Authors: Serena Bell
He nodded.
“And this?” She reached under and dug her fingers in at the base of his skull.
He almost jumped off the table.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Here?” Under his collarbone.
Not as bad, but enough to make him flinch. “Yeah.”
“Here?”
She picked out points on his body one by one.
Yes, yes,
and
yes.
She crossed the room and got a tennis ball. She began to tap it on his neck, his shoulders, his chest, his arms. Down to his hands. It was a strange but not unpleasant sensation. So was the brush of her breath over his skin as she leaned near.
“What are you doing?”
“Tapping is a way of telling the muscles that it’s okay to let go. One of the things that happens with chronic pain is that you tighten around it. You protect the pain, effectively. It can create a feedback loop, where the tightening is causing more pain than the original injury.”
The tapping was soothing. Like rain on the roof. He hadn’t slept in weeks. Months. Years, maybe. He was going to fall asleep sitting up. He hoped he wouldn’t snore. Or wake up screaming from a nightmare and trying to strangle her, like vets always did on prime-time TV.
“So. The blast.”
He sighed, resigning himself. “The guard tower was hit. I was at the base of the tower—Fuck,” he said, because the pain had doubled down. “Oh, fuck, that hurts. Stop. Stop it! You hit something bad. You’re not helping.”
She was quiet for a moment, her hands still, the ball suspended over his right shoulder.
Then she said, “Lie down.”
“That’s not going to help. Nothing helps when it gets like this.”
“Lie down.” Her voice was soft, but there was iron in it.
It was hard to obey, because the pain twisted, like someone had gotten his hands inside Nate’s body and was wringing him along his spine, trying to snap him. He clenched teeth. Fists. He lowered himself gingerly to an elbow, then lay flat out on the bed.
Mother of God, make it
stop.
You didn’t have to be a pain-management guru to see it. It wasn’t the tapping that had hurt him. It was talking about what had happened. It was remembering.
The tender points on his body told her that his brain was overreacting to pain signals. He was feeling more pain than there was, like a mic and speakers in a terrible feedback loop. It was pretty common with trauma, particularly trauma that had both a physiological and a psychological component.
The first step was breaking the loop.
She put her hands on his shoulders.
His skin, even through his T-shirt, was much warmer than she was expecting, and the sensation surged through her fingers with a shock that she’d failed to brace herself for. That sheer, electric human connection.
If a physical therapist has natural feelings of attraction toward a patient, he/she must sublimate those feelings in order to avoid sexual exploitation of the patient.
Words to that effect had been all over her ethics textbook.
She pulled her hands away for a moment. Recalibrated her mind. Put her hands back on his skin. The sensation was less intense this time, but still there. Like the heat in his body threw a switch beneath her surface.
Sublimate.
She knew what it meant, but she really wasn’t sure how the hell one
accomplished
it. She’d never thought to ask.
Maybe this was a bad idea. She’d thought of it as making reparations, but it was starting to look more like making the same mistake twice.
It wasn’t like she had a lot of choices here. She had a man in pain on her table. He’d been treating his pain with an addictive painkiller. She was currently the only physical therapist on staff. A litany of facts that didn’t give a shit about her feelings, natural or unnatural.
Surely treating him—despite any stray “natural feelings of attraction”—was a lesser evil than kicking him out of her office and probably sending him back to the pill bottle. Especially since she’d already screwed up his life once because she couldn’t control her attraction to him.
A physical therapist stands in a relationship of trust to each patient and has an ethical obligation to act in the patient’s best interest and to avoid any exploitation or abuse of the patient.
Noticing that her body reacted chemically to the nearness of his wasn’t exploitation or abuse. And it was pretty clear that it was in Nate’s best interest right now to break the pain loop.
Tentatively, she sent heat into her own fingers, warmed the area over his collarbone. So much tension vibrating in him. Maybe that was all she was feeling, the live-wire coiled energy of a man who’d been wound too tight. She was used to all kinds of electricity pouring off people, the accumulated impulses that a human body stored and shed. What she’d felt a moment ago was just that, another form of strange energy. Nothing to make herself crazy over.
She felt more confident now.
Right.
Nate was in pain. She could help.
She pressed his shoulders gently down, trying to give his neck a little more room. She kneaded with her thumbs, urging the thick knot of muscle to let go. A firm, businesslike touch. Professional strokes.
God, his skin is smooth.
She watched as his lips, which had been pressed together, softened. Loosened, relaxed. Felt something uncoil in her own body. In her chest. Lower.
Damn it.
Sublimate.
