Susan locks eyes with me over Carlisle’s shoulder and nods, her eyes full of understanding. “I’ll get more towels and I’ll grab you some scrubs and throw your wet clothes in the dryer.”
She leaves and I peel Carlisle off me enough to see her face. Her eyes are red, mascara smeared and her nose a bright pink. Her hair is starting to curl in those loose waves I love but her lips are tinged with blue. Susan returns with the towels and places a double layer on the bed so that I can sit Carlisle down and do what she needs me to do.
She is quiet while I help her dry off, taking over when I get to her hair and even accepting the comb when I snag it off her vanity.
“Do you want the Captain America pajamas or the ones Livvy sent you?” I hold up the sleep t-shirt that says “I’ve got 99 problems and liking men isn’t one of them” for her inspection. “I vote for this one because it makes all the staff feel sorry for me since I have no chance with you at all.”
She laughs a little at my joke and reaches out for it. “Yes, that one.”
I bring it to her and she lifts her arms up, inviting me to slide it over her head. The move is sexy and I lean over to lightly kiss her, whispering against her mouth. “Have I told you how much I love that you hate underwear?”
I realize about two seconds too late that I’ve said the wrong thing when she pulls back from me and turns away. I’m not bothered by the fact that sex is off the table for recovery reasons, it’s her refusal to talk to me about it at all. She can discuss any aspect of her recovery with me but she shuts me out whenever the topic of a future sex life comes up with her doctors if I’m around. I know that a sacral level spinal injury can cause issues with sexuality but I have no idea what’s going on with her.
Sex is the least of our issues but it’s one of the many that have created the tiniest gap between us. It’s nothing we can’t fix and I guess it’s understandable but I hate it all the same. I just wish she would talk to me.
“Thank you, Teo,” she says as I help her move her legs and slide under the covers.
“Hey, anything for you,” I say, positioning her pillow behind her in the spot she likes it best. I perch on the side of the bed and lean down to kiss her temple, murmuring against her hair. “You want to tell me what happened?”
She pauses for the briefest second and I will her to answer me but she shakes her head in the end. “Not right now. I think I need to sleep for a bit.”
I bite back my sigh and pull away to look into her eyes. Emerald green with flecks of gold look up at me and while I know she’s holding back, I don’t see anything that gives me a clue about what is going on.
“Okay, you sleep and when you wake up we can talk about what’s going on. Sound good?” She nods and reaches out to cup my jaw and I grab her hand and press a kiss to it. “We’re in this together. I’m not going anywhere.”
She smiles at me, not a full-blown grin but the kind that accompanies the heavy droop of her eyelids. I kiss her palm again and tuck her in as she falls asleep.
I take the scrubs into the bathroom with me and change quickly, mouthing a silent thank you to Susan when she takes my pile of wet things from me. I watch her leave and close the door behind her and pull the recliner chair closer to Carlisle’s bed so I can watch her sleep. I grab my backpack and pull out my textbook, opening it to the reading for tomorrow.
My phone buzzes and I pick it up, groaning at the text on the screen.
We are here for group. Where are you?
I stare at the gray box on my phone and glance at Carlisle. She’s out cold and probably will be for hours if not the rest of the night. The PT sessions wear her out and today’s reaction could just be the result of fatigue.
Or it could be something worse and I won’t know until she wakes up and I can persuade her to talk to me. Her red-gold hair is drying on the pillow around her face. The freckles on her nose are visible in her too pale face. She’s thinner now but not enough for me to be really worried, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that she’s carrying around a lot of shit in her head.
I start typing. Can’t make it tonight. Something came up. Sorry.
I don’t have to wait long for a reply. I hope you know what you’re doing. Don’t miss lecture asshole.
I toss my phone into my bag and settle back in the seat, my book unopened on my lap as I look at her. I know what I’m doing. Carlisle is my world and she needs me now. No matter how important school is, she has to come first.
