The Lost Read Online Free PDF Page A

of free weights and the exercise machines until sweat dripped from every pore of her body. With the last clank of the weights and her strength waning, she called it a day and headed to the showers.
    The locker room was relatively empty, but Bobbie wasn’t keen on revealing her body to others. There were too-visible scars from the explosions that had killed almost all of her platoon. Only her platoon leader and ex-lover—Gil Martinez—had survived the attack. Although she wasn’t sure you could call being comatose and connected to a bunch of machines living.
    She had fared much better, although her doctors had been shocked at that. Besides the wound to her arm, her leg had been damaged and there had been massive internal injuries. To hear the doctors talk, her abdomen had been nothing more than a complex jigsaw puzzle that had taken hours to piece back together.
    She gathered up her clothes and toiletries and walked toward the shower stall, where she hung her cane and towel on a hook. She undressed behind the curtain of thestall, prepped the shower, and stepped in. Squirting a fragrant shower gel into her hand from a nearby dispenser, she lathered up, thinking about how lucky she was to be alive.
    Alive but alone, she told herself. Lately, as her body grew stronger, so did the urge to not be alone. As she ran her hands across her body, feeling the slickness of the soap along her skin, she recalled how it had felt to be loved. To feel a man’s hands along her skin, stroking it. Giving her pleasure, she thought, as she cupped her breasts and her nipples tightened beneath her fingers.
    She ran her hands across the tips and between her legs came an insistent tension that needed release after so many months of solitude. That loneliness was weighing on her, growing more demanding with each passing day.
    As she caressed her breasts, she slid her hand toward her center to seek assuagement. But as she skimmed her soapy palm down her torso, the ridges of the scars along her midsection seemed as large as the craters on the moon.
    For months she had told herself that it didn’t matter. In truth, she had been so busy just trying to do the everyday things like walk or pick up a glass that something so far removed as being intimate with a man or having babies hadn’t been on her radar.
    But suddenly images of her sister Liliana’s very pregnant belly flashed through her mind along with the faces of her dead men. Life and death, twined together in her current existence like two serpents, never to be separated.
    She had survived, but inside there were parts of her that were lifeless, and nothing could change that. The reality of that stabbed deep, more painful than her manyinjuries. Drove her to bury her face in her hands and fight back the tears.
    Tears would accomplish nothing, she reminded herself. They wouldn’t bring back her men or heal Gil. The tears wouldn’t give her the babies and happy life she had envisioned for herself before joining the Marines, the American Dream kind of existence that her family had embraced.
    Stiffening her spine, she forced herself to rise, finished showering, and dressed in the curtained area outside the stall.
    When she had mustered enough control to meet her brother, she took a deep breath and put on her game face, not wanting him to see her upset. She grabbed her cane with her right hand—her left was too weak to be of much help—and hoisted herself to her feet. A slight pulling sensation came along her midsection. She rubbed at the spot directly above the line where she had been stitched back together like a rag doll. The ache calmed and she exited the gym facility.
    Outside, the early spring morning held a hint of the summer heat to come. Bright sun drenched the tree-lined parking lot and as a slight ocean breeze kicked up, a shower of white petals drifted down from the flowering maples along the edge of the lot.
    Bobbie paused to savor the brightness of the azure sky, fresh spring leaves