Текст книги "Revealed to Him"
Автор книги: Jen Frederick
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
CHAPTER TWELVE
NATALIE
I read the note for the umpteenth time. Call me.
Is he even serious? I feel like there’s some hidden message in the seven words on the page. Maybe it’s an anagram for “You’re the craziest loon I’ve ever met. Stay away.”
My mind is sluggish today. Oliver called Dr. Terrance, who ordered me a whole new cocktail of drugs and put off any attempts of mine to go outside for another couple of weeks. After Dr. Terrance chewed me out for opening the door to a stranger, someone he hadn’t met and approved of, Oliver showed up with the new prescriptions and wouldn’t leave until I’d taken my recommended dosage. Poor Oliver. He tries his best to cope with me, not calling Dr. Terrance until the last minute. Even Oliver grapples with Dr. Terrance’s need to vet everyone in my life and every action I take, as evidenced by Oliver hiring Jake without preapproval.
I’m not even sure what my biggest fear is anymore. Is it really breaking down in the middle of the subway or is it never being able to leave my apartment again?
I haven’t written in two days, just sat on the couch or laid on the floor near the French doors, looking outside without the lights on. Last night a dark car slid into a parking space and sat there for a long time. I stared at it, wondering who was inside, wishing it was Jake. But eventually it drove away. Probably a tourist—few people in the city own cars.
I probably should have been freaked out by it, but I was mostly sad it left. I’d felt like there was at least one person in the city still awake other than me.
Daphne has sent me a dozen unhappy emails about my lack of progress on the manuscript. I don’t need her to remind me of my looming, already-missed-once deadline, but my creativity is stifled when I take the drugs.
I can’t write emotion if I don’t feel it.
Call me.
The note is the only thing that interests me and really, what do I have to lose by calling him? He’s already seen me at my dismal worst. If he acts embarrassed and unhappy, I’ll hang up and that will be one more thing I’ve sacrificed at the altar of my anxiety. It’s eaten everything else that is decent and good. Why not Jake?
The phone rings so many times I nearly hang up.
“Tanner here.”
The sharp bite of his tone throws me, but I’ve called and he answered so I might as well plunge ahead.
“Beck here,” I mimic.
“Natalie.” His voice drops into a low, rumbly tenor. Comforting and sexy. I want to wrap myself up in that voice. “How are you doing?”
“Hungry,” I joke. Although it’s not entirely a joke. Now that I think about it, I haven’t eaten anything in a while. I lower the phone from my ear to check the time. Holy crap. I haven’t eaten anything in seven hours. I’ve just sat on my ass staring at the blank wall across from my sofa. “I’m sorry I missed our dinner date. I could be eating Chinese leftovers right now.”
“Maybe I would’ve taken the rest home with me,” he laughingly suggests. “I like leftovers too.”
“I don’t believe you would have. If you bring it to my house, you have to leave it here.”
“Is that a Natalie Beck rule?”
“I think Emily Post says it. If you are visiting, bring lots of food and leave it.”
“I’m taking notes.”
I love talking to him. Love it so much. I could talk to him forever. I stretch out on the sofa and pull a throw over myself. Snuggling down, I pretend he’s in the room and we’re having that date—just two normal people hanging out after dinner. Would he allow me to put my feet in his lap? Some guys are adamantly against feet. My last boyfriend, if I could really call him that, had an anti-foot fetish. He didn’t even like to see toes and was freaked out whenever I’d run my feet along his calf. Suffice it to say, we never played footsie. Not that that was what turned me on, but his aversion to my bare piggies kind of hurt my feelings.
And like I’d turn Jake down if he was anti-foot. I’ve already concluded that he must have some terrible personality trait that has not yet revealed itself to me. Like maybe he has bad personal hygiene and he smells terrible. Maybe he clips his toenails in bed.
Whatever it is, I am down with it. Because he wanted me to call him even after I freaked out about the clown. And it wasn’t just a courtesy gesture, because he could have made an excuse to hang up by now, but instead he’s talking to me, joking about our missed date.
He can have bad breath, leave the toilet seat up, and I’ll buy lots of paper towels to place under his feet. Hell, I’ll give him pedicures.
“I was worried when I didn’t hear from you,” he says softly.
“I’m drugged up,” I admit. “Oliver called Dr. Terrance. He was cursing because he told you to do it and you refused.”
“He said you had a love/hate relationship with your therapist. I wasn’t going to call someone to your place you didn’t fully want there.”