Chapter Twenty
Carlisle
It is dark outside when I wake up and the digital clock by my bed says “2:15 am”.
The room is quiet, the facility deep in collective REM as I blink the sleep away from my eyes. I stretch, flexing my arms, my torso and then it hits when my legs barely respond to my command. Like two heavy logs weighing me down into the mattress, the limbs that once propelled me through the water faster than anyone else on the planet have failed me again.
A snore, soft and low, draws my attention and I shift to the left and see Mateo sleeping in the recliner by the side of my bed. His head thrown back, long neck exposed and dark stubble on his chin. He looks delicious and I would love to walk over there and kiss all that exposed skin. I miss touching him, feeling all of his hot skin on mine.
I want him but I don’t even feel like myself anymore.
“Hey baby. Why are you awake?”
His voice surprises me and I laugh in half surprise and half shock, smiling when his grin flashes me from across the room. I reach out my hand before I even know I’m doing it and he smiles even more, closing the book on his lap and unfolding his long, lean body from the chair. He crosses the gap in two steps and then he’s there and I’m lifting the sheet and he slides in next to me. It’s a tight fit but I love it.
He settles in beside me, placing his right arm under my head and looping the other around my waist. We are cocooned together underneath the thin, white, over-bleached sheets and it feels wonderful. He’s hard and warm and every part of me fits with him. It’s like we were meant to be together. In this moment, I almost feel… whole.
Mateo leans over and kisses me. Once on the right side of my mouth. Once on the left side of my mouth. And finally on my lips, soft and sweet but thorough with a deep sweep of his tongue. I kiss him back, my fingers tangling in his hair and pulling him closer until we have to break for air. We stare at each other for a while, enjoying the closeness. With all the people constantly surrounding me, we haven’t had much time to just be together. This is beyond nice but I can’t help but notice the fatigue sitting heavily on his shoulders. The slump matches the dark shadows under his eyes. My man looks good but tired, bone-deep tired.
“Why are you still here?” I ask, playing with the fabric of his scrubs. “Why are you wearing these?”
“My clothes got wet and Susan gave these to me.” He glances down at himself and then grins back up at me. “I’m trying them on for size. Do you think I look like a doctor?”
I pretend to take my time answering but he looks hot. “You look fuckable-in-the-on-call-room hot.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.” I poke him in the chest. “But you won’t ever be ‘Dr. Hottie’ if you don’t get decent sleep and study time. You are always here.”
Mateo tenses next to me and I look closely at his face. He avoids my eyes for a few seconds but when he looks back, I only see determination in them.
“I want to be here with you. I want to help you.” He traces a finger down my cheek and I lean into it. “I need to be here.”
“I have a posse of professionals who are here to help me.” As soon as I say this I feel him stiffen again and I sigh, knowing I have hurt him even though I didn’t mean to. He looks away and I have to pull his face back around to get him to look at me. “Teo, I want you here. I need you.”
“I’m not so sure,” he whispers and them almost immediately shakes his head. “Forget it. I shouldn’t have said that.” He stares at me, cl
early thinking of what he wants to ask me. “What happened today?”
Now it’s my turn to break eye contact but he doesn’t let me get away with it. His finger under chin tips my face up for a quick, sweet kiss before he whispers, “Tell me. I need to know what’s going on in your head.”
I laugh. It’s short and bitter and makes my throat hurt. Or maybe that’s the emotion burning its way up from my gut.
“I work so hard and nothing is happening. I do everything they tell me to do. I follow every instruction to the letter and I don’t feel any different than I did a month ago.” I lean forward and bury my face in his neck, inhaling the comforting scent of my lover. “I’m scared Teo. Nothing works. I can’t feel… anything.”
I am not exaggerating. Nothing below my waist works right now. I have to empty my bladder and my bowels with enemas and catheters and my vagina and clitoris have gone the way of Elvis and left the building. I should be able to talk to Teo about this but I can’t. Not yet. I’m not ready to admit that I might never be the woman he needs. The one he deserves.