The PT ethics hadn’t said she couldn’t
feel
natural attraction. It just said she couldn’t act on it. She wasn’t acting on it. She was feeling it and going about her work and her business regardless of it.
She rested her hands where they’d started, on his upper chest. Her fingertips skirted the swell of his pecs. Even depleted, fatigued, stripped of whatever had once made him glow, Nate had a nice chest.
Not relevant.
Maybe she needed a focal point. Something that mattered more than the smoothness of Nate’s skin at the base of his neck. Something that mattered more than the pulse beating in the hollow below his throat. Something that mattered more than the sharp smell of soap, the faint, clean scent of deodorant, and the salt-musk combo that was Nate himself.
R&R.
The job.
Right. The job.
She shook it off—the chemical buzz of his flesh under her hands, that pulse point throbbing with life, how much she wanted to bury her nose in his hair, at the crook of his neck, where dark hair made a rough pattern under his T-shirt. To see where the scents concentrated strongest.
It’s one-sided,
she reminded herself.
He doesn’t feel it. He’s not lying there thinking about what I smell like, or if he is, he’s wishing I’d had a breath mint or had worn better antiperspirant. Or he’s still pissed at me because of what happened with Becca.
There was no buzz. No pulse. No tsunami of scents. Not in Nate’s mind.
There never was, and there never will be, because he’s never, ever been attracted to you. The attraction was all in your own head.
There,
she thought, with satisfaction. That
works.
Nothing like a little humiliation to drown those natural feelings of attraction.
There was pain inside of pain, pain unfolding out of pain, and then there was the heat of her hands. Something let go in his chest with a ping, and all the tension he’d been holding in his shoulders slid free.
Holy fuck.
Then there was stillness, peace, unfolding out of pain, his brain confused by the suddenness of it all.
There was still pain, but it was quieter now. Like surf roaring behind double-paned glass. Not wrenching anymore, but like something trying to argue its way to the surface of his mind.
And her hands on his shoulders. Smoothing over the bare skin of his neck and along the fabric of his shirt as it rode his collarbone. As if she were brushing something off him.
She guided his head to one side, exposing bare neck. He wanted to tilt his head back, to hide that vulnerable artery, but her grip was firm, and he made himself lie still against rising panic, and in a moment the touch of her fingertips, probing at tight muscle, made him forget fear.
Oh, God, don’t stop.
The thought came from nowhere.
I want you to hold the weight of my head, just like this, from now on. So I don’t have to. So I can let go like this.
He’d had no idea how heavy his head was. What an effort it was to hold it up. How good it would feel to give someone else the job.
“You’re hired.” His voice came out fainter than he’d expected, husky, like he’d just woken up.
“To be your physical therapist?”
“To hold my head.”
“You like that?”
She was evidently amused. She set his head down and picked up an arm instead. “If you like that, you’ll love this.” She hefted it. “Go limp. No, really limp. Let go.” She shook his arm for emphasis.
He couldn’t, though.
“I’m holding you. Let go.”
He did, with a rush of relief and pleasure that swelled hard in his gut. She had all the weight of his arm supported by hers, and she was lifting and twisting and tugging in a way that made him realize how tightly he’d been holding himself together.
She did the other arm, then went to the foot of the table. Her hand on his ankle was the whole world. Warm, the fingers pressing into spots he hadn’t known were filled with pain. That hollow on either side of the heel—that had been pain. The arch of his foot—that had been pain. She did the other foot, the same way.
She tugged gently on his legs so he rocked on the table, and,
God, that.
That was bliss.
She came back to his neck, found a muscle he hadn’t known he had. She followed it to his jaw, down into his shoulder. Behind his shoulder blade. She wasn’t digging in. She was just stroking, defining. His mind followed the stroke. It was hypnotic. Rhythmic.
Her fingers found a spot under his arm and teased space into it where there had been none.
The pain receded further and further, now like something being pulled out on the tide. Like the sweet, thick warmth of the painkillers, except it was only the pain that was being pulled under, not his mind. His mind had fallen open, empty. Before she started, he’d been made up of pain, and now he was lava.
And then he thought,
But it won’t last.
Because he’d had massages once or twice before and they helped, but the relief didn’t stick. The chiro hadn’t stuck, either. Nor the acupuncture. The pain always came back, sometimes worse than before, as if it were vengeful.
“Shh. What are you thinking about?”
She’d somehow read his thoughts in his body, and sure enough, the lava was gone and he’d gotten colder. The muscles she’d coaxed open tugged back toward their old postures.
“You got tense again.”
