No Damaged Goods Read online

  “Hnngh.” I grunt but shrug out of my jacket and look around, before just tossing it toward the couch. It hits the arm, and I start unbuttoning the flannel shirt underneath. “I mean, can’t be any worse than a doctor visit.”

  Her head turns like she’ll glance over her shoulder at me—before she stops and looks firmly forward. “You don’t trust doctors?”

  “Never have.” I toss the flannel next, then peel out of my undershirt and throw it on the pile before hooking my thumb in the fly of my jeans. It’s less the pretty girl worrying me right now and more how I’m gonna wiggle out of these without a damn sigh of pain. “Doctors left me fucked up like this. Bad stitch-up job. Muscle never healed right. It was a combat situation, sure, and I get they did their damnedest, but...”

  “And physical therapy never worked?”

  Most of the time that question gets my hackles up like nothing else.

  It’s a judgmental question. Like the pain I’m in is my fault because I just didn’t try some obvious thing or didn’t do it hard enough.

  Only, the way Broccoli Girl asks is different.

  It’s gentle. Honest. Kind.

  It’s part of this weird music in her voice and the soft tink of glass oil vials.

  It doesn’t feel like she’s judging me.

  Just seems like she wants to hear my story.

  That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as I mutter out slowly. “Tried therapy for a few years. Couldn’t even walk when I came back from Afghanistan with shrapnel embedded so deep in my leg they told me at first they’d have to leave it in. They cut it out, eventually, but not without carving me up real bad first. And the way it healed, fuck. PT just made it worse, I guess.” I shrug. “There’s something knotted up in there real nasty. Every time they’d try the exercises, it’d always pull something else loose. The surgeons messed me up, though they were trying their best, too. I guess.”

  Bitter much? Fuck yes, I am. A Purple Heart framed up in the corner of my basement can’t take away years of total agony.

  I hadn’t meant to tell her all that. Too late.

  And although Peace ain’t supposed to be looking, for a minute she turns back, just gazing at me with those warm green eyes that make me feel like it’s spring in the middle of this snowy, ice-scoured day.

  “Sometimes people’s best isn’t good enough. It’s okay to accept it,” she says. “You’re allowed to be angry at the surgeons for leaving you in this kind of pain, Blake. You don’t have to excuse it.”

  “I...”

  I’d never really thought of it like that.

  That I was making excuses for the mess they made of my leg, or if I just downplayed it, maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal and the pain would disappear.

  I make a huffy noise in the back of my throat.

  “You ain’t supposed to be looking, remember?”

  Yeah. No way in hell I’m misinterpreting the way her gaze dips over my naked chest, her lashes coming down in a soft sweep before a smile tugs at her lips as she turns away.

  “Not looking,” she says with this singsong lilt in her voice. Girl must sing a lot. “Pick a scent. Manly pine, sandalwood, or amber?”

  I flick the button of my jeans open. “Pine’s gonna sting my nose. Sandalwood’s too strong. The fuck does amber smell like?”

  She picks a bottle up and flicks the cap with her thumb, then sniffs. “Morocco.”

  “That ain’t a scent.”

  “It’s the best word I can come up with.” She laughs.

  “Fine, fine. Make me stink like Morocco.”

  Her only answer is another laugh. I let it hold me up, bracing myself for torture, and then lift myself up on one hand, tugging my jeans out from under me and since she said naked, dragging my boxer-briefs with.

  There’s a brief burst of agony, one that makes me groan in the back of my throat. Then I let myself down, using my hands to shimmy my clothes down my legs, kicking my boots and socks off in the process. I’m trying damned hard not to look at my hard-on, and grab a towel to cover it up quickly, cinching it clumsily around my hips.

  “Uh,” I mutter. “How you want me?”

  “On your back,” she answers, moving away from me, leaning over to light a single candle before circling the room.

  There are candles everywhere, I realize. She touches each wick delicately with a spark of flame that flicks in little gold tongues.

