by Frost, E J
I watch before imitating his movement.
The orderly nods his bald head. “That’s right. There’s good evidence that massage speeds healing. If you can keep this up twice a day for a few weeks, he’ll have a better chance of making a full recovery.”
“I will,” I promise.
“He lashes out or tries to get outta the bed and I’ll have to lock him down again,” the orderly says sternly.
“I understand. He was just confused and thought I was in danger. Now that he knows I’m safe, he’ll be fine.”
At least, I really, really hope so.
“Okay, little lady, I’ll hold you to that.” He unbuckles the last restraint, but leaves the cuffs all clipped to big metal loops set into the bedframe. “Doctor’ll tell me when he can be moved and I’ll take him up to a room. You can stay with him as long as the doctor says it’s okay. Once he’s in a room, he can have something to eat. You should get something, too. You look like you’ll blow away in a strong wind.”
My body responds to the command before I even realize what I’m doing. I lower my eyes and nod. “Yes, sir.”
God, I’m surrounded by Doms. I really need Vashi to get here so I’m not so outnumbered.
The orderly snorts. “Only ‘sirs’ around here are the doctors. I’m Benjie.”
He offers me a meaty paw, which I shake. “Emily.”
“All right, Emily. You keep that up and I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Yes, Benjie, sir.”
The orderly snorts again and pats my head as he passes me.
I glance up the bed to make sure Logan isn’t set off by Benjie touching me.
He’s asleep. A small smile creases his battered face.
My daddy.
I move quietly to the other side of the bed and start working on his left foot. His skin is cool. I rub with my palm to warm it first, before I begin digging into the tendons and muscles. Within a few minutes, his skin’s nice and pink, and his toes flex when I work on his instep. That gives me hope the damage isn’t too bad. My daddy’s going to be okay; I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure he is.
I rub until my hands cramp. I’m going to have to get some of those little squeezy balls to strengthen my hands if I’m going to massage him until he’s better. How long will that be? No one has said anything about his recovery, but I’m guessing it won’t be overnight.
Benjie doesn’t come back. There are no chairs to wait in, so I climb up onto the bottom of the bed and curl up along Logan’s right leg, careful not to disturb the leg that might have nerve damage. I straighten out his hospital gown and the sheet over his lap as best I can without waking him, before wrapping my arm around his thigh and pillowing my head on my hand.
A warm hand in my hair wakes me out of a doze. I know it’s Logan before I even open my eyes. I don’t know how I know. I just do. Logan’s touch isn’t like anyone else’s in the whole world.
“Daddy,” I whisper.
“Come up here, little girl. I need to hold you.”
Oh, he sounds like my daddy again.
I wriggle up the bed, which is a tight fit between Logan’s big body and the bed rail, but I squeeze in until my head’s resting on his chest. His hard arms close around me and everything else goes away. The hospital. His injury. The exhaustion making my eyes scratchy and my head thick. None of it matters because I’m back in Daddy’s arms.
I feel his warm breath on my forehead, then his lips. His breath smells really bad but mine probably does, too. I breathe through my mouth and ignore the smell when I hear what he’s whispering.
“Had to get back to you, little girl. I promised to make a safe place where you could be little all the time. What kind of shit daddy would I be if I left you before I fulfilled my promise, huh?”
A mortal daddy. A daddy who died.
The thought makes a tear slide from my eye and drip onto his hospital gown, but I push it away before I start bawling. He didn’t die. He’s here, and he’s going to be okay.
“I should have told you before I went to track down the brick. I should have told you. There are reasons. It’s too soon. I don’t want to scare you off. Those reasons are shit. The first thing I thought when I woke up was you were all alone and I hadn’t even told you I love you.”
I squeeze his chest as tightly as I dare. “I love you, too.”
“You don’t have to say it back. I know it’s too soon. I just needed you to know I love you and I wouldn’t ever leave you by choice. I was prepared to do anything to get back to you, even beg for my life, and I’ve never begged for anything. I couldn’t leave you alone when I hadn’t said it and you didn’t know.”
