Love Him Desperate (On the Market #5) - E.M. Lindsey

Chapter One

Raphael Meyer was four and a half years old when he took his first steps. It was one of the only early memories he retained with an almost vicious clarity. And try as he might, he couldn’t forget the way the handles of his crutches squished under his tight grip—or the way the cuffs dug into his skin so painful, it made his eyes water. He recalled the way he stared at his feet and waited for them to move, because he was so sure those crutches were magic.

His mother had said so. “These,” she said, strapping on his clunky metal braces to the outside of his boots, “are going to help your feet stay flat. And these,” she said, and pushed his little arm through the cuff and carefully loosened his tight fists with the tips of her fingers, “are magic, and they’re going to help you walk.”

“Just like you?” he asked.

She looked at him a very long time, and then she nodded. “Just like me.”

He was four and a half when he realized just how profoundly she was willing to lie to him. The braces on his feet did keep his feet flat, but they didn’t keep his boots from scraping along the ground, because the crutches had no magic. They didn’t make his spasming, stiff legs bend at the knees and turn at the ankle and carry him across the floor like all the other boys.

All they really did was hurt.

They hurt, and they made it so it took twice as long to get to his bedroom than he took before on his hands and knees. He was good at that. He was good at crawling and climbing—even better than the other kids who came over to play.

He got a teddy bear for those first steps though. It was half his size, fluffy and white, and sat at the edge of his bed as a reminder that he’d done something to make his mother cry happy tears. And it would be many, many years before Raphael understood the profound intensity of her joy at seeing him on his feet without someone at his side.

For him, standing was nothing more than a larger height for him to fall when a seizure struck. It was nothing more than extra strain to send his legs into terrible spasms, or leave his hands useless and curled into fists when he over-worked his muscles in the body that would never be just like everyone else—magic crutches or no.

But to the woman who had stared down at her small child and listened to a stoic-faced doctor tell her that he would never walk, never speak, and never feed himself—it was the greatest triumph he could have ever accomplished. Those six steps on his own had been everything to her.

As he aged, Raphael knew he would never be able to understand the passion behind her drive to have him fixed. Fixed, which was the term she favored.

“I spoke with a doctor who thinks he can fix that spasm in your left hand.”

“A specialist in Berlin has been able to fix the legs of six children with palsy so they can walk unaided.”

“There’s a neurologist in Paris who has a medicine known to fix how often the seizures happen.”

He developed a tic at the sound of that word, a little twitch in the corner of his right eye that would go off until he massaged it with tired fingers. He ached for her to love him in his own body—the one that trembled on good nights and sometimes fell unconscious with the bad ones. The body that didn’t allow him to run, but still got him from place to place. Raphael had been both cruelly mocked and gallantly defended by school children for most of his life, and never once had those jeers or praises stopped him from staring at himself in the mirror and trying to figure out what sort of person he was beyond that reflection.

In reality, he might never know. Not until he escaped the expectations of the people around him. Some teachers wrote him off, and others wanted him to climb mountains. His mother wanted him to metamorphize into a new being and ascend from the earthly prison created by one misplaced loop of umbilical cord around his neck as she was pushing him out.

Maybe, in reality, it was to alleviate her own guilt, but Raphael had stopped worrying about that by the time he was a teenager. The fact that

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