by E M Lindsey
His hips stuttered up like he couldn’t help it, and then he used his free hand to grab the back of James’ head and push him down hard as he fucked upward, coming. He felt James swallow it all down, resting there with Rowan’s softening cock lying on his tongue, and finally—finally—he pulled up. He swiped his mouth, looking down to make sure there was no mess, then smiled at Rowan.
“You fucking knew that was going to happen,” Rowan accused.
James laughed, then traced his thumb over Rowan’s newly tattooed thigh, inches away from the new ink. “Yes, I did. I told you about it, remember?”
Rowan’s eyes widened as he recalled the story James had told him that night in bed, nearly a year ago. “Oh my god… Wait,” he shot James a scowl, “you said Derek was the one who did your thigh work. Did he suck your dick?”
James threw back his head, laughing. “I was a virgin before you, remember? That included blowjobs.”
Rowan flushed, looking sheepish. “Sorry. The pain and orgasm have temporarily scrambled my brains.”
“Are you really angry I didn’t pre-warn you?” James asked.
Rowan snorted, pulling him in for a kiss by the front of his shirt. “I probably should be, you dirty man, but you sucked my brains out through my dick, so I don’t think I’m capable.”
James smiled against his lips. “You know I love you, right?”
Rowan softened, cupping James’ cheek. “Yeah. I know.”
“I’m glad you let me share this with you,” he said, and touched the inside of his thigh, just near where it was starting to really hurt.
“You’re my everything,” Rowan told him with utter and complete sincerity. “You’re my home.”
James curled his hand around Rowan’s wrist and pressed his hand harder against his cheek. “And you’re mine.”
Rowan felt his entire body relax, and he knew that this was it.
* * *
The End.
Book Five
Stick-And-Poke
Irons and Works: Book Five
“I spent my whole life not knowing what I want out of it, just chasing my tail. Now for the first time I know exactly what I want… and who… and that’s the damnable misery of it.”
Wyatt Earp
(Tombstone, Hollywood Pictures ©1993)
Chapter One
“Hey man, you’re doing great, okay? The frustration is normal, and you’re going to get it. Just remember, you’re making better progress than half the people here.”
Mat didn’t understand a lot, maybe only sixty percent of spoken words, but he did know when he was being patronized. If he’d been able to do something as simple as make a fist, he might have punched the smarmy blonde medical assistant who had been flirting with his wife all week during his physical therapy, but it was hard to fight a guy when you still couldn’t hold your own fucking spoon. Or hell, even say your own name. Mat’s biggest breakthrough was being able to recognize faces that week without forgetting them five minutes later.
He noticed it when Melissa had walked into the room wearing a tentative smile, keeping her distance like she’d been doing since the doctors had informed her of everything Mat was going through. She hadn’t turned into a stranger again halfway through her visit, though, like she had the day before. She said she was happy about it, though she seemed more interested in fucking around on her phone than watching the things he needed to do. But then again, how much fun could it be to watch him stand up and sit down over and over, or squeeze a rubber ball in his fist until his arm wanted to fall off? Two months ago, he’d been doing rounds at the ER. He was called Dr. Harlow, and he’d been offered potential positions in private practices once he was done with his residency.
Now he was learning how to grip the sides of his walker and take ten steps, or to take a shit without falling off the toilet. Funny how his brain could understand all of this—could understand it enough to be pissed off and bitter, but the moment he tried to express it, the words didn’t make sense. They were wrong, and sometimes backward, and mostly not real English.
He was a shadow of himself, with a grim prognosis for recovery, and a wife who looked like she wasn’t sure she wanted to be in the state anymore let alone married to him. She’d missed his OT, and he wasn’t going to cry about it because they were working on recognizing letters which didn’t make any goddamn sense. With his communication issues, his doctor had suggested using a text board to help people understand him, but when he was given the alphabet, it looked like nonsense.