“It doesn’t work. It doesn’t last. All this stuff—the pain goes away for a little bit, but it’s always back. That’s why I started taking the pills. Because at least they were something I could count on. They worked the same every time.”
“We’ll get you there.” She sounded supremely confident. “The important thing is, we got you out of that loop. And we’ll get you out of the next one—”
“But what if you can’t—”
“We
will.
And we’ll learn more about how to get you out, more and more, so you’ll be able to do it yourself eventually. And then you won’t need pills and you won’t need me. That’s my goal. To make you not need me. That’s always my goal as a physical therapist.”
“I can’t imagine that now.”
“It will happen. I promise. You have to trust me.” She slid her fingers under his head, hooking them under the edge of his skull, exerting gentle traction. “Like this. Like you trust me to hold your head.”
He lay still for a moment, soaking up the feeling of not being responsible for that particular weight. Then he said, “It’s like someone stabbed something in your eardrums.”
“That’s how the pain feels?”
“No. The blast. Like being pounded and shaken and rung like a bell. I was thrown, and I lost consciousness. And then I opened my eyes and there was nothing there. No tower. Just—sky.”
“Jesus.”
“And—”
“Braden’s dad. J.J. He was gone, too.”
If she flinched, he didn’t feel the vibrations of it against his skull. She exhaled softly.
He would trust her because he had to, because she was the next step forward.
He gave her the weight of his head, gave himself over to her. The pleasure of giving in was still there, even though the pain was skulking around the edges of his world again.
It was only much later, lying on the narrow extra-long twin bed in the room Jake had set aside for him, that he remembered. Who she was. That she’d deceived him once before. That she wasn’t someone he could trust.
She was wiping down the table after her 9 a.m. patient when Sibby, Jake’s receptionist and assistant, poked her head into the office.
“You have a walk-in.”
Sibby, who could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy, generically grandmotherly, had her arms crossed, and she sounded pissed. It didn’t bother Alia. Sibby always sounded pissed, but Alia loved her anyway, for the easy way she managed the front desk, turning impatient veterans into well-behaved little boys with a stern glance.
“Send him in.” Alia tossed the towel in the wash and set the disinfectant on the counter. She’d been planning to spend the hour replying to emails, but she was just as happy to take care of someone who needed it. She straightened her row of pain-management reference books and tried to use one of them to make the rest stand up.
A voice behind her said, “The woman at the desk said you could see me now.”
The little hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She didn’t have to turn around.
“Hi, Nate.” She kept her voice professional but not too friendly. God, she wished he wasn’t here. She wished she could just send him away, tell him that Sibby had made a mistake and she couldn’t see a patient right now after all.
“Pain’s back. You said you’d make it go away.”
She’d been hoping not to see him for several days. He’d made another appointment for four days out, and Jake would be back in a week and a half, which meant she could probably get away with seeing Nate only twice more. Then Jake would come back and take over, and the question of exactly how one sublimated natural feelings of attraction—and guilty shame—would be moot.
In the meantime, she’d promised herself, she’d keep things strictly on the up-and-up. She’d schedule only mid-morning visits, she’d keep the door cracked or open, and she’d devote a minimal amount of the appointment to hands-on work, leaving more time for stretching and strengthening and reprogramming his pain response.
So much for the best-laid plans. Of course the best-laid plans had never included brain-melting chemistry or an unprofessional desire to take advantage of his prostrate form.
But she couldn’t tell him about either of those things.
There was no one else to refer him to. And he was clearly in pain again. When she finally turned to him, she could see it right away. His hands were squeezed into fists at his sides. Last night, he’d looked so young with the pain smoothed off his face. Young and—free, almost, a look something like the abandon of giving in to sleep. But he’d stayed awake on the table, his breaths lengthening and sometimes slipping into sighs—of relief or maybe pleasure, she wasn’t sure—and she didn’t let herself think too hard about it. If the chemical effect of touching his bare skin had floored her, the sound of those sighs had nearly knocked her out of her shoes.
“I—” She was readying excuses. If she could put him off now, if she could keep visits to the minimum she’d imagined—she’d be—
Safe,
she was thinking. But safe from what? He had no designs on her. Never had. And it wasn’t like she was going to lose control and attack him. Nothing like that.
He cocked his head to one side. “Please.”
In the end, there was nothing rational about her decision. She didn’t weigh how much she wanted the job against the unstable ground of attraction. She didn’t calculate risk or benefit. She just heard the plea in his voice, saw how unhappy he looked, and thought of the peace she’d brought to him yesterday. She wanted to do it again. It was that simple.