“I know, Daddy.” And I do. Not even my hateful internal monologue can make me doubt this. “I love you, too.”
“You don’t have to say it back,” he repeats. “It’s okay if you don’t. It’s too soon.”
His rambling makes me smile. “I still love you.”
“Oh. Yeah? That’s . . . that’s good.”
It is good. All good. He’s quiet for a long minute. When I lift my head to look into his face, I see he’s fallen asleep again. My poor, wounded daddy. I’ve never had an injury more serious than a broken ankle, but I’ve had the flu and I remember that feeling of not being able to stay awake. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is he’s alive and we’re together again.
And he loves me.
Benjie wakes me and he’s not at all happy about me being in the hospital bed with Logan. Once I remove my unwanted presence, he makes a show of checking all of the tubes going into and out of my daddy before he growls at me, “Keep up.”
“Yes, Benjie, sir.”
Benjie scowls at me but doesn’t say anything as he unlocks the wheels of the hospital bed and pushes it out of the room. I trot along after him. I can’t have gotten much sleep, but I feel refreshed. Everything’s okay now that I know Logan will recover.
Benjie glances at me as we ride up in a big elevator with Logan’s bed between us. “Someone took her happy pill,” he grunts.
Someone’s daddy loves her.
“You said that if I massage him twice a day there’s a better chance of him making a full recovery. Is there anything else I can do? It doesn’t matter what it is. I can do it.”
“Lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. Kale, broccoli, greens. Juice them if you have to. Whatever it takes to get them down him. Essential nutrients. That’s the way athletes recover.”
“Massage, fruits, and veggies. Got it.”
“Stick with the physical therapy. He’s gonna feel like it’s not helping at first, but it does. Gotta stick with it, though.”
“Okay.”
“Give him lots of, you know, attention. Touch. Like you were doing. Not that you should be crawling into hospital beds. Don’t do that again, you could pull out his I.V. or his catheter. But once the tubes are out, give him a lot of physical attention. Touch is really important. He’s a big guy and in good shape. He won’t be able to do strenuous exercise for a while. He’s gonna crash and be depressed, just ‘cause his brain isn’t getting the chemicals it’s used to. You can give him some of that back with touch.”
“Massage, fruits, and veggies, stick with the P.T., touch him when I’m not going to pull out his tubes.”
“Someone also took her smart-ass pill,” Benjie grunts.
Someone’s daddy loves her even though she’s very, very occasionally a smart-ass.
I smile at the back of Benjie’s head as the elevator doors open and he wheels Logan’s bed out.
17
It’s funny, what a damaged brain retains.
Injured.
The Caring Crows, as I’ve come to call the flock of people roosting in and around my hospital room, make faces when I call my brain damaged. I’m injured. And my prognosis is good. Or so everyone keeps telling me.
At the moment, when I can’t walk because my injured brain has forgotten how to send the correct signals to my left leg, when I can’t shout
my anger and frustration, or make love to Emily, because my injured brain can’t handle the increase in pressure, I feel pretty fucking damaged.
I also can’t stay awake for more than two hours at a time. Dr. Lacey, who dazzles me each day with her rainbow collection of surgical scrubs, tells me this is normal. My body’s shutting itself down to heal the injury. Sleep, not laughter, turns out to be the best medicine. It still makes me wild with rage and frustration, that I can’t express for fear of increasing the pressure on my injured brain, to wake and discover that I’ve lost more time. Two hours, or four, or, once, eight, when I apparently nodded off in the middle of a conversation with Emily and slept through the night.
Whenever I open my eyes, my little girl is there, smiling her shy, gentle smile.
I hate that I made her worry I wouldn’t open my eyes again.
She’s amazing, the little girl who saved my life. She won’t accept any credit for it, in her self-deprecating way, insisting that Niall would have found me after I failed to check-in. Niall and I trade smiles, but we both know the truth. When we’re back home and I can take care of her again, I’ll make sure that Emily feels the full force of my gratitude.
