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“Not until we talk,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
But she put her arm out in my way, propping her hand against the edge of the bathroom sink so I couldn’t move.
“I can’t imagine what you’re going through, but so long as you’re in my care, you’ll play by my rules. This type of stuff? You don’t do on your own right now. I don’t know what kind of physical therapy program your other nurses had you on, but they’re clearly not sufficient. And if you think me catching you with your pants around your ankles is bad enough? You just wait until this hip surgery. I’ll be bathing you, Mr. Lowell. Top to bottom. So get used to it.”
Her eyes were heated and the tone of her voice was defiant. I didn’t like it. I didn’t take orders from people. They took them from me. I knocked her arm out of the way and wheeled out of the bathroom, cursing myself as I got my shirt caught on the bathroom door. I wheeled back to the window I was sitting in front of as I heard the toilet flush behind me, then the small pitter patter of feet left my room and shut the door behind the sound.
I didn’t know much, but I knew one thing was for sure.
That woman was definitely not bathing me.
Chapter Seven
Grace
“Give me one more.”
“I already did,” Hayden said.
“Then give me one more ‘one more’,” I said.
“No.”
“One more and then we can get you a shower.”
“How about we do no more and you keep your hands off me?”
Everyday he was like this. Combative. Argumentative. And always unwilling to let me help. He was paying me beyond top-dollar to keep after him and help him recuperate, yet he fought with me at every turn. It was exasperating, always trudging through his mental state. His anger. His condemnation of himself as a man.
“Fine, how about this?” I asked. “You can give me one more, then I can leave you here on the floor until you ask me to come help. How does that sound?”
I looked into his eyes and he huffed before he rolled his shoulder joint one last time.
“Good,” I said. “Now, do you want a shower or do you want to sit in your own sweat until bed sores develop?”
He shot me a look before he held out his arm for me.
That was how I had to address him. Every single time. Stern and hard, and not at all the way I wished I could talk with him. With the type of war-like relationship we were developing, I had no hope of ever working with him on his mental state. Getting into his mindset and trying to help him see the good in things. He didn’t trust me. And I really wasn’t sure if he even enjoyed me. The more the days dragged on, the more I felt like I was here for another purpose.
Other than to be his inconvenient nurse.
There were days that were better than others. And by better, I meant there were days where we didn’t talk. He would sit by the large windows in his living room and stare out into the world. Refusing to join it, but pining over it when he thought I wasn’t looking. I’d go out to grocery shop and bring things into the house that would promote his healing and I would run to go get his prescriptions. I’d draw blood to make sure his levels were where they needed to be and I would even ask him how his business was doing.
But if he
wasn’t fighting me, he was staring out of those windows. Longing for society but unwilling to go out into it.
I’d seen it before in patients I’d served during my nursing degree. Men who found their wheelchair to be a burden, or some sort of comment on his manhood. They saw it as a weakness. A hindrance. Something to be scoffed at and mocked. In their minds, they convinced themselves that it would be a tool used to undermine them. To somehow strip them of a sense of freedom or duty or valor.
Many times I would try to get him out of the penthouse apartment and into the sun, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it.
“Some sunshine might do you some good.”
“I can feel it from here,” Hayden said.
“If I threw the window open, you’d be able to get your daily dose of Vitamin D.”