Maybe that was wrong, wrong, wrong, but there had to be some higher power in the universe, some being that didn’t believe in human suffering, that would forgive her.
“Get on the table.”
“I like it when you’re bossy.”
She made a face at him. If he was going to flirt, that was going to make this ten thousand times harder. “Cut the BS.”
“Sorry.” He said it like he meant it. He slipped his hiking boots off and arranged himself on the table.
She started with the tapping, fingertips on his face.
“What
is
that? I mean, I get that it works, but I don’t get how.”
“Basically, I’m telling your body to tune in to the fact that you’re holding tension. And also trying to distract your brain from the pain long enough for it to recognize that there
is
no pain.”
“Oh, there’s pain. You aren’t trying to tell me that the pain’s in my head, are you? Because I’ve heard that one too many times, thank you.” One hand moved spasmodically on the table, but whether it was anger or whether she’d physically triggered the response, she couldn’t tell.
“I’m trying to say that once the pain gets started, your brain is convinced it’s there, even if whatever’s causing the pain stops.”
He nodded and closed his eyes. He had really long lashes for a guy. He’d shaved since yesterday, and that was somehow disconcerting, a step back toward the man who’d been so beautiful he’d seemed untouchable. Unattainable.
She’d never apologized in person to him for what had happened. Becca had told him the truth, and then Alia had sent him a brief but profuse apology email, thinking it was better to do it that way than to force him to confront her in the flesh. He hadn’t written back, and she hadn’t reached out to him again because she’d been sure he wanted nothing more to do with that episode of his life.
But something about how vulnerable and diminished he seemed—or maybe the fact that his eyes were closed—made it possible to bring up the past. “I haven’t said—” she began, then stopped. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you didn’t hurt me,” he said, his mind on the present moment, in which she was delivering stronger taps—karate chops, actually—to the tender spots where his arms met his torso.
“I mean, I’m sorry about deceiving you.”
“Ohhhh.”
She was pretty sure the “ohhhh” was for realizing what she was talking about, but it might also have been a groan of pleasure as she found an especially tight spot under his right shoulder blade. Her body, all amen about making him feel good, believed the latter.
“I still don’t really understand why you did it,” he said. “Wrote the letters. Or whatever. Cowrote the letters.”
Because Becca
needed
me to.
“She has a learning disability. A cognitive disability. She’s had it forever, but it took them years to figure it out, and it totally wrecked her self-esteem.”
Becca had confessed that she was totally intimidated by the prospect of corresponding with Nate. And she didn’t have to explain why.
In the chaos of their father’s death and mother’s depression, Becca’s school troubles had been ignored, or at least set aside. Teachers figured her poor grades and inability to concentrate could be—at first—attributed to grief and—later—to her troubled family life. (Alia imagined something like this: “Poor thing. Father’s dead. Mother’s barely functional.”)
Because spoken words didn’t trouble Becca as much as written words, she was able to scrape by for a long time. But as she got older, there were papers and more papers. Bad grades and bad behavior—chalked up to
bad attitude.
When the verdict of dyslexia finally came, she was already in junior high. Then it turned out Becca’s disability was more complicated than they’d thought, and the special-needs teachers were stumped. Their mother was useless, and Alia had to figure out how to find specialists, who piled on the diagnoses. A decoding and comprehension disability. Dysgraphia—not the classic motor difficulties, but something related to the way words “wiggled and crawled” in Becca’s mind—her own words.
When her mother couldn’t go, Alia went in to meet with teachers and administrators. There were accommodations, but by then it was difficult, almost impossible, to change how Becca saw herself. The pretty one, the dumb one, the one who was good at being popular and dating, but not at anything else.
Only it turned out that the kind of self-esteem you built on collecting friends and boyfriends was like a house of cards. And the house fell and the rot infected Becca’s romantic life, too.
Couldn’t you help me write him a few letters?
If Alia had qualms about it, she buried them so she could see her sister smile again, more often, all the time.
“She has no confidence in her ability to communicate. She wanted you to like her, and she freaked out about not being able to write the way she wanted to. So…so I helped her.”
Of course, that explained all of her behavior except the care package and the instant messages, but
God,
if Nate wasn’t going to bring them up, she sure as heck wasn’t going to.
He opened his eyes, dark blue and, even upside down, curiously intense. That gaze provoked a queasy sensation in her stomach, a mix of lust and guilt.
“Why don’t you roll onto your stomach. Here, give me a second, I’ll get the face cradle.”