“If I tell you everything, it will make it real,” I murmur against his throat, pressing a kiss there to ease the sting of not telling him what he wants to hear. “It’s just hard and I can’t turn off the shit in my head.”
“Have you called Dr. Shrieve?”
I shake my head.
“Not yet.” I pause and pull back to look at him, willing him to understand and not run from the head case I am obviously morphing into. “But I will. I think I need to talk to her.”
“I wish you would talk to me but I get it if you need to work it out with her first. All of this shit is scary.”
“Are you scared?”
“Of you conquering this?” He shakes his head, his smile sweet. “No way. You’ll kick its ass.”
“No. About school. Tell me how it’s going.”
“It’s fine,” he says but his lack of eye contact makes me poke him in the side again. He sighs. “It’s hard as shit but fascinating. I’m still waiting for it to feel real, though.”
“I think it’s because you’re never there.”
“Here we go,” he says on a groan while he presses his forehead against mine. “I’m there plenty. I’m studying and doing fine.”
We lie there in silence for a while and I can’t pinpoint why I don’t believe him. Medical school is hard. I know because I watched ER for all fifteen seasons and it was brutal in make-believe land. He cannot be doing what he needs to do and be here all the time.
“Teo, I can’t worry about you messing up school because of me.” I pause and then decide to tell him the truth that I can. “I’m going to be selfish and just put it out there that I can’t handle one more thing on my plate. Besides the obvious question of whether my body will ever work again, I worry about my parents and Livvy and so many other things that I shouldn’t but I do. I just can’t worry about your school as well.”
He stares down at me, his eyes searching my face in the semi-darkness.
“I need you to do this for me,” I plead. “Take this thing off my mind. Please.”
He sighs. “What do you need me to do?”
“Go to class. Don’t come here every day. Sleep in your own bed and get rid of the dark circles under your eyes. Take time to study properly in a library. Come see me when you can on weekdays and then bug the shit out of me on weekends.”
“I want to be here.”
“And I love you for that but I need to focus on what I need to do and I can’t do that if I don’t know you’re taking care of your business as well.” I cup his face in my hand, running my thumb over his cheekbone. “I’m a control freak so give me one less thing to control. Please. Promise me you’ll do this.”
We have a stare off and I wonder if he’ll fight me on it. I’m stubborn but he’s just as bad. I release my breath when he nods, his voice low and resigned as he agrees.
“I’ll do it.”
“Thank you.” I lean up and kiss him, letting our touches linger, enjoying the quiet and each other. My heart thuds in my chest, heavy and slightly elevated with the way he makes me feel. “I’ve missed you.”
“Tesoro.” Teo hums against my lips and then traces a path across my cheek to nuzzle into my neck, inhaling deeply. I squirm when it tickles and he laughs softly against my skin. “I’ve missed you so much. Missed this.”
I can’t help the thought that passes through my mind. It isn’t the first time it’s been a visitor in the middle of the night: the question of how we will do this, whether he will want me when I finally have to accept a life of catheters, enemas. Countless trips to every kind of doctor imaginable. A partner confined to a wheelchair.
The definitive verdict of no children. No family.
I always resolve to talk to Mateo about this stuff in the morning but I chicken out. My mother isn’t right about everything but she is accurate when she says we haven’t had a lot of time to get to know the stuff about each other that comes with being together for a long time. The kind of time that makes you fearless to ask anything and the confidence to know that the answer will not change what exists between the two of you.
We do not have that confidence. We needed more time but we didn’t get it and I’m not brave enough to ask.
So I let the moment pass as I lie in the dark and eventually fall asleep and dream of days when I will walk by his side.
Chapter Twenty-One
Carlisle
“What do you want to talk about?” Dr. Shrieve asks from the sofa in my room.
