became distracted by the obvious glitch in his gait. How had he hid that from me for so long? That he’d hidden it from me at all made me nearly as sad as his having it in the first place.
Once, we’d shared everything. Those days were as gone as he’d been.
I watched Owen move, observing him like a doctor, not a lover. He wasn’t my lover, hadn’t been for a very long time. So why did I remember every dip of muscle, every swirl of his hair, the very taste of his skin?
I didn’t. Not really.
His muscles were huge where once they’d been … quite adequate. His hair was buzzed—not enough there to swirl—with flecks of gray that had not been there before. His skin was wind worn, sun touched—older, like him, like me. Would it taste differently?
I should lick him and find out.
He turned; I yanked my eyes from their perusal of points south and up to his face. Had he noticed? I hoped not.
What was wrong with me? Nothing a good roll in the hay wouldn’t cure.
I cleared my throat. “How long is your leave?”
His gaze flicked to the trees where the dog had disappeared. “It’s open-ended.”
Right. Because the military was so easygoing. I decided not to press the issue. Owen had never been the kind of person who yielded to pressure, and I doubted ten years in the Marines had changed that. However, despite his words to the contrary, he wasn’t going back to active duty limping like that.
“I should let Reggie run a bit before we go back to town, okay?” Owen set his hand on the truck as he moved to the rear, then put down the tailgate and hitched his butt onto it.
“Sure.” I sat close enough to touch, but not touching, then swung my legs above the ground like I used to way back when.
He’d had a pickup then too—a POS that he’d tinkered with constantly just to keep it running. He’d worked at the café nearly every night after school when it wasn’t football season. I’d seen him handing money to my dad more than once. My dad hadn’t taken it, but he’d never stopped offering.
“I don’t have any appointments until later,” I continued.
And no one had called all day with an emergency—real or imagined—which was so strange I took out my phone.
No service. No wonder. When we got back to the town limits, the thing would no doubt start buzzing like a beehive with missed calls and messages. Oddly, the idea that I’d missed calls didn’t bother me the way that it should. For just a minute or two, I wanted to sit in the warm autumn air with the only man I’d ever loved.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
He stared straight ahead. “How bad is what?”
“This.” I laid my hand on his thigh.
The whole world stilled. I swore neither one of us breathed. But he didn’t move away. He didn’t take my hand and push it off. So I left it right where it was.
Beneath my palm his jeans felt on fire, even though the trees shaded the sun and the bulk of the rays shone on the house and not here. I flexed my fingers, my short nails scritching on the fabric. Static snapped, and he tensed.
“Shh.” I continued to stroke.
Had he told me where his injuries had been? I didn’t think so. But I’d watched him limp; I could figure it out. When I closed my eyes, I could see the bones like an X-ray. I traced the femur with my index finger, brushed the dark line of the fracture, halfway down, with my thumb. There was more wrong here than just that. Nerves. Tendons. Maybe both.
There’d been a few times in the past when I’d known something was off with a patient, despite all indications to the contrary. I’d close my eyes and “see” a bleeder, or a tumor, or a hairline break that didn’t pop on an X-ray. Once, during surgery, I’d found a golf ball in a Labrador’s stomach after I’d already located the half of a tennis ball I’d gone in there for.
There’d been occasions where an animal had just gone south. No matter what had been tried, nothing worked. Then the owner brought them to me, I acted on what I “heard” from them, or sensed myself, and they got better.
Not right away. It wasn’t magic. I was a fantastic diagnostician. Nothing more.