  “Don’t worry, Fire Chief Silver Tongue, there’s nothing flammable near the candles.”

  “Silverton,” I snarl, correcting her.

  Why the fuck are my ears burning?

  Even with her back to me, I can hear the grin in her voice. “I don’t know, I’ve heard your show. Silver Tongue sounds about right.”

  I make a sputtering noise. Is this girl openly flirting with me now?

  I’ve gotta ignore it.

  So I focus on shifting to my back instead. The massage table feels a little small for me, but it doesn’t wobble as I ease myself back with my bum leg stretched out, smoothing my towel. Peace turns back toward me.

  And immediately bursts out laughing, pressing her fingertips to her lips.

  I scowl. “What?”

  “You’re stiff as a board, my dude,” she says, stepping closer to the table. Her soft fingers brush my bare arm, my inner elbow, and rest there in little pinprick points of warmth. “It’s like you’re taking up planking as an Olympic sport.”

  “Planking? No clue what you just said.”

  “Of course not.” With an amused sigh, she presses down on my inner elbow. “Just relax.”

  I start to say something.

  Only for something about that pressure to click, and a sudden looseness flows through my entire body. Just like all my joints decided to pop and turn liquid.

  I groan, sinking against the warm linen cover of the massage table, gasping out in something close to pleasure. “What the...what was that?”

  “Chakra point,” she answers simply. “Almost like a switch, isn’t it? It’s a quick release of tension. Some folks say it’s all psychological, kinda like a placebo. Others think it’s from some mystical, higher place. For me, it’s a good place to start, whatever you want to believe.”

  She leans over me then, a few wisps of her hair falling down to tease against my cheeks as she looks at me searchingly.

  “Are you feeling any better?’ she asks. “Like it might be safe to get started?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” I nod shakily.

  Shit.

  I think this girl might be about to ruin me in more ways than one.

  “Okay,” she murmurs, pressing her slim hands flat to my stomach. “Close your eyes, then. And try to relax.”

  It’s almost a relief to close my eyes—at first.

  With my peepers shut I can’t see her bent over me, the heavy curves of her tits on the verge of falling out of that damnable tied-up shirt, her body this pure graceful siren call and her face too pixie-like.

  You know, everything that’d make the brutal pain in my dick a hundred times worse.

  But it’s actually harder with my eyes closed and nothing left to my senses but the imagination.

  Underneath the scent of whatever she’s pouring into her hands, this musky semi-sweetness that makes me think of sand and heat and spices, I can smell her.

  She’s almost got this creamy-thick scent, something I could sink my tongue into. It’s as radiant and real as the warmth of her body leaning in close, the soft sound of her skin and her clothing against the edge of the table as she works.

  And holy damn, her hands.

  Her hands are hell on my skin as she strokes me from neck to shoulders to chest to hips. Just like she’s waking me up, bringing my body back to life one square inch at a time.

  I’m sizzling, prickling, electric charges in the shape of her palms left everywhere she touches. I don’t think it’s the oil warming slick against my skin, smoothed on in a soothing layer.

  It’s her.

  A
nd if she keeps it up, no frigging pain’s gonna stop me from embarrassing myself under this flimsy towel when my cock spikes up a tent.

  “Hey,” I growl without opening my eyes. “That ain’t my thigh.”

  Peace stops, lower, somewhere near my knees.

  When her hands lift away from my body, she sounds almost wounded. “I’m trying to help you relax so the treatment will be more effective.”

  “Peace,” I sigh. “Please. Humor me.”

  There’s a pause before I hear her moving, her heat shifting, and then those soft hands rest just above my knee. “All right,” she says. “If that’s what you want...but it may end up hurting more.”

  “Don’t see how that’s possible.”

  I damn well find out a few seconds later.

  I don’t have to open my eyes to know the shape of the scar.

  It’s like a gnarled knot in a twisted tree trunk, blazed against my skin, starting a few inches above my knee and snaking in a strange contortion halfway up my thigh. The muscle somehow swirled into place around where that chunk of metal slashed my flesh.