That’s something that sticks in my injured brain. As do the hours of quiet conversation with Niall, who had a life-threatening, spinal injury six years ago. He tells me not just how he recovered, but how he topped Shaan while spending weeks in traction. I repeat those tips to myself after Niall leaves each night to imprint them on my injured brain. I’m going to need them until I’m back on my feet.
Other things? They won’t stick.
Emily has to reassure me every time I wake that Jason Merullo isn’t a threat anymore. Evidently, my injured brain is stuck on those last moments when I was sure he was going to kill me. Dr. Lacey says my mind will eventually reset. I’m not sure what that means, but I’ve dealt with PTSD before. If that’s what this is, I’ll dust off those coping mechanisms and use them again, once my injured brain recovers enough to do some self-hypnosis.
Jason Merullo isn’t a threat to anyone anymore. Nor will he be for quite some time. Despite Ed Isaak’s insistence no one involve the Mexican authorities, Captain Lopez was evidently so enraged by my injury and Emily’s distress she went completely off-piste. After finding out from Ed that I suspected Merullo, she had him restrained in a conference room until the ship docked in Mazatlán. There, she turned him over to the Mexican police. After giving her statement to the Federales, which included the brick she found on Merullo, she offered Ed her resignation. Ed’s not happy, although I gather he hasn’t accepted her resignation. Since the Mexicans are looking to charge Merullo with possession with intent to distribute and attempted murder, I’m guessing Merullo is a lot less happy.
If he didn’t want to spend quality time in a Mexican prison, he should have taken the deal I offered, instead of hitting me on the head, twice, with a bloody fire extinguisher.
The other thing that won’t stick is Miranda. After each time Emily reminds me, I take grim amusement in the idea my injured brain classifies Miranda as the same level of threat as Merullo.
She’s a threat to my damn peace of mind, anyway.
When I woke the second day after surgery and heard that Miranda was on her way to San Diego, my blood pressure went so high it set off all the machines plugged into me. The alarms caused the big, male nurse, who looks at Emily like he can’t decide whether to kiss her or put her over his knee, to come running. Under threat of sedation if I didn’t keep my blood pressure down, I made the calmest phone call to Mir I could manage. I didn’t stay calm for very long. She was still in London but only because the first flight she could get wasn’t until the next day. She insisted that she was coming to look after me, darling, because how could I possibly be left in the hands of the inept creature she spoke to on the phone? When I completely lost my cool, Maude, fresh off the red-eye, took the phone and warned Miranda that she would personally address Miranda’s inability to follow a Dom’s instructions if Mir showed her face in San Diego. Since I used to turn the house subs over to Maude for punishment when they really got out of line, that thought was also grimly amusing, but it doesn’t stick in my injured brain. Emily still has to tell me every time I wake that Miranda is still in London and wants me to call her, darling, whenever I wake so she can hear that I’m recovering.
I don’t call. But I do tell Emily how much I hate Miranda calling me darling, which makes my sweet girl smile.
I make it my mission to draw out that smile during the hours I’m awake. After getting the nod from the male nurse, who seems to be her guru in all things brain-injury related, Emily reads to me by the hour, even when I’m sleeping. I ask her read her own books to me, but she gives me a shy smile and claims she doesn’t have them with her. Instead, she reads to me from the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, because she says Sherlock Holmes is her second favorite detective. That gives me the opening to talk with her about investigative methods in general, and my search for the brick in particular, so that I can normalize my injury as much as possible. I know seeing me hurt must have terrified my little girl, even if she’s putting on the bravest of brave faces.
She smiles much more easily after I give her a schedule on the third day after my surgery. I model it on the schedule I gave her for the plane, with no more than an hour of sitting at my bedside before she takes a break to stretch or eat or exercise. She insists on both Maude and Niall sitting with me when she goes for the first of the fifteen-minute walks on my schedule, but looks so much more relaxed when she returns that Maude immediately ordains several more walks every day. Since Emily knows I have her taking walks every two hours, she simply smiles and says, “Yes, ma’am.”
