Silent Threat

by Dana Marton

  Since he looked almost approachable for once, she asked, “Where do your parents live?”

  The light look disappeared. He stilled, as if having a silent debate with himself. Then he answered, his tone reluctant, as if every word cost him, as if he had to put a dollar into an imaginary jar for every syllable. “My mother lives in Illinois. My father is gone.”

  Father—suicide. How could she forget, even for a second? He’d thrown her off-kilter when he’d rolled her under him. He’d thrown her off-kilter by being the guy from the gas station. He’d taken her by surprise.

  She needed to get her act together. “Would you like to talk about your father?”

  A couple of seconds ticked by as Cole looked up the path. “He got sick from the chemicals in the First Gulf War. Became too much for him in the end.”

  She touched his hand so he would turn to her. “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “Makes my mother worry.”

  Annie could see why it would. According to the notes in his file, he’d spent a month refusing to leave his apartment—holed up with a cache of loaded weapons.

  Chances of suicide for a person who had a close family member who’d committed suicide were two to three times that of the general population—a risk factor therapists took seriously.

  “Are you now considering, or have you ever considered, suicide?”

  “No.” His tone was sure, his gaze straight.

  “Good.”

  He walked forward, too fast, but she didn’t tell him to slow down. She matched her steps to his and waited for him to look at her before she asked, “Where did you get the scar on your arm?”

  “RPG. Rocket-propelled grenade.” He kept going. “Freak accident. The insurgents didn’t know our position. They were shooting blindly at the hillside. A one-in-a-million chance that they’d hit us. I made it. My spotter didn’t.”

  “Spotter?”

  “Ryan watched my back. We’d split surveillance. A sniper can’t be looking through the scope all day. You don’t want eye fatigue just when the target pops up behind a window and you have a second to take the shot. A sniper and his spotter are like two halves of a whole.”

  “I’m sorry you lost Ryan.”

  He turned from her. “I picked the spot.”

  She touched his hand again. And when he looked at her, she said, “It’s not your fault.”

  “The regular shrink already said that. Your job is to tell me about trees and . . . I don’t know, bushes?” From the bottom of his troubled soul, he looked unhappy with the prospect, but at least his tone was no longer combative.

  She would take from him what she could get. Progress was a beautiful thing, even when it came in drips and dribbles.

  She eased her pace. “We should start by slowing down.”

  After a moment, he matched her speed, so they stayed side by side.

  Next step. “Notice the way the dirt feels under your feet, how great the air smells, how beautiful the trees are, how calm and majestic.”

  He snorted, and she could tell he was fighting not to roll his eyes as he asked, “Calm as opposed to what? All the other trees that run around like headless chickens?”

  She bit back a smile. He might be gruff, but he wasn’t without a sense of humor.

  For long minutes, they walked in silence. The peace of nature seeped into her body. The woods always had this effect on her. Hopefully, Cole would feel the same in time, but for right now, he was a bundle of pain and raw nerve endings. All his bluster was nothing but a coping mechanism.

  As they walked around a bend, passing under majestic oaks, she touched his hand. And when he looked at her, she asked, “How much of the birdsong can you hear?”

  “The high notes.”

  His voice vibrated with tension—his demeanor alert, his gaze constantly scanning the forest when she wasn’t talking. She hadn’t fully understood until now how his being deaf would affect his experience . . . how the sounds of the forest—the soothing rustling of the leaves, the birds, and the bugs serenading them—would be lost to him.

  They were approaching her favorite clearing, a spot she’d come to think of as her meadow. She liked lying down in the open space, closing her eyes and listening to the primal, unspoiled song of life. The earth’s music filled her up, cleansed her, wrapped her up in peace.

  The idea that Cole couldn’t have that tightened her throat. He didn’t have the worst disability among her patients—some of the men were missing multiple limbs—but deafness or blindness could be incredibly isolating. Definitely an extra challenge for ecotherapy. She’d read about it during her studies, but she hadn’t had a patient before with either problem. She would have to feel her way forward here.

  For Cole, the loss of therapeutic sound probably wasn’t even the most difficult part. He was a soldier. He’d been trained to watch and listen for danger. A soldier who didn’t hear someone sneak up on him was a dead soldier. How could he let his guard down, knowing he was, without a crucial sense, vulnerable? How on earth was she going to make him relax?

  No wonder he was so ready to fight, ready to strike first. The way he’d whirled on her, ready to attack, in the alley by the gas station made sense now. He’d been standing there with his back to the bathroom door and hadn’t heard her turn the lock, only caught the sudden movement behind him.

  You startled me, he’d said.

  He’d sure startled her right back.

  “I don’t think you holed up in your apartment with those weapons because you were thinking about suicide,” she told him.

  “Didn’t I just say that?”

  “I think you did it to feel safe. Back to the wall, gun in hand. That way nobody could creep up on you.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “I’m glad you were able to move past that phase. You could have just as easily developed debilitating anxiety and tipped over into agoraphobia.”

  Again, he looked at her with that peculiar expression, as if reassessing her.

  She would love to know the result of his assessment, but she didn’t ask. They walked in silence for a while.

