Ian had just witnessed this whole, humiliating, life-crushing conversation. Enough of it, anyway.
“Can I do anything for you?” Ian asked me then, his voice as tender as I’d ever heard it. “Get you a glass of water? Beat the crap out of this wanker?”
I gave a microscopic smile, but Ian caught it.
I shook my head.
“Can we finish our conversation, please?” Chip asked, though I couldn’t tell if he was asking me or Ian.
“Maggie?” Ian said, never shifting his gaze from mine. “Is this a conversation you’d like to continue?”
I shook my head again. “I think we’re done.”
“That’s it, prick. Beat it.”
But Chip wasn’t ready to go. “Margaret—”
In a flash, Ian was right up next to him, looming a good six inches above. “You heard her. Get out.”
Chip put his hands up and backed away. “Okay.” He took several steps back, without turning, seeming to consider his options, and then, because he really didn’t have any, he turned to leave.
Just as he did, I called, “Chip! Wait!”
He turned back, and I pulled off his grandmother’s engagement ring and threw it at him with all the force I could muster.
He ducked, and I missed.
The ring bounced off the wall and then skittered under the empty bed next to mine—so Chip had to get down on his hands and knees to crawl after it. It was just enough humiliation to give me a twinge of satisfaction.
But only a twinge.
* * *
AS SOON AS he was gone, the fog closed back in.
It was like suffocating in plain air.
I started panting, but in deep, swooping breaths, pushing them out and then sucking them back in. For a second, I couldn’t see. The room didn’t go black—it went white. It blurred out of focus until there was nothing.
Except Ian’s voice. Ian was still there. “Slow it down,” he said, near my ear. “Take it slow. Count to four going out. That’s it. Now four going in. Good.”
As my breathing slowed, the world came back, and I felt Ian’s hand on my forehead, stroking my hair. I opened my eyes, and there was his face, just a few inches away.
“You’re all right,” he said. “You’re okay.”
“Ian,” I said next, when it felt safe to speak. “I need you to do me a favor.”
“Anything,” he said. “Of course.”
“I really, really need you,” I said, “to get me the hell out of here.”
Sixteen
IAN STOOD UP and evaluated me for a minute. Then he reached over to pull back my covers.
“Right,” he said. “Scoot to the edge of the bed.”
I dangled my legs over, and he bent down in front of me and backed up. “Climb on.”
“What? On you? Like a piggyback ride?”
He nodded. “Pretend I’m a horse.”
“A Clydesdale, maybe.”
“Move it, lass. Make it happen. Squeeze with your thighs.”
The good news was, I could do that. My thighs worked just fine. It was everything below them that didn’t. I leaned forward until my chest fell against his back, and then I wriggled my legs into position around his waist. I wrapped my arms around his neck.
“Not a choke hold, though,” he instructed. “Low, on the collarbones.” He moved my hands down.
He stood up. “Is this okay?”
A piggyback ride. When was the last time I’d had one of those? “Yes.”
“We’re not touching your donor sites? Or pulling on your grafts?”
“I’m good. I should travel like this more often.”
He pulled the quilt off my bed and grabbed a pillow, and then he walked us out past the nurses’ station—where every single person stopped what they were doing to gape at us going by. As we passed, without even slowing down, he grabbed a bag of Milano cookies off the reception desk.
He took long steps and moved fast. He really was a Clydesdale. He didn’t walk, he strode. I hadn’t moved that quickly through any space in weeks, and despite everything, it gave me a tickle of a thrill in my stomach. I felt an odd urge to laugh, but I held it back.
He walked us to the elevator, and we rode up to the top floor, then got off and strode to the end of a corridor, directly toward a door with a push handle that said NOT AN EXIT—ALARM WILL SOUND.
“Hey—that’s not an exit,” I said, as we barreled toward it. “Hey! ‘Alarm will sound’!”
We burst through the door anyway, though. No alarm sounded.
“It’s disabled,” he explained, as the door swung closed behind us. “It’s where the nurses go to smoke.”
Then we were outside. I caught my breath. It was a crisp, clear March evening—with the most stunning orange and purple sunset I’d ever seen. Or so it seemed. It would have been breathtaking in any situation, but I literally had not been outside since the night of the accident. How long had that been? We were ending my second week in the inpatient wing, and I’d spent a week in the ICU before that, so: three solid weeks without seeing the sky, or feeling the breeze, or breathing fresh air. No wonder I was feeling so crazy.
That, and everything else.
Ian took us across the roof to the far edge, which had a view of downtown Austin and the capitol building. With me still on his back, he laid the blanket out flat and dropped the pillow and the cookies. Then he got down on his hands and knees and backed up to the blanket like a dump truck and tilted up so I could slide down onto my knees. The whole thing gave me just a smidge of vertigo, and I rolled onto my side in the middle of the quilt. He brought the pillow around to prop me correctly so I could lie back to see the sky without damaging my grafts.
The sky. The wind blew across me and fluttered my hair back. I felt a little cold, but it was okay. It made me aware of all my edges—where I stopped and the rest of the world continued. I was still alive, I thought then. It hit me out on that roof for the first time.