He’d grunted, and whined, and said something he hoped sounded like, “What the fuck is this?” Did they give him Greek? Chinese? Russian? But then he’d looked down at the picture of the apple and he realized that whatever the fuck he was meant to be looking at should read A. Only…it wasn’t. It was, but it wasn’t.
Trying to wrap his mind around it had given him a migraine enough that he needed an extra dose of morphine and a dark room for the next six hours. He wasn’t sure if anyone had called Melissa to let her know his latest set-back, but he knew one more and she’d probably be out the damn door. He was just waiting on that phone call. The one where she confessed to him and he wouldn’t be able to reply back because he couldn’t fucking speak.
“Hey, I’m here for this little shit,” came a voice from Mat’s left. He looked over his shoulder, wobbling a bit, but he managed to stay steady and even managed a smile.
Catherine was his weekday afternoon nurse, and one of the few people he could actually stand to be around. Mostly, because she didn’t treat him like glass, or like a child. She didn’t beat around the bush with his limitations, and she didn’t try to sell him on the miracle of total recovery. She talked to him like a person, and she was patient, and she really didn’t like half the staff, which made her a winner in his book.
“Hi,” he said, because he’d managed at least that today.
She beamed. “Oh, that’s real fucking great. You get him talking and I’m never going to hear the end of it.”
Mat snorted quietly and shook his head. He didn’t have the rest of the words he wanted to give her—thanks, maybe, and to complain because his occupational therapist was an asshole and he was feeling really alone.
He didn’t protest when she took his arm, or when she urged him toward the walker instead of the wheelchair. He’d understood from a logical perspective that he didn’t want to lose too much muscle mass since it was his brain making it hard to walk, not injuries. His body had come away freakishly unscathed for such a bad roll-over. He probably should have been dead, and some days he kind of wished he hadn’t woken up at all.
He didn’t remember the coma—no dreams, no strange fantasy world, no walking outside his body or slipping into another universe. Just sleep. Then awake—and with awake came all of this. Actual hell, he was pretty sure, and he was resolved to be able to say at least that before he was discharged.
His grip was stronger, so he managed to keep a good hold on the walker as they made it back to his room. The injury had him tired all the time, moody beyond all reason, but small things like walking to his bed and getting in it by himself was a triumph. A bitter one, but a triumph all the same.
He lay, complacent and weak as Catherine took his vitals and updated his chart. She checked his dinner order, then instead of leaving, she flopped into the chair beside the bed and leaned back. “So. Do you want to hear more wedding drama?”
Mat looked at her with a grin, nodding. Catherine was getting ready to marry her fiancé, Liz, but Catherine’s family was religious and protesting a same-sex wedding. Liz’s family were more accepting, but—as Catherine put it— “Fucking crazy alcoholics who won’t go anywhere if they’re sober.”
“So, my mother had a break-down yesterday on our way back from wedding dress shopping. She’s pissed that Liz is more on the butch side but wants to wear a dress. She was having an aneurysm over not having anything traditional, and then she spent the last twenty minutes screaming—no joke, actual screami
ng—about how this was all my father’s fault. She says that his inability to provide a traditional home for me turned me gay.”
Mat leaned onto his side. “Bullshit,” he tried to say. It didn’t come out entirely right, but obviously the sentiment got across, because Catherine laughed and nodded.
“Seriously.” She looked at him, then cocked her head to the side. “Can you do this?” She put one arm on top of the other, making devil horns with one hand, with the other which rested by her elbow, she flung her fingers out.
It took a level of concentration Mat wasn’t sure he had to get his arms to cooperate, but he managed it, then gave her a frown. “Mm?”
“It’s ‘bullshit’ in sign language,” she explained. She stood up and crossed her arms, staring at him. “Want to try a few? Just basic stuff, so you can communicate better?”
Mat nodded, pushing the button to raise the head of his bed all the way up. “H-ho-ow?” he said, then tapped his head, then pointed at her and hoped to god she understood his pathetic pantomiming.
