet at the ankles and glided down in little hops. Surely not the most efficient way Dylan had spoken of, but my only goal for the first lesson was to get out of here unharmed. It was hard enough to ignore the glaring students who were all watching me with interest. Or boredom.
After reaching the ground safely, I closed the distance to the trampoline and made a somersault on the mat behind it with ease.
Now came the punching bag. Three were left at the bottom of the ramp for students to take. Grabbing one, I positioned it horizontally and stomped my feet into the ground to push the bag up. The first yards were manageable, but damn, the thing got quite heavy after a while. With one last grunt, I finally reached the top, nearly tripping over the other ten already used punching bags scattered on the floor.
Now the push-ups. Thankfully, an easier part for me as I did them regularly, although the last ones were making my muscles burn to the point it became crucial. Sweat was already pouring down my neck, and my lungs heaved from exhaustion.
Then came the narrow obstacle on the wall that nearly had cost Jared his nose. I had no idea how I should reach it without making a similar acrobatic failure.
Carefully, I stretched out one leg in an attempt to reach it with my toes. As I was able to do the splits, I hoped this would work. If not, a face-plant would have been the better choice for humiliation.