  When they reached her meadow, Annie meant to walk past. The practice of quiet listening would have to be skipped for Cole. But then she changed her mind, strode into the calf-high grass, and turned to him. “I usually stop here.”

  “Is this when we hug a damn tree?” he grumbled. “Forget it. I’m drawing the line.”

  “We’ll work up to tree hugging.” She put some mock censure in her gaze. “You can’t just walk up to a stand of unsuspecting oaks and start touching. They’d think you’re getting fresh with them.”

  He was . . . not exactly smiling, not even thinking about smiling. But he was maybe thinking about someone he’d seen smiling at breakfast in the cafeteria.

  Annie decided to count it as another tiny drop of success.

  The grassy clearing was around a fifth of an acre. If she lay down in the middle, she would still be able to see a ring of treetops in her peripheral vision. She was happy anytime she could see, hear, or touch her natural surroundings. All three at once was perfect.

  She walked to the trampled spot where she usually communed with nature. “Why don’t you lie down, be still with the world for a while, and then tell me what you think.”

  He lay down on his back, feet apart, arms open to the side, spread-eagle. He looked up at the sky. Then at her. “Are you going to lie down?”

  “No.” She had an idea. “I’m going to step back and stand guard. You can close your eyes. Stay as long as you want. Breathe in the forest. You pay attention to that. I’ll pay attention to everything else.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You think you can lull me into some false sense of safety and sneak in some ecotherapy unnoticed. I know what you’re trying to do.”

  She wouldn’t fight him. “Good. I like smart people. Makes conversation so much more stimulating.”

  When he ignored her comment, she said, “We’re going to relax.”


  “I can’t relax.” He looked as if he was maybe swallowing a curse. “I stayed alive for six months as a POW by never, ever relaxing. Never, ever letting my guard down. If they caught me unprepared, if I gave them a single second to do that, they would have broken me. I wouldn’t have made it back.”

  The stark truth lay between them like a hand grenade with its pin pulled.

  For a moment, she let herself imagine his life in captivity. The images in her head were unbearable. She wanted to cry for him, but tears weren’t what he needed.

  “You’re not a POW anymore. That’s what you’re here to learn.” When the tension in the air refused to thin, she added, “I’m going to go to the end of the clearing and sit on a stump.”

  The turbulence in his eyes held her in place. Slowly, slowly, the tension ebbed. She could fill her lungs at last. Then she lost her breath all over again when he gestured to the ground at her feet. “Sit here.”

  His voice was studiously neutral. Too studiously. Which meant that for some reason this was important to him.

  Annie sat, cross-legged.

  He left his hand stretched out, moving an inch so the back of his hand touched her bare knee. She waited. If he put his hand on her, she’d turn it into a teaching moment about what was and wasn’t appropriate between them. But he didn’t make another move.

  He asked, “What do you hear?”

  “A bee buzzing around your toes. Birds are calling out overhead. I can hear Broslin Creek, faintly, in the distance.”

  The music of the earth filled her heart with joy and peace, and her chest ached at the thought that Cole couldn’t fully experience this sacred moment.

  “I like thinking,” she added, “that the forest sounds the same as it did millions of years ago, and it will sound the same millions of years from now. I find the endlessness comforting. It puts my small problems into perspective. Like looking at the stars at night and realizing that everything I worried about all day is utterly insignificant compared to the vastness of the universe.”

  He closed his eyes. A couple of ants crawled up his arm. She leaned forward to brush them off.

  Without opening his eyes, he said, “Leave them.”

  So she did.

  Sensory perception. He was missing one sense. Maybe the ants tickling his skin made up—in some small way—for the silence in his ears.

  If he was one of her other patients, she would be talking now, explaining the science behind ecotherapy. But with his eyes closed, she couldn’t do that. She let him rest, watching as the lines on his face smoothed out, as his breathing evened.

  His face relaxed, still not handsome, but no longer harsh either. Cole Makani Hunter had strong, tough-set features. He had a scar under his jaw she hadn’t noticed before. His nose wasn’t just a little flat, it’d been broken.

  He was several notches rougher and tougher than the average guy she usually saw around town. Annie couldn’t imagine herself walking into Broslin Diner with someone who had barbed wire tattooed on his shaved head.

  The softest thing about his face was his eyelashes, nearly black and slightly curled.

  Her gaze slid to his lips. Now that they weren’t pressed together in disapproval . . . Quit looking.

  Annie turned her attention to the meadow and the forest around them. She breathed in the peace of the forest and let all distractions float away from her.

  Minutes ticked by. Half an hour passed. She shifted in place, rolled her neck and shoulders, careful not to break the connection between them.

  She settled into this new experience of being physically connected to someone while being connected to the earth. She normally didn’t touch her patients, but with Cole she had no other way of getting his attention when he wasn’t looking right at her. She was going to have to get used to that.

  Of course, she wasn’t trying to get his attention now. He was asleep. Yet she stayed where she was. She felt as if some kind of sacred circle had formed, something unfamiliar but powerful and important. So she decided to be still and give herself to the experience.

