Page 17 of Reckless

“You don’t sound very worried.”

He shrugged. “I think I’m a reasonable judge of people.”

“How many patients have you done this with before?”

“None.” He held my gaze, and I didn’t doubt it was the truth.

“What makes me different then?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I’m still trying to work that out. But I think there’s something here, Robbie, between us, and I’d very much like to discover what it is, if you’d be interested in exploring it too.”

I wanted to lie again. Couldn’t. “Yeah,” I said, my heart beating hard against the enormity of the word even as I tried to sound like it didn’t hurt to push it out. “Okay.”

His small answering smile felt as big as an ocean.

Chapter 6

ALASTAIR

I wasn’t normally much of a risk taker. Easily bored? Yes. Fantasising about a life of adventure? Sure.

But when it came down to it, I played things safe. I was a man who worried about horse germs. Who wanted people to eat more spinach and less red meat.

Maybe that was what had gone wrong between Neal and me. In our last year together, whenever I was feeling particularly spiteful, I told myself that Neal had held me back. That he wanted a safe life, running our own clinic and growing old together—and I just wasn’t cut out for that. When really, what I’d feared was that if we were both standing at a precipice ready to jump, Neal would jump first, sailing easily and confidently into the unknown and leaving me behind.

It was risky, what I’d done with Robbie Finch. Less risky for him, I hoped, than whatever he’d been doing in Newcastle. But risky for me because my heart was basically roadkill. I hadn’t felt much for Neal by the end beyond a faint echo of affection. But sometimes it was harder to grieve someone you should have loved than someone you actually had. Because the former came with disproportionate levels of guilt and self-loathing. The former was not about missing the dead so much as it was about missing something within yourself.

In order to do the things I wanted to do with Robbie—and God, were there so many things I wanted to do with him—I needed to be steady. I needed to be whole. I needed to see him precisely as he was, and not whatever I might want him to be.

It had been exhilarating, getting him to follow my orders without any show of force at all. Turning him to putty in my hands, giving him a pleasure that had satisfied that need of his, the need I was still trying to work out. That brief, simple scene had awakened feelings in me I hadn’t experienced in years. But Robbie was… I wasn’t sure what. ‘Naïve’ sounded patronising. ‘Inexperienced’ seemed inaccurate, given what he’d been doing in Newcastle. But he was new to putting names to his feelings and his wants. New to the idea of open communication. If he needed guidance, I believed I could be that stable, steadying force—but what if that was only because I didn’t have the emotional range to be anything different?

A man who could lose his husband—the love of my life, I’d thought once—and continue on, business as usual…well, there had to be something wrong with him, right? I wasn’t going to hurt Robbie Finch, not in the way strangers in Newcastle had. But I’d seen the way he’d reacted to those gentle cues and touches. And I’d seen the way he’d looked at me after—with suspicion and wonder, as though I’d practised witchcraft on him.

I might, if things kept on, end up hurting Robbie Finch with an absence of feeling, with the same weary indifference I’d shown Neal.

If Robbie only knew how much I’d wanted—while he was facedown on my bed and so deep in subspace I’d wondered if he would need to spend the night there—to take care of him. To have that be my sole responsibility for a little while.

I’d wanted to do that for Neal too, once upon a time. And look how that had turned out. It’s brain chemistry, I’d told Robbie. Not, It’s passion, it’s desire, I’m hot for you. Brain chemistry. Like I was a scientist in a lab conducting an interesting but ultimately meaningless experiment.

What if that was the only reason things worked between us? Because I was baffling to him, intriguing, new? Because he was inexperienced enough to mistake an illusion of care for the real thing?

Not an illusion. That was the terrifying bit. I did care for him, though we were scarcely more than strangers. I just didn’t know how to show that beyond offering him tea and a place to rest. Beyond feeling the hard planes of his shoulders, the power coiled in the muscles of his back, the soft skin of his nape—and telling myself it was something more than an indulgence on my part. I’d said I wanted to explore what was between us, and I did. I wanted to take it much, much further.

But not if I couldn’t offer him what he needed, either going into a scene or coming out of it.

When did he ever say he wanted someone to care for him? When did he ever say he needed passion or desire? He’s just got a voice in his head he needs quieting. Don’t mistake this for more than it is.

These were my thoughts as I walked to the old church to set up the health fair. I discovered I had a few reluctant volunteers…and one overly enthusiastic one. My new cleaner, Button John, was standing there beside Natty. Button John raised his hand to wave at me, and Natty was forced to duck.

“Hi, doc!” Button John yelled, as though we’d last seen each other years ago, instead of just yesterday afternoon when he’d spilled the mop bucket and turned the thirty-minute job of mopping the clinic floors into a two-hour long production that had involved a lot of traipsing to the back door to squeeze out the dripping mop.

I gave him a wave and a smile and went to greet the other volunteers.

My biggest surprise was Mavis Coldwell, who was not only present but attentive, hanging on every word of my quiet, precise instructions. I’d had an eclectic array of equipment brought in on the barge before the clinic opened. Things I needed for the general practice, but also a few items I’d wanted to have on hand specifically for the health fair.

I’d been too embarrassed, or too something, to ask for Robbie and Gerty’s help hauling these items from the storeroom in the old mill to the old church, and so Red Joe, the mayor, had gruffly volunteered his sister, Amy, and her truck. Yesterday, Amy had cheerfully hauled a massage chair, several yoga mats, my spare blood pressure machine, a scale, and a number of rolled up posters down the non-road from the clinic to the church.

Using the church had been Red Joe’s idea, since the church was apparently a more neutral assembly ground than my clinic, which was still viewed by some residents as a monument to government overreach. Plus, the church had a more open layout.