by Cara McKenna
And right then I decided, I hoped I did, too.
Kelly drained his bottle. “You signed up for restraint training tomorrow morning?”
I nodded. “Jenny said you teach it.”
“Nah, not really. They just use me ’cause I’m huge. Prepare you for the worst.”
“You’re really good at it, though, aren’t you? That’s what Dennis told me. He said they call you ‘the Disorderly.’ The best man to have around when there’s an incident.”
He smiled his panty-shredding smile. “And here I thought it was because I’m a bad housekeeper.”
My ability to string words together had abandoned me the second he grinned, so I took a final sip of the whiskey before sliding the not-quite-empty glass across the wood.
“Better get you back,” Kelly said, standing. Fuck me, he was tall.
“Can I give you some money for the drinks?”
He narrowed his eyes like I’d called his mother a rude word, and I dropped it.
I slid from my stool, feeling woozier than I should from two drinks. One glass of wine, a shot and a half of whiskey, twelve hours of work, little food and even less sleep . . . crippling, ill-advised infatuation.
“Thanks for bringing me out,” I told him as he held the door. The night felt good. When we’d left work it had been warm and humid, and now in the streetlight’s glow, with a breeze cooling my skin, it felt like a new day, like I’d left Monday behind me.
“No problem. If you’re feeling like you’re not cut out for this, don’t. Not yet. I’ve seen people fall to way worse pieces after their first days in Starling.”
“I don’t feel nearly as awful as I had when our shift ended, anyhow.”
“Nothing like a change of scenery to hit the restart button.”
I watched Kelly’s triceps twitch as he unlocked my side of his truck, thinking, yes, nothing like a change of scenery.
But I hated myself, a little, for being so attracted to him. He wasn’t quite like the men who’d turned my mom and sister’s lives inside out. He was hardworking and seemed honest, and unless he made a pass when he dropped me off, his intentions were harmless enough. But he’d painted himself as a cousin of those men—aggressive and admittedly selfish, admittedly a bit of a bully. I’d always been so determined to never fall for one of those types; now it felt like my body had turned traitor.
Just because your body’s interested doesn’t mean you’d ever do anything with him.
Good point, brain. Plus he was my coworker. But there was no harm if, say, I maybe hypothesized about what he’d be like in bed as I put myself to sleep, right? Though to be honest I didn’t have the first clue. The few guys I’d been with had been selected for their gentleness, all trusted friends slowly transitioned to lovers. And I’d never gotten hot over the idea of being with a hulking thug of a man, so I couldn’t even imagine what I might want to do with one. Or have done to me. If I’d even get a say, I thought, remembering the white wine.
As we drove I pictured tomorrow’s restraint training, trying to imagine Kelly’s huge arms locked around my neck or bear-hugging my middle, his deep voice at my ear, barking orders.
Fucking hell.
Chapter Three
I woke on my birthday with more of a hangover than I deserved, peeling my eyes open at the sound of my alarm clock. I’d been waking to that same bleating for fifteen years, but once I shut it off, all the familiarity of the world abandoned me.
Strange room, windows in the wrong places. Wrong-color paint on the walls, wrong temperature as I sat up, slipped on my flip-flops in the morning chill and dug in the open suitcase propped by the foot of the bed. Wrong, wrong, wrong that I had to put on a robe, lug my towel and shampoo three doors down, and punch in a security code to get into the women’s communal bathroom, wronger still that someone else already had steam rising from one of the shower cubicles.
As I adjusted the water and hung my robe on the hook outside the stall, I decided I’d find an apartment, a real one. Soon. They’d be cheap in Darren, even without roommates, and in a way, a twenty-minute drive would be preferable to a stroll across campus—a clear, physical delineation between work and home. Maybe I’d find a place and discover I lived near Kelly Robak, and we could carpool.
My hands paused mid-lather. Where had that stupid thought come from?
Though if I did live near Kelly, I’d probably worry a lot less about the town’s least savory characters hassling me. People wouldn’t fuck with Kelly Robak’s woman—
Oh God, where had that one come from?
