Norah fingered the check, she didn’t really like getting paid for it.
Kelsey saw. “Feeling guilty about taking the money?”
Norah nodded. “I took the job for the cash. I need it. But what I’m doing is being a friend. It seems wrong to get paid for that.”
With a nod, Kelsey started setting her stuff down. She plucked the check from Norah’s fingers and, before a protest was even possible, shredded it and pocketed the evidence. “You’re right. It is wrong to get paid for that.”
Norah was stuck in limbo. She felt better that she wasn’t getting paid for it. It hadn’t seemed right. But she needed the money, and technically it was owed to her.
Then Kelsey pulled out her checkbook. “You’re right. You’re the best at it because you aren’t doing a job. You’re a good friend. You expect things out of him and he does it.” She kept talking while she wrote, but Norah didn’t know what was coming. “JD and I couldn’t get that out of him, and we love him more than you could know. Probably more than he could know. There isn’t enough money in the world to thank you for what you’ve accomplished.”
She handed it to Norah. “I know you’ll stay while you can. And I don’t mean that as pressure. It’s just who you are. Thank you.”
With that, Kelsey said good-bye and gathered her things. Norah didn’t look at the check until she had turned out the lights, waved at the camp director through the room window, and climbed into the car. While she waited for the air conditioning to take effect, she unfolded the slip of paper.
The check was for a larger lump sum than the whole summer should have paid her. In the note line were three scrawled words: late Christmas present.
Chapter 12
If TJ had been thinking up tortures for a man in a wheelchair he would have automatically come up with ‘make caretaker an exotic beauty’. He wouldn’t have thought to add that she should smell like warm sunshine and something that made him think of sex. Of course, part of the torture was that he didn’t function below the waist anymore.
He had been in therapy for a month and a half, and he hadn’t felt the first sensation or seen the first movement. He spent his days in the hot pool and hauling himself around sadistic jungle gyms, but he never would have thought up the torture he was enduring now. And no one was torturing him. Not on purpose. Either she’d only recently started doing it, or he only just noticed it now.
Norah was dancing around the house. He’d gotten up one night for a drink, and found her with her foot on the kitchen counter, stretched over her long, lean leg while she waited for toast.
All the floors in the house were wood—smooth surfaces for the wheelchair to function better. Also, apparently, for Norah to practice her turns. She stretched in the mornings. She could pull her leg up and hold it over her head with the opposite hand. It lacked that undefinable quality that made people flinch at contortionists. On her it was graceful.
She would sit on the floor with her legs out almost to the side of her. What had made his jaw drop was that her torso was flat on the floor, too. When he’d questioned her, she had simply turned her head sideways, peeking out at him, and talked to him as though this were a perfectly comfortable position.
He didn’t think he’d ever had a woman who could do that.
Aside from the fantasies it was spawning—fantasies that he was incapable of doing anything about—it was making him jealous. What better torture for a paraplegic than to live with a dancer? Her limbs were lean, strong, and healthy, and responded to her wishes.
And TJ suffered.
On the one hand he was grateful that her dance school re-opened in another seven weeks. On the other, he wondered what he’d do without her.
“Jesus, Norah.”
She was on the living room floor, in jeans, in the splits. And apparently the splits alone weren’t enough. So here was a twenty-eight year old siren, on his wood floor, bent first over her front leg, then tipping back to touch her head to the sole of her raised foot.
She made it within an inch, and growled in frustration. It was all he could do to tone the bark down to a laugh. She gave him a dirty look, and switched legs. The thing was, she didn’t so much switch legs as simply leave them where they were and just swivel to facing the other direction.
This time her foot and head made contact, with the toe of her sock touching her forehead. “Ah-ha!”
“Christ!” That hurt just watching her. He watched his own feet for a minute. He’d have been happy if they just responded to a single wish. So he changed the subject. “How did you get started dancing?”
“Lilah did.”
“That’s it? You were a principal dancer with a ballet company because your sister did it?”
“She didn’t get that far.” Norah pulled herself up off the floor, looking like the stretches hadn’t affected her any. “Whatever Lilah did, I did. Dancing, getting good grades, even lusting after JD.”
“Oh, that’s sad.”
“Please! I saw you panting after her. You should have said something. She probably would have been glad to give you whatever you wanted.”
He decided to drop the conversation of Norah wanting JD. It bothered him somewhere south of his stomach. “You based your whole life off what your sister did?”
“No! And that’s the pot calling the kettle black.”
He jerked as her statement hit him.
Then he nodded. “Does that make me the pot or the kettle?”
Her eyebrows went up. “You’re the pot, I’m the kettle.”
A week and a half later he woke up screaming in the middle of the night. He grabbed for his calf, the pain crushing. In his dream, the truck had rolled over his left leg.
Footsteps pounded down the hallway, lights were thrown on in time to the feet. His door crashed open and Norah appeared silhouetted in the hallway light.
He fought for control but lost. A harsh sound pushed through his teeth, and that brought her instantly to his bedside.
She flung back the covers with no measure for propriety, his blue boxer briefs the only thing on him. But he was with Norah, and this was no time for niceties. It felt like his leg was being shredded. In rough words, he told her so.