“What else did you look at while you were here?” I ask. He’d seen it all except for my overly froufrou bedroom. I wait for him to remark about the girliness. It’s emasculating, Oliver told me once.
“Your bedroom is very pink,” he admits.
“Would that turn you off? Affect your performance negatively?” I tease.
He chuckles, though, apparently not offended or turned off by my question. “My manhood can withstand a little pink. I grunted a lot this morning.”
“That’s nice to know.” My cheeks are pink to match the decor, part in embarrassment over the other night and part delight. I burrow under the covers, where I can pretend that we’re talking in person. His next sentence surprises me.
“We need to reschedule our dinner.”
It’s a joke. It’s so clearly a joke so I respond in kind. “Yeah, tomorrow night.” I force a light laugh.
“I can do tomorrow.”
“It’s too bad you can’t come. Wait, what?” Did he just say tomorrow?
“How about tomorrow night?” he repeats.
“I, uh, I don’t know.” I can’t process his question right now because the thought of opening the door again, not knowing what is on the other side, is terrifying so I avoid it, but I can’t have him hang up on me. I change the topic hastily. “What’s your office like?”
He accepts my avoidance, just like he accepts every weird thing about me. “It’s very boring. White walls, gray carpet. It’s on the bottom of my townhouse, the garden level and the main level. I live in the top three with one of my sisters, Sabrina, who will be graduating from Columbia this year.”
“What’s your other sister’s name?” I want to know everything about him.
“Megan. She’s thirty-two. My parents had Megan and me a couple years apart. Sabrina was a late-in-life surprise for them. You?”
He’s thirty-four or thirty-five then. Nearly a decade older than me.
“Oliver’s like a brother to me. My parents died in a twenty-car pileup when I was five. The roads were icy and a truck on the interstate did a three-sixty, took a bunch of cars out, and caused a huge accident. They were coming home from a lecture at the university. My dad’s sister took me and raised Oliver and me together. He’s only two years older than me.”
“So you’re twenty-six?”
“You know how old Oliver is?” I guess he’s as good at math as I am.
“Since he won the Super Bowl, I think that everyone in the city not only knows how old he is, but how much he weighs, how tall he is, and what he bench-presses.”
“Good point. Are you a fan?” Maybe that’s it. Maybe he’s a huge Oliver Graham fan and he’s going to try to get to Oliver through me. He’d be disappointed to know that the most I can offer is a signed jersey, and I tell him so. “I don’t get free tickets to the game. Oliver’s given up on me attending so he gives them to other people. I could get you a signed jersey, though.”
I try hard to keep the disappointment out of my voice.
He’s quiet for a heartbeat, maybe two. “This may sound like I’m bragging, but I have a good friend who has a box at Cobras Stadium and I’ve got a freestanding invitation, and while I’m a fan, I think I’m a little old for a signed jersey. Besides, your cousin offered me one when we first met and I turned it down.”
“Oh.” There is a subtle rebuke in there, as if I should know better.
“Honey, are you trying to find something wrong with me?”
“No, I’m . . . oh Lord, this sounds pathetic and I know it’s going to sound worse when I say the words out loud, but I don’t understand why you’re even talking to me.”
“Tell me what flaws you’ve given me.” His voice warms me like a hot chocolate on a snowy day.
“No.” I’m not saying even one of them.
“I’m not going to be offended.” He’s having trouble hiding the amusement in his voice, I can tell.
“But I’ll be embarrassed. Or more embarrassed. If you could see me now, I’m rivaling a tomato in color.”
His voice drops at least a pitch. “I’d like to see how red you get. Do you blush all the way to your toes?”
If I wasn’t before, I am now. I’m hot, and not from shame, but from his suggestive tone and words.
“I, ah, I’m very red.” God, I suck at this phone-flirting thing but he . . . seems pretty adept at it. “Have you done this before? This, um, phone thing? You’re better at it than I am.”
He chuckles. “You’re doing just fine. But, yes, to answer your question, when I was deployed, I used Skype and emails to stay in contact with an old girlfriend.”
“How old?” I ask, instantaneously jealous over this nameless, faceless woman.
“In age or time since our separation? We broke up a few years into my deployment. I haven’t dated seriously since. How about you?”
“Not since Adam Masterson. He was a senior programmer for Saturnalia. I worked with him every day and after a couple of years, he seemed better than being celibate. We didn’t even date. We just kind of . . . fell into bed with each other. Neither of us were heartbroken when it ended.”