Definitely not his woman, definitely not, because for one, he would totally say something like that. Going to see my woman, tonight, he’d say. And all his meathead caveman friends would probably call me that, too. I have a name, I’d say.
Then I realized I was getting bent out of shape over the way I might be treated by a man who quite possibly had no designs on me, in a theoretical romantic relationship I didn’t even want to share with him.
Clearly, I was still drunk. Only possible explanation. First thing I’d do on my day off would be to find a shiny new water bottle and make it a point to stay more hydrated. Yes, that’d solve my Kelly problems. Stay hydrated, stay sober, stay free of horny thoughts about my coworker.
It wasn’t long before that resolve was tested. I saw Kelly an hour later in the hand-off meeting. He said good morning to me, nothing in his expression or tone suggesting we’d forged some profound bond the night before. Since of course we hadn’t. He was firmly back in work mode, a big gray human wall of calm. If only parts of me didn’t have such a distracting urge to climb him.
The morning went smoothly enough, and I spent the first couple of hours shadowing Jenny again. Then at ten I headed across campus to the Warbler building for restraint training.
The class took place in a small gymnasium, a nice little setup with a basketball hoop, yoga balls, a weights set, sports equipment. A large senior nurse named Audra was leading the three-session course.
A stocky fortysomething, Audra proved herself surprisingly spry, kicking off the class by having a male orderly pretend to attack her, then breaking forcefully from his choke hold. I found the display more unnerving than reassuring, as all I could imagine afterward was being violently attacked from behind.
“Everyone awake now?” she asked through a laugh, face pink from the performance. “Good! I’m Nurse Audra, and I’ve been at Larkhaven for sixteen years, not a one of them as a patient, if you can believe that! I’ve worked in every single building and on every single ward, including the locked unit. Anybody here this morning from Starling?”
I was alone in raising my hand.
“Excellent, excellent. You’re all here for one reason—restraints. And if you came hoping this’ll be about straightjackets, well tough beans! We’re talking about the act of physically restraining a patient in order to sedate them. Lemme say first and foremost, de-escalation is always preferable to a takedown—safer for us and the patients, and you can imagine it makes for a more harmonious environment. But restraints are still skills we all need for those worst-case scenarios.
“Now the key to effective restraints and breaks is all in the technique, and I’m going to show you all how even a tiny little woman like . . .” She prompted me with a nod.
“Erin,” I supplied, annoyed by how many diminutives she’d employed.
“How even a tiny little woman like Erin here can protect herself from attacks by a resident, even one twice her size and suffering from a psychotic episode. Of course, ideally, none of you will ever find yourselves in that position without fellow staffers on hand to come to your aid . . .”
My attention wavered then, as Kelly and two other men entered from a side room, one of them carrying an inflatable dummy, the kind you might knee in his plastic groin in a self-defense class. Kel
ly and the third orderly were lugging what looked like a wrestling team’s worth of blue gym mats. Then Kelly’s eyes met mine for the briefest second and I snapped my attention back to Audra.
“We’ll start out gentle,” she was saying. “Let’s break into groups of four, three new recruits and one instructor apiece.”
I wound up in a group with two RNs, a perky young one and middle-aged maternal one. Audra was with another group, but shouted to the instructors to show us some “arm breaks.” Naturally, I imagined someone breaking my arm.
My team’s instructor—a far warmer and more reasonably sized orderly than Kelly—had us take turns grasping his arms, then showed us in slow motion how he could swoop his hands up between our elbows to get free. We did it ten times apiece, quicker each time, then he made us put him in headlocks. It was almost fun. Though I sort of wished I got to put Kelly in a headlock. Probably be my only chance to feel like I had the better of him.
After twenty minutes of drills, Audra gave a lecture about the importance of proper technique, horrifying us with statistics about how many patients wound up with dislocations and fractures and sprains from panicky staffers not restraining them properly.