“How do I know?” she offered. “My dad’s hard of hearing, works at a school for the Deaf. I grew up with it. I’m not totally fluent, but I know enough. It could help.”
Mat grinned at her. It was possibly the first helpful suggestion anyone had given him so far.
Melissa walked in as Mat was trying a few simple phrases in sign. It wasn’t going well. He was having difficulty remembering them the following day, but he’d managed to remember things like, bathroom, and water, and hungry. It was less than the vocabulary of a ten-month-old, but it was something.
His stomach went icy, though, at the sight of her expression which was something like horror and disgust mingled together. “What’s he doing?” she demanded, staring pointedly at Catherine.
Catherine looked over at Mat whose face burned with an emotion that felt a lot like humiliation, and she clenched her jaw. “Why don’t you ask him? Since he’s sitting right here.”
“God, he can barely understand me, and I don’t want to wait a hundred years for an answer,” Melissa hissed.
Catherine stood up, gave the edge of her scrubs a prim tug, then put her hand on Mat’s shoulder. “I’ll be back to check on you in half an hour. Need anything before I go?”
He shook his head and wished he could beg her to stay, but he knew she wouldn’t. Melissa’s issue wasn’t Catherine’s problem, anyway. Letting his hands fall into his lap, he refused to look up and meet Melissa’s gaze, not that she’d dared to get any closer to him. He wondered how they’d once been so in love. How had she been the woman of his dreams, and so quickly turned into this hateful person who was disgusted at the sight of him? Hadn’t their vows said something about sickness and health?
“Was that…sign language?” she asked.
Mat turned his head to look at her, then shrugged. It was the most he could do—and if he started to try speaking, she’d leave.
“So, like, is that it, now? If I want to understand my own husband, I have to learn sign language?” She said the words with such vitriol, as though she was told she’d have to live in a rat-infested hovel in order to stay married to him.
Mat swallowed, then took a breath and put all his concentration in the words he was about to say. “I do—on’t kn—ow. M-maaa. Maaa—ybe. You c-c—caan leap. Leap.” I wasn’t the right word. He took a breath. “Leave.” It was probably the most coherent thing he’d strung together since waking up, and he didn’t miss the irony of it being him telling her to go. Not just to leave the hospital, but to leave him. To just end this, because clearly, she didn’t want to be here.
“They told me it might not get better. You might be retar—that you might be like this,” she said, likely ignoring his sudden, almost violent flinch at the word she almost said, “for good. Like, permanently. You might get violent, or cry a lot, or never be able to feed yourself. I didn’t sign up for that, Matty. You were a doctor. You were…we were going to have a future.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, because he understood exactly what she was saying. It wasn’t like he didn’t feel it every fucking day he was stuck in this place with millimeters of progress that felt like miles.
“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” she said.
He laughed, unable to help it, because he’d known that for a while now. He wanted to tell her to go, to fuck off, to not come back, but it wasn’t necessary. She had one foot out the door the day he woke up and didn’t know who the hell she was. He just swallowed and turned his face back to the window and softened his gaze until the echo of her footsteps were gone. When he was alone—and this time he was truly alone—he let out the breath he’d been holding.
Chapter Two
“I’d like to talk a little about why you’re here,” the man behind the desk said. He was a fill-in for Mat’s regular therapist, who had a family emergency, and Mat was slightly annoyed that he was so easy to just shuffle off. But that wasn’t reality talking, it was the struggle to get past everything he’d been through in the last year.
“I tried to kill myself,” Mat said, grateful that his aphasia was a low that day, but bringing all this up triggered it every time. “My wife d-d…my wife d-,” he let out a small growl of frustration and took a breath, grasping for another word. “My wife ended our marriage.”
“Because of your accident?” he asked.