I was alive.
In the next second, I felt Ian lay his fleece sweatshirt over me, and then he flopped down beside me and got settled on his back. Then he lifted a cookie up into my field of vision, and I reached up and grabbed it.
Nobody spoke, and for the first time ever—maybe in my entire life—that was okay. We listened to the wind, and the muted traffic ten stories below, and the crunch of cookies as we chewed. We watched the sky darken as the sun sank out of view. So much of life is just grinding through. So many moments just exist to deliver you to the ones that follow. But this moment was a destination in itself.
Did I feel happy right then? Not exactly. When you feel happy, or joyful, it’s kind of like a brightness in your chest, and my heart was too numb for brightness.
If you think of human emotions as music, then mine were like an orchestra with no conductor. I felt a lot of different sounds, but I didn’t know quite how to read them or combine them in ways I understood. And yet there was no doubt that the instruments of my body were playing—my skin under the wind, my lungs drawing in crisp breaths, my eyes taking in the vast and brilliant sky. There was music—good music—even if it wasn’t a melody I recognized.
Given the context, it seems odd that I should have felt such good feelings right then, and I guarantee it didn’t last. My brain still knew that my entire future was ruined—that Chip’s confession marked more than just the end of our relationship: It meant the end of my life as I’d known it.
But the physical pleasure of being outside for the first time in so achingly long was too real to deny. Later, there would be fallout—moments of rage, and bleakness, and grief over everything I’d lost—as I tried to understand what Chip had done and why. But not yet. Not tonight. Ian had given me this impossible gift—a little pause from it all. An experience so viscerally alive that nothing else could compete.
It was just us, and the wind—and now, suddenly, the stars starting to appear—for a long, quiet while.
Then I heard Ian’s voice, surpris
ingly close to my ear, say, “Myles’ll fire me for this, for sure.”
I turned my head. There he was. Starting a conversation. Of all things. “Will he? Seriously?”
He was gazing up, an arm behind his head, and the pose was so casual, so unguarded, so friendly, it was shocking. “Maybe not. He didn’t see it with his own eyes, after all. The nurses might not rat us out.”
“But don’t the PTs take patients out all the time?”
“Sure. On educational excursions. In groups. Not up to the roof alone.”
“What does he think you’re going to do to me?”
A classic Ian-style silence followed that question—but rather than feeling uncomfortable I suddenly started thinking of all the things that Ian could potentially have been doing to me, right that very moment. The longer the silence lasted, the more vivid my thinking became. He was just inches away. He could so easily roll onto his side and put his face down alongside mine. He could so easily take one of those big hands and run it along my side. The thought took hold of my thinking. I could almost feel it happening—the weight of his hands, the roughness of the stubble on his jaw, the warmth of his mouth.
I drifted off into the fantasy of being kissed by Ian, but then his voice pulled me back out. “There are all kinds of ungentlemanly things I could do to you on this roof,” he declared at last. “And I’m sure Myles would accuse me of them all.”
It’s a little odd—and a bit embarrassing—to confess that I had a vivid, unrequited, thirty-second, highly sexy, totally unauthorized fantasy about my physical therapist not an hour after I’d thrown my engagement ring at my ex-fiancé. But it’s important to mention. Because in those seconds, something happened. I felt a swell of some very potent, very enthusiastic, very physical feelings in response to that kissing fantasy.
Which meant—and this was big news—I could feel those feelings.
Suffice it to say, my time in the hospital had not been the most erotic experience of my life. On my scale of worries that month, my future sex life rated comically low. Probably, if I’d had a choice between a future with walking and a future with sex, I’d have picked walking. But I wasn’t given that choice. That said, since all my sensation down there was, as I’d been told over and over, “spotty,” I’d known there was a good chance that I’d lost that part of my life forever. Though, even if I’d been thinking about it enough to check, I likely would have been afraid to check. Part of me didn’t want to know. Don’t go looking for trouble.
But now, suddenly, thanks to this roof, I knew.
My body could feel things. Enthusiastically.
True, my body had just felt those things about a man who—most days, anyway—didn’t even want to be in the same room with me, but I wasn’t going to quibble over details. This was great news, dammit, no matter how foolishly I’d come across it! I could feel the feelings! One of life’s greatest pleasures was still on my menu!
Did I feel joyful about it? No. “Joy” didn’t seem to be an option anymore. I wasn’t really sure I could access “happy,” either. The best I could do right then was “pleasant.” I felt pleasant about it. And—maybe more than that: relief. Relief I didn’t even know I’d been waiting for.
The sunset was completely gone now, replaced by a deep blue night sky full of stars. I tried to sit up then, but lost my balance partway, and Ian lost no time helping. He sat up, too, and cradled me into a sitting position. “You okay?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“You look a little nauseous.”
Reading that so wrong. “I’m fine.”
“Do you want to go back?”
I turned and met his eyes. “I never want to go back.”
He gave a little shrug and then said, “Okay.”