“Let’s switch up those groups,” she said with a clap, “and I’ll take you through the basics of a prone restraint.”
Two junior nurses and I ended up in Kelly’s group. He gave me a reassuring little nod that said, You’ll be fine, a taste of the more personal side of him from the night before. It was the last thing I needed, that wriggly feeling upsetting my middle when I was trying to learn skills for avoiding maiming people and getting maimed myself.
“The goal for a restraint is always to have three staffers on hand. One for each arm and one for the legs.”
Audra and Kelly and the two other instructors walked us through a demo—Audra pretended to attack one of the orderlies, and he broke free of her grasp. Then Kelly and the other guy rushed over and eased her to the ground on her belly, one man pinning each arm and another her ankles.
“As you can see,” Audra said from the floor, speaking mainly to the gym mat, “I’m completely immobilized, and no longer a danger to myself or others.” Her feet wiggled and her hands flapped, and I had to bite back a giggle. Then I glanced at Kelly’s flexed and forceful arm and my body swapped in a few other inappropriate reactions. The southerly migration of my blood gave me a head rush and I quickly shoved the thought aside, lest I pass out and look even more incompetent than I felt.
They ran through a few other demos: a restraint mid-attack, a two-man restraint, a restraint with Audra flailing like a windmill.
For such a large man, Kelly had a certain grace about him. Most men his size would’ve lumbered, but his movements were measured and controlled, yet fluid. A ballet dancer he was not, but dexterous and quick. I imagined him fucking, and the grunting, frantic caveman I might’ve previously conjured was replaced by a picture of elegant, filthy labor.
Oops.
Thankfully I didn’t get any more time to fantasize, as it was the new recruits’ turn to try the moves. The first few were easy, slow motion. But after a half hour, Audra had rotated to our group, and we struggled to “gently but assertively” wrestle her to the ground while avoiding her kicks and thrashes. The woman didn’t fuck around.
By that time she’d worked up quite a sweat, and she stood from our latest successful attempt, red-faced. “Okay! Let’s try a few two-staff scenarios. One on arms, one on legs. Rotate!”
She bounded off to assist the next group, and Kelly strode to mine. I swallowed.
“You and you,” he said, pointing to a nurse and an orderly. They both looked a bit wary, but surely they didn’t share the fear that had me so unnerved—the fear of enjoying touching this brute far too much.
I watched as they ran drills with Kelly, and tried very hard not to think about getting drilled by Kelly. Then it was my turn, me and another young LPN.
“Legs,” she said. We’d been taught to “call” our intended target, much like shouting “I got it!” in a baseball game to avoid colliding with one’s teammate. It meant I was on arms. Big huge scarred-up Kelly Robak arms. When the moment came to grasp them, my hands were nowhere near big enough to get a decent purchase on his obscenely thick biceps. Lordy me.
He went down pretty easy the first time, and if I wasn’t mistaken, he smiled at me. With the side of his face pressed to the mat, it was tough to tell.
“Enjoying yourself?” he asked, like he’d come upon me reading on a park bench.
“I am. Maybe I’ll order you a white wine, while you’re down there,” I said, too quiet for anyone else to hear.
Now he was definitely smirking. “With a straw, I hope.”
“A funnel.”
“Touché.”
Audra shouted her approval of our technique and we let Kelly go. We switched legs and arms, then it was time to rotate again. I was tiring, my back achy from all the bending, shoulders grinding in their sockets. This was a hard-ass job. A decent workout, though, if dampened by the possibility of bodily harm.
“Let’s try some headlocks,” Audra said after a water break, some time later. We’d just rotated back into Kelly’s tutelage and I eyed his arm yet again, imagining it clamped around my windpipe.
“Trainees, attack your trainers, and trainers, break free in slo-mo.”
I swallowed as Kelly turned to me first. With me at five-three and him at least a foot taller, it was easier said than done. I’d look less like an attacker than a scarf.