“My heart wasn’t broken either,” he says softly, as if to reassure me that he isn’t holding out for a rekindling of any lost love.
“Did you like it? The phone stuff? The Skyping?” I truly want to know. Can anyone be fulfilled by this? I suppose they must to some extent, or cam girls and 1-900 numbers wouldn’t exist. But with someone like Jake, I’d think he’d have a dozen better offers than sitting at home having a virtual relationship with a shut-in.
“It was better than nothing.”
I’m one step up from nothing at least, I reassure myself. Curious, I ask a question that has sat in the back of my mind since the first time we exchanged messages. “Why do you want to know what the girl is wearing?”
“It grounds you. Gives you a visual. Men are very visual.”
“But the person on the phone could be lying.”
His text message—which I’ve read repeatedly—comes back to me.
And if you’re fully clothed, please feel free to lie and say nothing.
“Doesn’t matter. If you tell me you have your hand down your panties and your shirt pulled up to show off your spectacular breasts, that’s what I’m seeing regardless of what you’re really doing or wearing.”
I lift the blanket and look at my breasts. They’ve flattened out a bit now that I’m on my back, but my nipples are hard. I wouldn’t categorize them as spectacular, but I haven’t had complaints. They’re just . . . breasts. Maybe if he was holding them they would feel spectacular. I tingle at the idea.
“I’m too honest. Like right now I’m wearing jogging pants and an old T-shirt.”
“And nothing else?”
“Well, underwear.”
“Hmmm.” His hum enters my ear from the cell phone and shoots straight between my legs. I squeeze my thighs together once as if to catch his touch and hold it there.
“You?”
“Jeans, T-shirt. Gray socks. Boots.”
I want to know more about this phone sex thing, yet what he’s wearing doesn’t interest me. I guess I want to know what he’s doing or rather what he would do with me.
“So you just say sexy things to each other and then hang up?”
“I had more involvement than that.”
“Like what? You had the phone-sex pillow? I saw that on the Internet once. You programmed it to shake or something when you wanted to alert your long-distance partner to some activity back home. I’m not entirely certain how a vibrating pillow does anything for anyone.”
“No.” He sounds a bit as if he’s strangling on a laugh he doesn’t want to release. He clears his throat and answers frankly, “I’d jack off.”
“Oh.”
The image of him sitting with his legs spread and his big hand around his big dick appears immediately. He’d handle himself with sure strokes and his chest would heave as he took big gulps of air. But his eyes would be pinned to mine as if we were magnetically pulled together.
“You still there, Natalie?”
“Yes.” I lick my dry lips. “Just, um, visualizing it. It’s been a long time.”
His voice gets lower, quieter. “Tell me what you’ve been missing.”
He must read the yearning in my voice, but he doesn’t ask if I’m lonely, because he knows I am. So instead he asks what I want.
“Everything. I miss just the cuddling, but I guess a lot of guys aren’t into that. Just lying around for hours, wrapped up in each other.”
“What else do you want?”
You.
“Touch. The warmth of a palm on my knee.” I breathe in, once and then another time, trying to regain some control. I’m breathless and anxious but not panicked. The need for reassurance is strong. I hate that I’m so vulnerable, but I need to accept my weaknesses. That’s one thing Dr. Terrance has impressed upon me and truthfully it works. Other, more experienced women might be able to play coy but I can’t. Uncertainty generates panic for me, and I’d rather ask a dumb question and be shot down than not know what is going on. Bluntly I ask, “What’s happening between us?”
“We’re getting to know each other better.”
“I wasn’t expecting this,” I admit. I rub my neck, imagining that it is his palm on my chest and his weight against my body, his flesh pushing into mine.
“True for me as well,” he says. “But not all surprises are bad. I’m a big believer in the whole concept of things happening for a reason.”
“What about your loss? What was the reason behind that?” I hope it doesn’t come across as snotty. I am genuinely curious.
“I saved a friend,” he answers immediately. “And just so you don’t think I’m bragging, I’ll tell you it was pure accident. If he’d have jumped out of the Humvee before me, he’d have been hit, and he didn’t have the resources like I did. I’m pretty fortunate that I’m alive. I have a great family and a healthy bank account that allowed me access to things other folks don’t have.”
I can’t respond right away because my throat is thick with emotion. Of course he views himself as blessed by his circumstances, but what he won’t ever acknowledge is how he’s embraced his losses and healed both in body and spirit. In reality, his good life is due to his hard work at achieving that spiritual equilibrium that has eluded me for so long. But his courage inspires me.
