Keith (Hathaway House #11) - Dale Mayer Page 0,33

and she certainly didn’t need to dress up to have lunch with him in the middle of her workday.

As she wandered back into her office to take care of a stack of paperwork, her mind kept cataloging the differences between lunch with Keith today versus going out for lunch. But a relationship that started here at Hathaway House started without all that physical attraction. It started with getting to know the person on the inside because the outside appeared to be so broken. She couldn’t help but realize just how important that difference was.

Maybe that’s why the relationships she’d heard about here were doing so well because they got rid of the outside layers that were often something you couldn’t trust, or that weren’t even so much about trust but because people weren’t necessarily who they really were on the outside. Whereas, in a place like this, who a person really was, was evident every day. The good, the bad, and the ugly. She had yet to see much of the ugly in Keith’s case. But she also understood that it was there and that he was working on it. You couldn’t ask anybody for more than that.

Well, Keith had done it. He hadn’t really expected to ask her, but it had come out naturally. And casually. Almost like his lunch date was just a request between two friends. He knew it was more. He wanted it to be much more. Something was so special about her, yet it was really hard for him to acknowledge that she would want him. And he knew everybody else would just get plain angry over that. He understood, but it didn’t change anything, because really, so much was going on in his world that it was hard to segregate one from the other. Also sad but a fact of life.

Still, he had his morning to get through and more therapy to attend and then his shrink visit, which he absolutely detested. And he knew that they weren’t supposed to call them shrink visits, but it was almost like, by insulting the profession, it made it easier to deal with the fact that he had to see her. By the time he was done with his morning physical therapy sessions, he was exhausted already. He managed a shower and then slowly rolled himself toward the psychologist’s office. As he entered, she looked at him and smiled.

“Looking a little tired today.”

“I’m tired every day,” he said. “They don’t let you slack down there.”

“Do you resent that?”

He groaned. “Why does every question have to have more questions?”

“Fine,” she said, “what do you want to talk about?”

He just glared at her.

She smiled and said, “Okay, so how is it to have your sister around?”

“It’s nice,” he admitted, happy with a question he could at least answer. “I haven’t had a whole lot of time to be with her in the last ten years. So this is a really nice opportunity to get to know her again.”

“And are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Getting to know her better.”

“I just said so,” he said. He watched the smile at the corner of the doctor’s lips. “Yes, I’m enjoying getting to know her better.”

“Good,” she said. “She must have a different perspective on the healing here because she comes from working with animals.”

“I’m sure she’d say the animals are a whole lot easier than the humans. She doesn’t have to tell them to stretch. They do it instinctively. She doesn’t have to tell them to rest and to sleep. That’s generally what they do. And she doesn’t have to sit there and explain everything ten times over to make sure the animals understand what’s happening. They don’t understand, and she can’t explain it to them. The only thing she can do is give them comfort.”

“You like that system?”

“I like it better than people who just talk and talk and talk, with their suppositions and theories, their proposals and possibilities,” he said. “I would much rather have people just be quiet, show me the work I have to do, and let me get at it.”

“Again, very interesting.”

He groaned. “Not really,” he said. “It’s quite simple. I just want to be here for the time I need to be here and then move on.”

“And not make any friends in the meantime?”

“I’ve made friends,” he said.

“I’ve heard,” she said.

He frowned at her. “Heard what?”

“That you’ve been making some friends,” she said.

He just shrugged and didn’t say anything. No way would he bring up his relationship with