Physical Therapy (9 page)

I looked around, saying nothing. He got out a key, still on the tag from the realtor"s office, and unlocked the door. When it opened, it was both better and worse 46

Z. A. Maxfield

than I thought. The place was full of junk. Things were stashed in boxes and left littering the ground. There were cobwebs everywhere, and it would need new flooring, paint, and window coverings, not to mention a thousand little repairs. From where I stood, I could see that the kitchen windows were both broken, so heaven only knew what kind of animals had made their home here. On the other hand, on the positive side, it didn"t smell like anything had died.
Recently
.

“You are out of your mind,” I told him.

“It"s a project.” He turned to me, his blue eyes serious. “I
need
a project. One that isn"t me.”

“When you go back to school, you"ll have to find tenants. Do you want to be an absentee landlord?” I walked farther into the house, down the hall, and toward the bedrooms. The first bedroom was tiny but had a nice large window that looked out on the front of the house. There was a full bath after that with orange- and cream-colored linoleum. I suspected asbestos.

“I"m not going back to school,” Ken said, coming up behind me as I looked at the dirty mirror.

“What?” I tugged on his shoulder to stop him so he"d talk to me. “You have to finish. What kind of job can you get without—”

“I did finish. I was in my last semester when we had the accident. Since then, I"ve finished all my projects and completed the courses. I graduated with my class in June, but… Well, they cut me some slack, and it"s all on the record and official now.”

“So you"re going to stay in St. Nacho"s and work? What are you going to do?”

“I don"t know. Teach probably. I"ll have to get a teaching certificate. In the meantime, I could just get a job. My parents still want to support me, but…” He shifted around, and I followed him to the master bedroom. Lavender, with big cabbage-flower wallpaper on the walls fairly assaulted us when we entered.

“Have mercy,” I sighed. “This goes great with the used appliance lawn art.” Ken barked a laugh and oh,
shit
, how I liked the sound of it. I was so glad to be the guy who made it happen. “You"ll love the living room; it has a sweet fireplace. The kitchen isn"t big enough to hold a spaghetti pot.”

“Can you afford to buy a house?” I asked. “Think about if you don"t have a roommate, or if one stiffs you.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “For the
rent
.”

“Ah. Well, I have money from the insurance settlement, and that will make my monthly mortgage just about…nothing.” His eyes lit up for a minute. “Did I mention this house is going dirt cheap? There"s still the cost of fixing it up. I"ll play the invalid card and get lots of small-town compassion in the form of free labor.” Little by little, his enthusiasm persuaded me. There was no reason that he shouldn"t buy himself a house if he wanted one. No reason he shouldn"t want to fix it up and live there or rent it or sell it or burn it down. We walked to the living room together, and something scuttled across the floor. Lots of somethings. Burning the place Physical Therapy

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down started looking like a really good idea. I tried hard to keep myself from reacting, but my skin was crawling so I shuddered.

“Yeah, it"s…lived-in.”

“I wonder if it"s haunted too. That"d be like hitting the real estate trifecta, wouldn"t it? It"s falling down around your ears, it"s infested with…crawling things…and when you least expect it, the walls will drip blood.”

He watched my face intently. “You
like
it!” he said after a second or so, looking triumphant. “You like it and you"re covering it up with disdain.”

“How could you tell?” I turned away. I was still trying for disdain, but if the truth were to be told, I actually almost cracked a smile. “The place is completely hopeless.”

“So am I,” he said softly, coming up so quietly behind me that I wasn"t even aware of it until I felt his breath on my neck. His solid presence at my back sparked a host of erotic images in my mind that made my breathing quicken. Yeah.
Yes
. If he"d put his arms around me and pushed me to the ground I"d have gone willingly. When he spoke again, I got goose bumps along my arms. “But I think you like me too.”
I froze
. “That probably isn"t a good thing.”