“I’m scared of many things,” I whisper into the phone. “But not of you.”
“Good. I’ll never give you a reason to be afraid of me. I understand where you are coming from, Natalie. If your only contact with me is over the phone for a while, we’ll get creative.” His throaty words thrill me. “I suspect writers are really good at being inventive.”
It seems impossible, but this man appears to be telling me that he’s willing to date me over the phone for as long as it takes for me to open the door. With someone who fainted at the sight of a clown. How is this even possible?
“So tomorrow night? I’ll bring the Chinese food with me and leave you the extra food. How do things get delivered?”
Trying to stop myself from smiling, trying to stop my heart from fluttering, I answer as evenly as possible. “The doorman calls me, tells me he’s going to bring them up. He sets it by my door. He rings my bell and I wait to hear the elevator ding as he leaves, and then I open it. A lot of stuff Oliver brings up.”
“Okay, then, tomorrow that’s what we’ll do.”
“What if I can’t open the door?”
“Then you don’t open it.” His response is matter-of-fact, as if he doesn’t care that our date might be aborted because I can’t even twist a doorknob.
“How can that be okay for you?”
“Why don’t you let me worry about what’s okay for me, and you worry about you?”
“Okay,” I say, and the last syllable is swallowed by a hiccup. Tears are forming. They aren’t unhappy tears, but tears at this man’s amazing generosity. “Excuse me. There’re onions everywhere in my apartment.”
“Take your time.”
“I’m really having a hard time keeping it together. Because of, you know, the onions.”
His reply is full of understanding. “I’ll call you tomorrow, sweetheart. Have sweet dreams.”
“Thanks.” I manage to hold it together until he hangs up, and then I roll over and cry the happiest tears I’ve felt in a long time.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JAKE
“What kind of progress are we making on the note and the clown messenger?” I ask my tech guy, Devon Zachs.
Zachs’s inky black hair is stuck up in fifty different directions, and from the number of crumpled potato chip bags littering his desk, I’m wondering when he last left the cellar office.
He claimed this space when I first opened, jokingly saying he planned to drink all the wine from my nonexistent collection. The space was originally designed to house hundreds of bottles of wine and liquor. We tore down the shelves and put in storage units and a bunker that held all our electronic equipment as well as a storage locker full of enough ammunition to arm a small militia. Too many years in the army.
He taps his pen against the far left monitor in his bank of five large screens. “The note is a nonstarter. It’s plain white paper used in millions of offices around the world. It’s printed with an inkjet printer, which probably points to home use. I don’t know what type of ink. We can get that analyzed, but it’s probably just standard ink.
“The clown messenger information is more interesting. The email address that was used to pay him comes from an unverified PayPal account. We can try to hack into it, but hacking individual accounts is a lot harder than a system-wide hack, if you can believe that. We’d need to use a bit of social engineering, and we don’t have enough on the account other than the username dd1995dd. 1995 is an interesting choice, because it’s kind of a bland year. Could be his birthday. I tried a few passwords based on a 1995 date of birth, but came up empty. We don’t really have the computer processing power for hacking, though it’s not like we couldn’t get it. We’ve just never done it in the past. But as we both know, that would be illegal. And given that it’s a financial institution, the penalties could be quite heavy.”
Zachs looks unperturbed and almost a little excited about the idea of hacking into a bank. “What are our other options?” I ask.
“I set a tracer on the email. Maybe he’s left a review about bad service in the city or something. We’ll see. People leave unintentional tracks all over the place.”
“You think it’s a he?”
He furrows his brow. “I guess so. What’s he get out of it anyway?”
I tend to agree with him. “He likes the power, the feeling that he can make her afraid at any time, which is why I want you to look into Joshua James Terrance. He’s a psychiatrist. His offices are on Madison and East 59th Street.”
“So you think he’s the asshole?”
“I don’t know. But it’s someone who knows her very well, and currently her circle of people is small.”
“What about the ex-boyfriend?”
“Our tail on him doesn’t think he’s the guy. We can’t find any connection between him and the clown.”
“If it’s the doc, man, that’s so wrong. You make her sick so you can keep treating her? That’s fucked up.”
“I’ll have the boyfriend tail take a look at his other patients. See if we can’t identify them and then see if they’ve made any harassment reports. Maybe we can nail him on pattern and practice.”
“On it, boss.”
