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“You’ve been limping all morning.” She took a step closer. “You were limping yesterday, too, but it’s worse today.”
“Yeah.” Rhett found his voice. “When it’s cold it’s... Um, what...what exactly would you do?”
A pretty smile hooked the corners of her mouth. It lit her face up in a way he hadn’t seen before. Her body seemed to relax. “Sit down.”
Rhett settled onto the closest bench, without argument. He wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but the pain was so intense he didn’t really care.
Stanzi kneeled down in front of him and pushed up his shorts, on the right side. “Oh.” The word came under her breath when she spied the scars. “I see.”
Rhett waited for her to ask what happened to his leg. Everybody did. For a rotten second, he found himself formulating a lie. “No big deal,” he said.
“No? Okay. Wait here.”
Rhett wasn’t sure where she thought he would go, but she held up a finger as she rose, like she was telling a dog to stay. She put on that ridiculous coat and disappeared out the door. A few minutes later, Stanzi returned with a bottle of something in her hand. The coat came off again. “Lie down on the floor.”
Again, Rhett was in too much pain to argue. He regretted not paying more attention to her occupation on her waiver. Physical therapist? Nurse? He settled himself on the floor and waited.
Stanzi kneeled next to his right side, squirted something into her palm from the bottle she’d fetched and rubbed her hands together. She slipped one of her legs under his knee. “Relax. Let me support your weight.”
Rhett obeyed, closed his eyes and drew a deep breath into his stomach. Her hands, still warm from the workout, hovered above his knee. Even though he couldn’t see her, he could feel her, just above his skin. When she finally touched him, he felt a little jolt inside, but contained it, keeping his body still. She sat there a few seconds, doing nothing while he breathed. He waited for questions. None came. Then her hands moved into long, gliding strokes from below the knee, all the way up his thigh.
“Keep breathing like you are,” she said. “Achy pain is okay, but if you feel like you want to punch me, let me know.”
Rhett laughed a little bit. “Do your worst, Stanzi.” Despite his bravado, he felt himself bracing, in anticipation of the pain. He’d gone to a couple of massage therapists—he was guessing that was her occupation—for PT after he got back home and things always got excruciating. Afterward, he’d lie in bed feeling like he’d just beat the flu, weak and useless.
But as he lay there, and Stanzi worked his leg, he found himself relaxing. There was something different about her touch. She didn’t just jam her elbow in his scars and try to make him cry. She didn’t talk too much, either. Everybody else talked too damn much. He didn’t want to open his eyes to see, because it felt too good and he didn’t want to jinx it, but it felt like she was kneading his muscles more than squashing them. She could’ve had fifty hands for how deftly she worked his leg, all the way from below the knee, up into his groin.
“We could work this scar tissue more, at another time.” Her voice was light and professional as her fingers grazed over the old wounds. “It would be a little more painful, though, and right now I just want to loosen up all the fascia and get the quads separated and warm. You’ll feel a lot better, trust me.”
He already did. His thigh was warmer and looser, like she’d chinked up and loosened his muscles from their old bonds. This reminded him of the time Papa had dug up a dying tree in a client’s yard, and showed him the root-bound ball that was keeping the plant from getting the nutrients it needed. Papa had shaken out the dry dirt and worked the roots, combing his fingers through them like he stroked a lover’s hair, until he’d been satisfied and had replanted the tree in a larger hole with fresh soil.
Twenty years later, Rhett drove past that tree, now large and robust, every time he went home to visit his parents.
“You doing all right?”
Rhett nodded, unwilling to speak, afraid his voice would come out lacking authority and control. So he just kept breathing and hoped whatever she was doing would never end.
All too soon, Stanzi straightened out his shorts and slipped her thigh from beneath his knee. “How do you feel?” she asked as he blinked his eyes open.
Rhett sat up, then rose slowly to his feet. He bent his knee a few times. “Not horrible,” he said.Amazing, he thought. “Thanks. Now I can get through the day.”
“You need a full assessment. Your old wounds could be causing an ascending disorder. I’m guessing you suffer a tight back and some neck pain most of the time, in addition to the pain you get in the leg.”
Wow, how the hell would she know that? Rhett kept the surprise, and the laughter, out of his voice when he said, “Oh, trust me. I have an ascending disorder or two.”
Stanzi offered a pretty, genuine smile. A matured version of the one he’d seen so far, like she’d grown more comfortable after massaging him. He noted that she didn’t offer to give him the full assessment. He wasn’t going to ask, either.
Stanzi drew on her coat, zipped it all the way up her neck and over her mouth. The hat and gloves followed.
Rhett suppressed a chuckle. “All you need’s the mask and you’re in MOPP 4.”
“What?” The word came muffled from beneath the coat.
“Mission-oriented protective...never mind.” Rhett chuckled to himself.
She giggled, anyway. “Thanks for the lesson. I’m going to be sore as hell tomorrow.”
“That’s okay. Long as you come back the day after.”
All Rhett could see were those bright glacier eyes. Her mouth said nothing, but her eyes were conflicted. She was terrified, but excited. Overwhelmed, but had hooked into something she couldn’t deny.
Stanzi left, saying nothing.
But she’d be back.