  She thought about lying in the grass next to him, but she’d promised to stay on guard.

  Fifteen minutes before their session was over, she woke him with a gentle nudge of her knee to his hand, so they’d have time to get back.

  His bottomless dark eyes blinked open. He looked straight at her. “How much longer do we have to do this?”

  “Done for today.” She smiled, pretending that her breath hadn’t hitched at that sleepy, half-hooded look. “You fell asleep.”

  “I was resting my eyes. Can’t sleep without drugs.”

  “You just did.”

  “Might have blinked out for a minute, but that’s it.” He sat up and brushed strands of dried grass from his shoulders. “Sounds like your watch is broken.”

  Instead of arguing with him, she pushed to her feet and stretched her legs.

  They headed back to the path side by side.

  She turned so he would be able to see her lips. “How do you feel?”

  He gave an exaggerated groan and a flat look. “Thinking about hugging a tree and getting it over with. It’d save you the effort of trying to manipulate me into it next time.”

  “Does that mean you’ll be giving ecotherapy a try?”

  “Might as well, or the program coordinator will push me into art therapy. Believe me, nobody wants to see that.”

  She bit back a smile. “There’s music therapy too.”

  He didn’t credit her comment with an answer. But then he said, “So, tomorrow, same time, same place?”

  “Not tomorrow.” She pushed back the unease that tried to settle on her. “I’ll be off for the rest of the week.”

  She expected him to leap with joy, but instead, his forehead pulled into a frown. “What for?”

  “Worried about missing me too much?”

  “I like a regular schedule. You going on vacation?”

  “Going on a TV show.” She tried not to think about everything that could go wrong in the next couple of days.

  “Making people roll in dirt in front of cameras, on national TV? Don’t look at me if you’re asking for volunteers.”

  “Only the local channel, thank God. But it’ll be live.” She swallowed. “My cousin is a Realtor. I’m helping her out with something.”

  She didn’t mind helping. She just wished Kelly hadn’t asked this.

  Cole stopped walking. “Yeah?”

  Annie tried not to appear as unhappy as she felt. The key was to look at the show as an opportunity.

  Losing all her savings to Xane, her boyfriend before Joey, back in Philly, had been a major hit. Xane had serious rock-star delusions. He’d cleaned out her bank account to upgrade the band with new equipment, informing her after the fact with, I’ll pay you back when we make it big, babe.

  And then Annie had gotten laid off. Lost the apartment.

  Kelly had helped. She’d told Annie about the new rehab facility in Broslin, the small town where they’d both grown up. The position paid enough to qualify for a mortgage on a small fixer-upper. Annie was in.

  “My cousin is branching out from real estate agent to real estate adviser. She’s remarketing herself as someone who helps people find good investments for rent or flipping. I’ll be on the show with her.”

  “Doing what?” Cole asked.

  “Returning a favor. She found my house for me. I need to renovate it. She’s kind of managing the reno and got the local TV to cover the transformation. She’ll be giving tips on how to increase home value for a sale or flip.”

  “Establishing herself as the local expert.”

  Annie nodded. She didn’t want to go into the topic any deeper, hadn’t meant to go into it at all. But maybe sharing something personal would set Cole at ease. Establishing a more open relationship between them could only benefit his therapy.

  His gaze didn’t leave her face. “You’re not excited. My mother would be dancing down the street in a hula skirt. She
’s hooked on those house-makeover shows on TV.”

  “I’m excited,” Annie said, working hard at it. “I need to move. With a makeover, I might actually be able to sell.”

  He stopped. “Moving away?”

  “Just to a house with a bigger property. We’ve outgrown the backyard a lot faster than I expected. I have animals.” She had a dream for her life, and she was determined to make that dream a reality. This was going to be her lucky year.

  She was not going to do anything to mess up her dream, or the job that made it all possible. Which meant she would make things work with Cole, find a way to ensure that ecotherapy helped him.

  She’d gotten off on the wrong foot with him somehow during this intro session. Should she have kept more of a distance between them? She couldn’t, not when she had to touch him to make him look at her every time she needed to tell him something.

  At least she had the rest of the week off. By the time she returned to work, today’s odd vibe would be forgotten. She would hit the reset button and start over with him. Would not let her heart flutter because he slept his first drug-free sleep in months next to her, the back of his hand touching her knee.

  Attraction toward a patient was the kind of forest fire that could burn down her life and career before she had a chance to blink. She’d made enough bad decisions already to last her a lifetime. She was starting over here.

  “Got a boyfriend to help you with all that work?”

  “God forbid,” she said before she could catch herself.

  He raised a dark eyebrow as they began walking again. “That bad?”

  “A genetic, pathological inclination to be attracted to the wrong guy.”

  Cole’s expression turned lighter than it had been so far. Apparently, the thought of her failings cheered him up. “How bad can it be?”

  “One of them is still stalking me.”

  The hint of amusement disappeared from Cole’s gaze. As if someone had turned a switch, in a blink, he was all badass killing machine, laser focused and ready for anything. “Are you in danger?”

  “Forget I said that. Joey is harmless. Just part of the family curse.”