I leave Zachs to his work, silently berating myself for not asking more questions instead of flirting with her. This is why you don’t get involved with clients. But backing away now isn’t going to happen. I spent the night hard thinking of her in the ratty clothes she described with all that smooth golden skin underneath. I can tell she wasn’t ready, not ready to open the door and not ready to have dirty sex with me over the phone. But I am. Fuck, I am.
I can’t stop thinking about her. I’ve never talked to anyone on the phone so long. Not my mother, not my sisters, not Laura Severson, the girl I dated for four years before I signed up to join the army. We’d made it two years into my deployment before I broke it off. The man she thought she’d fallen in love with didn’t exist anymore. I’d changed from a snot-nosed kid with an Ivy League degree to someone who felt more comfortable sleeping in a ditch than at home in his parents’ multimillion-dollar townhouse.
We’d done those things I’d told Natalie about—the Skype sex, the phone sex. It’d been good. Shit, after days and nights of seeing nothing but the grimy faces of my fellow soldiers and acres of dust, any slight reveal of a boob or ass would’ve gotten me hard back then. She only had to smile or toss her $600 salon-colored, wheat-blonde hair over her shoulder to get me ready. Until it didn’t work anymore. Until I began to dread those phone calls, those Skype sessions, the visits with her back home.
She’d wonder aloud when I was getting out, suggesting various investment firms that would love to have me.
We’d have sex on those visits and I’d wonder how soon I could leave. And the answer was not soon enough. She felt like she couldn’t break up with a patriot, so I did it for her. I was the asshole who left her and she could move on without guilt. I was glad to hear she had gotten married.
At the bottom of the stairs, Victoria greets me. “Jake, do you have a minute?”
I open my mouth to say yes, and then I recall Ian’s warning from last night. The tentative smile on her face signals that business is probably not what she intends to talk to me about. Suddenly I remember I have an appointment.
“Not right now. Just leave me a message.” Victoria has dyslexia and her hastily scribbled notes are a conglomeration of letters and little pictures that only Ian understands. Her partner writes the reports and Victoria leaves me voice messages. In my office, I grab my jacket, phone, and keys.
“It will only take a minute,” she says.
A highly uncomfortable minute, I think.
“Sorry, leave a message.” I brush by her, but she’s dogged and follows me out to the car.
“You can’t escape me this easily. I work with you. I know where you live.” She points upstairs.
“But I have a car so I can escape.”
“You’re going to have a bitch of a time parking.”
“Maybe so.” I move her to the side and unlock the black four-door Audi A8 that she eyes with undisguised interest. Ian had been teaching her how to drive and she’s developed a new interest in cars—a good replacement after she’d traded her cycling shoes in for a private investigator’s license.
I didn’t lie to Victoria, though, because I did have an appointment to see Dr. Crist. It occurred to me after the game that he might have some insight on Natalie. I worry that her doctor is doing her more harm than good. There are good therapists and then there are assholes. I served with assholes and I served with good people. No organization or group of people is devoid of the dreck of humanity, the ones who like to kill for shits and giggles or the ones who are so irresponsible, they’ll shoot themselves in the face by accident. Problem is that sometimes you have difficulty discerning who’s the good guy and who’s the fuckstick.
The tree-lined street where Isaiah’s office is located is already full of cars. Victoria was right. I probably should’ve taken a cab or a car service, but I prefer to drive. I don’t like to be dependent on anyone for anything, including my own transportation. I maneuver the car into a parking spot two blocks away, but halfway to Isaiah’s office, my leg begins to ache—part of the drawback of getting up early and staying out late with a prosthesis.
I climb the steps of the brownstone and press the buzzer, announcing myself.
His secretary releases the lock. Sylvia has been with Isaiah for as long as I’ve known him, and she never looks like she’s aged a day.
“Dr. Crist is running late. May I get you something to drink?”
“No, thank you, ma’am,” I answer. I take a seat to stretch out my leg and give my thigh and knee a quick rubdown. I’m still squeezing it when Dr. Crist comes out.
“Looks like you’re not taking care of yourself,” he says in his deep baritone. Crist is slightly under six feet, but his wide shoulders create an imposing presence.
I rise and give my leg a little shake. “Just spending a little too much time on my leg. Thanks for throwing me under the bus the other night.”
He grins. “I thought you’d enjoy that. Come on in. How’s business?”
