Try - The Complete Romance Series (6 page)

“And you didn’t even think to ask me if I
wanted something,” Amie said, shaking her head in mock disapproval. “What a
bitch.”

I laughed.

“Yeah, well, you were busy. I didn’t want
to look like I was slacking off.”

“Which you are,” Amie interjected.

“Well yeah. But I didn’t want to look like
I was. So I sneaked out. Besides, didn’t I see you with a Starbucks cup
yesterday afternoon?” Amie snorted. It was an open secret in the office that
whoever had a cancelation was apt to run to either the closest café—a mom and
pop place that had better regular coffee than fancy things like lattes—or to
the Starbucks in the opposite direction. If we were slow then whoever ducked
out for a few minutes would take orders from everyone else, but if we were busy
it was important not to look like we were taking a break.

“How are your patients doing?” I patted
the pile of files on my desk and sighed. One of my long-time patients, who’d
been coming in three times a week for six months, was finally able to walk
competently on her own. I had advised her mother that we should probably go to
once-a-week sessions to increase the little girl’s balance and coordination,
but the mother had seemed relieved enough that her daughter could walk
unassisted that I doubted she’d follow through.

“I’ve got one who’s transitioning out of
care,” I said, smiling slightly. “And Ruby-Lee is doing really well, making a
lot of progress.”

“My Jeremy had a setback,” Amie said, her
face settling into glum lines. “I was really rooting for him, but he had a bad weekend
of seizures and now he’s lost a lot of progress.”

“I always hate when that happens.” I
sighed with her; it was heartbreaking to bring a patient to the verge of being
able to function, only to have something interfere. I reminded myself that if
I’d stuck with elderly patients, or even general practice, I’d see a lot more
of those cases—generally kids were much quicker to adapt, and faster to recover
from setbacks.

“But Cassie is doing really well! I think
she might actually be able to get clearance to start dance again in the New
Year.”

We chatted about different patients for a
while, comparing what we were doing, and picked apart an article in one of the
journals that had found that alternating hot, cold, and electrical therapies
had more efficacy than any of the individual therapies had alone. “As if we
needed a study to tell us that,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’ve been doing that
with the bad ones ever since I got my license to practice.”

“Well, but at least we can tell some of
those anti-vax parents that there
is
proof,” Amie pointed out. We both made faces at the mere idea of anti-vaccine
parents. More than a few of our patients that had come in over the months were
ones whose parents had refused vaccines; when the babies got whooping cough or
flu or something like that, their fevers climbed and they got brain damage that
they had to spend years and years working through. I had told more than one of
my former high school friends that if they refused to vaccinate their children
I would never speak to them again; only a couple were stiff-necked enough to
actually go against me, but I knew that there was a good chance that I’d end up
seeing their kids in my practice, victims of brain damage or nerve damage from
one disease or another.

I finished off my coffee, wishing I’d
bought one of the delicious-looking apple pastries to go with it while I’d been
in the café. “I have one patient that’s all good news,” I told Amie.

“Oh? Which?”

“Landon Willis. He’s making tons of
progress.”

 
Amie laughed. “Imagine that. When his dad
brought him in late that first session you were sure that he’d be one of those
that fell through the cracks.”

“Well I had reasons to believe that!” I
wagged my finger at Amie. “How often does a parent bring their kid in late for
an evaluation and then go on to be even halfway decent about follow-through in
their therapy?”

“True,” Amie said, nodding. “So he’s a
decent dad?”

“He’s really decent,” I told her. “Really
worried about his son. Wants to do everything right.”

“And he’s hot,” Amie pointed out. “That’s
always helpful.” I rolled my eyes at her, chucking my coffee cup into the trash
bin. “Ooh—is he single?”

“Yes,” I admitted, and I felt my cheeks
burning up with a blush.

“Look at that! Oh man you’ve got it for
him, don’t you?”

“He’s a patient’s father,” I protested. “I
can’t have anything for him other than a respect for the fact that he’s taking
good care of his kid.”

“You can have the hots for him just fine,”
Amie said. “There was a guy like…a year ago. He was so hot. He looked like Brad
Pitt from like twenty years ago. I could barely keep my mind on work when his
daughter came in for her sessions. I kept thinking of all the ways the
equipment could come in handy for sex.”

“You’re terrible!” I shook my head. “There
are
kids
using those machines.”

“It’s not like I’m saying I’d use it to
have sex with them!” Amie looked at me wide-eyed with pretend shock. “But it’s
the same equipment we’d use on an adult, most of the time. And you can’t tell
me the TENS unit wouldn’t be fun to play with if you found the right
open-minded guy.”

“You are depraved.” I shook my head again.
“Don’t you have like, two boyfriends right now? Why are you peeking at
patients’ parents?”

“Greener pastures, girl,” Amie said. “I’m
always on the lookout for a better option.”

“So you’re never going to be happy with
what you’ve got,” I told her. “Because you’re going to keep looking for a
hotter, sexier guy. You could land Brad Pitt himself and you’d still look—and
waste all that Brad Pitt hotness.”

“I’m not saying I’m not happy with what I
have,” Amie told me, holding up a hand to forestall me saying anything. “I’m
just saying that if a better option shows up, I’m on board.” She looked me up
and down, her lips twisting into a weird half-smile. “I think your problem is
that you’re not looking at all.”

“That’s not fair!” I gestured to my
cluttered desk. “I’m crazy busy all the time.”

“So am I, but there are these things
called phones. You can use them while you’re doing other things. They even have
apps that let you find people who are interested in meeting up and maybe
hooking up.”

“I don’t want to just hook up with
someone,” I said, frowning. “I want to find someone I can really have a
relationship with.”

“They have apps for that too. Girl, you
must be getting desperate if you’re getting all worked up over a patient’s
parent.”

