Unbound by Olivia Leighton Page B

one hundred percent sure about.”
     
    It felt like a long shot, but I wasn’t about give up so easily. I approached the counter and said, “you don’t think they’d mind you giving me his number?”
     
    “ I wouldn’t think so. And if so, they can take it up with me.”
     
    I watched as Mr. Tanner grabbed a pen from behind his register and started jotting something down on a piece of scrap butcher’s paper. I knew he was going to this lengths because he simply didn’t want to send me away totally devastated. And quite honestly, in that moment, I was fine with that.
     
    He finished up and handed the piece of paper to me. I barely looked at it before I pocketed.
     
    “ He seemed like a nice enough fella,” Mr. Tanner said. “I feel certain that he’d at least entertain the notion. He’s new to town and has a cabin up on Moose Hill.”
     
    I blinked a few times in rapid succession.   No way… I thought. I reached into my pocket and took out the paper. As I read it, Mr. Tanner voiced what I feared.
     
    “ His name is Jack. Not sure about the last name.”
     
    Everything inside of me deflated and I thought I might actually scream right there and then in the middle of Tanner’s Fresh Fish.
     
    “ Thank you,” I said absently, turning towards the door.
     
    “ You okay?” Mr. Tanner asked as I walked away.
     
    No.   “ Yes sir,” I said.
     
    But by the time the door closed behind me, I was nearly in tears.

8—Devlin
     
    Here’s the weird thing about being a movie star that quickly becomes accustomed to having a well-sculpted body: you start to miss the gym. I knew that there were two gyms it Sitka, but I wasn’t quite ready to “join” anything just yet. To join a gym and get a membership implied something solid and permanent. Still not certain as to where I might go next—or if I might end up staying in Sitka for the long term—I didn’t want to join a gym.
     
    Instead, I made some substitutes. I installed a single metal bar on the cabin’s back porch wall for pull-ups and extended crunches. For weights, I had rocks and bricks I had collected from the edge of the property, stuffed into small pillowcases. But more than anything, I used the natural shapes and surfaces of the back porch and the ground. It got me into a Rocky sort of mindset, working out in a rather old school way.  I spent about an hour each day on the back porch, running through a series of exercises that my trainer had showed me a while back.
     
    These were exercises that could be done in motel rooms when my schedule didn’t allow for me to hit up the gym. It was mostly cardio stuff with some primitive sit-ups and push-ups thrown in. Doing it outside, with that wide open and beautiful Alaskan sky overhead, was a tremendous experience. No gym walls, no trainer eyeing me to make sure I was meeting the director’s specs, no other huffing and puffing gym members around me… it was great!
     
    I was apparently not putting in enough time… or maybe eating a bit more than I should. I had gained nine pounds since arriving in Sitka and it seemed like that weight just wasn’t going to come off. I thought about this as I ran through a series of crunches on the back porch and laughed.  The guys back in the army would give me a ton of shit about me worrying about my weight.  Apparently I was now one of those guys.
     
    From time to time, I felt like I had betrayed everyone I served with by going Hollywood. This was especially true of the twelve men that died around me on the day I managed to survive and became an unexpected hero. It was something I had never truly dealt with—something that my Hollywood psychiatrist had liked to point out all of the time.
     
    All of this was racing through my head as the burn from the crunched finally started to set in. I focused on these things and took in deep breaths of the crisp, clean air.
     
    As I wrapped up the crunches, I heard the phone ringing from inside. Not many people knew