“I’ll get your medication.” And she was gone, footsteps pounding their urgency down the hardwood floors.
His fingers clenched on his leg as Norah returned. She moved so fast she was in danger of spilling the water she had brought. She thrust the pills and the cup to his hands, but he refused.
She attempted to put them into his mouth herself, but again he shook his head, refusing.
“TJ?”
He gulped for air, unable to remember any pain like this. “My leg hurts. I can feel it.”
In her surprise, she dropped the water. Luckily it bounced off the side of the bed and went onto the floor. But Norah didn’t go after it.
She gulped air herself, then squealed like a school-girl. “Oh my God!”
For a brief moment she threw her arms around him in glee. But, between breaths, he pushed out more words. “It hurts—I don’t want medication—don’t want to make the feeling go away—but it hurts.”
She peeled his hands away and replaced them with her own. In seconds she was sending shooting pains up his leg. His stomach clenched, but his brain was grateful for the sensation.
Norah pushed him onto his back while she worked. She massaged the whole leg, her fingers small but strong against his skin. That he could feel her touch through everything else was a wonder as well.
When she had massaged every muscle she could reach, and some he hadn’t known existed, she grabbed his foot and started rotating his ankle and bending and flexing his knee and hip.
TJ gulped. That sent another pain shooting up. He hadn’t realized that some of the pain had subsided until it shot up again. Still, Norah kept working with steady hands against his too-solid muscles, and never complained.
By now they both knew that muscle spasms, where the muscles just clenched and st
ayed taut, weren’t uncommon to his injury. He just hadn’t thought they’d feel like this. But her hands were sure and skillful, and TJ took a moment to be grateful it was a dancer in his house. That was probably how she knew what to do. Surely she’d had her legs seize up on her after a full day.
He tried to breathe.
He didn’t realize she’d been at it for an hour, or he would have stopped her. What he did realize was that her hands were all over his leg. While it wasn’t sexual, it wasn’t impersonal either. She wasn’t his therapist, and didn’t act like it.
For the first time, in the light from the hallway, he saw that she was mussed. Her hair made a messy halo around her head. Her shirt had gathered up at one side, exposing smooth olive skin. She was wearing men’s boxers. They didn’t reach all the way to her waist, revealing that she had one. It had been easy to mistake her build for skinny, but her height allowed her to be both slim and curvy. And her hands were slowly massaging their way up his leg.
TJ bolted up and brushed her hands off, replacing them with his own. As she slid away, flexing her own fingers to work out the kinks, her shirt shifted again, covering exposed skin and revealing new. She also looked down and realized she was only half clothed, but she didn’t blush or fluster. “I’m going to go grab my robe.”
He nodded, still working the kinks out of his leg.
Standing, the sleep clothes clinging, she walked out of the room. The last thing he saw of her as she disappeared through the doorway was long, lean legs and a sweet ass.
A bolt of lust hit him hard. And he felt it where he hadn’t felt anything for a while. Looking down, he saw that he was indeed rock solid. It wasn’t just his leg that had come back.
Norah, it seemed, was a miracle worker.
But he pulled the covers across and hid his erection.
It was a wise decision as she reappeared in his doorway all of five seconds later. He’d expected her robe to be terry cloth and bulky. Instead she was in a shimmery, silk-like fabric that belted at her waist and fell to only halfway down her thighs. She seemed to think it was appropriate, so he didn’t say anything.
Norah cleaned up the spill on the floor, then fetched them both ice water. He enjoyed the feel of the sheets on his leg, and of Norah poking him periodically. Her face lit up when he reacted.
“I’ve been poking you for weeks. This is the first time you’ve noticed.”
“You have?”
“It wasn’t working so I didn’t say anything.”
He nodded. Then jumped.
She giggled, and held up the ice cube she’d touched to his skin.
“You!”
“You felt it!”
He sighed, it was hard to be mad at her.
She massaged his leg for him again as the night wore on. But neither of them went back to bed, she stayed perched at his bedside for hours.
It was close to dawn when he started feeling his body pull him toward sleep, and he was almost there when Norah nudged him. “TJ look.”
She pointed at his foot.
He didn’t feel anything. He didn’t see anything happening to his foot that he should be feeling. And he still couldn’t make it move. So he lay his head back down.
“TJ.”
“What?”
“Watch.”
Sure enough. His foot twitched.
Chapter 13
Norah stood over TJ. She wanted to be upset, but he was asleep and there was something boyish and sweet about it. With the return of sensation in one leg, TJ renewed his attack on therapy. When he got home he often hauled himself out of the chair now, sitting on the couch and unwinding, rather than being stuck.
He had no more control over his body than he had the week before, but he had more hope, and more determination. Norah figured ‘hope’ wasn’t a word TJ was familiar with; he just plowed ahead, and believed.
Now he was curled on the sofa and passed out cold. Dark lashes fanned his bronzed cheeks and a five o’clock shadow made him look a little disreputable. Not that he needed any help in that department. While the brothers looked enough alike to make people believe they might be twins, JD had always looked wholesome, and something about TJ said he was the one your mother warned you about. It was there, even when he was asleep on the couch.