“I’m not getting worked up over him!” My
cheeks burned even hotter. “I swear to god—they’re coming in later, and if you
even look at me while they’re here I’ll beat the hell out of you.”

“You
are
hot for him,” Amie said, looking at me a little more seriously. “Not that I
blame you. He’s totally got the goods.”

“That’s not the point,” I said, sighing.
“It’s unethical.”

“That makes it even hotter,” Amie told me,
raising an eyebrow. “That little bit of risk of what might happen if it gets
out.”

“Nothing is going to happen. He’s not even
interested in me, not even a little bit.” I shrugged. “He’s a nice guy, he’s
taking good care of his son. He works all the time anyway, according to Landon,
so it’s not like he’s looking for a relationship in general.”

“Well I think you’d be cute together,”
Amie said, her voice teasing. “I better up there. My patient’s probably finally
showed up.”

I watched her leave.
I don’t have a crush on Patrick. He’s just a nice, cute guy.
 
I shook my head. The one time he’d called me
he’d been interested in finding out something about his son; even if we’d had a
quick personal conversation on top of it, it hadn’t been like he’d tried to
flirt with me or anything. A man as responsible as Patrick was wouldn’t rush to
date someone anyway; he’d want to wait until he knew that the girl he was
seeing would be a good influence on Landon—which was how it should be.
Besides, he’s good looking and has money.
It’s not like he’s got a shortage of people who’d like to play Landon’s
step-mom.

I spent the rest of my impromptu break
thinking about Landon and Patrick Willis, and trying to focus on the next
patient that I had coming in. He was a little boy with cerebral palsy, who had
moved to the city recently and had already had years of physical therapy in the
hopes of managing his health problems more effectively. I knew his parents
hoped that he might eventually be able to walk completely unassisted, but from
the progress he’d made so far I thought that the boy would need to have a
walker or possibly even a wheelchair at his disposal for the rest of his life.
There was a limit to what we could accomplish; that fact was something that a
lot of parents didn’t want to believe.

Patrick, at least, had come in with
realistic expectations, I thought as I pulled up the patient chart for the
little boy with cerebral palsy. I thought—though I wasn’t going to say it yet,
at least not to Patrick—that Landon might actually be able to take a week or
two off of his therapy at the end of the scheduled sessions. I might be able to
transition him to twice-per-week sessions by early January, and get him
finished up before Valentine’s Day. That would please both of them; but I
didn’t want to suggest it before I was absolutely sure. It was always a
terrible idea to suggest that a kid might recover faster, only to have a
setback arise or to see him or her hit their plateau sooner than you thought
they would. But I looked forward to seeing the widower and his son, whether or
not I wanted to think of how cute Patrick was.

Chapter Eight - Patrick

I told myself that there was nothing
different about the latest session with Mackenzie, that Landon was just the
same as he had always been and so was Mackenzie, but ever since Landon had
asked me if I thought Mackenzie looked like his mother, something had been
eating at the back of my mind. I sat on one of the benches, watching the two of
them as they went through one exercise after another, talking like they always
did.
She doesn’t look anything like
Joanne. Nothing at all.
I watched Mackenzie guiding Landon through another
exercise, encouraging him with her soft voice full of enthusiasm. “You’re doing
great, Landon,” I heard her say, patting my son on the shoulder. “Two more of
these and we can take a break.”

Landon told Mackenzie about his school day
as he caught his breath, and I listened in too, even though I’d gotten all the
news from him as we’d driven to the center from the school only a few minutes
before. “One of the third graders said that Jessie is my girlfriend,” Landon
told her; that was one thing he hadn’t mentioned to me.

“Oh? Did you ask him why he thought that?”

“He said it was because I always spend
recess with her, and I share my afternoon snack with her.” Landon made a face.
“She’s just nice.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Mackenzie advised him.
“I doubt that third grader boy even know what he’s talking about.”

“But he’s so much bigger and older!”

Mackenzie shrugged. “I’m bigger and older
than him, aren’t I?”

Landon considered the question and then
nodded and I stifled a little laugh. “You must know a lot more about boyfriends
and girlfriends then,” my son concluded.

“I know a little bit,” Mackenzie admitted.
My heart beat a little faster in my chest with a kind of dread; I just knew
Landon was going to ask a question that I’d have to talk Mackenzie’s way out
of. “I’ve had a few boyfriends in my time.”

“Did you share your toys with them?”

Mackenzie laughed, leading Landon over to
a new machine. “When I had toys to share, yes, I did,” she said, nodding
sagely. “But a boyfriend or girlfriend is really just a special kind of friend,
a different friend. Is Jessie different from your other friends?”

“Not really,” Landon said after thinking
about the question for a moment. “She’s just a normal friend.”

“Then she’s probably not your girlfriend,”
Mackenzie said. I didn’t know why, but I was glad she wasn’t taking the tactic
of telling my son that he was too young to have a girlfriend; that was exactly
where most people’s heads would have gone—hell, it as where mine went—but the
way she was explaining it to him made so much more sense, and she dodged the
issue of things that weren’t right for him to know yet.
She works with kids all day,
I reminded myself.
She probably hears all kinds of talk about
boyfriends and girlfriends, especially in the older kids.
There were a
couple of pre-teens in the area with us, working on balancing exercises, and I
could tell that the girl was making eyes at the boy.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

My stomach dropped to my knees at the
question.
Oh god, Landon…
it was
exactly the kind of question that I’d hoped Mackenzie’s explanation would
avoid. I’d hoped that Landon would move onto something else before he thought
to ask it.

“Landon, that’s not a good question,” I
started to say. “Mackenzie is…” but she glanced at me, humor in her big, bright
eyes, and held up a hand.