Mat looked up at him, took notice that the man was almost unbearably attractive—nothing like Mat was. The guy was tall, broad, with dark skin, a wide nose, a gentle fade cut around his slightly pointed ears. His slender fingers were folded in front of him on the desk, his nails glinting in the sun like he’d given them a coat of clear polish. Mat kind of liked that idea, that the guy got manicures. He certainly had the hands for it.
He pushed the thought aside and met Dr. Adebayo’s soft gaze. “Because of my blue,” Mat said. He absently rubbed at the scar on his temple, the way the flesh was softer there from the missing part of his skull. The scar went deeper into his hairline, halfway across the edge of his forehead, but he kept his hair long, the dark waves covering most of it. “She couldn’t handle what happened.”
“Because of your blue?” Dr. Adebayo asked.
Mat’s brow furrowed. “Blue,” he said again, then shook his head and tapped his temple.
“Brain?” the doctor offered, and Mat nodded.
“And you couldn’t handle her leaving?” he pressed.
Mat snorted. “I couldn’t handle being such a fucking burden that my own spouse couldn’t take it. I was disgusting.”
“You still think that?”
Mat sat back and rubbed at the back of his neck, shrugging. “Not as much as door.”
Dr. Adebayo frowned at him. “Door?”
Mat blinked. “What?”
“You said, not as much as door,” the doctor repeated.
Mat flushed and glanced away. “Sorry I…it still happens when I’m talking about the incident. Sometimes.” He frowned, but couldn’t find the word he was looking for, so he just let it go.
Dr. Adebayo nodded, rocking his chair back. “You’ve made tremendous progress with your physical and occupational therapy.”
It was just a fact, Mat knew, not really a compliment. And it wasn’t a lie, either. Forty-eight hours after Melissa had walked out, he’d tried to end his life. Being in a hospital, it was far more difficult to be successful, and he was found and treated in time, but he became even less of a person and more of a problem to solve for the staff. He didn’t see Catherine again after that, once they moved him to the psych-recovery ward. His every move was supervised—he wasn’t allowed to take a shit alone without checking in and out—and for a while he hated it and everyone around him. For a while, he had wanted to die.
In the end it wasn’t as difficult as he’d expected to find an open supply closet, or to walk away with a bottle of shower cleaner. In a strange way, it had also been an accomplishment, getting that much done while still barely able to keep his own balanc
e with his walker. The chemicals burned like acid going down, but that was nothing compared to the way it felt coming back up. And all of that paled in comparison to facing himself a few days later when he woke up to wrist restraints and the expression of his loveless nurse.
He’d become a stigma after that, of course. The man who really had lost it all. Transferred to behavioral health rehabilitation where no one wanted to drop in, the sparse visits from his family dwindled to nothing. But through it, he managed to claw his way to fresh air again. He took his first steps on his own three months after being transferred. He started to string together sentences that made sense—even if he couldn’t remember the words right all the time, and even if he had a stammer. He still couldn’t read, but he’d taken up drawing as a way of retraining his fine motor skills, and the doctor was more than thrilled to note he didn’t have a tremor.
When he could function on his own, they sat him down and asked what he needed. Part of him just wanted to go home, but he knew he wasn’t ready. So, his involuntary status became voluntary, and his meds were working, and his therapist was great.
Even this fill-in guy seemed like he gave more of a shit about Mat as a person rather than a statistic, and maybe that was what he needed.
“I wanted to talk to you today about this email I got from the Denver Art Museum,” Dr. Adebayo said. He reached behind him for his printer, then put a flyer down on the desk in front of Mat. The words were a mess, symbols that were jumbled together, and if he concentrated too hard on trying to make sense of them, he’d get a migraine. Instead, he looked at the photo. A stark grey building with a lot of windows and a massive sculpture in the lobby.
“I can’t read that,” Mat said.
The doctor blinked, then nodded. “Right. They’re having an art show, collecting pieces from around the world by people who are recovering from traumatic incidents, and people with mobility disabilities. Their big showcase is of people with spinal injuries that affect the mobility of their hands, but there are others as well.”
