“Burning off energy and keeping their body strong is important to young alphas,” Reed said, moving closer. “If you do this, Evie sees her mother modelling the kinds of behaviours she needs to adopt.”
“Goddammit…” I grumped. “Playing the guilt card is not OK.” I shoved down my socks and then stood up abruptly, seeing that everyone else had started jogging around the room. I sucked in a deep breath, knowing for sure I’d be doing that a lot today.
“C’mon, baby,” Jasper said, jogging in front of me and gesturing for me to join him. “I’ll keep pace with you.”
“Fuck this…” I muttered under my breath. “Evie better turn into some kickboxing brain surgeon as a result of being in this program.”
The guys just chuckled, forming a loose circle around me as we broke into a run. Probably because if they hadn’t, I’d have stopped where I was. I hadn’t gone running since I was forced to in Year 9 PE, and back then, to get through it, I’d promised myself I would never ever make myself do it again. I was a reader, not a runner, and there was no way that was changing.
“I’ll sort out a fitness program for you when we get home,” Jasper said, clapping me on the shoulder when we finally stopped. Probably because he was barely gasping, and I was sucking in breaths like a beached whale. “Shit, should Lils’ face be that colour?”
Thankfully, when the actual training session started, I could fall back and recuperate. Logan led Evie over and there was a moment of stiff silence in the air between us, initially.
“So, I’m thinking just some basics at first,” Ryan said after he’d jogged over. “Haze is getting the others to do some of the more advanced stuff, as most of the families have been here for a while. You guys OK with that?”
“We’ll get you punching through walls in no time,” Reed promised Evie, and her eyes shone with a strange light at that.
“Ahh… so the old-school thing is not really what we’re pushing here,” Ryan said. “It’s about control and knowing whennotto fight as much as when to. Now parents, the rules are that all feedback is to be positive and useful. No yelling, no unwarranted criticisms. Communicate what can be done better, but couch that with recognition of what Evie has done well first.”
“Get your hands up, cub!”Logan barked.
We’d gotten through the session fairly well. The guys showed Evie the proper way to throw a punch, then got her practising that a few times before showing her how to keep moving, her feet shuffling across the ground. It was harder to hit a moving target, they explained.
Evie had taken the advice surprisingly well, mutely listening to everything they said in a way I recognised well. When she was engaged, she was like a damn sponge, wanting to suck up every little scrap of knowledge and then apply it. I’d low key hated seeing Evie move like a little machine, punching and shuffling, but I had also come to recognise that there were limits to what I could provide our daughter. Not every single mother was in my position, with most able to more than meet all of their child’s needs. But I couldn’t. I was coming to accept that, in a series of small, painful steps every day.
But now they had Evie ‘working a bag’. This meant using the bag as a fake opponent, practising dodging the swing of it as well as punching the tough surface over and over. She was at no risk of being hurt, I was assured. Jasper stood close to the bag, hands out, ready to catch it if it went swinging too hard back towards her, and that helped allay my fears. He was utterly focussed on Evie, giving her a steady stream of supportive comments as she swung her arms like little pistons. But Logan’s brows dropped down into a sharp frown before his alpha bark tore through the air.
Evie’s hands jerked up and in front of her face, where they were supposed to be, but… The way Logan spoke to her, used his bark, it had me bristling. I started to stride over to the alpha to give him a piece of my mind, before Ryan stepped in.
“Come and have a chat, mate,” he said, redirecting Logan away from our daughter.
“If she doesn’t keep her hands up, she’ll get belted in her face, her nose rearranged!” Logan snapped at Ryan.
“Agreed,” he replied, holding his hands out. “It’s just the way you’re delivering that feedback.”
“That’s the way I was always taught,” Logan shot back, his back stiffening. “Fuck, we’d cop a smack around the earhole if we didn’t listen.”
“Yep and that’s the problem,” Ryan said, folding his arms across his chest. “Don’t fall into that trap.”
“What trap?” Logan said, pacing back and forth.
“The trap that says the bullshit we put up with as kids is the same bullshit we need to pass onto ours. I’m guessing old man Morrison was a tough operator?” Logan nodded mulishly. “And you tell yourself that you’re doing OK, so he must’ve been tough but fair?” Another sharp nod. “Good, bad or otherwise, people here tend to teach the same messages with a whole lot less corporal punishment. Look at Evie.”
Logan paused, resisting with every fibre of his being, but then forcing himself to turn around.
“Do you want to smack Evie up the side of the head for not doing as you said?”
Fuck, I was starting to see the point of this program, because at Ryan’s words I saw Logan’s face fall.
“No, I—”
“Of course, you don’t. She’s just a kid. She’s trying her little heart out there, doing everything that’s been asked of her to the best of her ability. Look at how well your daughter is doing.”
When Logan took a long breath in and then slowly let it out, somehow, I found myself doing the same thing. I just stared as I watched the frown slowly wipe away and be replaced by something else.
It was then that the many, many concerns I had about Logan being a part of Evie’s life started to abate. He watched our daughter with a look of wonder, his dark eyes hungrily taking in each and every move Evie made, seeing her trying so desperately to follow the barrage of advice as she worked her body hard.
“She does need to keep her hands up,” Ryan said, clapping the man on the shoulder. “She needs to keep moving and watching the bag at the same time, but today’s the first time she’s ever tried to do that. She’s still learning, picking shit up fast, but still…”