“It is for the house,” he pointed out. “It is for me.” I stepped away on the pretext of studying the fireplace closely, leaning over and tugging at the vent in the flue to see if it worked. Things I didn"t want to even think about fell onto my arm, feathers and great balls of fur and dust, and I jumped back in dismay, knocking Ken off his feet. We both landed on the hard floor, and I hope it was my imagination that I heard a kind of crisp, sickening exoskeleton crunch sound under my ass.

“If I don"t get out of here right this second I"m going to start screaming,” I said.

“Is that a no?” I stood and pulled him to his feet. He caught his balance with what I suspected was a manufactured excuse to touch me, grabbing my shoulders and pulling me flush against him. For a minute I was too stunned to react; by the time I got my bearings, his hard cock was as obvious as mine. I hung there, caught between two impulses, grinding against him, all the while eyeing the open front door as my only means of escape. When he lowered his head to kiss me, I thought of a thousand reasons why I wasn"t good enough for him and broke contact, leaving him puzzled, I guess, in the middle of the living room alone.

Once I was back in the fresh air, I took a deep breath. I wasn"t going to mention what happened if he didn"t, but I wasn"t going to be able to stop thinking about it either. He maneuvered down the porch steps carefully, and not for the first time I wanted to call the irony police and turn myself in. Ken was hot. He burned me up with those blue eyes of his and then played in the ashes.
I was totally fucked
.

“Ken, I think moving in with you is the worst idea I"ve ever heard for a lot of different reasons. And that house is a total nightmare.” 48

Z. A. Maxfield

“So the answer is no?” I hated the way he didn"t look me in the eye. I wanted him to trust me. I wanted him to laugh again. I wanted to answer all his questions, both spoken and implicit, with a resounding
yes
.

“I want to think about this. It"s still a long way from even being yours. You need to think carefully about it as well. I can"t promise I"ll move in here with you. I can"t promise that in the long run you"ll want me to. But
if
you get this house,
if
you move in, and
if
you ask me to, you have my word that I"ll work as hard as I can, as often as I can, to help you make it habitable.”

“Promise me you won"t sign a lease with anyone else in the meantime,” Ken said suddenly. “At least give us a chance.”

“Us? You and the Norman Bates Motel there?”

“Yes. We"re both fixer-uppers and we both need friends.” We stood looking back at the dismal little place for a minute. I sneaked a look at his face. In profile it was strong and resigned and hopeful. He clenched his jaw, and I could practically see the wheels turning as he made plans in his head. This was Ken attacking a college course or hitting a slider or climbing the tallest mountain in the world. I knew right then he could do anything, and I would probably kill to be by his side when he did it.

“I am your friend.” I put my hand on his arm, just below the place where his crutch cinched his forearm. The muscle was rock hard, and I felt a little thrill hit me, traveling from my fingers right to my dick, as his muscle flexed when he began to walk.

“That"s a start.” He headed for the car. “I"ll make all the necessary calls. You just get a tool belt, preferably one of those leather jobs that hangs low on your hips, a hard hat, and a pair of work boots.” He unlocked the car door and tossed his crutches into the backseat. As he climbed up next to me, he turned on that impossibly engaging smile again. “And it would be twice as nice if that"s all you wear.”

“You haven"t even told your family yet, have you?”

“Nope.”

“Then don"t start counting your naked handymen yet. I have a feeling you"ll run into more opposition there than you"ve bargained for.”

“Probably. But it"s a funny thing. Sometimes when you feel like you have nothing left, you also realize you have nothing to lose.” He pulled up a few minutes later in front of Day-Use and just let his SUV idle to let me out.

“You can always lose more,” I said grimly, but I put my hand on his. “I
am
your friend.”

“I can"t tell you how glad I am to hear it,” he said sincerely. His eyes told me he was thinking about kissing me again. “Really, really glad.” I left the car, and he pulled out of the parking lot. He didn"t look back or wave, but for some reason I watched him until he was completely out of sight. It was hard to think clearly when I looked at his face; it was always such a mixture of hope and dismay, dignity and playful self-deprecation. Sometime, I wanted to ask Izzie about his state of Physical Therapy

49

mind. I wanted to ask Izzie about a lot of things. Had she known he considered himself gay? Is that why she had told him I was? Was she matchmaking?

