Can't Hold Back Page 3

“At least Joe provides some services above and beyond security,” Gabi said to Melinda, with the expressive equivalent of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

  “Joe does earn his keep,” said Melinda, contentedly.

  Alia grinned.

  “So, no one special in your life?”

  Both women leaned in, eyes gleaming.

  “No. Last boyfriend was about six months ago, and I’m actually enjoying the dry spell.”

  “Is there a story to go with Mr. Last Boyfriend?”

  “Peter.” She told the story, such as it was. Peter had been in a bad place when she met him, unemployed and more or less homeless, which had propelled their relationship into high gear. He’d moved in with her quickly and had loads of time to devote to wooing her, and for a brief period of time she’d thought he was the one. But around the nine-month mark, when she’d been sure he was about to put a ring on her finger, he’d gotten a job and she’d discovered that he was a workaholic. So when he’d suggested he move into his own apartment, she hadn’t minded as much as she should have. And then things, well, faded away.

  “So you liked him better when he was a sad sack.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled. “Kinda.”

  “Take my word for it, though, sad sack is not a good long-term proposition.” Gabi sighed again.

  A few tables away, Nate lowered a forkful of food that was halfway to his mouth, his face lined with pain. She could see it clearly even from here, with her well-developed radar.

  The guy next to Nate leaned over. She filled in the dialogue: Hey, man, you okay?

  Nate shook him off. Fine.

  You don’t look fine.

  Alia worried that even though this was a drug-free, alcohol-free retreat, it was impossible to keep stuff from filtering in. A guy who’d given up oxy cold turkey would almost assuredly be offered that or a substitute once his friends knew he was suffering. And off prescription, no longer parceling out the tablets under someone else’s watchful eyes…that was when the real trouble started.

  Nate was getting up now, waving his hand to assure his tablemates it was nothing. Just hitting the latrine, she imagined him saying. But she saw it behind his eyes, written in the creases in his forehead, the deepening lines at the corners of his features: It wasn’t nothing.

  Before she could think it through, she was on her feet, pushing her chair back. “Hey, guys? I have to try to convince someone they need PT, okay? I’ll be right back.”

  “Ha!” said Gabi. “You have an even tougher job than I do. I just have to convince guys they want to watch action movies and play flag football.”

  Alia made a face at her and went after Nate.

  He wasn’t in the hallway outside the dining room. She hesitated, then headed for the stairs.

  She’d looked up his room number when he’d failed to show up for his appointment, tracking him there unsuccessfully before she thought to ask the guys on the back porch whether they’d seen him.

  Just before the staircase, she heard a low, short groan of pain—more of a grunt, really. Not quite human. A wounded animal. She turned back. She’d almost missed him.

  He’d ducked into an alcove, the doorway of one of the first-floor meeting rooms. He was pressed into the corner, one arm up above his head as if to brace himself.

  “Nate.”

  “Go away.”

  “Nate, please let me help you.”

  He raised his face and his eyes glittered. “What, witnessing my humiliation once wasn’t enough for you?”

  She reached out a hand, but he flung his arm out and knocked hers away. “Get out of here.”

  “Give me a chance. One chance. If I can’t help, I promise I’ll leave you alone.”

  “No.”

  She couldn’t make him accept her help. He’d made his position more than clear. She turned to go. Then a thought struck her.

  “For Braden,” she said, turning back again. “If you won’t let me help you for you, do it for Braden.”

  A long moment passed. The only sound was his breath, hard and ragged. Then he looked up, defeat in his eyes. And nodded.

  —

  Sitting in the reception area, waiting for Alia to call him into her office, he repeated “for Braden” over and over like a mantra, because this sucked. He would have been perfectly happy to have never laid eyes on Alia or Becca again as long as he lived, but because the universe had a savage sense of humor, Jake had gone on vacation and left Alia in charge of pain relief.

  She’s the best, Jake had said. I hate to say it, but she’s better than me. If there’s any way to make the pain stop, short of numbing yourself to death, she will find it.

  He didn’t believe it. But she’d said the magic words, For Braden, and she’d made him a deal he couldn’t resist: If she couldn’t help him, she’d leave him alone.

  Plus, last night he had hurt so ferociously, he’d been ready to beg, borrow, or steal pills. And he didn’t want to even flirt with that thought.

  When she’d said she would help him, he’d briefly thought she’d meant right then. Right there. That she would lay hands on and somehow transform the pain, and him. But of course it made sense that she was just asking him to schedule an appointment, like anyone else. Any physical therapist would have certain professional boundaries, and that probably went double for a woman working among so many alpha men, and triple for working in a setting where the pain never stopped and you were geographically available 24/7.

