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“Josie!” I cried, my voice more of a plea than a warning.
Right as she was about to take another bound into the road, someone snagged Josie’s hand and whipped her back onto the sidewalk seconds before the truck came speeding by. Something I couldn’t understand slipped from her mouth when she finally noticed the truck and how close it had come to hitting her. I was in the middle of exhaling the most relieved sigh I could recall when I twisted my head back to thank whoever it was who’d swooped in to save Josie. Only when I found the space behind us empty did I look over to find a hand still firmly clutched around Josie’s. Like me, she was staring at that hand. Well, she was more like gaping at it.
“Oh my god, Garth,” she whispered, her voice shaky from either what had almost happened or what was currently happening. Her hand twisted, her fingers tangling through the ones secured around hers. “Your hand . . . it moved . . . it’s moving . . .” She smiled at our conjoined hands, returning the squeeze my hand had just given hers. “What just happened?”
I recognized my hand was in hers. To have gotten there, it had to have moved, which had to mean something good, but that wasn’t what I was most concerned with right then. “You just ran out in front of a truck whose driver looked like he was minutes away from becoming a father and wasn’t exactly paying attention to the road or pedestrians.”
The truck was long gone, hopefully finding the ER entrance before his wife or girlfriend delivered their baby in the cab, but I still lifted my middle finger toward where the truck had disappeared. Just thinking about it got me all riled up. When my other hand started flying about, Josie’s gaze drifted toward it, her eyes widening.
“I mean, shit, Joze, do you want to end up like me? Stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of your life? Do you want to spend the rest of your life dead?”
She bit her lip to subdue her grin, but it didn’t work.
“Please, Joze, work with me here. I can’t move. A little help preserving your life would be much appreciated.”
I could have gone on and on—I was so worked up about what had just happened and just could have happened—but when she crouched beside me, her lips pressing softly then not so softly into my knuckles, my mind shifted gears. What else had just happened started to settle in.
“I can feel your hand,” I said, sounding out of breath.
Josie smiled as she continued to slide her mouth along the ridges and valleys of my knuckles.
“I can feel your lips.” My eyes closed from the pure, unparalleled pleasure of her lips moving against my hand. Even at our most intimate, I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt something so intense. “I moved.”
That made her laugh. With her mouth still pressed to my hand, her laugh vibrated up my arm and seemed to work its way deep inside. “I’ll say you moved,” she said as her laugh rolled to an end.
“Someone had to,” I grumbled. Even though I was pissed like nothing else about what had almost happened, thanks to two people focusing on everything but the road, my anger couldn’t dampen the hope trickling into my veins. I’d moved. Without willing my arm to lift or telling my hand to grab hers, something had fired to life inside me, and a minute later, it didn’t seem in a hurry to extinguish itself.
“Just when I’m sure you couldn’t possibly get any more wonderful . . .” She lifted her mouth from my hand long enough to smile at me.
I brushed her cheek with my thumb. I’d never realized until right then how Josie’s skin was the smoothest thing I’d ever felt. “I go and lift my arm?” I peaked a brow at her.
Her smile stretched as she watched my other arm lift into the air. Then her eyes shifted back to mine. “You go and save me when I was supposed to be saving you.”
I WAS LATE for my appointment. I blamed it on Josie. If she hadn’t gone and stepped into traffic without looking, then I wouldn’t have had to save her. Then we wouldn’t have spent a good half hour in a state of shock and surprise, trying to figure out what had just happened.
When we did finally make it to Dr. Miracle Worker’s office, no one seemed to mind we were late. Probably because the patient they’d expected to see paralyzed from the neck down was only paralyzed from the waist down.
“Can you feel this?” Dr. Miracle Worker, whose actual name was Dr. Murphy¸ asked as he tapped above my knee with a tool that looked like it belonged in a torture room instead of an exam room.
I shook my head. “No.”
Josie was standing beside my wheelchair and hadn’t once let go of the hand that had grabbed her. Even when we’d had to fill out some paperwork, she hadn’t let it go. I thought that, like me, she was afraid the spell would wear off if she let go, so she kept hanging on.
“Can you feel any sensation at all?” Dr. Murphy tapped at the same spot with what looked like a bit more force.
“Nothing,” I answered.
Dr. Murphy nodded, squinting as if he were lost in some internal dialogue. “And up until just outside, you were unable to move or feel anything from your waist to your neck, correct?”
I nodded.
More internal dialogue. From my estimate, Dr. Murphy had said five times more to himself than he had to Josie and me.
“What do you think that means?” Josie asked, sliding closer to me. “Does it mean he’s getting better?”
Dr. Murphy put away the torture device and shoved backward on his stool. He rolled halfway across the room, toward the phone hanging on the wall. “The spine doesn’t ‘get better’ in the traditional way we think of some parts of our body healing. If a vertebra is broken, it doesn’t just ‘fix’ itself, or if there’s extensive nerve damage, those nerves won’t heal on their own. Generally, if a person is paralyzed from a back injury, they stay that way. There are very few instances of a p
atient starting out paralyzed then regaining motion.”