“You want a stepstool?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not that short,” I said as I circled around him. “You’re just way too tall.” I looped my arm around his neck, having to press my chest flush to his back to reach. Goddamn, he was warm. And hard. And huge.
I felt his hand on my forearm, demonstrating for the other trainees in my group. His fingertips seemed to dawdle at my wrist as he spoke, casual as a woman might caress a garment at a store, admiring the fabric. Surely I was imagining that.
“Basic move,” he said, and I felt each word vibrating in his throat. “She’s using her right arm, so I’m going to use my left to get free. This isn’t the time to panic. Erin and I aren’t a great example, but usually your head’ll be pretty close to your attacker’s, and thrashing around is a great way to concuss yourself or the patient, or pull a tendon in your neck. Steady and calm’s the name of the game.”
Steady and calm. I could feel the muscles in Kelly’s broad back, feel his heat and his breathing, smell his perspiration. Steady and calm, I repeated to myself. Bet that’s not how you fuck.
“Pretending she’s got a good squeeze on me,” Kelly went on, “I’m going to turn my head just slightly, to keep blood flowing through the carotid artery.”
He said some other stuff, stuff I really ought to have been paying super-close attention to, but it was hard with us pressed together . . . even in the incredibly unerotic setting, with potentially lifesaving information being imparted, even with a hangover. My body was pretty sure that its very existence balanced on its chances at rolling around with Kelly’s body in a non-training situation, and told my brain to fuck off.
He got free—who knew how—and when the next person’s turn came to put Kelly in a headlock I tried to take mental notes. But his expression was nearly as distracting as his body, his mean face strained from the exercise and reminding me of how it might look, other times.
The drills went on for another full, sweaty, awkward hour, then we took a five-minute break before switching to self-defense basics.
What if a patient grabbed your clothes? Your hair? Your arms, legs, throat, waist, or tried to gouge your eyes? We learned tricks for all these terrifying scenarios, then got teamed with a fellow trainee or trainer to do some improvisational drills, with Audra patrolling, correcting people’s form. To my equ
al pleasure and annoyance, I got paired with Kelly. If I wasn’t mistaken . . . had he picked me? We’d been standing fairly close together, but I felt pretty sure he’d chosen me. It’d be just like him to lay claims. And it’d be very unlike me to take such perverse enjoyment from it.
I eyed him as we faced off. “Who’s attacking?”
“We’ll trade. You start.”
“Fine.” I was tired and stinky, and so far the course had left me more overwhelmed than empowered. I circled Kelly and looped my arm around his neck. Again, I felt way more like a dangling kitten than an assailant.
“You’ll never take me alive,” I told him, exhaustion making me punchy.
He nearly laughed, a huff with a smile behind it, though I couldn’t see his face. “You make a lovely psychopath.”
I squeezed his neck a bit harder, and he broke my hold, twisted around, and grasped each of my arms above the elbow. I was relieved to recall the technique without even thinking, but Kelly had a real grip on me, not a loose one like we’d done in the drills at the start of class. He was holding me tight enough to hurt . . . though surely not as tight as a raging patient might. Lonnie’s face flashed across my mind, dropping my stomach to my feet but focusing my energy. I looped my arms up inside Kelly’s. It took four spirited tries to break his hold.
“Not bad,” he said.
I rubbed my sore forearms. “Not great. You could have head-butted me into unconsciousness ten times over, in the time that took.”
“So try it again.”
And I did. Kelly made me do it a dozen times, until my shoulders burned and my face was flushed and my arms tenderized. I’d probably have bruises like his by the end of the three-day course, tattooed all black and blue.
We swapped, and he stooped to curl his arm around my neck. His hold was loose enough, but his elbow was as locked and unyielding as an iron collar. I did everything I’d been taught and everything Kelly’s deep voice reiterated just behind my ear, but he was too strong. Or I was too weak. I felt dizzy from the hangover and the creeping claustrophobia, my muscles more limp with every attempt, noodles turning soft and useless. My pushes grew frantic, and he must have sensed I was beyond trying.