  Muscle ain’t supposed to knot like that. It goes straight up and down, sometimes with a twist.

  Too bad they put me back together wrong.

  When her fingers press down on that knot, searching, looking for a single string to start unraveling, holy merciless fuck.

  My leg explodes. Pure riptide pain shoots up my hip to my knee, then ricochets back to throb up to my groin.

  I let out a low bearish sound, grappling at the edges of the table with my palms, digging my fingers in, spine arching. It hurts too much for me to even kick out, my teeth grinding like I’m trying to fucking crush them down to nubs.

  “I’m sorry,” Peace says softly, her touch gentling. “You’re carrying so much tension here. It’s like a land mine. Everything I do will hurt at this stage. I can try to work my way in from the outer edges to let you get used to it.”

  Part of me wants to say fuck this.

  I don’t know how hurting like this is supposed to help me at all.

  My eyes open to slits, watching her as she stands next to my thigh, looking at me with such warmth, such concern, still asking me to trust her.

  Kind of like I asked her to trust me that night on the side of the road, alone and frightened and waiting for me to come find her.

  Whatever.

  Taking several shaky breaths, I nod, digging my fingers in harder to the plush table cover till I feel the wood underneath. “Go ahead, woman. Do your worst.”

  She offers me a faint, almost sad smile.

  The next time she touches me, it’s farther from the center of the wound. The pain’s more a soft burst versus the supernova blast it was before.

  I close my eyes, swallowing hard, trying to endure it, counting out my breaths as her hands work and knead my flesh like it’s putty. She goes in a radial path around the most concentrated bits of the scar.

  It’s this weird, rhythmic dance of pain.

  Sometimes the pressure of her palms is enough to flatten it into nothingness, before it fights as soon as the pressure eases.

  “Hey,” she murmurs, her voice part of the rhythm, soft and low. “Talk to me. Anything to take your mind off it. It’ll help.”

  It’s hard to speak through gritted teeth. “Don’t know what you want me to talk about.”

  “Tell me about Andrea?”

  There’s a warmth in her voice when she says my daughter’s name that nearly undoes me.

  I know she only met Andrea once.

  That night I came to fetch my daughter, it’d been a hell of a something to see her through the windows, talking to Peace so easy. My Violet has a rare trust she’s been hard pressed to give to many since her ma died.

  “She’s a good kid,” I start. “No—that ain’t even right. She’s the greatest. Stubborn as hell, smart as hell, too. Determined to be this wild child artist and I’m gonna let her if that’s what she needs to be, as long as she keeps out of serious trouble.” I smile faintly. “She’s nothing like her ma. I think I’m glad for that.”

  Peace doesn’t answer for a long time.

  “She mentioned her mother passed,” she murmurs.

  “Yep. Abigail.” It’s weird to say her name out loud. When Andrea and I are locking horns, it’s always just your ma. “Four years ago last week. Freak medical condition. We were days away from signing the divorce papers anyway, but she was still Andrea’s ma. I was ready to work with that. Just because things went to hell in a handbasket with my lady didn’t mean it needed to spill over to my little girl. Didn’t want it destroying her.”

  Too fucking honest? Maybe.

  Hard to help it when I’m lying here under a pretty girl’s gaze, practically buck naked, letting her wonder-fingers torture me back into something resembling a functional human being.

  “She seems to still be taking it hard,” Peace says.

  “Sure. We manage most of the time, but that’s one subject where we just butt heads. Can’t seem to speak the same language.”

  Peace doesn’t answer. I realize her hands are still working, and I’m actually starting to enjoy it, the pain more of a low mellow burn melting like hot wax through my flesh.

  “You’re afraid of something,” she says. “It’s making you lock up again. Relax, Blake. Tell me what’s eating you.”

  If that ain’t a sucker punch.

  How the hell is this young woman—emphasis on the young—reading my body like it’s tarot?