Still, she had to wake him, TJ insisted that they go to JD and Kelsey’s for dinner, and that they show up early. So she reached out, making contact with his bare arm. Her brain caught as she felt the muscle underneath. She’d told him to use this opportunity to buff up his arms. In true TJ fashion, he’d used that suggestion only as a starting point. In a number of weeks the man had become ripped.
She tried not to notice. “TJ?”
When he didn’t respond, she shook him harder.
His hand batted hers away and went back to what it had been doing. She hadn’t realized it at first, but his fingers were playing guitar in his sleep.
She blinked and looked closer. It was funny, him playing air guitar in his sleep. She laughed, and he shook himself, blinking sleepy eyes at her. “What time is it?”
His words had that hazy quality of unpolished brain.
“Time to go, if you want to get there early.”
He nodded and his vision cleared a little more.
He levered himself into his chair, then rolled to the bathroom to brush his hair and his teeth, before showing up at the front door and declaring himself ready. Norah barely had time to grab her purse.
He was faster into and out of the van than he’d been even last week. The bumps in the sidewalk meant nothing to him now; he just powered over them.
When JD greeted them at the front door, ready to pull his brother up the steps, TJ refused, surprising both Norah and JD. But his words were more shocking. “We’re going for a walk first, just around the block.”
“Okay.” She didn’t know why they’d come to the door then, but TJ wasn’t done.
He turned to his brother. “Will you take Norah’s purse inside? And will you bring us Amy? I think she’d like to come along.”
“Amy?”
Norah wasn’t sure if it was her voice or his brother’s that uttered that. But TJ nodded, certain of what he was doing. She was just along for the ride, she realized.
JD didn’t understand either but did as asked, fetching the baby and handing her over. This time when TJ held her, he made real contact with his niece. She replied in the form of a bubbly smile.
He struggled with holding the baby in one arm, and operating the chair with the other. But he made it all the way down the drive and out beyond the hedges onto the street. Norah walked silently beside him.
TJ waited until they were well beyond the front gate. “Norah, Amy wants you to hold her.”
“No.” It came so easily. “I don’t do babies.”
“Yeah, that’s a problem.”
She didn’t see where it was. But it was TJ, and he managed to stop her dead in her tracks. “Were you a good mother?”
Her breath stopped in her chest and it took a moment to formulate even a simple answer. “I guess so.”
“Then why don’t you hold babies?”
“Don’t be stupid, TJ.” She wouldn’t look at him, just started walking away.
“Norah, you have to come back. It’s your turn.”
“I don’t need a turn holding babies.” She was actually calculating how far it was to walk from here to TJ’s house. She could make it.
“It’s your turn for therapy, Norah. I have to do it, and so do you.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Why not? You’re just as broken as I am.”
Her eyes closed. Maybe more so. The man knew where to hit her, and he didn’t pull punches. “You’re not being a very good role model for me.”
“Who said I was your role model?” Her hands clenched into fists. She wasn’t an idiot, she knew that was just a sign of how much this scared her.
“I do.”
“Well that’s just stupid.” She still harb
ored some hope that she could talk her way out of this. The thought alone was making her heart beat faster.
“If you don’t do your therapy, I won’t do mine.”
“You’re a bastard, TJ.”
“Yes. Come hold the baby.”
Her eyes opened. He’d come down to blackmail. Part of her was so tempted to just walk away. Let him stop going to therapy. His decision, not hers. But her fingernails were biting into her palms, and her chest was tight. So she forced herself to walk toward him and Baby Amy.
The poor thing was being held up by her uncle like some little sacrificial lamb. But Norah put her hands out.
The weight of the infant settled into her palms, but she felt it everywhere. For some reason Amy trusted her. She looked up with eyes the shade of deep blue that most babies came with, and she grinned.
Norah felt it flood her. She knew what to do with babies. She’d had her own for so long, and for so little. Her chest clenched and she put Baby Amy to her shoulder, bouncing her and talking to her.
“I hate you, TJ.”
“Why? Because you obviously like this. You are good at it.”
She bounced the baby a little more. “Because I was right.” She breathed in the soft clean smell that only babies have, and she was flooded again. “I didn’t avoid babies because I don’t like them, I avoided them because I know I’ll get attached.” She snuggled Amy in closer. “Apparently this is really all it takes for me.”
She patted the little back that wasn’t as wide as her hand. “I see Kelsey with all her kids. She just keeps having them, because she doesn’t know. She’s never had one ripped away. She’s so casual with them.”
A car drove past them. Norah heard it, but it didn’t break past the boundaries created by her and the baby.
“Come here. Sit down.”
She opened her eyes to see TJ indicating his lap. She almost couldn’t move. When she finally sat down, his hands came up and brushed at her face smearing the wetness there. She hadn’t realized that she’d been crying.
Eventually they walked back to the house. Norah held Amy most all of the evening. She thought she’d caught TJ saying something to Kelsey and JD, but she wasn’t sure, and they didn’t try to take the baby away.
Love Notes Page 6