My good girl.
The only order Emily won’t obey is getting back in bed with me. Evidently Benjie reprimanded her when she did it right after my surgery. Although I tell her she answers only to me, she refuses to go against anything he, or Dr. Lacey, tells her might hamper my recovery. Instead, she sleeps on a little cot Benjie brings for her each night, a clandestine arrangement since visiting hours end at twenty thirty. I sleep restlessly, not because of the pain, but because my arms are empty.
Finally, on the fourth day after my surgery, Benjie takes out all of the tubes stuck in me, including the motherfucking catheter, which is the thing that’s bothered me the most. Much more than the five-inch incision in my head or the titanium mesh holding together the broken bone beneath. Emily watches the removal of the last tube with gleaming eyes. As soon as Benjie moves away with his cart of tubes and bags, Emily climbs onto the foot of the bed. She worms herself up against my side, settles her head on my shoulder, and closes her eyes with a big sigh.
Benjie clears his throat.
Emily cracks open an eye to look at him before she gives him a beatific smile and snuggles back into me. “You said I couldn’t be in bed with him as long as he had those tubes in. Now they’re out.”
“You still shouldn’t be in a hospital bed with him. Health and safety,” Benjie grumps.
“I’ll risk it,” I tell him, happier to have my little girl back in my arms than anything since seeing her walk into the ICU.
“Dr. Lacey’ll be in to check you before she signs your discharge.” He points a thick finger at us. “Do not let her find you in that bed together.”
“No, Benjie, sir,” Emily says, with her eyes still closed, smiling against my shoulder.
After he leaves, she whispers to me, “Vashi and I are going to find him a nice subbie. He needs someone to call him sir and give him welcome-home blow jobs every night.”
That makes me chuckle, even though I’ve felt a few pinches of jealousy watching Emily respond to Benjie’s apparently subconscious dominance. “He does, does he?”
“Uh-huh. He’s such a Dom. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
“What about Daddy? Do I get welcome-home blow jobs every night?”
“Yes, Daddy, and good morning ones, too. Lots and lots of blow jo
bs as soon as Hendry clears you for sex.”
Hendry?
“Who’s Hendry, baby?”
“The physical therapist Mistress Maude recommended. She’s in the East Village, so we can walk to her office once you’re walking again. In the meanwhile, she’ll come to your house. You’ve got your first appointment with her the day after we get back to New York.”
“That’s quick work, little girl.”
“I have to get you better.” She lifts up onto her elbow and looks at me very seriously. “I’m still on orgasm restriction until you give me an hour of edging. I need you better fast, Daddy.”
I chuck her under the chin with my free hand. “I would never keep you on orgasm restriction until I’m better. I’ll give you an orgasm now if you take off those cute shorts.”
My fingers will work fine for that task, and I’m sure I can do it without raising the intercranial pressure that everyone’s so worried about.
She shakes her head. “I don’t want orgasms while you can’t have them.”
I tuck her back against my side, her face in my neck. “Emmy, you are such a wonder.” I stroke her hair. We haven’t said the magic words since the ICU. “I love you, little girl.”
She gives a happy sigh, her breath warm across my collar. “I love you, too, Daddy. So, so much.”
That’s how Dr. Lacey finds us. Snuggled together in my hospital bed. Saying words it’s too early to say, but both of us feel.
Dr. Lacey blows a gasket, in a cheerful, purple scrubs way, but she’s as annoyed as I’ve seen her in the four days she’s been treating me. Including when I tried to get out of bed on my own, and we discovered that my left leg wouldn’t hold me up.
Emily, ever sensitive to criticism, crawls out of the bed and stands to the side, head down, hands twisting the hem of her pink sweatshirt.
“Emily,” I say to draw her attention back to me.
She gives me the big, remorseful eyes.
I wink at her, so she knows I’m perfectly happy with her actions, and hold out my hand, to remind her that the only person she answers to is me. With a grateful smile, she takes my hand.