“Good. I’ve got more clients than I have employees.” I decide against sitting. Sometimes the burning or ache goes away if I walk it off, other times I just have to live with it. It’s the price an amputee pays for being mobile. I don’t know of one person who is pain-free with their prosthetic. At some point during the day, it starts to ache, but if you embrace the pain, it can be a sweet reminder of what you survived. “I’m guessing it’s the same for you. Sylvia sighed a lot before she told me I could see you at ten.”
“Unfortunately,” he admits, “there is no end of customers. The demand for your type of services may always be high.”
Isaiah’s office takes up almost half of the floor, and one side is lined with books. There are fiction, nonfiction, academic texts, and popular self-help books that rest side by side on the shelves. Toward the end, by the French doors leading to a garden terrace where Isaiah sometimes holds his sessions, I even find a set of Natalie’s books. I pull the first one out. Don’t Sleep by M. Kannan.
I’d have to ask her some time how she came up with her pseudonym. I hold out the book. “You plan to see the movie?”
Isaiah settles behind his desk and puts his feet up as I wander. “Opening night with my wife, I hope. You?”
“Yeah. Opening night,” I echo.
I wonder if Natalie would go or if that was one more thing that she would miss due to her illness. On the other side of the room are pictures. Some are of Isaiah when he was in the army, some when he was in college, but many are pictures of his family—old, deceased, and new. Isaiah lives the life dreamed by every soldier. His wife is literally a supermodel. She doesn’t model anymore but hosts her own reality-TV show. They have three beautiful children. In their wedding picture, the one that he has chosen to showcase in the middle of the wall, his tux pants are rolled up and you can see the titanium leg and blade that served as his foot that day. His wife is holding his hand tightly, her dress pulled up to reveal her perfect ankles and toned calves.
Isaiah is the perfect doctor to talk to if you’re a soldier who thinks his life is over. He will tell you it has just begun.
“I have a friend.” I put the book back in its place and turn around to lean against the shelves. “She suffers from severe anxiety. To the extent that she is housebound. She has difficulty even opening her door at times for fear of what unknown may be on the other side.”
“Anxiety disorders can be seriously debilitating, as you already know.”
I nod slowly, trying to explain the situation as best I can without breaking a confidence. “It’s been going on for at least three years. Recently she had gotten the courage to leave her apartment and go to places close by. A couple weeks ago she was able to make it to the subway entrance but not down in the tunnel. A subway attack was the trigger to her current situation.”
“Then something happened to impair that?”
“She received a threatening note. It disturbed her to the extent that a lot of the advancements that she had made were eradicated.”
He rocks in his big leather chair, the ancient brass ball bearings squeaking with each rotation. “And you want to know what? How to help her? I’ll certainly see her, if that’s what you’re asking. Although my schedule is full, I would make the exception for you.”
“She already sees someone her family trusts, but I don’t have a good vibe about him.”
Isaiah sighs and sits up. He folds his hands on his desk and peers at me over his glasses. “A patient’s relationship with their doctor is a unique one. Particularly when you’re talking about psychotherapy. Many people believe the type of therapy I do for soldiers is inappropriate and that in the long term, even if I solve some of their problems, they will suffer. And I’m sure that some of them would rather go back to the front line than enter my office.”
“She wants to get better and he’s holding her back,” I state plainly.
“How so?”
“Yesterday she told me she wanted to try some of her aversion therapy again and slowly start the process of going outside, but her doctor refuses and has told her to take a bunch of drugs that numb her out. His advice to her is to avoid new people and stay inside.”
“New people like yourself?”
I make an impatient noise and push away from the bookcase to stand near Isaiah’s desk. “He doesn’t know I exist. But her circle of acquaintances and friends is otherwise quite small. It’s two people—one she works for and one who is a family member. He’s tightening the bonds around her, corralling her into a spot where she only has a few contacts vetted by him. I don’t like that.”
The good doctor replies with an evenhanded tone, “Being patient has always been difficult for you. You wanted to be walking before you had the prosthetic on.”
“I did walk before I had the prosthetic.”
He laughs. “I remember you hobbling around the halls with your one crutch, nearly taking out nurses and aides with your recklessness.”
I felt my cheeks heat slightly. “It was one time. I almost ran into a nurse once.”
“Sit down, Jake. You’re looming.” He gestures toward one of the big leather chairs and I drop into it. “You care for this woman, which is wonderful, but I cannot tell you whether this other therapist is doing right or wrong without knowing more about your friend, without talking to her. It may be that she won’t respond well to aversion therapy at this point. My best advice to you is to listen to her. Be encouraging. Don’t force the issue. Everyone has their own timetable for healing.”