  “Nate.”

  She always said his name like it was a statement of fact. A conclusion.

  He raised his head from where he’d rested it in his hands and regarded the woman standing before him.

  Not head-turning. Not flamboyantly pretty. But her eyes were warm and her hair shone in the sunlight, and her gray T-shirt hugged her curves, and if the situation hadn’t sucked so bad, if he hadn’t still been pissed at both her and her sister, if he didn’t feel like he’d been run over by a tank, he might have felt a stirring of lust.

  That would have been the final straw, so it was damn good it wasn’t the case.

  He got to his feet, unsteady. A week since the oxy had gone down the toilet, and still not quite clean. He could feel the hunger in his veins, clamoring at him. He felt dirty and corrupted and, God, dizzy. He prayed he wouldn’t throw up in her office.

  “Follow me.”

  He did. She wore a short sporty skirt over her leggings, and if he’d had a shred of energy to give a shit, he would have said she had a nice ass.

  He didn’t remember Alia having a nice ass. Becca, yes. He didn’t remember a thing about Alia’s ass, actually, which was probably because he’d schooled himself not to look at it. He wasn’t the kind of guy who shopped around when he was dating someone, and Becca had been plenty beautiful enough to hold his attention, once she’d snared it.

  “You can sit there.” She gestured at a chair and climbed onto a stool beside a computer on a cart. “So. You have some pain.”

  He couldn’t decide if he was pissed that she was going to pretend that they were any therapist-patient pair or grateful that she wasn’t going to make him deconstruct the past. Grateful, he decided. He didn’t have the energy for rehashing anything. There was now, and pain, and fuck, he hoped Jake was right and she knew what she was doing.

  “It’s not that bad.”

  She made a face, as if to say We both know that isn’t true. “Tell me about the pain.”

  “Mostly my back. Spine and right side. And it goes up into my neck. And shoulder. And then sometimes into my arm and hand. And I get headaches, too.”

  She asked him more questions. Could he point to where it hurt on his back? How would he characterize the pain? Was it always the same place in his arm and hand? He did his best to answer. He told her about how it was always different, that it seemed to thrive on blindsiding him. That it didn’t follow rules.

  “Jake said it was a quaternary blast injury. You’ve heard that term before, right? Fourth-order—”

>   “Yeah, I know.”

  “Your kind of pain—chronic, unpredictable—is pretty common with that type of injury. We don’t understand as well as we should exactly what effect percussion has on all the tissues of the body.”

  He nodded. “They compared it to shaken baby syndrome.”

  She nodded. “Haven’t heard that one, but it makes sense. We don’t know what happens to human tissue when you traumatize it all over. We do know the brain doesn’t like being shaken.” She frowned. “Let’s see what your range of motion looks like. Stand up.”

  She made him turn his head. Tilt from side to side. Swivel at the waist. Reach forward, reach backward. Step, step back.

  “Tell me when it hurts.”

  “Everything hurts.”

  She frowned. “Tell me when it hurts more.”

  He tried, but his “nows” didn’t match her actions. The pain wasn’t following her lead. It had its own logic.

  He hated the pain the way you could only hate something living. The way you’d hate a nemesis.

  She made a humming sound in the back of her throat, pressed her lips together. “I want to test your strength.”

  She made him squeeze a grip with foam handles and a thick spring in the middle, then put his arms out and fight her while she pushed down, back, up, forward. She told him to extend a leg and resist as she tried to force it back down.

  As she worked, her hair shaded her face from his view. She kept her body at a distance from his, even when she manipulated his limbs. Not enough of a distance, though, that he could ignore her perky breasts at eye level, the hint of nipple poking through her T-shirt, that sweet and generous curve from waist to hip.

  Her hands on his arms and legs were professional, competent, but that didn’t stop him from noticing the quality of her touch. Warm fingers. Firm, prodding but not poking, holding but not gripping. A point of not-quite-pleasure in the middle of the pain.

  It had been a long time since anyone had touched him. The last time had probably been at the VA hospital, the culmination of a long line of doctors’ visits that had yielded diagnoses and prognoses and regimens, but no relief.

  She nodded, as if affirming something to herself. “No obvious weakness. That’s good. Sit.”

  He did.

  “Can you tell me about the blast?”

  He shrugged. “If I have to.”

  “Sometimes it’s helpful. I ask people who’ve been in car accidents or had other traumatic injuries, too. Sometimes there’s a detail that helps things make more sense. Does this hurt?” She touched his neck on both sides.

  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.

  Chapter 4

  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.