The morning after the night with Mateo I called her and asked for her to come see me at the facility. It wasn’t typical for her to leave her office to see a patient and I am grateful she is willing to help me out.
“I don’t know.” I twist the tie on my sweats and shrug. “Everything.”
“Let’s narrow it down a little bit, I’ve only got an hour,” she teases before she pulls out the ever-present notebook and looks at me for a full thirty seconds. “You look good. Not great but good. I think you need more sleep.”
“I fall asleep and then I’m up a few hours later.”
“Maybe you need to take something,” she muses as she writes something on the page. “Just to help you sleep better.”
“I feel like I’m becoming one big pill. I don’t want to shove another one in me.”
She nods. “I can get you a prescription for medical marijuana. If I recall it was one of your favorites.”
That makes me laugh and I slip her the bird as she answers me with a devious chuckle. It felt weird since she walked in but with this exchange, it feels normal. I spent the last year sharing more with her than with my own family and I think I missed it.
“Well, if you are turning down the chance for pot brownies, let’s figure out what’s keeping you up.” She pauses and looks at me. “I’m presuming it isn’t pain-related?” When I shake my head ‘no’, she continues. “How are you handling all of this? It’s a huge change from where you planned to be and so much work.”
I stop and think, rolling around what’s been in my head since I woke up from the surgery. Should I have just taken the pill stash hidden in my apartment and avoided the whole mess? Saved people a lot of trouble? “I’m not sure that I picked the right choice.”
“Okay. Do you plan on changing your mind?”
I think about it. Could I take all those pills now? “I’ve considered it…but no. I don’t think I can now. I’m too invested, people are too invested.”
“What do you think the outcome will be in the end? Will you walk? Wheelchair?”
I flinch at her words. They are too raw. Too direct. Everyone has been tiptoeing around me, even when my PT people are killing me, they are achingly polite. This stings but I lean into it. I need this, I think.
“I have no idea and it is making me fucking nuts.” I smack the armrest on my wheelchair and the reverberating pain in my hand is sharp but I don’t care. “Before I had this surgery I had pain, I h
urt all the time and I thought I would do anything to have it gone.” I grip my knee in my hand and it’s the same light pressure I’ve felt for the last couple of weeks. “But this feeling nothing is killing me.”
I start crying and Dr. Shrieve’s eyebrows shoot up. In all our sessions I never cried, never broke down and now I can’t seem to stop.
“My body is my enemy. The bombers were my besties compared to the shit my body puts me through on a daily basis. I can’t walk. I barely have any feeling from the waist down and I can’t even pee by myself.” I suck in a huge breath and continue, saying the thing that wakes me and won’t let me go. “Everyone keeps telling me that the girl who won all those medals can beat this but what they don’t realize is that those goddam medals belong to a girl who should have died along with Aaron and everyone else.”
The silence is profound but she keeps her gaze on mine as I gulp, and sniffle, and hiccup my way through the worst of it. And when I begin my descent, she gets up from her seat, walks over to the vanity and picks up the box of tissues. She returns to me and hands it over but instead of going back to her seat, she kneels down and takes my hand in hers.
“You are not that girl. A vital part of her did die that day right next to Aaron and that’s okay. It’s okay to be mad about it and to resent it and to wish like hell you could have her back.” She squeezes my hand and I cling to her like she’s a life raft because fuck knows I feel like I’m drowning. “But not all of her is gone. The part that makes you a fighter is there. I’ve read your medical records from that day and you should have been dead. There is no reason you are sitting here today except that you are a fighter, down deep in your overly competitive, pain-in-the-ass bones, you fight until you can’t get up again.” And then she smiles at me and pats my hand as she rises. “What I don’t understand is why you think this should be easy or you should know the outcome. Learning to break every world record was not easy and every time you got on that block, you had no idea how the race would end. Get in position, wait for the buzzer and jump off the damn block. Be that girl.”
Salvation (Nashville Nights #2) Page 14