  She’s not wrong, though.

  And I feel that fear tighten in my throat as I say, “I’m worried she blames me for killing her ma.” Then I move on quickly. “Not that there was ever anything violent! I ain’t that kinda guy. Real coward piece of trash who’d ever put a hand on a woman. Abby would...I mean, she’d hit on me a little sometimes, but that was just the way she was. Never hurt none. I just took it, gave her a look, and asked her if she was done.”

  There’s almost too much awed understanding in Peace’s silence.

  Fuck, this feels like some weird confessional, those hands kneading me in prayer.

  “Andrea was mad about us toward the end, yeah,” I try again. “Pissed that I was breaking our family up ’cause Abby and I just weren’t seeing each other no more. I married a woman too much like my ma, and that was the biggest mistake I ever made. Then she went and had a freak fucking brain aneurysm, swift and sudden.”

  Peace gasps. Her eyebrows knit together in this sad puppy dog sympathy I don’t fucking need.

  “That’s not the point. Think I’m just worried deep down she hates me because I pushed her ma away and drove her body to fail her.”

  “But you didn’t!” Peace says it with the same gentle firmness she works in my flesh. “You didn’t do that, Blake. You tried to make a decision that was best for Andrea, for your family, because things weren’t happy...and then nature or chance or something else stepped in and did things that were totally not your fault.” Her thumbs sweep inward, just barely touching the deepest ridge of my scar.

  I hiss, digging my teeth into my lip so hard I taste a smidge of blood.

  “And I don’t think Andrea hates you for it. She’s just young. Her feelings are in and out, confusing her all the time. Especially her feelings toward the man she values most. I’m sure she craves your approval as much as she needs to break your authority, so...” She giggles softly. “Andrea’s going to be a little rage-bucket at you pretty often. I know that’s how I was.”

  I let out a breathless laugh. I hurt, and not all of it’s the pressure turning my flesh into warm putty.

  My chest hurts, too.

  Fuck.

  I’ve never told anybody these deep dark secrets. It’s like they cut me inside on the way out of my mouth.

  “You’re not old enough to have a teenage daughter,” I tease, trying to deflect. “How do you know all this?”

  “Because I used to be that girl who loved and hated her old man,” she answers.
The wistfulness in her voice hovers around her. “And then he was gone on deployment, and then just gone, and I was left with my mother. She buried herself in work. I just needed to feel like something stable would stay, just for once. My father didn’t.” She sighs. “So I got angry and ran away from missing him, and wound up not staying anywhere at all.”

  I’m struck by the sudden urge to hug her.

  It’s irrational as hell. Even if she’s working on me and I don’t want to interrupt this quiet stillness building between us with her hands.

  “Sorry,” I murmur. “You’re allowed to be pissed at your folks for leaving you without any closure, even if they couldn’t help it. Same thing you told me earlier. No crime in being human.”

  “You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”

  “Well.” Damn, she’s just hitting all the pain points today, physical and psychic. “My ma died last year. She wasn’t good to me, or to...” I almost mention Holt, but something about the thought of him pulls me up short. “...my family. But I left, and I never got to say a lotta things to her, y’know? Things I needed her to hear. And now that chance is gone, and my family’s still a mess.”

  “Maybe not.” Her grip shifts and the heel of her palm kneads the knot of my scar.

  It actually doesn’t hurt. There’s a searing heat instead, like that stuff inside a stress ball moving under my skin, and it ain’t half bad.

  I sure as hell feel it creeping up, spreading higher and higher, toward my hips—tension everywhere else getting lighter. That’s ’cause it’s all flowing toward one specific place.

  “Sometimes we just need to be heard,” she whispers. “It doesn’t matter by who. I’m not your mother, but I can listen to what you need to say.”

  Any other time, I might’ve actually taken her up on the offer.

  It’s kind, genuine in a way I’m not really used to when most people just fall back on pity and useless platitudes. Anything to get out of this kind of conversation ASAP.