She slid the face cradle into the end of the table and draped it with a towel. He rolled over with a sigh. She was reminded of a dog settling itself before a fire at night.
His glute muscles were gorgeously thick and tight. He was fully clothed in jeans and a T-shirt, but even so, there was way too much for her to admire. And when she began to stroke the long muscles in his back, her own body resonated.
She closed her eyes tight and did a reverse “Think of England.”
I want this job
.
More than I want to slide my body up the length of his and comfort him with my warmth.
I want this job more than that.
I do.
She could take refuge in her own shame over the past, too. “It was a big lie, what Becca and I did. In the beginning, I did my best to just write down what she said, but she kept asking, ‘How could I say that better?’ Or, ‘Do you think that’s what he meant?’ Or, ‘What would help him most?’ ”
And then, when Nate’s replies came—
I know exactly what you mean;
How did you know?
I feel like you know me so well
—Becca had said,
You see?
What would I do without you?
You know what to say to him.
She’d hugged Alia with gratitude.
Alia had tried to ignore her own joy at how he’d responded to
her
in the letter.
But somehow more and more of Alia had slipped into the letters. Thoughts she had about stories he’d told. Advice she wanted to offer him. Comfort in words Becca wouldn’t have chosen but Alia eagerly typed up.
Toward the end, he’d written Becca a letter where he listed the things he missed most about civilian life. About Seattle.
The misty kind of rain where it’s definitely raining but you can walk around in it without getting wet. Perfect summer days where you can sit in the sun without overheating. The Bon—sorry, Macy’s!—star at Christmastime, and the carousel, too. Cow Chip cookies. Garlic fries and Kettle Korn at Safeco Field. And more generally, being at sports games. I was never a watch-it-on-TV guy. Always loved actually being there. I’d take an ordinary baseball game with a couple friends over the World Series on a TV in a crowded room any day.
“You should send him a care package,” Alia told Becca.
“None of that stuff seems like it would travel very well.”
“That’s not the point,” Alia said sternly. “The point is to cheer him up.”
“It would be a lot of work.”
It didn’t seem that bad to Alia. And it would be fun, right? Fun to think of his delight on opening the package. “What if I do the legwork? I don’t mind.”
“Sure, I guess. No harm, right?”
Alia took a photograph of the Macy’s star and then, for good measure, she recorded some video of the carousel and the beaming (and terrified) children on it. She stored it all on a thumb drive shaped like the space needle.
She bought a RainGlobe. It was an-original-to-Seattle item that some enterprising lifelong resident had dreamed up.
There wasn’t any way to capture a sunny day for him, but she did her best, photographing the sky in as many spots and from as many angles as she could, stitching them together in a collage.
She bought cookies and Kettle Korn. An old-school M’s cap.
Had to leave out the garlic fries,
Alia wrote, on the printed note she included in the care package.
Several weeks later—during which she’d wondered, often, if he’d gotten the package and what expression he’d worn as he’d uncovered each treasure—she’d come home to the apartment to find Becca standing in the foyer, looking stricken. She held a sheet of paper in her hand.
“What?”
Wordlessly, Becca handed it to her. It was a long letter, full of stories about “the guys” and the long, painful wait that was Nate’s war.
They’re not kidding when they say it’s ninety percent waiting, or whatever they say.
But Alia knew it wasn’t any of that that had made Becca’s face look the way it looked. It was:
I’ll be home somewhere around the end of April, and I want to see you so bad.
That care package might have been the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me. It’s so lonely here, and it meant a ton to me to feel like someone out there
gets
me. You know? Sappiness alert: I was already falling for you, but that really sealed it.
It was the third week of April now. He’d be home, if everything had gone smoothly, in a week.
Falling for you.
Falling for—
Alia was struggling to assimilate all that she had learned in the last few minutes, and also struggling to figure out what it meant. Nate had said he was falling for
her,
meaning—
Suddenly, with a stab of pain, she saw. Saw it all, with total clarity.
Falling for someone, yes, but not Becca. And not her. Someone else. Someone who…didn’t exist.
Lead sank in her gut. “Oh, shit.”
“I thought it couldn’t do any harm,” Becca said slowly. “But I was wrong, wasn’t I? Everyone said to wait till he came home. Everyone said you can’t break up with someone who’s deployed, it’s too risky; if he’s really upset, it could mess with his head, and then—”
The words coming out of Becca’s mouth took a moment to make sense to Alia. They weren’t the words she’d expected, the words about how the sisters had invented a woman and deceived a man, had deceived
Nate,
words about how angry he was going to be when he found out. They were different words.