“Tell me about your nebbishy boss,” I said then, as we watched the lights of the city skyline. “What’s going on there?”
“Only if you put on my sweatshirt.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Put it on.”
“Bossy,” I said. But I put it on, and as I did, I got a great waft of that delicious Ian smell. It was so overpowering in that moment, it was all I could do not to press my face into it and gulp down a big breath. But I covered well. I pretended like the zipper was stuck. Then I looked at Ian to prove that I was waiting for him to start talking.
When he didn’t, I prompted: “So? You think Myles would fire you for taking me up here.”
“Myles would definitely fire me for taking you up here.”
“Even though you don’t like me like that.” It was the kind of statement girls sometimes make in honor of the one percent chance that the guy might contradict it.
Ian did not contradict it. He kept his gaze straight out on the horizon. “No. I don’t like you like that.”
“So you’re safe.”
He looked off. “I am far from safe.”
“What’s Myles’s deal with you, anyway?”
“That’s a long story.”
The wind kept blowing one lock of my hair into my face. I tried to tuck it behind my ear, but it was too short. “I truly have nothing but time.”
Ian sighed. “I used to work here before. That’s why I moved to Texas, in fact—to take a job at this hospital. I started young and worked my way to manager of the PT gym. Myles came about when I did, but I got promoted over him again and again.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s a rule-obsessed wanker, and a petty tyrant.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Anyway, then a female PT got hired to work in the therapy gym. Her name was Kayla. We hit it off right away, and we started seeing each other.”
It was pushing, but I couldn’t help it: “What was she like?”
He gave a little shrug. “Lovely. Feisty. She had no patience for foolishness. She could be so mean.” He said it with great admiration.
I watched him think about her. After a bit, I said, “What does this have to do with Myles?”
Ian let out a long breath. “Myles liked her, too. He would say that he saw her first—and I stole her away.”
“Did you?”
“He might have seen her first,” Ian said, shrugging. “But she never liked him. I couldn’t steal something that was never his.”
“Of course not.”
“But that fact was not—still is not—relevant to Myles. He liked her, and that was all that mattered.”
“That’s why he hates you?”
Ian nodded. “That’s why he hates me. I ruined his life, and now he is determined to ruin mine.”
“But she wasn’t into him!”
“He feels, very strongly, that he could have won her over.”
“But you’re not still with her?” I asked, to confirm.
“No.”
“You broke up?”
Ian seemed to hold his breath. “In a way.”
“So what’s his problem?”
“I’ve wondered about that a lot. I think Myles is the kind of guy who needs an enemy. He needs an enemy to fight so that he can feel like a hero.”
“But he’s not a hero!”
Ian looked over and gave a little shrug. “I might be a villain, though.”
I waited.
“I wasn’t very nice to him. I gloated a bit when I won her. I wish I could go back and change that. It wasn’t kind of me.”
“Okay,” I said, “but Myles is totally the kind of person who makes you want to gloat.”
“Maybe,” Ian said. “But I should have been the bigger man.”
I didn’t say anything to that. I knew all about regrets.
Ian went on. “Kayla and I had been together about a year when I had this idea to strike out on my own from the hospital. I wanted to start a rehab gym for people who are beyond the critical phase, but who still want to work to get better—people who insurance won’t cover. There’s all kinds of great research out there about ways to stimulate the nervous system, get the brain and spinal cord to rewire
and communicate with the body in new ways. I wanted to make use of that research.”
“That’s brilliant.”
“And so she came with me. We took out loans, found a facility, worked out a business plan, printed up T-shirts, and sank everything we had into it.”
He gave me a look. “I poached all the best people from the hospital and talked them into coming with me. I filled their heads with ideas about the fun we could have and the path we could forge. We could change people’s lives. We could change the face of recovery.”
“And Myles?” I asked.
“He wasn’t invited.”
“Because he’s a wanker.”
Ian nodded. “He’s toxic, really, in so many ways. Narrow and vindictive and peevish. Not the kind of guy you want around. I didn’t want to work with him. I kept the whole plan a secret from him—but he got wind of it somehow, and he started asking to join. I rejected him over and over. I was cocky about it. When he demanded to know why I didn’t want him, I laid it all out in no uncertain terms.”
“Like, you said he wasn’t right for the job?”
“I told him he was an idiot and everybody hated him.”
“Okay. That’s laying it out.”
“After we all quit, there was almost nobody left. So they promoted him.”
“And now Myles is the boss.”
“Which was fine with me, until—”
I looked over. “Until what?”
“Until the business crashed and burned. And then I found myself with no savings and no job. Then a spot opened up here. Somehow, in some circle of hell, I wound up working for him.”
“The business crashed?”
Ian nodded.
“How? Why? You had all those great people! And such a great idea.”
He shook his head, and I could tell we weren’t going to travel far on that topic. “Lots of reasons.”
I watched him a long time, but he didn’t offer anything more.
Finally, he went back to Myles. “He’s had it out for me since the day I came back—just a few weeks before you showed up. He’s actively looking to get me fired.”
How to Walk Away Page 15