I went back into the gym and went right to work, giving the men"s bathroom a good disinfecting and wipe down. I was using bleach wipes on the weight benches when a group of firefighters came in to work out with free weights.

I left them to it and looked for Izzie to see if there was anything specific she wanted me to do. I found her in her tiny office working on her laptop. As I got closer, I heard the unmistakable sounds of the game Portal.

“Giving the brain a workout?” I asked.

“If you must know—” She broke off and stared at me for a whole minute before I looked behind me to see if there was something there.

“What?” I asked her.

“What, what?” She was still staring.

“You"re staring at me.” I crossed my arms. “Are you trying to freak me out?

"Cause it"s working.”

“Of course not,” she said, humming a little. “I was just enjoying your aura.”

“Right, my aura.” I still wasn"t ready to admit that I believed in such things.

“You are currently emanating a rich cerulean blue with spikes of vibrant pink. Just so you know.”

“And what does that mean?” I asked, neatly caught by curiosity in general and a certain tendency to believe the worst, specifically.

“I don"t know. It"s a color combination I often associate with people falling in love.

And oddly enough”—she looked back at her computer and grinned like a stupid person—“I saw it just today on someone else… What was his name again? Oh yeah.

Ken Ashton.”

50

Z. A. Maxfield

Chapter Eight

I had the first of my clandestine cop massages at four. Jim Lundgren turned out to be a really nice, really stressed-out human being who groaned a little as I worked on muscles that felt as hard as petrified wood. We didn"t talk at all, which was just fine with me, and I put him to sleep at one point in the foot massage, so I continued to work, eventually waking him up as I dug around in the large muscles on his back. After an hour, he got up looking fuzzy-headed and ready for another long nap. I made him drink a whole bottle of water, and he tipped me really well.

As I watched him go, I wondered if he would see me differently if he knew about my past. I felt antsy, uneasy in my skin. I could never understand why, especially on days like this when I felt almost happy, I wanted to turn my back on everything and move on. It made me see how my friend Cooper, who for years felt the same guilt over the accident we shared that I did, could spend almost four years never staying in any one place longer than three or four days. Cooper worked through his guilt eventually because he came to realize, as I did, that the responsibility was mine, that he only shared the awful memories.

Cooper is still my best friend, someone who never turned his back on me, even when I deserved it, even when I tried to shift the blame to him. Now I was afraid to call him, to tell him I was in town.

When I thought about Nacho"s Bar where he worked in the kitchen, it was with such a wave of longing to see his face it almost made me sick. I had two more appointments and I"d be getting out at about eight thirty. If Izzie didn"t have anything planned, I"d walk back to the hotel and take my car down to the beach and tell Cooper I was here.

I hoped he might be glad to see me. I tried to tell myself that it certainly wasn"t because Cooper was the only man I"d ever really loved. That suddenly, inexplicably, I wanted to hear his voice.

Physical Therapy

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I told myself it wasn"t because someone else was making me think about love.

I snapped myself out of it. Izzie was the one talking about love, wasn"t she? Not me. I just wanted to help. It would do me good to remind myself that feeling more than compassion for someone in the midst of their pain could be confusing and disorienting.

It was the infamous thirteenth step in a twelve-step program, the reason behind quickie marriages, quicker divorces, Liza and David, and Larry and Liz.

Most importantly, it was the reason for the trail of broken hearts and broken promises that leave people who are physically and emotionally at their lowest ebb even further down on themselves than they were to begin with. I"d attended at least four weddings with the theme “You Raise Me Up,” after which people threw each other down with such abandon I feared for their lives. I had avoided this by not allowing myself to get involved with anyone except for work, but now that I was here in St.

Nacho"s, I thought it might be time to try out, if not love, then the kind of deep friendship I imagined I could form with Cooper and Shawn. The kind I was trying to show Ken.

But isn"t it always the way that you make a plan and something happens to blow it all to hell? Ken Ashton, bigger than life and twice as fucking hot, waited for me outside of Day-Use when I left that evening.